The US midterms are over, with (as the Wall Street Journal puts it) “no significant foreign influence seen” by either officials or private companies watching the vote for cyberattacks. There were, of course, various ongoing influence operations spotted, but that sort of operation amounts to a new normal and can be expected to continue post-election. 

Some of that disinformation will seek to shake confidence that the election was fairly conducted, as the US Department of Homeland Security emphasized in press briefings yesterday. All that matters to the adversaries is creating an impression that the vote was untrustworthy, as the Washington Post sums up DHS’s advice.

Facebook confirmed to TechCrunch that accounts the social network suspended this week were connected to Russian operators.

The apparent lack of hacking proper may remind older observers of what happened—for the most part nothing, really—at the end of the Y2K panic. But it’s also likely that, as Fifth Domain reflects, that the relatively smooth election was the result of some intelligent preparation over the past two years.

Those interested in nation-state threat actors and what might be expected of them may consult Nextgov’s account of China’s long game, Meduza’s guide to Russia’s GRU, and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ outline of Iran’s “cyber-enabled economic warfare.”

The Apache Software Foundations urges users of Struts 2.3.36 to update the Commons FileUpload library to avoid a remote-code execution flaw.

Trend Micro warns that a fake-banking app in Google Play is appearing in Spanish-language smishing attacks.