Cyberattacks against Iran? Trickbot goes to Pyongyang. UK election disinformation. Cryptowars. Ransomware, again.

Today's issue includes events affecting Canada, China, European Union, Iran, Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, Nigeria, Poland, Russia, United Kingdom, and United States.

Bring your own context.

An attack on online gaming, that's no big deal, right? Who cares if Junior has trouble with whatever first-person shooter he's currently obsessed with? Actually, maybe an attack is more feature than bug...well, not so fast.

"As silly as that sounds, it can actually cause quite a few problems, in particular because the devices that they target – typically the only time an organization becomes aware that their routers have been compromised is when someone else lets them know. Say their provider or someone that's actually being attacked says we're getting all of this malicious traffic coming from your network space. So it can cause issues both for the brand – if they're, you know, the company where the routers got compromised, and they're being perceived as doing some sort of attack, which they actually aren't doing. That can cause problems. And also it can degrade network functionality as well. So it can cause a lot of problems for organizations where it will slow a network down to the point where it can be unusable. So these things sometimes seem more almost like a nuisance kind of attack more than anything else, but they can have real world important kind of consequences."

—Jen Miller-Osborn, Deputy Director of Threat Intelligence for Unit 42 at Palo Alto Networks, on the CyberWire's Research Saturday, 12.7.19.

So, home or business owner, you may not be interested in the games, but the games are interested in you. At least when they've been hacked.