Hey hackers!!!

Today we will discuss about the search engine for hackers i.e Shodan.

What is Shodan ?

Shodan is a search engine for hackers .Unlike Google, Bing and Yahoo which crawls from front end pages .Shodan crawls the web for devices such as printers, security cameras, and routers , which are connected to internet . Shodan is dubbed as “the scariest search engine on the web”.

We can say that shodan is the search engine for everything on the internet. While Google and other search engines index only the web, Shodan indexes pretty much everything else — web cams, water treatment facilities, medical devices, traffic lights, wind turbines, license plate readers, smart TVs, refrigerators, anything and everything you could possibly imagine that’s plugged into the internet .

Shodan can help Penetration Testers to find valuable information about the target .

How Shodan works ?

It works by scanning the entire Internet and parsing the banners that are returned by various devices. Using that information, Shodan can tell you things like what web server (and version) is most popular, or how many anonymous FTP servers exist in a particular location, and what make and model the device may be.

The algorithm of shodan is short and sweet :

1. Generate a random IPv4 address

2. Generate a random port to test from the list of ports that Shodan understands

3. Check the random IPv4 address on the random port and grab a banner

4. Repeat step 1.

#ethical-hacking #cybersecurity #shodan #iot