15-31 May 2013 Cyber Attacks Timeline

And here we are with the second part of the Cyber Attacks Timeline for May (first part here).

The second half of the month has shown an unusual activity with several high-profile breaches motivated by Cyber-Crime or Hacktivism, but also with the disclosure of massive Cyber-Espionage operations.

The unwelcome prize for the “Breach of the Month” is for Yahoo! Japan, that suffered the possible compromising of 22 million users (but in general this was an hard month for the Far East considering that also Groupon Taiwan suffered an illegitimate attempt to access the data of its 4.1 million of customers).

On the cyber-espionage front, the leading role is for the Chinese cyber army, accused of compromising the secret plans of advanced weapons systems from the U.S. and the secret plans for the new headquarter of the Australian Security Intelligence Organization.

On the Hacktivism front, this month has been particularly troubled for the South African Police, whose web site has been hacked with the compromising of 16,000 individuals, including 15,700 whistle-bowlers.

Other noticeable events include the unauthorized access against the well known open source CMS Drupal (causing the reset of 1 million of passwords), the trail of hijacked Twitter accounts by the Syrian Electronic Army and also an unprecedented wave of attacks against targets belonging to Automotive.

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).may-2013-cyber-attacks-timeline-part-ii1

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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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