The US FBI and Department of Homeland Security warn that North Korea's government is responsible for a botnet ("Hidden Cobra") that's conducted distributed denial-of-service attacks against media, aerospace, infrastructure, and financial targets since 2009. US businesses appear to have received the most attention, but Hidden Cobra's hood is thought to cover the globe.
As the US Congress votes overwhelmingly to sanction Russia over its probes of US electoral machinery, historians and security experts point out that such activities, both black propaganda and election influence operations, are nothing new. War on the Rocks, for one, usefully traces their history back eight decades.
CrashOverride malware is receiving close attention at high levels of government and industry. Dragos analyzed CrashOverride from samples obtained during investigation of last winter's Ukrainian power grid hack. Related sectors are watching the electrical industry's response closely. DNG-ISAC and others suspect the malware may have implications for the natural gas industry as well.
Bitfinex, the world's largest Bitcoin exchange, began experiencing DDoS attacks Tuesday. They continued through yesterday, and the exchange seems not yet to have fully recovered.
A special Congressional election in the US state of Georgia draws attention to voting system security weaknesses. (Georgia is unlikely to be alone.)
Mozilla has patched thirty-two Firefox vulnerabilities.
In industry news, Microsoft confirmed last week that it was buying Hexadite; VentureBeat reports that Hexadite laid off most of its US-based workforce on the day of the announcement.
An unnamed company lost a 2014 court fight against expansive US FISA orders.