Last Updated on January 27, 2021

I am catching up with the cyber attacks timelines for this troubled 2020, which has nearly come to an end. I am happy to publish the first timeline of December, covering the most important events occurred in the first two weeks of this month. Before going into the details let me say that you will hopefully note a change. Starting from this timeline, I have decided to report three different dates for each event in order to provide a consistent chronological order even for the events occurred in the past and disclosed (or discovered) a posteriori: the date when the event was published, when it happened, and, if available, when it was discovered (and this is different than the date when it was published).

Despite double extortion ransomware attacks continue to dominate the threat landscape, undoubtedly this timeline is characterized by the massive supply chain attack allegedly carried out by Russian state-sponsored actors and potentially targeting more than 18,000 organizations worldwide including high-profile targets in the government and business space. This operation will leave an enduring mark and some months will be probably necessary to evaluate its real extent.

The above event overshadows everything else, so even the fact that nearly one out of three events are related to ransomware (but this is not a surprise any longer), with the list of high-profile victims that continue to grow at each timeline. Ransomware that has also become destructive and, in case of the Pay2Key operation, used as a cyber weapon in the war between Israel and Iran. In general I would say that the number of operations driven by cyber warfare is unusually high in this timeline.

Last but not least, even the cyber espionage front is quite crowded, but this is another sign of the difficult times we are living…

Details and links for each event are in the timeline! Thanks for sharing it and supporting my work in spreading the risk awareness across the community. Also, don’t forget to follow @paulsparrows on Twitter, or even connect on Linkedin, for the latest updates.

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