Sean Michael Kerner

From the ‘shaking my head in disbelief‘ files: Reports are out that a hacker broke into the personal files of Twitter employees by way of password guessing then sent those files to popular tech site TechCrunch where some of them have been published. What’s wrong with this picture? If someone broke into your house, stole […]

From the ‘no that’s not a typo‘ files: On Tuesday, I wrote about the new critical 0-day flaw that is now publicly available for Firefox 3.5.  As of 10 AM ET today there is no publicly released fix for regular Firefox 3.5 users, but users of the next generation Firefox 3.6 browser are already covered. […]

From the ‘googleupdate.exe is your update master‘ files: If you’re a Google Chrome user (on Windows), than you’ve got googleupdate.exe running – providing silent continuous updates to Chrome as Google releases them (*update* – Google Update actually now works with the Windows Update scheduler – ThnX P Kasting for commenting!). The only problem is sometimes […]

From the ‘follow the yellow brick road‘ files: Infonetics Research is now forecasting a recovery of the telecom/datacom equipment market in 2010. Phew. While the recession officially started in the US in 2008, Infonetics is now reporting that the telecom and datacom (networking) equipment vendors they track, hit global revenues of $150 billion in 2008. […]

From the ‘real hardware for real threats‘ files: My colleague Alex Goldman wrote a great story yesterday about Cisco’s mid-year security report. Cisco’s report (and the story) has a strong emphasis on what IT can do to better secure itself with best practices and awareness of threats, insider and otherwise. One thing that report doesn’t […]

A major release of an operating system typically brings significant changes that require users to learn new skills. But backers of the open source FreeBSD 8 operating system say that’s not necessarily going to be the case with its next major version. FreeBSD 8 is currently in its beta release cycle with a final release […]

From the “Mrs. Clinton” files: In a really interesting town hall exchange (for which a full transcript is now available) a US State Department official asked Mrs. Clinton if he could please get the Mozilla Firefox browser for his PC. “I just moved to the State Department from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and was […]

From the ‘shiny, new and broken‘ files: US-CERT is warning today about a new un-patched 0-day Firefox 3.5 vulnerability. According to US-CERT, the vulnerability is due to an error in the way JavaScript code is processed. There is proof of concept code for the exploit publicly available now and as such in my opinion this […]

Details are emerging from the massive cyber attack that hit South Korea and the U.S. earlier this month — showing security researchers what went right in stemming the tide. Initially, the South Korea government blamed North Korea for the attack, though no solid evidence has yet been put forth to support that claim. In the […]

From the ‘how much faster can it go‘ files: The race for the fastest Linux boot has been going on for about a year at this point and now we’ve got a new winner. Embedded Linux vendor MontaVista today is announcing the demonstration of a 1 second Linux boot. In contrast the fastest production Linux […]