An increasing operational tempo in international cyber conflict induces some observers to see the beginning of a new Cold War. Poland sees an uptick in attacks on that country's sites that have some connection with US-Polish combined operations. Nor are smaller countries immune: Luxembourg reports seeing more attacks by state-sponsored actors.

If this is indeed a new Cold War, cyber operations' low barriers to entry and the disparate national interests in play make Cold War Two much more multipolar than the original was. (See the US indictment of FSB officers in the Yahoo! hack, but see also recent Turkish operations against sites in the Netherlands and Germany.) One similarity a new Cold War seems to bear to the old one: much of the chill is manifest in propaganda (now called "information operations"). One difference may be the convergence of information operations with covert and clandestine work.

A Washington Post op-ed looks at WikiLeaks' Vault 7 and believes it discerns the root cause of the US Intelligence Community's security problems—too many contractors—but exactly how this amounts to a weakness in practice isn't really specified.

Turning to cyber crime, the popular quiz app Wishbone has sustained a breach. 2.2 million email addresses and 287 thousand mobile numbers, many if not most of them belonging to teenagers, have turned up for sale in dark web souks.

Morphisec believes it's traced recent infestations of flieless malware to a common threat actor.

Palo Alto researchers see NexusLogger, a cloud-based criminal keylogger, taking growing black marketshare.