The malware used against official sites of the PyeongChang Winter Olympics now has a name: "Olympic Destroyer." It's also said, by Cisco's Talos research unit, to share some code with NotPetya and BadRabbit, pseudoransomware strains famously used last year. The malware was apparently used with disruptive rather than financially motivated intent. The two usual suspects are Russia and North Korea, with more of the circumstantial evidence (and motive, and opportunity) pointing toward Russia. Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs is on the counter-messaging warpath, denouncing rumors of that country's involvement as nothing more than a CIA and NSA operation concocted with firms like ESET, ThreatConnect, and Trend Micro. Bratislava-based ESET is particularly mentioned in dispatches, and a Slovak-American plot against Russia would at least have the virtue of novelty. But ESET understandably and believably denies that any such thing is up, characterizing the charges as propagandistic hooey and misdirection.
North Korea may be posing as a global model citizen during the games, but its Lazarus Group has shown a new spurt of activity in its familiar specialty of cryptocurrency theft.
The hitherto little-known BitGrail cryptocurrency exchange says it's lost $195 million to hackers, but observers are skeptical.
Skype has been found to suffer from issues in its updater process that could grant an attacker system-level privileges through DLL hijacking. Microsoft won't patch it immediately: it's a tricky problem that will require significant reworking of Skype code.
Tomorrow is Valentine's Day. Experts caution the lovelorn against entrusting their hearts to the Internet.