Did anyone use Gnutella (back when that was a thing) to search for "autoexec.bat" in order to find people who were foolishly sharing their entire hard drives and then trawl through their "My Documents" or Pictures folders to see what they were into?
Me neither.
That would have been very wrong.
I was just asking is all.
I think the modern version of that is Shodan image searches for Port:5900, which return a load of instances...
Sadly, VNC Roulette isn’t up any more.
I'll bite: what did that find?
VNC (remote desktop administration) instances available from the browser using the RealVNC Java client. Basically, if they didn't have passwords or a fully updated client, you could get right into their desktop like you were sitting there in front of it.
I'd assume public VNC Java applets, therefore being able to access random people's machines.
VNC Servers on the public internet, that typically used weak passwords. You could monitor or remote control other people's computers.
There was a site posted here a while back that scanned for wide open VNC and found a lot of things that looked disturbingly like industrial control consoles. Want to blow up an oil refinery?
I remember once I was using VNC on my iPhone, in order to remote manage it from my PC. I was using it to run a script on my PC where my mouse would send clicks on specific points in the screen, to keep-alive and send clicks on specific areas for game-botting reasons. When doing so I had the 3G connection off, so when VNC server on my iphone was ON, only the internal wifi network would be able to access the device, and not someone via the 3G IP.