Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
While googlestalking is scary and bad and I'm not condoning it, in this *specific* case, if the docking locations of U.S. naval ships is something that they do not want made public perhaps they should simply not make them public?
Go into kazaa and gnutella and search for any .doc files. Or some likely sounding names like "resume" or "job application"
It's surprising what people will sit in their kazaa upload directory, using it like a documents dump. Legal papers, company's employee policy documents, employee records, sensitive stuff, medical records.
Taken straight from people's HDs, no hacking, cracking or other media-unfriendly terms needed, just the ignorance of the people who leave this stuff open is needed.
That googledorsk link... You're telling me if i put the word "googledorks" on my website and wait a few months i will be one because it appears in a google search?
Is googledorks a real hacker movement or just some random key word any one with a high ranking web page can abuse?
On another note, the best thing i found that was supposed to be hidden was with the query "quality hentai" This was last year. It has since been secured (by being taken offline).
What have you found?
...but what the heck are "googled orks"?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Why do people always have to drag Google into this sort of thing? Somewhere, someone is pissed off at Google for putting their medical records on the web, and letting people get at them, when they should be angry at the people who posted them to the web in the first place. It's like calling Southwest Bell your partner in crime because you used DSL to steal from an online bank. It just makes SWBell look bad, just as this makes Google look bad.
-twb
But can they find the last port location of the SS Minnow?!
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
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.
This isn't anything too new. For kicks, I once searched for "Resume" and "Credit card" on KaZaA and got hundreds of results. Presumably, the trouble is that people sometimes believe that security through obscurity works - or, in the case of KaZaA, a lack of attention leads people to share files they didn't really want to.
Interestingly, I found a text file with all the user names and passwords for brokerage firms, and bank accounts, of the IT director at the firm I was working in. Scary, considering he was supposed to have "15 years in the IT industry".
A while back I Googled my credit card number for a laugh. I was shocked to find it in an indexed webserver log for a site I had previously 'tried' to purchase from. (the form timed-out and I gave up).
A quick call to the bank and a few angry calls to the company sorted it, but I was not impressed.
Perhaps a tool to search for ones own private details should be developed to keep an eye on this?
The most basic way to keep Google from reaching information in a "Web server", security experts said, is to set up a "digital gatekeeper in the form of an instruction sheet for the search-engine's crawler. That file, which is called "fembots.txt"
Let's keep in mind that patents are in place to keep lawyers employed and keep them litigating. -CatGrep
People have used this for years to find things like Bill Gates' social security number and all kinds of things we think should be private. Chances are, if its in a record somewhere, that information will leak onto the internet sooner than most people think.
Hmmm, let's see:
1. Microsoft has stated it wants to win the search engine war.
2. MSNBC (Microsoft owned) puts out story calling Google insecure because it invades your privacy.
3. MSN Search comes out with "secure, private searching" for only $9.95 a month.
4. Profit???
Conclusion: This is nothing more than a FUD story designed to sow the seeds of doubt about Google.
Visceral Psyche Films
Lets pretend I'm taking a computer science course.
Lets pretend each week I have a program to code.
You see if you pretend, of course, I put the filename into google, and clicked search. In pretend, you know what came up?
The source code to the program I had to write for my university.
But remember, this is in pretend land.
This all brings up one of the central tenets of computer network security: If it is connected to the Internet, it can be accessed, and sometimes the probing computers that are looking leave their little IP footprints all over the place. For instance, I was rather surprised a couple of years ago watching some IP's scroll through while someone/a software bot was accessing my workstation. Whois revealed nothing, but traceroute revealed an IP that allowed me to do a little more poking around to find out the identity as something from a "Special Collections Service" in Maryland. A little more poking around revealed it to be something involving a state department program whereupon I rather quickly decided to stop investigating. I still don't know anything about them or what they do, but it is surprising how hard it can be to be anonymous on the web. Hey, I am sure even all those Slashdot anonymous coward posters are leaving IP's that can and are documented. :-)
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
The real story here is that companies and other organizations and institutions are setting machines up as servers and are too stupid to create an appropriate robots.txt file and/or keep their confidential information elsewhere. Google doesn't just drop in, even on networked machines. I have some sympathy for individuals who don't understand what they are doing when they make their machine a server, but surely any professional sysadmin, even one with limited training and experience, should know better than this. It's the same as leaving your briefcase on the front seat of an unlocked car.
The article seems to imply that the problem is Google, but that simply isn't fair--the problem is that people are posting private info to the web. If you don't want the public to see it, don't post it in public.
Part of this problem comes out of who owns the daggoned data. For example, let's say a hospital, instead of using clipboards, uses smartcards to hocket about patient records.
Who own's the data. The hospital, the insurance company paying the bill, or the poor schmuck on the business end of a colonoscopy?
I ask because without the indiviual having the write to own the data, there seems to me little that can be done to protect oneself other than go through expensive and tedious legal channels.
And if someone else can own sensitive data about me, then what can we do, as private citizens with limited resources, to make sure larger entities such as insurance companies play by rules like HIPPA?
--- have you healed your church website?
I read once that an old trick some people used to use is to do a search for "root" on Altavista (yeah, this was back in the days) and it would actually return useful information for gaining access. Not sure if that was just a geek urban legend but it sound plausible to me.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
article:
Since 2001, the FTC has settled cases with Eli
Lilly & Co., Microsoft Corp. and clothing maker
Guess Inc. for not taking "reasonable" measures
to keep medical or financial information
secure, said Jessica Rich, assistant
director of the commission's bureau of consumer
protection. Letting customer information
reside on an unsecure server can open
up a business to such liability.
If your information is "sensitive" or "private", do yourself a favor and don't put it on the web.
Peeps nowadays...
How can we not hold Mapblast (how's that name for irony!) partially responsible for the Two Towers tragedy when several aerial photographs from the site were found in Atta's car?
Shouldn't we also hold the gas companies responsible? I bet they found gasoline in his car too.
Shouldn't Google take precautions to make sure that sensitive data doesn't fall into the wrong hands?
No, they should not. They are not in a position to know what _is_ sensitive - and to whom. They can reasonably only assume that anything reachable with an ordinary, polite spider is meant to be accessible to the world at large. If you feel certain information should not be made accessible, bring it up with those actually making it accessible, not with those just indexing it once it is.
Shooting the messenger is not just pointless, it is counterproductive.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
Err, not me of course ;-)
Also, these are not precise locations. Yeah, you can find that the USS Roosevelt (DDG-80) is homeported in Mayport, Florida but you're not going to find the precise pier number.
As for ships on deployment, one can find their general locations just by looking at the latest issue of the Navy Times and by reading the newspaper of the town that the ship and its battlegroup are from.
The Navy really tightened up on what get's posted on official ship's websites after 9/11. If there is sensitive information still out there, Google is not at fault, but rather the unit's webmaster, Commanding Officer, and the Operational Security people who are supposed to be looking out for that sort of thing.
Imagine if the US government gets in its head that search engines are a terrorist tool?
Wouldn't that be interesting?
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Maybe they should just use the fricking robots.txt protocol. That's what it's *FOR*. You can put a little file named robots.txt in the directory you want hidden, put text in it that says "i want this hidden, google", and google will ignore your directory forevermore.
No one has any right to complain if their page is in a search engine unless they followed the robots.txt protocol and the search engine did not.
Nothing is private any more. I wholly agree. But:
Anyone else notice that the site is msnbc.msn.com? Isn't Microsoft trying to develop a google competitor?
Am I just another cynical bastard?
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
Ok, Lets make some connections here people:
This article places the google search engine as the medium for this activity.
This article is from MSNBC.
MSNBC is owned by Micro$oft
Wasn't Micro$oft trying to compete with Google for search engine market?
Someone please tell me I'm just being paranoid
now's our chance! I think we can slashdot Google!
Esoteric reference.
Well then again... it is an MSNBC article.
:)
Seems some one in the mainstream press got a clue and has decided that the other 98% of the people should join in on the fun... if they can figure out how to use Google that is.
Who knows, maybe they'll even teach the clueless about Google image search... which came in handy this last weekend when a girl who wanted to model but couldn't figure out how to send me a pic attached in an email... Curious as to what she looked like, I googled and found her.
As you can see, the stuff you can find on image search sure as hell beats those top-secret pentagon word documents anyday
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
I am a member of a university organisation called the Assassins Guild, the basic premise being that, on the basis of the most limited possible information, we hunt down and "kill" other guild members with weapons such as cap guns and cardboard swords. As such, I have some personal experience of the use of Google in stalking. I can tell you that, in a university composed presumably of some of the most net-savvy people around, I have only found a photo once. Occasionally I have found a usenet posting or slashdot account. Old schools are common, but the folk at my uni are often those who are mentioned in school newsletters. The average web presence of the average user is approximately nil. In a range of cases, someone may become more prominent (either by accident or design - Darl McBride for example), but on the whole there is very little you can gather from Google. Occasionally it's enough to kill your target, but don't count on bank details.
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
An old trick I used to do was searching for something along the lines of
"http://*:*@" member
and you would get a bunch of sites with direct links into passworded member sites. Microsoft will put a stop to this with their latest update to IE however.
I.O.U One Sig.
The google mediapartners bot which will look at pages for the purposes of advertising such as in Opera is different and seperate from the bot that adds pages to Google's search database. The mediapartners bot does not feed the Google search engine.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
And on a totally unrelated thought. . .
Is Yuki Noguchi on crack? Google does not do anything to privacy. All Google does is make it easier to find publicly available information. Maybe "Online search engines act as a catalyst to find private information" would be more a accurate title. ". .Losing faith in humanity one person at a time.
Manly man, aren't you?
Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers.
Opera doesn't even send such urls to Google.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
This article is from the Washington Post, not from Microsoft. Please adjust your conspiracy theories accordingly.
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
Google and the wayback machine, respectively, have memories. Just because you take something off the web doesn't mean it can't be found by those services; it just means it won't respond to your browser's request. Cached results and so forth are dangerous. If there ever was leaked data about the locations of those ships, it can still probably be found somewhere, and if that information hasn't changed since it was taken off the web, it's still a problem.
This applies to any information that's ever been stored electronically; I call it the "backup tape problem". Someday, that information may (will?) find its way online, a public service will index it, and the genie will be out of the bottle forever.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
I was looking at a few examples and tried out intitle:"Index of..etc" passwd. The first result is a honey pot :)
They have some Webalizer stats for the honey pot too.
(\(\
(^.^)
(")")
*This is the cute bunny virus, please copy this into your sig so it can spread
How to use this for evil is obveous. (Actually I do searches on myself ever now and then just to see what I look like on the Internet. Do it yourself it's fun.)
Your an evil badguy and go nuts on Google... Credit Cards... Horray... Now to go nutz.
Leave it to MS NBC to neglect to mention that this is also a tool for good.
Your a credit card holder..... Now go google your credit cards... DO IT NOW.
Did you find it? I didn't.
I've got 4 credit cards.. two store cards one business visa and one personal mastercard.
(Oh yeah hackers the name on the card is Felinoid) Yeah they'll buy that.. not...
Don't need to use Google BTW... Use Alta Vista.. or Microsoft serch.. or Lycos...
Oh yeah and when your done put your credit cards away (I had to leave desk while entering post an left my wallet on desk... Now my credit cards are gone and I think I saw a stuffed teady bear running down the street yelling "Charge it"... Just kidding got all my cards..).
(Oh yeah if you do see a teady bear running down the street your missing credit cards are the least of your conserns)
Now to set up a bot to trap all thies searches on Google....
(Oh come on it had to be said)
I don't actually exist.
This isn't news when it comes to the ships for the navy. For years I have been a member of a small group of warship fans in the Seattle who have swapped emails for years about ship X being at location Y. It basically amounts to: "That new destroyer put into Bremerton last week. Go take a look at it!" Of course the only difference here is now that that information is available to the general public. Whoopee! Disaster! You might know something!
Google will leave you right the fuck alone
All it takes is one cross-link from a site that links, and a number of hits, and google will advertise the cross-link, robots.txt or not.
I am sure there are other reasons you could get your SSN changed, like "I'm Bill Gates, and every jokester in the world has my SSN..."
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
> 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:
--------
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)
--------
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.
Google has been great for catching plagiarism - my mother has used it to verify essays she suspected of being plagiarized.
Bít, zabít, jen proto, ze su liska!
On the one hand, yes, the information was already out there to be found and sorted. On the other, however, things like Google take such information and make them available to anyone (which they were before) in an incredibly easy-to-use form (which it was most certainly not previously). Say I want to know information about Al G. Trenton, the G is for Greerson. This person went to XYZ school back in high school and held ZYX position. Do a few searches for common phrases, you get some information maybe from a private web side or a town newspaper. Maybe you get parents' names or the name of a college or something; boom, you have more information to refine your search. This once would have taken days, maybe weeks, and preferably a trained professional; now it takes hours, and is easily done by a moderately bright and creative individual.
Hopefully this sort of flagrant violation will draw at least a modicum of public attention.
This isn't some hardened criminal mastermind at work. It's not a seasoned cracker attacking military targets. This isn't even some script kiddie poking at IIS. It's a MACHINE. A machine that respects robots.txt for Eris' sake!
If medical records and other "real" secrets are this visible, something is terribly wrong and I want to see public floggings. Seriously, this is not a case of weak security, or poor security, or incompetent security. It's a case of there not being so much as a screen door between the public and sensitive information.
This is actually a case where I think the government (or at least the courts) can do some good. You'll notice banks don't get hacked on a daily basis. That's because they'd lose squintillions of dollars if it happened. But nobody cares about my medical records because it costs money not to have incompetent asses running things. On the other hand, if revealing to without were punishible by a $1000 fine per person, per offense, you'd notice a severe tightening of security in a mighty big hurry.
It's a shame that suing people is sometimes the only way to get their attention, but with the decline of basic civil responsibility it might be inevitable.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
Damn! I tried to search for the WMDs on Google...Not even Google could find them! hehehe...
I say why blame just one person/group/entity. Let's blame the people who publicly post the personal information AND the people who use that information to hurt people. But let's not blame Google or any other search engine for doing too good of a job.
Losing faith in humanity one person at a time.
"The scariest thing is that this could be happening to the government and they may never know it was happening," Long said.
This isn't "happening to the government", as if the government is some innocent victim. Rather, "the government screwed up big time". Likewise, if some company has sensitive personal information lying around on a public web server, the company is at fault and should be liable.
Let's not make victims out of perpetrators.
Google and Janet Jackson's right boob are CLEARLY the causes of the deterioration of our society!!!!!!!!!
From the article:
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."
---
From the website:
googleDork (gOO gol'Dork) noun 1. Slang. An inept or foolish person as revealed by Google.
---
Ok... So who here is the googledork (hint: It's not me)? The dork who googles for the victim's information or the clever person who googles for the dork's information? Confused? If the website is more authoritative than the original slashdot poster (Rican) then maybe Rican is the dork?
You can find out whether personal information about you is available accidentally by searching for your name and a piece of your sensitive information on Google, say, your name and the last four digits of your SSN, the last four digits of a credit card number, parts of your phone number, or your street address. Leaked personal information would have to contain both your name and that other information. Chances are that you will retrieve only a few documents, which you can quickly review.
Keep in mind, however, that Google queries are not encrypted and are not guaranteed to be private or secure, so, for your search, don't use the full SSN or anything else that shouldn't be disclosed.
I don't know why Google never indexes this stuff, it's clearly public record and can be of interest to a lot of people, but they never did (I checked them many times, including just now, and they show no indication of the document). I wonder what other good government documents are out there if you only know where to look for them.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Sounds to me like these "search engines" are nothing more than tools used by those "internet hackers" for their evil deeds. Lets all write letters to our congressmen; these criminals can be tolerated no longer!
The allinurl and site search features can be used to good affect when looking for machines with vunl cgi that give one execute or read permissions.
.gov and .mil one only needs a web browser to gain the foothold on their DMZ/LAN. (Heh, DMZ, giving them way too much credit).
for example:
allinurl: cgi print site:.mil
You would cry if you realized that to hack
Anyway, using common cgi tricks like dot traversal, poison null byte (RFP you can kiss my ass), obfuscation (".." == "%2e%2e"), etc... Oh dont forget the pipe operator.
I agree with other posters who say it is not Google's fault. They do a great job. It is the people who program those cgis need to really take a bit more time.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Just tonight I was Googling for "number personnel U.S. military" and I was surprised to find many links along the lines of "How to find U.S. military personnel." The site with the most links to directories has a Netherlands domain name, which seemed odd. I tried to find some family members and did turn up some information. Some sites were DoD and had recognizable warnings about monitoring. Another was a .com for the military community and required standard registration procedures. I don't know if it's a good idea to have this information online and I wonder what military folks think about it. I reckon there are pros & cons.
a) Mediapartners-google does check robots.txt
b) Opera always has the name "Opera" in it's UA string, even when masquerading as IE.
c) Mediapartners-google doesn't feed the Google search engine. It is only used for Google adverts.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
How can we not hold Mapblast (how's that name for irony!) partially responsible for the Two Towers tragedy
I'd pin most of it on Saruman.
how about robot.txt? is it forgotten? does current modern search engine ignore them?
above all of that, does it was a stupid idea to hide an information with just no link point it? u must make sure it's properly secure with access control like ip address or password of the visitor.
maybe some people it was not simple to build access control using some content management or any self build scripting. but i think it was so simple to use http autenthication whose provided by most web server.
----
so many dreams r swinging out of the blue we let them come true (forever young, alphavile)
Did anyone notice how heavily "enhanced" the cited MSNBC web page is? Try to print it using Mozilla 1.2.1 on Linux and it crashes the browser. Try to view it with Mozilla 1.1 on Windoze XP and page is displayed very incorrectly. Even printing with IE from XP took 3 tries.
These fuckers never give up.
I know this is very late in the discussion.
But, if I wander into an unprotected system, like a bank or military site, and I start reading confidential documents... Is this not a crime?
What's the difference if I locate the unprotected documents via a search engine or by using a port scanner with an IP range.
I think what I'm saying is that port scanning and finding an vunerable system, going into that system and looking around is now a crime.
But didn't I just describe what's going on with google hacking?
I don't advocate nor believe any of this is a crime but where and why is a line drawn between them?
I've often said about hacking that just because I go to the market and forget to lock my front door, that doesn't mean I expect to come home and find someone rumaging through my house.
If it's an administrator who forgets to lock down a port or one how inadvertantly places confidential materal on the wrong box... Again, Where is the line and how is it drawn, and why, between criminal hacking and "it's on an open system, google found it so it's legal".
I'm just asking. It's early in the AM and my brain isn't working because it's not seeing the difference. I'm only seeing a very fine line between what one might consider a "public" system versus one that expected to be "private". Is the only difference our "expectation" of privacy that makes one illegal and another a sport?
f Bill Gates is using the same broswer that he pushed in 1995, then he is a total moron. He is not a moron. Therefore he is not using the same browser that he pushed in 1995,IE, QED
dumb, de-dumb, dumb.
Nice of MSNBC to malign the thing M$ can neither match nor buy.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
A lot of the personal data that is publicly accessible was not made publicly accessible by the data subject, but by a third person/party.
People say I'm crazy, I got diamonds on the soles of my shoes...