Sean Michael Kerner

Facebook, continuing its efforts to help keep users safe and secure on the social networking site, is launching its Security Checkup tool today. The new tool includes account login status, login alerts and password safety features. Login status is an important part of account security at Facebook. Users can log in to the site from […]

The risk of any breach is that personally identifiable information ends up in the wrong hands, which could lead to identity theft or other crimes. In the case of the recent U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and Anthem health insurance breaches, there could well be another risk, that of a nation-state attempting to spy […]

Many sites across the Web use OAuth-based protocols to share and grant access to users. OAuth, however, doesn’t always provide the granular control over user information that modern privacy requires, which is where the User-Managed Access (UMA) standard comes into the picture. UMA provides a profile for OAuth deployment that can enable more control over […]

Security vendor Pindrop Security has added granular access controls for users and a new Fraud Workbench for call analysis to its phone Fraud Detection System (FDS), which helps identify potential phone fraud via a number of machine learning analytics techniques. The new features are part of the 2.4 release of FDS, which was announced on […]

Add the U.S. Census Bureau to the list of U.S. government agencies that have been the victim of an IT security attack in recent months. While the Census Bureau’s admission that it was attacked is not a surprise, the details on how the attack was able to happen reveals an IT security vulnerability that is […]

The number 42 has a special significance in Geek culture as the answer to the question of the meaning of life, the universe and everything. For security firm Cylance, $42 million also has special meaning as the dollar amount raised in a new Series C round of funding announced today, with investment from DFJ Growth, […]

When it comes to security, a safe—the physical device in which money is deposited for safekeeping—is quite literally supposed to be safe. Yet, according to new research set to be demonstrated at the DefCon 23 conference in Las Vegas on Aug. 8, certain models of Brink’s CompuSafe digital safes can be exploited to enable an […]

Seven Key Milestones in OpenStack’s Five-Year History OpenStack, which just turned 5 years old, has emerged as one of the leading cloud platforms, and now its member roster includes governments and major companies. One Small Step for Two Companies: NASA, Rackspace OpenStack was formed in July 2010 with two core components, NASA’s Nebula compute project, […]

Security firm Zimperium today is publicly disclosing a flaw in Google’s Android mobile operating system that could expose 950 million users to risk. The vulnerability is found in the Android Stagefright media library, which is a common element in Android versions 2.2 and higher. Zimperium zLabs Vice President of Platform Research and Exploitation Joshua Drake […]

When it comes to gaining secure access to online sites and services, the use of strong authentication mechanisms, including biometrics, is a good idea, though it’s often difficult to implement. Security startup HYPR is aiming to change that by making it easier to implement biometrics through the use of its biometric security software development kit […]

Fiat Chrysler Automobiles is recalling 1.4 million cars and trucks to help mitigate the risk of a remote hack that could enable an attacker to take control of a vehicle. The recall follows days of intense scrutiny after a media video report showed a pair of security researchers taking remote control of a 2014 Jeep […]

DDoS Attacks Overwhelm Targets With Ever Rising Data Floods Nearly 21 percent of DDoS attacks are now 1G bps or higher, according to an Arbor Networks report on DDoS attack trends. Here are highlights from the report. Attack Size Is Growing In the second quarter of 2015, Arbor reported an average attack size of 1.04G […]