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Dangerous Google – Searching for Secrets
Michał Piotrowski
This article has been published in issue 4/2005 of the
hakin9
magazine.All rights reserved. This file may be distributed for free pending no changes are made to its contents or form.
hakin9
magazine, Wydawnictwo Software, ul. Lewartowskiego 6, 00-190 Warszawa, e
n@hakin9.org
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hakin9 4/2005
B a s i c s
G
oogle serves some 80 percent of allsearch queries on the Internet, mak-ing it by far the most popular searchengine. Its popularity is due not only to excel-lent search effectiveness, but also extensivequerying capabilities. However, we shouldalso remember that the Internet is a highlydynamic medium, so the results presentedby Google are not always up-to-date – somesearch results might be stale, while other relevant resources might not yet have beenvisited by Googlebot (the automatic scriptthat browses and indexes Web resources for Google).Table 1 presents a summary of the mostimportant and most useful query operatorsalong with their descriptions, while Figure 1shows document locations referred to by theoperators when applied to Web searches. Of course, this is just a handful of examples – skil-ful Google querying can lead to much moreinteresting results.
Hunting for Prey
Google makes it possible to reach not justpublicly available Internet resources, but alsosome that should never have been revealed.
Dangerous Google – Searching for Secrets
Michał Piotrowski
Information which should beprotected is very often publiclyavailable, revealed by carelessor ignorant users. The result isthat lots of condential data isfreely available on the Internet – just Google for it.
About the Author
Michał Piotrowski holds an MA in IT and hasmany years' experience in network and systemadministration. For over three years he hasbeen a security inspector and is currently work-ing as computer network security expert at oneof the largest Polish financial institutions. Hisfree time is occupied by programming, cryp-tography and contributing to the open sourcecommunity.
What You Will Learn...
• how to use Google to nd sources of personalinformation and other condential data,• how to nd information about vulnerable sys-tems and Web services,• how to locate publicly available network de-vices using Google.
What You Should Know...
• how to use a Web browser,• basic rules of operation of the HTTP protocol.
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hakin9 4/2005
Google hacking
Table 1.
Google
query operators
OperatorDescriptionSample query
site
restricts results to sites within thespecied domain
site:google.com fox
will nd all sites containing theword
fox
, located within the
*.google.com
domain
intitle
restricts results to documents whosetitle contains the specied phrase
intitle:fox re
will nd all sites with the word
fox
in thetitle and
re
in the text
allintitle
restricts results to documentswhose title contains all the speciedphrases
allintitle:fox re
will nd all sites with the words
fox
and
re
in the title, so it's equivalent to
intitle:foxintitle:reinurl
restricts results to sites whose URLcontains the specied phrase
inurl:fox re
will nd all sites containing the word
re
in the text and
fox
in the URL
allinurl
restricts results to sites whose URLcontains all the specied phrases
allinurl:fox re
will nd all sites with the words
fox
and
re
in the URL, so it's equivalent to
inurl:foxinurl:reletype, ext
restricts results to documents of thespecied type
letype:pdf re
will return PDFs containing the wordre, while
letype:xls
fox will return
Excel
spreadsheetswith the word
fox
numrange
restricts results to documents con-taining a number from the speciedrange
numrange:1-100 re
will return sites containing a number from 1 to 100 and the word
re
. The same result can beachieved with
1..100 relink
restricts results to sites containinglinks to the specied location
link:www.google.com
will return documents containingone or more links to
www.google.com
inanchor
restricts results to sites containinglinks with the specied phrase intheir descriptions
inanchor:re
will return documents with links whosedescription contains the word
re
(that's the actual linktext, not the URL indicated by the link)
allintext
restricts results to documents con-taining the specied phrase in thetext, but not in the title, link descrip-tions or URLs
allintext:"re fox"
will return documents which con-tain the phrase
re fox
in their text only
+
species that a phrase should occur frequently in results
+re
will order results by the number of occurrences of the word
re
-
species that a phrase must not oc-cur in results
-re
will return documents that don't contain the word
re
""
delimiters for entire search phrases(not single words)
"re fox"
will return documents containing the phrase
re fox
.
wildcard for a single character
re.fox
will return documents containing the phrases
re fox
,
reAfox
,
re1fox
,
re-fox
etc.
*
wildcard for a single word
re * fox
will return documents containing the phrasesre the
fox
,
re in fox
,
re or fox
etc.
|
logical OR
"re fox" | refox
will return documents containing thephrase
re fox
or the word
refox
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