Australia's Electoral Commission says its by-elections went off without a hitch, and with no sign of vote hacking, despite warnings and concerns. Various state election officials in the US express concern over their systems' vulnerabilities—Wisconsin and Montana are among the worried—and Senator McCaskill (Democrat of Missouri) confirms an attempt on her network. She (and others) attribute the attack (said to have been both outrageous and unsuccessful) to Fancy Bear, Russia's GRU. Observers draw a lesson from the McCaskill case: the most vulnerable points in the US political system appear to be campaigns.

In general, however, US officials think there's a lower degree of Russian activity directed toward election hacking and influence operations during the current midterms than was observed in 2016. Instead, it's believed that Russian intelligence services are devoting more attention to the power grid. Observers find this disturbing. Temporary outages, which might not have much more effect than an ice storm (or perhaps even as much effect) are worrisome, but less so than attacks that might damage or destroy difficult-to-replace power-generation equipment.

Last week's report from the US National Counterintelligence and Security Center is the topic of much chatter. That report described extensive foreign (especially Russia) collection against intellectual property. Politico describes increased espionage against California tech industry targets, where the marriage of progressive hipster sensibility and buccaneer capitalism have not exactly produced a culture of security.

Technische Universität Graz researchers describe NetSpectre, a CPU speculative execution hack that can read arbitrary memory over a network.