Lesson 5: Discovering Sensitive Information about People

Let's talk about Google dorks. Google dorks are search operators that will allow you to narrow down your search results and can also be used to find some sensitive information that are not easily accessible through a regular search. Now Google dorks are basically used by hackers, journalists and anyone who needs to find any specific information.

I would like to show you a real life example on how we can use Google dorks to find people information. So we will be looking for a person called Rishi Khabra and this person works at Contact Out. So what we are going to do throughout this section and the next sections is to gather as much information as possible.

So the first Google dork or search operator that I would like to show you is the double codes. Now I want you to keep in mind that this search operator doesn't only work on Google but it also work on Bing and Yandex. So the double codes will only display a result that exactly match your search query.

For example, right here we have searched for the name Satsaraj and we have got 121,000 search results. But when we used the double codes we were only able to get 3550 search results which is way less than before. So let me show you a real life example.

I'm going to be searching for Rishi Khabra and see what information we can get. So you can see that we have got 479,000 search results and we cannot go through all of these search results because this is going to take a lot of time. So what we can do is put this name within two codes like this and hit enter and now we have got 1840 search results.

Since we know that he works at contact out we can add a space and say contact out within two quotation marks and now we only got 132 search results. There is an alternative option that you can use to narrow down your search results without using double codes which is verbatim search. So you can enable verbatim search by clicking on all results and then verbatim but I like to use the double codes because the double codes will show you how many search results were found.

So I'm going to hit enter right here and you can see that we have 132 search results which is not visible if we used verbatim search. Now if we looked at the search results again we can see that we have a person called Rishi Kabra and he is a product manager at contact out and he is from India Kolkata. So let me open this profile to see his profile picture and we can see that this is how he looks like and this is the person that we are looking for.

So we can see that he is a product manager at contact out, we can see his profile picture and he is from India Kolkata. We can also scroll down to see more information about him and his experience etc. Now we will be talking about this in the social media in which we will utilize this information to get more information about this person.

Before we continue I would like to show you how you can take notes because notes are very important. So the first option that I would like to show you is called Notion which is a cloud service that will allow you to save your notes on the cloud and if you would like to save your notes locally you can use keep note which is also a good option. Another important thing is taking screenshots and I like to use either green shot or light shot but I like green shot more because it has more features.

But for now I am going to copy the URL of his LinkedIn profile and put it in my notes. Now let's come back to the search results, we can see that he has an X account and we can read the description a product manager, developer, gamer etc. and he has a different username.

So I am going to copy the URL and then I am going to go to a website called URL clean which will clean all the URL that are copied from Google. So if I pasted the URL you can see that it is a Google URL and we need to clean it using this website. And now we can copy this URL and put it in our notes.

Now if we scroll down a little bit we can see here that some results may have been removed under data protection law in Europe. So if you are living in Europe then some search results will be hidden and not displayed. And we will see how we can bypass this in a future lecture.

Another thing that I would like to show you is if you are searching for a person and you know how this person looks like or you saw their profile picture on their account for example as we have seen here. What we can do is search for faces in Google. So you want to go to images and then you want to go to tools and then type and then select clip art.

And once you select this you are going to replace the word clip art in the URL to the word face. So here we have clip art and we are going to replace it with the word face. And as you can see now Google only search for faces.

And the first three search results are the people that we are looking for. And we can see that he has an x account right here and he is using same or similar picture that he used on LinkedIn. And he also has a github account.

So I am going to open it and also save it in my notepad. Now another thing that I would like to show you which is if you know where this person lives then you can add the person name in double quotes as we have done here. And then put the name of the city where he is living.

For example since we know that he is living in Kolkata we are going to say Kolkata and then hit enter. And then we will get some search results. And now we can see that we have an Ask.fm account.

And I am going to copy the URL and also save it in my notes. Now if we scroll down a little bit we might see something. For example we can see that here we have a website that seems to be selling stuff.

And we can see the name Kolkata and Rishi Khabra. And since we know that Rishi Khabra lives in Kolkata we might assume that he was trying to sell a sofa on this website. So let's open the URL and as you can see we cannot see the search result.

We cannot see the sofa that he was trying to sell. So I assume that this sofa has been sold before and this offer is not available on this website anymore. So what we can do in this case is look if there is a cached version of this page.

Let's copy the URL as we have done before and then go to URL clean and put the URL right here and say clean it. And now we have the URL. So we are going to ask Google to see if there is a cached version of this page.

Please keep in mind that not all the pages on Google are cached. And cached means that there is an old copy that Google has in its database. So I am going to open my notepad and put the URL and at the beginning I am going to type the word cache and then a colon.

So it is going to be cache colon and then the URL. I am going to copy it and paste it in a new tab. And as you can see we can see an old version of this page.

And we can also see how the sofa looks like and we might get an idea of the apartment where he is living. We can also see that this is in West Bengal in Kolkata in this place.