Sean Michael Kerner

In September 2011, news first broke that the kernel.org site that hosts the core development infrastructure behind the Linux kernel was breached. For the last five years, few facts about the attack have been revealed and the attacker remained at large—that is, until he was picked during a traffic stop in Miami on Aug. 28. […]

DDoS Peak Size Declines, but Attacks Slam Media, Entertainment Sites There was some good news concerning DDoS attacks in Q2—the average peak attack size declined. But attacks still slammed the media and entertainment industry. Here are highlights of Verisign’s latest DDoS trends report. 75 Percent of DDoS Attacks Are 1Gbps or Higher Among the disturbing […]

On Aug. 25, Apple rushed out a critical patch for its iOS mobile operating system, fixing three zero-day exploits. As it turns out, the same flaws impact Mac OS X, which is now getting patched a week after its mobile sibling. The OS X patch is being made available for both OS X Yosemite v10.10.5 […]

Every day, good and bad bots traverse the internet looking for content and access to web resources. After realizing that most organizations didn’t know how to defend against bad bots and had little visibility into bot traffic overall, Rami Essaid saw an opportunity and started Distil Networks in 2011. Distil Networks has raised $65 million […]

Dropbox warned its users last week that if they haven’t updated their passwords since 2012, they would be prompted to update them. As it turns out, the reason for the password reset is related to a breach originally disclosed in 2012, which is now exposing the credentials of approximately 68 million Dropbox users. For its […]

When Docker containers first emerged several years ago, the initial reaction from many industry experts was that they would become a competitive alternative to VMware. As it turns out, VMware in its own way is embracing containers and today at the VMworld conference announced further enhancements to support container deployments. At the VMworld 2015 event, […]

Browser vendor Opera, the victim of a breach last week, reported on Aug. 26 that the attack was blocked quickly. The breach affected the Opera sync system, which provides users with the ability to synchronize settings and passwords across multiple devices. “Although we only store encrypted [for synchronized passwords] or hashed and salted [for authentication] […]

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV), on the market since November 2009, is now undergoing a rebranding to simply Red Hat Virtualization with the new 4.0 update. The Red Hat Virtualization 4.0 milestone enters a fragmented market with organizations looking at multiple competitive options, including proprietary technology from VMware as well as open-source container alternatives. “One […]

Mike Fey has had a busy few years. As of Aug. 1, Fey is the president and chief operating officer of Symantec, after having had the same role at Blue Coat, which was acquired by Symantec in a $4.65 billion deal. Prior to Blue Coat, Fey was the executive vice president and CTO for McAfee […]

Security startup IDVector, which provides an alternative approach to VPNs to help ensure secure access to internet resources, emerged from stealth mode this week. With most VPN technologies, user traffic is encrypted and routed through a gateway, but IDVector’s goal is to go beyond a basic VPN by providing additional security assurances and even a […]

LinuxCon: Tracing Linux’s Roots, Mapping Its Future LinuxCon speakers made it clear that Linux is about more than just an OS. It is about a wider market of open-source technologies that Linux helps enable. Linux a Widespread Success Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, used his time on the LinuxCon keynote stage to […]

Apple today issued a critical update to iOS, version 9.3.5, which patches three zero-day exploits that were first discovered in the wild in an attack against human rights advocate Ahmed Mansoor. Apple patched CVE-2016-4655, a kernel memory disclosure issue with the iOS kernel; CVE-2016-4656, a memory corruption vulnerability in the iOS kernel; and CVE-2016-4657, a […]