News & Insights

Shadowserver has unexpectedly lost the financial support of our largest sponsor. We need to transition the impacted operations staff and move our data center by May 26th 2020. This is an extremely aggressive timeline. We urgently appeal to our constituents and the community to rally together, help save Shadowserver and help secure the Internet. Learn more about how can you help Shadowserver and the community.

Private sector partners Microsoft and Bitsight announced their disruption of the Necurs botnet on March 10th 2020. Shadowserver supported the operation, through the use of our Registrar of Last Resort (RoLR) for helping to deal with the millions of potential DGA C2 domains involved, and by making available our victim remediation reporting channels. In this blog post we provide our take on some of the more interesting aspects of this operation, analyze the sinkholed Necurs victim populations and compared their observed demographics with data from the previous decade of spambot takedowns.

New MQTT IPv4 scans are now carried out daily as part of our efforts to expand our capability to enable the mapping of exposed IoT devices on the Internet. A new report - Open MQTT - is now shared in our free daily victim remediation reports to 107 National CSIRTs and 4600+ network owners. In particular, the report identifies accessible MQTT broker service that enable anonymous access. The work is being carried out as part of the EU CEF VARIoT (Vulnerability and Attack Repository for IoT) project.

A joint operation by International Law Enforcement Agencies today arrested the alleged administrator of the DarkScandals child sexual exploitation website sites and protected victims by seizing the sites. The Shadowsever Foundation was happy to play a small role in the successful operation by providing technical support to our LE partners.

Celebrating a particularly significant long term milestone - our 107th National CERT/CSIRT recently signed up for Shadowserver's free daily networking reporting service, which takes us to 136 countries and over 90% of the IPv4 Internet by IP space/ASN. This has finally changed our internal CERT reporting coverage map of Europe entirely green.

The Dridex botnet was sinkholed in October 2015 and the infected victims remediated via Shadowserver's free daily network reports. In December 2019, the US DoJ, FBI and UK NCA unsealed criminal charges against other actors alleged to be behind the Dridex botnet’s activities, via an organization self described as “Evil Corp”. This included a record US $5M FBI Most Wanted cyber criminal reward being offered.

Between May 2016 and April 2019, The Shadowserver Foundation participated in the SISSDEN EU Horizon 2020 project. The main goal of the project was to improve the cybersecurity posture of EU entities and end users through the development of situational awareness and sharing of actionable information. It exceeded KPIs, with 257 sensors in 59 countries, using 974 IP addresses across 119 ASNs and 383 unique /24 (Class C) networks, and collected 31TB of threat data. This blog post provides detail on Shadowserver's role in SISSDEN, including a 3 minute explainer video.

2019-06-02 - 0820 UTC-7 - It seems that the power company "accidentally" turned off all the power to the building where our data center resides for about 20 minutes.  This of course took everything out. 

The US DoJ, FBI and international LE partners announce multiple indictments against the alleged operators and customers of the Goznym malware, controlled via the Avalanche platform. Sinkhole data continues to be available from The Shadowserver Foundation, as part of ongoing sinkholing over over 20 Avalanche malware strains.

After over a decade over operations, the Shadowserver Foundation finally launches a shiny new website. The new site hopefully better explains to the public our values, free services and constituents, and what we continue to do to improve the overall security of the Internet. Our team, focus and mission remain otherwise unchanged. But we may hopefully spare ourselves the occasional embarrassing question!