News & Insights

Shadowserver issued a report to inform government leaders, policymakers, and other key stakeholders in ECOWAS Member States in West Africa on the following: a) The ECOWAS region’s cyber threat landscape and attack surface using Shadowserver’s free, actionable cyber threat intelligence, technical analysis, and expert insights b) The region’s institutional and operational cybersecurity deficiencies (“gaps”) that make it increasingly vulnerable to cyber threats c) Recommended actions that can be undertaken at the national and regional levels to address the identified gaps, improve digital security, and enhance cyber resilience in the region d) The potential economic and societal impact should the identified institutional and operational cybersecurity gaps remain unaddressed.

We are happy to continue our efforts in collaboration with the UK FCDO, building on our previous global outreach to Africa, Indo-Pacific, Central and Eastern Europe (CEEC), and Association of Southeast Asia Nations (ASEAN) regions to produce a cyber security spotlight on the Gulf Region. For a review of previous UK FCDO supported activities please read a) UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office funds Shadowserver surge in Africa and Indo-Pacific regions, b) Continuing Our Africa and Indo-Pacific Regional Outreach, c) More Free Cyber Threat Intelligence For National CSIRTs and d) Shadowserver’s New Public Dashboard.

Shadowserver has recently been funded by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) to provide more detailed and tailored cyber threat insight support to countries in the Association of Southeast Asia Nations (ASEAN), specifically Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines and Thailand. These activities included obtaining a better understanding of the device makeup of the exposed attack surface in those countries, vulnerability exposure (especially relating to emerging threats) and observed attacks/infected devices - coming both from and directed at the region. The intention is to enrich Shadowserver's free daily threat feeds and public benefit services to the region, providing National CSIRTs and other system defender entities (organizations that are network owners) with a better awareness of their threat and vulnerability landscape, thus helping them to improve their cybersecurity posture.

We are happy to announce multiple enhancements to our public Dashboard, particularly to the Exploited Vulnerability data collected by our server-side honeypot sensors, thanks to funding provided by the UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO).

After many years of not having public interface for exploring our extensive cyber threat intelligence data sets, Shadowserver are very excited to make available our new public Dashboard, kindly funded by the UK FCDO. Use our Dashboard to dig into two years of aggregated country level data about many different type of threats, including some unique data sets and vantage points, then visualize the data in various ways that can be easily shared via URLs. Free to use (with attribution) for research, informing policy makers and by journalists/news media in educating the public about cyber security threats.

We recently began scanning for middlebox devices that are vulnerable to Middlebox TCP reflection, which can be abused for DDoS amplification attacks.  Our results are now shared daily, filtered for your network or constituency in the new Vulnerable DDoS Middlebox report. We uncover over 18,800,000 IPv4 addresses responding to our Middlebox probes. In some cases the amplification rates can exceed 10,000!

A new reflection/amplification distributed denial of service (DDoS) vector with a record-breaking potential amplification ratio of 4,294,967,296:1 has been abused by attackers in the wild to launch multiple high-impact DDoS attacks. Attacks have been observed on broadband access ISPs, financial institutions, logistics companies, gaming companies, and organizations in other vertical markets. Security researchers, network operators, and security vendors Akamai SIRT, Cloudflare, Lumen Black Lotus Labs, Mitel, NETSCOUT Arbor ASERT, TELUS, Team Cymru, and The Shadowserver Foundation formed a task force to investigate the new DDoS vector and provide mitigation guidance. Vendor Mitel has released software patches which disables the abusable test facility and are actively engaged in remediation efforts with their customers. Vulnerable device information is available through Shadowserver's free daily network reports.

We have started daily IPv4 /0 scanning for exposed MS-RDPEUDP instances on port 3389/UDP. Aside from the usual risks associated with exposing RDP services to the Internet, this UDP extension of the popular RDP services has been found to be susceptible to amplification DDoS abuse with an amplification factor of over 84. Over 12 000 instances of MS-RDPEUDP have been found to be accessible on the IPv4 Internet.

We have enabled a new scan for exposed CoAP (Constrained Application Protocol) devices on port 5683/UDP. The scan has uncovered around 460 000 exposed CoAP services that can be potentially abused for CoAP amplification DDoS attacks. These services may also leak information or expose other vulnerabilities. This is the third IoT scan implemented as part of the EU CEF VARIoT project.

This blog is the first in a series in which we will take a look at different world regions in order to demonstrate what taking a more holistic view of our data can reveal - starting with the African continent. The derived insight helps us better drive our outreach activities and hopefully allows National CSIRTs in the region, as well as numerous other authorities/partners and private enterprises, to enhance their incident response coordination and share information from our public benefit victim remediation network reports with local communities in a more effective manner.