Sean Michael Kerner

There is no shortage of data breaches and exploits reported in any given week, with many of them having a root cause in some form of application code vulnerability. There are many reasons why developers don’t always write secure code, and conversely there are many ways that security professionals can help developers, according to Tanya […]

Splunk held is annual .conf customer event Oct. 1-4, making a series of announcements about product direction and new capabilities across its portfolio. Among the new products is the general availability of the Splunk Enterprise 7.2 platform, which provides insight into log files and network traffic. Splunk also announced its latest security platform updates, including the […]

TORONTO—In July 2015, Toronto-based infidelity website Ashley Madison was breached, exposing information on more than 37 million individuals around the world. Since then, Avid Life Media, the parent company of Ashley Madison, rebranded itself as Ruby Life and brought in new cyber-security expertise, including Chief Information Security Officer Matthew Maglieri. In a session at the […]

TORONTO—Cyber-security researcher Keren Elazari came to the SecTor conference here to deliver to the button-down, business crowd a key message: Hackers can help companies improve cyber-security. Elazari delivered the keynote address on Oct. 2, providing an overview of current cyber-security challenges, including unauthorized cryptocurrency mining, ransomware attacks, SMS phishing, and issues with weak and reused […]

TORONTO—Canada, just like every other country, company and individual in the world, is a target of cyber-crime and nation-state-based attackers. The government of Canada, however, is not sitting idly by and has an active strategy to defend its networks. In a keynote address at the SecTor security conference here on Oct. 2, Scott Jones, head […]

Synopsys released its BSIMM9 report on Oct. 2, providing new insight into how organizations are using additional controls to help secure cloud and container deployments. The Building Security in Maturity Model (BSIMM) is based on data from 120 firms and more than 7,800 software security professionals, collected over a 10-year period. The 78-page BSIMM9 report […]

Nearly 30 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web as a new way to distribute information and knowledge. Now in 2018, Berners-Lee is concerned the web he helped to create has become increasingly centralized and puts user information at risk. On Sept. 28, Berners-Lee announced his new effort to help decentralize internet information […]

It wasn’t one but at least three different bugs that enabled a data breach impacting 90 million Facebook users that was first reported on Sept 28. Facebook has revealed additional technical details about its data breach that involved unknown attackers somehow obtaining access tokens for Facebook users. In an initial advisory on the issue, Facebook […]

This continues to be a challenging year for Facebook.  On Sept. 28, the company publicly admitted that it was the victim of a data breach that impacted approximately 50 million user accounts. Out of an abundance of caution, Facebook is resetting the access tokens for a total of 90 million user accounts. The breach was […]

There are many different ways that an attacker can compromise a system, one of them is getting users to ignore warnings about risk.  Cisco Talos along with partner ReversingLabs reported a new approach used by the Adwin Remote Access Trojan (RAT) that makes used of Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) to get past users’ anti-virus software. […]

It wasn’t that long ago when major releases of Java were years apart, but that has changed in 2018, with Oracle releasing not one, but two major releases so far this year. On Sept. 25, Oracle released Java 11, providing users of the widely deployed programming language with 17 new features, including performance, scalability and security […]

Some features take longer than others to get right. On Sept. 27, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation announced the general availability of Kubernetes 1.12. Among the highlights of the update is the stable release of TLS Bootstrapping, a security capability that developers have been working on for the past two years, since the release of […]