Sean Michael Kerner

The Zeus malware family has been a common sight on the IT threat landscape for years, powering a banking fraud botnet of the same name that U.S. authorities have tried to shut down. Zeus has now evolved. Researchers at Kaspersky Lab have detected a new 64-bit variant of the Zeus malware. 64-bit-based operating systems are […]

The U.S National Security Agency (NSA) is using Google cookies in order to track potential targets, according to a new report published Dec. 10 in The Washington Post. The report is based on material leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden and explains how the NSA uses cookies for their own purposes. Cookies are widely used on […]

Red Hat today announced the beta availability of its next-generation Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7 operating system platform. The new beta marks the first major public milestone release of RHEL 7, which is the successor to the RHEL 6 platform that first debuted in 2010 and was most recently updated with the 6.5 release […]

While the FBI and other law enforcement agencies around the world have successfully been able to shut down a number of illegal online sites this year, The Pirate Bay is not one of them. The Pirate Bay is perhaps the most successful pirate content location on the Internet today—if success is measured by the simple […]

Mozilla is out today with its latest milestone Firefox release, this time providing security fixes as well as new functionality in the open-source Web browser. The Firefox 26 release first entered beta in early November. From a security feature perspective, the big change that Firefox 26 introduces is the concept of “click-to-play” plug-ins. Prior to […]

Microsoft came out with its December Patch Tuesday update, which delivers fixes for 24 flaws spread across 11 advisories, six of which are identified as being critical. At the top of Microsoft’s patch list is a TIFF image flaw that was not fully patched in the November Patch Tuesday update, even though it was known […]

At the beginning of the Internet era, one company became synonymous with both great success and great failure. That company was Netscape. In the middle of the 1990s, Netscape completely dominated the Web browser landscape and was used by nearly every human on the planet that wanted to explore the Internet. But by the end […]

Although the cloud can be used for general computing purposes, a general-purpose operating system is not necessarily the best fit for the cloud. To that end, the Linux Foundation’s Xen Collaborative project today announced the Mirage OS 1.0 cloud operating system. Mirage is a “library operating system,” which means that it can run on any […]

Linux vendor Red Hat has been working toward the next major release of its flagship platform for much of the last two years and is now gearing up for the home stretch. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 platform was first released in 2010 and recently updated to version 6.5. Next year is now looking […]

Week after week for months on end in 2013, new allegations and reports have emerged about the online surveillance activities of the U.S. National Security Agency, and now, a group of the largest tech vendors in the U.S. have said, enough is enough. In an open letter publicly posted on a new Web domain, titled […]