Media Coverage

The internet has a lot of underlying infrastructure most of us seldom give much thought to, but which is essential to keeping it working… and working properly. One of those seldom-seen, essential services that works tirelessly to keep things running smoothly is a nonprofit called Shadowserver . The reason you’re hearing about it now? Shadowserver is about to lose its main source of funding. Shadowserver’s key function is running honeypots and sinkholes, which trick botnets into directing all of their traffic into a black hole rather than to an actual website. Shadowserver sinkholes five million infected machines every day. Without it, who knows where the malicious traffic they generate will end up, or what it’ll do to the usability of the internet. But Shadowserver are losing the funding from their primary supporter and it needs $1.7 million to make it through the rest of 2020. Perhaps that’s the one downside of being such a quiet, inconspicuous company is that few have heard of it, and even fewer understand why it matters. Being distracted by a pandemic, though, can’t be helping matters either. Shadowserver’s never wanted the limelight, but now for all of our sakes it needs as much as it can get.

There is a danger that financial support for the independent non-profit organisation Shadowserver may soon vanish. Shadowserver is a crucial link in efforts to combat internet crime. Shadowserver analyses malware and botnets, issues warnings free of charge to national CERTs and providers concerning victims who have been infected within their networks, and prevents abuse and wrongly configured or compromised hardware. The organisation’s US branch is losing its principal sponsors, and the European branch too may in due course lose its funding. The organisation is therefore urgently seeking new, reliable sources of income to enable the existing function to be maintained while preserving its independence. (1) In view of the important role that Shadowserver plays for society and the disastrous impact on European online security if the organisation were to cease to exist, the EU should consider ways of allowing that role to continue to be played. Will the Commission provide support without delay in the form of funding (even indirect), fund-raising, subsidies, etc. to ensure that Shadowserver does not go bankrupt and can continue its independent work?

Anyone who’s seen the 1984 hit movie Ghostbusters likely recalls the pivotal scene where a government bureaucrat orders the shutdown of the ghost containment unit, effectively unleashing a pent-up phantom menace on New York City. Now, something similar is in danger of happening in cyberspace: Shadowserver.org, an all-volunteer nonprofit organization that works to help Internet service providers (ISPs) identify and quarantine malware infections and botnets, has lost its longtime primary source of funding.

Shadowserver has time and again been the trusted partner when national law enforcement agencies needed someone to manage the technical side of things while people with guns and badges seized hard drives at the affected ISPs and hosting providers.

Anyone interested in supporting that migration effort can do so directly here; Shadowserver’s contact page is here.

Keeping the internet safe may sometimes feel like a game of Whac-A-Mole, reacting to attacks as they arise, then moving on to the next. In reality, though, it’s an ongoing process that involves not just identifying threats but grabbing and retaining control of the infrastructure behind them. For years a small nonprofit called Shadowserver has quietly carried out a surprisingly large portion of that work. But now the organization faces permanent extinction in a matter of weeks.

There’s a pivotal scene in Ghostbusters in which Environmental Protection Agency inspector Walter Peck marches into the group’s headquarters, armed with a cease and desist order. “Shut this off,” Peck tells the utility worker accompanying him. “Shut this all off.” They cut power to the Ghostbusters’ protection grid, and all the ghosts are released. Think of Shadowserver as the internet’s protection grid.

Janet CSIRT: “The largest UK GDPR fine was £183M in 2018 when the British Airways booking website was hit by Magecart credit card skimming code. @RiskIQ worked with Abuse.ch and Shadowserver to take down the malicious domains”. “Listen to DarknetDiaries Episode 52: Magecart. Credit card skimming on your online purchases? Ya it’s happening. With the amazing and fearless @ydklijnsma from @RiskIQ.”

The OWASP Amass Project is tool developed to help information security professionals during the mapping process of attack perimeter. It allows DNS enumeration, attack surface mapping & external assets discovery, using open source information gathering and active reconnaissance techniques.

OWASP Amass tries to collect useful information including the following techniques: DNS, Scraping, Certificates, Web Archives and APIs.

• APIs: AlienVault, BinaryEdge, BufferOver, CIRCL, CommonCrawl, DNSDB, GitHub, HackerTarget, IPToASN, Mnemonic, NetworksDB, PassiveTotal, Pastebin, RADb, Robtex, SecurityTrails, ShadowServer, Shodan, Spyse (CertDB & FindSubdomains), Sublist3rAPI, TeamCymru, ThreatCrowd, Twitter, Umbrella, URLScan, VirusTotal, WhoisXML

Me-Tech —a small prototyping company—was attacked several times over the space of seven months. The network was actually a honeypot consisting of real industrial control systems (ICS) hardware and a mix of physical hosts and virtual machines, set up by Trend Micro Research to mimic the operations of a small factory. The researchers monitored the attacks against the honeypot to determine how “knowledgeable and imaginative” attackers had to be to compromise a manufacturing operation, and to monitor firsthand what kind of attacks manufacturing companies dealt with on a regular basis. The threats didn’t come from sophisticated state-sponsored groups, but rather cybercriminals intent on fraud and financial gain. The researchers identified scanning traffic from 9,452 unique IP addresses, of which 610 were linked to scanners such as ip-ip, Rapid 7, Shadow Server, Shodan, and ZoomEye

Seeking to minimize Internet’s susceptibility to spoofed DDoS attacks, we are developing and supporting open-source software tools to assess and report on the deployment of source address validation (SAV) best anti-spoofing practices. This project includes applied research, software development, new data analytics, systems integration, operations and maintenance, and an interactive analysis and reporting service.

We generate a summary report on the current “state” of Internet IP source address spoofing/filtering using data from an active measurement tool. Since 2015 when UCSD/CAIDA took over development and support of the spoofer infrastructure, we’ve collected data from 7468 autonomous systems in 207 countries. More details and published results from our research are also available. The CAIDA IP Spoofer report is highlighted by ShadowServer.

ProgrammableWeb present the full list of the Most Clicked, Shared and Talked About APIs of 2019 in Security and Privacy, that piqued the interest of our readers, followers, and editors. Shadowserver is a non-profit, watchdog group of security professionals that gather, track, and report on malware, botnet activity, and e-fraud. The Shadowserver API provides a lookup mechanism to test an executable file against a list of known software applications. The details are serialized in JSON for integration with your application.

IntelMQ is a solution for IT security teams (CERTs & CSIRTs, SOCs, abuse departments, etc.) for collecting and processing security feeds (such as log files) using a message queuing protocol. It’s a community driven initiative called IHAP (Incident Handling Automation Project) which was conceptually designed by European CERTs/CSIRTs during several InfoSec events. Its main goal is to give to incident responders an easy way to collect & process threat intelligence thus improving the incident handling processes of CERTs. Current supported feeds include: ShadowServer.