1-15 December 2012 Cyber Attacks Timeline

Christmas is coming quickly, we have just passed the first half of December, and hence it’s time for the first update of the Cyber Attacks Timeline for December.

The Team GhostShell has decided to close the year with a clamorous Cyber Attack, and hence,as part of the project ProjectWhiteFox, has leaked 1.6 million of accounts from several organizations all over the world. This is the most important event for this first part of the month that apparently has shown a decreasing trend. Hacktivists are still focusing their attention (and their keyboards) to Israel, and Cyber Criminals are maybe preparing for the Christmas attacks.

However, the main events of the first half of December, are related to hacktivism, besides the above mentioned cyber attack, it worth to mention the new wave of massive DDoS attacks against US Banks (up to 60 Gbps of peak according to Arbor Networks), but also the leak of a ITU document on the future of Deep Packet Inspection and the attacks in Egypt, Mexico and India.

Last but not least: this two weeks also offered a giant attack to the famous Social Platform Tumblr and also the warning of the Switzerland’s national security agency (NDB) that a huge amount of secrets may have been leaked by a disgruntled IT Administrator.

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). To do so, you can use this form.

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1-15 August 2013 Cyber Attacks Timeline

The first half of August has gone, so it is time for the Cyber Attacks Timeline summarizing the main events occurred in this period.

Looks like the massive breaches have decided to have a break during August. Although the first fifteen days have shown a remarkable number of attacks, no huge leaks have been recorded.

The only exception is the latest attack to the United States Department of Energy (14,000 individuals potentially affected) and the one targeting the Ferris State University with nearly 60,000 records potentially affected.

Other remarkable events include the attacks against Opscode and Crytek. In this latter case four websites have been temporarily taken down.

Last but not least, the Syrian Electronic Army is back in action, and its wave of Social Engineering attack has directly and indirectly hit many primary targets such as Channel 4 and the New York Post (via the hack to the SocialFlow platform).

Important: this period has also seen an high cyber activity between India and Pakistan. The attacks deserve a dedicated timeline to be published very soon. So they will not appear in this timeline.

As usual, 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 and now 2013 (regularly updated). You may also want to have a look at the Cyber Attack Statistics, 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).

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1-15 October 2013 Cyber Attacks Timeline

It’s time to review the list of the main cyber attacks happened during the first half of October.

Of course there are few doubts: the breach involving Adobe (compromising the details of 3 million customers and the source code of two products) is for sure the most remarkable event of the month (and probably of the year), and its consequences will likely affect the Infosec landscape for long. In addition it overshadowed all the other events occurred so it is quite hard to summarize the threat landscape of the first 15 days of October.

In a nutshell, these two weeks have brought an unprecedented number of DNS Hijackings and several considerable breaches (however not comparable in size and impact with the one affecting Adobe). At first glance, looks like the number of attacks motivated by Cyber Crime is constantly increasing and leaving behind Hacktivism.

Last but not least, curiously, for this couple of weeks, I did not find any remarkable operations motivated by Cyber Espionage.

As usual, 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 and now 2013 (regularly updated). You may also want to have a look at the Cyber Attack Statistics, 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).

1-15 October 2013 Cyber Attacks Timeline

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1-15 February 2014 Cyber Attacks Timeline

And here we are with the timelines of the main Cyber Attacks happened during the first half of February.

It is very hard to summarize these days from an Infosec perspective, considering the noticeable number of massive breaches: Kickstarter (potentially 5.6 million of records affected), Forbes (1 million records leaked), Orange (800,000 users impacted) and St. Joseph Health System (400,000 users affected) are the main examples, but they must not overshadow other ‘minor’ events such as the the attack against Bell.ca (‘only’ 40,000 users affected).

15 days in which Cybercrime and Hacktivism dangerously overlapped, ‘thanks’ mainly to the infamous Syrian Electronic Army, author of the hack against Forbes but also of several account hijacking attacks that have become their unique fingerprint, but also ‘thanks’ to the RedHack collective who, once again, targeted (directly or indirectly) the Turkish Government with three noticeable attacks.

Last but not least, the Cyber Espionage: the first half of February has brought us the discovery of “The Mask” (AKA Careto), a massive Operation targeting 31 countries around the world, but also the revelation of an alleged attack carried on by Huawei against the Indian provider BSNL and a further purported Chinese attack against some bio-medic industries in the U.S.

Finally, the Cyber War between India and Pakistan deserves a special mention, despite only defacements have been reported, the end of the fight is far from being reached.

As usual, 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 and now 2013 (regularly updated). You may also want to have a look at the Cyber Attack Statistics, 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).

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1-15 May 2014 Cyber Attacks Timeline

Here we have with the list of the most significant Cyber Attacks happened in the first half of April (according to my very own point of view).

There are few doubts about the fact that Orange is the winner of the unwelcome prize for the most noticeable breach after the theft of the information of 1.3 million users.

Other interesting events related to Cyber Crime include the breach of Bitly, the famous URL shortening service and a new heist against a virtual currency wallet (this time the victim is Doge Vault, one of the most popular online repositories for the cryptocurrency Dogecoin).

Moving to Cyber Espionage, this month reports two interesting events, the theft of Data related to the Ukraine crisis from the Belgian Foreign Ministry, and the discovery of Operation Saffron Rose, a long-term campaign against western defense contractor carried on by a team of Iranian hackers dubbed Ajax Security Team.

Last but not least, among the hacktivists, chronicles report of  a new action of the infamous Syrian Electronic Army (against four accounts of The Wall Street journal) and the usual skirmishes between Pakistani and Indian hackers (but is questionable in my opinion to determine if those events can be classified as part of a harmless cyber war or are rather mutual actions between hactivists acting on opposite sides).

As usual, 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 and now 2013 (regularly updated). You may also want to have a look at the Cyber Attack Statistics, 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).

1-15 May 2014 Cyber Attacks Timelines (more…)

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