Sean Michael Kerner

Though the ability to collaborate and share information is a critical component of modern IT infrastructures, it is often lacking in healthcare environments, where siloed information is the norm. Such information is housed on proprietary computing architectures that can’t always be accessed by different platforms. Taking its cue to deliver a salve for this situation, […]

Open source driver availability has long been an issue of contention for Linux distribution, particularly in the video space where most remain proprietary. It’s about to get a whole easier thanks to Intel. Late yesterday, Intel developer Keith Packard announced the immediate availability of open source software drivers for the Intel 965 Express Chipset graphics […]

Mozilla has long relied on its community to help it identify bugs within applications. Now it has another ally in the fight against bugs. Internetnews.com has learned that Mozilla will announce that it is using Coverity’s source code analysis software, which extends beyond the confines of Coverity’s Department of Homeland Security grant to improve open […]

In the annals of computer “(in)security,” few groups are as well known as the Cult of the Dead Cow (cDc). They are now adding a new chapter to their infamous history with the release of a new malware search engine that enables researchers to analyze over 31,000 “hostile” files. It’s all part of an effort […]

Old Linux kernels don’t necessarily die off once a new one becomes available. Though both the Linux 2.2.x kernel and the 2.4.x kernel are far from the leading edge of kernel development, both remain supported with official kernel.org updates. It now looks like the 2.6.16 kernel may join the list and become a long-term supported […]

There are many that think that SCO , the company embattled in a four-year old legal battle against Linux, is “mad.” Today in an afternoon conference call from the SCO Forum conference currently under way in Las Vegas, SCO CEO Darl McBride confirmed that SCO is indeed “MAD,” but it’s not what you think. “If […]

Reporter’s Notebook: In the most entertaining presentation that I have ever attended at a technical conference, the infamous hacker Johnny Long explained to a capacity Black Hat audience how Hollywood has accurately portrayed hacking. Long took humorous excerpts from various Hollywood films that portrayed hacking and asked the audience whether they were “l33t” (pronounced Leet) […]

LAS VEGAS — Microsoft spent a whole day here at the Black Hat conference extolling the security enhancements in its upcoming Vista operating system. Joanna Rutkowska, a security researcher with security firm Coseinc, spent a day picking it apart. Then again, what else would you expect from a session at a hacker convention titled: “Subverting […]

LAS VEGAS — Your browser’s cache may be helping hackers to help themselves to your information. During a Black Hat conference discussion on the topic, Corey Benninger, a senior consultant at McAfee’s Foundstone division, described cached browser information as a ticket for instant hacker gratification. The browser cache is intended as a usability feature that […]

LAS VEGAS — RSS  is a great technology for delivering content; it’s also a potentially destructive tool for hackers to use as an attack-delivery system. In a Black Hat presentation here, SPI Dynamics Security Engineer Robert Auger laid bare the plain facts on RSS and ATOM feed exploitation. Auger tested both Web-based and local RSS […]

LAS VEGAS — Few tools are freely available to security researchers that are as powerful for developing and testing exploit code as the open source Metasploit Framework. No matter how powerful the current version of Metasploit is, the upcoming version 3.0 will be even more so. Metasploit creator H.D Moore took the stage at the […]

As the Black Hat conference descends upon Las Vegas this week, internetnews.com presents a series of articles addressing security issues past and present. LAS VEGAS –- It wasn’t that long ago that phishing was an e-mail-only issue. But that has recently changed with the introduction of terms such as vishing into the security lexicon. In […]