[Chapter-delegates] Internet Census 2012

[Joly MacFie]

[Via Franck Martin]

An ad hoc survey using a botnet counts 1.3 billion hosts


http://internetcensus2012.bitbucket.org/

Abstract
While playing around with the Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE) we
discovered an amazing number of open embedded devices on the Internet.
Many of them are based on Linux and allow login to standard BusyBox
with empty or default credentials. We used these devices to build a
distributed port scanner to scan all IPv4 addresses. These scans
include service probes for the most common ports, ICMP ping, reverse
DNS and SYN scans. We analyzed some of the data to get an estimation
of the IP address usage.

All data gathered during our research is released into the public
domain for further study.

So, how big is the Internet?

That depends on how you count. 420 Million pingable IPs + 36 Million
more that had one or more ports open, making 450 Million that were
definitely in use and reachable from the rest of the Internet. 141
Million IPs were firewalled, so they could count as "in use". Together
this would be 591 Million used IPs. 729 Million more IPs just had
reverse DNS records. If you added those, it would make for a total of
1.3 Billion used IP addresses. The other 2.3 Billion addresses showed
no sign of usage.


We hope other researchers will find the data we have collected useful
and that this publication will help raise some awareness that, while
everybody is talking about high class exploits and cyberwar, four
simple stupid default telnet passwords can give you access to hundreds
of thousands of consumer as well as tens of thousands of industrial
devices all over the world.


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