Sean Michael Kerner

Security automation vendor Palerra closed a new $17 million Series B round of funding on April 8, bringing the total funding for the company to $25 million. The Series B funding round included the participation of August Capital, Norwest Venture Partners (NVP), Wing Venture Capital and Engineering Capital. Palerra was founded in 2013 with a […]

The Let’s Encrypt initiative today announced that it is becoming a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project. The Linux Foundation is well-known as the home of Linux development, but it has also expanded in recent years to host multiple open-source collaborative efforts, including the Xen hypervisor, OpenDaylight software-defined networking and Dronecode projects. Secure Socket Layer/Transport Layer Security […]

For months, Apple has been previewing the new Photos App, which has now officially landed in the new OSX 10.10.3 Yosemite update that first became generally available on April 8. The OS X 10.10.3 update also includes new emoji characters and improves WiFi performance. Perhaps even more noteworthy, though, is the volume of security updates […]

The Federal Bureau of Investigation issued an alert on April 7 about the potential danger of Islamic State (ISIS) terrorists abusing vulnerabilities in the open-source WordPress blog and content management system software. “Researchers continue to identify WordPress content management system (CMS) plug-in vulnerabilities, which could allow malicious actors to take control of an affected system,” […]

On Oct. 28, 2014, news first broke about a security breach in the White House email system, and at the time, there was speculation that Russia was involved. Now a new report from CNN is claiming that Russia in fact was the source of the attack. The attack allegedly breached an unclassified network in the […]

Singapore Telecommunications Ltd. (Singtel) is acquiring privately held security vendor Trustwave in a deal valued at $810 million. Under the agreement, Singtel will acquire a 98 percent share of Trustwave, which has an enterprise value of $850 million. Trustwave Chairman, President and CEO Robert J. McCullen will retain the remaining 2 percent share. Singtel expects […]

A year ago today (April 7), I first saw the OpenSSL advisory about a new security vulnerability identified as CVE-2014-0160 and titled “TLS heartbeat read overrun.” When I first wrote my article for eWEEK on the issue, I identified the flaw as the Heartbeat SSL flaw. By the middle of the day on April 8, […]

In the modern world of security threats, intelligence and the ability to rapidly respond to incidents are the keys to survival. To that end, Cisco today announced new threat intelligence and incident response services. The new capabilities come to Cisco thanks in part to the integration of technologies from ThreatGrid, a company Cisco acquired in […]

Mozilla has had a change of heart regarding opportunistic encryption—for now. The company rolled out its open-source Firefox 37 Web browser on March 31, with one of the key new features being a capability known as opportunistic encryption. However, due to a security issue related to opportunistic encryption, Mozilla disabled the feature in the Firefox […]

CoreOS today announced a new $12 million round of funding as well as a new product called Tectonic that is based on the Google Kubernetes open-source project for container orchestration. The new funding is to help CoreOS, which got its start in 2013 as a clustered operating system project focused on the optimized delivery of […]

E-commerce fraud-prevention vendor Forter has examined data for more than 1 million transactions in 2014 and identified a number of fraud trends. Among the key findings in Forter’s analysis is the fact that fraud rates peak between 2 and 6 a.m. ET. “We know that many fraudsters operate from outside of the U.S., which is […]

As the popularity of Google’s Android mobile operating system has grown over the years, so too have the security threats against it—that is, until 2014, according to Google’s Android Security State of the Union 2014 report. Although Google has made significant strides in improving security, the reality is that Android users still face a number […]