Sean Michael Kerner

FireEye’s Mandiant division came out on Feb. 24 with its M-Trends 2015 report, revealing the current state of breach discovery on the IT landscape. Among the top-level findings in the report was that the median number of days before a breach was discovered in 2014 was down from previous years. In 2014, that number was […]

Mozilla rolled out on Feb. 24 its second major milestone release of the Firefox browser so far in 2015. Firefox 36 provides security fixes and improvements, and is the first version of Firefox to fully support the new HTTP/2 protocol. HTTP/2 is the successor to HTTP 1.1, the protocol on which the Web has run […]

Organizations aren’t properly patching their systems, according to the findings of Hewlett-Packard’s 2015 Cyber Risk report, published Feb. 23. Drawing on data collected across HP’s security teams in 2014, the study found that 44 percent of breaches could be attributed to patched vulnerabilities that were between 2 and 4 years old. “We found it a […]

Lenovo is now changing its stance on the Superfish adware that was bundled on some of its PCs between October and December 2014. Initially, Lenovo claimed there was no security risk from Superfish, but as it turns out, the risk is real and it extends beyond just Lenovo. On Feb. 19, Lenovo published a statement […]

Organizations around the world have deployed all manner of technology to help protect infrastructure and endpoints from security risks. Technology, however, isn’t the only risk that needs to be secured. In a new report from Intel Security, titled “Hacking the Human Operating System,” researchers reveal the role of social engineering within cyber-security. The report defines […]

Social networking giant Facebook is no stranger to the world of open source. After all, CEO Mark Zuckerberg originally built Facebook on top of open-source infrastructure components. During a keynote at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit on Feb. 18, James Pearce (pictured), head of open source at Facebook, detailed how the company’s open-source efforts have […]

Lenovo finds itself at the center of a security storm today over concerns related to the so-called Superfish adware that was included on some of the company’s PCs. The concern is that Superfish bypasses SSL/TLS (Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security) best practices and could potentially enable man-in-the-middle (MiTM) attacks. For its part, Lenovo denies consumers […]

Pindrop Security announced Feb. 19 that it has raised $35 million in a Series B round of funding, which will be used to help advance Pindrop’s efforts to secure against the risks of phone fraud. The Series B round was led by Institutional Venture Partners (IVP) and included the participation of Andreessen Horowitz, Citi Ventures, […]

A Quick Look at Eight Recent Linux Kernel Releases by Sean Michael Kerner Average Kernel Development Cycle Is 66 Days The Linux Foundation report looked at eight Linux kernel releases (from 3.11 to 3.18) and found that the average development time during that period was 66 days. This compares with 70 days in the previous […]

Justice may not always be swift, but the U.S government has proven itself to be tenacious in tracking down alleged cyber-criminals to the ends of the Earth. The U.S Department of Justice (DOJ) announced Feb. 17 that Russian national Vladimir Drinkman appeared in a federal court in New Jersey in connection with cyber-attacks that occurred […]

At the White House Summit on Cybersecurity and Consumer Protection on Feb. 13, the challenges and ironies that the modern Internet presents, as well as its benefits, was the topic of much discussion. The Internet is a source of openness and commerce, but the Web is also the medium by which new forms of cyber-attack […]

Red Hat Feb. 17 announced the general availability of release 6.0 of its Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform (OSP), providing an enterprise-grade cloud platform based on the OpenStack Juno milestone release. Red Hat is also going a step beyond what was in the OpenStack Juno release by providing its users with a technology preview […]