Search Engine for Hackers

A new search engine has been introduced called "SHODAN" that lets you find specific computers (routers, servers, etc.) using a variety of filters. Some have also described it as a public port scan directory or a search engine of banners.

Web search engines, such as Google and Bing, are great for finding websites. But what if you're interested in finding computers running a certain piece of software (such as Apache)? Or if you want to know which version of Microsoft IIS is the most popular? Or you want to see how many anonymous FTP servers there are? Maybe a new vulnerability came out and you want to see how many hosts it could infect? Traditional web search engines don't let you answer those questions.
Following things could be searched for:

• country: 2-letter country code
• hostname: full or partial host name
• net: IP range using CIDR notation (ex: 18.7.7.0/24 )
• port: 21, 22, 23 or 80

As we [some of us] can understand, it is very easy to find vulnerable host just by looking at all the banner responses shown by SHODAN. It could turn out to be a huge threat as many skiddies could be scanning hosts anonymously round the clock for particular exploit or something that they understand well.

Click here to go to SHODAN

Do you have questions, comments, or suggestions? Feel free to post a comment!

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