Sean Michael Kerner

When news of an alleged breach of the National Security Agency-backed Equation Group first surfaced , there was much speculation about whether the sale by Shadow Brokers of pilfered tools was real or a hoax. As it turns out, multiple security vendors are now confirming that at least some of the tools the Shadow Brokers […]

A month ago, Duo Security publicly released its free Duo Insight tool, enabling organizations to test responses to phishing attacks. The results of the first six weeks of user testing are now in, and the numbers are not inspiring. From July 12 to Aug. 5, approximately 400 organizations made use of the Duo Insight tool. […]

Cobalt Labs is aiming to grow its crowdsourced approach to security testing with a new round of seed funding, announced Aug. 17. The $1.5 million seed round was led by eLab Ventures and included the participation of Tim Draper with Draper Associates. Cobalt Labs has raised a total of $2.5 million since its launch in […]

As it turns out, the vast majority of victims that are infected with Cerber ransomware never actually pay the ransom, but that doesn’t mean that Cerber isn’t making money—in fact, it’s making a lot of money. A new report published Aug. 18 by security firm Check Point Software Technologies provides insight into how Cerber operates […]

On Aug. 13, a previously unknown group identifying itself publicly only as the Shadow Brokers announced on Twitter that it was selling cyber-weapons it had allegedly stolen from a breach of the Equation Group. The Equation Group itself is a shadowy group allegedly linked to the U.S National Security Agency (NSA), according to a 2015 […]

It happens every day in offices, coffee shops and airplanes around the world—one person will look over another person’s shoulder and see private information on a computer screen. Although some might just call it eavesdropping, it’s actually a real cyber-risk, known as visual hacking. 3M and the Ponemon Institute have been studying the visual hacking […]

IT Security Skills Shortage Means Higher Salaries, More Risks A new Intel Security study finds the IT security skills shortage is a global issue with no end in sight. Here are critical findings from the study. Some Skills in Higher Demand Than Others According to the study, the top three security skills in demand today […]

New research presented at the USENIX security conference this week revealed that there is a critical weakness in vehicles that could enable an attacker to unlock and start a car remotely. The research was conducted by computer science researchers at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. “We show that the security of the […]

Among the top challenges often cited for cloud adoption is security, which is why Rackspace has a managed security service that it offers to customers. Rackspace first announced its managed security service in September 2015 and is now expanding the offering to support Microsoft Azure customers. While Rackspace operates its own OpenStack-based public cloud, it […]

While most of us dread being the recipient of a robocall, Aude Marzuoli actually looks to attract and collect fraudulent calls to her robocall honeypot, aka, the phoneypot. Marzuoli, a data scientist at Pindrop Security, first provided details about the phoneypot and a sample of 100,000 calls it collected in the first half of 2016 […]

Among the biggest pieces of news to come out of the Black Hat USA conference last week was Apple’s announcement of a new bug bounty program. As part of Apple’s program, the top award for an iOS security flaw will be $200,000, which is a figure that has already been surpassed by other third-party bug […]

Among the myriad security disclosures that came out of last week’s Black Hat and DefCon security events was one about a new Android flaw dubbed QuadRooter by security firm Check Point. While QuadRooter (a set of four security vulnerabilities affecting Android devices built using Qualcomm chipsets) is real, it likely doesn’t represent new vulnerabilities that […]