Archive
May 2012 Cyber Attacks Timeline (Part II)
As usual, here it is the second part of the Cyber Attacks Timeline for the month of May 2012: a month particularly rich of Cyber Events. As you will probably know, the Flame malware has monopolized the attention, deserving the most attention from the Information Security Professional.
Nevertheless the scene has offered many interesting events, among which it worths to mention the breach of 123,000 federal employees records, the breach affecting University of Nebraska, and, last but not least, the breach against WHCMS (which, as we will soon see, has proved to be fatal for its author).
The hacktivist front is still hot and preannounces another hot summer. On the other hand the authors of several remarkable cyber-criminal actions are probably going to leave the scene: the long trail of arrests made by Law Enforcement Agencies against hackers has continued in this month and has hence led to the arrest of Cosmo, the leader of the infamous group UGNazi, which claimed to be the author of the Cyber Attack against WHCMS.
In your opinion are the arrests against hackers really going to stop the growing number of Cyber Attacks (acting as a deterrent)?
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.
After the jump you find all the references, and at this link the first part covering 1-15 May.
A New Beginning For The Middle East Cyberwar?
After several months of silence, a new resounding dump in Middle East.
I have just received an email message from you-r!-k@n, one of the early pro-Israeli contenders of the Middle East Cyber War, advising me of a new huge dump against an Iranian Server (irimo.ir, Iranian Meteorological Organization), which is currently unavailable. He claims to have acquired administrator privileges for the domain (1500 computers and server, 400 users), and has posted some screenshot as evidence, and the list of 400 Active Directory Users.
Of course I have decided not to publish the list except a small sample (which appears to come from a Windows 2000 Server), but cannot help but notice that, after a couple of months of silence, this is the first new event that closely resembles the resounding dumps which characterized the very first stage of the Middle East Cyber War.
Will this be an isolated episode or a brand new precursor of a new wave of attacks in the Middle East?
Update: Irimo.ir is currently unavailable, however, I was given a screenshot of the site before it was taken down. Looking at the messages left on the devastated site (which announced the erase of the Active Directory), it is interesting to notice that the reference to the Nuclerar as to reaffirm that the standoff between Israel and Iran about the Nuclear Strategy of Tehran, is influencing also the Cyber Space.





