Yesterday the US Departments of Justice, Defense, and Homeland Security joined the Director of National Intelligence, the FBI, NSA, and CISA to reassure Congress and the public that "unprecedented" security measures were in place to protect US elections. Some of those measures were on display in yesterday's off-off-year elections some states held.

FireEye CEO Kevin Mandia told CNBC's Mad Money that the biggest problem with election security isn't hacked voting machines, but rather misinformation disseminated over social media. Vice reports that disinformation relative to the 2020 elections is already flooding social media, and a study by Freedom House concludes that social media have increasingly become tools of influence operations and social control exercised by illiberal governments.

Not all politically themed campaigns are necessarily concerned with politics. Cisco's Talos unit describes how criminals use political phishbait in ransomware, scareware, and other attacks.

Kaspersky yesterday published a study of a hitherto unremarked APT, "DarkUniverse," which operated quietly between 2009 and 2017. The researchers see links between DarkUniverse and script found in the ShadowBrokers' 2017 "Lost in Translation" leak.

Facebook, which has been working to rein in developers' access to data, has found that an oversight in its Groups App gave video-streaming and social-media-management app developers access to private group member data like names and profile pictures.

Nikkei America, the New York-based subsidiary of Japan's Nikkei media group, acknowledged late last week that it had acted on instructions received in a business email compromise scam to transfer $29 million to a fraudster account.