V. Anil Kumar

Aakash Singh, Kuldeep Singh Yadav, V. Anil Kumar et al.

The disclosure of the Log4Shell vulnerability in December 2021 led to an unprecedented wave of global scanning and exploitation activity. A recent study provided important initial insights, but was largely limited in duration and geography, focusing primarily on European and U.S. network telescope deployments and covering the immediate aftermath of disclosure. As a result, the longer-term evolution of exploitation behavior and its regional characteristics has remained insufficiently understood. In this paper, we present a longitudinal measurement study of Log4Shell-related traffic observed between December 2021 and October 2025 by a reactive network telescope deployed in India. This vantage point enables examination of sustained exploitation dynamics beyond the initial outbreak phase, including changes in scanning breadth, infrastructure reuse, payload construction, and destination targeting. Our analysis reveals that Log4Shell exploitation persists for several years after disclosure, with activity gradually concentrating around a smaller set of recurring scanner and callback infrastructures, accompanied by an increase in payload obfuscation and shifts in protocol and port usage. A comparative analysis and observations with the benchmark study validate both correlated temporal trends and systematic differences attributable to vantage point placement and coverage. Subsequently, these results demonstrate that Log4Shell remains active well beyond its initial disclosure period, underscoring the value of long-term, geographically diverse measurement for understanding the full lifecycle of critical software vulnerabilities.

Aakash Singh, Kuldeep Singh Yadav, Md Talib Hasan Ansari et al.

The increasing adoption of server-side component-based web frameworks has introduced new application-layer attack surfaces that remain insufficiently understood at Internet scale. On 3 December 2025, a critical remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2025-55182) in React Server Components, referred to as React2Shell, was publicly disclosed and subsequently observed being exploited in the wild. Despite its critical severity and a CVSS base score of 10.0, there is limited empirical understanding of how this vulnerability is exploited across the Internet. This paper presents the first Internet-scale measurement study of React2Shell exploitation activity using traffic collected from an Active Network Telescope. We developed a deterministic detection methodology that identifies exploitation attempts targeting endpoints implementing React Server components. It helped analyze exploitation traffic to characterize its temporal evolution, geographic and autonomous system-level distribution, and behavioral properties of the observed scanning activity. In addition, exploit payloads are examined to understand the attacker infrastructure and delivery mechanisms. The analysis reported rapid post-disclosure exploitation activity exhibiting patterns consistent with automated scanning campaigns, geographically distributed scanners, and concentrated backend infrastructure. To the best of our knowledge, this work provides the first quantitative characterization of React2Shell-triggered scanning activity, including the number of distinct scanners, their geographic and autonomous system distribution, and the scale of backend infrastructure involved in exploitation attempts.