Protect your website from Google Code Search

It has come to our attention that Google has released a new product, Google Code Search, that is capable of indexing and crawling through archive files stored in the public directories of web servers. This is security advisory because� I have discovered that some site administrators are storing archives / backups of their website in the web root. Because of this, Google Code Search is able to crawl the archives and read unparsed PHP files as if they were plain text. This has resulted in the disclosure of some sensitive information including MySQL passwords and SMTP credentials.