Frequently Asked Questions about Scanning
For a full list of all 108 protocols and 3500+ ports, see Scanning Introduction.
Censys global scanning engine is continuously scanning the Internet to find new services, remove old services, and refresh data about current services in its free searchable index.
Discovery scans are performed on several schedules based on the popularity of certain ports and networks (such as those allocated to cloud providers) in the IPv4 address space.
Every day, every known service in our host dataset is evaluated for its age, and any service older than 24 hours is rescanned to verify its accuracy.
The Censys next-gen scan engine scan provides visibility for over 99% of the public Internet by scanning the most ports (3,500+) using automatic service detection from multiple scanning perspectives.
The Censys datasets also have higher fidelity in terms of tracking changes to the Internet over time and providing the most accurate snapshot of the current Internet.
We provide geolocation data using the IPInfo Geolocation API and routing information using the RouteViews dataset.
We provide academic and other non-commercial researchers with free access to the same data as our highest-tiered customers: Censys datasets available in Google BigQuery and up-to-date raw scan data for downloading. This access is strictly limited to non-commercial use. Learn more about research access.
Censys strives to be a good citizen of the security community. Our scans help the scientific community accurately study the Internet and help security practitioners defend it.
Tip
Censys only scans to get information: Censys never tries to log into any service, read any database, or otherwise gain authenticated access to any system.
If you want to opt out, configure your firewall to drop traffic from the subnets we use for scanning. .
We do not remove any results from Censys data sets, but if you blocked these subnets, your hosts are automatically pruned out of our daily snapshots.
Censys originally started as an academic research project at the University of Michigan. From 2015–2017, Censys was operated at Michigan with generous support from the Google Anti-Abuse Team. During this time, our license restricted access to non-commercial research. Since then, we've spun out from the University of Michigan into an independent company.
Censys was started by the same team that created ZMap, and the Censys legacy scanner used many of the ZMap tools to collect and annotate data. The ZMap Project is and will remain an independent open-source project, and is primarily maintained by the Censys development team.
We are staunch supporters of open-source software.
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