Lion Cipher Lab
Find your exposed assets with Shodan
- Threat Intel Analyst
- Beginner
- ~30 min
- Free · no account required
Why it matters
Attackers do not start by hacking you — they start by looking you up, and Shodan is one of the first places they look. It continuously scans the public internet and catalogues what every reachable device is running, so anything of yours that faces the internet with a door left open is already listed and searchable before you have thought about it once. Turning that same lens on your own assets is the cheapest security win there is: you see your exposure exactly the way an attacker does, then you close what should never have been open. This is defensive reconnaissance — reading public records…
What you'll learn
- attack-surface awareness
- using Shodan on your own assets
- finding your public IP
- reading banners, open ports, and services
- interpreting known-vulnerability (CVE) tags
- recognizing risky exposed services (RDP, databases, cameras)
- the authorization boundary for recon
- reducing internet-facing exposure
Steps in this lab
- The one rule before you open Shodan: your own assets only
- What Shodan is — and why it is not Google
- The vocabulary, and how to find your public IP
- Look up your own IP and read the host page
- Read the banners, ports, and services
- The dangerous ones: RDP, databases, cameras, and vuln tags
- What Shodan does NOT tell you — then close the door
- Why looking yourself up is the habit worth keeping