“Google Dorking” – Waking Up Web Admins Everywhere

Last July, the US Department of Homeland Security warned of a new kind of criminal attack: “Google dorking“. This refers to asking Google for things they have found via special search operators. Let’s look closely and see what this is.

Google finds things online using a program that accesses web sites: the Google web crawler, called the Googlebot. When the Googlebot examines the web and finds “secret” data, it adds it to Google’s database just like any other kind of information. If it’s publicly accessible, it must be fine, right?

Now suppose your company’s HR representative left a spreadsheet with confidential employee data online. Since it’s open for everyone to access, the crawler sees and indexes it. From them on, even though it might have been hard to find before, a simple – or not so simple – Google search will point any attacker to it. Google never stored the actual data (unless it was cached), it just made it easier to find.

This kind of “attack” has been around for as long as search engines have been around. There are whole books devoted to the subject of “Google dorking”, which is more commonly known as “Google hacking”.  Books have been published about it for years, and even the NSA has a 643-page manual that describes in detail how to use Google’s search operators to find information.

The warning – as ridiculous as it might seem – has some merit. Yes, finding information that has been carelessly left out in the open is not strictly criminal: at the end of the day, it was out there for Googlebot to find. Google can’t be blamed for finding what has been left public; it’s the job of web admins to know what is and isn’t on their servers wide open for the world to see.

It’s not just confidential documents that are open to the public, either. As we noted as far back in 2013, industrial control systems could be found via Google searches. Even more worryingly, embedded web servers (such as those used in web cameras) are found online all the time with the Shodan search engine. This latter threat was first documented in 2011, which means that IT administrators have had three years to shut down these servers, but it’s still a problem to this day.

In short: this problem has been around for a while, but given that it’s still around an official warning from the DHS is a useful reminder to web admins everywhere: perform “Google dorking” against your own servers frequently, looking for things that shouldn’t be there. If you don’t, somebody else will and their intentions might not be so pure. Point well taken, thanks DHS!

 

Post from: Trendlabs Security Intelligence Blog – by Trend Micro

“Google Dorking” – Waking Up Web Admins Everywhere

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Story added 9. September 2014, content source with full text you can find at link above.