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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Middle East Cyber War Timeline (Part VIII)

This last week has seen some remarkable events an undoubtable revamp of data leaks inside the Middle East Cyberwar.

Not only the infamous 0xOmar, the initiator of the Middle East Cyber War, reappeared, leaking alleged secret data from some Israeli Virtual Israeli Air Force School websites; but also the Pakistani zCompany Hacking Crew has re-entered the scene unchaining the original weapon, that is the Credit Card leak. As a matter of fact ZHC published 5,166 records containing working credit cards, usernames, emails and addresses of individual supporters of the Zionist Organisation of UK & Ireland (zionist.org.uk).

On a different front, the massive defacements of websites all over the world in support of #OpFreePalestine continued. Under the label of the same operation, the Anonymous also “doxed” several companies and individuals on pastebin.

As far as the two main contenders (Iran and Israel) are concerned, the strategies seem quite different.

Iran has shown a cyber activity culminated in the alleged attack against the BBC Persian Service. For this nation, it is also important to notice its “cyber autarky”, maybe a choice forced by the embargo, that led to the creation of an internal email service, in contrast to the traditional Gmail, Yahoo, etc. This happens few weeks after the decision to develop an internal Antivirus.

On the opposite front, Israel keeps on its apparent cyber silence. Is it the prelude for the feared military action against Iran?

If you want to be constantly updated on the Middle East Cyber War, at this link you find the complete timeline. Also follow @paulsparrows on Twitter for the latest updates!

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