At first glance, this looks like gibberish. To the untrained eye, it’s a broken sentence. But to a security researcher, it is a key that unlocks a specific category of unsecured, live video feeds across the globe.
To find the exact same results on Shodan, you would search: html:"multi.html" title:"webcam"
The axis-cgi folder handled CGI scripts, and multi.html was the file that displayed multiple camera views. The title of this page was frequently hardcoded as "Live Webcam" or "Webcam Viewer." inurl multi html intitle webcam link
User-agent: * Disallow: / This politely asks Google not to index your camera. Be aware: malicious scrapers ignore this. Vulnerable cameras are often old. Manufacturers like Axis, Hikvision, and Dahua have released patches for default credential issues. Update or replace legacy devices. Part 7: Beyond Google – Shodan and Censys While Google is slowly purging sensitive live feeds, Shodan (the "search engine for the internet of things") explicitly indexes them.
A common file structure for these cameras was: http://[camera-ip]/axis-cgi/multi.html At first glance, this looks like gibberish
Thus, inurl:multi html intitle:webcam was the perfect recipe. The extra word "link" was added later to filter for pages that explicitly contained hyperlinks to individual video streams (like mpeg4/video.cgi ).
Shodan does not hide results. It is legal because it only indexes publicly accessible banners. However, Shodan does not respect robots.txt and is often used by both security professionals and cybercriminals. To find the exact same results on Shodan,
Stay curious, stay legal, and secure your streams.