Sean Michael Kerner

On Aug. 28 a group of security vendors jointly revealed that they worked together to help identify and disrupt the operations of a mobile Android device botnet known as WireX. The botnet made use of malware infected apps that Google has now removed from the Play store, to launch Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. […]

Security vendor Forcepoint today announced the acquisition of privately held user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) vendor RedOwl. Financial terms of the deal are not being publicly disclosed at this time. To date, RedOwl has raised $21.6 million in venture capital funding. The basic concept behind UEBA technologies is that data and usage behavior patterns […]

How App Install Advertising Fraud Has Become a Costly Problem An increasingly popular form of online advertising are ads whose goal is to get users to install apps. Fraud is a big problem in the app install advertising world, with losses as high as $300 million, according to a DataVisor report issued on Aug. 23 […]

Two years ago, VMware first began talking about the concept of the “Goldilocks Zone,” where the virtualization hypervisor sits at the ideal location in the network to improve enterprise security. At the VMworld event today in Las Vegas, VMware announced that its Project Goldilocks vision is at long last becoming generally available, under the product […]

The FBI arrested a Chinese national identified as Yu Pingan on Aug. 21, alleging he was involved in the creation of malware that has impacted multiple U.S. organizations. Pingan was arrested in Los Angeles, where he was attending a conference. Pingan, who is also known by the alias “GoldSun,” has been charged with one count […]

Cyber-security vendor Versive announced on Aug.22 that it has raised $12.7 million in a new round of funding that will be used to help the company build out its go-to-market and technical efforts. Total funding to date for the company now stands at $54.7 million. When the company launched in 2012 it was originally known as […]

Zerodium updated its exploit acquisition payout schedule on Aug.23, adding new targets and prices for zero-day exploits. Among the new targets are mobile messaging apps including WhatsApp, iMessage and Signal, for which Zerodium will pay up to $500,000 for a remote code exploit with local privilege escalation zero-day vulnerability. Zerodium is an independent, privately held […]

DDoS Attackers Taking Direct Aim at Gaming Companies, Akamai Reports In the second quarter of this year, 82 percent of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks were targeted at gaming companies, according to Akamai‘s 2Q17 State of the Internet / Security report. The report, which was released on Aug. 22, provides new statistics on the DDoS and […]

Security firm Illumio is updating its Adaptive Security Platform with new capabilities that aim to help organizations visualize connections within an enterprise and create security policies that reduce risk. When Illumio first emerged from stealth in October 2014, one of the core capabilities of the company’s platform was a technology called Illumination. The promise of […]

One Identity today announced the official debut of its new Starling Identity Analytics and Risk Intelligence (IARI) service, providing organizations with cloud-delivered security and risk analysis capabilities. The IARI service is the second offering on One Identity’s Starling software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform, joining the Starling Two-Factor Authentication service. The IARI service is not based on any pre-existing […]

Mimecast is warning today of a new type of email exploit it has named “Ropemaker” that could potentially be exposing hundreds of millions of desktop email client users to security risks. The Ropemaker attack abuses desktop email client functionality that enables email messages to pull CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) information from a remote location. Mimecast’s […]

More Cyber-Attacks Occur on Weekends Than a Weekday, Study Reveals Fortinet released its 28-page FortiGuard Labs Q2 2017 Global Threat Landscape Report on Aug. 21, providing insight drawn from over 3 million network devices and sensors within production environments. Overall, Fortinet’s data quantified 184 billion exploit detections during the quarter for an average daily volume […]