The US Government has "shut-down" over its ongoing budgetary impasse. What this means for cyber security is discussed below. One thing is clear: those aspects of information security that depend heavily upon labor will be stressed for the duration of the shutdown.

AnonGhost hacks Israel Product Research Company, a firm specializing in crowd control and police technology. The Syrian Electronic Army resurfaces in attacks on GlobalPost's Website and Twitter feed.

Symantec sinkholed as much of the ZeroAccess botnet as it could reach, but the botnet's peer-to-peer command-and-control architecture enabled it to escape destruction. It's expected to return slowly to business as usual.

The Proxy.sh VPN provider's customers are disturbed by the service's announcement that it had begun sniffing traffic on one of its US servers to catch "an alleged hacker."

The Internet Storm Center reports seeing shortened urls in tweets that lead to malware-infected sites. Chokepoint warns against unverified SSL. Fort Disco malware, seen in brute-force attacks on WordPress credentials, has been observed targeting email and FTP servers. (Why, by the way, is WordPress such a popular target? Because many users have old, unpatched versions installed.)

SSNDOB, which compromised knowledge-based authentication via attacks on major data brokers, has been detected inside into the National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C). NW3C is a congressionally funded US not-for-profit supporting anti-cybercrime operations.

An NYU-Poly study claims to have identified personality traits associated with susceptibility to phishing.

Congress has, for now, other fish to fry, but the European Parliament continues its investigation of "PRISM."