Sean Michael Kerner

BERLIN—How are security vulnerability disclosures handled in the open-source Kubernetes container orchestration and management system? That’s the question that was answered at length in a standing-room only session at the Kubecon/CloudNative EU conference in Berlin. Though the session had the somewhat whimsical title,’ Dance Madly on the Lip of a Volcano with Security Release Processes’ there is […]

BERLIN—At the CloudNative/Kubecon EU event in Berlin on March 29, the big news was that Docker contributed its containerd runtime, while CoreOS contributed its rkt (pronounced rocket) runtime to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). The containerd and rkt projects are rival container runtimes that aim to implement specifications that are being formally defined by […]

2016 was a particularly active year for cyber-security —that is if you look at it in terms of breached records and disclosed vulnerabilities. IBM released its X-Force Threat Intelligence Index 2017 on March 29, reporting a record high number of disclosed software vulnerabilities and breached data records. Since 1997, IBM’s X-Force vulnerability database has been […]

2016 Was a Record Year for Breaches, Gemalto Reports More data records were breached in 2016 than in 2015, according to the latest edition of the Gemalto Breach Level Index. The new index data for 2016, which was released on March 28, reported that approximately 1.4 billion records were compromised in 2016, an 86 percent […]

BERLIN—Every release of the open-source Kubernetes container management and orchestration system has been led by a Google employee, until the release of the latest version, Kubernetes 1.6, which was led by CoreOS software engineer, Dan Gillespie.  Kubernetes 1.6 officially became available on March 28, providing users of the open-source container system with a new release […]

It’s been nearly eight months since Symantec completed its $4.65 billion acquisition of security vendor Blue Coat, bringing in Blue Coat’s management to lead the new combined company, and so far, so good, according to Mike Fey, who came over from Blue Coat and is now the chief operating officer of Symantec. “Business has been […]

Apple on March 27 released updates for both iOS and macOS Sierra, its second security updates of 2017 for the operating systems. Both iOS 10.3 for iPhone and iPad users and macOS Sierra 10.12.4 for desktop users patch myriad flaws. The prior iOS 10.2.1 and macOS Sierra 10.12.3 updates debuted on Jan 23. The iOS […]

GNOME 3.24 Provides Users With More Pleasing Linux Desktop Experience The open-source GNOME desktop environment received its first update for 2017 on March 22 with the debut of GNOME 3.24, code-named Portland. According to the GNOME Project, the 3.24 release includes 28,459 changes that were made by approximately 753 contributors. Many of the changes are […]

IBM has been talking a lot lately about its cognitive capabilities, often in the context of the cloud and usually in reference to the company’s Watson platform. IBM today announced a new cognitive technology that aims to help reduce the risk of phishing. The new cognitive phishing capability however is not directly related to IBM […]

Google is threatening to stop trusting some Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) certificates issued by Symantec inside of the Chrome web browser. Google alleges that Symantec has failed to properly validate issued certificates, a claim with which Symantec strongly disagrees. “Since January 19, the Google Chrome team has been investigating a series of failures […]

Security vendor Distil Networks announced on March 24 that it has discovered an automated bot it is calling GiftGhostBot that is being used to steal retail gift card balances in a global attack. To date, Distil has seen GiftGhostBot attack approximately 1,000 customer websites, though the actual number of sites impacted globally could be significantly […]

JavaScript Is Still Most Popular Language, but Developers Love Rust One of the leading indicators of developer sentiment and trends is the annual Stack Overflow developer survey. Just like in 2016, the 2017 edition of the survey, which garnered responses from 64,000 developers from around the world, found that the most popular programming language is […]