News & Insights

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.

We have enabled a new scan for exposed CoAP (Constrained Application Protocol) devices on port 5683/UDP. The scan has uncovered around 460 000 exposed CoAP services that can be potentially abused for CoAP amplification DDoS attacks. These services may also leak information or expose other vulnerabilities. This is the third IoT scan implemented as part of the EU CEF VARIoT project.

We have enabled a new scan dedicated to finding open IPP (Internet Printing Protocol) devices exposed on port 631/TCP. The roughly 80,000 devices uncovered as a result of the scan have connected to the Internet without adequate access controls or authorization mechanisms in place. This could allow for a potential range of different types of attacks, from information disclosure and service disruption/tampering, to, in some cases, remote command execution. Results of the scan are collected in the new Open IPP report. This is the second scan enabled under the EU CEF VARIoT project.

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.

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.

As many of you are aware, we scan the Internet on a daily basis for many different protocols.  We have added several new ones over time mostly depending on our own time available to engineer a scan for that protocol.  Occasionally, we add one that is more topical and addresses a recent vulnerability or issue that needs to be focused on sooner rather than later.  ISAKMP falls into that category.

On 15 September 2015, FireEye published information about potentially compromised Cisco routers under the name SYNful Knock. As soon as Shadowserver became aware of these potential compromises, Shadowserver and Cisco worked together and cooperated to scan the internet to detect these affected routers to allow a more accurate notification of the affected end-users.

With all the recent news and attention on world events the concept and concern around privacy has increased over the last several years.  There seems to be a lot of confusion around the concepts of privacy and security.  It has been developing that many people and organization attempting to promote privacy are considering them synonymous.  In reality, they are two separate issues that can work together or may be mutually exclusive.

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.

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.