October 2012 Cyber Attacks Statistics

Last Updated on May 24, 2015

It’s time for the statistics derived from the Cyber Attacks Timeline of October 2012 (Part I and Part II).

Let us begin with the Daily Trend that has seen a revamp of the Cyber Attacks in the second part of the month, with a marked decrease towards the end of the month (maybe in preparation of the massive wave of cyber attacks we are experiencing in conjunction with the 5th of November, the so-called #5Nov or #OpVendetta).

The Motivations Behind Attacks chart confirms the predominance of Cyber Crime with nearly the 59% of occurrences, followed by Hacktivism with the 37.3%. Apparently October has confirmed the trend of September with similar percentages.

The Distribution Of Attack Techniques Chart confirms the predominance of SQL Injection over Distributed Denial Of Service but the two have only 5 points of difference, in clear contrast with the findings of the previous month when the percentages were respectively: 42.1% and 18.2%. It is interesting to notice that, on average, approximately one attack on five has no useful details to identify the used techniques, probably this is a side effect of the sample that is very heterogeneous.

Nothing new, the distribution Of Targets Chart confirms the preference of Cyber Crooks against Government targets which rank at number one with the 31.4% of occurrences, nearly 8 points more than September. Industry targets rank at number two with nearly 17% of occurrences, hence substantially stable (the previous month the value was 14.6%). Great jump of the targets belonging to education that rank at number three with the 12.7% of occurrences, while finance confirms the fourth place (in cohabitation with online services) with the 7.8% of occurrences.

Please, as usual, take the sample very carefully since it refers only to discovered attacks (the so-called tip of the iceberg), and hence does not pretend to be exhaustive but only aims to provide an high level overview of the “cyber landscape”.

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), at the Cyber Attack 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).