A scan is a sca

n is a scan

One of our readers provided an update this morning to the ISC of an ongoing educational/research scan of the Internet that will be expanding to include further ports and protocols.  While I appreciate the effort and reasoning behind the educational/research scans, using the internet at large may not necessarily be the way to go about this, so I'm asking for input and comment.

The value in data taken from scans of the internet is very real, no doubt, and I applaud the organizations for efforts to inform the Internet community they are doing.  The impact to the organizations is the hidden cost in this scanning and classification effort, however, and I am afraid the research institute may be overlooking this fact.  

In almost every organization with an IDS or IPS you will have a person responsible for the review and analysis of the activity.  However not all Security Analysts out there read the ISC or other sources of security information on a daily basis.  So when the security analysis notices unidentified addresses or services, the effort to classify the activity begins.  This may take an hour sometimes, and from my experience time is always the resource we never have enough of.  This is where the cost is incurred by the end user being scanned.   The time spent to identify and update their internal databases.

One last thought: The vulnerability data collected by these scans would be a gem in the wrong hands, much like the compromise of the database compromised earlier this year which contained a catalog of existing vulnerabilities in US hydroelectric dams.

So thoughts your thoughts, is this the best way to do this?  Is it the only way?

tony d0t carothers @t gmail