Network Scanner Finds Every Raspberry Pi

April 29, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 34 Comments

DHCP is great for getting machines on the network with a minimum of fuss. However, it can also make remote administration a pain because you never know which IP you’re supposed to be SSHing into. [Philipp] ran into this problem quite often, so decided to whip up an app to make things easier.

At it’s heart, the app is a simple network scanner—of which many already exist. However, [Philipp] had found that many options on Android were peppered with ads that made them highly undesirable to use. Thus, he whipped up his own, with a particular eye to working with the Raspberry Pi. It’s not uncommon for a hacker to have a few scattered around the home network, and it can be a real chore keeping track of where they all end up in IP land. The scanner can specifically single out the Raspberry Pi boards on the network via MAC-OUI and mDNS detection. Plus, just in case you need it, [Philipp] threw in some GPIO pinouts and electronics calculators just to make the app more useful.

If you’ve been looking for an open-source network scanner without all the ugly junk, this project might just be for you. You can also check out the source over on Github if that’s relevant to your interests. We’ve seen some interesting custom network scanners before, too. If you’re whipping up some fun packet-flinging software of your own, don’t hesitate to notify the tipsline!

Containing Conficker

March 30, 2009 by Eliot 50 Comments

conficker

With all the noise about Conficker turning your computer into liquid hot magma on April 1st, there’s actually some positive news. Researchers from the HoneyNet Project have been following the worm since infections started in late 2008. They recently discovered an easy way to identify infected systems remotely. Conficker attempts to patch the MS08-067 vulnerability during infection. A flaw in the patch causes the machine to respond differently than both an unpatched system and an officially patched system. Using this knowledge, the team developed a proof of concept network scanner in python to find infected machines. You can find it in [Rich Mogull]’s initial post. [Dan Kaminisky] has packaged it as an EXE and has instructions for how to build the SVN version of Nmap, which includes the new signature. Other network scanner vendors are adding the code as well.

In conjunction with this detection code, the team has also released the whitepaper Know Your Enemy: Containing Conficker. It discusses ways to detect, contain, and remove Conficker. They’ve combined this with a tool release that covers Conficker’s dynamic domain generation among other things.