Hacking the Internet to build a botnet

[Highland]

Fascinating whitepaper how they used insecure boxes to build a botnet that could scan the entire Internet. Kinda scary how many boxes like this are out there...

http://internetcensus2012.bitbucket.org/paper.html

[mikeshinn]

Neat, but not too surprising about there being a number of vulnerable systems out there. I imagine there are a lot, although I cant say how many.

I will say though that if this paper is true and I didnt missing something obvious (and that this paper isnt just a troll ) its a remarkable confession to a tremendous amount of potential criminal activity. I believe that under US federal law any unauthorized use of a computer is a crime, so if the author did gain unauthorized access to a lot of devices then it could be argued that what the author did was illegal, and it seems on a big scale.