Various cyber espionage campaigns appear, several of them centered on the Middle East. A flaw in shareware file archiver and data compression utility WinRAR is reportedly being exploited against government and industry enterprises. Symantec finds njRAT spreading from the Middle East, used for hacktivism, information theft, and botnet building. Most of its command-and-control servers are located in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, the Palestinian Territories and Libya.

Trend Micro warns of "Farheit," a Windows Trojan that also serves as a channel for Zeus infections and Cribit ransomware.

ESET continues to track "Windigo," the rapidly spreading and spam-generating malware campaign, and appeals to Unix users for help running it to ground.

Websense, in its periodic report on cyber black markets, notes (again) the features they share with legitimate markets, including cost-conscious buyers. That said, economic rationality doesn't imply diligence or genius: F-Secure's bloggers point out (we paraphrase) that cyber crooks remain lazy, opportunistic losers: they generally target businesses for relatively unprotected money exposed in cyberspace.

Bad news for Texans and Californians who like wine: their liquor stores suffer data breaches.

Apple upgrades Safari security.

Arms control mavens tackle the familiar dual-use problem, now in cyberspace.

US Director of National Intelligence Clapper responds to a Senate inquiry with acknowledgement that the Intelligence Community has engaged in warrantless electronic surveillance.

The US Department of Justice looks for easier ways of getting electronic surveillance warrants.

Google seeks to convince the US Supreme Court that packet-sniffing from unprotected Wi-Fi sources is already legal.