Sean Michael Kerner

Shellshock, the vulnerability in the Bourne Again Shell (Bash), is taking a new twist and is now being actively exploited in network-attached storage (NAS) devices, according to a new report from FireEye. The Shellshock vulnerability, first reported Sept. 24, could enable an attacker to inject arbitrary commands into a system where Bash is used. Bash […]

A proverbial lynchpin holds the world’s major public cloud providers together, and that pin is the open-source Xen hypervisor. Amazon, Rackspace and IBM SoftLayer have all had to reboot their servers in the last several days to fix a flaw in Xen that was privately reported two weeks ago and only publicly disclosed on Oct. […]

Microsoft has released pre-release builds of Windows 10 ahead of the operating system’s expected 2015 launch. Beginning today, users can download Windows 10 Technical Preview, and the Enterprise edition, via the company’s new Windows Insider Program. “As a member of the Windows Insider community, you will have an active role in helping us build Windows […]

Finding bugs isn’t an act of charity; it’s a time-consuming process that researchers should be rewarded for. That’s a fact that Google understands well and is now increasing the amount of money it pays out to security researchers for disclosing bugs. Google first started paying security researchers for finding bugs in the Chrome browser back […]

2014 is likely to go down in history as the year of the data breach. The latest set of reported breaches includes a second attack against grocery chain Supervalu and an attack against point-of-sale (POS) vendor Signature Systems that affects more than 300 restaurants. It’s bad enough for an organization to admit that it is […]

Five days after the Shellshock vulnerability in the Bash (Bourne Again SHell) shell scripting application was first publicly reported, Apple is finally providing a fix for Mac OS X users. It’s about time. The Shellshock flaw came to light on Sept. 24 and was first associated with a vulnerability identified as CVE-2014-6271. The scope of […]

The Shellshock Bash (Bourne Again SHell) vulnerability that was first disclosed on Sept. 24 now has not one, but multiple publicly available patches. Initially, the Shellshock vulnerability was identified as single issue in CVE-2014-6271. While a patch was quickly available for CVE-2014-6271, that patch was incomplete and there were in fact other Shellshock vulnerabilities. One […]

While much of the technology world has been consumed with the Shellshock vulnerability, which was first reported on Sept. 24, another big open-source vulnerability was disclosed the same day. Both Mozilla and Google updated their Web browsers on Sept. 24 for a vulnerability that had been present in all prior releases. The updates fix a […]

Eight Up and Coming OpenStack Cloud Projects By Sean Michael Kerner Sahara Delivers Hadoop as a Service In the upcoming OpenStack Juno release, set to officially debut on Oct. 16, the big new addition will be the Sahara project. Sahara was originally known as Savannah and provides a Hadoop big data as a service capability […]

A pair of recent incidents show how much the Bitcoin environment has changed from a hobbyist activity to something significantly more serious. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is now responding to complaints about Bitcoin vendor claims while PayPal, itself an innovator in online payments, is now embracing Bitcoin as well. In the early days of […]

One of the best ways for any company to expand its reach is by partnering with a bigger company that already has broad reach. That’s exactly what cloud security startup FortyCloud is now doing by becoming part of the McAfee Security Innovation Alliance partner program. FortyCloud, co-founder and CEO Amit Cohen told eWEEK, offers a […]

Akamai issued an advisory today about the new Spike distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) kit that is responsible for a number of recent high-bandwidth attacks. Spike is responsible for attacks against multiple Akamai customers around the world, with one of the largest coming in at a peak of 215 gigabits per second. DDoS attacks overall have been […]