News & Insights

A review of Shadowserver’s 20th year as the world’s largest provider of free, timely, actionable, daily cyber threat intelligence. Covering the latest improvements in our public benefit services, responses to emerging cyber threats, and detection and reporting of the latest vulnerabilities to National CSIRTs and system defenders globally. We provide highlights of our cybersecurity capacity building efforts, plus successful outcomes from our free support to Law Enforcement in major cybercrime disruption operations.

In the last few months, Shadowserver has been systematically rolling out IPv6 scanning of services. We chose to conduct our scanning based on hitlists of IPv6 addresses observed being used in the wild, maintaining up to 1 billion unique IPv6 addresses on the hitlist at any one time. We currently scan 9 different services (11 ports) uncovering over 120 million active services by unique IPv6 daily.

We have recently began scanning for  accessible MySQL server instances on port 3306/TCP.  These are instances that respond to our MySQL connection request with a Server Greeting. Surprisingly to us, we found around 2.3M IPv4 addresses responding with such a greeting to our queries. Even more surprisingly, we found over 1.3M IPv6 devices responding as well (though mostly associated with a single AS). IPv4 and IPv6 scans together uncover 3.6M accessible MySQL servers worldwide.

We have recently started scanning for accessible Kubernetes API instances that respond with a 200 OK HTTP response to our probes. Kubernetes is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. We find over 380 000 Kubernetes API daily that allow for some form of access, out of over 450 000 that we are able to identify. Data on these is shared daily in our Accessible Kubernetes API Server Report.

We recently began scanning for middlebox devices that are vulnerable to Middlebox TCP reflection, which can be abused for DDoS amplification attacks.  Our results are now shared daily, filtered for your network or constituency in the new Vulnerable DDoS Middlebox report. We uncover over 18,800,000 IPv4 addresses responding to our Middlebox probes. In some cases the amplification rates can exceed 10,000!

We have started daily IPv4 /0 scanning for exposed MS-RDPEUDP instances on port 3389/UDP. Aside from the usual risks associated with exposing RDP services to the Internet, this UDP extension of the popular RDP services has been found to be susceptible to amplification DDoS abuse with an amplification factor of over 84. Over 12 000 instances of MS-RDPEUDP have been found to be accessible on the IPv4 Internet.

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.

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.