One of the stories that I wrote this week for SiliconANGLE is chronicling the start of the Israeli/Hamas war. As many of you know, my daughter has been living there for several years, finding her husband and now has two small boys. The horrors of this catastrophe are too much for me to describe. My story is about the cyber dimension of the war, and what we know so far in terms of hacking attempts on various institutions. For those of you interested, I have begun writing my thoughts about what is happening to my family there and sending them out via email, LMK if you would like to see these remarks.

Today’s story is about the hopeful demise of Microsoft’s NTLM protocol. Well, sort of. Microsoft has been trying — not too hard — to rid itself of this protocol for decades. Many IT managers probably weren’t born when it was invented back in the 1980s, and few of them even remember when it ran on their networks.

I have written several times about the hackers behind the Magecart malware, which is used to compromise ecommerce servers, such as from Woo Commerce and Magento. This week’s story is about how the latest versions conceal the code inside a web 404 status page. Talk about hiding in plain sight. Most of us — probably all of us — haven’t given a 404 page much second thought, but maybe now you will.

This week also saw a new uptick in DDoS threats that have been observed by several of the major online operators. What is particularly troubling is that this botnet isn’t all that big — maybe 20,000 endpoints — yet is amplifying and generating enormous traffic loads, in some case more than a fifth of a normal’s day in web traffic. I write about how they happen with a new type of threat called rapid reset, based on the HTTP/2 protocol.

Finally, one more chilling story about a new type of spyware called Predator. It is another multinational journalistic endeavor that has simillarities to the Pegasus files from 2021. What makes this spyware lethal is that you don’t have to click on it to activate it, and how pervasive it has been seen across the planet.

Thanks for reading my work, and stay safe out there.