Assignment #1

Assignment #1Network Security

Zaheer Ahmed Gauhar TE-49C3/2/2015

Objective:To learn how to get data from unprotected directories over the internet using nothing but simple Google search operators.Introduction:Innovation in the field of communications has left much vulnerability when it comes to information security. Although most of them have been addressed over the past few years but many loopholes still remain unattended. One such loophole is an unprotected directory. If you own a website but dont secure your directories then anyone can access data from them by simply using Google search engine cleverly.Similarly you can use Google to download music, movies, e-books and other stuff from unprotected directories available on the internet.Here is a step by step guide:For this example we will download the e-book Cryptography and Network Security by William Stallings.

Step-1:Go to www.google.com and type in how to hack using google. You will get results as shown in the figure 1.Figure 1

Step-2:Click the link that says www.indiahowto.com/how-to-hack-using-google.html as shown in figure 1. It will open up a new page from website as shown in the figure 2.Figure 2

Step-3:Read through the complete article comprising of four pages. Use the link at the bottom of each page or use table of contents as shown in figure 3 to navigate through the complete article.Figure 3

Step-4:Now lets try what we have learnt about accessing unprotected directories. Type the following line in google search and you will get results as shown in figure 4.intitle:Index of +Index of +name +description +modified +size As learnt from article at indiahowto.com, unprotected directories have a specific format and they are indexed by Google. So we can access them by using proper keywords in our search query. For example in the above line, intitle is an operator which specifies that search results with specific words in the title* must be shown. Those specific words for this example are Index of. All the remaining terms restrict Google to show only the results having name, description, index of, modified and size on the webpage.Note: double quotes ( ) are used to combine multiple words and use them in the query.*title of the webpage is what appears at the very top in the title bar.

Figure 4

Step-5:Utilizing the operators learnt from the article, you can now construct your own queries to get the required information. So in order to find out the e-book, lets write the query.intitle:Index of +Index of +name +description +modified +size +william +stallingsThis query is going to show all the unprotected directories with keywords William and stallings in them.Figure 5

Step-6:Once you get results as shown in figure 5, start opening the links one by one and search for the required book in the page. The links will look something like the one shown in figure 6.Figure 6

Step-7:There is no need to read each and every book name to get the desired item. Simply press ctrl+F and it will open up the search bar through which you can search within the webpage. Type the book name Cryptography and Network Security and it will highlight the link if it exists. Simply click the link and download will start. See figure 7 (top right corner).Figure 7

Troubleshooting tips:There is a possibility that your results may not match the ones shown in above figures. That is because there are some errors in your query, some of them are identified by Google others are not. If you misspell a name or common word it will be highlighted by Google as shown in figure 8 and you can correct it to reach desired results.Figure 8

Note that in the operator intitle: there are no white spaces after the colon, so if you have placed one accidentally then your results may differ drastically. If you dont get the desired results, this might be the problem in which case your results will look something like the figure 9.Figure 9