Sean Michael Kerner

From the ‘That Was Fast!’ files: Late Wednesday at the pwn2own hacking challenge, security firm VUPEN demonstrated a 0day flaw against a fully patched Firefox 19.0.1 browser running on Windows. VUPEN was awarded $60,000 from the contest organizer HP for the exploit. Less than 24 hrs after the flaw was first reported, Mozilla is out […]

From the ‘time is real’ files: Real Time Linux, that is Linux with a deterministic timing component for an action to occur, is big deal for a lot of industries (military among them). Red Hat first announced it’s production grade Real Time Linux platform, dubbed MRG back in 2007. Back then, Real Time enhancement were […]

eSecurity Planet met up with Nicholas Percoco, senior VP at Trustwave SpiderlLabs, during the RSA conference last week to discuss the state of PaaS security. Percoco specifically took aim at the Red Hat OpenShift PaaS in his demo, though he cautioned that OpenShift is not necessarily vulnerable. He noted that his team’s exploration into PaaS […]

The European Commission has imposed a 561 million EUR fine (approximately $731 million US) on Microsoft for violating the browser choice agreement of 2009. The Browser Choice Screen (BCS) was legally agreed to by Microsoft in 2009, providing European Windows users with a screen that enables them to choose which web browser(s) they want to […]

Cisco currently dominates the 10GbE space with a 66.1 percent market share. Cisco’s overall Layer 2/3 switch share actually declined in the fourth quarter of 2012 to 61.2 percent down from 64.0 percent in the prior year. “While growth in the Ethernet switch market will largely come from 10GbE and 40GbE in the coming years, […]

Late Monday, Oracle’s upstream swim continued with its fifth major update to Java this year for security fixes. Java 7 Update 15 provides two fixes for vulnerabilities being exploited in the wild today. Both vulnerabilities are remotely exploitable without user authentication, and both carry the highest possible CVSS (Common Vulnerabilities Scoring System) rating of 10. […]

From the ‘Metered Cloud’ files: One of the most talked about new technologies for the open source OpenStack cloud platform that I heard about at the last OpenStack Summit was Ceilometer. Ceilometer provides metering for OpenStack -think billing and usage. It is already in used at multiple cloud providers including AT&T and DreamHost. The effort […]

Playing video games is typically considered to be a form of recreation. As it turns out, playing games might just also be helping humans to become more resilient in their everyday lives and with IT. Speaking in a keynote session at the RSA Conference, Game Developer Jane McGonigal told the capacity crowd to embrace gaming. […]

In the desktop world, anti-virus is a must have for many platforms. The same is not as true when it comes to mobile. “If you want to talk about anti-virus for phones it doesn’t make sense,” Security researcher, Charlie Miller said. “The way that phones are made, apps are downloaded with privileges on purpose.” Miller […]

During a panel session at the RSA conference this week, Tom Ridge, the first head of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, recounted the efforts that he helped lead 10 years ago. Ridge was joined by Howard Schmidt, who helped author the U.S. National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace under President Bush. More recently, Schmidt served […]

From the ‘Goodbye Desktop IDE’ files: I’ve been following the development of Orion, since the Eclipse Foundation started the effort back in January of 2011. The basic idea behind Orion is to move development online into a web-based development model. The Orion 1.0 release came out in October of last year, and here we are […]

While the name Wikipedia has become well known in the English lexicon, it’s still not quite as well known in China. During his keynote, Wales showed pictures of restaurant menus from China that had the name Wikipedia as the name of food items. For example, Wikipedia with noodles. Why is that the case? Wales has […]