How to find out what a hash means?

Question

We are having lots of strange requests in our log to a resource called "09fe503e5898bcba55056542d470a803", such as:

GET /cache/09fe503e5898bcba55056542d470a803
GET /something/cache/09fe503e5898bcba55056542d470a803
GET /something-else/cache/09fe503e5898bcba55056542d470a803

We have no resource or cache entry called like that so don't understand where these calls come from.

The funny thing is that a Google search on this hash returns many results as if this hash was somehow special (if I change just one character, no Google result comes up).

Does anybody know what this mean? Is there any way to find out where this hash comes from?

Answer 1

The resource requested isn't necessarily a hash - it could just be a fixed size random sequence of bytes encoded in hexadecimal.

If it was a hash, and you had identified the algorithm used to compute it (MD5 etc.), you could search some rainbow tables (databases of keys that map to hashes), to try and identify the key (although I doubt this would be of any benefit).

The funny thing is that a Google search on this hash returns many results as if this hash was somehow special (if I change just one character, no Google result comes up).

Interesting observation, this suggests that the string is common, but doesn't allude to it's source. Converting the string to text doesn't show anything meaningful.