Distributed denial of service attacks pose a serious threat to online gaming communities, according to the latest white paper from DDoS mitigation specialist Prolexic. The company found that the average duration of attacks increased to 32.2 hours in 2013, up 67 percent from the 19.2 hours in the fourth quarter of 2012.

The report lists rivalries among players, poor password protection and the growing number of freely available DDoS toolkits as the primary drivers the increased intensity of attacks. Stuart Scholly, the president of Prolexic, warned of serious repercussions from denial of service attacks that “feed off the explosive growth of online gaming infrastructures.”

DDoS offensives and other emerging threats to enterprises were at the center of discussion at this week’s HP Protect conference in Washington, D.C. Hewlett Packard unleashed a slew of security solutions at the event, including a new family of firewall appliances and a crowdsourced intelligence platform that lets users share data about new threats. Also new to the HP lineup is ArcSight Application View, a data-driven malware detection tool that integrates with nearly half a dozen other solutions to automate application monitoring.

Hewlett Packard’s latest solutions may be able to keep hackers at bay, but the NSA is a different story. The latest NSA revelation, courtesy of public records firm MuckRock, shed light on the spy agency’s relations with zero-day exploit vendor Vupen. The NSA reportedly hired the French firm to provide it with backdoors that could be used to carry out false flag cyber attacks.

If you’ve upgraded to iOS 7, the NSA’s secret war against encryption should be the least of your worries. Security researcher Jose Rodriguez has recently uncovered a bug that leaves devices running Apple’s latest operating system vulnerable to hijacking.