16-30 April 2014 Cyber Attacks Timeline
It’s time for the report of the cyber activity in April. As usual this post summarizes the main events between 16 and 30 April, whereas the first part covering the attacks between 1 and 15 April 2014 can be found here (ok, actually there’s one attack I had to include in this timeline, dated 10 April).
Apparently this second half has shown a decreasing trend (who knows, maybe the Easter has brought good intentions), nonetheless there have been some noticeable events such as the breach to AOL Mail affecting potentially 50 million users, the breach to Eircom and the interesting trend of attacks against educational institutions (Universities of Virginia, Iowa, North Carolina Wilmington).
In this general decreasing trend, even the attacks motivated by hacktivism have shown a consistent reduction in volume and impact (the Syrian Electronic Army has admitted to be in vacation).
Nothing else of particularly significant to mention but the continual cyber skirmishes between India and Pakistan. Although interesting from an analytic perspective, the attacks were ‘limited’ to defacements, and hence the overall impact was modest.
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).