News & Insights

Breaking news: Shadowserver's malware repository now exceeds the One Billion Binaries milestone (and, spoiler alert - not everyone in the team is as excited by this news as some of us). We provide a little bit of history about the growth of our malware collection, and the some of the challenges we continue to face.

As most of you may know The Shadowserver Foundation is a non-profit organization in both the US and in the EU.  We survive through donations, sponsorships, as well as project work to expand out what we are able to do.  We share our data for no cost with the direct network owners.  From our last few posts you can get an idea of how many drives we go through and the possible cost to maintain all the work that we have been doing.  We do not ask for credit, only the occasional support.

We have been engaged in scanning of the internet for its better health for over a year (we started with a few, then grew to a dozen).  The decreases in abusable systems has dropped significantly in several areas.  We have also had an inadvertent effect of identifying networking misconfiguration on many networks which has helped improve the stability and security of those organizations.

The news and our networks have been full of articles and packets related to the different UDP amplification attacks that have been ongoing.  We and several other researchers have been looking at this problem for a while and while there are not any easy solutions we can at least make network owners more aware of the issues that we can see on their networks from the outside. This has led to some interesting results, most of which are not pleasant.

Shadowserver added a new set of reports to all of those who have signed up to receive information about their networks.  The report is the culmination of months of work figuring out how to reliably scan the Internet for potential Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) amplification.