Sean Michael Kerner

TORONTO—People around the world are being targeted for exploitation with malicious remote admin tools (RATs) that are taking advantage of old, already patched Microsoft vulnerabilities. That’s the finding of researchers from the Citizen Lab based at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, speaking at the SecTor security conference here this […]

Microsoft released its monthly Patch Tuesday security update, including fixes for a pair of critical zero-day flaws in the Internet Explorer Web browser. IE, however, isn’t the only critical area that Microsoft users need to be concerned about this month. “There will be one thought on IT teams’ minds today: ‘Where did this second IE […]

Cyber-Crime Costs Keep Rising: Seven Surprising Reasons Why by Sean Michael Kerner U.S. Has the Highest Cyber-Crime Costs in the World The HP-sponsored Ponemon Institute study isn’t just a U.S study. It also examines the global landscape. The cost in the U.S. is currently higher than in any other country analyzed. Cost of Cyber-Crime Varies […]

The bad news is in: The cost of cyber-crime in 2013 is actually going up despite projections last year that it might level off in the future. “The bad news is that companies across different industries are experiencing a fairly substantial cost of cyber-crime,” Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of the Ponemon Institute told eWEEK. […]

There are a lot more big-name vendors, including IBM, HP, Dell, Cisco and Intel, that are involved in the open-source OpenStack cloud effort than there are smaller vendors like Mirantis. Mirantis is an OpenStack training and services vendor that has raised $20 million in funding to date as it ramps up its services and its […]

Both cyber-security awareness and the security threat landscape itself have changed over the past decade, but some of the basics about how individuals and enterprises can stay secure have not. October 2013 marks the 10th anniversary of National Cyber Security Awareness Month, which is all about helping educate users and enterprises on how best to […]

Security research should not be a thankless task; it should be a task that is celebrated, rewarded and, more importantly, acted on with all the necessary expediency that a given piece of research might deserve. A number of events occurred this week that show how different groups value and act on security research at very […]

One of the biggest data breaches of all time occurred not by a malicious external actor, but by IT contractor Edward Snowden, who was able to take privileged information from the National Security Agency (NSA). The fact that Snowden had access is not a unique problem for the NSA, according to a new study sponsored […]

The Tor onion router project is used by countless numbers of users around the world in a bid to protect their privacy and provide a degree of anonymity. According to new revelations published today by the Guardian newspaper from data pilfered by whistleblower Edward Snowden, Tor users have been specifically targeted by the National Security […]

The Dread Pirate Roberts isn’t just the fictional name of a movie character from the classic 1987 film The Princess Bride; it’s also the alias for an alleged criminal mastermind who has now been arrested for operating the illegal goods Silk Road Website. While the Silk Road site was hidden in the bowels of the […]