16-31 January 2013 Cyber Attacks Timeline

Two Weeks Living Dangerously! I have no other words to describe this second half of January (first two weeks here) that has shown an unprecedented level of attacks! And if a good day starts with the morning, this will be a very troubled year from an information security perspective.

Not only the peaks of DDoS attacks against the US Banks have reached an unstoppable peak, but, most of all, at the end of the month details have been unveiled about a massive cyber-espionage campaign allegedly orchestrated by Chinese hackers against some major US media including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and Bloomberg News.

A very very long list of targets this month, with some high profile victims such as the U.S. Sentencing Commission, whose web site has been hacked twice and turned into an Asteroid game, but also Renault Argentina that suffered 37,000 accounts leaked.

To summarize this month is really impossible, you just have to scroll down the timeline to realize the hacking spree in this January 2013.

If this trend continues, I will have to decrease the frequency of publication…

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.16-31-january-2013-cyber-attacks-timeline

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16-30 April 2014 Cyber Attacks Timeline

It’s time for the report of the cyber activity in April. As usual this post summarizes the main events between 16 and 30 April, whereas the first part covering the attacks between 1 and 15 April 2014 can be found here (ok, actually there’s one attack I had to include in this timeline, dated 10 April).

Apparently this second half has shown a decreasing trend (who knows, maybe the Easter has brought good intentions), nonetheless there have been some noticeable events such as the breach to AOL Mail affecting potentially 50 million users, the breach to Eircom and the interesting trend of attacks against educational institutions (Universities of Virginia, Iowa, North Carolina Wilmington).

In this general decreasing trend, even the attacks motivated by hacktivism have shown a consistent reduction in volume and impact (the Syrian Electronic Army has admitted to be in vacation).

Nothing else of particularly significant to mention but the continual cyber skirmishes between India and Pakistan. Although interesting from an analytic  perspective, the attacks were ‘limited’ to defacements, and hence the overall impact was modest.

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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