Vladislav Surkov, the Putin consigliere who doesn't use email? He uses email. Several of the very large number of documents hacked and released by CyberHunta are confirmed as genuine; some of them indicate Russian government contingent plans to force a showdown over the Donbas as early as next month.

Meanwhile, Mr. Putin dismisses (widely believed, strongly supported) claims that Russia is meddling in US elections, accusing American officials of acting like a bunch from a Banana Republic (he has the dismissive stereotype of a small Central American government in mind, not the clothing retailer) trying to whip up "hysteria."

Mirai botnets are continuing spurts of activity against targets that strike observers as selected more-or-less randomly. Since Mirai's source code was released, Arbor Networks has been tracking its mutations. Hackers (dismissed by Motherboard as "wannabes") have been adding buggy features to that code.

The DDoS attacks against Dyn a week ago were very large, perhaps exceeding a terabyte per second. Various proposals for dealing with botnet-driven distributed denial-of-service attacks by ISPs include increased filtering and blocking (controversial because of the potential for censorship or other other misuse) and notification to customers of device compromise.

Some promising university research into ways of controlling the traffic amplification and reflection provided by blackmarket "booter" (or "stresser") services is out.

EnSilo reports finding a code-injection vulnerability affecting all Windows versions—they're calling it "AtomBombing."

RIG and Neutrino continue to distribute ransomware, respectively CrypMIC and Cerber.

The Australian Red Cross has suffered a major data breach.