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Hack’n Roll: Here’s The Special Chart of Singers Who Had Their Twitter Account Hacked
Octo
ber 2012 has deserved a bad surprise for the members of the famous rock band Garbage, who had their official Twitter account hacked from an unknown cybercrook who enjoyed posting bogus messages to their nearly 60k followers.
Unfortunately, among the music stars, they are not the only ones who have suffered this sad fate, and actually, since 2009 to present, the list is quite long.
Britney Spears opens this special chart, which also includes high-profile singers such as Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber and Kesha. Brit currently holds the unwelcome record to have been hacked twice, but the group of the victims is quite varied and covers different genres: pranksters and cybercrooks, at least from this point of view, have proven to be impartial.
The accounts have been hacked for different motivations: scam, hacktivism, or simple fun, and accessed via lost phones or by mean of brute-force or password-guessing techniques.
Famous singers are used to be on top of selling charts.I believe they willingly avoid to rank at the top of this unwelcome chart (after the jump you will find the related links).
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 (regularly updated), at the Cyber Attack Statistics, and follow @paulsparrows on Twitter for the latest updates.
1-15 May 2012 Cyber Attacks Statistics
As I did in the last month, I have summarized the data collected in my Cyber Attacks Sample for the first half of May, (whose thumbnail is on the right), in order to provide some aggregated statistics. Collected Data have been summarized in three charts representing: Motivations Behind Attacks, Distribution of Targets and Distribution of Attack Techniques. Although the 60 attacks sample does not intend to be comprehensive (and hence the results must be taken with caution), the charts provide a quick overview, which in turn might be useful to identify trends and hopefully to address countermeasures. Apparently the trend is quite (un)stable with Cyber Crime, ranking at number one as the primary motivation for the attacks, and Governments that continue to be the preferred targets for cybercrookers.
As far as Motivations Behind Attacks are concerned, once again Cyber Crime ranks at number one with nearly the 70% of occurrences. Hacktivism is well behind with “only” the 23% followed by Cyber Warfare and Cyber Espionage that triggered singularly the 10% of attacks. If compared with April, the trend shows a growth of Cyber Crime and a corresponding reduction of hacktivism. As far as Cyber Espionage is concerned, particularly interesting om this month have been the Attack to U.K. Ministry Of Defence and to some undisclosed U.S. Natural Gas Companies.
The Distribution of Targets chart confirms that Governments continue to be the preferred targets for Cyber Criminals and Hacktivists with nearly one third (30%) of occurrences. With respect to April, targets belonging to educational sector have gained one position ranking at number two with the 15% of occurrences and before the LEAs which shifted at the third place with the 7% of occurrences. If we sum up military targets to LEAs we have the 12%. In any case the trend is in line with the previous month.
SQL Injection is the number one among Attack Techniques, with the 36% of occurrences taking over, at least in the first two weeks of may, Distributed Denial Of Service, that ranks at number two with the 18%. Summing up the “conclamated” SQLi Attacks with the “uncertain” SQLi Attacks, leads to the surprising result that nearly one attack on two (46%) has been performed exploiting this kind of vulnerability. So definitively run and patch your applications!
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 (regularly updated), and follow @paulsparrows on Twitter for the latest updates. Also feel free to submit at ppasseri@gmail.com details about Cyber attacks in order to make the timelines even more detailed and meaningful.
Related articles
- April 2012 Cyber Attacks Statistics (hackmageddon.com)
- May 2012 Cyber Attacks Timeline (Part I) (hackmageddon.com)
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.
Exclusive Infographic: All Cyber Attacks on Military Aviation and Aerospace Industry
Cross Posted from TheAviationist.
2011 has been an annus horribilis for information security, and aviation has not been an exception to this rule: not only in 2011 the corporate networks of several aviation and aerospace industries have been targeted by digital storms (not a surprise in the so-called hackmageddon) but, above all, last year will be probably remembered for the unwelcome record of two alleged hacking events targeting drones (“alleged” because in the RQ-170 Sentinel downed in Iran episode, several doubts surround the theory according to which GPS hacking could have been the real cause of the crash landing).
But, if Information Security professionals are quite familiar with the idea that military contractors could be primary and preferred targets of the current Cyberwar, as the infographic on the left shows, realizing that malware can be used to target a drone is still considered an isolated episode, and even worse, the idea of a malware targeting, for instance, the multirole Joint Strike Fighter is still something hard to accept.
However, things are about change dramatically. And quickly.
The reason is simple: the latest military and civil airplanes are literally full of electronics, which play a primary role in managing avionics, onboard systems, flight surfaces, communcation equipment and armament.
For instance an F-22 Raptor owns about 1.7 millions od line of codes , an F-35 Joint Strike Fighter about 5.7 millions and a Boeing 787 Dreamliner about 6.5 millions. Everything with some built in code may be exploited, therefore, with plenty of code and much current and future vulnerabilities, one may not rule out a priori that these systems will be targeted with specific tailored or generic malware for Cyberwar, Cybercrime, or even hacktivism purposes.
Unfortunately it looks like the latter hypothesis is closer to reality since too often these systems are managed by standard Windows operating systems, and as a matter of fact a generic malware has proven to be capable to infect the most important U.S. robots flying in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, and Indian Ocean: Predator and Reaper Drones.
As a consequence, it should not be surprising, nor it is a coincidence, that McAfee, Sophos and Trend Micro, three leading players for Endpoint Security, consider the embedded systems as one of the main security concerns for 2012.
Making networks more secure (and personnel more educated) to prevent the leak of mission critical documents and costly project plans (as happened in at least a couple of circumstances) will not be aviation and aerospace industry’s information security challenge; the real challenge will be to embrace the security-by-design paradigm and make secure and malware-proof products ab initio.
While you wait to see if an endpoint security solution becomes available for an F-35, scroll down the image below and enjoy the list of aviation and aerospace related cyber attacks occurred since the very first hack targeting the F-35 Lightning II in 2009.
Of course aviation and aerospace industries are not the only targets for hackers and cybercriminals. So, 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 (regularly updated) at hackmageddon.com. And follow @pausparrows on Twitter for the latest updates.
As usual the references are after the jump…
One Year Of Lulz (Part II)
Christmas has just gone and here it is my personal way to wish you a Happy New Year: the second part of my personal chart (first part here) of Main 2011 Cyber Attacks covering the time window from August to November 2011 (December is not yet finished, and featuring remarkable events, so expect an update very soon). This memorable year is nearly over and is time, if you feel nostalgic, to scroll down the second part of the list to review the main Cyber Events that contributed, in my opinion, to change the landscape and the rules of the (information security) game. Many events in this period among whom, IMHO, the most noticeable is the one carried on against Diginotar. Since then our trust in conventional authentication models is not (and will not be) the same anymore.
Of course this is my personal selection. Suggestions are well accepted and if you need more details about the cyber events in 2011, feel free to consult my 2011 Cyber Attacks Master Index. As usual after the page break you find all the references…

























