Created by The Cult of the Dead Cow (cDc), Goolag is a search engine for vulnerable websites. That is, it is a service which lets you know how likely any site is to be hacked. And as such, it’s got two main uses. On the one hand, it lends itself to all the mischief that you can imagine, as it is an automatic way for young hackers to know which sites could be taken down more easily. But on the other hand, Goolag.org has got a more legitimate use: it lets people who have just created their very first websites realize how safe they really are.
If you are a young designer, you can build a couple of test sites, and use Goolag to spot all these breaches that they have. In this way, you’ll be learning how to build safer sites by trial and error, only that these errors won’t affect any client, and your credibility as a designer won’t be tarnished.
Just in case you wonder, Goolag is a PHP application that was developed by one of the members of the Cult of the Dead Cow named Johhny I Hack Stuff, and it scans sites using a technology he has named “Google Hacking“. I’ve got a feeling Google won’t be too keen on that…
UPDATE: These guys asked for trouble, and they got it. The site was taken down in the last months of 2009.
