Various hacktivist groups promised major attacks on the anniversary of 9/11 (and spare a thought or a prayer for those who suffered then or since) but so far little has surfaced beyond minor vandalism and unsubstantiated claims of success. Similarly with respect to Syria: FOS TV's Hootsuite account was breached by the SEA, and warnings of Assad cyber-retaliation for punitive strikes are discussed in the US Congress, but there's little serious (or new) as of this writing.

Still, the calendar can inform one's calculation of cyber risk—Radware, for one, divides significant dates into the "ideological" and "business-relevant"—and other experts advise how to prepare networks for risky days.

A North Korean APT ("Kimsuky") is targeting South Korean industrial and think-tank networks. It seems cobbled together from various special-purpose components (some with Bulgarian traces) and designed to bypass Ahn Labs firewalls; its mode of transmission remains unclear.

Intego reports that the long-quiescent Tibet malware family has reappeared, now targeting OS X. A service hosting malicious Java applets (favored by lower-end hackers) is detected in the wild. Trend Micro sees an increase in attacks against both unpatched (and no longer supported) Java 6 and—more troubling—the Java Native Layer.

Microsoft, BlackBerry, and Adobe issued critical patches yesterday.

In the US, NIST denies it permitted backdoors in encryption standards. The DNI declassifies a large tranche of documents pertaining to electronic surveillance, some of which indicate that the complexity of NSA's seriously intended privacy safeguards rendered their implementation less effective than wished.