The Internet search engine Shodan has made a splash by getting a spotlight on multiple blogs and sites like CNN this month. There is a lot of sniffing and crawling that happens on the internet; Shodan’s niche is the darker side of the internet – sites that aren’t meant for public consumption. Major search engines like Google and Bing will not show this type of content when they come across it, but Shodan does.
Some examples of content available through this search engine include results for – networking equipment and printers open to the internet; malware infected tablets and computers that may be exposed without the user’s knowledge; and, on the more unsettling end, control and maintenance systems for public utilities and industrial equipment.
Internet security is a topic we take very seriously. Sometimes it’s difficult to explain that security comes at the cost of convenience and how users would like to work. The knowledge that the internet is paying close attention to small details does well to highlight the impact we weigh in our recommendations.