July 2012 Cyber Attacks Timeline (Part I)

Update 08/02/2012: July 2012 Cyber Attacks Timeline (Part II)

Although the number of attacks has considerably diminuished, the first half of July has left several high-profile attacks which deserverd huge attention, exposing in theory more than 2,000,000 individuals. Yahoo! Voice, Android Forums, Nvidia, Formspring, Billabong and ASUS are several of the well-known names that were victims of the high-profile breaches in the first two weeks of July.

World Health Organization and PBS (once again) were also illustrious victims of Cyber Attacks.

Besides these remarkable events, it looks like the actions carried on by the Law Enforcement agencies in the last period led to some results since the number of incidents looks undoubtably smaller than the previous months.

For what concerns the cyber attacks driven by hacktivism, it is particularly important to notice #OpPedoChat, still ongoing, which caused many pedophiles to be exposed, in several cases with unpredictable consequences, as in Belgium where a far-right official resigned after Anonymous’ Paedophilia Claims.

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 and 2012 (regularly updated), 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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Continue ReadingJuly 2012 Cyber Attacks Timeline (Part I)

1-15 January 2013 Cyber Attacks Timeline

So here we are with the first Cyber Attacks Timeline for 2013 covering the first half of January.

Apparently the new year has begun with an intense activity by Cyber Crooks. Hacktivists and Cyber Criminals had many time to spend in front of their keyboards during the holiday break, and as a consequence the number of breaches with more than 10.000 accounts compromised is incredibly high. WWF China, the City of Steubenville, Ohio and The German Chamber of Commerce are only three examples of institutions that suffered massive breaches during the beginning of this year.

But the massive breaches are not the only remarkable events of this period: the waves of DDoS Attacks against US banks continued (and promise to extend also in the next weeks), Kaspersky Lab discovered a new massive Cyber Espionage Campaign dubbed “Red October”, and also the Japan Farm Ministry was hit by yet another Cyber Attack, allegedly originating from China…

If this is only the beginning… 2013 promises to be pretty much troubled for system administrators…

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 and 2012 and the related statistics (regularly updated), 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). To do so, you can use this form.

1-15 January 2013 Cyber Attacks Timeline (more…)

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1-15 March 2013 Cyber Attacks Timeline

Other troubles for system administrators: March is confirming the 2013 dangerous trend with several high profile breaches against industrial, financial and governmental targets.

The first two weeks of March have begun with the breach to Evernote, and continued with (among the others) the third phase of the infamous Operation Ababil, targeting U.S. Banks and an alleged Chinese attack against the Reserve Bank of Australia.

Additional noticeable events include a wave of DDoS attacks against several Czech Republic’s targets (belonging to media, news and financial sector), a breach suffered by the NIST Vulnerability Database (unfortunately not an isolated example of the attacks against US governmental targets happened in these two weeks) and also the leak of 20,000 records from an Avast! German distributor.

Last but not least, the examined period has also confirmed the role of Twitter as the new mean to make resounding attacks against single individuals or organizations. Qatar Foundation, Saudi Aramco, and France 24 are only several of the organizations fallen victims of accounts hijacking.

Of course, these are only the main events, feel free to scroll down the list to analyze in detail what happened in these two weeks.

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).

Once again, a special thanks to Kim Guldberg AKA @bufferzone for continuously advising me about significant cyber events through the Submit Form! Much Appreciated!

1-15 March 2013 Cyber Attacks Timeline

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1-15 August 2013 Cyber Attacks Timeline

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).

1-15 August 2013 Cyber Attacks Timeline Addendum (more…)

Continue Reading1-15 August 2013 Cyber Attacks Timeline

Timeline of Cyber Attacks in Conjunction with the Pakistan and India Independence Days

As I previously mentioned in the 1-15 August Cyber Attack Timeline, I decided to build a dedicated timeline for the Cyber Attacks between India an Pakistan happened during the month of August as they reached an unusual peak in conjunction with the occurrence of the Independence Days in Pakistan (14 August), and India (15 August).

Actually the relationships between the two countries are not what I would define idyllic, and to confirm this scenario, a huge cyber espionage operation against BSNL the Indian state-owned Telco company, has recently surfaced. In any case, easily predictable, hackers of both sides contributed to add further fuel to the fire with an unusual peak of attacks concentrated around the dates of the Independence Days. These attacks have not the sophistication typical of state-sponsored operations, since are mainly “limited” to defacements (so the damage is more symbolic than practical). However, in several cases the targets are of very high profile (as in the case of the Facebook pages of the Pakistan Army).

A short (probably non-exhaustive) summary follows:

India Pakistan TL

Also notice that during the same Period Pakistan was targeted by an unprecedented wave of Cyber Attacks by Afghan Hackers.

Pakistan Afghanistan

This is indeed quite curious since the attacks came nearly in contemporary of the first football match between the two countries in Kabul after 36 years (and the first home match of the Afghanistan national team after 10 years). For the chronicle, in the real world, Afghanistan’s footballers have won 3-0 over Pakistan.

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Continue ReadingTimeline of Cyber Attacks in Conjunction with the Pakistan and India Independence Days

1-15 July 2014 Cyber Attacks Timeline

It’s time for the first cyber attacks timeline of July reporting the main cyber events happened (or discovered) during the first half of the month.

In a short summary: if even the number of recorded attacks remains moderate, the most important events of this period are related to Cyber Espionage: eight sophisticated campaigns have been discovered, a number remarkably high for this category.

On the cyber crime front, the most important event of this period is undoubtedly the massive attacks against Boleto, the Brazilian payment system ($ 3.5 billion is the amount of money stolen by the criminals), but also the purported leak of CNET’s database (subsequently offered on sale by the criminals at the symbolic price of 1 Bitcoin) deserves a special mention. Also the African continent is on the spot with the discovery of a repeated fraud against a couple of Nigerian banks.

Nothing particularly remarkable by hacktivists, with the partial exception of the Syrian Electronic Army, back with the Specialty of the House (the account hijacking, this time against the official Twitter account of the Israel Defence Force). The hacktivistic landscape also offered some attacks against Israel, related to the events in Gaza. Nothing particularly relevant so far, but everything suggests that the number of these attacks will dramatically increase in the next timeline.

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).

1-15 July 2014 Cyber Attacks Timeline (more…)

Continue Reading1-15 July 2014 Cyber Attacks Timeline

1-15 October 2014 Cyber Attacks Timeline

Here we go with the first timeline of the main Cyber Attacks happened in October (according to my personal evaluation metric).

Two weeks very active from an information security perspective. The list of attacks is quite long and heterogeneous, with massive breaches (The Snappening and a list of nearly 7.000.000 compromised accounts used to brute-force Dropbox), a rich list of cyber crime and cyber espionage campaigns, a renewed burst of the cyber war between India and Pakistan, and a couple of operations orchestrated by hacktivists.

Digging into Cyber Crime, besides the two above quoted events, we find the Mac.BackDoor.iWorm, a widespread botnet targeting OS X, and trapping 17,000 devices. The list continues with a purported attack against Yahoo, initially believed to be orchestrated exploiting the infamous Shellshock vulnerability, the ATM malware Tyupkin, supposed to have been used for stealing millions of bucks from 50 ATMs in Eastern Europe and Russia, a breach against Kmart, and, last but not least, other two (and a half) waves of leaked photos from the Snappening.

Scrolling down the Cyber Espionage events, we cannot help but notice a similar abundance of operations with a widespread usage of 0-day vulnerabilities. Just to mention several names: Sandworm, Hurricane Panda, and even an old acquaintance like Nitro.

India and Pakistan were very busy in the Cyber Space, with  defacements and leaks against a wide range of mutual targets like also the Anonymous, who kicked off #OPHK, against China and in support of Hong Kong protesters.

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).

1-15 October 2014 Cyber Attacks Timeline (more…)

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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).

16-31 October 2014 Cyber Attacks Timeline (more…)

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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…)

Continue Reading1-15 December 2013 Cyber Attacks Timeline