Assad's Syrian Electronic Army has shifted its sights from media to chat and VOIP services, evidently in a move toward more effective surveillance and repression.

Emirati authorities coordinate a response to pro-Morsi hacktivism with the Egyptian government.

Compromise of French Webhost OVH has international repercussions (particularly in Canada). The commodification and de-skilling of crimeware proceeds apace, with a new banking Trojan ("KINS") on offer for $5k and a new botnet-setup-as-a-service available. KINS has the potential to displace Citadel from its place atop the bank fraud tool black market.

A malicious app targeting the Android "master key" vulnerability (discovered recently by Bluebox Security) has been found in the wild. The cross-platform Janicab Trojan affects both PCs and Macs. SIM card vulnerabilities are easily fixed, says Security Research Labs, but the problem matters nonetheless—a lot of appliances connect through problematic cheap mobile data modules.

OpUSA peters out into desultory cybervandalism, but researchers note it produced an increase in malicious DNS request traffic.

The cyber industry mulls Cisco's $2.7B acquisition of SourceFire. Analysts think it's the beginning of major consolidation, with IBM, Juniper, EMC, and Check Point named as likely buyers. Cash-flush big defense integrators like Lockheed Martin, BAE, and Northrop Grumman aren't mentioned (but should be).

The US executive and legislative branches square-off on surveillance, and the White House hangs surprisingly tough. New Zealand legally extends its own surveillance programs.

Lawyers and those who consume their services might look at two unrelated but interesting articles on Internet scraping and privacy policies.