Sean Michael Kerner

CTS Labs caught silicon vendor Advanced Micro Devices off-guard on March 12 when it reported to the company that it had discovered a set of vulnerabilities that impact AMD’s EPYC, Ryzen, Ryzen Pro and Ryzen Mobile processors. Contrary to established best practices in the security industry, CTS Labs only gave AMD 24 hours to respond, […]

The best hackers are able to stay hidden in a system, looking like legitimate users, and it is these hackers whom cyber-security startup XM Cyber is aiming to expose with its HaXM platform. XM Cyber announced HaXM on March 20, describing it as an automated advanced persistent threat (APT) platform. The company, which is now […]

Docker Turns 5: A Look at How the Technology Popularized Containers In March 2013, Solomon Hykes introduced the world to a new generation of Linux containers that he dubbed Docker. Over the last five years, Docker as a technology and as a company has remade both itself and the software industry. According to Docker, there […]

New Java Platform Standard Edition (Java SE) releases used to take years of development effort before becoming generally available. That’s no longer the case, as Oracle announced the availability of Java SE 10 on March 20, barely six months after Java SE 9 was released. Oracle officially committed to a new six-month release cadence for […]

Four years after starting a bug bounty program, GitHub is still seeing benefits from rewarding security researchers for responsibly disclosing security vulnerabilities. For 2017, GitHub reported that it received 840 bug submissions to its bug bounty program, which is run on the HackerOne platform. A total of 121 reports were resolved by GitHub, with an […]

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) voted on March 14 to accept the NATS messaging project as its newest hosted effort. The NATS project is an open-source distributed messaging technology that got its start seven years ago and has already been deployed by multiple organizations including Ericsson, Comcast, Samsung and General Electric (GE).  “NATS has […]

Six Best Practices for Improving Identity and Access Governance Access control and identity governance policies are two key pillars of enterprise security, providing organizations with approaches to securing important technology assets. Unfortunately, it’s not always easy to properly secure identity and access control, due to organizational complexity. Further compounding the challenge is that cyber-attackers are […]

On the second and final day of the Pwn2Own 2018 hacking competition on March 15, security researchers were awarded $105,000 in prize money for new zero-day exploits.  The total two-day prize total awarded by Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) at the event came to $267,000, which is far less than what was available for […]

The U.S. Government warned on March 15 that Russian government hackers have taken direct aim at the U.S. power grid, as well as other critical manufacturing sectors. The allegations about Russian hacking of the U.S. power grid comes as a result of a joint Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) […]

Security researchers were able to successfully exploit Microsoft Edge, Apple Safari and Oracle’s VirtualBox technologies at the first day of the Pwn2Own security contest on March 14 and were awarded a total of $162,000 for their efforts. In total, there were four exploit attempts made by security researchers on day one of Pwn2Own 2018, which […]

Mozilla is aiming to increase its browser market share with a new effort that will better enable managed deployments of the Firefox browser in enterprise environments. The new Firefox Quantum for Enterprise technology is part of the Firefox 60 release which reached the beta milestone on March 14 and is set to become generally available […]

Ransomware, PowerShell Malware Spike Higher, McAfee Reports New malware reached an all-time high in the fourth quarter of 2017, according to McAfee. The 19-page McAfee Labs Threat Report: March 2018, released March 12, reveals that 63.4 million new malware samples were discovered in the fourth quarter of 2017. Not all forms of malware, however, were […]