Sean Michael Kerner

About

Sean Michael Kerner is an Internet consultant, strategist, and writer for several leading IT business web sites.

RSA: Bruce Schneier Discusses What Should be Done With the NSA

SAN FRANCISCO—Bruce Schneier is a legendary figure in the security community, well-known for his expertise in cryptography and more recently for his insight into the surveillance activities of the National Security Agency (NSA). Schneier currently serves as the CTO of incident response management vendor Co3 Systems. In an interview with eWEEK at the RSA conference […]

Law Enforcement Aims to Prevent Cyber-Attacks: Secret Service Agent

SAN FRANCISCO—What role does law enforcement play in helping prevent and stop cyber-crime? That question was tackled during a press event hosted by Verizon at the RSA Conference Feb. 25. Cyber-criminals more often than not only have a single goal—money, said Ed Lowery, special agent in the criminal investigations unit of the U.S. Secret Service. […]

Apple Patches OS X and iOS, Yet Unpatched Flaws Remain

Apple is updating both its Mac OS X desktop operating system and its iOS mobile operating system to fix flaws related to the implementation of Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption. The iOS 7.0.6 update was released by Apple on Feb 21, and the OS X Maverick 10.9.2 update got its release on Feb 25. The […]

NSA, Snowden Revelations Not Surprising: RSA Panel

SAN FRANCISCO—What do the world’s greatest cryptographers think about the current state of information security? At a panel at the RSA Conference Feb. 25, the discussion began with the National Security Agency (NSA) disclosures about surveillance of Americans. Adi Shamir, professor in the computer science department at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and […]

Microsoft Takes Aim at Java Security With EMET 5

SAN FRANCISCO—Microsoft today announced a technical preview of version 5 of its Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET), providing new security protection for Java as well as Microsoft Office. In an interview at the RSA Conference here, Jonathan Ness, principal security development lead at Microsoft’s Security Response Center (MSRC), explained to eWEEK that the goal of […]

eWEEK at 30: The Lamp Stack Switches on Large-Scale Web Development

For much of computing history, application delivery came by way of proprietary, vertically integrated application stacks that were designed and engineered by IT vendors. In the late 1990s that changed. The Linux open-source operating system emerged in the early 1990s just in time to serve as an important tool that would drive the nascent Internet. […]

RSA Chief Calls on Governments to Respect Privacy

SAN FRANCISCO—Art Coviello, executive vice president of EMC and executive chairman of RSA, the security division of EMC, kicked off the RSA Conference 2014 here today with a keynote address about the state of U.S. government snooping, privacy and cyber-warfare. The RSA Conference has been shrouded in controversy from the outset over the allegation that […]

McAfee Aims to Achieve Sustainable Innovation in IT Security

SAN FRANCISCO—McAfee executives speaking at a press event Feb. 24 at the RSA Conference here detailed their plans to push security forward and bypass rival vendors. McAfee, an Intel company, aims to change the way it looks at a key challenge that faces modern enterprise security: achieving true, sustainable innovation. “Taking an individual countermeasure, like […]

Cisco Adds Advanced Malware Protection to Its Portfolio

Cisco revealed Feb. 24 that it is adding critical new security capabilities to its portfolio, thanks to technology gained via the $2.7 billion acquisition of SourceFire in 2013. The advanced malware protection (AMP) feature has been available on SourceFire’s FirePower appliances and will now be available as a service for Cisco’s customer base. Cisco has […]

Microsoft’s EMET Security Technology Isn’t Impenetrable: Bromium

Researchers from security firm Bromium today revealed that they have discovered ways to bypass Microsoft’s Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET). EMET is designed to provide an additional layer of security to applications to reduce the risk of exploitation. While EMET prevents many attacker bullets from getting through to an application, Bromium now asserts that EMET […]