Here's what you find when you scan the entire Internet in an hour (The Washington Post)
Over at The Washington Post, Timothy B. Lee looks at the ZMap network scanning tool that was announced (slides [PDF]) at the USENIX Security conference on August 16. "In contrast, ZMap is "stateless," meaning that it sends out requests and then forgets about them. Instead of keeping a list of [outsanding] requests, ZMap cleverly encodes identifying information in outgoing packets so that it will be able to identify responses. The lower overhead of this approach allows ZMap to send out packets more than 1,000 times faster than Nmap. So while an Internet-wide scan with Nmap takes weeks, ZMap can (with a gigabit network connection) scan the entire Internet in 44 minutes." Beyond just the tool itself, Lee also looks at the results of some of the research that ZMap has facilitated in areas like HTTPS adoption, security flaw fixing, and when the internet sleeps.