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).

(more…)