Last Updated on December 3, 2020
It’s time to publish the statistics for October derived from the two cyber attacks timelines (part I and part II). For this month, I have taken into consideration 223 events, despite you need to consider that 17 events alone are related to 17 companies, whose data (an aggregated of 34 million records) was put on sale on October 28.
The peak on October 28, when these 34 million accounts were discovered is clearly visible in the Daily Trend chart.
The above chart can also be broken down to see the distribution of the motivations on a daily basis.
The Motivations Behind Attacks chart is quite boring, as always Cyber Crime ranks on top with a percentage floating around 80% (precisely 82.5% vs 85.6% in September). Cyber Espionage jumps to 12.6% from 11.4%. Cyber Warfare accounts for 2.2% and Hacktivism scores a modest 0.4% (the were both at 1.5% in September).
Malware is still on top of the Attack Techniques, but its percentage is back to the levels of August (38.1% from 46.8%). Account hijackings are always at number two among the known attack techniques down to 12.1% from 13.4%. Similarly to September and August, targeted attacks rank at number three with 8.1% from 10.9% from 11.7%.
Similarly to September and August, attacks against multiple targets lead the Distribution of Targets chart with 20.2% (from 19.4% of September), ahead of governments (15.7% from 12.4% in September) and individuals (11.2%). Healthcare targets slide at number four from number two in September with 7.6% (was 15.9%).
As always bear in mind that the sample refers exclusively to the attacks included in my timelines, available from public sources such as blogs and news sites. Obviously the sample cannot be complete, but only aims to provide an high level overview of the threat landscape.
Finally, please support my work, sharing the content, and of course 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).
