Abuse.ch seeks funding to survive

Abuse.ch founder appeals for organizational funding by end of 2020 to convert the volunteer threat-intel project into a sustainable research effort.

This article is a personal appeal from the operator of abuse.ch, a long-running community threat-intelligence project (ZeuS Tracker, URLhaus, MalwareBazaar), describing the operational and financial strain of running the infrastructure as a one-person, spare-time effort. The author outlines the project's history since 2008, its reliance on community-contributed data, and the increasing cost and complexity of maintaining large-scale threat-data collection and publishing pipelines.

The piece is not a technical threat report but a call for organizational support: the author is seeking funding commitments from organizations that consume abuse.ch data, with the goal of converting the project into a formally funded research initiative by the end of 2020. No specific malware campaign, vulnerability, or active threat activity is detailed; ZeuS/Zbot is mentioned only historically as the original motivation for the project.

From a threat-intelligence perspective, this is an informational/community-sustainability piece rather than an incident report. It carries relevance for the broader security community that depends on abuse.ch's free datasets, but has no direct security impact or urgency for defenders.

Source reporting: https://abuse.ch/blog/moving-forward