Sean Michael Kerner

The Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is at the foundation of all Web based communications, and when security flaws are found, immediate fixes are required. On April 7, the open-source OpenSSL project issued an advisory regarding a critical vulnerability that could potentially leave millions of users at risk. The flaw—identified as CVE-2014-0160 and called “TLS heartbeat […]

The Target data breach will not be claiming security vendor Trustwave as one of its victims after all. On March 24, a class-action lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court, Northern District of Illinois by Trustmark National Bank and Green Bank naming Trustwave alongside retailer Target in their complaint. The legal action against Target […]

The Safari 7.0.3 and 6.1.3 browsers were both released by Apple on April 1 for Mac OS X users. In total, the browser updates provide fixes for 27 vulnerabilities, with the Google Chrome Security Team reporting 16 of them. All the vulnerabilities fixed in the Safari update are within the WebKit rendering engine. Until April […]

In a video tour guided by Jeff Enters, chief infrastructure architect at HP, the breadth and depth of the Interop network, known as InteropNet, is revealed. The network includes a dual-stack IPv4 and IPv6 network addressing system. InteropNet also benefits from the Shortest Path Bridging Standard (SPB). InteropNET itself is first assembled in California to […]

This week Cisco announced the Nexus 9516, which is a large 21 Rack-Unit (RU) chassis box with support for up to 2,304 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) ports. Going a step further, the Nexus 9516 supports up to 576 x 40 GbE ports. In total, Cisco claims the Nexus 9516 can deliver up to 60 Terabits […]

Google is re-architecting how cloud instances are sold. In the typical cloud model, on-demand based pricing for virtual resources is always more expensive than if a developer buys some form of a reserved instance. In order to bridge the gap between reserved and on-demand virtual instances, Google is now introducing the idea of sustained-use discounts. […]

While the Bitcoin cryptocurrency is still a relatively new phenomenon, it is one that is generating real money for people. Enough money, in fact, that Bitcoin has now attracted the official interest of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. The taxman always wants to get his due, and Bitcoin is no exception. In a notice posted […]

Dell is also announcing a new Active Fabric Controller that overlays on top of the physical Leaf and Spine network architecture to enable an SDN model for networking. “Active Fabric Controller automates the entire lifecycle of the physical network infrastructure, customizing policies, providing workload visibility and adapt the fabric for automated discovery and quality of […]

Full-Disclosure is a popular open mailing list for security disclosure that first got started in 2002, and over the years it has become a valuable source of security information. On March 19, however, John Cartwright, the founder of Full-Disclosure, decided it was time to pull the plug. Cartwright complained that he was getting a lot […]

The CloudStack 4.3 release is the first major update to CloudStack since the 4.2 release debuted in October. CloudStack is an open-source effort that Citrix donated to Apache in April 2012. The original technology behind CloudStack came to Citrix by way of the acquisition of Cloud.com in 2011. CloudStack 4.3 offers support for Microsoft’s Hyper-V […]

The open-source Apache HTTP Server is being updated to version 2.4.9 to fix two separate security issues, both of which carry the highest possible exploitability score  from the National Vulnerability Database. While Apache still dominates the web server landscape, in recent years the open-source nginx web server has emerged as a serious challenger. Last week […]

Cisco has pledged to invest over $1 billion into its Global InterCloud effort over the next two years. At the center of the Global Intercloud is the open source OpenStack cloud platform, as well as Cisco’s own Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI). Cisco first officially joined the OpenStack community in 2011 and is now a leading […]