Vulnerability Development mailing list archives

Google lists vulnerable sites.


From: <silencedscream () hotmail com>
Date: 5 Jul 2002 19:01:14 -0000



Let me first say that I do now know if this issue has been brought to 
light before or in what detail it might have been discussed.  On to the 
show...

The problem I have found is that google may be archiving too much 
information on sites.  By carefully crafting search strings you can 
reliably return sites who's root, cgi-bin, bin, admin, etc... directories 
are exposed and unprotected.  The first thing you must do is select the 
name of a commonnly protected directory (I will use admin in this 
example).  The second is to think of a filetype that only the 
administrator and not the average web surfer would have access to.  
Things like bin, txt, or htm are no good because they are commonly made 
available in other directories for legitimate reasons.  For this example 
I choose to go with .db.  Now to create the search string.

inurl:admin filetype:db
The above gives us,
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&q=inurl%3Aadmin+filetype%
3Adb

The above search sets the requirments that admin must be in the url and 
only sites that contain a file of the type .db are returned.

Now most of the links you click on will take you to some meaningless url 
or email database but if for exaple you had

www.somesite.org/admin/cgi-bin/url.db

and you removed the url.db from the link you are now free to traverse 
through there directories and files.  By useing carefully selected search 
terms like the ones above I have about a 90-95% success rate of 
vulnerable sites returned.  The trick is finding the right directory and 
filetypes to use in the search.


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