SHODAN

Introduction

Introduction

SHODAN is a search engine that lets us find specific computers (routers, servers, etc.) using a variety of filters. Some have also described it as a public port scan directory or a search engine of banners.

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 we want to know which version of Microsoft IIS is the most popular? Or we want to see how many anonymous FTP servers there are? Maybe a new vulnerability came out and we want to see how many hosts it could infect? Traditional web search engines don't let us answer those questions.

So what does SHODAN index then? Good question. The bulk of the data is taken from 'banners', which are meta-data the server sends back to the client. This can be information about the server software, what options the service supports, a welcome message or anything else that the client would like to know before interacting with the server.