This morning the US Justice Department unsealed yesterday’s indictment of two Chinese hackers, Zhu Hua and Zhang Shilong, whom it connected with a long-running, extensive campaign by China’s Ministry of State Security to steal intellectual property from at least twelve countries. Initial reactions regard the indictment as containing damning accusations against Beijing, especially long-standing and systematic violation of that government’s undertakings to restrain itself with respect to industrial espionage (TechCrunch). 

The condemnation appears to be international: the US is expected to be joined by the UK, Australia, Canada, Japan and Germany, at least, in an announcement of unspecified joint action against Chinese cyber espionage (Washington Post).

China remains under suspicion of being responsible for the breach of EU diplomatic cables. Beijing denies responsibility (Computing).

Twitter observed a large volume of unusual traffic to its customer support site early this week. The social media company thinks it might be receiving some unwanted attention from potential attackers in either Saudi Arabia or China. Still, the incident remains unclear (but clear enough for investors to shy away from the company’s stock) (CNBC).

Late yesterday Microsoft issued an out-of-band patch for an Internet Explorer vulnerability being actively exploited. It’s a remote code execution issue in the scripting engine’s handling of objects in memory.

Facebook is suffering from its long-running accretion of bad news. The access the New York Times reported Facebook granted partners may have been less nefarious than it sounded (Ars Technica), but a lot of people aren’t listening to exculpations anymore (WIRED).