What is Google Hacking?

Google hacking is the term used when a hacker tries to find exploitable targets and sensitive data by using search engines. The Google Hacking Database (GHDB) is a database of queries that identify sensitive data. Although Google blocks some of the better known Google hacking queries, nothing stops a hacker from crawling your site and launching the Google Hacking Database queries directly onto the crawled content.

More information about Google hacking can be found on: http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=170880.

What a Hacker can do if your Website is Vulnerable

Information that the Google Hacking Database identifies:

Advisories and server vulnerabilities
Error messages that contain too much information
Files containing passwords
Sensitive directories
Pages containing logon portals
Pages containing network or vulnerability data such as firewall logs.

In 2014 the total number of websites on the internet reached 1 billion. Today it’s hovering somewhere in the neighborhood of 944 million due to websites going inactive, and it is expected to normalize again at 1 billion sometime in 2015. Let’s take a minute to absorb that number for a moment – 1 billion.

Another surprising statistic is that Google, one of the most popular search engines in the world, quarantines approximately 10,000 websites a day via its Safe Browsing technology. From our own research, out of the millions of websites that push through our scanning technology, roughly 2 – 5% of the them have some Indicator of Compromise (IoC) that signifies a website attack. Granted, this might be a bit high, as the websites being scanned are often suspected of having an issue, so to be conservative we would extrapolate that to suggest about 1% of the total websites online are hacked or infected. To put that into perspective, we are talking somewhere in the neighborhood of 9 million websites that are currently hacked or infected.

How to Check for Google Hacking Vulnerabilities

The easiest way to check whether your web site & applications have Google hacking vulnerabilities, is to use a Web Vulnerability Scanner. A Web Vulnerability Scanner scans your entire website and automatically checks for pages that are identified by Google hacking queries. (Note: Your web vulnerability scanner must be able to launch Google hacking queries).

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