Last Updated on December 30, 2018

It’s time to publish the statistics derived from the cyber attack timelines of September (Part I and Part II), a month that shows a new uptick in term of number of events given that I collected 106 events against the 80 of August.


And as always, let’s start with the Daily Trend of Attacks chart, where we recognize quite a high constant level of activity that curiously follows precisely the weekly cycle (in that there is few/no activity during the weekends).

Cyber Crime leads the Motivations Behind Attacks and its percentage is back above the physiological threshold of 80%. The value is ten point higher than the one recorded in August (87.7% vs 77.5%). Cyber Espionage drops to 9.4% from 18.8% in August), while Hacktivism closes the chart with 2.8% from 1.3% in August. This month I haven’t recorded any event classified as Cyber Warfare


Malware is stable on top of the Attack Vectors chart soaring to 43.4% from 35% in August. Targeted attacks rank at number of two of the known attack vectors with 17% (it was 12.5% in August). Vulnerabilities jump to 10.4% and were in August the third known vector.

Even in August, single Individuals rank on top of the Distribution of Targets chart with 19.8% (slight down from 22.5% of August), sharing the first place with the multiple industries category (it was 13.8% in August). Public Administrations slide to number three with 10.4%, down from 13.8% of August.

As always, bear in mind that the sample refers exclusively to the attacks included in my timelines, aiming to provide an high level overview of the “cyber landscape”.

In any case, 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, 2015, 2016, and 2017 (regularly updated). You may also want to have a look at the Cyber Attack Statistics, and 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).


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