Tag Archives: Search Engine

Googling for web.config and other source code

I don’t remember which blogger pointed this out to me, but I wont take credit for the means of searching google in this fashion. However, there are some seriously misguided folks out there that obviously don’t know the first thing about security. Google allows you to search for pages with specific information in the title of the page as well as in the text of the page. Since many directory browsable websites have the word “Index of” in the title , it’s fairly easy to search for sites that are directory browsable. What’s more interesting is that you can then add an “in text” search that searches for specific files in those directory-browsable sites. This could be potentially dangerous if the wrong file were browsable. Take a look at the following search:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=intext%3Aweb.config+intitle%3A%22index+of%22+&btnG=Search

These are some of the very folks that want to blame Microsoft for all of their security and virus problems. Seems to me I saw some *cough* Apache servers serving up some of those pages. When will you people get the point that you are only as secure as you want to be and you can’t blame any one vendor for not doing all of your work for you?