Welcome back, aspiring cyberwarriors! In the world of OSINT Google dorking remains one of the most popular reconnaissance techniques. While many hackers focus on finding vulnerable web applications or exposed directories, there’s a goldmine of sensitive information hiding in plain sight: personal knowledge bases and note-taking systems that users inadvertently expose to the internet. Today, […]

The post Google Dorks for Reconnaissance: How to Find Exposed Obsidian Vaults first appeared on Hackers Arise.

Welcome back, aspiring cyberwarriors!

In the world of OSINT Google dorking remains one of the most popular reconnaissance techniques. While many hackers focus on finding vulnerable web applications or exposed directories, there’s a goldmine of sensitive information hiding in plain sight: personal knowledge bases and note-taking systems that users inadvertently expose to the internet.

Today, I’m going to share a particularly interesting Google dork I discovered: inurl:publish-01.obsidian.md. This simple query get access to published Obsidian vaults—personal wikis, research notes, project documentation, and sometimes, highly sensitive information that users never intended to be publicly accessible.

What is Obsidian and Obsidian Publish?

Obsidian is a knowledge management and note-taking application that stores data in plain Markdown files. It’s become incredibly popular among researchers, developers, writers, and professionals who want to build interconnected “second brains” of information.

Obsidian Publish is the official hosting service that allows users to publish their personal notes online as wikis, knowledge bases, or digital gardens. It’s designed to make sharing knowledge easy—perhaps too easy for users who don’t fully understand the implications.

The Architecture

When you publish your Obsidian vault using Obsidian Publish, your notes are hosted on Obsidian’s infrastructure at domains like:

• publish.obsidian.md/[vault-name]





• publish-01.obsidian.md/[path]

The publish-01, etc., subdomains are part of Obsidian’s CDN infrastructure for load balancing. The critical security issue is that many users don’t realize that published notes are publicly accessible by default and indexed by search engines.

Performing Reconnaissance

Let’s get started with a basic Google dork: inurl:publish.obsidian.md

Most of the URLs will lead to intentional Wiki pages. So, let’s try to be more specific and search for source code and configuration: inurl:publish-01.obsidian.md ("config" | "configuration" | "settings")

As a result, we found a note from an aspiring hacker.

Now, let’s search for some login data: inurl:publish-01.obsidian.md ("username" | "login" | "authentication")

Here we can see relatively up‑to‑date property data. No login credentials are found; the result appears simply because the word “login” is displayed in the top‑right corner of the page.

By experimenting with different search queries, you can retrieve various types of sensitive information—for example, browser‑history data.

Summary

To succeed in cybersecurity, you need to think outside the box; otherwise, you’ll only get crumbs. But before you can truly think outside the box, you must first master what’s inside it. Feel free to check out the Hackers‑Arise Cybersecurity Starter Bundle.

The post Google Dorks for Reconnaissance: How to Find Exposed Obsidian Vaults first appeared on Hackers Arise.

Source: HackersArise
Source Link: https://hackers-arise.com/google-dorking-discovering-exposed-obsidian-vaults/