News & Insights

The UK FCDO have been supporting The Shadowserver Foundation's efforts to provide more free, actionable, daily Cyber Threat Intelligence to National CSIRTs in Africa and the Indo-Pacific. After making some great progress over the past year, we are seeking support from the community to engage some additional countries in the region. Can you help connect us, and the Internet more secure for everyone?

Shadowserver received funding from the UK FCDO in Q1 2021 for a short surge to improve the support we offered to Africa and the Indo-Pacific region. We achieved some good results, so we are providing some public highlights in this blog post. We are also pleased to announce that we have received some additional FCDO funding to continue these efforts through Q4 2021 and Q1 2022, and hope to further expand our free public benefit service coverage to more National CSIRT and additional network owner (ASNs) in these target regions.

Can you help Shadowserver sign up more countries/networks in Africa and the Info-Pacific to receive our free daily network reports and help secure the Internet? We are running a UK FCDO funded surge in Feb/March 2021, aimed at increasing outreach and expanding our honeypot sensor network in those regions. We are seeking introductions, contacts and hosting so please get in touch if you can help us achieve these goals.

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.

Celebrating a particularly significant long term milestone - our 107th National CERT/CSIRT recently signed up for Shadowserver's free daily networking reporting service, which takes us to 136 countries and over 90% of the IPv4 Internet by IP space/ASN. This has finally changed our internal CERT reporting coverage map of Europe entirely green.

The Dridex botnet was sinkholed in October 2015 and the infected victims remediated via Shadowserver's free daily network reports. In December 2019, the US DoJ, FBI and UK NCA unsealed criminal charges against other actors alleged to be behind the Dridex botnet’s activities, via an organization self described as “Evil Corp”. This included a record US $5M FBI Most Wanted cyber criminal reward being offered.

Shadowserver recently achieved the significant milestone of having our 100th National CERT/CSIRT sign up for our free daily network reports, so we though that this would be a good moment to provide an update on our global network remediation coverage.

Our goal as always has been to get data about infected, compromised or abuse-able hosts to the network owners as efficiently as possible.  The most consistent and effective vehicle for that is using National CERT's.  In many ways they are the gateway to the rest of the networks of a country.