With any great invention comes, of course, the potential for huge problems.
And that is one of the things that we face when it comes to none other than the public Internet.
Sure, we couldn't live without it.
Sure.
Most of the time it is to our in incredible benefit.
But when it comes to foot printing as well, the World Wide Web is going to provide a treasure trove
of information.
We're going to be discussing lots about the World Wide Web and foot printing.
And you are going to be doing lots of flashcard work, assignment work and all kinds of goodness in
this area.
One of the first things that we're going to focus on is search engines and the amount of information
that our attackers are going to be able to extract about a target.
Now, we have to keep in mind that this is most commonly going to be against our publicly accessible
resources.
So I publish, you know, my networking dot com website, and that is going to be providing a ton of
information about me.
And I always have to think when I publish content there.
Okay, this is publicly accessible resources.
So what exactly is it that I want to say about my personal life, about whatever, because it's publicly
accessible.
But as we're going to be discussing, not everything that is going to be surveilled about us is going
to be from the publicly accessible resources we have a dark web.
And what about the dark web?
And are there search engines for the dark web while of course there are.
So that's something that we need to consider as well.
But in this phase of our foot printing discussion, we are talking about publicly accessible resources
using the major engines that you know and love like Google.
I think that's the big one.
How many computer criminals do we know that are running around going, Ooh, I'm going to get really
good at Bing?
Probably not.
No offense to Bing, but man, I know I will.
I'll be in an edge browser left in its defaults, or I'll be on a microsoft Windows machine and maybe
I'm helping someone on their Microsoft Windows and there is no browser installed on their system other
than edge.
So I will fire open edge and it defaults to bing search is in the address bar and so I will do a search
and it will be a bing search and I will not find what I'm looking for, unfortunately for Bing.
So anyways, the major engines are what we are talking about using here and we are talking about using
them like the attackers would.
And that is in an advanced fashion.
So one of the things we need to work with is the advanced search operators.
And you need to know these.
So what are we talking about here?
We're talking about utilizing the advanced operators in something like Google.
And I tell you, I learned this long ago and it wasn't for the purposes of hacking.
No, I learned this long ago with the research that I would have to do for like writing assignments.
So notice here I'm qualifying my search to the site of Cisco dot com and I might qualify the file types
that I want to find to PDF type and I might want to input a date range and I might want to, you know.
Now, typically I wouldn't get need to get that sophisticated, but I would do things like maybe I want
UCS management specifically.
So notice I put that in quotes.
So I get UCS management specifically.
So these are the type advanced searches.
Notice with prefix operators there that we need to be able to perform to find just what it is we need
to find on the World Wide Web.
But notice what we're doing here.
We're not looking for things in a research capacity.
No, no.
We're actually looking to surveil using these prefixes.
Now, there is a lot of potential prefixes that you could use.
So I'd like you to go ahead and attack the next couple of assignments, which are going to be having
you learn and perform these advanced Google search operators.
Now, before.
For.
I leave you though, and send you off to do those tasks.
I did want to point out that there is the tools menu here in Google and notice that's going to allow
you to do your search range.
That's why I don't tend to use the date range prefix.
And just to give you a hint in the upcoming assignment that you're going to have.
The date range takes a julienned date format.
So you would go to Julian Converter, for instance, and you would grab one of the Julian date converters.
And I would say if I was interested in articles from only 2021, I'll just say convert and we will get
the Julian representation of that date.
And then that's what I would use in my advanced operator.
And now I do my search and look at that.
We're getting, you know, a subset of the results that we had gotten.
These are all PDFs that were published, it looks like in 2021, because notice the date range had no
effect on the date of the post.
But I'm thinking this is PDFs because notice we're restricting this to find links involving PDFs.
Anyways, you get the idea.
These are the types of operators that we're going to make you demonstrate the use of.
But that date range, that is not all that commonly used because we have the tools option here with
the date range and also are all results or just the verbatim results?
I'm not sure I know the difference there or no.
Actually, you know what?
I think that's a way to filter the ads maybe, which would be cool on another thing, I want you familiar
with this.
If you go to tools, where is it?
Here.
I want to show you.
Oh, that's right.
Okay.
So if you're on an image search, for instance, you will get different options when you go to tools.
Yeah, that's what I wanted to show you.
So notice I use this a lot.
You'll notice some Creative Commons license things that I'll use in this class, right?
So I'll say, like TCP handshake.
And these, of course, are illustrations because I'm saying in the common domain, under usage rights,
creative common licenses, you know, these crappy things are not protected.
And there you can see the image I used when we were discussing the TCP three way handshake.
Right.
These are for open use.
They are not protected.
They're, you know, shared on wikis and things of that nature.
So we want to get expert using the various tools of search just like those that are attacking us are
going to be doing.
All right.
With all this said, I've got a couple of assignments for you now on those Google advanced operators.
We need you to know.