Google Dorks

FBI warning about new dangerous search tool?

The FBI has sent a warning to police and other emergency personnel, about a ‘deadly’ new tool
which ‘malicious criminals’ using for deadly effects against the American government.

The warning, reported by Ars technica, refers specifically to ‘Google Dorking’ also known as
‘Google Dorks’. They use specialized syntax searches such as ‘filetype:sql’.

‘Google dorks’ refers to search syntax which allow users to search within a specific website (
by using the term URL ) or for specific file types, they can also search for specific databases.
These terms are widely known, and they are also legal. The warning is for organizations who
don’t know how to secure their databases properly.

Is google dorks the ‘weapon of the malicious’?

In October 2013, unknown attackers used ‘google dorks’ to search for vulnerable websites to
find vulnerable versions of a so called ‘internet Message Board Software’ product, according to
the researchers, Says the FBI warning.
After they search for vulnerable software identifiers, the attackers were able to create new
administrator account, on about 35,000 websites.

Shocking searching employed web users

The warning also offers a useful link to Google’s own testing Centre for preventing such attacks,
the google hacking database.
Webmasters can use this to check if files are ‘visible’ to Google Dorks, and then hide them if
they wish.

Ars Technica points out that the warning refers to ‘malicious cyber criminals’ and refers to a
notorious case in which reporters were accused of ‘hacking’ a website by using freely available
information and an automated tool, GNU Get.
However, as Ars Technica explains, the warning is not really meant to highlight a ‘new’
technique.
Ars Technica is warning webmasters for Google Dorks, urging them to keep their websites
secure.

This warning from the DHS and the FBI was mostly intended to give law enforcement and other
organizations a sense of urgency to take a hard look at their own website ‘security’ Ars
comments.

Local police departments have increasingly become the target of the ‘hacktivists’.
Recent examples include attacks on the Albuquerque police department’s network in March
following the shooting of a homeless man and the attacks on the St. Louis County Police
network in response to the recent events in Ferguson, Missouri.

The warning says; ‘Ensure sensitive websites are not indexed in search engines. Google USPER
provides webmaster tools to remove the entire site, individual URL’s, cached copies and
directories from Google’s index.

What is ‘google dorks’ exactly ?

Almost every website you visit has a private ‘virtual notebook’, also known as a database.
A database stores everything you do on their website.

If you give the website your phone number, credit card number or social security number, it
stores your information in the ‘virtual notebook’ of the website. When you leave the website
you’d think that you are the only one that can see your information but, unfortunately, the
whole world can get any information you have entered on almost every website, but only if
your website doesn’t hide private information from Google search. The search indexes of
Google make everything public, including those ‘virtual notebooks’ and everything stored in
those notebooks.
If you gave your credit card number on a site, then there is a high chance that the site isn’t
secured and has put all the information public, Google will then automatically add the
information to its search.
This information is very easy to find for anyone and especially for cyber-criminals because
Google has made it so that anyone can do a google search with the word filetype: and then
have access to the ‘virtual notebook’.

A person has contacted google when he found out about this ‘Google Dorks’ problem, he thought they
would fix it. But he was wrong. Google was fully aware that people can find all your information, they
felt like they could stop it, normally it’s their job to ‘censor or curate’ their results unless they are
required to do so by the law.
This is the e-mail Google sent back to the person.

‘Official letter from Google saying that they will not stop their search engine from exposing info from a database’.

How do you use Google Dorks?

Google hacking
 I already explained what Google Dorks is.
So now I’m going to explain how hackers or cyber criminals use these Google Dorks to create
complex query to Google search engine to extract the results that normal users can’t.

Let’s assume the hacker wants to find the admin login page of all websites; we have a Dork for
this INURL because the hacker want to search admin login pages and generally admin login
page’s names look like adminlogin, login, etc.

So we write Dork - inurl:adminlogin

You can see on the screenshot that we have the admin login pages of tons of websites.

Similarly , we can now construct this Dork for any particular website.

So now we construct a Dork - site:facebook.com inurl:login

let’s try a more complex Google Dork now: intext:”Hikvision” inurl:”login.asp”

The Dork above will give us login the page of hikivision cameras that are installed like cctv.

Example’s

Let’s try some more complex and more interesting: intext:phpMyAdmin SQL Dump filetype:sql
intext:INSERT INTO `admin` (`id`, `user`, `password`) VALUES –github

The above dork will find sql dump files which are dumped files of data from the website. So
Here you can see all password and usernames and also all sensitive information that reside on
the database

Another interesting example: ext:mdb inurl:*.mdb inurl:fpdb shop.mdb

The directory “http:/xxx/fpdb/” is the database folder used by some versions of FrontPage. It
contains many types of Microsoft Access databases. It contains customer info like phone
numbers but also plain text passwordsRemove the shop.mdb part to see the complete list of
databases.

ext:log “Software: Microsoft Internet Information Services *.*”

Above Google Dork will give you the log files of the sites that have the Microsoft internet
information server installed. This file includes ftp usernames, password, path information and
database names.

intitle:”WSO 2.4″ [ Sec. Info ], [ Files ], [ Console ], [ Sql ], [ Php ], [ Safe mode ], [ String tools ],
[ Bruteforce ], [ Network ], [ Self remove ]

The above dork will find the ESO 2.4 shells uploaded by the hacker on any server.
allintitle:”index.of” “backup files”

This Dork above will give you the backup files of the server.

intitle:”apache 1.3 documentation”

The Dork above will show you the apache 1.3 documentation page directly.

Now you can see by yourself how easy you can use Google Dorks.
Always be sure that when you give your private information that the website is actually secured.
Because you can see how easy hackers can get all your information.