Censys Announces Censys Search 2.0: A Brand New Scanning Engine that Finds Tremendously More Services on Risky Non-Standard Ports

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Jun 04, 2021, 10:22 ET

ANN ARBOR, Mich., June 4, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Censys announced today that it is launching a new version of its public search engine, which continuously indexes Internet services on more than 2,500 ports, providing 177x times more coverage than in its original 2015 service. Censys' new scan engine also incorporates several major improvements including: daily refresh of known services, automatic protocol detection, and multiple global vantage points, which help security teams to conduct better threat hunting, asset discovery, and OSINT for Red and Blue Teams.

This is a map of devices, scanned by Censys, on the Internet as of May 2021.

"Censys Co-founder, Zakir Durumeric, explains that "When we originally launched Censys in 2015, we scanned 14 popular ports. Since then, security researchers have shown that services are spread across a tremendous number of ports and that services are changing nearly constantly. We've designed a new scan engine that continuously scans an extended set of ports to help defenders and researchers more comprehensively find security problems."

Censys scans the top 100 ports daily. Censys' new engine surveys the top 100 ports daily and the top 2,500 ports every ten days across all public IPv4 hosts, finding nearly four times as many services as in the original platform and 85% more services than our nearest competitor. Censys also refreshes known services daily to ensure that users are presented with up-to-date service information despite constant Internet churn.

Censys' launch also brings several additional feature improvements to its hundreds of thousands of researchers and community users, including:

Multiple global vantage points: Censys is now scanning from the US, Europe and Asia. These three perspectives bolster Censys' visibility to over 99% of the Internet.
Automatic protocol detection: Censys now automatically detects the protocol running on each port, which allows it to find services on non-standard ports. In fact, 66% of Censys' scan results come from services on non-standard ports today.
Historical data: Censys now stores historical data about hosts and networks that enables threat hunters to quickly understand quickly changing attacker infrastructure.
Fast host lookup: Utilize Censys data programmatically via the Censys API, looking up detailed information about current or historical assets with even faster response times.

What is the impact? We're making this data available to the public with the launch of Censys Search 2.0, which is directly accessible at search.censys.io. Censys Search 2.0, like its predecessor, will offer a free community tier and paid professional tiers.

About Censys

Censys, Inc.™ is the leading provider of continuous attack surface management. Founded in 2013 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Censys gives organizations the world's most comprehensive real-time view of global networks and devices. Customers like FireEye, Google, NATO, Swiss Armed Forces, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and over 10% of the Fortune 500 rely on the company's Internet-wide continuous visibility platform to discover and prevent cybersecurity threats. Censys was recognized by CB Insights as a 2019 Cyber Defender for pioneering technology with the potential to transform the cybersecurity industry. To learn more, visit censys.io and follow Censys on Twitter.

SOURCE Censys