General security topics

We’ve partnered with Google Cloud Security to bring Censys ASM and the Censys Platform directly into Google SecOps SIEM and SOAR to deliver real-time internet intelligence and comprehensive external exposure context where it matters most.With this integration, teams can:Triage suspicious infrastructure faster with built-in enrichment Validate remediation with real-time rescans and historical context Reduce manual pivots across monitoring and response workflows Learn more: https://bit.ly/4u4fxk0

Dear Censys Support,Thank you for your response.I am fully aware of what Censys does. That is precisely the issue.Your opt-out model is not compliant with GDPR. Under Article 6 of Regulation (EU) 2016/679, any processing of data — including the active probing of private infrastructure — requires a valid legal basis. "Legitimate interest" (Article 6.1.f) is explicitly conditional: it cannot override the rights and interests of the data subject when those are clearly asserted. I am asserting them now, in writing, for the second time.To be unambiguous:- I did not opt in to your scanning program.- I am not required to opt out of something I never consented to.- The burden of compliance is yours, not mine.I also note that my server logs show repeated connection attempts from multiple Censys-operated IP ranges over an extended period (July–August 2025, and again April 2026). This is documented and timestamped.I expect the following within 5 business days:1. Permanent cessation of all scannin

Dear Censys IO Legal & Security Team,This notice is addressed to your organization following the identification of repeated, unsolicited scanning activities targeting my production SMTP server infrastructure, originating from IP ranges attributable to Censys IO.While I am aware that Censys operates as an internet intelligence platform, I wish to make the following unambiguously clear:1. UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS ATTEMPTSThe scanning activities directed at my server constitute unauthorized probing of a private, production-grade system. Under applicable law — including but not limited to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA, 18 U.S.C. § 1030), the EU Directive on Attacks Against Information Systems (2013/40/EU), and French law n°88-19 on computer fraud — such activities may expose your organization to civil and criminal liability, regardless of intent.2. ABSENCE OF PRIOR CONSENT OR NOTIFICATIONNo prior communication, opt-in mechanism, or notification was received from your organization b

The Vertex Project and Censys recently hosted a joint webinar highlighting the Synapse-Censys Power-Up and how analysts can use it to query Censys’ data and represent their findings within Synapse. For our use case, we focused on how an analyst might use the Synapse-Censys Power-Up to research infrastructure associated with a group called NoName057(16) and its use of a custom Distributed Denial of Service toolkit known as DDoSia. This blog will walk through several of the webinar’s key points.

Hi,I was wondering about the threathunting module. I came across a host that is tagged as malicious, in this case by the malware Vidar. However, I believe it to be a false positive. Is there a way to re-evaluate a threat? A feature to send in a threat for review would be nice. 

HelloI’m currently trying to integrate Censys with an external tool, which requires the legacy API credentials, specifically the API UID and Secret Key.I was able to generate a Personal Access Token successfully from my account, but I could not find any option to obtain the API UID or Secret Key (API ID and API Secret) anywhere in the dashboard.Is there still a way to obtain legacy API credentials? If not, is there a recommended way to make tools like recon-ng work with the new authentication system?Thank you for your help!

I am having trouble topping up my credits, I kept getting the error message "Verify your account information and payment method, then try again.". Can I get your team's help on this urgently?

Hello! I want add 100$ to my balance, but I can't pay with my CreditCard in United States, I see error "Transaction FailedVerify your account information and payment method, then try again."Please fix this or help me with top up! 

Can anyone recommend a search that I can use to check if I have any instances of NetWeaver in my environment?

If you think Salt Typhoon has moved on—you might want to double-check your attack surface. We’re still seeing critical telecom infrastructure exposed to active targeting. Find out what we uncovered (and what you should be looking for) in the new research team blog: https://censys.com/blog/the-persistent-threat-of-salt-typhoon-tracking-exposures-of-potentially-targeted-devices

Hello, I need to do a historical search of the open ports of one of our public IPs, I wanted to know if by buying Censys credits I can do this historical search and how far back I can go.Thanks

Last week, the Censys research team set out to test the existence of ICS protocols on port tweaks. Instead of picking one ICS protocol as a proof-of-concept analysis, we set out to investigate all of them. 🕵️ Read part 2 here.

merci pour le groupe censys

At Censys, our goal is to capture an accurate representation of the Internet at any given time. However, not only is the Internet large, but our investigations and prior research show that many of the services on the Internet do not respond on their standard port. While you would expect Modbus to be found only on port 502, the reality is that there is a plethora of Modbus on other, non-standard ports.Our research team put together a new blog about how we use independent measurement and research to verify where to scan in a more focused manner, concentrating on ICS protocols as a case study. You can check it out here. 

Recently, our cybersecurity system detected an IP owned by Censys trying to connect to our SMA on port 443.  Censys has lots of posts about SonicWall vulnerabilities recently.I'm wondering if Sonicwall has engaged with Censys for some sort of penetration testing? Or if Censys is just doing blanket pen tests on public IP addresses to find vulnerable Sonicwall products?

Good morning, We have been seeing intermittent failures with the Censys Search API all weekend, with a further stream of 500 failures this morning. A number of searches via the GUI are also returning 0 results.  We have checked the Censys status board, which does not suggest that there are availability issues with the API. Please can you investigate. 

In their third annual State of the Internet Report, the Censys Research Team is back with fresh insights into the state of internet security and its implications for organizations and their security teams.This year, the team focuses specifically on the security of Industrial Control Systems (ICS) to understand the extent of exposures across these Internet-connected devices, many of which are relevant to critical infrastructure operations.Check out the report here. If you have any questions for the research team, feel free to ask them here!

Hey everyone! On October 29, 2024 we are holding an in-person threat hunting workshop in Washington, D.C. I want to extend an invite to the folks here in the Censys Community. The workshop will provide an opportunity to learn from industry experts and other Censys users through hands-on exercises and discussions, offering insights and strategies to get the most from your security technology. I will be leading the workshop alongside Andrew Morris from Greynoise. We will cover… Malicious Infrastructure Discovery and Fingerprinting Deceptive Services/Honeypot Detection If you work in the threat intel and response world, are a security engineer, or are more broadly in the cybersecurity analyst industry, this workshop will be perfect for you.You can request an invite to the event here. Hope to see you there!

Hi folks, We just published a report examining the most commonly exposed types of assets belonging to the Internet of Healthcare Things (IoHT) 🏥 in Censys data.Ransomware and data breaches in healthcare continue to rise, and effective exposure management in this sector is more critical than ever. Healthcare organizations often have sprawling, decentralized infrastructure and under-resourced IT departments, which create significant challenges.We examined the global external attack surface of publicly accessible medical devices and IoHT applications and found legacy protocols, unauthenticated medical image databases, and data platforms with histories of exploited vulnerabilities.You can read the full report here: https://censys.com/state-of-internet-of-healthcare-things/ 

A total of 14 vulnerabilities affecting DrayTek Vigor routers were disclosed yesterday in a report by Forescout. The vulnerabilities were scored as follows: 2 critical severity, 9 high severity, and 3 medium severity. Most of these vulnerabilities are found in DrayTek VigorConnect, the web control interface for Vigor routers.Let’s examine the most severe vulnerability, CVE-2024-41592, which has been assigned the maximum CVSS score of 10.0. It’s a buffer overflow in the GetCGI() function of the VigorConnect Web UI that can be triggered by sending a specially crafted, excessively long query string to any of the CGI pages.When exploited individually, CVE-2024-41592 allows a threat actor to potentially cause a Denial of Service. However, if chained with CVE-2024-41585—the second-most severe vulnerability, which is an OS command injection flaw—it is possible to gain remote root access to the host operating system. This exploit chain only affects Vigor router models 3910 and 3912.If a router

BackgroundYesterday, September 26, after significant anticipation and dramatic drum rolling on social media, a series of vulnerabilities were disclosed in the Common Unix Printing Service (CUPS), a widely used printing utility found on many Linux distributions (specifically these ones, according to the original researcher’s writeup). These vulnerabilities are summarized below: Source: https://www.evilsocket.net/2024/09/26/Attacking-UNIX-systems-via-CUPS-Part-I/#SummaryThe most buzzy of these vulnerabilities is CVE-2024-47176, which affects cups-browsed. After a Red Hat security forum discussion, this was initially unofficially associated with a CVSS score of 9.9, but GitHub recently assigned it a score of 8.3 (High).Understanding CUPS and IPPCUPS is found on many Linux and other Unix systems for managing printing jobs and queues. It is used in conjunction with the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) for network communication between computers and printers. IPP was designed to allow device

Date of Disclosure: September 19, 2024CVE-ID and CVSS Score: CVE-2024-8963 is a critical vulnerability with a CVSS score of 9.4.Issue Name and Description: Ivanti Cloud Services Appliance (CSA) If successfully exploited it allows a remote unauthenticated attacker to achieve restricted access. As noted in Ivanti’s security advisory, if chained with CVE-2024-8190 (OS command injection) an attacker can gain admin privileges and achieve RCE. Censys PerspectiveAt the time of writing, Censys observes 2,017 exposed Ivanti CSA instances online, mostly concentrated in the U.S. Note that not all of these are necessarily vulnerable – as specific device versions are not available. This vulnerability affects CSA versions 4.6.0 and earlier.To identify potentially exposed Ivanti Cloud Services Appliance instances, the following Censys queries can be used:Censys Search Query: services.http.response.html_title=`Ivanti(R) Cloud Services Appliance` Censys ASM Query: host.services.http.response.html_title

We (GreyNoise) are investigating a long-standing mystery and reaching out to anyone who may have thoughts, theories, or insights! https://www.greynoise.io/blog/greynoise-reveals-new-internet-noise-storm-secret-messages-and-the-china-connection 

 “at the end of the day, it’s not actually computer-to-computer, right?” he said. “The technology is a vector for human beings. Behind the connection is a person." - Nate Fick,  US State’s ambassador for cyber.Using this mentality, and the fact that humans have patterns, I dug into IOCs from the Joint Cybersecurity Advisory on Iranian threat actor group “Fox Kitten” to uncover hosts that shared either identical IOCs or similar patterns (ports, software, certificates, DNS, etc) and therefore, are likely part of their infrastructure that wasn’t mentioned in the report. Check out the analysis here.Specifically, a search for domain IOCs from the Advisory yielded the following IPs with those IOCs in their DNS and certificate records. These IPs were not listed in the Advisory yet share Autonomous Systems/networks with host IOCs that are listed in the Advisory, further linking them to the group.“Host M” - 64.176.165[.]17 “Host N” - 70.34.218[.]77 “Host O” - 18.130.251[.]165What does this mean

Hello! We are trying to map IPs in our address space to OGRE router nodes and TOR nodes. Do you know of any way to investigate this through Censys or do you know of any sources of information related to this?Here are some links on the subject of Ogre Routing, with some similarities to TOR Routing:-https://github.com/NthMetal/ogre-router/blob/master/README.md-https://github.com/NthMetal/ogre-router-server Thanks!