Here's what you find when you scan the entire Internet in an hour
Until recently, scanning the entire Internet, with its billions of unique addresses, was a slow and labor-intensive process. For example, in 2010 the Electronic Frontier Foundation conducted a scan to gather data on the use of encryption online. The process took two to three months.
A team of researchers at the University of Michigan believed they could do better. A lot better. On Friday, at the Usenix security conference in Washington, they announced ZMap, a tool that allows an ordinary server to scan every address on the Internet in just 44 minutes.
The EFF team used a tool called Nmap that sends a request to a machine and then listens for the recipient to reply. These requests can be conducted in parallel, but keeping records for each outstanding request still creates a lot of overhead, which slows down the scanning process.
