Sean Michael Kerner

The White House, home of U.S President Barack Obama and office to the Executive Branch of the U.S. government, is the latest organization to be a victim of a network breach. A report in The Washington Post claims that an unclassified network in the White House was breached by hackers that are likely aligned with […]

The Tor Project is an open-source effort to help enable a degree of privacy and anonymity for users. A recent report from security firm Leviathan Security alleges that a Tor exit node was adding malware to user traffic. The real story, however, isn’t so simple. The way that Tor works is that traffic is routed […]

A critical flaw in the open-source Wget application that is widely used on Linux and Unix systems for retrieving files has been patched quietly. “It was found that wget was susceptible to a symlink attack which could create arbitrary files, directories or symbolic links and set their permissions when retrieving a directory recursively through FTP,” […]

Whenever there is a data breach, it is usually the attackers that are blamed and deemed responsible. The U.S. Federal Communication Commission (FCC), however, has a slightly more nuanced view and wants operators to take responsibility for their own security. On Oct. 24, the FCC issued a statement about a fine it is planning against […]

In recent years, there has been a lot of hype and discussion about moving all forms of IT to a cloud model. GoDaddy, which is a leading domain registrar and hosting provider has an alternative viewpoint on the cloud and doesn’t see it as the right solution for all forms of application hosting. This week, […]

Microsoft is once again scrambling to contain a zero-day vulnerability in a software component that it has recently patched. Microsoft’s Oct. 4 Patch Tuesday update included fixes for 24 Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs), including CVE-2014-4114, also known as Sandworm. On Oct. 21, Microsoft first began to warn its users about a flaw identified as […]

TORONTO—Credit card theft continues to be among the most common and widespread forms of digital crime. Speaking at the SecTor security conference here Oct. 22, Grayson Lenik, principal security consultant at Nuix, outlined how these credit card thieves—known as “carders”—operate and how they eventually get caught. The world of carders is a highly hierarchical one […]

Canonical, the lead commercial sponsor of the open-source Ubuntu Linux operating system, came out today with its 14.10 release, also known as the Utopic Unicorn. The 14.10 release follows the 14.04 release by six months and introduces improved application deployment and orchestration capabilities. The Juju orchestration system has been expanded in the Ubuntu 14.10 release, […]

TORONTO—For many organizations, the typical approach to implementing security is as a bolt-on feature after development. At the SecTor security conference in Toronto, Securosis CEO and analyst Rich Mogull explained why the emerging world of DevOps can radically remake how security is built into the software development and deployment process. “The problem is that by […]

Security startup Illumio emerged from stealth mode today with the promise of enabling a new policy-driven future for IT workloads. Illumio is venture backed and to date has raised $42.5 million in funding. PJ Kirner, CTO and co-founder of Illumio, told eWEEK that he saw a gap in the market between how security works in […]

In the race to secure user accounts against compromise, two-factor verification technologies are often recommended as a way to protect users. Today Google announced its embrace of a new form of two-factor authentication by supporting the FIDO Alliance’s Universal 2nd Factor (U2F) technology. With U2F, Google’s Chrome users will now be able to secure access […]

OpenStack cloud vendor Mirantis has raised $100 million in a new Series B round of venture funding—bringing the company’s total capitalization to $120 million as it positions itself for an IPO in 2016. Mirantis raised $20 million in 2013 in two segments of a Series A round: $10 million in January and another $10 million […]