News & Insights

On Tuesday 29th August 2023, the US DoJ and FBI, together with other global law enforcement partners, announced a disruption action against the Qakbot botnet. This involved the FBI deleting the Qakbot malware from infected victim computers under US court order. As part of their operation, the FBI acquired a copy of the threat actor’s database of historical Qakbot infections, which covered the period July 2019 to August 2023. This database contains a record of over 700,000 discrete Qakbot bot infections in 230 countries. Shadowserver is sharing elements of this dataset as a one-off Special Report, to allow historical Qakbot infections to be investigated and any secondary malware identified and remediated by system defenders.

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.

In the last few months, Shadowserver has been systematically rolling out IPv6 scanning of services. We chose to conduct our scanning based on hitlists of IPv6 addresses observed being used in the wild, maintaining up to 1 billion unique IPv6 addresses on the hitlist at any one time. We currently scan 9 different services (11 ports) uncovering over 120 million active services by unique IPv6 daily.

We have recently began scanning for  accessible MySQL server instances on port 3306/TCP.  These are instances that respond to our MySQL connection request with a Server Greeting. Surprisingly to us, we found around 2.3M IPv4 addresses responding with such a greeting to our queries. Even more surprisingly, we found over 1.3M IPv6 devices responding as well (though mostly associated with a single AS). IPv4 and IPv6 scans together uncover 3.6M accessible MySQL servers worldwide.