recall-roster

Der Spiegel’s International Desk reports that back in late 2012, an anonymous researcher set out to take a roll-call, a secret census of the public internet worldwide.

No one had been able to accurately gauge the volume of world-wide-web activity beforehand, and the demographics of this convert door-to-door poll probably can never be studied in a meaningful way, since the results were obtained illegally. Unlike WiFi snooping scandals, the hacker pinged routers to illicit a response, in much the same way as one would launch a denial of service attack but without the ill-intent and for counting only.

After establishing dialogues with some 450, 000 server farms, the hacker’s creation, named Carna Botnet (after the Roman goddess of health, internal organs, hinges and stoops) was able to propagate itself further and shake hands with some 2.3 billion active internet protocol addresses. This ease of access was quite surprising and the census project turned unexpectedly into an industry warning about the robustness of security and systemic vulnerabilities. There probably will not be another such screen-capture, snapshot of the internet’s denizens but it was nonetheless exhilarating to be included in something benign that showed how fast the on-line world is growing.