In 2015, Soldier of FORTRAN gave a talk about finding mainframes on the internet. It was a small, simple talk about some of his finds and the misadventures of using Nmap and friends. Since then he turned his operation in to a well oiled machine and has, essentially, completed his project. This talk will be about all the new mainframes he discovered, significant changes to Nmap and how it detects mainframes, including a discussion around Nmap and its change process, automating the discovery and posting of mainframes to Tumblr. It will also cover cow easy it was to use a VPS and massscan to scan the entire internet and how to feed that data in to Nmap so you can do this yourself!
Soldier of Fortran is a mainframe hacker. Being a hacker from way back in the day (BBS and X.25 networks) he was always enamored by the idea of hacking mainframes. Always too expensive and mysterious he settled on hacking windows and linux machines, until 2010 when he finally got his very own. Not worrying about system uptime he dove in head first and was surprised by what he found. He’s spoken both domestically (DEFCON, BlackHat) and internationally on the topic, developed tools for mainframe penetration testing and has even keynoted a large mainframe conferences on this topic.