17.03.2020
Shadowserver urgent request for financial support to sustain US operations
The Shadowserver Foundation, the volunteer watchdog group engaged in combatting malware, botnet activity and electronic fraud has lost founding from Cisco and calls for support from the cybersecurity community.
Key sponsor Cisco Systems had been providing Shadowserver’s US based data center facilities and donating technical operations support staff for many years. With the drawback of Cisco as primary financial supporter, Shadowserver lost 7 in US technical staff at short notice, and now has to move its entire US data center somewhere else before May 26th 2020 to keep operating.
Without immediate assistance from the community, Shadowserver will no longer be able to continue to operate most of its core public benefit services, including free daily network reports for all constituents.
This includes its ability to notify National CERTs/CSIRTs and network owners of infected victims inside their networks, and prevent timely remediation of abusable, misconfigured or compromised devices globally. Shadowserver is the only free daily service to the entire Internet on this scale.
Shadowserver highlights that EU project delivery and support services to active international Law Enforcement operations will not be immediately impacted, since these are currently funded independently, through its EU legal entity. But they will likely also be impacted in the longer term by the loss of the US data center.