Sean Michael Kerner

At last year’s Black Hat USA conference, Jeff Forristal revealed the Master Key vulnerability impacting millions of Android users. For the upcoming Black Hat 2014 event, Forristal is back with another deep flaw within Android, this time a Fake ID vulnerability that could enable attackers to impersonate valid app developers. Forristal plans on providing full […]

Hewlett-Packard is bringing a Capture the Flag (CTF) competition to the upcoming Black Hat USA conference, which gets under way next week (Aug. 5-7) in Las Vegas. The CTF competition will in some ways follow a format similar to the CTF event at the DefCon security conference, which follows Black Hat USA. HP researchers have […]

The open-source CoreOS Linux operating system hit a major milestone on July 25, issuing its first stable release. CoreOS is an Andreessen Horowitz-backed startup that offers the promise of a highly available operating system platform that is fully integrated with the Docker container virtualization technology. Docker is an open-source technology that delivers a container approach […]

Container virtualization technology has become increasingly popular in 2014, partly because of the meteoric rise of Docker. Yet Docker isn’t the only form of containers, and containers aren’t just for Web servers. Security vendor Comodo is using its own container technology to help secure end-user systems with a platform called SecureBox. Comodo’s antivirus security products […]

The open-source WordPress blog and content management system (CMS) software is widely deployed and is increasingly being targeted by attackers too. The root cause of a WordPress vulnerability more often than not is an exploitable plug-in, which is what’s going on now with the MailPoet WordPress plug-in. Security researcher Daniel Cid of security firm Sucuri […]

Nginx, the lead commercial sponsor behind the open-source Nginx Web server, is out today with a new release of its Nginx Plus server. The Nginx Plus r4 release provides users with new security and load balancing features. Nginx Plus is the commercially supported enterprise release of the widely deployed open-source Nginx Web server. According to […]

Apple has many different services on its iOS devices that collect diagnostic data, yet not all of them are well understood or documented. Security researcher Jonathan Zdziarski thought he found some backdoors into iOS by way of some of those previously undocumented diagnostic features. Zdziarski presented his findings at the HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth) […]

The open-source Tails Linux distribution issued its 1.1 update on July 22, providing multiple security fixes, though according to at least one security research firm, vulnerabilities still remain. Tails, which is an acronym that stands for The Amnesic Incognito Live System, is focused on enabling user privacy while online. The Tails 1.0 release debuted on […]

Firefox 31 Brings New Tools to Developers By Sean Michael Kerner Mozilla’s Rapid Release Schedule Continues to Deliver Firefox 31 follows the Firefox 30 release that only debuted on June 11. Firefox has a rapid release development cycle, with new browser releases coming approximately every six weeks. Developers Can Now Easily Identify Colors Among the […]

Oracle’s launch today of Linux 7 provides users with a freely available enterprise-grade Linux distribution. Oracle Linux 7 is based on the recent Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (RHEL) distribution released June 10. As Oracle Linux 7 is based on RHEL 7, it inherits many of the same new features, though Oracle is not simply […]

Authorities in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada have made arrests of six individuals who are alleged to have breached accounts at eBay’s ticket reseller StubHub. The breach was first discovered by StubHub in March 2013. StubHub identified that more than 1,600 of its user accounts had been compromised and that account holders’ […]

Part of the allure of the Black Hat USA security conference is hackers talking about and demonstrating dangerous things. Over the years, however, the conference has faced more than its fair share of controversy with vendor threats and pulled talks, and the upcoming 2014 event that gets started on Aug. 2 will be no exception. […]