In case you were wondering about the name, SHODAN was the evil computer from the classic computer games System Shock and System Shock 2. (Apparently the name stood for "Sentient Hyper-Optimized Data Access Network," a delightful string of marketing jargon!)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHODAN

I just have to include the iconic SHODAN quote:

"Look at you, hacker. A pathetic creature of meat and bone, panting and sweating as you run through my corridors. How can you challenge a perfect, immortal machine?"

I wonder if the creators of the search engine are aware that a.) SHODAN wasn't the hacker. b.) SHODAN tried repeatedly to kill the hacker. And c.) the situation didn't turn out particularly well for SHODAN.

Yes on all counts, but SHODAN is remembered as the iconic character of the hacker-themed game.

PS: And 'shodan' also means 'to search for something' in Hindi.

Oh cool! I didn't know that. Learn something new every day.

Hmm, . . . , that's very interesting. I wonder if the etymology of SHODAN is from the Hindi shodan? Maybe it's just a coincidence?

Similar to a certain eternally cheerful OS, or should I say, GLaDOS...

Half the time I can't even remember the protagonist's name.

BioShock couldn't live up to what a great game SS2 was. However Warren Spector's (of SS1) later title 'Deus Ex' was probably the best cyberpunk game of all time.

Agreed on all counts. BioShock was awesome (its use of music and art-deco design was amazing), but System Shock 2 was simply one of the best games of all time.

Deus Ex also rocked, though its sequel was decidedly sub-par.

Interesting, literally for "hackers" in the bad sense of the term. I cannot see how this is useful in a normal day to day fashion other than to find computers/routers that are compromisable. Maybe there is another utility for this? The only one I can imagine right now is to see trends on what is out there in terms of webservers and the versions on them for research papers and the like.

The point comes up a lot that this tool could be misused by script kiddies, so I thought I'd address some of those concerns:

- Search results are limited to 50 hosts (if you're logged in, 10 hosts if you're not). This makes it impractical to use for building a botnet or any kind of large-scale operation.

- I take steps to limit anonymous access (ex. Tor not allowed)

- 'net' and 'country' filter require you to be logged in; makes anonymous systematic scraping much harder

- Users detected of scraping get banned (zero tolerance)

The bottom line: this is a tool for penetration testing and market research, not for script kiddies.

As a network security engineer, it allows me to look at my public-facing IP addresses, and it also gives me an at-a-glance overview for IP address ranges that seem to be attacking me, without the need to fire up nmap, nessus and nikto for a "retaliatory" or "recon" scan.

Just like Johnny Long's GHDB, a list of search operators for Google that reveal sensitive and/or vulnerable services or data, there are both creative/beneficial and malevolent uses for these tools.

Also, "research" is a completely valid reason.

I tried the country search, but the country part was ignored:

'country' filter ignored. Please login to use the 'country' filtering option.

Random observation: only 3 hits for .coms running yaws in the U.S. Odd...?

http://www.shodanhq.com/?q=yaws+.com+country:US

If you're looking for aggregate statistics, etc, Netcraft has been doing this for a while:

http://www.netcraft.com/

Hope you're not scanning IP ranges: I believe it's illegal in most countries.

It isn't in the US, see 'Moulton v. VC3'.

Now you don't even need to scan ip ranges to find a target!