Anonymous, having last week gone after North Korean sites, displays a lofty indifference to distinctions between the peninsula's two regimes by attacking Seoul's Korea Exchange Bank.
As Twitter extends its reach and influence, it becomes a more attractive target for hacktivists and cyber criminals. The Syrian Electronic Army continues to try to hijack Twitter accounts, and Trusteer reports finding financial fraud malware disseminated via tweet. (The Dutch especially are affected.) Kaspersky identifies botnets engaged in spamming via Twitter—these are easily detected and shut down, but unfortunately also easy to create, so volume is the criminals' business model.
An Android Trojan appears in Google Play, infecting millions of users. Russian authorities shut down a bank fraud scheme. BitCoin exchanges remain under denial-of-service attack. Portuguese and Brazilian hackers, united apparently by language, promise to attack Ecuadoran targets after their (allegedly) successful data theft capers in Hong Kong and Dubai. Data breaches compromise gamers' credentials.
Akamai, Verizon, Arbor Networks and Microsoft release threat trend studies. Among their conclusions: China leads the world as the source of 41% of global attack traffic (the US is a distant second at 13%), some 20% of data breaches are cyberespionage as opposed to cybercrime (China is—cautiously—held responsible for most), businesses of all kinds are subjected to cyber attack, and denial-of-service attacks are growing in size and speed.
China's Lenovo, undeterred by the prospect of US sanctions, considers buying IBM's server business. Hoping to reduce cyber tensions, the US and China hold high-level military talks.