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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Middle East Cyber War Update

Another week of Cyber War in the Middle East…

Another week in which pro Israeli hackers seem to have disappeared, and hence have apparently left the scene to Pro Palestine hackers, although not so many high-profile actions have been reported in this period. The only exception to this schema is represented by Mauritania Hacker Team who dumped 4000 login accounts from Microsoft Israel Dynamics CRM Online website. This action is particularly significant… Not because it targeted a Cloud service, and not even because it targeted a Microsoft Cloud Service, but most of all because on the wake of the multiple dumps performed by Pro Arab hackers against Israel (among which the dump to the Microsoft Cloud Service was only the latest), the Israel’s Justice Ministry has releases guidelines forbidding unnecessary collection of personal national identification numbers. This is the first time in which the aftermath of a Cyber War has direct implications on everyday life.

From this point of view the wars fought on the cyber domain are completely different from the wars fought on the real world… In the cyber battlefield the civilians are the primary targets (since they have their personal data dumped) and not collateral victims…

Read the complete timeline of the Middle East Cyber War at this link and follow @paulsparrows on Twitter for the latest updates.

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16-31 October 2014 Cyber Attacks Timeline

It’s time for the second timeline of October (Part I here) covering the main cyber attacks between the 16th and 31st: yet another consistent list confirming the growing trend of the last period.

In particular, in these two weeks the most important events have been spotted inside Cyber Espionage, whose chronicles report, among other, a state-sponsored attack to an unclassified network of the White House, a relevant number of operations (APT 28, Operation Pawn Storm, Operation SMN, Operation DeathClick, a tail of the infamous Sandworm), and even a man-in-the-middle attack against Chinese iCloud users.

Cybercrime is also on a roll: the trail of attacks against retailers seems unstoppable (Staples is the latest victim), but chronicles also report a massive breach in South Korea, involving Pandora TV and a gigantic SQL Injection attack, driven by CVE-2014-3704, against every unpatched website running Drupal, existing on this desperate planet. There is also space for a little bit of irony, as in case of Sourcebooks, the publisher hacked few days before releasing the latest book of Brian Krebs.

Israel and Ukraine keep on being two hot fronts for Hacktivism, whereas India is again the cradle of  cyberwar, many events event in this months (despite limited to skirmishes involving defacements of governmental and military websites).

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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