Coyness about attributing ongoing cyber campaigns to the Russian government largely disappears as researchers release more evidence of cyber espionage directed at NATO, the Near Abroad, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The threat actors, called "APT28," are described as displaying unusual patience, stealth, and sophistication. The US White House, for example, has disclosed that an unclassified Executive Office of the President network sustained an intrusion ("activity of concern," the White House calls it) from Russian actors. Reports say "an ally" alerted the US Government to the intrusion within the last two weeks.
China's "Operation SMN" cyber espionage campaign remains under scrutiny. A coalition of security companies (Novetta, Cisco Systems, Microsoft, FireEye, F-Secure, iSight Partners, Symantec, Tenable Network Security, ThreatConnect, ThreatTrack Security and Volexity) collaborated to respond to the attacks. Some indication of success appears in reports of the coalition's having cleaned some 43,000 infections.
Exploitation of Shellshock in mail transport agents appears to pose a greater threat to small than to large enterprises.
Four distinct watering hole attacks are found to be dropping variants of the ScanBox keylogger.
US-CERT issues new warnings that the Dyre banking malware is spreading rapidly.
BlackEnergy crimeware has been found in US industrial control systems.
Observers look at international competition and unsurprisingly conclude, pace Henry Stimson, that reading other gentlemen's mail is a permanent feature of the world system. Leaders of the US Intelligence Community, notably DCI Clapper and NSA Director Rogers, talk about how they see their organizations serving in that world.