Sean Michael Kerner

SEATTLE—How does anyone know if any given open-source project is following security best practices? That’s a question that the Linux Foundation is now trying to answer with a new program announced at the LinuxCon conference here. Emily Ratliff, senior director of infrastructure security at the Linux Foundation, announced the new badging effort in a press […]

Adult infidelity Website Ashley Madison and its owner Avid Life Media (AVM) are reeling today from a catastrophic attack against its systems that has now exposed the information of 37 million account holders to public scrutiny. The breach was first disclosed in July, with attackers threatening to disclose information on account holders in an attempt […]

SEATTLE—At the annual LinuxCon event here, Linux creator Linus Torvalds revealed how he thinks about security. Torvalds was onstage with Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin, who asked the Linux founder how he feels about being the boss of Linux. “I love open source and how all the credit comes to me,” Torvalds said. “Realistically […]

SEATTLE—The Linux kernel continues to grow—both in lines of code and the number of developers that contribute to it—yet some challenges need to be addressed. That was one of the key messages from Linux kernel developer Jonathan Corbet during his annual Kernel Report session at the LinuxCon conference here. The Linux 4.2 kernel is still […]

The U.S. Internal Revenue Service is mailing letters to 220,000 Americans this week to inform them that their information was involved in a data breach. That figure is an expansion of the breach the IRS first reported May 26. The original disclosure estimated that 100,000 American taxpayers were affected due to an attack against the […]

SEATTLE—The Linux Foundation’s annual LinuxCon USA event started here today, with a trio of announcements that could help propel the mainframe, networking and storage worlds forward: the official announcement of the Open Mainframe Project, led by IBM; the IO visor networking project from PLUMgrid; and the Kinetic storage project, which benefits from code contributions from […]

SEATTLE—Containers are one of the hottest topics in IT today and at the Linuxcon USA event here there is a co-located event called Containercon, dedicated to this virtualization technology. Docker, the lead commercial sponsor of the open-source Docker effort brought three of its top people to the keynote stage today, but not Docker founder Solomon […]

A week ago, Google surprised the world by restructuring itself under the Alphabet umbrella. A key surprise was the simple fact that Google did not buy Alphabet.com, which BMW currently owns, and instead opted for the Alphabet.xyz top-level domain (TLD). The move is sparking a surge of interest in .xyz domain registration and could herald […]

Kali Linux 2.0 Moves to Rolling Releases, Gains More Security Tools A new release of the widely used Linux security distribution gets a major upgrade that features rolling updates. Kali Linux 2.0 Sports a GNOME 3 Interface Kali Linux 2.0 provides users with multiple options for a desktop environment, with GNOME 3 as the default […]

Among the big stories to break at the Black Hat USA conference this year was the Android security vulnerabilities in the libstagefright media framework, impacting 950 million users. Google claimed last week that it had fixed the Stagefright flaws, but new research from security firm Exodus Intelligence now alleges otherwise. “The issue is still exploitable, […]

Apple has come out with what could be its last major update to OS X 10.10 before the release of OS X 10.11 “El Capitan” next month. OS X 10.10.5 is largely a security update, as it includes patches for issues that have already been publicly disclosed. One of those issues, CVE-2015-3760, is a vulnerability […]

Cloud database-as-a-service (DBaaS) vendor Tesora today announced that it has completed a new round of funding, bringing in $5.8 million. The new round included the participation of Red Hat, Rho Canada Ventures, and existing investors General Catalyst and Point Judith Capital. Total funding to date for Tesora now stands at $14.5 million. Ken Rugg, founder […]