Sean Michael Kerner

When security vulnerabilities strike in the cloud, it’s important to make sure there is a playbook in place to know how to respond. Cloud vendor Rackspace has seen its fair share of security incidents, including the Heartbleed security vulnerability, which left the entire IT industry scrambling back in April. In a video interview with eWEEK, […]

AT&T has not formally disclosed how many customers the company’s latest data breach affected, but the attack appears to have exposed customer birth dates and Social Security numbers (SSNs). It isn’t the first time that AT&T revealed that a data breach put customer information at risk. Yet there is reason to believe that the latest […]

The Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV 3.4) platform, released today, provides new features that make hypervisor-based virtualization easier to deploy and manage. The new RHEV release comes at a pivotal time for the virtualization industry as Docker container-based virtualization is now beginning to pick up momentum. RHEV 3.4 is based on the upstream open-source oVirt […]

U.S. retailer Target suffered technical difficulties with its checkout payment systems on Sunday, June 15. Reports from around the country, including Target locations in New York, Las Vegas and Los Angeles, indicate that the systems trouble led to long lines at the cash registers. The company, however, is not blaming hackers for the incident. Target […]

Chinese restaurant chain P.F. Chang’s confirmed June 12 that it was the victim of a security compromise affecting its credit card payment terminals. The breach draws renewed attention to the vulnerability of point-of-sale systems and the impact of that on restaurateurs and other retailers as well as their customers. The compromise was first alleged in […]

In the modern social Web era, users are often encouraged to leave comments on articles and blog posts, yet not all comments are the same. A class of comments, known as “comment spam,” could lead to user and site exploitation. A new report from security firm Imperva, lays bare how comment spam is constructed and […]

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks have been around since the dawn of the Internet era and are still a pestilence that infests the modern Web. This week, DDoS attacks were leveraged against online services Feedly and Evernote, once again demonstrating the vulnerability in Internet infrastructure. In a typical DDoS attack, a large flood of data from […]

Hewlett-Packard’s Atalla division rolled out new encryption offerings designed to make encryption easier and faster to deploy on-site and in the cloud. The technology, announced June 10, includes the HP Secure Encryption with HP Enterprise Secure Key Manager (ESKM) 4.0 release. The new technology enables enterprises to manage the encryption keys across servers, including HP’s […]

Twitter users are a vocal bunch, and when the popular TweetDeck application ran into some security trouble today, the message was shared in 140-character snippets. TweetDeck is a Twitter application that was acquired by Twitter in 2011 and is widely used by many (including yours truly). The first signs of trouble with TweetDeck appeared around […]

Not all browser releases are full of exciting, new features users will immediately notice. The Mozilla Firefox 30 browser does not include major new features, yet it does provide users with security fixes and some incremental updates. Released June 10, Firefox 30 improves on the Firefox 29 browser, which debuted April 29 with the biggest […]

Microsoft issued one of the biggest security updates ever to patch its Internet Explorer Web browser. As part of Microsoft’s June Patch Tuesday update, the MS14-035 cumulative update for IE provides 59 fixes for security vulnerabilities. The large number of updates for IE is surprising to some security researchers. “Initially, I was surprised and assumed […]

In a report published on June 9, security firm CrowdStrike revealed new details about Chinese military cyber-espionage against the United States in a campaign it has dubbed “Putter Panda.” The Putter Panda campaign, referred to by other security firms as MSUpdater, has been ongoing since at least 2012. The CrowdStrike disclosure on the Putter Panda […]