Sean Michael Kerner

Cisco announced on March 5 that it is expanding its Tetration analytics platform to provide new workload protection capabilities. When Cisco unveiled Tetration in June 2016, the initial focus was on data center visibility. With the Tetration 2.0 update in February 2017, Cisco added application segmentation capabilities and the ability to build automatic security policies. […]

Facebook announced on March 5, that it is turning on a new capability that will automatically direct users to an HTTPS secured version of a link target, if one is available. The feature known as HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) preloading is being rolled out across facebook.com and Instagram. With HSTS preloading, a site link that […]

Brave Browser Shields Users From Trackers, Rewards Publishers Online advertising blockers have become increasingly popular in recent years as a way to speed up websites and improve security. The open-source Brave web browser includes an integrated set of blocking and security technologies, grouped under the name Shields, to protect its users. Brave, which was co-founded […]

Network security firm Fortinet held its Accelerate 18 annual customer conference from Feb. 26 to March 1 in Las Vegas, highlighting successes and announcing new products. The biggest set of announcements came on Feb. 27, with the launch of the FortiOS 6.0 firmware, which enables Fortinet’s security fabric. Among the new features in FortiOS 6.0 […]

GitHub reported on March 1 that it was the victim of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack that peaked at 1.35 Tbps (Terabits per second), making it the largest DDoS attack that has been publicly reported to date. The attack is part of the ongoing memcached amplification attacks that were first publicly reported by […]

Bug bounty platform vendor Bugcrowd announced on March 1 that it raised $26 million in a Series C round of funding. The company will use the funding to grow its go to market efforts and expand what its crowdsourced bug bounty platform is able to do for organizations. The new funding round was led by […]

There is a new threat vector for Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks that is now taking aim at global service providers. Multiple vendors and cloud operators are reporting that attackers are using mis-configured Memcached servers to help amplify DDoS attacks. In an amplification or reflection attack, hackers abuse a misconfiguration in a publicly accessible […]

8 Startups Raise Money to Secure Everything From ICS to Home Networks Cyber-security startups continue to gain the attention of venture capitalist pocketbooks—in February 2018, at least eight vendors raised new money. The biggest single round of funding in February was secured by fraud detection vendor DataVisor, which raised $40 million. Artificial intelligence-powered threat hunting […]

The OpenStack Queens platform was officially released on Feb. 28, marking the 17th release of the open-source cloud platform, originally started by NASA and Rackspace in 2010. OpenStack today is widely used by large organizations, including Walmart, as well as serving as the underlying infrastructure for multiple cloud providers, including platforms from IBM and Oracle, […]

Duo Security reported on Feb. 27 that it discovered a series of vulnerabilities in widely-used Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) implementations. SAML is used by many different vendors to help enable single sign on (SSO) and federation capabilities across different services. Duo Security worked with CERT to help alert impacted vendors which include Okta, OneLogin, OmniAuth, […]

Cyber-security vendor CrowdStrike released its 2018 Global Threat Report on Feb. 26, providing insights from the company’s globally distributed network that processes approximately 100 billion events a day. Among the highlights of the 74-page report is an analysis of what CrowdStrike refers to as the average breakout time, which is a key metric for organizations […]

Encryption Use Growing for Both Data Traffic and Malware, Cisco Finds Not only has the volume of encryption used on the internet grown in the past year, but so has its use by malware authors, according to Cisco’s 2018 Annual Cybersecurity Report. The 68-page report, released on Feb. 21, provides insight from a benchmark survey […]