Articles by John P. Mello Jr.

While founder and CEO Elon Musk's unpredictable management of Twitter has forced Tesla stock into a precipitous decline, the car maker's models continued to remain popular for most of 2022, according to Cox Automotive's Kelley Blue Book For the first nine months of 2022, it reported four of the top six best-selling electric cars were Teslas. At the...

More online fraud, recession-resistant budgets, and continued talent shortages can be expected in 2023, according to cybersecurity pros who spoke with TechNewsWorld Online fraud, driven by persistent supply chain shortages and bot proliferation, will continue to rise in the coming year, predicted Benjamin Fabre, co-founder and CEO of DataDome, make...

Microsoft has announced a hands-on preview for the commercial customers of its new Teams Premium product designed to make meetings more personal, intelligent, and secure The premium product includes several slick features, such as:...

Ransomware and distributed denial-of-service attacks significantly increased from October to November of this year, a cybersecurity research company reported Tuesday NCC Group reported a 41% jump in ransomware attacks in November, to 265 from 188 in October, making November the most active month for the malware since April....

A new analysis of data from the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) reveals that Nevada has more cybercrime victims than any state in the union by a large margin -- 801 per 100,000 internet users, four times higher than the national average The analysis performed by Surfshark, a privacy protection toolset developer based in Lithuania, noted...

Greater consumer protections are needed to battle gift card fraud, which bilked Americans for more than US$233 million in 2021 alone, according to a report released Monday by an international think tank that focuses on data, technology, and public policy Among the recommendations in the Center for Data Innovation report is broadening the Electronic...

Action by a government standards agency on potential post-quantum cryptographic algorithms will strongly stimulate the PQC market over the next five years, according to an international research and advisory firm In its recently released Post-Quantum Cryptography application analysis report, ABI Research predicted PQC revenues will jump 12% from US...

As if defenders of software supply chains didn't have enough attack vectors to worry about, they now have a new one: machine learning models ML models are at the heart of technologies such as facial recognition and chatbots. Like open-source software repositories, the models are often downloaded and shared by developers and data scientists, so a co...

Loopholes in the rules governing advertising for stimulant medications should be closed, according to a report released Monday by an international think tank Many telehealth companies have used advertising loopholes to aggressively market stimulant medications to users on social media without the typical disclosures found in pharmaceutical ads, acc...

Inflation woes and a looming recession did little to dampen online shoppers' enthusiasm on Cyber Monday, according to figures released Tuesday by Adobe Analytics, a tracker of seasonal e-commerce activity Adobe estimates online shoppers spent US$11.3 billion on Cyber Monday, a 5.8 percent increase over 2021 when sales for the Monday after Thanksgiv...

A draconian Covid lockdown and work disruption at an iPhone factory in China might take some of the jolly out of Apple's holiday season Worker unrest at the Zhengzhou Foxconn factory could result in a production shortfall of six million iPhones, just as the holiday season is about to enter the home stretch, according to a report Monday by Bloomberg...

Running a business without some cloud support is a rarity these days. Still, when formulating a cloud strategy, companies seem to make some common mistakes. Here are several of them Gartner, at its IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference this week, noted that a successful cloud strategy needs support from IT outsiders....

If you want to give the gift of privacy this holiday season, you may want to check out the 2022 edition of Mozilla's Privacy Not Included buyer's guide, released Wednesday. The annual guide contains privacy reviews of more than 75 popular consumer electronics gifts and will be continuously updated throughout the giving season Among the potential gi...

A technology platform watchdog group reported Monday that it had found more than 100 Facebook groups, some with tens of thousands of members, where business management accounts are bought and sold in violation of the social network's rules The accounts can be used to run multiple pages and ad campaigns, creating new opportunities for online scams, ...

Mozilla believes the high-tech industry has lost its soul by putting profits ahead of people and is going to try and do something about it. It has announced Mozilla Ventures, a US$35 million venture capital fund to finance early-stage startups producing products and technologies that advance values such as privacy, inclusion, transparency, and human dignity. ...

Schools are spending a flood of money on security products. Still, according to a new report from Parks Associates, not enough thought is given to how the products can be leveraged to better respond to violence in schools The market research and consulting company in Addison, Texas, noted in its report that while schools have boosted the use of acc...

Nearly 50% of all phishing attacks targeting government personnel in 2021 aimed to pilfer the credentials of those workers, according to a report released Wednesday by an endpoint-to-cloud security company Phishing attacks on civil servants jumped 30% from 2020 to 2021, with one out of every eight workers exposed to phishing threats during the peri...

A C-level executive will be fired for their firm's use of employee monitoring in 2023. That's one of the security, privacy, and risk predictions aired by Forrester on Monday In the coming year, lawmakers will be paying increased attention to workplace monitoring, and whistleblowers may also be demanding monitoring information to support complaints ...

Kids who play video games three hours or more a day performed better in cognitive skills tests involving impulse control and working memory than kids who never play video games, according to research released Monday The study of nearly 2,000 children was conducted by researchers at the University of Vermont in Burlington and sponsored by the Nation...

A large-scale phishing campaign built on typosquatting is targeting Windows and Android users with malware, according to a threat intelligence firm and cybersecurity website The campaign currently underway uses more than 200 typosquatting domains that impersonate 27 brands to hoodwink web surfers to download malicious software to their computers an...