Bender bending unit 3000

Some of the most popular searches on Shodan aren't actually for devices, but rather about custom HTTP headers that sysadmins decided to add. You can find everything from the web server equivalent of Bobby Tables to Chuck Norris facts.

Looking for a job? Maybe instead of browsing websites you should be browsing headers:

One of my favorites are references to the Futurama TV show in the form of quotes from Bender, Fry and Leela:

I wanted to get a better sense of where these custom messages are being setup, so I plotted them on a map:

Since Futurama was a US TV show I wasn't too surprised that the majority of the servers would be located in the US. However, the 2nd most popular location to virtually honor Bender is Slovakia?! It turns out all 10 web servers are located within the same netblock and they all have a simple header:

Many of the headers responding with Futurama quotes are hardcoded, some of them are dynamic and it was fun to explore this lighter side of the Shodan data. Oh, I did notice something when looking at the hosts of the web servers in Slovakia:

If you change your banners to hide your web server software, make sure you change the header for both your HTTP and HTTPS web server.