16-30 November 2012 Cyber Attacks Timeline

November has gone and it’s time to review this month’s cyber landscape.

From a Cyber Crime perspective, November 2012 will be probably remembered for the breach to Nationwide, one of the largest insurance and financial services providers in the US, a breach that has potentially left up to 1 million users exposed. Unfortunately, in terms of massive breaches, this is not the only remarkable event of the month, just at the end Acer India has suffered a massive cyber attack culminated in the leak of nearly 15,000 records. Not comparable with the breach that affected Nationwide, but for sure of big impact.

Also on the cyber-espionage front this month has been interesting: JAXA, the Japan Space agency has been targeted by yet another targeted attack (after January 2012) and Symantec has discovered W32.Narilam, a new destructive malware targeting several nations in Middle East.

The hacktivist front has been characterized by the dramatic events in Gaza, the attacks have reached a peak around the first half of the month (as in the first part, I did not take into consideration the attacks carried on in name of OpIsrael for which I wrote a dedicated timeline), in any case the Anonymous have found another way to mark this month, leaking 1 Gb of documents from the Syrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Last but not least, this month has seen three large-scale DNS Poisoning attacks (against the Pakistani Registrar PKNIC, Inc., GoDaddy, and the Romanian Registrar). A very rare occurrence!

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).

16-30 November 2012 Cyber Attacks Timeline

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Fortune 500 Cyber Attacks Timeline

For the Infosec professionals, this troubled 2014 will be remembered for the trail of gigantic breaches unleashed nearly exactly one year ago, when the real outcome of the infamous Target breach became to emerge. The real extent of the breach was yet to be known, like also the fact that it would not have been an isolated case, but just the beginning of a nightmare.

However this is not the only example of a Fortune 500 company deeply hit, and thanks to a very smart hint by @bufferzone, I took the opportunity to collect in this timeline all the main cyber incidents involving Fortune 500 and Fortune 500 Global companies since 2011 to nowadays.

The adopted selection criteria take into considerations only incidents involving a direct impact on end users, so defacements have not been taken into consideration.

Fortune 500 Global companies are characterized by a blank value in the Rank column, whereas Fortune 500 companies are characterized by a red value. Also, when possible I inserted both values if the targeted company belongs to both charts and, in those cases in which a subsidiary company has been targeted, I have obviously inserted the rank of the parent company.

Fortune 500 Cyber Attacks TImeline (more…)

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