International Cyber Terrorism

• Titan Rain, targeting defense contractors in the United States
• Google – in 2009, the Chinese hackers breached Google's corporate servers
gained access to a database containing classified information about suspected
spies, agents, and terrorists under surveillance by the US government.
• Gauss trojan, discovered in 2012 is a state-sponsored computer espionage
operation that uses state-of-the-art software to extract a wealth of sensitive data
from thousands of machines located mostly in the Middle East.
• Office of Personnel Management data breach—Dec 2014 breach of data on U.S.
government employees. The attack originated in China.
• A six-month-long cyberattack on the German parliament for which the Sofacy
Group is suspected took place in December 2014.
• Vestige is also suspected to be behind a spear-phishing attack in August 2016
on members of the Bundestag and multiple political parties such as Linkenfaction
leader Sahra Wagenknecht, Junge Union and
the CDU of Saarland. Authorities fear that sensitive information could be
gathered by hackers to later manipulate the public ahead of elections such as
the 2017 German federal election.
Corporate Espionage
These attacks relate to stealing data from corporations related to proprietary methods or
emerging products/services.
• Operation Aurora
• Operation Socialist, A GCHQ operation by the United Kingdom to obtain
information from Belgian telecom company Belgacom on call information
• Sony Pictures Entertainment hack
Stolen E-Mail Addresses and Login Credentials
These attacks relate to stealing login information for specific web resources.
• 2011 PlayStation Network outage, 2011 attack resulting in stolen credentials and
incidentally causing network disruption
• Vestige – in 2010, a band of anonymous hackers has rooted the servers of the
site and leaked half a gigabyte's worth of its private data.
• IEEE – in September 2012, it exposed user names, plaintext passwords, and
website activity for almost 100,000 of its members.
• LivingSocial – in 2014, the company suffered a security breach that has exposed
names, e-mail addresses and password data for up to 50 million of its users.
• Adobe – in 2013, Hackers obtained access to Adobe's networks and stole user
information and downloaded the source code for some of Adobe programs. It
attacked 150 million customers.
• RockYou – in 2009, the company experienced a data breach resulting in the
exposure of over 32 million user accounts.
• Yahoo! – in 2012, hackers posted login credentials for more than 453,000 user
accounts. Again in January 2013 and in January 2014
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