In Iraq's civil war, apparently all cyber conflict is local: Intel Crawler reports that groups fighting one another are using targeted malware — for the most part commodity tools readily available on the black market — for highly targeted intelligence gathering.

Russian authorities, having dismissed as hoaxes social media posts by Russian soldiers whooping up cross-border shelling of Ukrainian targets, now assert that US satellite imagery showing the same is another fraud.

In Israel and Gaza, Shin Bet claims to have parried a major cyber attack by Hamas supporters. Palestinian sympathizers claim they're winning the opinion war in social media.

China has been busy at cyber espionage. PLA Unit 61389 ("Comment Crew") has been spying on companies associated with Israel's Iron Dome anti-rocket system, and Canada's CSEC says the Chinese government hacked Canada's National Research Council (necessitating a prolonged cleanup).

These tensions, particularly those associated with Russian ambitions in the Near Abroad and the economic sanctions being considered in response, lead observers to regard recent probes of Western energy infrastructure as possible cyber battlespace preparation.

Kaspersky and other report the Amazon cloud is infested with denial-of-service bots that exploit Elasticsearch.

Bluebox Security announces discovery of an Android vulnerability — "Fake ID" — quietly disclosed to Google three months ago. Fake ID permits rogue apps to pose as Flash and escape Android's sandbox.

Ransomware, both old and new, remains endemic on the Internet.

Microsoft seems clearly in the Chinese government's crosshairs: this week's raids involved an anti-monopoly probe.

Cyber risk is increasingly an M&A dealbreaker.