Hackmageddon.com

First of all, let me begin with great news: The Cyber Attacks Statistics page is complete with all the data collected so far: I created and inserted even the charts for January, so I am currently covering (and will cover) the whole 2012.

Now, after this small “self-gratification” it is time to look at the statistics derived from the Cyber Attacks Timeline for the first half of August. You will soon discover that this month has seen an (un)expected revamping of Hacktivism and consequently of his preferred weapon (DDoS), and preferred targets (governments). This is a consequence of the so-called OpDemonoid carried on by the Anonymous collective against the takedown of the famous Torrent Tracker (which in many ways reminded the most famous OpMegaUpload). But this is also a consequence of OpAustralia, the operation (successful since the law proposal is in standby) against the new Australian Internet Surveillance Law.

As far as the Motivations Behind Attacks are concerned, Hacktivism ranked at number on with nearly the 50% of the events. Cyber Crime ranked at number two (43%) while as usual Cyber Espionage and Cyber Warfare are well behind (but I wonder how many targeted attacks are acting in this moment, silent and undetected). It is interesting to notice the rise of events motivated by Cyber Espionage (three inside the interval taken into consideration): the Gauss Cyber Attack, the campaign against Saudi Aramco and the attacks against the Nepalese Government.

The winds of hacktivism have a clear influence even in the Distribution Of Attack Techniques which shows a new entry (as it were) at number one. Yes, in the first half of August the DDoS has overtaken the SQLi with nearly one third of the occurrences (31.9%) against the 21.3 of the latter. Only for the 17% of the attacks it has not been possible to identify with certainty the attack technique leveraged.

Clearly the hacktivism also influenced the Distribution Of Targets: nearly one cyber attack on five (among the sample considered), corresponding to the 21%, hit government targets. Targets belonging to the industry sector and to the news sector ranked at number two, both of them with the 13% of the occurrences. Apparently the first half of August has been particularly awful for the News Sector, thanks most of all to Thomson Reuters, that has been hacked three times in two weeks.

Again, I will never get tired of repeating that data must be taken very carefully since they do refer only to discovered attacks (the so-called tip of the iceberg), and hence do not pretend to be exhaustive but only aim to provide an high level overview of the “cyber landscape” of the considered period.

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).