SecureWorks has been tracking Fancy Bear's activity during the run-up to last year's US elections, and they've found that activity to have begun as early as March 2015, and to have prospected some 6730 people. While there was clearly a lot of interest in the US election, that was far from Fancy Bear's only interest. Targets are said (by Motherboard) to have included "members of the US military, diplomats all over the world, Russian government critics, Hillary Clinton campaign staffers, and even Hillary Clinton." It was a phishing campaign, thus typical of the commodity-level approach that continues to pay off well for espionage services. Only 2% of the marks took the phishbait, but when you've trolled through nearly 7000 accounts, 2% is enough. SecureWorks was able to get the details they did because FancyBear left its Bitly url-shortener accounts public.

Reports suggest the EU will soon mandate backdoors in encrypted comms, which seems in tension with stringent privacy protection.

The ISS 6.0 vulnerability is being actively exploited against Windows Server 2003. Windows Server 2003 is beyond its end-of-life (so no patch).

Researchers at Palo Alto Networks have found two remote access Trojans, Troichilus and MoonWind, in active use against utilities and other targets in Thailand.

Open-source developers using GitHub should beware: the Dimnie Trojan is there, and being used against them.

Gizmodo says it's found FBI Director Comey's Twitter account. (The Director's handle is an homage to theologian Reinhold Niebuhr; you'd think a Chicago man would have chosen Paul Tillich.)