1-15 January 2015 Cyber Attacks Timeline

Last Updated on January 23, 2016

It’s now time for the first chart of this 2015, a year that has begun in the worst way even from an Information Security perspective, given the high number of attacks recorded in the first half of January.

Unfortunately the sad events happened in Paris have inevitably conditioned this period: France has been the target of an unprecedented number of cyber attacks (approximately 19,000) allegedly carried on by Islamist hackers and strictly related with the events of the Charlie Hebdo. Nearly in contemporary, the Anonymous have declared war against the IS-IS and have taken down several Jiahdist sites. In the meantime the pro IS-IS hackers of the Cyber Caliphate have found the time to hijack the Twitter account of the CENTCOM: the US military command that oversees operations in the Middle East.

France has also been one of the main targets for Cyber Criminals, since the most remarkable breach of this two weeks has hit the shopping site of TF1, the most important local TV stations (nearly 2 million records possibly compromised). There is also indication of a possible attack to the Spanish affiliate of Orange, but it has not been confirmed.

Other noticeable events of this period concern a possible breach to the EA/Origin service, another (failed) attempt to blackmail a bank, perpetrated by the infamous Rex Mundi collective, and, on a different scale a massive malvertising campaign targeting sites with a combined total monthly traffic of around 1.5 billion visitors.

However, at least for once, I have not recorded events related to Cyber Espionage.

If you want to have an idea of how fragile our electronic identity is inside the cyberspace, have a look at the timelines of the main Cyber Attacks in 2011, 2012, 2013 and now 2014 (regularly updated). You may also want to have a look 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).

1-15 Jan 2015 Cyber Attacks Timeline (more…)

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16-31 December Cyber Attacks Timeline

Last Updated on May 23, 2015

Despite still related to December 2014, here is the first timeline for 2015 covering the main events occurred between the 16th and 31st December 2014 (first part here).

No doubt, this Christmas will be remembered for the unwelcome surprise of the DDoS attack performed by the infamous Lizard Squad against the online services of Sony and Microsoft. An attack that has shattered the dreams of many players, just few minutes after unwrapping their brand new consoles under the Christmas Tree. However, the light that burns twice as bright burns half as long, and inevitably two members of the collective have allegedly been arrested (not before having attempted a Sybil Attack against Tor).

But the latter was not the only attack targeting the Tor anonymity service in this period, which also suffered an unexplained outage affecting a cluster of Tor Directory Authority Servers in a Rotterdam data center.

Other noticeable events concern the outage of the Internet connection in North Korea (despite it is not completely clear if caused by a cyber attack or a fault), a malware detected in a South Korea power plant, the attacks targeting the ICANN and the ISC Consortium, two among the most important organizations for the Internet, and (yet another) breach targeting NVIDIA.

Moving to a different topic, all in all the hacktivists decided to enjoy the Christmas vacations with the exception of the Syrian Electronic Army who were back, and defaced an online magazine, the International Business Time, for an article against the Syrian regime.

Last but not least, with regard to  Cyber Espionage, there have been two operations discovered in this period: an alleged attack perpetrated by Chinese hackers against an Afghan CDN targeting directly many local governmental sites, and indirectly many foreign institutions, and also the discovery of the Anunak group, a well-organized crew able to steal USD $25 Million with a long lasting cyber espionage operation against targets in Europe and the US.

If you want to have an idea of how fragile our electronic identity is inside the cyberspace, have a look at the timelines of the main Cyber Attacks in 2011, 2012, 2013 and now 2014 (regularly updated). You may also want to have a look 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).

16-31 December 2014 Cyber Attacks Timeline (more…)

Continue Reading16-31 December Cyber Attacks Timeline