The White House is reportedly moving swiftly forward with a plan to harden the security of the US power grid against hacking attacks. According to Bloomberg, the Biden administration has a plan to dramatically improve how power utilities defend themselves against attacks from countries considered to be adversaries in cyberspace – such as Russia, Iran, North Korea, and China.

As expected, the start of 2021 has seen unprecedented movement in the U.S. with 22 states introducing comprehensive privacy legislation and even more introducing specific-use legislation. To date, hundreds of privacy bills were introduced across the states; to give some perspective, more than 50 privacy bills were introduced in New York alone. Undoubtedly a hot topic, it seemed anyone with an idea for a privacy bill put it in writing and introduced it to their legislature.

AT&T Alien Labs closely monitors the evolution of crimeware such as the QakBot malware family and campaigns in connection with QakBot. The jointly coordinated takedown of the actors behind Emotet in late January has left a gap in the cybercrime landscape, which QakBot seems poised to fill.

If you’re responsible for a microservices app, you may be familiar with the idea of a “latency budget.” This is the maximum latency, measured as total request time, that you need for the app to work, in order to meet your SLAs and keep stakeholders happy. For a stock trading or financial services app, this budget might be the barest of microseconds.

Australia recently confirmed that a series of mobile phishing attacks were successfully executed on senior officials. According to The Sydney Morning Herald, the targets – which included Australia’s finance minister, health minister and ambassador to the U.S. – were sent messages asking them to validate new WhatsApp or Telegram accounts.