One Year Of Lulz (Part II)

Christmas has just gone and here it is my personal way to wish you a Happy New Year: the second part of my personal chart (first part here) of Main 2011 Cyber Attacks covering the time window from August to November 2011 (December is not yet finished, and featuring remarkable events, so expect an update very soon). This memorable year is nearly over and is time, if you feel nostalgic, to scroll down the second part of the list to review the main Cyber Events that contributed, in my opinion, to change the landscape and the rules of the (information security) game. Many events in this period among whom, IMHO, the most noticeable is the one carried on against Diginotar. Since then our trust in conventional authentication models is not (and will not be) the same anymore.

Of course this is my personal selection. Suggestions are well accepted and if you need more details about the cyber events in 2011, feel free to consult my 2011 Cyber Attacks Master Index. As usual after the page break you find all the references…

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Middle East Cyber War Update

Another week of Cyber War in the Middle East…

Another week in which pro Israeli hackers seem to have disappeared, and hence have apparently left the scene to Pro Palestine hackers, although not so many high-profile actions have been reported in this period. The only exception to this schema is represented by Mauritania Hacker Team who dumped 4000 login accounts from Microsoft Israel Dynamics CRM Online website. This action is particularly significant… Not because it targeted a Cloud service, and not even because it targeted a Microsoft Cloud Service, but most of all because on the wake of the multiple dumps performed by Pro Arab hackers against Israel (among which the dump to the Microsoft Cloud Service was only the latest), the Israel’s Justice Ministry has releases guidelines forbidding unnecessary collection of personal national identification numbers. This is the first time in which the aftermath of a Cyber War has direct implications on everyday life.

From this point of view the wars fought on the cyber domain are completely different from the wars fought on the real world… In the cyber battlefield the civilians are the primary targets (since they have their personal data dumped) and not collateral victims…

Read the complete timeline of the Middle East Cyber War at this link and follow @paulsparrows on Twitter for the latest updates.

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Timeline of Opisrael

After the ceasefire of the 21st of November, the cyber attacks against Israel, executed in name of OpIsrael, have come to a break.

The contemporaneous ceasefire in the real world and in the cyber space has confirmed the two dimensional nature of this conflict. A conflict in which even the social media played a crucial role: IDF chose Twitter to make the first official announcement of the airstrike that killed Ahmed Al-Jaabari, and subsequently during the stages of operation Pillar of Defence Twitter has been intensively used by the two opposite factions for actions of propaganda, psyops, and even to divulge official news of the war operations.

Since the Ion Cannons are not shooting, this is the best moment to analyze the cyber attacks. At this purpose, in the following table I tried to summarize the timeline of the main events that have characterized this operation (and in general all the cyber attacks executed against Israel since the 14th of November).

Of course I do not pretend to be exhaustive: more than 44 million of cyber attacks in a week are impossible to enumerate singularly.

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