Using Search Engines as Penetration Testing Tools

January 17th, 2018  By Uladzislau Murashka
 
Search engines are a treasure trove of valuable sensitive information, which hackers can use for their cyber-attacks. Good news: so can penetration testers. 
 
From a penetration tester’s point of view, all search engines can be largely divided into pen test-specific and commonly-used. The article will cover three search engines that my counterparts and I widely use as penetration testing tools. These are Google (the commonly-used) and two pen test-specific ones: Shodan and Censys.
 
Google
Penetration testing engineers employ Google advanced search operators for Google dork queries (or simply Google dorks). These are search strings with the following syntax: operator:search term. Further, you’ll find the list of the most useful operators for pen testers:
 
Full Article.