Sean Michael Kerner

The recent data breach at retailer Target—which left 70 million Americans and their personal information at risk—is receiving Congress’ attention this week in a number of hearings on data security. One of the participants in those hearings is Bob Russo, general manager of the Payment Council Industry Security Standards Council (PCI SSC), which oversees the […]

LibreOffice 4.2 Office Suite Boasts New Features, Performance Boost By Sean Michael Kerner LibreOffice Isn’t Just for Linux While LibreOffice is widely deployed on Linux systems, there are both Windows and Mac OS X installers, enabling users of proprietary operating systems to benefit from a freely available office suite. LibreOffice Start Screen Gets a New […]

During a panel session at the Open Compute Summit Jan. 29 in San Jose, Calif., celebrated Internet browser pioneer turned venture capitalist Marc Andreessen explained why he’s bullish on the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. Andreessen’s enthusiasm is about the technology itself as well as the hardware that will need to support it. New Bitcoins are created by […]

The annual Pwn2Own browser-hacking competition has risen to mythical status over the years, with tall tales of security researchers exploiting within minutes browser technologies thought to be secure. For their efforts, researchers have been awarded cash and prizes by the event’s sponsor, Hewlett-Packard’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI). HP has now released the rules for the […]

Yahoo announced late on Jan. 30 that its widely used consumer mail service was attacked recently. “Recently, we identified a coordinated effort to gain unauthorized access to Yahoo Mail accounts,” Jay Rossiter, senior vice president of Platforms and Personalization Products at Yahoo, wrote in a Tumblr blog post. “Upon discovery, we took immediate action to […]

FreeBSD Open-Source OS Comes to the PC-BSD Desktop By Sean Michael Kerner KDE 4.10 Is the Default Desktop PC-BSD’s installation media includes the open-source KDE 4.10 desktop as the default choice. KDE 4.10 had its first public release in February 2013 and is the stable branch KDE development. Encryption Is Built-In As part of the […]

Details continue to emerge about the root cause of the security breach at U.S. retailer Target that exposed the personal information of 70 million people during the 2013 holiday season. According to a Wall Street Journal report this week, the Target attackers were able to gain access to the retailer’s system by way of stolen […]

Yesterday, I wrote about the ignominious story of how Twitter user Naoki Hiroshima lost his @N Twitter account. The story involved somewhat questionable actions from vendors PayPal and GoDaddy, and the story is still evolving. After the media coverage here on eWEEK and elsewhere, both PayPal and GoDaddy issued public statements on Wednesday, Jan. 29, […]

The risk of data loss from a Website can come from multiple avenues. There could be an outright data breach where an attacker steals content directly from a database, or an automated bot could scrape the site, stealing data that is out in the open. The challenge of dealing with automated Web-content scraping is one […]

A harrowing tale has emerged about how Twitter user Naoki Hiroshima lost his Twitter account @N. In a detailed and dramatic post on blogging site Medium, Hiroshima explains how an attacker was able to steal the @N Twitter handle from him. The attack wasn’t a simple one-layer exploitation; there was no hacker guessing that Hiroshima’s […]