Google Dorks: An Advanced Hacking Tool
This blog will introduce a must-have skill called google Dorking, also known as Google hacking.
What are Google Dorks?
Google Dorks, also known as Google Dorking or Google hacking is a hacking technique that is used to find the best-desired search results without wasting time exploring google for required information. Usually, google dorks are used by researchers or hackers to find critical information about a company, individual, software or app, a research topic, or anything else. But a normal person can also use google dorks in many places and can save time and will get better information.
How Google Dorks work?
As you all know, Google crawls almost all websites and indexes almost everything available on that website including some sensitive information. That simply means google exposes too much information about websites including the technologies used, username, passwords, and some other general vulnerabilities.
By using some simple techniques which we call google dorks, we are just exploring that sensitive information. Apart from this, by using google dorks, we can also help Google to understand more about what search results we are expecting from google.
Why do we need google dorks?
Everyone uses google dorks for a different purpose. Below are some of the most common reasons for using google dorks -
- cybersecurity experts use google dorks to find critical information which gets exposed by mistake or exposed by someone knowingly about anything so that they can, later on, hide or delete that so that no one can use that for any wrong purpose.
- researchers, content writers, journalists, etc use google dorks to gather all the information available on google about a particular topic so that they can use that information for reaching their own goals.
- students mainly use google dorks to find answers to their questions which are from their textbook or asked by someone or for finding leaked versions of a course or a book for free.
- companies and their employees use google dorks to gather information about their competitors and for finding honest reviews of their products or services so that they can use that information further for improving their products and services and which results help their company grow faster.
What can we find from Google Dorks?
Google dorks can be used to find a variety of information in many aspects but it is mainly used to find the information described below -
- critical information of a website, company, organization, software
- blogs, articles, research papers, etc on a particular topic
- leaked courses and ebooks
- reviews about a company, its product, and its services
- finding solutions to answers to textbook questions
Apart from these, there exist many other kinds of information which can be found via google dorks very easily.
How to use Google Dorks?
Let’s learn this by an example. While searching for any free ebook, once add filetype: pdf in your google search box along with book name and in results Google will only show you those search results which have a pdf with the same name as you typed in the search box. For a better understanding, once try this on your own.
Note -
Also for the betterment of our users, we have shown examples of what and how you should type search queries in Google.
Collection of Most Useful Google Dorks
I have compiled the list of all my favorite google dorks and published that on Github, the link of the same is given below.
https://github.com/InfuriousICC/Google-Dorks-Simplified#collection-of-most-useful-google-dorks
How to safeguard information from Google Dorks?
You can take the following safety measures to protect your information from being disclosed by google dorks -
- Protect pages that contain sensitive information via username and password.
- Run regular dork queries against your website to discover sensitive information.
- Request removal of sensitive information if found via google search console
- https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9689846?hl=en&visit_id=637871614748203924-38706967&rd=1
- Block sensitive content by using a robots.txt file located in your root-level website directory.
You can read more about google dorks on our Github repo.
You can follow me for learning my writeups on topics related to ethical hacking and cybersecurity and a few topics on technology and to knowing my tips and tricks which I use to save my time and for better results.
