Sean Michael Kerner

Hewlett-Packard’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) has announced the rules and prize structure for its 2015 Pwn2Own browser hacking challenge that is set to occur March 18 and 19 during the CanSecWest conference in Vancouver, British Columbia. The upcoming event will see a smaller prize pool than the 2014 event, though there is still a lot […]

Apple is extending the reach of its two-step verification process to protect its FaceTime and iMessage applications. Two-step verification requires users to input a second password (or verification) beyond just their Apple ID username and password. Apple first introduced two-step verification, in which users get the second password by way of an SMS sent to […]

Netatmo is the latest vendor to be exposed as having weak security to protect user information. The Internet of things (IoT) vendor has several products, including a set of Internet-enabled weather monitoring devices that connect via a user’s WiFi network to communicate with the cloud. The problem is that the Netatmo was storing user WiFi […]

Identity Finder announced Feb. 12 the release of its 8.0 platform, which includes new dynamic classification system and sensitive data watch capabilities. The Identity Finder platform enables enterprises to identify sensitive information in order to take the appropriate steps to prevent data loss or leakage. “With this release, we’re focused on more than just DLP […]

Damballa’s Q4 2014 State of Infections Report, released on Feb. 12, reveals that antivirus (AV) technology doesn’t always detect new malware. As part of the report, Damballa conducted a study that included four of the most popular AV technologies to determine product efficacy. In the first hour of submission, 70 percent of malware was not […]

Facebook sits at the nexus of the social networking world, and it now wants to be at the nexus of the security threat information world with the ThreatExchange, which was announced today. The ThreatExchange is a platform for sharing security threat information and is enabled by way of an API that lets partners query information […]

The open-source Docker project rolled out its 1.5 release on Feb. 10, providing users of the application virtualization container technology with new networking and visibility capabilities. Docker is an increasingly popular open-source technology that can enable application virtualization in containers. A number of large vendors, including IBM, Amazon, VMware, Microsoft and Red Hat, have embraced […]

The 2014 CrowdStrike Threat Intel Report is now available, shedding light on threat adversaries, particularly those that are nation-state backed and attacking organizations around the world. CrowdStrike gives names to the threat actors it tracks, with different animals referring to different points of origin, such that attackers from China are given a name that includes […]

Microsoft’s first Patch Tuesday of 2015 did not patch a single Internet Explorer flaw. Today’s February Patch Tuesday update is a very different story, with Microsoft patching a staggering 41 vulnerabilities in IE. In total, Microsoft patched 56 vulnerabilities spread across nine security bulletins. The IE update patches one issue that was publicly disclosed and […]

Home security systems by definition are supposed to secure home owners. Ironically, however, they could well be opening a door for attackers, according to a new study from Hewlett-Packard. The report on home security devices follows an HP report issued in July 2014 that found common vulnerabilities across Internet of things (IoT) connected devices. While […]

One of the key takeaways from the Heartbleed vulnerability in 2014 was that there was a need for more funding for critical open-source technology projects. That’s why the Linux Foundation created the Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) in April of 2014 and in 2015 is continuing to move forward with the effort. Among the financial backers […]

The world’s first Ubuntu Linux phone is now available, two years after the effort to bring Ubuntu to phones was first announced by Canonical, the lead commercial sponsor of Ubuntu Linux. The new Ubuntu phone is actually not new hardware; it’s an Ubuntu Linux edition of the BQ Aquaris E4.5 device that is already in […]