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IPv4 Census - Port scanning /0 using insecure embedded devices (internetcensus2012.github.com)
29 points by jenrzzz 4843 days ago
4 comments
jychang 4843 days ago
This is pretty amazing if true. A census - not a sample! - of the entire IPv4 address space tells us a lot about the internet.
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16s 4843 days ago
Where is the source code to his bot? I don't see it. Maybe I over-looked it. Without seeing source code, I find this story hard to believe.

Also, who is the person behind it? The PGP key published is to an anon Gmail account internetcensus2012@mail.com.

If the story is true, the legal liability of doing this may be the reason the author is hiding his/her identity.

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chockablock 4843 days ago
"We will not release any source code of the bot or the backend because we consider the risk of abuse as too high"

A great deal of raw data is available for download over BitTorrent. It shouldn't be too hard to test the validity of the census results by verifying a random sample of the results.

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j_s 4843 days ago
Perhaps https://github.com/InternetCensus2012/InternetCensus2012/blo...
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shurane 4841 days ago
It's pretty rad. That's an effectively big botnet. I wonder if it's possible to have a breakdown of residential vs enterprise for the boxes he's connected to. Maybe a sample of the local subnet? Or doing port scanning on the internal network too, and judging based on network size?
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viraptor 4843 days ago
What I really wanted to see is whether anyone has found the readme file and contacted the author. Unfortunately the author doesn't mention this.

I'd expect that a couple of hosts he got into were honeypots.

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