Headlines this week have featured an alphabet soup of three-lettered agencies, from the FTC to DHS and the FBI. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced that “it is exploring rules to crack down on harmful commercial surveillance and lax data security.”

In addition to launching Cybersecurity Awareness Campaigns in Honolulu and New Orleans, FBI field offices across the country have been working to stop cybercrimes, including sextortion and other crimes on the rise in Tennessee.

During his visit to Omaha, Nebraska, FBI Director Christopher Wray applauded the bureau’s work over the past year as they aided in thwarting cyberattacks that could have disrupted Nebraska’s food supply and compromised a health care center.

A top DHS official speaking at Black Hat this week said there’s reason to believe the Chinese government is leveraging vulnerability disclosure rules to “preview dangerous zero-day flaws before tech companies can deploy fixes,” CyberScoop reported.

And across the pond, the UK’s NHS was one of many customers whose systems were disrupted after a managed service provider, Advanced, was the victim of a ransomware attack.

Advanced threat actors breached Twilio using a phishing campaign. Attackers also targeted Cloudflare with a similar campaign, but “the company’s use of hardware-based MFA keys prevented the would-be intruders from accessing its internal network.”

In its incident report, Twilio said, “We have reemphasized our security training to ensure employees are on high alert for social engineering attacks, and have issued security advisories on the specific tactics being utilized by malicious actors since they first started to appear several weeks ago,” prompting a response from Ira Winkler, who contributed a blog post on the need for improved security strategy.

I know I’ve already covered a lot, but there’s even more that happened this week. Here’s an overview of what else made industry headlines.

Aug. 12: “The US government has for the first time revealed the identity of whom it believes to be a key member of one of the most prolific ransomware groups around,” Infosecurity Magazine reported.

Aug. 12: In-app browsers in both Apple’s Instagram app and Facebook’s iOS app reportedly allow Meta to track every tap and click a user makes, including interactions with external websites.

Aug. 11: According to SpaceNews, “the Army now wants to figure out other ways to use space technologies for nontraditional military operations such as cyber and information warfare.”

Aug. 11: MIT researchers reverse-engineered a “side-channel attack” that could allow malicious actors to steal information from the on-chip interconnect, a component of computer processors.

Aug. 11: Computer Weekly reported, “Cisco has revealed that it has fought off a potentially damaging cyber incident that unfolded after a threat actor conducted a phishing attack on one of its employees by abusing their personal Google account to access its network.”

Aug. 11: Al Jazeera conducted a months-long investigation into Cambodia’s cyber-slaves, and one victim recounted being held alongside hundreds of others forced to perpetrate “various types of online shopping scams roping in people in China, Europe, the United States, Japan, Vietnam and Thailand.”

Aug. 10: At Black Hat USA, 18 technology and cybersecurity companies announced the launch of a new Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF), which aims to build a security standard for sharing information.

Aug. 10: The Department of Justice reported, “Three Nigerian citizens were extradited from the United Kingdom (UK) and arrived in the United States in relation to their alleged participation in multimillion-dollar cyber-enabled business email compromise (BEC) fraud schemes in the Western District of North Carolina, Southern District of Texas and Eastern District of Virginia.”

Aug. 9: “Ransomware attacks on industrial systems continued unabated in the second quarter of the year according to data collected by security company Dragos, which counted 125 incidents during that time,” The Record reported.