March 2015 Cyber Attacks Statistics

Last Updated on May 30, 2015

It’s time to aggregate the two Cyber Attack Timelines for March 2015 (Part I and Part II) into statistics.

As always, let’s start from the Country Distribution chart, which, similarly to March, sees the United States on top, followed by the United Kingdom and Australia.

After a slow start, the Daily Trend of Attacks chart shows an heterogeneously growing trend, at least up to March 29th, where the monthly peak is achieved, after which, a sudden drop appears and continues until the end of the month.

We have been used to see Cyber Crime on top of the Motivations Behind Attacks chart, and March inevitably confirms this trend, with a percentage that slightly drops to 69% from 73.8% of February. Hacktivism is in line with the previous month, (20.7% vs 19%), as also Cyber Espionage is (8% vs 7.1% of February). I have also recorded a couple of events related to Cyber Warfare.

The technique behind the 19.5% of the attacks remains uncertain, however, once again SQLi ranks on top of those known, even if the percentage drops to 16.1% from 25.3% on March. Defacements and Accounts Hijackings complete the podium of the known attacks, swapping their positions in comparison to March. The others follow…

For the seventh month in a row, industry ranks on top of the Distribution of Targets chart with 27.6%, a value slightly increasing, but comparable with 26.2% of the previous month. Organizations show up in second place with 17.2%, ahead of Governments, at the third place, with 12.6%.

Again, the Industry Drill Down chart is extremely fragmented, the only constant is the terrible moment for the E-Commerce sites, which rank on top, well above the other categories. On the other hand, the Law Enforcement institutions are the preferred targets for the Organizations, as reported in the corresponding Drill Down chart.

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, 2014 and now 2015 (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).