Summary:
Aiming to address worries that popular apps like TikTok and WeChat could harvest personal information of US citizens for nefarious uses in China, the Department of Commerce issued recommendations aimed at protecting such data without a full-out ban on foreign apps. The previous administration had tried to ban TikTok and WeChat from online app stores.

Summary:
Somehow the governor of Missouri decided that base64 encoding is an encryption method, and that led him to threaten legal action against the press for finding that his state had exposed private information of the state's teachers. The journalist who was behind this dastardly decoding of 3 SSNs on a state website had immediately reported the problem to the state. Of course, the state then had to do the embarrassing thing of telling the teachers that their private information had been exposed. The governor decided that the best apology is a broadside, so he condemned all parties involved in helping the state recognize a serious problem. Surprisingly, Cybersecurity Guide notes that Missouri has a "wealth of cybersecurity educational opportunities" and that Missouri University of Science and Technology is "recognized by the NSA for ... excellence".

Missouri follow-up
Nov. 10, 2021, State of Missouri statement re "Vulnerability Incident" admits some culpability re mishandling private information.

Summary:
A fake email emanating from an FBI server caused some worry about the integrity of the agency's infrastructure on November 13, but by the next day the problem was explained away. The server was dedicated to forwarding FBI notifications to state and local law enforcement, and its configueration was quickly changed to eliminate the misuse.

Summary:
Microsoft's Azure cloud service features a database service named Cosmos DB. Many Fortune 500 companies, and others, use this tool for large-scale data management tasks that underlie their critical operations. So a bug that reveals the passwords for Cosmos DB users would be a Big Deal. But would Microsoft leave a gaping security hole like that in a flagship product? That's really unlikely. But that did happen when Microsoft developed a tool for Cosmos users that included an open-source web app for sharing live code. That app ran C# code as root. This was an astronomically large attack surface that was discovered by security researchers. They described the details recently at Black Hat Europe.