460 Million Connected Internet Devices

Beautiful data visualizations of some very scary data!  

An anonymous hacker under the pseudonym of “Carna Botnet” has posted a comprehensive Internet Census 2012 report of over 460 million internet connected devices that responded to PING requests or were found to have open ports.  He was able to create a botnet using over 30,000 Internet devices that had remote administration available using the Telenet and still had the factory installed standard passwords.  He found several hundred thousand open devices, but didn’t need that many.

Abstract: While playing around with the Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE) we discovered an amazing number of open embedded devices on the Internet. Many of them are based on Linux and allow login to standard BusyBox with empty or default credentials. We used these devices to build a distributed port scanner to scan all IPv4 addresses. These scans include service probes for the most common ports, ICMP ping, reverse DNS and SYN scans. We analyzed some of the data to get an estimation of the IP address usage. 

All data gathered during our research is released into the public domain for further study. 

The visualizations he was able to create using the gathered data are fantastic.  Check out the IMAGES page of the report for beautiful, high-resolution images.

The map visualization above shows the geolocation data of all 460 million devices that responded to the queries from the botnet, clustered around population centers as you might expect.  The animated GIF below shows the geolocated devices that responded during the course of a day, showing that many devices are turned off overnight but many more are just left on constantly.

My favorite visualization from the data is the Hilbert Map, which uses the a 2-dimensional Hilbert Curve to map out the continuous sequence of IP4 addresses into a square area, and then color-codes the address blocks that responded to a PING request.  There’s even a cool zoomable viewer of the Hilbert Map that lets you drill into the details.

This form of mapping was inspired by the xkcd Map of the Internet, which shows the Internet addresses that were distributed to major corporations in the 1990s before the Regional Internet Registries took over the allocation.

Found on the Security Now podcast #396 and FlowingData

Can You Protect Yourself from Hackers at CES?

Are you headed to CES in Las Vegas this week?  Do you know how to protect your electronic devices?  The Is Your Device Safe at CES? infographic from Novell shows us some heartbreaking stats.

The Numbers Don’t Lie

You don’t think it will ever happen to you, do you? Well, think again. With a laptop or tablet being stolen every 53 seconds you can literally lose your mobile device at any minute. Oh, and by the way, you’re losing a lot more than that precious device: sensitive company documents, passwords, credit card information, etc. So what are you doing to protect that phone/iPad/laptop? Apparently very little as only 4% of smartphones have Mobile Device Management security installed on them. Take a look at a few of the scary numbers and some ideas you could implement to protect your device and your precious content.

This design is long, but there’s a lot of information to share.  I like the simple color scheme, and there’s some really good data included in here.  However, most of the statistics are shown in text only, which is disappointing.

I’ve said it many times here on Cool Infographics.  Big fonts are not data visualizations.  You want your readers to comprehend and remember the numbers you are showing them in your infographic design.  To be successful at that you need to put the numbers into context for the reader, by visually comparing them to another value or showing them the scale of the value.

Thanks to Mat for sending in the link!

Defending the Death Star

Old age meets new age. Defending the Death Star with A little Data Center Design takes a concept that people can relate to (Star Wars) and applies modern day data center technologies. Brought to you by Data Center Reports.

When Aristotle first explained the concept of “hamartia” in Poetics, he probably didn’t know just how many hero and villain stories would be driven forward by fatal flaws in character, judgment or planning. The Star Wars saga is an epic tale that is powered by fatal flaws – yet we couldn’t help but wonder how things might have turned out had the Empire used a little of today’s security insights to better protect the superweapon better known as the Death Star.

This infographic design tells a good story with illustrations.  No big data sets to visualize, but a simple story that’s incredibly easy for the reader to understand.  The Star Wars comparison puts the different technologies into context for the reader.

The footer should include a copyright and the URL link to the original infographic so readers can easily find the original high-resolution version.

Found on Data Center Reports

Stuxnet: Anatomy of a Computer Virus [video]

Stuxnet: Anatomy of a Computer Virus from Patrick Clair on Vimeo.

Stuxnet: Anatomy of a Computer Virus is a video that claims to be a “motion infographic.”  Created by Patrick Clair, it explores some of the information that has emerged as people have been dissecting the Stuxnet computer virus.

An infographic dissecting the nature and ramifications of Stuxnet, the first weapon made entirely out of code.

I really like the idea of motion infographics, but I disagree that moving text and animation make this an infographic.  There is a lot of information, but there aren’t any data visualizations.  There were a couple of animations that looked like data visualizations, but they’re vague and don’t convey any data to the viewer.

I really like the video, the topic of weaponized software is fascinating and the Security Now podcast #291 has a really good explanation of what has been publicly learned about the virus.

Question for everyone reading: “Does informative = infographic?”

Direction and Motion Graphics: Patrick Clair patrickclair.com
Written by: Scott Mitchell

Found on Visual News

The video is now also available on YouTube: