A ransomware attack darkened the video surveillance system of the District of Columbia's police department eight days before the presidential inauguration of Donald J. Trump. Video storage devices for 70 percent of the CCTV system reportedly were unable to record anything between Jan. 12 and Jan. 15, as police techies scrambled to combat malicious software found on 123 of 187 networked video recorders.

Microsoft has fortified the latest version of Windows to make it more secure than previous editions, but the strongest protections will be available only to those willing to pay a steep price for them. Windows 10 Anniversary Update has introduced many mitigation techniques in core Windows components and the Microsoft Edge browser, researchers Matt Oh and Elia Florio wrote in a blog post last week.

Las Vegas is arguably the gambling capital of the world, but it's also the king city for ransomware, based on recent research. Among the world's nations, the United States ranked highest in ransomware incidents, according to a Malwarebytes report on the prevalence and distribution of extortion apps. The area of the country that logged the most incidents was the Las Vegas-Henderson, Nevada, region.

Ransomware has become a gold mine for digital criminals. In the first three months of this year, electronic extortionists squeezed $209 million from victims desperate to recover their data after it was scrambled by the malicious software, based on FBI estimates. At that rate, ransomware could funnel as much as $1 billion into criminal coffers this year.

The DoJ on Monday released new details about the multinational takedown of Avalanche, a multimillion-dollar malware and money-laundering network, following a four-year probe led by German police and prosecutors. Assistant Attorney General Leslie R. Caldwell, Acting U.S. Attorney Soo C. Song and Assistant Director Scott S. Smith of the FBI's Cyber Division made the announcement in Pittsburgh.

More than 1 million Google accounts have been breached by Android malware dubbed "Gooligan," Check Point reported Wednesday. The malware roots infected devices and steals authentication tokens that can be used to access data from various Google apps including Gmail, Google Docs, G Suite and Google Drive. It potentially affects devices running Android 4 and 5.

Facebook has denied that its network and Messenger app were being used to spread ransomware to its users, contradicting the claims of a security firm. Two Check Point researchers last week reported they had discovered a new method for delivering malicious code to machines, which they dubbed "ImageGate." Threat actors had found a way to embed malicious code into an image, they said.

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Authority, or SF MTA, was hacked on Friday. "You Hacked, All Data Encrypted," was the message reportedly displayed on computer screens at the authority's stations throughout the city. "Contact for Key (cryptom27@yandex.com)ID:681 , Enter." Fare payment machines at underground stations were out of order, resulting in free rides.

Sites that repeatedly violate Google's safe browsing policies will be classified as repeat offenders, the company said. A small number of websites take corrective actions after Google displays alerts on their landing pages warning visitors that they're harmful. However, they typically revert to violating the policies after Google verifies that they're safe and removes the warnings.

It's widely known that human DNA evidence has had a major impact in the criminal justice system. Now another kind of DNA may have a similar impact in the fight to eradicate malicious software. Malware DNA, also known as "malware provenance," is the art and science of attributing elements of one object to another object. The technique has applications outside information security -- for example, in genetics, or to test the authorship of student papers.

Hackers last week launched DDoS attacks against both presidential candidates' campaign websites. The attacks were routed through HTTP Layer 7 of the OSI protocol. There were at least four 30-second attacks reported. "The websites were not penetrated by a cyberintrusion," said John Costello, a senior analyst at Flashpoint. The attackers were unsophisticated hackers and not a nation-state.

Internet bots have many useful online purposes, but they have a dark side, too, as three researchers demonstrated in their analysis of Twitter traffic during the first presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Bots are used to automate functions on the Net. For example, if you belong to several social networks, you could use a bot to post a photo to all of them at once.

Symantec on Tuesday reported on a malware campaign that has targeted financial organizations worldwide for the past 10 months. Dubbed "Trojan.Odinaff," it has infiltrated the banking, securities, trading and payroll sectors, as well as organizations that provide them with support services. Odinaff is used in the first stage of an attack, to get a foothold into a network.

The source code for Mirai, the malware behind the botnet that launched a massive attack on the Krebs on Security website -- the largest DDoS attack on record -- has been released in the wild, according to Brian Krebs. A hacker who goes by the handle "Anna-senpai," apparently because of increased scrutiny from the cybersec industry, last week announced the release on Hackforums, Krebs said.

Federal authorities have been investigating reports that hackers targeted the mobile phones of a handful of Democratic Party staffers. The news follows a series of breaches in recent months that revealed emails and other personal information of party staffers and other Democratic officials. The FBI has launched an investigation into the attacks, which may be linked to Russia.

It's no longer a question whether hackers will influence the 2016 U.S. elections -- only how much they'll be able to sway them. Leaked emails already have cost a Democratic Party chairperson her job, and the FBI last month issued a flash warning that foreign cyberadversaries had breached two state election databases. Those two states -- most likely Arizona and Illinois -- aren't alone.

Cisco has swung into action to combat a hacker group's exploitation of vulnerabilities in its firmware. The group, known as the "Shadow Brokers," released online malware and other exploits possibly stolen from the Equation Group, which is believed to have ties to the U.S. National Security Agency. Cisco earlier this month disclosed the vulnerability, even though patches were not yet ready.

The website of prominent security blogger Brian Krebs is back online this week after sustaining one of the largest distributed denial of service attacks in Internet history. DDoS attacks typically disrupt service at a website by flooding it with junk traffic. In this case, garbage traffic assaulted Krebs' site at 620 gigabits per second. By comparison, consumer bandwidth is in the 10-15 megabit per second range; businesses, 100 Mbps to 1 Gbps.

Dirty tricks during political campaigns are nothing new, but the Internet and the proliferation of mobile devices have allowed tricksters to up their games a notch. It came to light last week, for example, that Donald Trump's campaign app was hoovering the address books on his supporters' phones. Trump's app wasn't doing anything illegal. It wasn't even trying to hide what it was doing.

Apple on Thursday issued a patch that addresses three recently discovered critical iOS zero-day vulnerabilities, and advised users to update their systems immediately. State-sponsored actors exploited the flaws to target United Arab Emirates human rights defender Ahmed Mansoor, and a Mexican journalist who reported on government corruption. Researchers have dubbed the flaws "Trident."

Symantec and Kaspersky Lab last week separately announced the discovery of a highly sophisticated APT that had eluded security researchers for at least five years. A previously unknown group called "Strider" has been using Remsec, an advanced tool that seems to be designed primarily for spying. Its code contains a reference to Sauron, the main villain in The Lord of the Rings.

Russia's FSB recently reported that it found a cyberspying virus in the computer networks of more than 20 state authorities and defense contractors. The claim that malware has infected various government and defense companies came in the midst of a flurry of accusations that Russia has engaged in cyberattacks against U.S. targets in an effort to impact the presidential election.

Four newly identified vulnerabilities could affect 900 million Android devices, Check Point researchers disclosed. The vulnerabilities, which the researchers dubbed "QuadRooter," affect Android devices that use Qualcomm chipsets. They exist in the chipset software drivers. The drivers, which control communications between chipset components, are incorporated into Android builds.

"Patch your systems in a timely manner" is a mantra of security experts, but what happens when the patch well runs dry because a product's maker no longer supports it? That is a situation facing many large enterprises, and it's one that poses security risks. Between 30 percent and 50 percent of the hardware and software assets in the average large enterprise have reached their end-of-life date.

Ransomware has become a scourge on the Internet -- but two information security companies, along with a pair of law enforcement agencies, this week launched an initiative to do something about it. No More Ransom is the centerpiece of a collaborative effort involving Kapersky Lab, Intel Security, the Dutch National Police and Europol. The new portal aims to educate the public about ransomware.

Ransomware infections are on the rise, and healthcare organizations are ripe targets, which may be why the federal government addressed the subject last week. Ransomware attacks have risen from about 1,000 a day last year to 4,000 a day this year, Symantec has reported. Many of those attacks are for small change, but some of the larger ones have been directed at healthcare providers.

Though quick to capitalize on connected health devices and the coming Internet of Medical Things, hardware manufacturers may be moving too slowly when it comes to building the necessary protections into the back end. The National Security Agency last month told participants in a defense technology summit in Washington that it was looking into hacking connected medical devices.

The number of mobile ransomware victims across the globe has increased fourfold compared to a year ago, suggests a Kaspersky Lab report. Kaspersky software protected 136,532 users targeted by ransomware from April 2015 to March 2016 -- up from 35,413. "The growth curve may be less than that seen for PC ransomware, but it is still significant enough to confirm a worrying trend," the report notes.

More than 85 million Android devices worldwide have been taken over by the Yingmob, a group of China-based cybercriminals who created the HummingBad malware, according to Check Point. HummingBad establishes a persistent rootkit on Android devices, generates fraudulent ad revenue, and installs additional fraudulent apps. HummingBad reportedly has been generating revenue of $300,000 a month.

If crime doesn't pay, Russian ransomware bosses wouldn't know it. The average Russian ransomware boss makes $90,000 a year -- or 13 times the average income for citizens in the country who stick to the "straight and narrow," according to a recent Flashpoint study. What does a ransomware honcho do for those rubles? Basically, the job calls for supporting and maintaining the malware.