Last Updated on May 24, 2015

It’s time for the stats related to the Cyber Attacks Timeline of August. I do not remember a month so characterized by Hacktivism like this! The reason is mainly due to the actions motivated by the so-called OpFreeAssange, the waves of cyber attacks in favor of Julian Assange and, most of all in the first part of the month, to the OpDemonoid, the attacks targeting Ukrainan sites after the shutdown of the famous torrent tracker.

Let us begin with the Motivations Behind Attacks Chart. More than one half of the attacks of my sample (58%) were motivated by hacktivism, in line with the data of July (when the value was 55%). Cyber Crime motivated attacks rank at number two, with the 36% of occurrences, even in this case a value substantially in line with the previous month when it was at 31%. Cyber Espionage and Cyber Crime are well behind with the 3% respectively.

Moving forward to the chart regarding the Distribution Of Attack Techniques, there is a predominance of SQLi, which confirms to be the preferred weapon for Hacktivists or Cyber Criminals. DDoS (real or claimed) counts for nearly one third of the occurrence (32,4% real plus a further 2,9% claimed). Of Course, keep always in mind that data refer only to my sample and do not take into account all the defacements (make a jump to Zone-H and you will realize that is simply impossible) unless they are particularly meaningful.

Last but not least, the Distribution Of Targets chart clearly reflects the predominance of hacktivism in this month. In fact target belonging to governments rank at number one with the 19% of occurrences. Industries and organizations are immediately behind with respectively the 16.2% and the 15.2%. Inside industry, technology has been the most targeted sector, this is mainly due to the (controversial) Philips hack, but also to other remarkable cyber attacks such as AMD and AVX Corporation.

Of course, as usual, data must be taken very carefully since they do refer only to discovered attacks (the so-called tip of the iceberg), and hence do not pretend to be exhaustive but only aim to provide an high level overview of the “cyber landscape” of the considered period. Moreover, remember that the most dangerous threats are the invisible ones.

If you want to have an idea of how fragile our data are inside the cyberspace, have a look at the timelines of the main Cyber Attacks in 2011 and 2012 (regularly updated). Also have a look at the 2012 Cyber Attacks Statistics and follow @paulsparrows on Twitter for the latest updates.

Also, feel free to submit remarkable incidents that in your opinion deserve to be included in the timelines (and charts).

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• 1 – 15 August Cyber Attacks Statistics (hackmageddon.com)
• Several Small Enhancements to 2012 Cyber Attacks Statistics (hackmageddon.com)