Three years ago, a security researcher found a view.shtml page for a resort in the Caribbean. The page did not show a camera feed. Instead, it showed a live, editable dashboard of key card access logs. A malicious actor could have seen exactly which rooms were unoccupied and which room numbers had just been checked out (and thus, whose locks had been reset).
One of the most fascinating and potent search strings in the Google hacking arsenal is .
While the heyday of finding hundreds of live hotel webcams via .shtml has passed, the search still yields fascinating results. It is a reminder that the internet is a library where the books are constantly being rearranged, but the index is never perfect.