News & Insights

After many years in our current datacenter, we've outgrown the space. We have found a new datacenter space nearby and have slowly been moving into it. We've reached a point where we have to shut everything down for a week to finish the migration.

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.

July of last year we had a little problem.  We had a lot of drives to dispose of and did so as inexpensively as possible via a drill press, a lot of time, and a lot of flying metal as we slowly destroyed stacks of drives one at a time.  Moving forward in time to today, we realized that our bins were once again full of drives, almost 1500 this time.  This adds up to almost three petabytes of storage in disks.  Knowing that it would take us days of drilling we sought out a faster solution, and here it is.

With the advent of massive inexpensive storage also comes the issue of the disposal of that storage when it inevitably fails on you, usually taking something valuable with each failure. Even the best of disks will fail eventually and at the end of the week you have a large steaming pile of disks that are no longer useful but cannot just be tossed into the rubbish bin.

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.

Reporting has been fixed and all data going out in the reports again.

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.

One of our core missions is to provide actionable data to network owners and researchers. Given this mission, we are constantly on the lookout for new and interesting ways to deliver our data and we are now pleased to announce that we have published a Maltego transform compatible with the Malformity Project.

As individuals and as a group we have been collecting malware for many years. The Shadowserver Foundation repository dates back to 2005 and we collected our first million shortly after we actually started counting.