Imperva’s Hacker Intelligence Initiative (HII) this week revealed that hackers are leveraging the power of search engines to successfully carry out attacks – and it’s risk free. Hackers, armed with a browser and specially crafted search queries (“Dorks”), are using botnets to generate more than 80,000 daily queries, identify potential attack targets and build an accurate picture of the resources within that server that are potentially exposed. Automating the query and result parsing enables the attacker to issue a large number of queries, examine all the returned results and get a filtered list of potentially exploitable sites in a very short time and with minimal effort. As searches are conducted using botnets, and not the hacker’s IP address, the attacker’s identity remains concealed.
- CLAIRE HOJEM
- InfoSecurity
- Posted On
