June 2013 Cyber Attacks Statistics

Here we are with the statistics for the cyber attacks included in the June 2013 timelines (part I and part II). A priori this month should have been characterized by huge operations (such as the infamous OpPetrol), instead, all in all, the cyber activity was quite moderated as shown by the Daily Trend of Attack chart, that shows a single remarkable peak around the 3rd of July (when several primary DNS providers were the victims of DDoS attacks).

The Motivations Behind Attacks chart shows an evident predominance of Cyber Crime (with 62% of the occurrences). Please keep in mind that the stats cannot take into considerations all the attacks made under the umbrella of the so-called OpPetrol, since many attacks were considered fake or even old dumps “recycled” for this occasion. Without these attacks, hacktivism ranks at number two, well below, with the 26% of occurrences. It is also interesting the growing weight of cyber-espionage, with an 8% substantially in line with the 9% of the previous month.

The Distribution of Attack Techniques chart is substantially in line with the previous month: SQLi leads the chart with nearly one third of the known occurrences, while DDoS ranks at number three with nearly 15%. A factor particular interesting in this chart is the growing influence of targeted attacks (11.1%) at the third rank among the known attacks, and fourth rank in general since in many cases (18.5%) it was not possible to detect the attack technique used.

The Distribution of Target chart confirms the industry sector on top of the unwelcome attentions of the cybercrooks, immediately followed by governmental targets and essentially in line with the previous month. The news sector ranks at number three, immediately before Internet Services (as a consequence of the uncommon number of attacks reported against DNS Providers).

As usual, please bear in mind that 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”.

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 and now 2013 (regularly updated). You may also want to have a look at the Cyber Attack Statistics, and follow @paulsparrows on Twitter for the latest updates.