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Googling Your Way Into Hacking

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the don't-be-stupid-here-people dept.

knifee writes "New scientist is running an article explaining how hackers can use Google's cache to quickly hunt down sensitive pages, for example, by searching the terms "bash history", "temporary" and "password". Might be worth looking at this tutorial about robots.txt if you think you might be at risk." That's pretty amusing.

3 of 431 comments (clear)

  1. My favorite... by inertia187 · · Score: 5, Informative
    My favorite Google search phrase is:
    "Index of" "Name Last modified Size Description"
    Then you add file extensions or other things. For example:Anyway, as you can see, it's pretty effective. Sometimes admins wise up, and all you have is the Google cache. But sometimes they don't, and you get to look. Thanks Google!
    --
    A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
  2. Re:This happens because of dumb admins, not google by dan14807 · · Score: 5, Informative

    > The first thing I do when I log onto a box is link > bash_history to /dev/null

    unset HISTFILE

  3. Re:This happens because of dumb admins, not google by SeanAhern · · Score: 4, Informative

    ln -s ~/.bash_history /dev/random

    Whoops!

    You meant: ln -s /dev/random ~/.bash_history