Use of Shodan for Device Searching
Introduction Shodan is a search engine for Internet-connected devices. 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. All About the Data Banner The basic unit of data that Shodan gathers is the banner. The banner is textual information that describes a service on a device. For web servers this would be the headers that are returned or for Telnet it would be the login screen. The content of the banner varies greatly depending on the type of service. For example, here is a typical HTTP banner: HTTP/1.1 200 OK Server: nginx/1.1.19 Date: Sat, 03 O...