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