Stealing resources from a website

A bit confidential title isn’t it? No wonder you got here. Anyways this article is about downloading some of the resources in a website which cannot be directly downloaded. Examples of these resources are: images, javascript files, css files, swf or flash files and others.

Remember that this is just for educational purposes. Studying existing code from a website is our top priority here.

Some of these resources can be easily downloaded if they are not made as a css background. Because basically you cannot just right click a css background and download it as an image.

And some are just not visible to the naked eye. But is really found on the site.

 

Page Source

The magic happens when you right click on any empty space on the website and select view page source. I’m not going to use any site as an example here. Because I might be breaking a law which I do not know. So just pick out any site that you want and try the same principles that you will find in here.

After opening up page source. You will see a bunch of code. But what you will need to find first is the files which has .css file extension. Because this is where most of the hidden images are being linked. You can find them by pressing ctrl + f on your keyboard and type in .css. Surely something will pop up.

You will just have to click on that link. If the css file is a gibberish like that of Twitter. Then you can’t rely on your naked eye to do the job for you. Just make use of the ctrl + f magic. And search for the following:

• .jpg or .jpeg
• .png
• .gif

Those are the most common image types. If you found one, then just use your common sense and your knowledge on linking directories to get to the image that you want. Most of the time, the filename of the image will tell you what it is.

If the link looks something like this:

../img/system/pokemon.png

And you are currently in(Oops, don’t click the link, I think somerandomwebsite.com is really an existing domain name.):

http://somerandomwebsite.com/css/randomcss.css

Then you already know that you have to take 1 step backward to get to the proper directory:

http://somerandomwebsite.com/img/system/pokemon.png

You will do the above if you have found two dots before the img directory, if not then do something like this:

http://somerandomwebsite.com/css/img/system/pokemon.png

 

Conclusion

That’s it for this short tutorial. You can also find javascript files or any other file that you want from a site using the same principles. Just don’t forget to use what you have learned for good and not for bad.

If you have something to ask

This is yet another post on the resources that I am using, especially if I can’t get any answer from google or bing.

So here they are:

Superuser.com– this is where you can ask questions regarding computer software and hardware. You can use an open id to log in and star asking some questions.

Stackoverflow.com– this is where you can ask programming questions. In any computer programming language. You can ask questions regarding python, php, java, ruby, etc. But questions tend to be repeated or related to each other so please try to search for your query first before you go asking some questions.

Serverfault.com- this is where you can ask questions about networking and the like. You can ask questions about your router configuration. Apache server. And other things related to it.

That’s all. I hope you will find this sites useful.