If not on this list, this certainly gets regular mentions on other similar lists and in books on hacking. Nevertheless, new subscribers to this list may not have heard about it. Bringing it up again is therefore useful in educating newcomers. Google is certainly a useful beast. BRYAN ALLERDICE -----Original Message----- From: silencedscreamat_private [mailto:silencedscreamat_private] Sent: Friday, July 05, 2002 3:01 PM To: vuln-devat_private Subject: Google lists vulnerable sites. Let me first say that I do now know if this issue has been brought to light before or in what detail it might have been discussed. On to the show... The problem I have found is that google may be archiving too much information on sites. By carefully crafting search strings you can reliably return sites who's root, cgi-bin, bin, admin, etc... directories are exposed and unprotected. The first thing you must do is select the name of a commonnly protected directory (I will use admin in this example). The second is to think of a filetype that only the administrator and not the average web surfer would have access to. Things like bin, txt, or htm are no good because they are commonly made available in other directories for legitimate reasons. For this example I choose to go with .db. Now to create the search string. inurl:admin filetype:db The above gives us, http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&q=inurl%3Aadmin+filetype% 3Adb The above search sets the requirments that admin must be in the url and only sites that contain a file of the type .db are returned. Now most of the links you click on will take you to some meaningless url or email database but if for exaple you had www.somesite.org/admin/cgi-bin/url.db and you removed the url.db from the link you are now free to traverse through there directories and files. By useing carefully selected search terms like the ones above I have about a 90-95% success rate of vulnerable sites returned. The trick is finding the right directory and filetypes to use in the search.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Jul 05 2002 - 22:52:37 PDT