Sean Michael Kerner

Small tags embedded with Bluetooth Low Energy have become increasingly popular in recent years as a way for consumers to track things such as car keys or other small items. There is only one small problem: They’re also potentially a larger public privacy risk, according to new research released Oct. 25 by security firm Rapid7. […]

BARCELONA, Spain—Walmart, the world largest retailer and one the largest employers, aims to give back to the OpenStack community. In a session at the OpenStack Summit here, Andrew Mitry, lead architect for Walmart’s OpenStack effort, and Megan Rossetti, part of the OpenStack Operations team at Walmart, detailed how the open-source model is working for the […]

OpenStack Adoption and Revenues on the Rise A pair of new studies detail OpenStack adoption and usage trends, and it’s clear that OpenStack is becoming more and more popular with organizations. OpenStack Revenues Growing to $5.7B by 2020 According to the 451 Group, from 2015 through 2020 OpenStack revenues will grow at a compound annual […]

Last Friday was a tough day for the internet, though it and its inherently redundant design pulled through. Early in the morning on Oct. 21, multiple big-name sites, including Twitter, Spotify and GitHub, experienced slowdowns as an attack against Domain Name System (DNS) services took shape. The initial attack was focused against DNS provider DynDNS, […]

The U.S. Department of Justice revealed late Oct. 21 that the individual first apprehended by Czech police on Oct. 5 in connection with the 2012 breach of LinkedIn is actually allegedly responsible for two of the largest breaches of that year. When Czech police first publicly disclosed that they had apprehended an individual in connection […]

The Hack the Pentagon bug bounty program—which Defense Secretary Ashton Carter announced last March at the RSA security conference—lasted several weeks, but it was so successful that the Department of Defense is now following up with an expanded initiative. The new, expanded DOD bug bounty effort will be operated by HackerOne and Synack. In a […]

Red Hat and Mirantis both announced large agreements this week that bring their respective OpenStack technologies to carrier partners. The news comes ahead of the OpenStack Summit that kicks off in Barcelona, Spain, on Oct. 24. Red Hat announced on Oct. 19 that it has a new OpenStack partnership with telco provider Ericsson. “Ericsson and […]

SecTor Features Snowden Appearance, Call to Secure All the ‘Things’ At the 10th annual SecTor security conference, Edward Snowden made a virtual appearance. Here’s a look at some of the other highlights from SecTor. 10 Years of SecTor The SecTor conference was first held in Toronto in 2007 and was started by founders Bruce Cowper […]

As internet users on the East Coast of the United States woke up Friday morning to access the internet, many were impacted by a massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that slowed access to popular services including Twitter, Reddit, Spotify, GitHub and Soundcloud, among others. The attack appears to have been a multipronged effort focused against […]

Back on Aug. 27, National Security Agency contractor Harold Thomas Martin III was arrested on charges of confidential information theft. Initially investigators found six classified documents in Martin’s possession, but on Oct. 20, the U.S. Justice Department alleged that Martin’s theft of secrets was vastly larger. “During execution of the search warrants, investigators seized thousands […]

The long arm of U.S. justice may well have finally caught up with one of the individuals behind the 2012 breach of social networking site LinkedIn. Czech police (Policie Ceske Republiky) announced on Oct. 18 that with the help of an international Interpol Red Notice alert, they apprehended an unnamed man who was wanted by […]

Oracle released its October Critical Patch Update, fixing 253 different vulnerabilities across the company product portfolio. The update, released Oct. 18, is the second-largest ever issued by Oracle, outpaced only by the company’s July CPU in which 276 vulnerabilities were patched. Overall, Oracle’s patching updates have been growing in recent years, with 2016 set to […]