Shodan, called 'the scariest search engine on the internet', finds traffic lights, power plants

THE 'scariest search engine' is peering in the darkest corners of the internet and finding servers, webcams, traffic lights and even power plants open to anyone with a computer.

Shodan, dubbed the 'search engine for hackers', collects information on 500 million devices every month, CNN reports.

The search engine was named after the villain in the cyberpunk role-playing games System Shock and System Shock 2.

Traffic lights, security cameras and home automation systems are all hooked up to the internet and easy for the 'dark Google' to find. One cybersecurity expert even used it to find a hockey rink that could be defrosted, traffic lights for an entire city, and the controls for a hydroelectric plant in France.

Simple searches on Shodan uncover system controls for a water park, a gas station, hotel wine cooler and crematorium, CNN reports. And some researchers have even found control systems for nuclear power plants and even a particle-accelerating cyclotron, as well as garage doors and lighting systems.


In a shocking security lapse, few of these devices even have passwords - because many were never supposed to be put online in the first place.

“You can log into just about half of the internet with a default password,” Rapid 7 chief security officer told CNN. “It’s a massive security failure.”

Searching for ‘default password’ on Shodan brings up numerous servers, system controls and printers that use ‘admin’ as ‘1234’ as username and password.

Independent security tester Dan Tentler, at a Defcon cybersecurity talk, said tens of thousands of webcams, hydrogen fuel cells used in military instillations, power meters, theatre lighting, heat pumps are all online.

"You could really do some damage with this," he said.

Many of these systems have no security, because they were designed to be hooked up to a company’s own systems. Instead, they are connected to a web server - making them open to anyone with a computer.