News & Insights

As everyone knows now, Shadowserver had a bit of a funding issue earlier this year which caused us to go through the process of needing a new space for our data operations.  A place to call home for all that storage and computing that we do daily.  A new data center was required.  This story will go through that recent history, the actual move, and a few after action and post move things that occurred.  This blog will be partially serious, some tongue in cheek, and some sad comedy, so enjoy our journey.

The Data Center is moving and we expect to be down from 2020-08-14 (Friday) to 2020-08-18 (Tuesday).  This will impact all of our services except incoming email.  Most of our data collection system will remain functional, but we will have no way of importing and reporting anything.  In fact, all reports will be suspended until we come back up.

We have recently enabled a new IPv4 Internet-wide scan and report for accessible Radmin services on port 4899/TCP. Radmin is a remote access software product commonly in use today. Our daily scans uncover around 50,000 accessible Radmin services on port 4899/TCP. While Radmin is in general considered a secure mechanism for remote access, care should be taken as with all similar types of services to ensure no misconfiguration has taken place.

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.

We have enabled a new scan dedicated to finding open IPP (Internet Printing Protocol) devices exposed on port 631/TCP. The roughly 80,000 devices uncovered as a result of the scan have connected to the Internet without adequate access controls or authorization mechanisms in place. This could allow for a potential range of different types of attacks, from information disclosure and service disruption/tampering, to, in some cases, remote command execution. Results of the scan are collected in the new Open IPP report. This is the second scan enabled under the EU CEF VARIoT project.

As planned, we have spent all of April talking to potential hosting and colocation providers about providing space for our new Shadowserver data center, including following up with everyone who had already contacted us to offer assistance. We have completed the review of all of our options and have signed a contract for a new home for our Data Center.

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.

Shadowserver urgently needs to move our current data center by August 2020. We are blogging our data center requirements for hosting and colocation providers, or other companies who might be able to help provide a new home for our public benefit services for the global Internet. Please reach out and get in touch if you can help.

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.

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.