Sweshi's Tutorials

Penetration Testing Tools

Google Footprinting

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NOTICE: All the tutorials on this website are meant to help you find security vulnerabilties on your own network and devices to understand your security posture before black hats do. Penetration testing without a written consent is illegal and you can be prosecuted. Use these tutorials to secure your own networks or those whose permission you have been granted. Keep it ethical and keep it professional.
Table of Contents

Seach engines such as Google and Bing can be quite useful in the process of footprinting. This is because web crawlers are able to find information in web directories and on web pages quickly. In this section, I show how you can use some keywords to be able to find information using Google.

Information you can find with a search engine
  • Usernames and IDs
  • Passwords or password files
  • Live web camss
  • Publicly accessible cloud storage folders
  • Specific files in file formats
  • Web directories that you can enter
  • and much more
Examples of google advanced search keywords
  • For all of these, try coping the code and pasting in the search engine to see the output.
inurl:

This is able to find URLs that have some word in it. In the example below, I am search for URLs that have the word "sweshi" as part of the text.

inurl:sweshi
site:

This enables you to restrict the results of a search to be coming from a specific domain name. In the example below, I am searching for "tutorial" from "sweshi.com".

site:sweshi.com tutorial
link:

The link keyword can find URLs that point to the URL that you specify. It is a way of knowing which web pages have a certain link. This could be handy if you are in security and need to know who is distributing a dangerous link. In the example below, I simply check for websites the have sweshi.com as part of their links.

link:sweshi.com
intitle:

This one searches for words that could be in the title of a web page. In this example, I search for web pages that have the word "sweshi" as part of their title.

intitle:sweshi
ext:

As you can imagine, this one has the ability to find finles that have a specific extension. In this example we search for excel "xls" files.

ext:xls
cache:

Some searches can be based on what google has cached and we can use this to find the results that are based on cache rather than those based on the database results. I search for sweshi tutorials to see what cache entries could be there in this search.

cache:sweshi tutorials

Here are some security related searches that use some of what we have explained.

search intended result
intitle:"Index of" passwords modified To find directories that have password files
inurl:auth_user_file.txt To find URLs that have authentication information in text files
"access denied for user" "using password" Searches for pages with error messages that reveal passwords
"Index of /backup" Finds backup directories
intitle:"Index of" config.php Searches for folders that have configuration files.

Remember that you can mix these keywords to find even more specific machines in your searches.