Show HN: Osint tool that finds exposed files on domains

7/5/2026 at 11:45:02 PM

There's an astounding amount of .DS_Store showing up - I hadn't realised how common it apparently is for people to accidentally upload this.

by technion

7/6/2026 at 12:03:41 AM

It’s a terrible design from Apple to expose this metadata like this, it’s one of my biggest pet peeves.

by stingraycharles

7/6/2026 at 9:51:06 AM

KDE does something similar (but not as bad?) with .directory files.

by graemep

7/6/2026 at 1:17:53 AM

In the early days of the web you could do a search on google like

  path:/etc/passwd

Sometimes there were even shadow passwd files with the hashes exposed on the web. Crazy days.

by keepamovin

7/6/2026 at 1:34:41 PM

I remember seeing examples like this in security courses.

It was always surprising how many servers accidentally exposed sensitive files.

by katemaster009

7/6/2026 at 1:59:06 PM

Yes. Apache misconfigurations were a big one iirc. There were also basic auth files, databases and probably classified/proprietary information.

Similar to how the telephone network used to have all kinds of unsecured entry points that people explored, leading to business phone systems, strange modems, and even international “trunk” lines and operator capabilities.

It was a wild frontier

by keepamovin

7/6/2026 at 5:57:05 AM

Is this just re-skinned leakix.net? One of my honeypots for them is showing the same results.

by Elliott-Diy

7/6/2026 at 6:01:26 AM

Nope, i crawl everything myself.

by PatchRequest

7/5/2026 at 10:39:44 PM

Its interesting and not interesting at the same time based on some of the search results

Almost all of them seem like home projects being deployed with ease in mind than security. The common thread seems to be the fact that most of them are phishing website, not sure if thats a business model to target here?

by sandeepkd

7/6/2026 at 12:25:04 AM

So is this the crawler that has been constantly hammering all my applications searching for these files from the very second I first issue a TLS cert for them? Thanks to you I've had to put fail2ban on all my public-facing web servers...

How about you be a good netizen and make it so people can request to be scanned and don't proactively do it, let alone constantly keep hammering them with requests?

by phoronixrly

7/6/2026 at 3:34:52 AM

I need to protect against the malicious good guys, the shodans of the world. Peeping inside your windows and trying your front door handles. Querying every string imaginable and port pinging all 65536 of them.

And I need to protect against the actual criminals already inside my house looking for something to steal. Scouting out the easy target to setup their ransomwares.

by bblb

7/6/2026 at 12:12:12 PM

Lots of crawlers do this. I have never seen a webserver that does not get a variety of these from obviously different sources. Even just an ssh port will get a lot of malicious login attempts.

by graemep

7/6/2026 at 2:48:36 PM

I don't get what you mean by that. Everyone does it so it's OK?

No - scanning without consent is abuse and anyone doing this is malicious regardless of what they tell themselves or anyone else.

by phoronixrly

7/6/2026 at 1:53:37 AM

Nice tool. I’d like to understand what kinds of businesses the customers using this website are in.

by Avery29

7/5/2026 at 10:38:36 PM

searching for .gov reveals 0 matches... doubt

by cvadict

7/6/2026 at 5:56:56 AM

I manually blacklisted .gov from being crawled on my side. felt like it wasn't worth the potential trouble

by PatchRequest

7/5/2026 at 10:42:29 PM

My guess is that they ran selective search on the domains which get registered with any registrar, thats the trigger to start the search. .gov domains are not managed by your typical registrar which is selling the domain registration information to all these downstream partners/scavengers (for lack of better word)

by sandeepkd

7/5/2026 at 10:56:20 PM

The OP says it's using CT logs, not new domain registrations. The approach you have in mind would not include subdomains and would be less likely to coincide with a new server being configured.

by jadamson

7/5/2026 at 11:26:03 PM

Yes CT is explicitly stated source which is why I qualified it with "Guess" for domain registration. There were couple reasons for that -

1. Quite a few websites in the search results where just on HTTP

2. The .gov sites do use public certificate authorities like digicert, verisign, amazon & letencrypt so they would have been captured unless they are removed explicitly

And yes the domain registration would not include subdomains

by sandeepkd

7/6/2026 at 4:17:58 PM

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by raullu

7/6/2026 at 8:44:25 AM

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by Flaapjan

7/6/2026 at 1:19:35 AM

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by tangsoupgallery

7/6/2026 at 1:24:24 AM

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by tangsoupgallery

7/6/2026 at 1:25:10 AM

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by tangsoupgallery