Sean Michael Kerner

From the ‘Nahant‘ files: After 6 plus years of service, Red Hat is moving its Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (RHEL 4) into a bug and security fix maintenance phase. The move follows the release of RHEL 4.9 which is the last update of RHEL 4.x that will include new features and hardware support. According […]

Brower plugins have become a near-ubiquitous feature users embrace to enhance their Web experience. But all those nifty add-ons come with risks, as well. Security vendor Qualys is presenting new research at this year’s RSA conference that highlights one aspect of the vulnerabilities: namely, the failure of many users to keep their plugins updated. In […]

IBM has decided that the best way to deal with the mounting volume of threats to the enterprise network may be more horsepower. This week at the annual RSA conference, IBM unveiled a 20 Gbps intrusion protection system (IPS), powered by Linux, that stands as its most powerful network security offering to date. “This is […]

Drive-by download attacks, as their name implies, are scary things. Unsuspecting Internet users can find their computers infected with a malicious payload simply by visiting a website. Application-scanning vendor Cenzic and Dasient, a security company that focuses on Web-based malware hidden in widgets and third-party JavaScript, are joining forces to make the Web a little […]

February is shaping up to be a big month for Java security. With its quarterly Critical Patch Update for Java, issued on Wednesday, Oracle is taking aim at 21 security vulnerabilities in Java, nearly all of which present targets for attackers working remotely. Included in the release is an update to Oracle’s Java Runtime Environment […]

From the ‘How Long Does a Fork Take?‘ files: Last September, the mageia group emerged as a fork of Mandriva (formerly Mandrake) Linux. Years ago, I was a fan and user of Mandrake, but thinks have gone off the rails every since founder Gael Duval was forced out in 2006. Yet somehow, Mandriva has remained. […]

In years past at the big RSA security conference, Cisco has talked up what it described as self-defending network architecture. This year, the firm is going a step further, debuting SecureX, a new contextually aware framework that looks to improve network intelligence, helping to monitor for threats and keep policies updated across all endpoints. “SecureX […]

Linux users looking to run Microsoft’s Silverlight media framework on their machines got a boost this week. Novell this week released its Moonlight 4 Preview, an open source implementation of Microsoft’s technology, which offers APIs for Silverlight 3 and a substantive early version of Silverlight 4. “We’re finished with 3.0 APIs for Silverlight 3 and […]

A new open source Web Application Firewall (WAF) project called IronBee was released this week. The launch means an alternative approach to ModSecurity, which has helped lead the WAFs charge to date. Spearheaded by Qualys security researcher Ivan Ristic, the IronBee project has already gained the interest of content delivery network vendor Akamai. Ristic stressed […]

Virtualization can be a great way for enterprises to reduce costs and avoid so-called server sprawl, but this new generation of virtual machines (VM)s require security just as their physical counterparts. Enter Juniper Networks (NYSE:JNPR) which this week announced a new virtual security solution called the vGW Virtual Gateway. The vGW builds on technology that […]

From the ‘Open Source Dev Goodness‘ files: Google is out this week with a new release of the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and it’s the most exciting release, I’ve seen in years. GWT 2.2 now includes support for the HTML5 Canvas tag – which means you can now build dynamic images/animations/transitions all in HTML with […]

As mobile devices increasingly become consumers’ computing device of choice — or at least convenience — carriers are having to deliver ever-growing volumes of data over their networks. The consumption of mobile video is poised to put a particular strain on network capacity, according to Cisco. That concern has led the networking giant to develop […]