1-15 September 2013 Cyber Attacks Timeline

So unfortunately the Summer is nearly gone, but, despite the sadness for the beautiful season fading away, here we are with the usual analysis of what’s happened in September from a Security Information perspective.

The main event for the first half of September is the massive attack against Vodafone Germany, potentially compromising more than 2 million customer records. Actually it was very hard to declare a main event, since even Belgacom performed was on the infosec news, unleashing some information related to a targeted attack, it was victim of. Always on the Cyber Crime front, it’s also worth to mention the failed (luckily) attack against Santander.

Nothing new under the Hacktivism front, that offered a minor revamp of the Syrian Electronic Army, despite the claims of them being dox’ed, some events in Turkey, where the cyber temperature remains hot despite the Summer fading away, and again some small attacks related to Syria and the NSA affair.

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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1-15 October 2013 Cyber Attacks Timeline

It’s time to review the list of the main cyber attacks happened during the first half of October.

Of course there are few doubts: the breach involving Adobe (compromising the details of 3 million customers and the source code of two products) is for sure the most remarkable event of the month (and probably of the year), and its consequences will likely affect the Infosec landscape for long. In addition it overshadowed all the other events occurred so it is quite hard to summarize the threat landscape of the first 15 days of October.

In a nutshell, these two weeks have brought an unprecedented number of DNS Hijackings and several considerable breaches (however not comparable in size and impact with the one affecting Adobe). At first glance, looks like the number of attacks motivated by Cyber Crime is constantly increasing and leaving behind Hacktivism.

Last but not least, curiously, for this couple of weeks, I did not find any remarkable operations motivated by Cyber Espionage.

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).

1-15 October 2013 Cyber Attacks Timeline

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1-15 June 2014 Cyber Attacks Timeline

It just looks like attackers are enjoying the beginning of the Summer, since the first half of June confirms the decreasing trends.

The controversial 2014 World Cup has revived the hacktivists, and in particular the Anonymous collective who kicked off the Operation OpWorldCup, targeting Brazilian Governmental institutions and Sponsors of the World Cup.

Looking at the Cyber Crime, the most remarkable event of the month is the extortion attempt against  Belgian and French customers of Domino’s Pizza (650,000 users affected). It is also worth to mention the wave of DDoS attacks against Feedly and Evernote, in the first case motivated by extortion, and also the compromising of a US Army database in South Korea.

Last but not least, chronicle report the details of two Cyber Espionage Operations: Operation Molerat, originating allegedly from Middle East, and yet another one from China, discovered by Crowdstrike and attributed to a group dubbed Putter Panda.

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).

1-15 June 2014 Cyber Attacks Timeline

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1-15 January 2014 Cyber Attacks Timeline

It’s time for the Cyber Attacks Timeline for the first half of January 2014. I wish we had a better start for this Infosec year. Not even a month has passed (actually this timeline covers the first two weeks) and we have already seen several massive breaches (Snapchat) and other resounding events, maybe less relevant from a mere numeric perspective, but equally meaningful for the high profile of the victims involved (Microsoft).

Besides Snapchat, other important organizations have been targeted by Cyber crooks with very bad consequences: World Poker Tour (175,333), Staysure (93,000 individuals involved) and OpenSUSE (79,500 victims) are the most noticeable examples. On the cyber crime front other meaningful events include a wave of attacks against Video Games industries, and the hacking of Yahoo advertise network, infecting, potentially 27,000 users per hour.

Hacktivists of the Syrian Electronic Army are back with the result that even Microsoft is now part of the list of their victims (however their web site was also hacked in the same period). Other hacktivists very active in the same period include the infamous RedHack collective.

Last but not least, the control room of the Nuclear Plant of Monju in Japan was found infected with a malware capable of allegedly exfiltrate 42,000 emails.

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).

1-15 Jan 2014 Cyber Attacks Timeline

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16-31 January 2014 Cyber Attacks Timeline

Even if with several days of delay, it is time for the second Cyber Attacks Timeline of June January 2014 (Part I here).

Unfortunately the trail of massive breaches has continued even in the second half of the month with the two remarkable events of the 16 million of records scraped by a German botnet and also the discovery of the ChewBacca malware by RSA. Cyber Crime Chronicles also report a global password reset issued by Yahoo! after the discovery of a coordinated effort to compromise accounts.

Cyber Espionage Chronicles report of an attempted malware attack against the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Israeli Defense Ministry and, most of all, the discovery of an operation allegedly orchestrated by Russian hackers against Western energy interests.

Looking at the attacks motivated by Hacktivism, the Syrian Electronic Army were behind the most noticeable events.

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).

16-31 Jan 2014 Cyber Attacks Timeline

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1-15 February 2014 Cyber Attacks Timeline

And here we are with the timelines of the main Cyber Attacks happened during the first half of February.

It is very hard to summarize these days from an Infosec perspective, considering the noticeable number of massive breaches: Kickstarter (potentially 5.6 million of records affected), Forbes (1 million records leaked), Orange (800,000 users impacted) and St. Joseph Health System (400,000 users affected) are the main examples, but they must not overshadow other ‘minor’ events such as the the attack against Bell.ca (‘only’ 40,000 users affected).

15 days in which Cybercrime and Hacktivism dangerously overlapped, ‘thanks’ mainly to the infamous Syrian Electronic Army, author of the hack against Forbes but also of several account hijacking attacks that have become their unique fingerprint, but also ‘thanks’ to the RedHack collective who, once again, targeted (directly or indirectly) the Turkish Government with three noticeable attacks.

Last but not least, the Cyber Espionage: the first half of February has brought us the discovery of “The Mask” (AKA Careto), a massive Operation targeting 31 countries around the world, but also the revelation of an alleged attack carried on by Huawei against the Indian provider BSNL and a further purported Chinese attack against some bio-medic industries in the U.S.

Finally, the Cyber War between India and Pakistan deserves a special mention, despite only defacements have been reported, the end of the fight is far from being reached.

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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