Sean Michael Kerner

LAS VEGAS — Last year, the FBI kicked off Black Hat with a keynote. This year, it was the NSA. Tony Sager, chief of the vulnerability analysis and operations group in the Information Assurance Directorate for the National Security Agency (NSA), took the stage this morning at Black Hat to discuss what his agency is […]

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) users rejoice; an update is coming your way soon. RHEL 5.1 beta is now offering a bevy of updates for Red Hat’s flagship RHEL 5 platform, which was released in March. The long list of updates includes improvements to Microsoft Windows interoperability, as well as an update for Samba, which […]

LAS VEGAS — The majority of presentations at this year’s Black Hat security conference here go down quite simply: A researcher takes the stage, talks about an attack vector and then proceeds to demonstrate how he or she can attack the target. At least one security research group is trying to spice it up this […]

With the Black Hat security conference under way in Las Vegas, the pace and volume of security related news is just warming up. To help get it started, security analysis vendor Cenzic today issued its second-quarter Application Security Trends report claiming that, once again, vulnerabilities are on the rise. But is Cenzic just fear mongering […]

Apparently patents do matter when it comes to open source software adoption. In a teleconference preview ahead of next week’s LinuxWorld conference, Matthew Lawton, director of IDC’s Worldwide Software Business Strategies Group, revealed the results of a non-public survey of IT end users about their attitudes toward software in general and open source in particular. […]

Network Access Control (NAC) continues to be one of the most hyped and talked about networking security technology approaches. NAC offers the promise of secure pre- and post-admission control, ensuring that only the good guys are on your network. At Black Hat 2006, Insightix CTO Ofir Arkin debunked the myth that NAC is a silver […]

Mozilla has patched a pair of security vulnerabilities in its Firefox Web browser just in time for its release of security tools at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas this week. The most notable security fix is the critical fix for a flaw that Mozilla first blamed on browser rival Microsoft. Mozilla Foundation […]

UPDATED: The Web browser is the most basic common unit of the Internet experience for much of the global community. It’s also one of the most attacked. And it’s not just the bad guys breaking the browsers anymore, but also the browser vendors. On Wednesday, Mozilla will take a massive step forward and explain to […]

There is a certain mystique about the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas that it’s a place where bad things are talked about openly and things that we once thought were secure get thrown out the window. It’s a perception that is well founded and one that I expect will be further reinforced at this […]

Look out, Google! Jimmy Wales is coming for you. The founder of Wikipedia is aggressively building out his Wikia effort, a commercial collection of Web sites anyone can edit. One of its key parts? Search. Today Wikia announced the acquisition of the Grub distributed search project from LookSmart and released the technology under the GPL […]

What do Mozilla, Microsoft and monkeys have in common? A bit more than you might think. Here’s the rundown: Mozilla may be taking advantage of Microsoft Shared Source Licensed materials to help build out its next-generation JavaScript platform. Among the components of the new platform are efforts code-named ActionMonkey, IronMonkey and ScreamingMonkey. And not all […]

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software is the goliath of the software industry, encompassing in its scope the financial and sometimes physical operations of a company. Many smaller companies don’t bother with full ERP  applications due to their complexity; it’s a situation that xTuple President and CEO Ned Lilly is trying to fix. Until this week, […]