The Carna botnet was a

botnet A botnet is a group of Internet-connected devices, each of which runs one or more bots. Botnets can be used to perform Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks, steal data, send spam, and allow the attacker to access the device and its co ...

of 420,000 devices created by an anonymous

hacker A hacker is a person skilled in information technology who uses their technical knowledge to achieve a goal or overcome an obstacle, within a computerized system by non-standard means. Though the term ''hacker'' has become associated in popu ...

to measure the extent of the Internet in what the creator called the “Internet Census of 2012”.

Data collection

The data was collected by infiltrating Internet devices, especially routers, that used a default password or no password at all. It was named after Carna, "the Roman goddess for the protection of inner organs and health".Internet Census 2012: Port scanning /0 using insecure embedded devices
, Carna Botnet, June - Oktober 2012 Collected data was compiled into a

GIF The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF; or , see pronunciation) is a bitmap image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite and released on 15 June 1987. ...

portrait to display Internet use around the world over the course of 24 hours. The data gathered included only the

IPv4 Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) is the fourth version of the Internet Protocol (IP). It is one of the core protocols of standards-based internetworking methods in the Internet and other packet-switched networks. IPv4 was the first version d ...

address space and not the

IPv6 Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is the most recent version of the Internet Protocol (IP), the communications protocol that provides an identification and location system for computers on networks and routes traffic across the Internet. I ...

address space. The Carna Botnet creator believes that with a growing number of IPv6 hosts on the Internet, 2012 may have been the last time a census like this was possible.

Results

Of the 4.3 billion possible IPv4 addresses, Carna Botnet found a total of 1.3 billion addresses in use, including 141 million that were behind a firewall and 729 million that returned reverse

domain name system The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical and distributed naming system for computers, services, and other resources in the Internet or other Internet Protocol (IP) networks. It associates various information with domain names assigned ...

records. The remaining 2.3 billion IPv4 addresses are probably not used. An earlier first Internet census by the

USDHS The United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is the U.S. federal executive department responsible for public security, roughly comparable to the interior or home ministries of other countries. Its stated missions involve anti-terr ...

LANDER-study had counted 187 million visible Internet hosts in 2006.

Further implications

The data provided by the Carna botnet was used by security researcher Morgan Marquis-Boire to determine in how many countries FinFisher spyware was being used. The use of such legally-gray data to conduct open source analysis raised questions for some, but Marquis-Boire expressed a belief that data is data. "I consider this more like rogue academia rather than criminal activity," he told Wired Magazine.

Number of hosts by top level domain

Amongst other, Carna Botnet counted the number of hosts with reverse DNS names observed from May to October 2012. The top 20

Top Level Domain A top-level domain (TLD) is one of the domains at the highest level in the hierarchical Domain Name System of the Internet after the root domain. The top-level domain names are installed in the root zone of the name space. For all domains in ...

s were:

References

External links

Internet Census 2012: Port scanning /0 using insecure embedded devices
Carna Botnet, June — October 2012 * All of the data can be found o
GitHub
and

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music ...