Middle East Cyberwar Update (Part VI)

Looks like Israel has approached a “wait and see” strategy, as these last days of cyber war have seen almost exclusively actions against that country without any appreciable response. In a certain sense, most of all at the Israeli site, the cyber conflict seems to have fallen into a rest, even if new actors have entered the scene, as is the case of the Mauritania Hacker Team, who opened with the leak of 2500 Israeli emails and claimed to have hacked the Central Bank of Israel. Despite these events the number and intensity of the attacks is no longer that of the early days.

The frequency of the attacks has drastically fallen, even because the early cyber fighters seem to have disappeared, apart from the AlienZ who, every now and then reappear with some dumps against arab sites (and not only).

In the meantime, Iran is suffering several sparse attacks from the Anonymous, targeting that country in the name of #OpIran, and in contemporary attacks its Azerbaijani neighbors considered close to Israel.

Interesting to notice I also found evidence of internal attacks in Iran against reformist websites considered close to former President Mohammad Khatami. The storyboard follows the same line both in real and virtual world.

Apparently Israel seems not to respond to attacks. A temporary truce or a real turnaround?

(At this link you can find the complete Middle East Cyber War Update and follows @paulsparrows for the latest updates.)

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Continue ReadingMiddle East Cyberwar Update (Part VI)

1-15 October 2012 Cyber Attacks Timeline

Apparently October has shown a decrease in the number of Cyber Attacks. At least from a mere numerical perspective. It is not a coincidence that I used the term “Apparently” since if we consider the most important event of the month: the massive leak from Worldwide universities executed by Team GhostShell inside their ProjectWestWind operation, things are well different.

The one carried on by Team Ghost Shell (approximately 120k accounts leaked) is for sure the most important operation of the current month which has also shown the first virtual hacking operation (at least as far as I remember): the massive death of avatars inside World of Warcraft.

Other remarkable events in the first half of October concern the attack to Playspan (possibly millions of users affected), the new waves of DDoS cyber attacks against US banks, and an alleged hijacking to the Irish domains of Google and Yahoo!.

It worth to mention also the breach of University of Georgia (8,500 users affected) and  the 400,000 bucks stolen by unknown hackers to the City of Burlington.

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).

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Continue Reading1-15 October 2012 Cyber Attacks Timeline