How to get the lists of file and directory names of a site?

Question

How exactly do you do this? The reason is my CMS has been breached, well, mainly because the username and password is fairly common (my bad). But I've always thought that it is save, since the directory name is pretty un-common and hard to guess (not the usual /cms/ or /admin/). Brute-forcing from a script? or maybe some Google tricks?

update : my CMS is in PHP and I developed it myself. I don't remember putting the link to it everywhere, except once in email I sent to my friend via gmail.

update 2 : as this could be used by some people to attack a site, please don't put any script in the answer. My intention is just to know the general ways to do it, so that I could prevent further attacks like this.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

My guess is, that somebody linked to your CMS URL and an automated (evil) script found it using Google search results looking for some common patterns.

Search in Google using this query

link:http://www.example.com/myCmsFolder

to verify if your link/pages are contained in Google.

Answer 2

Maybe you had a link to administrative area somewhere?

Or maybe accessing main directory without filename renders directory index? I.e. you're using mod_autoindex?

Answer 3

Did you ever surf somewhere via a link from your CMS? Your browser would have sent a referer (note the misspelling) header, indicating where you came from.