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Online Search Engines Lift Cover Of Privacy
Rican writes "MSNBC has an interesting article about how 'Googledorks' are using the powerful search engine to do searches across the web for sensitive and/or private information. Some of this information includes 'Medical records, bank account numbers, students' grades, and the docking locations of 804 U.S. Navy ships, submarines and destroyers.'"
The worst example I saw was the FBI NCIC 2000 manual [PDF]. It gives you examples of how to look up criminal records and such... which could be very useful to the criminally vested social engineer.
Other examples are ".dbx", the file name extension for mail folders in Outlook Express. Or ".pwl", the Windows 9x system password file (supposedly easily crackable with the correct tool).
There are unfortunately clueless users who share their whole hard drive. File sharing programs have however started getting better in discouraging or preventing the users from doing this.
The thing is that most people will literally inadvertantly share their entire hard drive's contents, or at least all "media files".
What I like to do is go on gnutella or kazaa and search for "DSN" or one of a number of similar prefixes. Why? Because most digital cameras save their files in a specific hardwired format, and the kind of people who leave their entire hard drive shared on kazaa are the kind of people who don't rename their digital cameras.
You can find the most random, interesting, occationally personal shit that way.
I'm trying to remember the other common prefixes besides DSN and failing.
-- Super ugly ultraman
> existance of that page get from Opera to Google such that it
> could pin-point (not crawl) that page?
Opera submits URLs browsed to by users, to google, when advert support is turned on.
http://www.opera.com/adsupport/
From that page:
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What is the connection between the Web page and the relevant ad displayed by Google?
Opera's interaction with the Google ad system:
The Opera browser sends Google the URL of the web page you are visiting and your IP address (with the exceptions Opera filters out -- see below)
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Exceptions are https, forms, passwords, cgi, and non-http URLs.
As an example from my apache log file last night, when I gave a friend a URL to a photo:It's surprising how many Opera users will deny this happens, despite the evidence. That's a 5 minute delay, google is pretty quick with its crawling. Personally, I don't mind. I put things up in my temporary directory and pull them down fairly soon after. I know nothing is secure if it's just an unprotected URL, so I'm not worried like the grandparent poster. However, Opera does send URLs to google, and google does come back and check them out.