Sean Michael Kerner

Hewlett-Packard is on a mission to raise awareness about insecure configurations and practices in the emerging Internet of things landscape. The latest target for HP’s research is the smartwatch, which, like all the other types of IoT devices HP has looked at thus far, is lacking when it comes to proper security. HP first began […]

Security researchers Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek have made a career out of hacking cars. Valasek is the director of vehicle security research at IOactive, and Miller is a security researcher at Twitter. At 3 p.m. PT on Aug. 5 at the Black Hat USA security conference, the pair are set to provide new details […]

A month ago today, Docker Inc. joined with its container rivals in a new Linux Foundation effort, known as the Open Container Project. The name of the effort is now being changed to the Open Container Initiative (OCI) as the membership rolls swell and development efforts to build and define a common baseline for containers […]

While attacks against organizations continue to make headlines, not all attacks go unpunished. The FBI is charging five individuals with criminal activities that might be linked to the massive attack against JPMorgan Chase in 2014. The FBI’s public disclosures do not make a direct link to the JPMorgan attack, though media reports from Bloomberg and […]

Day in and day out, the headlines around the Web paint a picture of an Internet often under attack and data breaches victimizing organizations of all sizes. Despite all that, a new study from Intel Security and education and policy studies organization Aspen Institute found that many organizations see an improvement in security. “The biggest […]

The Linux Foundation today is announcing the official formation of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation in a bid to advance cloud application management and interoperability. The new effort will be operated as a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project and brings together many of the major players in the cloud application infrastructure space in a joint open-source […]

Facebook is enhancing its open-source osquery security framework with new features that make it easier for users to organize and gain insight from operating system information. Osquery, which Facebook announced in October 2014, makes OS information look like a standard SQL database that can be queried to gain operational and security insight. Since the first […]

Oracle Offers Preview of Solaris 11.3 Unix OS Features By Sean Michael Kerner Solaris Enables Private VLAN Creation In the modern world of software-defined networking, virtual LANs (VLAN) still play a key role, enabling organizations to segment networks. With private VLAN (PVLAN) in Solaris 11.3, a logical VLAN can be segmented into an arbitrary number […]

The risk from any breach is that personally identifiable information (PII) is exposed, enabling an attacker to cause damage to victims. In many cases, the potential damage of a PII breach is financial, but in the case of the newly disclosed breach of infidelity Website Ashley Madison, the damage is likely more social, as 37 […]

Adobe is under tremendous pressure to do more to secure its Flash Player technology, which has been aggressively exploited in 2015. However, Adobe isn’t alone in its efforts to secure Flash, as a very key ally is contributing significantly to Flash’s defense—none other than Google. Flash’s weaknesses are numerous, but common ones are use-after-free (UAF) […]

Google officially is joining the open-source OpenStack Foundation today as a corporate sponsor. Google’s sponsorship isn’t about advocating for a rival cloud technology, but rather about helping boost interoperability across clouds, using container technology. Google, of course, has its own cloud technology that is not open-source. In that light, Google’s Cloud can and should be […]

Over the years, the Black Hat USA security conference has built a reputation around being the place where new security vulnerabilities are disclosed, and 2015 will be no exception. Defensive approaches to security will also be a key theme at the upcoming Black Hat USA 2015 briefings event, which starts Aug. 4. Steve Wylie, general […]