Some skids still at large who claim affiliation with Lizard Squad cozy up to the Cyber Caliphate with a weekend hack of Malaysia Airlines. Attackers deface webpages with both a chipper shout-out to ISIS and a cruel allusion to the loss of flights MH370 and MH17, then promise to release information they've gleaned from compromised servers.

Some think Lizard Squad and the Cyber Caliphate are the cyber arm of ISIS (which senior US officials have lately taken to calling, in an information operations riff, "Daesh"), but their activities seem more consistent with loosely coupled hacktivism than any effectively controlled or even committed movement.

ISIS/Daesh has attracted its own share of odium from the likes of Anonymous. Anonymous also promises to clean up the darknet with OpDeathEater — an exposure of pedophile networks. These raise policy issues worthy of consideration: cyber vigilantism, like the urge of banks to hack back against attackers, seems to arise in the perceived absence of effective action by authorities. (There's plenty of fear to go around, much of which is being carried out of Davos by Gulfstream.)

Those authorities (particularly in the US and UK) are working on policies to improve cyber security, but their efforts remain controversial. NSA reform and fear of over criminalization remain sticking points in US debate; the UK continues to worry encryption.

Several phishing scams and data compromises that are likely to lead to phishing have emerged recently: beware IRS and ATT emails.

Adobe patches the second Flash zero-day ahead of schedule.