Carna Botnet Visualizations

These visualizations represent a census of the Internet from data collected from a botnet comprised of more than 420,000 Internet connected devices. This botnet, dubbed the Carna Botnet, after the Roman goddess of the heart and vital organs of the human body, was created by an anonymous cybersecurity researcher as part of an ethical hacking endeavor to measure the extent of the Internet. The botnet worked by scanning the Internet for unsecured IPv4 addresses. After nine months, of all the possible IPv4 addresses, the researcher found 1.3 billion addresses in use.

A report on the project,  which included these visualizations, was posted anonymously on bitbucket in 2012 as part of a post titled “Internet Census 2012” with the poster noting: “We have completed, to our knowledge, the largest and most comprehensive IPv4 census ever. With a growing number of IPv6 hosts on the Internet, 2012 may have been the last time a census like this was possible."