Media Coverage

In February 2024, representatives from States, international organisations, private industry, academia, and civil society came together to consider the challenges posed by the proliferation and irresponsible use of commercial cyber intrusion capabilities (CCICs) and launched the Pall Mall Process. In August 2024, the Pall Mall Process launched a consultation on good practices through which to tackle this shared threat. This report summarises responses to the Pall Mall Process consultation into good practices, including examples, recommendations and concerns raised by participants in written responses and through virtual workshops.

Civil society and academia represented: Shadowserver Foundation

Put simply – we have been hijacking backdoors (that were reliant on now abandoned infrastructure and/or expired domains) that themselves existed inside backdoors, and have since been watching the results flood in. This hijacking allowed us to track compromised hosts as they ‘reported in’, and theoretically gave us the power to commandeer and control these compromised hosts. Over 4000 unique and live backdoors later…

For the same reasons that both this research and the .MOBI research came to exist, we would be guilty of the exact same careless disposal of infrastructure if we were to let these domains expire as their previous owners did. We’re incredibly grateful for the support of The Shadowserver Foundation, who have agreed yet again to save us from our own adventures and to take ownership of the domains implicated in this research and sinkhole them.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD) published Playbook for Strengthening Cybersecurity in Federal Grant Programs for Critical Infrastructure to enable grant-making agencies to incorporate cybersecurity into their grant programs, and to enable grant-recipients to build cyber resilience into their grant-funded infrastructure projects.

The guide includes a comprehensive list of cybersecurity resources available to support grant recipient project execution. Shadowserver is included in the Advisory Support/Technical Assistance Service section in the Protect category.

Europol has supported the dismantling of a sophisticated criminal network responsible for facilitating large-scale online fraud. In an operation led by the Hanover Police Department (Polizeidirektion Hannover) and the Verden Public Prosecutor’s Office (Staatsanwaltschaft Verden) in Germany, and supported by law enforcement authorities across Europe, over 50 servers were seized, significant digital evidence was secured, and two key suspects were placed in pretrial detention.

The UK Government published its 2023 to 2024 annual report on the Conflict, Stability and Security Fund (CSSF), a cross-government Fund, that acted as a catalyst for a more integrated government response to tackling conflict, insecurity and instability.

The section on ‘Transnational Threats: Cyber’ highlights the Shadowserver Foundation’s project work funded through the CSSF Indo-Pacific Cyber Programme – ‘Improving Threat Data for Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand’. This project improved the quality of free daily cyber threat intelligence provided to national telecoms and cyber security incident response teams. In early 2024, a significant and new malware vulnerability was identified in the region, released by a Chinese state actor. Shadowserver quickly responded by detecting and reporting on the exposed networks and devices, alerting cyber response teams, network owners and media. New scanning techniques were developed to determine whether exposed devices were vulnerable and reported through existing mechanisms. Through CSSF funding, Shadowserver helped multiple governments and users in the Indo-Pacific and across the world, including the UK, to help identify and reduce vulnerabilities to a new cyber threat.

On Wednesday, December 4, 2024, law enforcement authorities dismantled key structures of an extensive network for committing cybercrime during a coordinated operation. In close collaboration with Europol and police forces across Europe, the Lower Saxony prosecution authorities shut down over 50 servers, secured extensive digital evidence, and placed two suspects in pretrial detention.

The operation involved police authorities from the Netherlands, Finland, Austria, Czech Republic, Poland, and Norway, as well as Europol task forces, alongside the Verden Public Prosecutor’s Office and Hanover Police Directorate. The investigative authorities were also supported by the nonprofit organization The Shadow Server Foundation.

In this Help Net Security interview, Piotr Kijewski, CEO of The Shadowserver Foundation, discusses the organization’s mission to enhance internet security by exposing vulnerabilities, malicious activity, and emerging threats. Kijewski explains the foundation’s automated efforts to track and disrupt cybercrime.

By providing actionable intelligence we help equip CSIRTs and network defenders worldwide with the information needed to secure their networks and/or constituencies. We also provide free technical support to law enforcement cybercrime disruption operations. We provide cybersecurity capacity building services around the world (typically funded through various grants, such as from the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office – FCDO) in areas of threat detection, cyber threat intelligence and incident response.

Shadowserver’s free daily network reports help provide organizations with a baseline of timely, actionable and often unique cyber threat intelligence – even for those organizations without big budgets.

As many as 2,000 Palo Alto Networks devices are estimated to have been compromised as part of a campaign abusing the newly disclosed security flaws that have come under active exploitation in the wild.

According to statistics shared by the Shadowserver Foundation, a majority of the infections have been reported in the U.S. (554) and India (461), followed by Thailand (80), Mexico (48), Indonesia (43), Turkey (41), the U.K. (39), Peru (36), and South Africa (35).

A malware botnet is exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in end-of-life GeoVision devices to compromise and recruit them for likely DDoS or cryptomining attacks. The flaw is tracked as CVE-2024-11120 and was discovered by Piotr Kijewski of The Shadowserver Foundation. It is a critical severity (CVSS v3.1 score: 9.8) problem.

“Unauthenticated remote attackers can exploit this vulnerability to inject and execute arbitrary system commands on the device,” warns Taiwan’s CERT.

Kijewski told BleepingComputer that the botnet appears to be a Mirai variant, which is usually used as part of DDoS platforms or to perform cryptomining.

A critical command injection vulnerability (CVE-2024-10914) impacting numerous end-of-life D-Link network-attached storage (NAS) devices is currently under active exploitation. The Shadowserver Foundation has reported observing active exploitation attempts targeting these devices since November 12th, with nearly 1,100 devices confirmed as exposed.