How To Use Google To Find Passwords

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Using Google To Find Passwords

Google presents a rich treasure trove of information that many people and organizations don't even realize they are publishing

Make sure you don't get caught by following these procedures to make sure you are not exposing the wrong information

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See also Search Engine News Yahoo (Search), Google Patents (Search)

Google encourages what is possibly the easiest form of hacking on the internet. But you don't have to be a victim. Spend time to learn how to use Google's advanced search operators, and then use them to examine your own site to find files containing passwords, financial information, databases, images, and other information that you might have thought was private, but wasn't.

Google has been used to find the following kinds of confidential information:

• Medical college patient records
• Private customer lists
• Bank sites listing 10,000 social security and credit card numbers
• Military documents listing suspected Taliban and al Qaeda members
  • Gave dates and places of birth, passport numbers, and national ID numbers
• Bank account numbers
• Students grades
• Docking locations of 804 U.S. Navy ships, submarines and destroyers

In order to be sure that you are not exposing confidential information search your own site using Google's site: operator to make sure you are not exposing any of the following kinds of materials:

• private spreadsheets and documents (search for common extensions)
• search for special abbreviations in your private documents, things like column names in spreadsheets.
• Search your site for login pages that should not be exposed to the public internet
• Make sure that website configuration files are not inadvertently exposed
• Be careful that login password files like htpasswd, are not published to the public internet
• Check that router and modem configuration pages are not exposed
• Check for various kinds of SQL errors on your public website, they can reveal problems you weren't aware of.

Error messages are an area that particular care needs to be given to. Error messages should be carefully check to tmake sure they don't display path names, function names, filenames or partial SQL code. Any of these kinds of information could make a site vulnerable to injection attacks. Some fatal errors can reveal compiler information, and partial source codes.

For each piece of software you use on your website, search Google for the name of the software and "injection attack" to see if there are any security advisories about the software. Some software such advanced guestbook 2.2 and mnoGoSearch?Create|Search are known to have significant problems.

Reasons to make sure your systems are secure

Identity theft has been the number one consumer problem for the Federal Trade Commission for over four years. In 2003, 215,000 complaints for identity theft, compared to 152,000 in 2002.

Companies who have settled breach of privacy cases with the FTC for not taking "Reasonable" measures to keep medical or financial information secure:

• Eli Lilly & Co.
• Microsoft
• Guess Inc.

Despite later removing the documents, private information often remains cached on other servers.

Other software the has a risk of revealing passwords or private files:

• Personal Web servers that come with operating systems.
• Turnkey shopping cart software.
• Web-enabled Access databases.

More information:

• Googledorks (Search for Googledorks)

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