I think their big thing is speed. They are scanning the entire IPV4 space in 60 minutes which... is kind of impressive? I haven't thought about it but doing a port scan on my public network takes a little bit of time and I'm only dealing with couple dozen IPs.

You only need 1 Gbit/s upstream and a laptop to hit the 45 minute mark. On fancy hardware zmap needs less than 5 minutes.

One of the people behind the project presented it a 30C3 a few years back (including a live scan) in case anyone is interested: https://media.ccc.de/v/30C3_-_5533_-_en_-_saal_2_-_201312281...

I'm just browsing their website some more, they seem to have lots of interesting libraries too, like https://github.com/zmap/ztag

"ZTag processes ZGrab output and annotates raw scan data with additional metadata such as device model and vulnerabilities."

Surely the technology will be cheap enough to do at some point.

(To reach to the capability of what google is doing right now, not to surpass what they will be doing then )

So can my phone?

At what point does tech become a parody of itself?

I believe the founder was on Recode podcast within the last year. It was a great listen and really sold the product value prop. I work in healthcare and in my office alone we have 2 or 3 printers connected that IT isn't aware of because we couldn't get approval.

He wasn't a case officer (AFAICT), he was not an agent (somebody an officer recruits to spy), he was an analyst.

The distinction is important.

If they are able to credibly provide a baseline for number of connected devices and percentage that are vulnerable, it won't be a huge step up from zmap, but it could provide some interesting data for security pros, regulators and insurance. Not sure how they get to the part about vulnerability of devices.

The cyber kill chain provides a nice jumping off point for a hierarchical model, but the kind of data necessary to really flesh it out is just so damn hard to find at the quality levels necessary.

Is there more info into "how"? How is this something that doesn't already exist? Other's have referenced Zmap, how is this an improvement over it, or even just a patient person with Nmap?

Uhmm.... so, it detects WindowsXP installations?

That said, it's kind of a huge scaling problem. If it really is a matter of throwing more hardware on it, and they currently use, say, 100 servers, they're going to need 429496729600 servers to get the same times they are getting now.

Basically, before scanning, query and iterate all ASes advertisments and union present ranges, then feed that to zmap or something that can scan IPv4 and/or IPv6.

IPv4 uses 32-bit IP address, and with 32 bits the maximum number of IP addresses is 232—or 4,294,967,296. This provides a little more than four billion IPv4 addresses (in theory). The number of IPv4 available addresses is actually less than the theoretical maximum number.

So you would need to be prepped to hit 4 billion approx devices.

Good luck!