Pastenum: Enumerating Text Dump Websites

Text dump websites are used by programmers and system administrators to share and store pieces of source code and configuration information. Two of the most popular text dump websites are pastebin and pastie. Day by day more and more programmers, amateur system administrators and regular users are captivated by the attractive functional features of these web tools and use them in order to share large amounts of configuration and source code information. Therefore, like happening in each famous web platform, sensitive information sharing is inevitable. Potential attackers use these web platforms to gather information about their targets, while on the other side penetration testers search into these sites to prevent critical information leakage.

Most of the text dump web platforms offer a searching mechanism and therefore anyone can manually query the database for matching strings. Although an automated script/tool capable to query all these text dump websites and generate an overall searching report, would be very useful for the reconnaissance phase of a penetration test. Pen-testers can use such an automate tool, in order to efficiently search for potential configuration and login credentials information leakage that will help an attacker to profile the victim system and find a security hole.

Recently I came across in the web with such a script, pastenum. Pastenum is a ruby script written by Nullthreat member of the Corelan Team. It can query pastebin, pastie and github for user defined strings and generate an overall html report with the searching results.

Pastenum can be downloaded from here, while detailed installation information can be found here.

Let’s see some screenshots with pastenum in action.

A. Bechtsoudis