Sean Michael Kerner

The United States Postal Service (USPS) publicly admitted that it was the victim of a cyber-intrusion on Nov. 10. As it turns out, the USPS had been aware of a potential intrusion since Sept. 11, and it took several months of planning and strategic actions until the public and USPS employees were informed. Full details […]

On Black Friday in 2013, millions of consumers shopped at retailers that had been breached by point-of-sale (POS) malware. A year later, has anything changed? Target admitted in December 2013 that it was breached between Nov. 27 and Dec. 15 of that year in an incident in which 70 million customers were impacted. The breach […]

Adobe issued an out-of-band patch update on Nov. 25 for a vulnerability identified as CVE-2014-8439, which impacts the Adobe Flash Player. Typically, an out-of-band patch update is a rare event that is reserved for severe and risky zero-day flaws, but that’s not quite what is going on with the new Adobe update. The CVE-2014-8439 vulnerability […]

Sony Pictures reportedly has been hit by an attack that has taken over its network and locked out its employees. The group behind the attack calls itself the #GOP (Guardians of Peace) and is allegedly holding Sony Pictures’ data hostage. An image originally shared on Reddit shows the ransom screen that the #GOP hackers put […]

Eight Important Facts About the OpenStack Cloud Platform by Sean Michael Kerner Private Cloud Deployment Leads the Way There are multiple types of cloud deployment models. For OpenStack users, the most popular deployment type is as an on-premises private cloud. Pulling the OpenStack Deployment Strings With Puppet When it comes to deploying an OpenStack cloud, […]

The open-source Docker container virtualization technology has emerged as one of the hottest and most hyped technologies of the year. Docker, however, isn’t immune from security vulnerabilities, as a pair of recent updates illustrate. On Nov. 24, the Docker open-source project released version 1.3.2, fixing a pair of critical security vulnerabilities. One of the issues, […]

The Heartbleed flaw that was first publicly disclosed in April of this year, was in some respects a black eye on the open-source community. Heartbleed is a flaw in the open-source OpenSSL cryptographic library that had wide ranging impact across the infrastructure of the Internet. In the aftermath of Heartbleed, a new effort emerged called […]

It’s been a busy week for Firefox developer Mozilla. On Nov. 19, Mozilla announced a major shift in its business model away from Google being the default search engine in its open-source Firefox Web browser in favor of Yahoo. A day later on Nov. 20, Mozilla released its 2013 financial statements and annual report, showing […]

Millions of open-source WordPress site owners received email notifications over the last 24 hours advising them of a site update. The new WordPress 4.0.1 update provides multiple security fixes and data-hardening improvements to help secure WordPress sites. The WordPress 4.0.1 update is the first incremental update for WordPress since the 4.0 release in September. The […]

Staples can now officially be added to the growing list of retailers that have publicly admitted this year that their systems were attacked and customer data was breached. In Staples 10-Q filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the company provided a few details about the attack against its systems. “The company is […]

In a surprise move late on Nov. 19, Mozilla and Yahoo jointly announced a five-year partnership that will see Yahoo Search become the default search engine in the open-source Firefox Web browser. The Yahoo partnership marks the end of a decade-long partnership that Mozilla had with Google that paid it hundreds of millions of dollars […]

Google is out with the Chrome 39.0.2171.65 browser stable release, fixing 42 security issues and, for the first time, providing 64-bit support for Apple Mac OS X users. The Chrome 39.0.2171.65 stable release includes 12 security fixes that Google is rewarding researchers for reporting. In total, Google is paying researchers $41,500 for reporting security vulnerabilities […]