1-15 November 2012 Cyber Attacks Timeline

The first half of November 2012 has been undoubtedly characterized by Hacktivism. Not only the month has begun with the ProjectBlackStar by the infamous Team Ghostshell (2.5 million accounts leaked belonging to different Russian sectors), but also the long-awaited November 5 has brought an unprecedented wave of Cyber Attacks against organizations all over the world, including Symantec and the UK Ministry Of Defence (more than 3,000 accounts leaked in both cases).

Moreover, after the dramatic event of the 14th of November (the killing of Ahmed Al-Jaabari, the commander of the military wing of Hamas by an Israeli missile and the consequent Operation “Pillar Of Defense”), the Anonymous have started a massive campaign of Cyber Attacks against Israel sites and in support of Palestine. This campaign is still ongoing even if it is really impossible to track all the attacks (nearly 700 defaced web sites so far), and hence, as far as possible, only a general overview is provided.

Of course these events have shadowed the other attacks, including the ones to LG (3,300 accounts leaked in two different cyber attacks) and Adobe (150,000 records allegedly compromised).

The chronicles also report of an alleged cyber attack against Telecom Italia (30,000 accounts allegedly leaked), even if there several doubts about the real authenticity of this attack.

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).

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16-30 November 2013 Cyber Attacks Timeline

It is time for the report of the cyber landscape of the second half of November.

This month will be probably remembered for the discovery of the giant breach targeting Cupid Media and involving potentially 42 million users. However, this was not the only remarkable breach of November: chronicles report of 77,000 customers of Vodafone Island having their details leaked.

Other interesting events involve a brute-force attack to GitHub, forcing several users to change password, and yet another attack against a Bitcoin Wallet (the equivalent of $1 million stole).

Not only Cyber Criminals. Even Hacktivists were particularly active in this period: the attacks of Indonesian hackers against Australian targets continued in the second part of November, as also the mutual defacements between Pakistani and Indian crews. Last but not least, the Anonymous leaked some documents and emails allegedly belonging to the Italian Governor of Lombardy and the details of 40,000 individuals from an Israeli Job search portal.

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).16-30-november-2013-cyber-attacks-timeline

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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.

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1-15 July 2013 Cyber Attacks Timeline

I am quite in time with the list of the main Cyber Attacks occurred in the first half of July.

This period has been quite hard for the Video Games Industry with two noticeable events targeting Konami and Ubisoft (58 million of account potentially affected in this second case). Another noticeable breach involves the attack against the Italian Website of Sony, which lead to 40,000 records leaked.

Regarding hacktivism, Turkey keeps on being quite hot in this period, and not only for the Summer: several governmental targets have been hits by cyber attacks directly related to the OpTurkey initiative.

Last but not least: you will notice I have added a new column indicating the target country: for the sake of clarity, it refers to the nationality of the targeted organization and not to the geo-location of the targeted IP.

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 October 2013 Cyber Attacks Timeline

It’s time to review the list of the main cyber attacks happened during the first half of October.

Of course there are few doubts: the breach involving Adobe (compromising the details of 3 million customers and the source code of two products) is for sure the most remarkable event of the month (and probably of the year), and its consequences will likely affect the Infosec landscape for long. In addition it overshadowed all the other events occurred so it is quite hard to summarize the threat landscape of the first 15 days of October.

In a nutshell, these two weeks have brought an unprecedented number of DNS Hijackings and several considerable breaches (however not comparable in size and impact with the one affecting Adobe). At first glance, looks like the number of attacks motivated by Cyber Crime is constantly increasing and leaving behind Hacktivism.

Last but not least, curiously, for this couple of weeks, I did not find any remarkable operations motivated by Cyber Espionage.

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 October 2013 Cyber Attacks Timeline

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16-31 December 2013 Cyber Attacks Timeline

Let’s give the welcome to this new infosec year with the first timeline of 2014 (or better the last of 2013) summarizing the main events occurred in the second half of December 2013.

With no doubt, this holiday season has been characterized by the Target breach, whose size is constantly growing (110 million the number of potential victims according to recent estimates). This massive incident has somehow shadowed another massive breached occurred in Turkey, were Russian hackers have allegedly been able to obtain 54 million citizens’ ID Data. With similar numbers, the 300.000 users potentially affected by the Cyber Attack involving Affinity Gaming appear risible.

Other considerable events include a Christmas Intrusion on a BBC server (with the author possibly selling the backdoor access on the underground) and yet another possible intrusion by Chinese hackers on a US target, specifically the Federal Election Commission.

Nothing particularly significant on the hacktivism front characterized by the consolidated “background noise” of events whose sizes are well far from the levels of the recent years.

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 February 2014 Cyber Attacks Timeline

And here we are with the timelines of the main Cyber Attacks happened during the first half of February.

It is very hard to summarize these days from an Infosec perspective, considering the noticeable number of massive breaches: Kickstarter (potentially 5.6 million of records affected), Forbes (1 million records leaked), Orange (800,000 users impacted) and St. Joseph Health System (400,000 users affected) are the main examples, but they must not overshadow other ‘minor’ events such as the the attack against Bell.ca (‘only’ 40,000 users affected).

15 days in which Cybercrime and Hacktivism dangerously overlapped, ‘thanks’ mainly to the infamous Syrian Electronic Army, author of the hack against Forbes but also of several account hijacking attacks that have become their unique fingerprint, but also ‘thanks’ to the RedHack collective who, once again, targeted (directly or indirectly) the Turkish Government with three noticeable attacks.

Last but not least, the Cyber Espionage: the first half of February has brought us the discovery of “The Mask” (AKA Careto), a massive Operation targeting 31 countries around the world, but also the revelation of an alleged attack carried on by Huawei against the Indian provider BSNL and a further purported Chinese attack against some bio-medic industries in the U.S.

Finally, the Cyber War between India and Pakistan deserves a special mention, despite only defacements have been reported, the end of the fight is far from being reached.

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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