2013 has begun quietly, at least from a cyber perspective. Its biggest news so far involves the brinksmanship at the edge of the US "fiscal cliff," a fall over which seems to have been averted by a late-night compromise yesterday.

Whatever else the New Year may bring, it has not yet brought relaxed cyber relations between the US and Iran. PolicyMic regards those tensions as amounting to full-scale cyber war as Al Arabiya has details of Iran's cyber warfare exercises.

The Gauss banking Trojan (bracketed last year with Flame and Stuxnet as state-sponsored malware targeted against Middle Eastern enterprises) is noted for its sophisticated encryption scheme, but Kaspersky reports that scheme may soon be broken.

Kroll warns against "vampire data," data that reside in a corner of an enterprise, vulnerable but largely forgotten. Relatively easily compromised, vampire data can, Kroll breathlessly warns, return to "drain the life from an organization." Still, the vulnerability is a real one, as the US Army's Communication and Electronics Command's recent loss of old Fort Monmouth data attests.

Microsoft has issued a fix for the Internet Explorer vulnerability discovered (and exploited) late last week.

Eugene Kaspersky made Wired's list of the world's fifteen most dangerous people, largely on the strength of his alleged connections with Russia's FSB, but also for his firm's exposure of Flame and Gauss.

PricewaterhouseCoopers expects to see a wave of divestitures in the tech sector as companies concentrate on core capabilities and exploit savings made possible by migration to cloud services.