Officialdom may be slow to attribute recent politically-relevant hacks but Crowdstrike isn't: the company says Cozy Bear (Russia's FSB) is behind breaches at US think tanks studying Russia.
Russian intelligence services remain the leading suspects in last month's incursions into US voting databases, but Russia Today pooh-poohs evidence ThreatConnect, Fidelis, Crowdstrike, and SecureWorks offered as a whole lot of nothing. Few are convinced, but in fairness (and as usual) the evidence remains largely circumstantial. (A bonus—Foreign Policy runs the best stock picture of a hacker ever. It's got a kid's wading pool, a beach chair, a cheap tent, a huge laptop, a MiG 21, and a guy who's shirtless instead of be-hoodied. A nogoodnik if ever we've seen one.)
There is general consensus that US elections are vulnerable to disruption. The Department of Homeland Security's "critical infrastructure" designation is being understood as offering the sort of security support DHS now provides Wall Street and the power grid, but accounts are scanty with respect to details.)
The Dropbox breach is now thought to affect sixty-eight million users. OneLogin has also sustained a breach: customers' unencrypted Secure Notes are exposed.
Dr. Web warns that the Mutabaha Trojan is impersonating Chrome in the wild. ESET finds OSX/Keydnap, which steals OSX Keychain data and installs a backdoor, spreading via the Transmission BitTorrent client application.
A new ransomware strain AVG discovered—"Fantom"—infects by posing as a Windows update. Another strain—this a Locky variant—spreads as an email with the subject "Transaction Details."