ISIS murders, done for the benefit of the camera and widely disseminated online, may be the cruelest mode of information operations going. They may also be provoking a long-delayed backlash.

Ukraine's biometrics passports were produced by a company with apparently deep connections to Russian oligarchs, and that company probably has access to Ukrainians' personally identifying information. (A Radio Liberty reporter cheekily tweets a request for comment at Mr. Snowden.)

The US State Department's email is back up, amid unofficial notice that "incidents of concern" look like Russian cyber espionage, and amid widespread journalistic eyebrow-raising over the state of .gov cyber security.

Brian Krebs maps the Russian organized cyber crime landscape.

Germany's BfV chief warns that his country is actively targeted in cyberspace by state (especially Chinese and Russian) security services.

Cisco researchers dissect some recent steganographic cloaking of malware. Seculert finds increasingly sophisticated domain-generation algorithms, and Lookout warns that mobile botnets are growing more resilient. Blue Coat points out encryption's downside: "visibility voids." Bromium looks at crypto-ransomware.

Holiday shopping is upon us, and observers expect a rising tide of retail cyber crime. Cyactive points out new variants of Backoff point-of-sale malware. TrendLabs looks at point-of-sale scammers' toolkits.

Yesterday Microsoft issued a critical out-of-band patch of a Kerberos privilege escalation vulnerability.

Boeing may be shopping some of its cyber units.

Tor convinces many that de-anonymization is harder than researchers made it seem.

The Council on Foreign Relations sees declaring zero-day policy (note — declaration of policy, not zero-days themselves) as a confidence-builder.