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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Philippines and China, on The Edge of a New Cyber Conflict?

05/11/12: Updated timeline. The tension between Philippines and China escalates and new cyber attacks target both sides.

The month of April has suddenly revealed a new unexpected Cyber Conflict between two very different countries: Philippines and China.

Of course the Chinese Cyber Activity is not that surprising, differently from the Philippines which had not shown any bellicose intention in the Cyber Domain. At least until these days when the cyber peace between the two countries has been broken because of a dispute concerning the sovereignty on the Scarborough Shoal and the Spratly Islands claimed from both countries. As often happens, the dispute has crossed the boundaries between the real and the cyber worlds and has hence unleashed an endless and unexpected trail of mutual cyber attacks.

According to Roy Espiritu, spokesman of the government’s information technology office, all the attacks came after Philippine ships faced off with Chinese patrol vessels in April 8 in the disputed Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea. Before that, there had been no such eventsm at least until April 2o, when some hackers, identifying  themselves as Chinese, attacked to the University of the Philippines. In that circumstance they defaced the UP website (up.edu.ph) with a map, labeled with Chinese characters, showing the Scarborough Shoal (Panatag as called by the Philippines and Huangyan by China).

Needless to say, the latter episode has started an endless line of mutual attacks that are still continuing despite the calls to end the attacks from Manila.

Will the cyber conflict be limited to “simple” defacements, or will it take the shape of the first phase of the Middle East Cyber War when both parties faced themselves leaking credit card details of innocent individuals? Moreover, are critical infrastructure really in danger as suggested by Filipino IT professionals?

Based on the current events, maybe this latter scenario is exaggerated, in any case once again, the upsetting evidence shows that the Cyber World has become a consolidated further battlefield for the disputes inflicting the real world.

If you want to have an idea of how fragile is the equlibrium inside the cyberspace, have a look at the timelines of the main Cyber Attacks in 2011 and 2012 (regularly updated), and follow @paulsparrows on Twitter for the latest updates.

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Continue ReadingPhilippines and China, on The Edge of a New Cyber Conflict?