Welcome guys!
In this lecture we'll talk about hacking
Google searches.
You'll find out how hackers and security researchers find out information on the Internet.
Google hacking, also named Google dorking, is a computer hacking technique that uses Google search to
find security holes in the configurations that websites use.
This is in fact an information gathering technique that uses advanced Google search queries.
This can be used to identify security vulnerabilities in web applications,
gather information about arbitrary or individual targets, discover error messages, disclosing sensitive
information, discover files containing credentials and other sensitive data.
Let's get started with the basics!
When you search something on Google it will try to intelligently guess what you are in fact willing
to find out.
Let's search for web scraping with Python
and Google returned a lot of results and each result has something to do with words web, scraping and
python.
Now if you want to search for an exact string you should enclose the string in double quotes, like this,
and it's showing only results that contain these four words,
"web scraping with python" in the exact order written by me.
This is very useful sometimes to cut out the noise.
Now if you are looking up for a technology related question you do not want to see old or obsolete results.
To be more relevant
you can narrow the search to the latest results.
And one of the favorite ways to do that is to click on tools and then choose a specific time interval
for your search. Let's
see only the results from the past year.
OK.
These are the results from the past year.
Another thing we can do to make the search even more helpful is to add a particular file type. Let's say
I want to find out only pdf files related to Python web scraping written between double quotes. To
do that
I'll use what is called an operator and for this example the operator will be file type; so file type
the name of the operator : and the name of the file pdf. And we see that all results are of
type pdf.
They are only pdf files.
Let's try another one!
I'm looking for Apple sales in 2019 and I want to see only excel files! so 2019
apple sales filetype:xlsx and I want to see all results, not only the results from the past
year.
So any time!
OK!
I 've got
only Excel files related to Apple's sales in 2019.
This is really useful to limit your searches only to what matters to you.
I'll go even deeper and I'll say that I want to see results about Apple's sales in 2019 but I don't
want to see anything related to iPhone so I'll add - iPhone to the search query.
I put a minus sign just before the word or the words that I don't want; iPhone was excluded.
These are Apple iPad sales worldwide!
And if you want to limit the results to only a website you can use the site operator like this: site :
let's say Wikipedia.org intitle
(This is another operator)
:security
all the results are from Wikipedia
.org and intitle made Google to restrict their results to web pages containing the word security
in the title.
There is always the word security in the title. Another useful operator is the logical or.
For example I'm searching for bitcoin or Ethereum.
This is the OR operator; you can use a pair of parentheses to group multiple terms or search operators
to control how the search is executed.
For example I'm searching for either (bitcoin | ethereum) - a pair of parenthesis and then
hash algorithm.
I'm searching in fact for bitcoin hash algorithm or ethereum hash algorithm.
Another thing you can do, if you find this confusing, is to use the advanced search option. Go to Google
.com/advanced underline search and you'll see here a lot of useful options that allow you to
construct your search with the exact parameters.