Here we are with the statistics extracted from the October cyber attacks timelines (part I and part II).
I have already stressed this concept many times, but some readers keep on asking where the data is scraped from. The answer is simple and always the same: I compile the timelines each month, quoting the sources in the footnotes. Each month I elaborate the data trying to represent them in charts, which of course cannot be exhaustive, but just give an idea of what’s going on in the cyberspace.
That said, this month I added again an old acquaintance: the graph related to the Country Distribution of attacks divided into categories: of course US rank of top, except for Cyber Espionage operations, which privilege multiple countries.
Instead, the Trend of Attacks chart shows an overall high level of activity throughout the month, with a prominent peak around the 9th, corresponding to the spree of attacks between India and Pakistan.
As usual Cyber Crime leads the Motivations Behind Attacks chart with nearly 60% (10 points below the previous month, but always at a remarkable level). Cyber Espionage jumps at number two with a new record (17.2%). Hacktivism ranks at number three with a “modest” 13.8%. You will notice also a small presence of attacks related to Cyber War (9.2%). I decided to classify in this group the events behind India and Pakistan and an alleged (unconfirmed) attack to the Warsaw Stock Exchange, for which an hacker affiliated to IS claimed responsibility.
And for the first time after so many months, SQL Injection leads the Attack Techniqueschart with 18.4%. Particularly important is also the 13.8% of targeted attacks, which steadily places this category at the third place. On the opposite site, the number of DDoS attacks is constantly decreasing, and this explains its “miserable” 3.4%. I do not remember such a low level for this category.
Again, for the second month in a row, industry ranks on top of the Distribution of TargetsChart (28.7%), nearly 7 points ahead of governmental targets (21.8%). Attacks against single individuals are the new entry at number three (10.3%), slightly ahead of organizations (9.2%).
A deeper look at the distribution of the industrial targets, shows a predominance of E-Commerce (24%), while, as it often happens, political parties lead the chart of the Organizations.
As usual, the sample must be taken very carefully since it refers only to discovered attacks included in my timelines. The sample does not pretend to be exhaustive but only aims to provide an high level overview of the “cyber landscape”, or at least of the ones that gained space in the media (yes, using an abused expression this is just the tip of the Iceberg).
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, 2013 and now 2014 (regularly updated). You may also want to have a look at the Cyber Attack Statistics.
Of course follow @paulsparrows on Twitter for the latest updates, and feel free to submit remarkable incidents that in your opinion deserve to be included in the timelines (and charts).
July 2: the video game developer warns 58 million users that an intruder gained illegal access to some of its online systems, illegally accessing data from the account database, including user names, email addresses and encrypted passwords.
December 16: Hurriyet News reports that Russian hackers were able to obtain 54 million Turkish citizens’ ID data. The Turkey’s Supreme Election Committee initially shared the data with Political Parties, who kept the information in insecure websites, where it was easily accessed.
March 2: Evernote’s Operations & Security team discovers suspicious activity that appears to have been a coordinated attempt to access secure areas of the Evernote Service. As a precaution a massive password reset is implemented for 50 million users.
April 26: LivingSocial suffers a massive cyber attack on its computer systems, resulting in “unauthorized access to some customer data from our servers”. The hack affects customer names, emails, birthdates and encrypted passwords and impacts 50 million customers.
November 20: Brian Krebs reveals that an intrusion at online dating service Cupid Media earlier this year exposed more than 42 million consumer records, including names, email addresses, unencrypted passwords and birthdays.
December 19: Target Corp. confirms an unauthorized access to payment card data that may have impacted customers making credit and debit card purchases in its U.S. stores. Approximately 40 million credit and debit card accounts may have been impacted between Nov. 27 and Dec. 15, 2013.
October 3: Adobe announces a massive breach affecting customer IDs and encrypted passwords for 2.9 million customers (initially). The real extent of the breach is
May 18: Yahoo! Japan Corp. warns its 22 million users to change their passwords after the detection of an unauthorized attempt to access the administrative systems.
December 9: unknown hackers leak a database of an estimated 20 millionhotel reservations on multiple websites and even on WeChat, the popular messaging service.
May 28: Groupon Taiwan reveals to have suffered a cyber attack compromising usernames and passwords of its 4.1 million registered users. Apparently, the intruders did not access credit cards and financial details
December 1: the Maricopa County Community College District notifies, after seven months, 2.4 million students and employees that their academic or personal data were compromised in an April security breach.
September 12: personal details of more than 2 million customers of Vodafone Germany are stolen from an Internal Database. Data includes names, addresses, bank account numbers and birth dates.
July 20: E-mail addresses, user names, and password data for every registered user of the Ubuntu Forums, estimated to be 1.82 millionaccounts, are exposed in a security breach after a hacker managed to gain administrative access to the back-end servers.
May 9: the Washington State Administrative Office of the Courts (courts.wa.gov) was hacked sometime between September 2012 and February 2013, and up to 160,000 SSN and 1 million driver’s license numbers may have been accessed during the data breach.
May 29: passwords for almost 1 million accounts on the Drupal.org website are reset after hackers gained unauthorized access to sensitive user data exploiting vulnerability in an undisclosed third-party application.
November 15: vBulletin.com notifies the registered users to change their password as a consequence of a sophisticated cyber attack, allowing the attackers to access customer IDs and encrypted passwords of 860,000individuals.
