Shodan: A Step by Step Learning Guide

Here is one of many that I found on Shodan. This one is inside an airplane hangar in Norway. Notice that it has java controls to tilt and pan that you can use from the web so that you can scan and zoom-in throughout the hangar. There are so many devices that can be found on Shodan that the list would fill this entire article.

One of the most intriguing things we can find are traffic signals and the cameras that monitor traffic at lighted intersections some states now use these cameras to record your license plate number and send you a ticket if they detect you speeding or running a red light. Messing with or hacking traffic signals can cause fatalities and may be illegal.

Here I show a listing of the "Red Light enforcement cameras" from Shodan. Shodan catalogues thousands, if not millions, of routers, many of which are unprotected. Here's a screenshot of one I found and logged into the administrator account with the username of "admin" and password of "admin".

Obviously, if I had malicious intentions, I could have changed all their settings, including the password and wreaked havoc on this wireless device and its poor, unsuspecting users. Among the scariest and potentially most damaging uses of Shodan is finding SCADA supervisory control and data acquisition devices with web interfaces. SCADA devices are those that control such things as the electrical grid, water plants, waste treatment plants, nuclear power plants, etc. These SCADA devices are the most likely targets in a cyber-terrorism or cyber warfare scenario, where two combatants are attempting to disable the other's infrastructure.

Obviously, if one combatant can disable the others electrical grid, power and water plants, etc. When I clicked on this link, I was presented with this login screen of the hydroelectric plant's control system's interface. Obviously, the ability to login to this web-based interface could be very damaging to the hydro plant and the people and nation it serves.

Many of these sites and interfaces use default passwords.

Fortunately for us, there are many resources on the web that list the default passwords for all devices. Here is one at www. There are literally hundreds of these sites on the web. Simply Google "default passwords". As many consumers and system administrators are careless and don't change the default passwords, often you can gain access to these devices simply using these lists to find the default admin username and password. Shodan is a different kind of search engine. Shodan pulls banners from IP addresses and then catalogues all types of devices that have a remote interface from all over the world.

Many of these devices are set to accept default logins, so that once you find a device and its default login, you may be able to own it! Just keep in mind that Shodan is not an anonymous service. In addition, Shodan has some powerful features to search specifically for devices by type, login, port, and geography.

I will show you some of these on my next Shodan tutorial, so keep coming back, my greenhorn hackers! I was just at the point of researching and setting up a automated mass banner search of the Internet through nmap. Omg it's good to see I don't have to now. It appears its time to fire up Tor get my dummy email address and get to work. What do you mean, If you take precautions with your identity, its just information.

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Do you know what a honey pot is. There are some great articles here on what they are and how to detect them. Ok gonna cover this real quick, I think tomorrow I will do a more in depth post, been really busy with art and researching hacking. Do not sign up for shodan if you have any intentions what so ever and never to do anything marginally, partially or in any way that can lead back to you with your regular account.

Through Tor setup a hushmail account. Do not use any information that you have ever, ever used anywhere to setup the account. Only use Shodan through your Tor browser. I personally only bookmark all sites I want to access that may cause be problems in my Tor browser. The CSV format returns a file containing the IP, port, banner, organization and hostnames for the banner. It doesn't contain all the information that Shodan gathers due to limitations in the CSV file format. Use this if you only care about the basic information of the results and want to quickly load it into external tools such as Excel.

The XML format is the old, deprecated way of saving search results. It is harder to work with than JSON and consumes more space, thereby making it suboptimal for most situations. Don't use this format unless you have existing software that depends on it.

Downloading data consumes export credits , which are one-time use and purchased on the website. They aren't associated in any way with the Shodan API and they don't automatically renew every month. Data files generated by the website can be retrieved in the Downloads section of the website, which you can visit by clicking on the Downloads link in the main menu:. The website lets you generate a report based off of a search query. This feature is free and available to anyone. To generate a report, click on the Create Report button from the search results page:.

And hit the green Create Report button! It usually takes a few minutes for Shodan to gather all the relevant information and once it's available you will receive an email with a link. The only way for other users to see your report is if you share your link with them. The report will then look something like this:.

When you generate a report you are asking Shodan to take a snapshot of the search results and provide an aggregate overview. Once the report has been generated, it doesn't change or automatically update as new data is being collected by Shodan.

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This also means that you can generate a report once a month and keep track of changes over time by comparing it to reports of previous months. By clicking on the Reports button in the main menu you can get a listing of previously generated reports. Finding specific devices requires knowledge about the software they run and how they respond to banner grabs over the Internet. Fortunately, it is possible to leverage the shared knowledge of the community using the search directory on Shodan.

People are able to readily describe, tag and share their search queries for others to use.

If you're interested in getting started with Shodan, the shared searches should be your first stop. Likewise, if you've created a search query that you'd like to share with the community simply click on the Share Search button in the search results page:. Shared search queries are publicly viewable. Do not share queries that are sensitive or you don't want others to know about. Shodan Maps provides a way to explore search results visually instead of the text-based main website.

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All search filters that work for the main Shodan website also work on Maps. From a technical perspective, Shodan Maps is the same as the main Shodan website except it automatically adds a geo filter to your search query to restrict search results to the area that you're looking at on the map. There are a variety of map styles available to present the data to your preference.

Click on the gear button next to the search button for a list of options:. For a quick way to browse all the screenshots that Shodan collects check out Shodan Images. The search box at the top uses the same syntax as the main Shodan search engine. It is most useful to use the search box to filter by organization or netblock. However, it can also be used to filter the types of images that are shown.