Researchers Release Tool That Can Scan the Entire Internet In Under an Hour 97
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."
Re:doesn't add up (Score:5, Funny)
That's how they're able to scan it all in just 45 minutes, they are using a much smaller internet. Perhaps this tool uses some kind of temporal protocol that allows it to communicate with the internet of 25 years ago.
Slashdotting the Internet (Score:5, Funny)
I can see it now, a multitude of /.ers downloading, installing then running the program, playing with probe settings to the point where the whole Internet (yes, more then just Web) is brought down by the /. effect