16-31 July 2014 Cyber Attacks Timeline

July is gone and hence it’s time, as usual, to summarize the main cyber events happened in the second half of this month (Part I here).

For a strange coincidence this month has shown an unusual number of breaches dating back to several years ago (2010-2012) and reported only now: Catch of The Day, Think W3 Limited, Paddy Power and Lasko are the organizations affected.

Looking quickly at Cyber Crime, these two weeks have brought the breach to The Wall Street Journal (by W0rm the same author of the breach to CNET), the disclosure of a failed attempt to disrupt the Nasdaq in 2010, a breach to the website of the European Central Bank, an extensive attack aimed to compromise the Tor Infrastructure, and, last bunt not least, the DHS advisory related to Backokff, a PoS Malware already compromising 600 organizations throughout the U.S.

Moving to Cyber Espionage, this period will be remembered for the Canadian allegations against China, related to a cyber attack against The National Research Council and the possible compromising three Israeli defense contractors responsible for building the “Iron Dome” missile shield program.

Israel was even under the radar of the Hacktivists, who concentrated there their efforts in support of the #OpSaveGaza operation.

If you want to have an idea of how fragile our electronic identity is inside the cyberspace, have a look at the timelines of the main Cyber Attacks in 2011, 2012, 2013 and now 2014 (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 August 2014 Cyber Attacks Timeline

This month of August will be probably remembered for the massive cache of 1.2 million of password scooped up by the Russian gang Cyber Vor, undoubtedly the most important event that overshadowed all the other activity recorded in these dog days.

Besides this remarkable fact, the Cyber Crime chronicles report, among others, an unprecedented attack technique, aimed to hijack ISP traffic to steal bitcoins, the breach to SuperValu, and the compromising of 60,000 staffers who participated in Tennessee health screening program.

Cyber Espionage is still in the spotlight, with the breach to USIS (United States Investigation Services), the discovery of the Turla campaign, and also of a similar campaign targeted specifically to Ukraine.

Turning the attention to hacktivism: Ukraine, Israel and the US (following the events of St. Louis) have been the hottest frontlines, even if the most important event is perhaps the attack against Gamma International, the company behind of the infamous FinFinsher spyware.

If you want to have an idea of how fragile our electronic identity is inside the cyberspace, have a look at the timelines of the main Cyber Attacks in 2011, 2012, 2013 and now 2014 (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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16-31 October 2014 Cyber Attacks Timeline

It’s time for the second timeline of October (Part I here) covering the main cyber attacks between the 16th and 31st: yet another consistent list confirming the growing trend of the last period.

In particular, in these two weeks the most important events have been spotted inside Cyber Espionage, whose chronicles report, among other, a state-sponsored attack to an unclassified network of the White House, a relevant number of operations (APT 28, Operation Pawn Storm, Operation SMN, Operation DeathClick, a tail of the infamous Sandworm), and even a man-in-the-middle attack against Chinese iCloud users.

Cybercrime is also on a roll: the trail of attacks against retailers seems unstoppable (Staples is the latest victim), but chronicles also report a massive breach in South Korea, involving Pandora TV and a gigantic SQL Injection attack, driven by CVE-2014-3704, against every unpatched website running Drupal, existing on this desperate planet. There is also space for a little bit of irony, as in case of Sourcebooks, the publisher hacked few days before releasing the latest book of Brian Krebs.

Israel and Ukraine keep on being two hot fronts for Hacktivism, whereas India is again the cradle of  cyberwar, many events event in this months (despite limited to skirmishes involving defacements of governmental and military websites).

If you want to have an idea of how fragile our electronic identity is inside the cyberspace, have a look at the timelines of the main Cyber Attacks in 2011, 2012, 2013 and now 2014 (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 March 2014 Cyber Attacks Timeline

And here we are with the timeline of the main Cyber Attacks happened during the first half of March.

Even if globally the number of attacks seems to keep on its decreasing trend, one event in particular will probably be remembered in the chronicles of 2014: definitely the breach to KT Corp. in Korea (12 million customers compromised) deserves a special mention (despite this is not the only one in this first half of the month), even if, apparently, the authors have been immediately busted.

Other interesting trends include the long trail of attacks against Bitcoin Exchange sites (the equivalent of $700.000 has been vaporized by hackers in this two weeks) and an anomalous number of attacks against Universities (North Dakota, Johns Hopkins and Central Oklahoma).

Moving to hacktivism, the landscape has been predictably influenced by the events happening in Ukraine (chronicles report of several attacks in Ukraine, Russia, Poland and also a DDoS against some NATO web sites).

The temperature on the Cyber Espionage front remains high, most of all in India where a local newspaper has unveiled some details related to an operation compromising 50 computers belonging to the Defense Research and Development Organization.

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 Mar 2014 Cyber Attacks Timeline

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