Shodan: The scariest search engine on the Internet
Shodan: The scariest search engine on the Internet
April 8, 2013: 1:41 PM ET
Hacking anything connected to the Internet
NEW YORK (CNNMoney)
"When people don't see stuff on Google,
they think no one can find it. That's not true."
That's according to John Matherly, creator of Shodan, the
scariest search engine on the Internet.
Unlike Google (GOOG, Fortune 500), which
crawls the Web looking for websites, Shodan navigates the Internet's back
channels. It's a kind of "dark" Google, looking for the servers,
webcams, printers, routers and all the other stuff that is connected to and
makes up the Internet. (Shodan's site was
slow to load Monday following the publication of this story.)
Shodan runs 24/7 and collects information on about 500 million
connected devices and services each month.
It's stunning what can be found with a simple search on Shodan.
Countless traffic lights,security cameras,
home automation devices and heating systems are connected to the Internet and
easy to spot.
Shodan searchers have found control systems for a water park, a
gas station, a hotel wine cooler and a crematorium. Cybersecurity researchers
have even located command and control systems for
nuclear power plants and a particle-accelerating cyclotron by
using Shodan.
What's really noteworthy about Shodan's ability to find all of
this -- and what makes Shodan so scary -- is that very few of those devices
have any kind of security built into them.
"It's a massive security failure," said HD Moore,
chief security officer of Rapid 7, who operates a private version of a
Shodan-like database for his own research purposes.
A quick search for "default password" reveals
countless printers, servers and system control devices that use
"admin" as their user name and "1234" as their password.
Many more connected systems require no credentials at all -- all you need is a
Web browser to connect to them.
In a talk given at last year's Defcon cybersecurity conference,
independent security penetration tester Dan Tentler demonstrated how he used
Shodan to find control systems for evaporative coolers, pressurized water
heaters, and garage doors.
He found a car wash that could be turned on and off and a hockey
rink in Denmark that could be defrosted with a click of a button. A city's
entire traffic control system was connected to the Internet and could be put
into "test mode" with a single command entry. And he also found a
control system for a hydroelectric plant in France with two turbines generating
3 megawatts each.
Scary stuff, if it got into the wrong hands.
"You could really do some serious damage with this,"
Tentler said, in an understatement.
So why are all these devices connected with few safeguards? Some
things that are designed to be connected to the Internet, such as door locks
that can be controlled with your iPhone, are generally believed to be hard to
find. Security is an afterthought.
A bigger issue is that many of these devices shouldn't even be
online at all. Companies will often buy systems that can enable them to
control, say, a heating system with a computer. How do they connect the
computer to the heating system? Rather than connect them directly, many IT
departments just plug them both into a Web server, inadvertently sharing them
with the rest of the world.
"Of course there's no security on these things," said
Matherly, "They don't belong on the Internet in the first place."
The good news is that Shodan is almost exclusively used for
good.
Matherly, who completed Shodan more than three years ago as a
pet project, has limited searches to just 10 results without an account, and 50
with an account. If you want to see everything Shodan has to offer, Matherly
requires more information about what you're hoping to achieve -- and a payment.
Penetration testers, security professionals, academic
researchers and law enforcement agencies are the primary users of Shodan. Bad
actors may use it as a starting point, Matherly admits. But he added that
cybercriminals typically have access to botnets -- large collections of
infected computers -- that are able to achieve the same task without detection.
To date, most cyberattacks have focused on stealing money and
intellectual property. Bad guys haven't yet tried to do harm by blowing up a
building or killing the traffic lights in a city.
Security professionals are hoping to avoid that scenario by
spotting these unsecured, connected devices and services using Shodan, and
alerting those operating them that they're vulnerable. In the meantime, there
are too many terrifying things connected to the Internet with no security to
speak of just waiting to be attacked
Comments
Post a Comment