Surveillance and information operations continue respectively to reveal and spin the current state of Russia's slow re-engorgement of Ukraine. A Russian artillerist's Vkontakte posts demonstrate how difficult controlling information can be, even in military units: "All night we pounded Ukraine," he writes, sharing pictures of his battery firing from Russian territory. And these don't seem the posts of some dissident, but rather the happy over-sharing of a proud (if simple) soldier. This suggests the current futility of traditional censorship, whether it take the form of an MVD RFP for Tor anonymity-breaching technology (Snowden take note) or Iraqi net filtering (driving people to Firechat). Throw in a Florida State University demo of how easy it is to geolocate people's pets ("cat-stalking," Naked Security calls it) and one is reluctantly moved to skepticism concerning privacy, too.

Researchers track ransomware's evolution into more sophisticated forms. Some moderately good news on this front, however, comes from Sophos, which offers a guide to getting out from under the "FBI Lock" ransomware without paying off the hoods.

Observers watch for signs of negative market reaction to the European Central Bank hack. Others note this extortion attempt provides an object lesson in the risk the compromise of even a low-level database carries.

The Emmental banking malware campaign exploits two-factor authentication, intercepting session tokens transmitted to users by SMS.

The MailPoet WordPress plug-in, still widely unpatched, is still widely exploited.

Data breaches prove costly: Sony settles for $15M; the University of Maryland pays $2.6M for victims' credit monitoring.