Researcher's Illegal Botnet to Scan Internet

[Tinman57]

Exposed Devices Used as Botnet to Scan Internet

A controversial Internet scanning project has come under fire for illegally accessing and running code on remote machines. The Internet Census 2012 project, revealed Sunday in a post to Seclists.org, discovered 420,000 embedded devices accessible using default credentials. The unnamed researcher behind the project then used the devices as a botnet to scan most of the IPv4 address space.

http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/exposed-devices-used-botnet-scan-internet-032013

[kyrathaba]

At least it appears this "exploit" was done in the aim of research, not harm. I'm all for raising awareness of our internet-wide vulnerabilities, but I'm also a bit leery when I find out about things like this after the fact. It's like saying, "Guess what, you were one of our 420,000 mice in our experiment and you did just great!"

[kyrathaba]

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