Sean Michael Kerner

Red Hat announced a series of updates for its Ansible automation platform technologies on Sept. 7, including version 3.2 of Ansible Tower and a new open-source project that will help power DevOps configuration management. The new open-source AWX Project is the foundation upon which Ansible Tower, with the 3.2 update, is now built. Ansible Tower […]

Victims of Payment Card Breaches Not Fully PCI DSS Compliant The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliance regimen includes 12 key requirements and hundreds of related controls, all designed to keep payment data secure. According to the Verizon, no organization that has been breached in the past seven years was fully PCI […]

Nginx Inc announced on Sept.6 a series of products that will enable a new Nginx Application Platform. One of the new products is built with technology that Nginx obtained with the acquisition of privately-held software vendor Zokets. Nginx was originally just an open-source web server, but in recent years has been adding enhanced application capabilities […]

Symantec warned on Sept. 6 that it is seeing the re-emergence of a hacker group known as Dragonfly that is directly targeting energy firms and industrial control system (ICS) infrastructures.  Symantec issued warnings about the first Dragonfly attacks back in July 2014, after which the hacker group’s attacks diminished. The new round of attacks, dubbed […]

The mobile edition of the Pwn2Own hacking contest is returning for its sixth year, with a prize pool of $500,000 and new targets for security researchers. The event is scheduled to be held at the PacSec 2017 conference in Tokyo Nov. 1-2. Pwn2Own is operated by Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) and has both […]

While most Americans were enjoying the Labor Day weekend, Linux creator Linus Torvalds was busy releasing the Linux 4.13 kernel on Sept. 3. Linux 4.13 is the fourth new Linux kernel released in 2017 and follows Linux 4.12, which debuted in July. The Linux 4.13 kernel is noteworthy for a number of reasons, including multiple […]

Ransomware Increasingly Targets Businesses Instead of Consumers In terms of impact and scale, 2017 is shaping up as a milestone year for ransomware, with multiple high-profile incidents including the WannaCry and NotPetya attacks. According to the Symantec Internet Security Special Report (ISTR) on Ransomware released Aug. 30, ransomware is on track this year to set […]

Instagram publicly admitted on Aug. 30 that an attacker was able to gain unauthorized access to a small amount of user information. The social networking service noted that it has already fixed the root cause vulnerability that enabled the attack. “We recently discovered that one or more individuals obtained unlawful access to a number of […]

Compliance with security regulations doesn’t always mean that an organization won’t be breached, but according to Verizon, compliance does often lead to better security outcomes. That’s one of the high-level findings in the Verizon 2017 Payment Security Report released Aug. 31, providing insight into the current state of Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) […]

The OpenStack Foundation debuted its 16th milestone release today with the launch of the OpenStack Pike cloud infrastructure platform. Pike follows the OpenStack Ocata release which came out in February and had a focus on cloud federation. Unlike Ocata, the new Pike release has a particular emphasis on enabling standalone OpenStack services, without the need […]

7 Cyber-Security Vendors That Raised Funding in August 2017 2017 so far has seen a steady flow of cyber-security startups emerge with new funding, and August, though slower than other months, was no exception. Multiple cyber-security vendors raised new funding rounds to support and grow their technology and go-to-market efforts. The two big areas for […]

The Pivotal Container Service (PKS) was announced today at the VMworld 2017 conference, providing an enterprise-grade Kubernetes container orchestration capability that can be deployed on VMware vSphere and Google Container Engine (GKE). PKS was developed as a joint engineering effort between Pivotal, VMware and Google and builds on top of the open-source Project Kubo that […]