Testing: Spidering and googling

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OWASP Testing Guide v2 Table of Contents

Brief Summary

Web spiders are probably one of the most useful tools ever developed for the internet. After all, with millions of separate and different sites out there today, how else can you gather all that information?

A spider does one thing - it goes out on the web and collects information. The way a typical spider (like Google) works is by looking at one page and finding the relevant information. It then follows all the links in that page, collecting relevant information in each following page, and so on. Pretty soon, you'll end up with thousands of pages and bits of information in your database. This web of paths is where the term 'spider' comes from.

The Google search engine found at http://www.google.com offers many features, including language and document translation; web, image, newsgroups, catalog, and news searches; and more.

You can use this ability to locate targets based on criteria that allow you to narrow the scope of your search.

Description of the Issue

These features offer obvious benefits to even the most uninitiated web surfer, but these same features offer far more nefarious possibilities to the most malicious Internet users, including hackers, computer criminals, identity thieves, and even terrorists. This article outlines the more harmful applications of the Google search engine, techniques that have collectively been termed "Google hacking."
BASIC SEARCH Since the Google web interface is enter and click, I won't describe the basic functionality of the http://www.google.com web page. Instead, I'll focus on the various operators available:

Use the plus sign (+) to force a search for an overly common word. Use the minus sign (-) to exclude a term from a search. No space follows these signs.

To search for a phrase, supply the phrase surrounded by double quotes (" ").

A period (.) serves as a single-character wildcard.

An asterisk (*) represents any word—not the completion of a word, as is traditionally used.

Google advanced operators help refine searches. Advanced operators use a syntax such as the following:

operator:search_term

Notice that there's no space between the operator, the colon, and the search term.

The site: operator instructs Google to restrict a search to a specific web site or domain. The web site to search must be supplied after the colon.

The filetype: operator instructs Google to search only within the text of a particular type of file. The file type to search must be supplied after the colon. Don't include a period before the file extension.

The link: operator instructs Google to search within hyperlinks for a search term.

The cache: operator displays the version of a web page as it appeared when Google crawled the site. The URL of the site must be supplied after the colon.

The intitle: operator instructs Google to search for a term within the title of a document.

The inurl: operator instructs Google to search only within the URL (web address) of a document. The search term must follow the colon.

By using the basic search techniques combined with Google's advanced operators, anyone can perform information-gathering and vulnerability-searching using Google. This technique is commonly referred to as Google hacking

Site Mapping

To find every web page Google has crawled for a specific site, use the site: operator. Consider the following query:

site:http://www.owasp.org OWASP

-INPROGRESS PLACEHOLDER - Tom Brennan

Black Box testing and example

Testing for Topic X vulnerabilities:
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Result Expected:
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Gray Box testing and example

Testing for Topic X vulnerabilities:
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Result Expected:
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References

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Tools
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OWASP Testing Guide v2

Here is the OWASP Testing Guide v2 Table of Contents