Nmap Developers Release a Picture of the Web

iago-vL writes "The Nmap Project recently posted an awesome visualization of the top million site icons (favicons) on the Web, sized by relative popularity of sites. This project used the Nmap Scripting Engine, which is capable of performing discovery, vulnerability detection, and anything else you can imagine with lightning speed. We saw last month how an Nmap developer downloaded 170 million Facebook names, and this month it's a million favicons; I wonder what they'll do next?"

Comments

Scope.

[Securityemo]

I was really struck by this image, actually. It gives you a visual feel for how vast the net is, with all the favicons stretching back into space until they're just indistinguishable dots. And for those who complain about uselessness, download it and give it a go yourself! To get ranges, just use whois or a http://www.iana.org/numbers/ search on a relevant ip/hostname, and to map routing paths use the zenmap frontend - the radial visualization is great, but a bit slow for large numbers. You can also use the -oX option to output a scan in XML, and import it into zenmap later; zenmap also aggregates scans for you. The script scan engine is also geared towards penetration testing/exploitation, of course, but you can ignore "offensive" parts. Just remember to read the documentation, if you want to keep a low profile.

Re:Alexa?

[A beautiful mind]

I find that to be the case aswell. It's pretty funny how many people take Alexa seriously though. I had a journalist call me a liar based on Alexa's numbers, when I quoted a unique visitors / month number for a website that was based on both Google Analytics and independently audited logging.