Google Hacking Techniques-1

Google Hacking Techniques

By using the basic search techniques combined with Google's advanced operators, anyone can perform information-gathering and vulnerability-searching using Google. This technique is commonly referred to as Google hacking.

Site Mapping

To find every web page Google has crawled for a specific site, use the site: operator. Consider the following query:

site:http://www.microsoft.com microsoft

This query searches for the word microsoft, restricting the search to the http://www.microsoft.com web site. How many pages on the Microsoft web server contain the word microsoft? According to Google, all of them! Google searches not only the content of a page, but the title and URL as well. The word microsoft appears in the URL of every page on http://www.microsoft.com. With a single query, an attacker gains a rundown of every web page on a site cached by Google.

There are some exceptions to this rule. If a link on the Microsoft web page points back to the IP address of the Microsoft web server, Google will cache that page as belonging to the IP address, not the http://www.microsoft.com web server. In this special case, an attacker would simply alter the query, replacing the word microsoft with the IP address(es) of the Microsoft web server.