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Researchers Release Tool That Can Scan the Entire Internet In Under an Hour

Posted by samzenpus on from the scan-me dept.

dstates writes "A team of researchers at the University of Michigan has released Zmap, a tool that allows an ordinary server to scan every address on the Internet in just 45 minutes. This is a task that used to take months, but now is accessible to anyone with a fast internet connection. In their announcement Friday , at the Usenix security conference in Washington they provide interesting examples tracking HTTPS deployment over time, the effects of Hurricane Sandy on Internet infrastructure, but also rapid identification of vulnerable hosts for security exploits. A Washington Post Blog discussing the work shows examples of the rate with which of computers on the Internet have been patched to fix Universal Plug and Play, 'Debian weak key' and 'factorable RSA keys' vulnerabilities. Unfortunately, in each case it takes years to deploy patches and in the case of UPnP devices, they found 2.56 million (16.7 percent) devices on the Internet had not yet upgraded years after the vulnerability had been described."

3 of 97 comments (clear)

  1. doesn't add up by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    > 2.56 million (16.7 percent) devices on the Internet had not yet upgraded years after the vulnerability had been described."

    Something doesn't add up here. Is TFS saying that there are only 15 million devices on the internet? I'm pretty sure the number is bigger than that.

  2. Uninformed / Inexperienced by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Pretty sure the problem with UPnP in consumer routers is simply that consumers generally just don't know about the issue. Even if they did know most will have no idea where to start looking to upgrade their devices firmware (if an update is even available). Most consumers walked into the store and the sales rep told them they could connect the to the magic box. The same reason (to this day) that users are running with the default device username/password (admin:admin anyone?) and with the shared key that was preconfigured with the box when they bought it 5 years ago..

  3. straight from the PDF by schneidafunk · · Score: 3, Interesting

    "an open source tool that can port scan the entire IPv4 address space from just one machine in under 45 minutes with 98% coverage- With Zmap, an Internet- wide TCP SYN s can on port 443 is as easy as: $ zmap – p 443 – o results.txt
    34,132,693 listening hosts (took 44m12s)"

    --
    Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin