Hunt exposed Files with Directory Listing
Internet is full of misconfigured webservers with directory listing, let's take a tour with google

Directory listing is a feature of web servers that, when enabled, allows users to view a list of files and folders in a web directory.
While it may be useful for developers when debugging or for specific purposes, leaving directory listing active on publicly accessible servers represents a significant security risk.
When an HTTP server does not find a default file (such as index.html or index.php) in a directory, it can respond by showing a list of the files and subfolders in that directory.
This behavior is often enabled by default on some servers, especially in unoptimized configurations.
For example, by visiting http://example.com/uploads/, the user may see a complete list of uploaded files, including sensitive documents, backups, or even critical configurations.

These Google dorks can be used to identify servers with active directory listings, allowing anyone to access publicly exposed files.
Here are some common queries to find open directories, the obviously most used prefix is intitle:"index of /", it really just takes a bit of imagination:

[*] intitle:"index of" /private
[*] intitle:"index of" "backup"
[*] intitle:"index of" ("database"|"*.sql")

I guess they all speak for theirselves but you can obviously add other dork keywords for more specific results.


[*] example_1.png


[*] example_2.png


Can i use alternative search engines?
Of course, i recommend FOFA, the results indexed by a specific search engine are significative more than google.
However google dorking is still used to search files, certain strings in a certain URL path, and other things like that.
The effectiveness of crawling offered by google spiders is usually deeper (by visiting subdirectories, most clicked links, etc...).

title="index of"