Because of the strange nature of cyberspace, even an employee passing through a plant with a wireless connection on a laptop can create a temporary data link that exposes control systems to intruders.
“They have sort of connected through osmosis,” said Marty Edwards, a senior cybersecurity official at the Department of Homeland Security. “What we have done is connect to everything.”
An accidental discovery
The idea for Shodan came to John Matherly in 2003, when he was a teenager attending community college in California. Obsessed with the digital world, he named his project after a malevolent character in a video game called System Shock II. The character, Sentient Hyper-Optimized Data Access Network, or Shodan, is an artificial intelligence entity that thinks it is a goddess and sets out to eradicate humans.
Matherly, who grew up in Switzerland, toyed with his system for years as he earned a degree in bioinformatics from the University of California at San Diego and built his career as a programmer, data miner and Web developer. His early Shodan versions found only hundreds of devices a day on the Web, and the information was not searchable. After devoting months to the project in 2009, he made a breakthrough, solving the search problem and locating many more devices.
When he launched his first live version of the program, in November of that year, he thought it might catch on with software makers who wanted to know about the systems being used by potential customers. On his Web site, Matherly described his program as “the world’s first computer search engine that lets you search the Internet for computers. . . . Find devices based on city, country, latitude/longitude, hostname, operating system and IP.”
The Shodan software runs 24 hours a day. It automatically reaches out to the World Wide Web and identifies digital locators, known as Internet protocol (IP) addresses, for computers and other devices. The program then attempts to connect to the machines. If a connection is made, Shodan “fingerprints” the machine, recording its software, geographic location and other data contained in the identification “banner” displayed by devices on the Internet.
Such identifying information is called “metadata” — and it’s far more common, useful and problematic than anyone had realized. Shodan compiles the information in Matherly’s servers — about 10 million devices every month now — and makes it almost as easy to query online as a Google search.
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