Sean Michael Kerner

Abusers are leveraging a feature in the popular WordPress open-source content management system to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, according to multiple sources. Todd Redfoot, chief information security officer at GoDaddy, told eWEEK that he started to see an uptick in WordPress attacks in late February. The attacks leverage the XML-RPC (Remote Procedure Call) “pingback” […]

Cloud file storage, sharing and synchronization vendor OwnCloud is aiming to accelerate its market adoption and growth, with a new enterprise release and a new round of funding. OwnCloud is set to formally announce on March 13 that it has closed a $6.3 million Series A round of funding led by Devonshire Investors and General […]

Microsoft came out today with its monthly Patch Tuesday update, and as was the case in February, the Internet Explorer (IE) Web browser figures prominently into the total tally. Microsoft is fixing 23 different vulnerabilities in the March Patch Tuesday update, spread across five security advisories. Of the 23 vulnerabilities, 18 of them are directly […]

The open-source Docker Linux container project is continuing its march toward broader deployment this week with the release of Docker 0.9 on March 10 and the announcement of a Linux container certification effort from Red Hat today. Docker leverages a container approach to virtualization, which is fundamentally different from the traditional hypervisor virtual machine model […]

Mozilla quietly announced in a blog post March 7 that it is no longer putting full-time developers to work on the Persona Web-authentication system. In my opinion, that’s a real shame and a tragic failure for Mozilla and its efforts to help build a more open and secure Internet. I first wrote about Persona when […]

As the Internet opens up to connect more things and networking models move from physical devices to a virtualized software-defined networking (SDN) model, security needs to be top of mind. That’s the message that Chris Young, senior vice president for Cisco’s security business unit, is driving both within Cisco and to the market as a […]

The National Security Agency and other government agencies that are using mass surveillance techniques on Internet users are “setting fire to the future of the Internet,” said NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden March 10 during a discussion Webcast from the South by South West (SXSW) conference. The former NSA contractor spoke at length about his actions […]

March 6, 2014, is a date that the Bitcoin community is not likely to forget anytime soon. On that date, an article ran in newly revived publication Newsweek that claimed to have outed the founder of Bitcoin, the mysterious figure known as Satoshi Nakamoto. Throughout the day on March 6, my Twitter feed was littered […]

It looks like at long last Microsoft will plug a zero-day flaw in its Internet Explorer (IE) Web browser March 11. That is, of course, the first Tuesday of the month and the time when Microsoft releases its monthly Patch Tuesday security update. Ahead of every Patch Tuesday, Microsoft always releases an advance notification for […]

The open-source Linux operating system is freely available to those who want to use it, but finding good sources of training for Linux has not always been as free. In a move to further enable more people to get Linux training, the Linux Foundation is now opening up its education efforts. The Linux Foundation is […]

Fast-growing cloud startup DigitalOcean today announced that it has raised $37.2 million in a Series A round of funding. The new funding round was led by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and included participation from CrunchFund and IA Ventures. DigitalOcean had previously raised a $3.2 million seed round of funding in July 2013. The new […]

Retail giant Target lost its CIO, Beth Jacob, on March 5. The story is that Jacob resigned after being at the company 12 years. Target, of course, is at the center of the largest retail data breach in recent memory. On Dec. 9, Target reported that 40 million credit and debit cards were compromised in […]