Last Updated on May 24, 2015

Let us gave a look to the landscape of Cyber Attacks, during the first half of December 2012. Apparently cybercrooks are taking a break for Christmas, since, according to my selection Criteria, the number of attacks has shown a small decrease in comparison with the previous months.

The Daily Trend shows an inconstant trend with two peaks around respectively the 3rd December and the 11th and 12th (the latter due to the peak of Cyber Attacks against the US Banks).

The Motivations Behind Attacks chart shows, for the first time since August, the overtake of Hacktivism against Cyber Crime. Let us see if this trend will be confirmed until the end of the year.

The Distribution Of Attacks chart confirms that SQL Injection confirms to be the weapon preferred by Cyber Attackers with nearly one third of the occurrences (the value reaches nearly the 40% if one sums also the cases in which the attack seems to have been carried on with this technique but no enough evidences have been collected). In my opinion it is also important to notice the presence in the chart of several attacks perpetrated exploiting application vulnerabilities, but also the growing presence of targeted attacks (as usual you can find the details on the corresponding Cyber Attack Timeline.

Instead, at least for the first half of the month, the Distribution of Targets chart seems quite fragmented. Governmental targets lead the chart, but Financial, Industrial and Organizational targets are very close. Maybe the fragmentation depends from the partial sample. The second half of December will tell us if cybercrooks will concentrate their attacks against a specific sector.

As usual, no need to remind that the sample must be taken very carefully since it refers only to discovered attacks (the so-called tip of the iceberg), and hence it 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 and the related statistics (regularly updated), 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). To do so, you can use this form.