Google is often used by hackers to search for various sensitive informations. This same technique is used along with other tools by IT security professionals to gather preliminary data or information about a target (a customer), in order to prepare a penetration test. The use of certain keywords that enter in association with your search will give surprising results in some cases. Avoid certain searches as they could get you into a lot of trouble, always check the legality of your actions. This tutorial is only intended to be used for personal research and especially as one of the different tools in phase 1 of an intrusion test, either through the different sites that offer to train you legally, or within the framework of an intrusion test that you will have previously validated by a contract with your client. It is obvious that in the case of a penetration test for a client, all the information and techniques that you have used must be included in the final report to inform your client, who will take the necessary measures to prevent malicious people from finding this information in the future, who can in some cases be very sensitive. Here is a small list of some of these keywords called «Google dorks»
inurl is used to search for any text inside a url.
intext is used to search for any text within the body or source code of the website.
filetype is used to search for any type of file you want to locate within a website or on a particular topic. You can search for any type of file.
intitle is used to search for web page titles.
site is used to narrow the search area to a particular website.
link is used to check other websites containing links to a website.
Here are some examples of the use of these google dorks. Not to be too long I would not put more, but you can of course do a search on Google to have more information and examples when using this search technique, or directly click on the following link: http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators_reference.html
An example to find the keyword « cybersecurity » in the title of a website would be to enter the following dork in the search bar:
- intitle:cybersecurity
Another example with the same dork but a little more complex will allow you to access all sites where there is index.of in the title:
- intitle:index.of
Another example with the same query but even more perfidious this time to find sites with a specific type of server which would norlamly be Apache version 2.0
- « Apache/2.0 Server at » intitle:index.of
- intitle:index.of “Apache” “server at”
Thats is for this simple and short tutorial. Use it wisely and in legality.
