Sean Michael Kerner

Analyst firm IDC has some good news for the rows of vendors showing their wares at the RSA conference this week: The security market is still growing. Speaking during IDC‘s annual analyst breakfast meeting at RSA, Chris Christiansen, program vice president for IDC’s Security Products and Services group, detailed key trends in the sector. “The […]

There is no shortage of research releases at the RSA 2013 security conference. Yet one piece of research stands alone, above all others by virtue of the sheer audacity of the undertaking. HD Moore, celebrated hacker, founder of the open source Metasploit framework and CISO at Rapid7, scanned the *entire* Internet in an effort to […]

In the world of online privacy, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla are all front and center. The chief privacy officers from all four vendors took the stage at the RSA Security conference today to debate what online privacy is all about. The most heated moment during the panel discussion came when Keith Enright, Senior Privacy […]

At the RSA Security conference this week, a panel of CAs and researchers discussed ideas that could help shore up the system of awarding SSL certificates. DANE Leverages DNS Yngve Pettersen, a software developer and security specialist for TLS Prober Labs, mentioned an approach known as DANE (DNS-based Authentication of Named Entities). DANE is defined […]

Speaking at the RSA Security conference, Patrick Ready, chief information security officer at the FBI, provided a packed session room with real-world lessons on how to detect and thwart insider threats. He started the discussion with a candid observation. “Insider threats are not hackers,” he said. “People like to think of insider threats as hackers […]

According to new research announced by Symantec at the RSA 2013 conference, Stuxnet has been around since at least 2005. During his keynote, Francis DeSouza, president of Product and Services at Symantec, referred to an early version of Stuxnet from 2005 that his team has dubbed Stuxnet 0.5. This earlier version of Stuxnet is a […]

Content Delivery Network (CDN) vendor Akamai is updating its Kona Site Defender Web Application Firewall this week with new rules and DDoS mitigations In a DDoS attack, a site is hit by a flood of concurrent requests which serve to disrupt or disable a site. Akamai as a platform has 10 Terabytes of scalability and […]

Adi Shamir, co-inventor of the RSA cryptographic algorithm, challenged his fellow co-inventor Ron Rivest and Whit Diffie, co-inventor of the Diffie-Hellman algorithm, during a keynote panel session at the RSA 2013 conference. “Cryptography is becoming less important,” Shamir flatly stated to the shock of his fellow panelists. “In the 21st century, even the most secure […]

Even though the IT security landscape is not lacking challenges, Microsoft’s Scott Charney, Corporate VP, Trustworthy Computing, believes that there is reason for optimism. “My optimism is not delusional,” Charney said. “It is based in fact.” Charney delivered a keynote at the RSA 2013 security conference this morning about why he is optimistic about IT […]

Thanks to cloud and virtualization, the attack surface has expanded and so has the security risk, ARt Coviello, Exec Chairman of RSA Security said. Big Data is not just about collecting lots of data, it’s about extracting value from that data, Coviello stressed. The value that can be extracted from Big Data isn’t limited to […]

Now in an effort to provide greater clarity and improve its research efforts, HP is consolidating DVLabs, the Zero Day Intiative (ZDI) and HP Fortify Software Security Research into a single unit called HP Security Research (HPSR). HPSR will provide threat intelligence feeds for multiple HP products, including the new HP Reputation Security Monitor (RepSM) […]

Mozilla is announcing that at least 17 carriers spanning the globe have now committed to carrying FirefoxOS-based mobile smartphones. The carriers include: América Móvil, China Unicom, Deutsche Telekom, Etisalat, Hutchison Three Group, KDDI, KT, MegaFon, Qtel, SingTel, Smart, Sprint, Telecom Italia Group, Telefónica, Telenor, TMN and VimpelCom. The carrier expansion represents a net addition of […]