Do you know how much time will it take to scan entire Internet with billions of IP addresses? I am sure your answer will very from few weeks to few months. It was right few months back. But now you can scan the whole Internet in just 45 minutes with an opensource scanner Zmap. Researchers from University of Michigan have developed this nice tool.
“ZMap is an open-source network scanner that enables researchers to easily perform Internet-wide network studies. With a single machine and a well provisioned network uplink, ZMap is capable of performing a complete scan of the IPv4 address space in under 45 minutes, approaching the theoretical limit of gigabit Ethernet,” Zmap posted on website.
The washington post reported that the tool works in similar way as popular network security scanner NMap, but in better way. NMap sends request to a machine and then listen the reply. It also keeps records for each outstanding request that creates overhead and slows down the process. But Zmap forgets the request after sending to a machine. It encodes the outgoing request to identify responses and doesn’t keep a list of outstanding requests. Thus Zmap reduced the overhead making overall scanning process 1000 times faster than Nmap.
This tool is really nice and can be used in many kind of analysis process. It helped in finding Hurricane Sandy affected people on the East Coast. It quickly scanned the area to find offline computers and then gave real-time data of affected area.
New Source: The Washington Post
