Sean Michael Kerner

The Heartbleed security vulnerability is now being actively leveraged by attackers as part of spam campaigns. Symantec is now warning about the dangers of the latest Heartbleed spam campaign which includes a malicious tool that is intended to help users secure themselves from Heartbleed. The Heartbleed security flaw was first publicly disclosed on April 7 […]

As part of the settlement, Palo Alto will pay Juniper Networks $75 million in cash and $100 million in stock. The two companies have also pledged to dismiss all patent litigation pending as a result of the settlement. “Juniper Networks initiated this litigation in order to protect our intellectual property and investment in innovation that […]

A users online actions and behaviours inside of a browser can help to define who they are. That’s the basis of a new patent from IBM researchers designed to help limit the risk on online ecommerce fraud. “At a high-level what we have patented is the ability to help fraudulent transactions before they occur,” Brian […]

From the ‘Still Waiting for PHP 6’ files: Three and a half years ago in December of 2011, I wrote about Facebook’s new HipHop Virtual machine for improving PHP. Now it looks like mainline PHP developers are going to soon go the same route. The Hip Hop Virtual Machine (hhvm) makes PHP faster by providing […]

Oracle announced the new MySQL Fabric technology as an open-source tool that is available in the MySQL Utilities 1.4 release. “If you want to build a high-availability MySQL database, you typically have to setup replication, manage the failover and write some scripts to manage the failover,” Tomas Ulin, vice president, MySQL Engineering explained toDatabaseJournal. “MySQL […]

Apple users across Australia are reporting being victims of a widespread attack in which their iPhones, iPads and other iOS devices are being locked and held for ransom. Apple support communities list several threads on the ransomware attack. “I went to check my phone and there was a message on the screen (it’s still there) […]

Security vulnerabilities in online forum software are not a new phenomenon. Back in 2009, the popular open-source PHPbb.com forum was hacked. And the vBulletin online forum software has been repeatedly targeted over the years by attackers. An Avast spokesperson told eWEEK that the company’s forum was running the open-source Simple Machines Forum (SMF) version 2.0.6. […]

From a WordPress perspective, a number of things can be done to improve security as it relates to cookies. In an email to eWEEK, open-source WordPress developer Andrew Nacin explained that WordPress segregates its cookies for security. “The front-end cookie is delivered over HTTP by default and is simply used to identify the user for […]

From the ‘Run Steam OS Linux Today’ files: The ultimate Linux gaming machine – aka Valve’s Steam Machine won’t be available until 2015. That’s not good news. The Steam Machines effort is a Linux powered gaming machine that could revolutionize console gaming and take on Sony’s PlayStation and Microsoft’s Xbox, if it ever gets out […]

From the ‘Nothing Lasts Forever…’ files: Open-source projects come and go all the time. In the Apache world though there is a prescribed process by which the ‘going’ happens that is somewhat unique in the world of open-source software development. Apache has an archived place for ‘dead’ projects known as the Attic and the latest […]

The eBay breach has generated a lot of interest and discussion about the modern state and usefulness of passwords. Some experts advocate the use of password management systems, and some wonder if passwords have outlived their usefulness. Although debate about the usefulness and security of passwords is important, it’s crucial to realize that the eBay […]

The Internet is a global network that connects most of the planet, but in its most basic form, the Web only connects the world at a networking level, enabling disparate endpoints to connect to servers and to each other. The Internet today doesn’t have a planetary-scale cloud operating system, where applications and policy can move […]