Last week's announcement that the US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) had suffered a data breach dominates the news. The Government says the Einstein system's detection of the breach is a success; skeptics think that's like calling a smoke alarm "successful" if it goes off after the house burns down.
Other observers note Einstein's uneven deployment across Federal networks. OPM's CIO tells Politico "encryption and data obfuscating techniques 'are new capabilities that we're building into our databases.'" (Politico says compromised data were unencrypted.)
The scope of the breach appears greater than initially thought: background investigations going back thirty years, for example, seem to have been compromised.
How the attackers got in remains unclear, although phishing tops speculation. ThreatConnect and Crowdstrike are quick to see the signature of Deep Panda. (Noting among other giveaways the use of Avengers' themed names "Steve Rogers" and "Tony Stark," which strikes some as thin, easily spoofed evidence — still, many agree the perpetrators look like the same ones who popped Anthem.)
High on the list of conjectured objectives for the OPM breach is raw material for HUMINT recruiting. The Chinese government is being widely blamed, and naturally points out the inherent ambiguity of the evidence (to do otherwise would not only be diplomatically provocative, but would also break kayfabe).
Some call for an international law to govern espionage (without offering the slightest clue of how that might work).
Other stories worth attention cover Russian info ops against Ukraine, ISIS info ops against pretty much everyone else.