It’s time for the first Cyber Attacks Timeline of December (and the last for 2014).

Of course the attention of the infosec professionals is still concentrated on the devastating cyber attack against Sony happened in November (and the world as we know it, won’t be the same again), nonetheless this first 15 days have shown some remarkable events, not least the news of a breach happened earlier this year to Sony (once again), which went unreported.

At least for once, let us start from hacktivism. The hacktivists seem to be back in action: the Anonymous have taken part, directly or indirectly to several operations motivated by the racial tensions in the US (DDoS attacks against Oakland and Ontario), the raids against the Pirate Bay (leaks of Governmental emails), and the protests against the new High Speed Train line connecting Turin and Lyon (the defacement of  Official website of the Rhône-Alpes region).

A different form of hacktivism (but the border with Cyber Warfare in this case is really blurred) hit Sands Casinos earlier this year. Bloomberg has revealed that an apparent innocuous defacement happened in February was actually the mark of a more devastating attack perpetrated by Iranian hackers, who were able to wipe out all the internal clients and servers.

The Cyber Crime landscape (again maybe it should be more correct to call it Cyber Warfare) is still dominated by the outcome of the Infamous attack to Sony. Other interesting events concern the attack to an unnamed steel industry in Germany, causing physical damages, yet another wave of DDoS attacks against Sony (again!) and XboX Live, and the alleged compromise of Ars Technica requiring the registered users to change their passwords.

Last but not least, the level of state-sponsored operations is always high: at least three of them deserve to be mentioned: Operation Cleaver (allegedly backed by Iran), the resurrection of the Red October Group (Cloud Atlas or Inception) and also the discovery that the ISIS is active also in the Cyber Space, targeting a group of Syrian activists.

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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