Today I investigate Spiffy Co. , my nickname for a company that sells licensed, proprietary software. Their intention is to have only registered customers be able to log in to access downloads they've already paid for. Unfortunately, their paywall is very flimsy.
Checking out their robots.txt file, I noticed there was nothing blocking that particular directory (/downloads) from search engine crawlers to see it. So I search "insite [spiffyco.com]" to see what kind of view the public has. Though, it doesn't exactly return what I'm looking for, since it's just manuals in a directory below that directory. So I go to the manuals directory and try to navigate up to see if it will list a directory with downloads and ... nope, no listing. It returns me to the paywall.
At this point, I decide to guess. A pretty intuitive starting place seems to be /downloads/downloads/, since I guess that's what I would do if I were trying to organize the site. Behold, here are the list of .exes. Yep. Just by a guess, and thinking "how would I have done that?". No coding magic here!
Moral of story: Similar to the cheat-on-homework.net post below, you cannot count on directories without links to them to be secure links.
Disclaimer: It is illegal to install and use licensed software that you haven't paid for. Don't try this at home.
