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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.'"
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.
...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.
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?
If your information is "sensitive" or "private", do yourself a favor and don't put it on the web.
Peeps nowadays...
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.
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)
now's our chance! I think we can slashdot Google!
Esoteric reference.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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)
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.
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.
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?