If you were tasked to gather information from a company website, then the file type search operator
is going to be vitally important, because this search operator will allow you to search for file types
across the internet, which means that you can tell Google to show you search results that are only
PDF files, Excel files, word files, PowerPoint files, etc. and we can combine it with the site search
operator to find a specific file type on a certain website.
For example, here we have specified the site as the Security.org and we are searching for all the indexed
PDF files on Google from the domain name security.org.
So let's see an example.
I'm going to search for all the PDF files that are indexed by Google from the domain name z security.org.
I'm going to hit enter.
And then we can see that we have 82 search results.
And all of these search results are PDF files.
So let me open the first file.
And this is basically a walkthrough of what we can do is download this file on our machine.
And then go to a website that will allow us to read metadata from this file.
And metadata are information that are embedded with a PDF file, or with an image that will allow you
to see the creation date, the creator, producer, author, etc..
So these are some information that can be only found if you read the metadata.
Sometimes you'll be able to find some geolocation information in the metadata, which is something that
I'm going to cover in the next lectures.
So now let me upload the file that we have downloaded.
And then I'm going to say read PDF metadata.
And you can see that this is the author, which is something that we cannot find.
If you open the file, we can also see the exact time when this file has been created and with which
software this file has been created.
Sometimes you will see old software versions that has many vulnerabilities that a hacker could exploit.
Here is another example to find PDF files that are related to the name Rishi Kabra.
I'm going to hit enter and I can scroll down and see that there is a document on this website.
So I'm going to open this document.
And if I zoomed in, I can see the names of the people who contributed in this document.
So we can see the name Rishi Kabra.
And we can also see an email of this person which is right here.
Rishi Kabra 132 at gmail.com.
And this is a username that we have previously saved in our notepad.
So as you can see here, he used his GitHub username as his email address.
Coming back to the search results, we can scroll down a little bit.
And then we can see a search result of a PDF file that is published on the university of where Rishi
Kabra was.
So this is called SRM something.
If we went to Rishi Kabra LinkedIn account, we can also see that he was in the SRM University.
And if we open this file we can search for the name Rishi Kabra, as you can see here.
So his name were also mentioned in this document.