Reverse Analytics Search
What is a Reverse Analytics Lookup?
The technique is a way to identify owners of websites through a common Google Analytics or Adsense ID.
A web page can be configured to track visitors (analytics) or serve Google Adsense advertisements. Both these tracking codes contain a unique identifier that is common to the owner of the website, not the actual site itself. So if we have a data set of the HTML code from the world's websites we can search this data set to determine common links between the different sites.
Far from a new technique, this was first highlighted back in 2011 by Sophos and again in 2015 by the Bellingcat investigative unit.
Network Attack Surface Discovery
When performing security testing of an organisations IT assets there is a phase of network attack surface discovery.
Discovery of subdomains and related domains is an essential part of this reconnaissance. Linking of Analytics or Adsense identifiers can reveal associated web sites, virtual hosts, and IP address ranges that may not otherwise be identified.
Assessing the Accuracy
As with any open source intelligence, it is important to stop and assess the accuracy of the information that has been collected. The technique used by this tool is a simple regex against a HTML dataset. There is no guarantee that the results are 100% accurate or current.
An important note about misdirection
It is possible results could be tampered with. For example, it would be a simple matter for anyone to put another entities identification ID on any web site that they have access to. This could result in what appears to be a link between benign websites and other less savoury sites but is fabricated.
How is the data compiled?
The bulk of the data for the reverse Google Analytics Search comes from our crawls of the Alexa Top 1 Million sites and the Common Crawl data set. All information used is publicly available.
Reverse Google Analytics Lookup API
An easy to use simple API for quick access to our backend database. Use curl
, python
or any web request against the API url below to receive the results in plain text format.
The API is simple and designed to be used for quick recon tasks; like all our IP Tools there is a limit of 50 queries per day or you can increase the daily quota with a Membership. For those who need to send more packets, HackerTarget.com has Enterprise Plans.
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