Conduct Search Engine Discovery and Reconnaissance for Information Leakage is in testing checklist for information gathering while doing analysis.
This article will throw light on the information leakage in the cyber world unintentionally by the application/system/organisation which can be misused by the third party which will create a loss.
The objective is to understand what sensitive design and configuration information of the application/system/organisation is exposed both directly (on the organisation’s website) or indirectly (on a third party website).
The concept behind this is to find sensitive information about your application/system/organisation shown to the world without your knowledge. We might get some great and unexpected results from this test.
We use these searches to find:
- Network diagrams and configurations
- Archived posts and emails by administrators and other key staff
- Log on procedures and username formats
- Usernames and passwords
- Error message content
- Development, test, UAT (User acceptance testing is used to test software in real worlds by the intended audience. It is last phase of testing.) and staging versions of the website
There are direct and indirect elements to search engine discovery and reconnaissance. Direct methods relate to searching the indexes and the associated content from caches. Indirect methods relate to gleaning (obtaining) sensitive design and configuration information by searching forums, newsgroups, and tendering websites.
Once a search engine robot has completed crawling, it commences indexing the web page based on tags and associated attributes, such as