Last Updated on June 5, 2015

It is time to summarize the data collected into the January 2015 Cyber Attacks timelines (Part I and Part II) into valuable statistics.

Many readers keep on asking where the information used to create the stats comes from. The answer is always the same: the statistics are created elaborating the timelines that I collect (approximately) on a bi-weekly basis and I publish on this blog (see also the Cyber Attacks Master Index).

I cannot be exhaustive, but at least my intention is just to provide an overview of the Threat Landscape, reporting the attacks that gained space in the media.

Moving to the data, as usual, the United States lead the Country Distribution chart for each category. The surprises of this month are France and UK, which win the “silver medal” having suffered an unusual number of cyber attacks by Pro-Islamist hacktivists, but also a number of “more traditional” attacks related to cyber crime, a number well above the average.

The Daily Trend of Attacks Chart shows an initial peak, a new concentration of activity in the middle of the month, followed by a decreasing trend with a partial revamp towards the end.

Cyber Crime is always on top of the Motivations Behind Attacks Chart, even if with a small decrease in comparison with December (67.4% vs 72.6%). All in favor of hacktivism, which bumped up to 29.2% from 17.8%. On the opposite site, Cyber Espionage is well below the noticeable 8.8% of December.

Sometimes it comes back! I am obviously talking about SQLi, which, after several months in the shadow, ranks on top of the Attack Technique Distribution Chart (and even with quite an important value (33.7%). Defacements and Account Hijackings complete  the podium for the known attacks.

For the fifth month in a row, industry ranks unchallenged on top of the Distribution of Targets chart (but the 28.1% recorded this month is notably smaller than the 47.9% reported in December). Governmental targets rank at number two, and educational institutions are at the third place exactly just like one month ago.Once again, E-commerce leads the drill-down chart for the industrial targets, whereas Non-Profit are on top of the corresponding chart for organizations.

As usual, the sample must be taken very carefully since it refers only to discovered attacks included in my timelines, aiming 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, 2012, 2013 and now 2014 (regularly updated). You may also want to have a look at the Cyber Attack Statistics.

Of course follow @paulsparrows on Twitter for the latest updates, and feel free to submit remarkable incidents that in your opinion deserve to be included in the timelines (and charts).