News & Insights

A review of Shadowserver’s 20th year as the world’s largest provider of free, timely, actionable, daily cyber threat intelligence. Covering the latest improvements in our public benefit services, responses to emerging cyber threats, and detection and reporting of the latest vulnerabilities to National CSIRTs and system defenders globally. We provide highlights of our cybersecurity capacity building efforts, plus successful outcomes from our free support to Law Enforcement in major cybercrime disruption operations.

The Shadowserver Foundation and trusted partners have observed three different malicious campaigns that have exploited CVE-2023-3519, a code injection vulnerability rated CVSS 9.8 critical in Citrix NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway. The summary below is based on collaboration with the individual compromised organizations, as well as their commercial incident response teams. All timestamps in this write-up are in UTC timezone, and they have all been slightly adjusted to not disclose the actual times. If you own a Citrix NetScaler or have those in your constituency, please follow the detection and hunting advice for signs of compromise and webshells!

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.

The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued an alert on nation-state sponsored exploitation of router infrastructure. The alert calls out SNMP public exposure and one vulnerability in particular - CVE-2017-6742 - which relates to a long known “remote code execution” opportunity on certain Cisco routers. This alert is a timely reminder for all with unpatched equipment to think broadly! We use this opportunity to highlight our data and free daily reports that provide information on the SNMP and Cisco device exposed attack surface (and more!).

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).

We are happy to announce the first major extension to our newly launched Dashboard - the addition of IoT device statistics and server-side attack statistics, data sets that have been collected as part of the HaDEA EU CEF VARIoT project.

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.

A maximum risk critical vulnerability in the popular Apache Log4j open source logging software was made public as CVE-2021-44228 on December 9th 2021, potentially providing attackers with easy remote code execution on thousands of systems globally. Although Shadowserver decided not to scan for this vulnerability, our honeypots continue to detect IPv4 /0 scanning and exploitation attempts. A second run of our Vulnerable Log4j Servers Special Report provides updated data from Alpha Strike Lab's scanning activity performed during the week since our first Special Report. The updated Special Report is being distributed to National CSIRTs and network owners as a public benefit service to aid in rapid remediation.

After our recent Special Report and blog post about vulnerable log4j servers, a quick and dirty update on the “log4shell” mass scanning and attempted CVE-2021-44228 exploitation activity we have been seeing across our global honeypot sensor network between Sunday December 11th and Thursday December 16th, including a quick analysis of the top ten Malware Callback URIs observed and server distribution.