This is a great article, but this bit is particularly rich. Tyler Bass of Vice’s Motherboard reports the now well-known Petraeus affair with an elegant juxtaposition of facts:

“Oaths do matter,” David H. Petraeus, then C.I.A. director, said at the time. “And there are indeed consequences for those who believe they are above the laws that protect our fellow officers and enable American intelligence agencies to operate with the requisite degree of secrecy.”

Just weeks later, Petraeus would fall from grace after FBI agents, conducting a separate investigation, discovered emails that revealed an extramarital affair.

Oaths indeed.

Nate Anderson, at Ars Technica:

You will not be shocked to learn, dear reader, that McAfee’s massive spy operation didn’t just reveal some petty corruption or embarrassing secrets but rather the existence of a Hezbollah trafficking network that funneled 11 Lebanese men a month into America. And, of course, these were probably terrorists; one man had plans to make deadly ricin from plants being grown in a Nicaraguan training camp.

I would have linked directly to McAfee’s post in my headline, but as of this post’s publication the page throws an error that reads “Error 320 - Reverse BrowserSpy Java redirect - Session Username_: Session interrupt: invalid table.” Is he really logging our keys? Is he?

Crazy, crazy stuff.

Kim Zetter, writing at Wired:

The researchers don’t know if the attackers used the bank component in Gauss simply to spy on account transactions, or to steal money from targets. But given that the malware was almost certainly created by nation-state actors, its goal is likely not to steal for economic gain, but rather for counterintelligence purposes.

It’s worth thinking about: state-sponsored cyberespionage has been around for a while, but modern advancements in malware are giving such snooping tools a new level of automation and scale.

PS: I’m going to keep an eye on this story with the hopes that Kaspersky, the Russia-based security lab researching Gauss, eventually cracks the encryption on the mysterious payload.