1-15 November 2012 Cyber Attacks Statistics

Last Updated on May 24, 2015

This November 2012 seems really to be endless from an Information Security Perspective. We have assisted so far to a remarkable number of Cyber Attacks.

As usual is it time to provide the partial snapshot of November taken from the corresponding Cyber Attack Timeline and covering the first half of the month. Please notice that the stats below do not include the following events:

The massive leak of Team Ghostshell for ProjectBlackStar (2.5 million accounts leaked from different targets in Russia);
The Cyber Attacks executed by the Anonymous and the other affiliated collectives for OpIsrael.

The above attacks have been executed on a much wider scale so counting the singe events would be senseless. Anyway other Sites have done an excellent Job for the aggregated stats of those attacks, see for instance OZDC.net for Project Black Star, and OpIsrael.

With this in mind let us proceed to examine the Daily Trend Of Attacks. Please notice the peak of November 5 (no need to comment it!):

Of course the Motivations Chart reflects this trend with the 60% of the attacks considered in my sample led by hackitivism. Apparently no different motivations than Hacktivism and Cyber Crime have been observed in this period.

I use not to take into considerations defacements, but this time their impact on the past two weeks has been very high. This is clearly shown in the Techniques Chart, where they rank at the first place, together with SQL Injection, with the 33% of occurrences:

As usual, the Target chart shows that Governmental targets rank at number one, immediately followed by targets belonging to Industry. Please notice the peak of Torrent Sites. This is due to the waves of DDoS Attacks carried on by Zeiko Anonymous, only because he has not been able to obtain an invite to a close torrent forum. Nothing to add: the reasons for hacking may range from Cyberwar to “simple” whims.

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).