Good old archie... http://archie.icm.edu.pl/archie-adv_eng.html
Now this DOES bring on the nostalgia... :-)
I recall there used to be a veronica too (Very Easy Rodent Oriented Network something or the other....), then a jughead too ...
Ever wondered how many open FTP servers there are?
51–60 of 100 posts
Re: Ever wondered how many open FTP servers there are?
#52Are there any legal implications for doing this? Was going to do something similar with Redis and MongoDB.
People do internet-wide scans all the time, for black hat and white hat reasons. I'm not aware of anyone doing this for research purposes ever having seen any legal consequences. But you usually get some angry emails to your abuse address.
Of course this doesn't mean that some court somewhere may think this is illegal. But it's a common and widespread practice.
Re: Ever wondered how many open FTP servers there are?
#53Are there any legal implications for doing this? Was going to do something similar with Redis and MongoDB.
People do internet-wide scans all the time, for black hat and white hat reasons. I'm not aware of anyone doing this for research purposes ever having seen any legal consequences. But you usually get some angry emails to your abuse address. Of course this doesn't mean that some court somewhere may think this is illegal. But it's a common and widespread practice.
I'm wondering where the legal boundary lies though, port scanning might be a grey area but mostly fine.
Connecting to an FTP service (i.e. logging in), even just for 5 or so seconds....I'm not so sure.
Especially when big companies with lax security and aggressive lawyers might see this is as a "hacking attempt"
Re: Ever wondered how many open FTP servers there are?
#54The submission links to a blog post on how the data was retrieved: http://255.wf/2016-09-18-mass-analyzing-a-chunk-of-the-inter...
> For this little experiment, I’ve setup a single KVM instance, running a single 2GHz vCore with 2GIB of RAM and 10GiB of HDD space. This is sufficient. Probing for ftp access is an extremely CPU-intensive task. You are going to hit bottlenecks in this order: > > CPU > Memory > a whole lot of nothing > network > > While the rescan was running, only about 1 to 2kpps were exchanged, while the CPU was pinned at 100%.
So this means his setup spent about 1-2 million clock cycles per probe. That's a lot!
I suppose this is because he runs the probe script once per IP address? I suspect that an implementation which would stay in-process would be at least an order of magnitued faster.
Re: Ever wondered how many open FTP servers there are?
#55The submission links to a blog post on how the data was retrieved: http://255.wf/2016-09-18-mass-analyzing-a-chunk-of-the-inter... > For this little experiment, I’ve setup a single KVM instance, running a single 2GHz vCore with 2GIB of RAM and 10GiB of HDD space. This is sufficient. Probing for ftp access is an extremely CPU-intensive task. You are going to hit bottlenecks in this order: > > CPU > Memory > a whole lo…
Sure. Faster even with a better scheduler. I just wanted to show how the simplest and most redneck way still finishes in a reasonable amount of time. :-)
Re: Ever wondered how many open FTP servers there are?
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
> would suddenly be hosting a ton-o-warez. which could then be found by searching for "index of"...
... if only we had had search engines then. :)
I used to telnet archie.mcgill.ca to search the collected index of archive sites, back in 1991 or so.
Re: Ever wondered how many open FTP servers there are?
#57S/he talks about it as if it's something bad, something unfixed. The whole thing sounds like it but in particular "[to be excluded] go fix your shit".
I agree that if you don't want people to access it, you should secure it. Yet not all these servers are accidentally open: my ftp on 80.100.131.150 (I assume it's in there) hosts a copy of Damn Small Linux because all downloads were extremely slow or broken at the time.
Re: Ever wondered how many open FTP servers there are?
#58The submission links to a blog post on how the data was retrieved: http://255.wf/2016-09-18-mass-analyzing-a-chunk-of-the-inter... > For this little experiment, I’ve setup a single KVM instance, running a single 2GHz vCore with 2GIB of RAM and 10GiB of HDD space. This is sufficient. Probing for ftp access is an extremely CPU-intensive task. You are going to hit bottlenecks in this order: > > CPU > Memory > a whole lo…
Sure. Faster even with a better scheduler. I just wanted to show how the simplest and most redneck way still finishes in a reasonable amount of time. :-)
I was amazed how fast that went. Was fully expecting the story to unfold with how you rented out 100 AWS servers to complete the task, instead it was just one computer and only took hours.
Re: Ever wondered how many open FTP servers there are?
#59any stats on how many servers are running Pure-FTPd vs. Paradise FTP vs. some other software?
Re: Ever wondered how many open FTP servers there are?
#60"All in all, there were exactly 18,454,087 things that responded to a banner fetch... The JSON file is about 4GiB." where can I download this JSON file? I only see the list of ips available.