Hacker's ramblings

The H-Security blog wrote about Skype reading all the messages you type. They had seen weird traffic into their website after posting the URL into Skype. Read all about it from their blog entry "Skype with care – Microsoft is reading everything you write". There is also Ed Bott's article about how H-Security guys got it wrong the first time, meaning that they don't check your links.

Anyway, this is absolutely something I had to check out. A perfect candidate for this is our Development Lab test server. In testing phase we're in public Internet so that all the parties can test our upcoming version. There are 0 links to the site, but for some reason Google has indexed a number of pages from there. The information I got is from http://www.wholinks2me.com/

What's strange here is that I had to change the domain names couple of weeks ago, to make our testing process more exact what version we're testing. Also, knowing our people I'm pretty sure that nobody publishes the test-server links in any of their wesites, I know I don't. So, the question raises: where did Google get the new address from?

When I changed the domain, I did send an e-mail about it. Yep, you got it right, our team is using Google Mail. For the purpose of full discousre: on the site there is also Google AdSense advertisements and Google Translate tool.

I investigated 10 days worth of web-server logs. In that there are 18 distinct IP-addresses where the server was accessed from. A short investigation of all 18 addresses revealed that 8 of them can be easily explained. They are home and office IP-addresses of our team. What was strange that 5 of them were from Amazon EC2 and Google networks. I have no reasonable explanation why they are accessing my site. So it is very easy to come up with couple of conspiracy theories when something like that happens.