In two apparently unrelated incidents, Rheinmetall and Defence Construction Canada sustained attacks on their IT infrastructure. In Rheinmetall's case the attack, whose precise nature the company didn't specify, disrupted automotive production in Brazil, Mexico, and the US. Defence Construction Canada has been able to maintain operations in the face of what the Ottawa Sun reports may have been a ransomware attack.

SRLabs says it's developed a way of determining whether devices are vulnerable to SimJacker and similar exploits.

Police in the German Land of Rhein-Pfalz have raided and shutdown a bulletproof-hosting data center in Traben-Trarbach, the AP reports. The action crossed both Land and international boundaries, with arrests near Frankfurt and other police action in the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Poland. The data center, located in a surplus NATO facility acquired by a Dutch national in 2013, is thought to have been involved in both contraband markets and in the 2016 distributed denial-of-service attack on Deutsche Telekom.

Gnosticplayers may be back. Online game company Zynga disclosed a breach on September 12th, and now the Hacker News says that Gnosticplayers (a nom de hack) claims he (she? they?) has counted coup against Zynga, gaining access to some 218 million Words with Friends accounts. Gnosticplayers is neither a greyhat nor a gadfly. Earlier this year he gained notoriety for offering 747 million records culled from twenty-four popular sites.

A snail-mail letter purporting to be from Her Majesty's household asks recipients to help Queen Elizabeth save Britain's economy from Brexit (with Bitcoin, of course).