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16-31 January 2013 Cyber Attacks Timeline
Two Weeks Living Dangerously! I have no other words to describe this second half of January (first two weeks here) that has shown an unprecedented level of attacks! And if a good day starts with the morning, this will be a very troubled year from an information security perspective.
Not only the peaks of DDoS attacks against the US Banks have reached an unstoppable peak, but, most of all, at the end of the month details have been unveiled about a massive cyber-espionage campaign allegedly orchestrated by Chinese hackers against some major US media including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and Bloomberg News.
A very very long list of targets this month, with some high profile victims such as the U.S. Sentencing Commission, whose web site has been hacked twice and turned into an Asteroid game, but also Renault Argentina that suffered 37,000 accounts leaked.
To summarize this month is really impossible, you just have to scroll down the timeline to realize the hacking spree in this January 2013.
If this trend continues, I will have to decrease the frequency of publication…
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 and the related statistics (regularly updated), 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). To do so, you can use this form.
1-15 December 2012 Cyber Attacks Timeline
Christmas is coming quickly, we have just passed the first half of December, and hence it’s time for the first update of the Cyber Attacks Timeline for December.
The Team GhostShell has decided to close the year with a clamorous Cyber Attack, and hence,as part of the project ProjectWhiteFox, has leaked 1.6 million of accounts from several organizations all over the world. This is the most important event for this first part of the month that apparently has shown a decreasing trend. Hacktivists are still focusing their attention (and their keyboards) to Israel, and Cyber Criminals are maybe preparing for the Christmas attacks.
However, the main events of the first half of December, are related to hacktivism, besides the above mentioned cyber attack, it worth to mention the new wave of massive DDoS attacks against US Banks (up to 60 Gbps of peak according to Arbor Networks), but also the leak of a ITU document on the future of Deep Packet Inspection and the attacks in Egypt, Mexico and India.
Last but not least: this two weeks also offered a giant attack to the famous Social Platform Tumblr and also the warning of the Switzerland’s national security agency (NDB) that a huge amount of secrets may have been leaked by a disgruntled IT Administrator.
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 and the related statistics (regularly updated), 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). To do so, you can use this form.
Sometimes They Come Back: Team GhostShell Leaks 120K Records from Top 100 Universities
This summer, when Team GhostShell released one million accounts as part of their Project HellFire campaign, I was particularly impressed by one sentence contained in the pastebin statement which accompanied the release.
One million accounts/records leaked. We are also letting everyone know that more releases, collaborations with Anonymous and other, plus two more projects are still scheduled for this fall and winter. It’s only the beginning.
I was wondering what else the hacking collective had in mind, and unfortunately I did not have to wait too long for the answer. As promised, at the beginning for this fall 
Team GhostShell returned with a new campaign called “ProjectWestWind”, aimed at “raising awareness towards the changes made in today’s education, how new laws imposed by politicians affect us, our economy and overall, our way of life”.
Their interpretation of their concept of “raising awareness” is a little bit complicated since, in order to raise awareness they hacked top 100 International Universities and leaked more than 120,000 accounts (leaving in their servers hundreds of thousands more). The list includes Harvard, John Hopkins, the University of Michigan, Tokyo University, New York University, Princeton and the University of Rome and leaked data contains email addresses, hashed passwords, IDs and names of students and faculty members.
It worth to mention that they claimed to have found a lot of servers infected with malware, and some other storing credit card information.
There is not so much to comment. I would prefer to limit myself to the Italian situation: when dealing with the quality of infrastructures, Italian Universities rank inevitably at the bottom of every possible chart, when dealing with being hacked, they rank inevitably at the top…
16 – 31 August 2012 Cyber Attacks Timeline
Here the first part with the timeline from 1 to 15 August 2012.
Here we are with the second part of the August 2012 Cyber Attacks Timeline. A second part of the month that has been characterized by hacktivism, most of all because of the so-called OperationFreeAssange, which has targeted many high-profile websites.
Among the targets of the month, Philips has been particularly “unlucky”. The Dutch giant has been the victim of three Cyber Attacks, even if there are several doubts about the authenticity of the hacks.
But maybe the biggest operation of the month is the #ProjectHellFire, carried on by the collective @TeamGhostShell, that has unleashed something as 1 million of accounts belonging to different sectors (banks, government agencies, consulting firms, law enforcement and the CIA). And the group promises new action for this Fall and Winter.
The Middle East confirms to be very hot, with a new Cyber Attack, probably another occurrence of Shamoon, targeting RasGas, yet another Oil Company.
Just one note: of course it is impossible to track all the targets of the #OpFreeAssange. You can find a complete list at cyberwarnews.info.
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 and the related statistics (regularly updated), 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).
July 2012 Cyber Attacks Timeline (Part II)
Click here for Part I.
The Dog Days are nearly here. Weather forecast are announcing for Italy one of the hottest summers since 2003, and the same can be said for the Infosec temperature, although, July 2012 has been very different from the same month of 2011, which was deeply characterized by hacktvism.
Instead looks like that hacktivists have partially left the scene in favor of cyber criminals who executed several high profile breaches also in the second part of the month: Maplesoft, Gamigo, KT Corporation and Dropbox are the most remarkable victims of cyber-attacks, but also other important firms, even if with different scales, have been hit by (improvised) Cyber Criminals. One example for all? Nike who suffered a loss of $80,000 by a 25-year improvised hacker, who decided that exploiting a web vulnerability was the best way to acquire professional merchandise.
But probably the prize for the most “peculiar” cyber-criminal is completely deserved by Catherine Venusto, who successfully changed her sons’ grade for 110 times between 2011 and 2012.
As far as the Hacktivism is concerned, although we were not in the same condition of one year ago (a leak every day kept security away), this month has offered the massive leak of the Australian Provider AAPT, with 40 gb of data allegedly stolen by the Anonymous.
Last but not least, a special mention for the cyber espionage campaigns, that had an unprecedented growth in this month: Israel, Iran, Japan, the European Union and Canada, are only few of the victims. Iran gained also an unwelcome record, the first nation to be hit by a malware capable of blasting PC speakers with an AC/DC song…
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 and the related statistics (regularly updated), 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).
July 2012 Cyber Attacks Timeline (Part I)
Update 08/02/2012: July 2012 Cyber Attacks Timeline (Part II)
Although the number of attacks has considerably diminuished, the first half of July has left several high-profile attacks which deserverd huge attention, exposing in theory more than 2,000,000 individuals. Yahoo! Voice, Android Forums, Nvidia, Formspring, Billabong and ASUS are several of the well-known names that were victims of the high-profile breaches in the first two weeks of July.
World Health Organization and PBS (once again) were also illustrious victims of Cyber Attacks.
Besides these remarkable events, it looks like the actions carried on by the Law Enforcement agencies in the last period led to some results since the number of incidents looks undoubtably smaller than the previous months.
For what concerns the cyber attacks driven by hacktivism, it is particularly important to notice #OpPedoChat, still ongoing, which caused many pedophiles to be exposed, in several cases with unpredictable consequences, as in Belgium where a far-right official resigned after Anonymous’ Paedophilia Claims.
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 remarkable incidents that in your opinion deserve to be included in the timelines (and charts).
June 2012 Cyber Attacks Timeline (Part I)
Update 07/05/2012: June 2012 Cyber Attacks Timeline (Part II)
A (first half of the) month living dangerously…
June has come and strongly confirms that Summer is the preferred month for Cybercrookers: just look back at June 2011 and you will probably remember the days of Lulz of the infamous LulzSec Collective (which curiously seems to be reborn!).
June 2012 has shown a remarkable number of incidents and is proving to be a mensis horribilis (horrible month) for Social Networks and Online Services in general, due to the high profile breaches of LinkedIn, Last.Fm, eHarmony and the online game League of Legends.
On a geographic scale, looks like China is becoming another important source of Cyber incidents, having been targeted from #TeamGhostShell, who claim, inside their #ProjectDragonFly, to have obtained up to 800,000 accounts from different sources.
Hacktivism-led actions seem (apparently) to decline, whilst, on the Cyber Crime front, a new collective, UGNazi, is taking the scene, having confirmed, in the first part of June, the wake of cyber attacks, we have become familiar with for some time.
Another Infosec Summer promising to be very hot!
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 remarkable incidents that in your opinion deserve to be included in the timeline.
May 2012 Cyber Attacks Timeline (Part I)
Update June 4 2012: May 2012 Cyber Attacks Timeline (Part II)
As usual here it is the timeline of the Main Cyber Attacks occurred in May (at least according to my evaluation criteria).
This first half of the month has seen the arrival of a new hacking collective, “The Unknowns”, who has performed an impressive trail of attacks during the first days of May, targeting Space Agencies, Universities, and several other organizations. Although these events appear to be closer to cyber crime actions rather than hactivistim-driven attacks, they have not been the most remarkable ones of these days: as a matter of fact chronicles report of a massive breach at the Hangzhou Dianzi University, targeting approximately 150.000 acccounts.
As far as hacktivism is concerned, this first half of May has confirmed the constant trend of DDoS attacks targeting high profile websites such as SOCA and CIA (once again) and the Supreme Court in retaliation for the U.K. extradition laws.
Interesting to mention is also an alleged Cyber Espionage campaign targeting networks belonging to US natural gas pipeline companies.
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.
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08/13/2011 - My Post on Android Malware Mentioned on Engadget.
04/14/2011 - The Article Smart Grid: L'ultima Frontiera del Cybercrime published on ICT Security Magazine May 2011.
03/14/2011 - Security Summit 2011: Paolo Passeri guest at Round Table "Mobile Security: Rischi, Tecnologie, Mercato"
02/14/2011 - The Article Gears of Cyberwar published on ICT Security Magazine January 2011.
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