Does "Powered by vBulletin" assist hackers?
 

I was just wondering about the general opinion here.

Anybody else thinks that "Powered by vBulletin" helps hackers out to target VB powered websites?

I GOOGLED the copyright and google did a great job.

Is there a way to prevent google from indexing a specific statement?

I removed the powered by vbulletin its not hard to do

You can not legally remove that from the footer unless you have a branding free license. The only part you can remove is the version number.

I THINK the minimum information that can be used is something like...

He might be talking about the one on the header as i removed that i also have the branding option as well that helps

Sure does sadly enough.

You can edit the header template and remove the powered by phrase in the titleimage and simply replace it with the bburl variable.

Edit Header template and find:
Replace this:
With this:
Result:

Per vBulletin themselves you can also take a screenshot of your footer (the copyright text) then replace it with the image so when they google "Powered by vBulletin" your site will not be listed yet the image is there and still displays the copyright to members just in photo format instead of crawlable text ;) I cannot find copyright as image info easily though so I'll leave that googlin' up to you!

The actual answer to the question is 'no, not really' since they're going to figure out what you're using anyway.

For a good many of the lower skilled script kiddies, it's actually a deterrent.

But - like most folks I removed "powered by" everywhere it appears.

Saaaaaaaaaay whaaaaaaaat? Nah it helps them, they can find you quicker that way... otherwise if removed and done properly they would need to find another way to "find" you. Then again I suppose one could simply drag & drop a image from the images directory into Google Images and find even more vBulletin forums!

^ Don't tell the ftard hackers I said that, I bet none have thought of that yet the silly rabbits, the lot of them!

LOL at ftard

Well that's what came to mind lol... out of all the hacked sites I've fixed, only a select few had a non-script kiddie do the damage and those were pretty severe so while they may not have been ftards knowledge-wise they still were morally/ethically imo!

Right, in searches for the term. I should have recognized that's what the OP was asking.

This is the same reason we also remove the version number as well.