It’s time to publish the first timeline of October, covering the main cyber attacks occurred between 1 and 15 October 2016.
So the good news is that the decreasing trend is confirmed since these first two weeks have shown the lowest number of cyber attacks collected so far in this 2016 (“only” 23). But unfortunately decreasing trend does not necessarily mean decreasing number of records: Modern Business Systems suffered a breach involving 58 million customer records, whereas in case of Evony Gaming the compromised records have been “only” 33 million.
And if you were waiting for more confirmations on the role of cyber security in the US presidential elections, you won’t be disappointed… The Clinton Foundation has suffered yet another leak by Guccifer 2.0 and a possible targeted campaign against its donors, in the same time Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s Twitter account has been hacked, posting an improbable pro-Trump tweet. In any case also Republican donors have fallen victim of an online credit card skimming campaign (oh well, they were in good company as it is believed that 5900 organizations worldwide have been targeted by the same attackers).
Last but not least, the chronicles report another attack against SWIFT (whose outcome is uncertain), and a “disruptive” attack against an unnamed German nuclear plant occurred two or three years ago. In all cases there are plenty of things to be concerned about.
As usual, 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, 2014,2015 and, in a bit, 2016 (regularly updated). You may also want to have a look at the Cyber Attack Statistics that are regularly published, and follow @paulsparrows on Twitter for the latest updates.
Additionally, feel free to submit remarkable incidents that in your opinion deserve to be included in the timelines (and charts), and if useful, you can access the timeline in Google Sheet format:
