Heritage assesses Iranian cyber attack intentions and capabilities.

Former DirNSA Hayden suggests a thought experiment. While hacktivists aren't equivalent to terrorists, consider an analogy: what target would be to hackers as the World Trade Center was to al Qaeda?

Baneki Privacy Labs and Cryptocloud back away from their claim that Tor anonymity was compromised through an NSA-run exploit. They conclude now that there's no solid evidence for attribution. In New Zealand, a professor calls on people to lead government surveillance services on a "merry dance" by flashmob versions of a mass Bayesian poisoning attack.

Netherlands DNS servers experience a fresh wave of hijacking, mostly to direct traffic to Blackhole. An obscure Kansas City subnet appears to be involved in snooping around Indian government and military sites. Other odd exploits include an apparently motiveless attack by Bangladeshi hackers on the Covina, California, police department, and Kosovo hacktivists' defacement of British UNESCO pages with anti-Serb diatribes.

Cisco TelePresence is found vulnerable to remote exploitation. A fresh entry to the black market, the "Hand of Thief" banking Trojan (now only $2000) attacks Linux but not Windows systems. Popular blogging platforms remain under brute force attack (the "Fort Disco" campaign).

Google sticks to its guns over Chrome password storage, and many observers agree—Google is "thinking like a security architect."

Forbes asks about power grid cyber vulnerability; Control coincidentally gives a partial answer.

Huawei pushes into the Western enterprise market. Chinese media high-five Putin for embarrassing the US over Snowden. NSA remains under scrutiny.