A branch of al Qaeda—the Caucasus Emirate—takes the field in Syria and seeks to rival ISIS with online videos. The US continues to work toward fulfilling its promise to take the fight to ISIS in cyberspace, and quiet conversations with tech companies on potential contributions to information operations continue.

360 SkyEye Labs says that a threat actor they're calling "OnionDog" has been stealing information from the "energy, transportation and other infrastructure industries of Korean-language countries." There's no attribution, but some of the command-and-control appears to be located in the Republic of Korea itself.

Defense One looks at December's Ukraine grid hack and sees it as connected with Russian incursions into Crimea: if the territory seized got its power from Russia as opposed to Ukraine, that would help Russia consolidate its hold.

The Mac ransomware KeRanger has been assessed, by Bitdefender and others, as a variant of Linux Encoder, malware identified by Dr. Web last November.

Children's toys and games continue to be vulnerable points-of-entry into home networks and families' lives. The Wi-Fi enabled toy LeapFrog appears susceptible to attacks that leverage Adobe Flash weaknesses. And parents are advised not to let children download mods or add-ons for Minecraft, especially when offered by third-parties.

Cothority, a project working toward preventing backdoored software updates, has offered to help Apple ensure, by decentralizing the signing process, that backdoors installed in response to secret court orders would become public.

Apple warns that opening the jihadist's phone would cause it to fall behind in the "arms race" with hackers.