--Long-term global cyberspying uncovered. McAfee issued a report that said it had identified a single perpetrator of cyberattacks that lasted up to five years on a wide range of governments, American corporations and even United Nations groups, and that the pattern of targets suggested the attacker was a "state actor." After blogging about "Operation Shady RAT," McAfee VP of Threat Research Dmitri Alperovitch was thronged by reporters. Alperovitch said the cyber-spying campaign was the "biggest transfer of wealth in terms of intellectual property in human history." Read more at and .

--New threat: Hacking batteries. Security researcher Charlie Miller demonstrated how he was able to completely control the microprocessor embedded in batteries used in Apple Macintosh laptops and then remove or bypass the built-in safeguards. He suggested it would be possible to overheat a battery and start a fire by convincing a controller that the battery was discharged, even though it was completely full, but said he has not tried it and an analog fuse may prevent disaster. Read more at and .

--Why Facebook's facial recognition is creepy. Alessandro Acquisti, Ralph Gross, and Fred Stutzman showed how they took publicly available photos of students from Facebook and then used facial recognition technology to identify the students as they looked into a webcam. In another test, the researchers took photos from 277,978 Facebook profiles and compared them to profiles from an online dating Website where people don't use their real names. They were able to correctly identify 10 percent of the dating site's members using facial recognition technology. Read .

In other Black Hat news, Microsoft announced that offers more than $250,000 in prizes to security researchers who can develop better solutions to counter security threats. Conference organizers also handed out , including one to Sony for "."