You, and most of the planet, have been hacked. Thankfully, instead of stealing your identity or files off of your computer, the hacker’s main goal was to define a visual representation of what the internet looks like as people log on and off of it. By scanning the IPv4 (Internet Protocol version 4), the anonymous person sent billions of pings out to discover a world full of connected computers. This act was done by using virtually unsecured IPv4 devices as a temporary 420,000-node botnet to perform the scan, because they required a trivial admin/admin or root/root username-password login or no password at all.
Why did this person feel the need to map out what the internet looks like? For fun.
The why is also simple: I did not want to ask myself for the rest of my life how much fun it could have been or if the infrastructure I imagined in my head would have worked as expected. I saw the chance to really work on an Internet scale, command hundred thousands of devices with a click of my mouse, portscan and map the whole Internet in a way nobody had done before, basically have fun with computers and the Internet in a way very few people ever will. I decided it would be worth my time.
For a more in depth explanation of how this knowledge-seeking hacker accomplished this dynamic goal, check out the “Internet Census 2012” paper. You can see an animated GIF of the internet word in action below.
Click here to see a much higher resolution image.
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