Shodan.io

Shodan.io is a search engine that allows users to search for various types of servers (webcams, routers, and so on) that are connected to the internet using a number of filters.

Search Engine for the Internet of Everything (AKA: The Internet of Sh*t)

Shodan.io

This is the page you will see after logging in. Shodan is not completely free, but the pricing is reasonable, and you can obtain it for free if you have a student account (.edu account). Before that, we’ll explore what it is, what powers it holds, and what it is capable of…

Our traditional search engines, such as Google, Firefox, Duck Duck Go, and others, do not show us the exact results of what hackers are finding, so here comes shodan.io. If you’re curious like me, you’ve probably wondered, “What if you’re interested in measuring which countries are becoming more connected?” Or do you want to discover which Microsoft IIS version is the most popular? Or are you looking for malware control servers? Perhaps a new vulnerability has been discovered, and you want to determine how many hosts it could affect. Shodan provides exact results for all the questions. Shodan collects data on all devices that are directly linked to the Internet. When a device is directly connected to the Internet, Shodan searches it for publicly available information. The devices that are indexed might range from small desktop computers to nuclear power reactors and everything in between.

Now, if you’re a newbie or novice, you can utilize the basic search directory to locate some simple and most common searches, and if you ‘re comfortable with that, you can go for manual searches. The most common search is webcam, where you can see webcam which are open to internet.

Suppose we’re conducting a pentest on a company and want to see what services one of their servers provides. Take, for example, the website hackthebox.com Find the IP address and search on Shodan will discover that it is hosted by Cloudflare in the United States and has several open ports.

Cloudflare acts as a middleman between Hackthebox and their actual servers. This would be useless if we were pentesting a big company. We need a way to get in their IP addresses. This could be done by using ASN (Autonomous system number), which is a global identifier for a range of IP addresses. Large companies, such as Google, will most likely have their own ASN for all of their IP numbers, whereas smaller businesses will not. We can use an ASN lookup tool, such as https://hackertarget.com/as-ip-lookup/, by entering ip address and then search on Shodan.io using filter asn:AS(number)

Doing this, we can see a whole range 6.7 million websites, in fact) that are on this one single ASN! Knowing the ASN is useful since we can use it to search Shodan for devices such as coffee machines or vulnerable computers. Before you proceed, read this Google Dorking blog.

Time to dig in!

If you search Cisco, you will receive over 7.5 million results, but what if you want to specify a country, location, port, and so on? Here comes the filters. Some basic filters include

• city: find devices in a particular city.
• country: find devices in a particular country.
• geo: search for specific GPS coordinates.
• hostname: find values that match the hostname.
• product: search the name of the software or product identified in the banner.
• os: search based on operating system.
• port: find particular ports that are open.
• before/after: find results within a timeframe.

Now, with these filers, you may search for anything more specifically and find the results.

Is Shodan legal?

Yes! Shodan simply collects information that is already publically available for reference.
Shodan does not obtain information that he is not permitted to have. Instead, it gathers data that is already available on the internet. Although several news sites labelled Shodan as part of the “dark web,” it is a totally valid website with many benefits — there are hacker tools similar to Shodan that aren’t publicly available, so Shodan really helps to “level the playing field” between hackers and IT experts.

Brain Tattoo :-

• If you have a .edu email address issued by your university, you can receive a free shodan.io upgrade.
• When a device is directly connected to the Internet, Shodan searches it for publicly available information.
• The most common search is webcam, where you can see webcam which are open to internet.
• Your searches will provide millions of results.