Sean Michael Kerner

Over the weekend, attackers posted explicit pictures of Hollywood celebrities including Oscar winner Jennifer Lawrence, allegedly obtained via a vulnerability in Apple’s iCloud service. The pictures were posted on the 4chan site, where users often share explicit pictures. The original poster claimed to have additional photos for which payment was being sought. Spammers tend to […]

Mozilla is doubling down on its security procedures after reporting two separate incidents in which developer information was unintentionally publicly disclosed. The most recent incident was first reported by Mozilla on Aug. 27 and involves information disclosure on 97,000 developers. The landfill.bugzilla.org development system for the Bugzilla bug tracking platform left developer information, including email […]

Why Backoff Malware Is Such a Big Threat to Retailers by Sean Michael Kerner Backoff Has Been Active Since October 2013 Although the U.S. government didn’t issue a public advisory about Backoff until July, it turns out the malware has been active since October 2013. At Least 1,000 Businesses Across the U.S. Have Been Infected […]

If the purpose of a hacker is to steal money, then going after a big bank seems somewhat obvious. According to reports in the The New York Times and Bloomberg, JPMorgan Chase was the target of attackers. Both media outlets cite unnamed sources familiar with the matter in their reports. JPMorgan Chase did not respond […]

For most of the last decade, whenever there has been major Red Hat Linux news, Brian Stevens more often than not has been the person I have spoken with. Until Aug. 27, Stevens had been the CTO of Red Hat, a position he had held since November 2001. Stevens’ departure comes as a surprise to […]

According to Hewlett-Packard’s new State of the Network Security survey, many organizations are not taking internal threats as seriously as they should. The study found that 70 percent of attacks inside of a network come from systems that had been compromised by some form of malware. “This means that corporate networks are already infected with […]

The open-source WordPress blogging and content management system software is widely deployed and is also often attacked. In a bid to improve security, Automattic, the lead commercial sponsor behind WordPress, announced on Aug. 26 that it has acquired security vendor BruteProtect. Financial terms of the deal have not been publicly disclosed. BruteProtect provides multiple security […]

More often than not over the last several years, FireEye has been one of the most often credited vendors for zero-day vulnerability disclosures. Although it discovers more than its fair share of zero-day flaws, that’s not necessarily FireEye’s core business. In a video interview with eWEEK, FireEye CTO Dave Merkel explains why his company finds […]

While much of the virtualization market’s attention this week is focused on the VMworld event taking place in San Francisco, Linux vendor Red Hat wants people to remember that VMware isn’t the only virtualization vendor in town. This week, Red Hat announced updates to its OpenStack Platform as well the CloudForms cloud management technology. Red […]

LinuxCon Showcases Advances in Linux, Open Source By Sean Michael Kerner Chicago Hosts LinuxCon LinuxCon North America was hosted in Chicago for the first time. The 2013 event was held in New Orleans. Linus Torvalds Still Wants the Desktop Linux creator Linus Torvalds told a supportive LinuxCon audience that he’s still interested in winning the […]

The open-source Docker container virtualization technology has a new ally today. VMware announced a new partnership with Docker, Google and Pivotal to enable container technology in VMware environments. The news was formally announced at the VMworld conference in a keynote by VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger and discussed in a follow-up press conference. Among the key […]

VMware has been one of the top contributors to the open-source OpenStack cloud platform over the last several years, and now the company is taking the next logical step by announcing its own OpenStack distribution. The new VMware Integrated OpenStack (VIO) offering, formally announced at the VMworld conference Aug. 25, provides a new option in […]