ISIS/Daesh is said to have developed and issued its own homebrewed, secure Android messaging app.

We've seen much discussion of ISIS/Daesh information operations (their inspiration of the San Bernardino massacre is becoming clearer). But it's worth remembering that Daesh has at least one regional competitor — Syria's Assad regime — and that competitor is showing some online propaganda chops as well. Their principal social media mouthpiece is retailing familiar conspiracy-theory tropes: ISIS as US puppet, Holocaust denial, etc.

Facebook, Google, and Twitter step up their efforts to contain ISIS information operations, and the efforts are proving as problematic as the companies themselves have long predicted. Some potential models, however, have emerged, including earlier work against child pornography and online piracy.

Anonymous has declared this coming Friday "ISIS Trolling Day."

The Russian espionage-cum-criminal enterprise known variously as Pawn Storm, Sofacy, etc. resurfaces with some enhanced capabilities. The group made its name with intrusions into NATO targets (including the defense industry). This time around it's also going after Ukraine. Many note that Pawn Storm is "attacking air-gapped systems"; what this appears to mean is that it's using infected USB drives as vectors.

"Hacker Buba," as we now know the crook who's trying to extort some $3 million in Bitcoin from UAE banks, has begun to release some customer information. Both this form of direct blackmail and extortion by ransomware (as recently seen in new CryptoWall distributions) are on the rise.

Massacres in Paris and San Bernardino reignite crypto debates in France and the US.