The advert that states more than 1000 universities and 89% of the fortune 100 companies are signed up. Is that meaning there is a decision maker that has signed up on behalf of the university or company and is using it in an official role, or has someone signed up that stated they happened to work at a uni or one of those companies or used their work or uni email to sign up?
Typically the email domain of a user is enough for those sorts of claims.
It probably shouldn't be, especially for university domains. But here we are.
Ugh! That's such a inappropriate interpretation of the data they have available. I always feel for funders who are fed such information and likely don't have all the expertise to recognise these tricks.
Why?
Security teams for asset discovery likely. Run a periodic search to discover anything you didn’t know about. It used to be simpler when you’d have “your” ip ranges but now you could suddenly be leaking PII on all sorts of big tech hosted services.
For finding unsecured Minecraft servers!
Note that everyone and their dog knows the IP ranges Shodan scans from, and blocks them first.