Internet Census 2012

March 20, 2013 7:06 PM

"...we discovered an amazing number of open embedded devices on the Internet...We used these devices to build a distributed port scanner to scan all IPv4 addresses..." A research team started checking out wide open devices on the Internet. They discovered there were far more than they expected. After several months of work, they had an army of 100,000 bots surveying the Internet. Their results are available for download - all 9 terrabytes of data. "After completing the scan of roughly one hundred thousand IP addresses, we realized the number of insecure devices must be at least one hundred thousand. Starting with one device and assuming a scan speed of ten IP addresses per second, it should find the next open device within one hour. The scan rate would be doubled if we deployed a scanner to the newly found device. After doubling the scan rate in this way about 16.5 times, all unprotected devices would be found; this would take only 16.5 hours. Additionally, with one hundred thousand devices scanning at ten probes per second we would have a distributed port scanner to port scan the entire IPv4 Internet within one hour."
posted by BillW (0 comments total)