After the two timeline of August (Part I and Part II), it's time to publish the corresponding statistics.
August has been a month with two faces, with a first half quite lazy, and a tail of events in the second half. In any case, all in all I have collected 80 events, which seem quite few compared to the 130 of July.
I am trying to catch up with the delayed timelines, so I am happy to publish the first timeline of August, covering the main cyber attacks occurred in the first half of this month.
Well, it looks like the cyber criminals decided to take same days off, since the number of events collected in this fortnight is sensibly smaller than the second half of July (31 vs. 81).
Here we go with the second timeline of August covering the main cyber attacks occurred between August 16th and August 31st. A timeline apparently indicating that the malicious actors decided to end their summer break quite soon, as the number of recorded events is considerable higher that the first timeline.
The first half of August has seen a revamping of Hacktivism, encouraged by the takedown of the famous Torrent Tracker Demonoid (and the consequent OpDemonoid targeting most of all Ukrainian sites), but also encouraged by OpAustralia, the wave of attacks against Australian Web Sites carried on against the Australian Internet Surveillance Law (apparently the latter operation was successful since the controversial law has been put on standby).
But Hacktivism was not the only “trend topic” for this period. The Middle East continues to be the cradle for unexpected cyber weapons threats. In August, two new occurrences of allegedly state sponsored malware: Gauss, a cyber-espionage tool targeting bank transaction, and Shamoon , a destructive malware targeting energy companies.
These are probably the most remarkable Cyber Events of this period, which has also seen a purported giant breach targeting Pearl.fr, a French e-commerce website whose 729,000 accounts, together with over 1 million bank transaction details, have been subtracted by hackers.
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 and 2012 and the related statistics (regularly updated), and 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).