As the title states, I found this article last night while surfing

the net. Posted on January 14, 2006 so fairly new. Full story can be found

here

http://castlecops.com/article-6466-nested-0-0.html

One of the most common remote web authoring tools is

Microsoft's Front Page. Front page extensions and WebDav, the

services on the web server that allow you to remotely connect and

author web pages, can be configured with a certain degree of

security. However, in certain configurations, the userID and password

are stored in local files on the server. Using a Google query, you

can easily locate thousands of these files and dump the contents.

The query form is quite simple: "inurlfilename).pwd", where

(filename) is the name of the .pwd file. This query can be expanded

to be very specific and target a specific site by using a command to

search for a specific site or domain. The results of a specific

search like this would list hundreds if not thousands of these files

that would contain something like "# -FrontPage-

dmiller:I1KEaH1TZqxEw". Basically dumping the userID and password.

This type of basic query can be used to find all kinds of interesting

information such as using the "intitle:"index of" (name of directory

you want to locate)" which not only reveals many web directory

structures of "index of/", it also reveals how many web servers on

the Internet do not have even the most basic forms of permissions and

directory security. You will find that once you access a particular

directory, that you can then move up the directory tree and you never

know what you may find.
A lot of 'Free' webspace providers and ISP's with their 'free' 10mb

of webspace doesn't support front page extensions, for security

reasons.

The Google Search Engine supports very complex query types.

For instance, if you were to construct a query like ""parent

directory " Gamez -xxx -html -htm -php -shtml -opendivx -md5

-md5sums", the query would result in lists upon list of systems that

have a /Gamez directory off the root of the "parent directory" of the

web server. Or, to locate music files of type mp3 you could issue a

query like "intitle:index.of mp3 (name of band/song)".

The bottom line here is that it is possible to locate very specific

types of files. It is also possible to perform queries for inline

passwords from various search engines by performing a query similar

to "http://*:*@www".
Interesting stuff indeed.

The Google Search Engine is a powerful tool that can be used

by people with ill intentions just as it can be used for basic

web searching.
How safe and smart would it be to do this? I personally wouldn't. One

I'm not that type of person to try to obtain password files and such

and second, google 'records'/'logs' what you type. For instance, the

dude that killed his wife, he went to google and typed broken neck,

snap neck, 1001 ways to break a neck etc... remember what happened to

him right? Anyways whats your take on the subject?