This appears to be a white-hat effort using von Neumann replication and poorly secured telnet ports to build "a distributed port scanner to port scan the entire

This appears to be a white-hat effort using von Neumann replication and poorly secured telnet ports to build "a distributed port scanner to port scan the entire IPv4 Internet within one hour." "We hope other researchers will find the data we have collected useful and that this publication will help raise some awareness that, while everybody is talking about high class exploits and cyberwar, four simple stupid default telnet passwords can give you access to hundreds of thousands of consumer as well as tens of thousands of industrial devices all over the world." This is a well-written report, with great mapping and images, and the research is very likely reproducible. Pro-active ISPs and companies might do well to scan their own IP ranges, before some other entity does it for them. Reading it reminds me of the way that diseases brought by explorers affected indigenous populations lacking antibodies.