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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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.

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16-31 December Cyber Attacks Timeline

Despite still related to December 2014, here is the first timeline for 2015 covering the main events occurred between the 16th and 31st December 2014 (first part here).

No doubt, this Christmas will be remembered for the unwelcome surprise of the DDoS attack performed by the infamous Lizard Squad against the online services of Sony and Microsoft. An attack that has shattered the dreams of many players, just few minutes after unwrapping their brand new consoles under the Christmas Tree. However, the light that burns twice as bright burns half as long, and inevitably two members of the collective have allegedly been arrested (not before having attempted a Sybil Attack against Tor).

But the latter was not the only attack targeting the Tor anonymity service in this period, which also suffered an unexplained outage affecting a cluster of Tor Directory Authority Servers in a Rotterdam data center.

Other noticeable events concern the outage of the Internet connection in North Korea (despite it is not completely clear if caused by a cyber attack or a fault), a malware detected in a South Korea power plant, the attacks targeting the ICANN and the ISC Consortium, two among the most important organizations for the Internet, and (yet another) breach targeting NVIDIA.

Moving to a different topic, all in all the hacktivists decided to enjoy the Christmas vacations with the exception of the Syrian Electronic Army who were back, and defaced an online magazine, the International Business Time, for an article against the Syrian regime.

Last but not least, with regard to  Cyber Espionage, there have been two operations discovered in this period: an alleged attack perpetrated by Chinese hackers against an Afghan CDN targeting directly many local governmental sites, and indirectly many foreign institutions, and also the discovery of the Anunak group, a well-organized crew able to steal USD $25 Million with a long lasting cyber espionage operation against targets in Europe and the US.

If you want to have an idea of how fragile our electronic identity is inside the cyberspace, have a look at the timelines of the main Cyber Attacks in 2011, 2012, 2013 and now 2014 (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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