A hacker’s guide to Google dorking

Google dorking is a comparatively simple yet invaluable reconnaissance technique for ethical hackers to learn.

Suitably customised ‘dorks’ (Google searches that reveal sensitive information about targets) can uncover hidden admin panels, misconfigured subdomains and exposed credentials within minutes – all without sending a single direct scan. Master common Google dorking operators like site:, inurl: and filetype: and this passive recon technique can provide intel that paves the way to finding hitherto overlooked vulnerabilities.

The power of Google dorking (aka Google hacking) was creatively demonstrated, for instance, by research about leveraging dorks to find zero-days from Suraj Khetani of Unit 42, which was a contender for PortSwigger’s web hacking techniques awards for 2017.

This article will elaborate on the value of dorking to Bug Bounty hunters, and explain how to conduct dorking queries in a multitude of effective ways.

You can find the full article on YesWeHack’s blog page