Sean Michael Kerner

The open-source CoreOS operating system project issued its first beta release today, providing users with a Linux operating system that is built specifically for Docker container delivery. Docker is an open-source container technology for application virtualization and currently runs on multiple Linux distributions, including Red Hat and Ubuntu. What CoreOS is aiming to provide is […]

7 Surprising Findings From Check Point’s 2014 Security Report by Sean Michael Kerner Data Loss Events Are Growing On a year-over-year basis, Check Point found that across the industrial, finance, government and telco sectors, the percentage of organizations with at least one potential data loss event is growing. Malware Is Downloaded Every Two Hours Fifty-eight […]

The CEO of Bitly publicly admitted on May 8 that the company’s URL-shortening service was compromised. Bitly CEO Mark Josephson blogged that compromised credentials include users’ email addresses, encrypted passwords, API keys and OAuth tokens. OAuth tokens are used to connect a Bitly account to identity systems from Facebook and Twitter for user access. The […]

Oracle Solaris 11.2 Beta Features Full OpenStack Cloud Distribution By Sean Michael Kerner Mark Hurd Sets the Bar High for Solaris Oracle President Mark Hurd kicked off the Solaris 11.2 launch event making a number of predictions. One of them is that Solaris will enable Oracle to become the leader in high-end computing. Desktop Options […]

Setting up the policies that define compute, storage, and networking access and performance represents a key control point in any cloud or enterprise IT deployment. The Congress project, which is currently being incubated within the open-source OpenStack cloud community, might one day be the answer to delivering an open policy engine for all IT. In […]

Hewlett-Packard is reaffirming its strong commitment to the open-source OpenStack cloud platform today, with a $1 billion, two-year investment in research and development and a new Helion cloud platform initiative. Helion is the new brand name for HP’s OpenStack efforts and includes a full OpenStack distribution that will have both community and commercial editions. Additionally, […]

Heartbleed Saga Continues: Highlights of Vulnerability’s First 30 Days By Sean Michael Kerner Heartbeat Function Is the Root Cause of the Flaw The OpenSSL Project first disclosed CVE-2014-0160 on April 7, noting that “a missing bounds check in the handling of the TLS heartbeat extension can be used to reveal up to 64k of memory […]

Further expanding its security platform, FireEye entered an agreement to acquire network forensics firm nPulse for $70 million. Announced today, the deal is made up of approximately $60 million in cash and $10 million in stock, and is expected to close in the second quarter. What makes nPulse an attractive addition to FireEye is technology […]

The open-source OpenSSL cryptographic library is being patched for a pair of security flaws, one of which has been in the code for at least four years. OpenSSL, of course, is the source of the now infamous Heartbleed vulnerability, first disclosed on April 7. While Heartbleed has had a wide-ranging impact that has left hundreds […]

It was nearly one month ago that the Heartbleed Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption flaw upended the world with one of the most wide-reaching security incidents of the last decade. Ever since, vendors, researchers and media have all been trying to find the next Heartbleed-type flaw, with little success. On May 2, my inbox was […]

U.S. retail giant Target today announced that CEO Gregg Steinhafel is leaving his post, effective immediately. Steinhafel has been working at Target for 35 years and had been serving as the company’s CEO since 2008. Under Steinhafel’s watch, Target was the victim of a data breach that was first disclosed on Dec. 19, 2013. The […]

Back in 2011, ‘do-not-track’ (DNT) technology that was actively being built into Firefox, Internet Explorer and other Web browsers offered the promise of improved privacy for Internet users. Now, in 2014, DNT could be in real trouble as Yahoo, one of DNT’s first implementers, has backed out of using the technology and DNT settings are […]