This Is the Most Detailed Picture of the Internet Ever (and Making it Was Very Illegal)


Why would you need a map of the Internet? The Internet is not like the Grand Canyon. It is not a destination in a voyage that requires so many right turns and so many left turns. The Internet, as the name suggests and many of you already know, is nothing but the sum of decentralized connections between various interconnected computers that are speaking roughly the same language. To map out those connections and visualize the place where I spend so much of my time may not have any clear use, but it intrigues the pants off me.

An anonymous researcher with a lot of time on his hands apparently shares the sentiment. In a newly published research paper, this unnamed data junkie explains how he used some stupid simple hacking techniques to build a 420,000-node botnet that helped him draw the most detailed map of the Internet known to man. Not only does it show where people are logging in, it also shows changes in traffic patterns over time with an impressive amount of precision. This is all possible, of course, because the researcher hacked into nearly half a million computers so that he could ping each one, charting the resulting paths in order to make such a complex and detailed map. Along those lines, the project has as much to do with hacking as it does with mapping.

The resultant map isn't perfect, but it is beautiful. Based on the parameter's of the researcher's study, the map is already on its way to becoming obsolete, since it shows only devices with IPv4 addresses. (The latest standard is IPv6, but IPv4 is still pretty common.) The map is further limited to Linux-based computers with a certain amount of processing power. And finally, because of the parameters of the hack, it shows some amount of bias towards naive users who don't put passwords on their computers.

But on a general, half-a-million-computer level, this is what the Internet looks like in all of its gorgeous motion:

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The research also serves as another much-needed warning about Internet security. "A lot of devices and services we have seen during our research should never be connected to the public Internet at all. As a rule of thumb, if you believe that 'nobody would connect that to the Internet, really nobody', there are at least 1000 people who did," says the report. "Whenever you think 'that shouldn't be on the Internet but will probably be found a few times' it's there a few hundred thousand times. Like half a million printers, or a Million Webcams, or devices that have root as a root password."

It's entirely unclear if anybody will actually pursue this anonymous hacker for violating however many laws he violated. But data scientists are excited about the results regardless. "This is a great study which underlines the fact that once again exploitable weak links are abundant and ripe for compromise, even on embedded or industrial systems," cyber security professional Mark Bower told The Register. Mark Schloesser, security researcher at Rapid7, told the paper, "The actual research itself is noteworthy in that it is the most comprehensive Internet-wide scan." Schloesser added, "I'd like to see more projects of this kind, conducted legally, and sharing information about the real state of play on the internet.

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