North Korea, its economy hard-hit by international sanctions, continues to find income through cybercrime. BAE researchers attribute a recent theft of $60 million from Taiwan's Far Eastern International Bank to the DPRK's Lazarus Group, the same outfit thought responsible for 2016's illicit funds transfer from the Bangladesh Bank. As they did in the 2016 robbery, the thieves exploited the SWIFT international money transfer system. How they did so isn't yet fully understood, but it appears that a ransomware attack may have functioned as misdirection.

The Magnitude exploit kit is currently active distributing Maniber ransomware to South Korean targets. The vector is malvertising.

Some security researchers argue it's IEEE's fault that the WPA2 wi-fi protocol proved vulnerable to KRACK attacks. IEEE standards, they say, aren't generally open to inspection and vetting by security researchers who might be able to discern flaws earlier. "IEEE working groups are a closed industry process," Johns Hopkins cryptographer Matthew Green told WIRED.

Cybercriminals follow a Willy-Suttonesque path of least resistance to where the money is. That path right now seems to lead to cryptocurrency mining. Some of the criminals seem garrulous and careless, and likely to receive a sabbatical courtesy of various police agencies. Bleeping Computer describes one such, a Russian-speaking hood whose nom de hack is 0pc0d3r. He's installing Monero miners via Grand Theft Auto gaming mods, and he can't seem to shut up about what he's up to.

Oracle's quarterly patch addresses 250 bugs. Other notable patches are out from BlackBerry, Lenovo, and PeopleSoft.