Let's check now if a popular search engine like Google will enable us to find confidential information
on the Internet
I have a few predefined queries which you've already seen on a slide.
We'll start with exploring whether there are any results for a company Zola's spreadsheets.
In other words Excel spreadsheets that relate to user accounts
as it turns out there are over 64000 results for the search.
It takes a lot of time and persistence to browse through all of these spreadsheets
they'll try to give you a more interesting example and show another type of search.
This time will search for PTF files on military Web sites that contain the phrase top secret.
It doesn't seem likely that anyone would put these documents on the Web does it.
But here you are.
There are over 53000 results.
If this piques your interest and you're not planning on visiting any other countries that put up these
files go ahead and click on the links to find out what types of classified information can easily be
found on the web.
The crawling methods I've shown you are manual that can be automated though.
For example by using a tool like gulag scanner
the application contains a simple set of Google queries that fall into several categories.
There are for example video files containing juicy info like passwords Loggins and the like.
Or software error messages that display sensitive information on a system another category includes
files containing usernames clicking on open in the browser will cause a search engine with selected
file types to be displayed instead of clicking on each file type.
You can select a whole category type in the page name that interests you.
For example example does come and click on scan.
Notice that you don't connect to the site directly.
We don't search for information on the servers of a given company.
The query is not only sent to the Google search engine we're exploring what has already been indexed
we'll be able to send bulk queries and still search engines like Google blocked them.
As you can see in the slide 15 results have been returned
all queries have been processed successfully which means there are no files that contain user names
and the results
a small application called Foca is a rather curious example of a search engine that cross the web for
publicly available information.
It enables users to not only analyze selected web sites but also the meta data that saved the website
files.
We'll create a project by entering a web site name.
For example Microsoft dot com
using search engines like Google are being.
We can try to extract information on the network infrastructure the servers versions and so on.
We can try to ascertain whether or not there are any vulnerabilities or susceptibilities to a given
type of threat.
We can also read the meta data or the various documents
opening the documents will extract information on their creators
to download unanalyzed file.
Right click on the document and select download
once you've downloaded the files.
They can be analyzed.
Click on extract metor data will extract all the meta data available for the document
files from both categories will be analyzed in sequence.
We have records for 10 users.
They're the creators of PTF documents or doc files.
We can view the information on when and in how many documents they used Open Office in Microsoft Office
and also see the versions of the operating systems that were used to create the documents.
All of this metadata is contained in the files that we edit and save on a daily basis.
When you publish your files on the Internet you have to realize that the metadata will also be published
and be accessible
meditator.
This causes not only the information on a configuration of the system but it also contains your personal
information
Foca is a great tool for extracting information of this type.