16-31 October 2013 Cyber Attacks Timeline

And here we are we the second part of the October 2013 Cyber Attacks Timeline (first part here).

It’s interesting to notice how sophisticated cyber attacks are characterizing the final part of this 2013. The second timeline of October reports at least three remarkable cases: Belgacom (once again), the Finland’s Foreign Ministry and a wave of spear phishing against several targets belonging to Israeli Industries in the defense and security sector

Other noticeable events include the compromising of some servers belonging to php.net, the breach to the online database MongoHQ, and also a breach involving NeoGaf, a popular video games forum, targeting potentially 114,000 users.

The latter is the only remarkable breach (at least from a numerical perspective) of this second half of October, in the same period in which new revelations indicate that the number of victims of the infamous Adobe breach occurred in the first part of this month appears 12 times greater than initially estimated (38M users).

For the rest, the summary of the month is closed by the usual background of hacktivism, a growing phenomenon that is showing multiple different “flavors” and hence is no more characterized by the only infamous Anonymous collective.

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 December 2013 Cyber Attacks Timeline

Maybe hackers are feeling the Christmas atmosphere since this first half of December has recorded a minor number of attacks in comparison with the previous months. However considering merely the number of attacks to evaluate the cyber landscape could bring to wrong conclusions since, even if in absolute terms the number of attacks has experienced a decrease, in several cases the amount of affected users has been really considerable.

This is the case, for instance, of the 20 million of records leaked in China (and found on WeChat) or the 2.4 million of students and employees of Maricopa Community College compromised in an Aprl Security Breach.

It is really curious to notice that in (too) many cases the breaches have been notified several months later. As also happened for JP Morgan Chase, who also had 456,000 owners of prepaid cash cards compromised in July and notified only in December.

Concerning Cyber Espionage, chronicles report of an alleged Chinese Cyber Attack during the 2013 G8 Summit in Russia, while hacktivists were constantly active in Ukraine, Turkey, India, Syria (indirectly) and, a new Entry for December, Angola.

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 December 2013 Cyber Attacks Timeline (more…)

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