Ever wondered how many open FTP servers there are?
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Re: Ever wondered how many open FTP servers there are?
#2I wonder how many of those are just mirrors of Linux distros and other open-source software, how many have more interesting things (including software), and how many of those were deliberately configured to be open for sharing. There is the somewhat-well-known filesearch.ru if you want to look for things on this non-HTTP part of the Internet. (If I remember correctly, Google used to index FTPs too and you'd get plenty of results with the right queries, but that seems to have mostly and silently disappeared...)
Re: Ever wondered how many open FTP servers there are?
#3Good old archie... http://archie.icm.edu.pl/archie-adv_eng.html
Re: Ever wondered how many open FTP servers there are?
#4I remember back in the 90s, people would hunt for FTP servers that allowed anonymous writes. Companies that didn't know how to secure servers would suddenly be hosting a ton-o-warez.
Re: Ever wondered how many open FTP servers there are?
#5Good old archie... http://archie.icm.edu.pl/archie-adv_eng.html
> Search Type: Sub String Exact Regular Expression
Google has an advantage in terms of index size, but definitely lose in terms of precision. The way it munges queries is a bit unsettling at times, and even the "exact" option doesn't seem to always work the way it should.
Re: Ever wondered how many open FTP servers there are?
#6I recommend using Shodan for this kind of stuff.
Re: Ever wondered how many open FTP servers there are?
#7Scanning the IPv4 space. I know there are many different projects that do it. I was thinking about how I would do this today. I believe the first step would be to arrive at all the IPv4 blocks (/22, etc), then do a calculation to arrive at the address of each based on the prefix. Then in an array of threads or so, try to connect(2) to the address on some type of service in a timeout handler. If it succeeds, then consider that address as up. I would consider doing this in an async loop with epoll(7), so that many connections could be attempted at once and improve through put.
Anyway. nmap can probably do this and is a great tool
Re: Ever wondered how many open FTP servers there are?
#8I wonder how many of those are just mirrors of Linux distros and other open-source software, how many have more interesting things (including software), and how many of those were deliberately configured to be open for sharing. There is the somewhat-well-known filesearch.ru if you want to look for things on this non-HTTP part of the Internet. (If I remember correctly, Google used to index FTPs too and you'd get plent…
Actually most of them. It's pretty easy to eliminate them if you have the hostname entry from the scan and cross-reference with public distro mirror lists. Also exclude any edu servers and names of universities etc. If you want to look for actual files, there's hardly anything better than http://filemare.com. Crawlers like Napalm (http://www.searchftps.net/) focus more on servers that are meant to be public. Using filemare one can find the interesting things ;-)
Re: Ever wondered how many open FTP servers there are?
#9Scanning the IPv4 space. I know there are many different projects that do it. I was thinking about how I would do this today. I believe the first step would be to arrive at all the IPv4 blocks (/22, etc), then do a calculation to arrive at the address of each based on the prefix. Then in an array of threads or so, try to connect(2) to the address on some type of service in a timeout handler. If it succeeds, then cons…
You wouldn't want to use nmap for WAN. nmap is really great if both the scanning and target nodes are somewhat distrbuted across a LAN. Internet mapping is done using Z{map,grab} (censys.io) or masscan. Reduce using the Censys or Shodan search.
Re: Ever wondered how many open FTP servers there are?
#10Good old archie... http://archie.icm.edu.pl/archie-adv_eng.html
> Search Type: Sub String Exact Regular Expression Google has an advantage in terms of index size, but definitely lose in terms of precision. The way it munges queries is a bit unsettling at times, and even the "exact" option doesn't seem to always work the way it should.
Have you tried verbatim mode? (Thanks https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12046056)