Articles by John P. Mello Jr.

Fake social media accounts are usually associated with bot networks, but some research released Tuesday revealed many social media users are creating their own fake accounts for a variety of reasons One in three U.S. social media users has multiple accounts on the social media platforms that they use, according to a survey of 1,500 U.S. social medi...

Less than 1% of Netflix's 221 million subscribers are playing the service's games each day, according to a report from CNBC Based on statistics from Apptopia, the report revealed that there have been 23.3 million global downloads of Netflix's mobile games and an average of 1.7 million subscribers are engaging with the games daily....

Nearly all the top 10 universities in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia are putting their students, faculty, and staff at risk of email compromise by failing to block attackers from spoofing the schools' email domains According to a report released Tuesday by enterprise security company Proofpoint, universities in the United States a...

If you're looking for the best digital quality of life in the world, Denmark appears to be the place to go According to a study released Monday by VPN provider Surfshark, Hamlet's homeland finished first among 110 nations based on five "pillars" of measurement: internet affordability, internet quality, infrastructure, security and government....

Meta took a step Tuesday toward abandoning its policy of removing misinformation about Covid from its platforms The company, which owns Facebook and Instagram, is asking its Oversight Board for an advisory opinion on whether measures taken to squash dangerous Covid-19 misinformation should continue or be modified....

The market for home security systems continues to grow despite concerns about false alerts, according to a new report from Parks Associates Security system ownership is at an all-time high in multiple sectors, the report noted, with more than a third of U.S. broadband households (36%) having home security systems and 41% of multi-dwelling unit mana...

A lawsuit against the administrators of more than 10,000 Facebook groups alleged to be part of a broker network for churning out fake product reviews was filed Tuesday by Amazon In its lawsuit, Amazon alleges the administrators have attempted to orchestrate the placement of bogus reviews on Amazon in exchange for money or free products. It added th...

Inflation may be forcing many Americans to reduce their discretionary spending, but shopping still appears to be strong among the luxury set, according to a survey released Wednesday by Saks Higher-income consumers continue to spend on luxury, including health, wellness and fitness products, according to the Saks Luxury Pulse, which is based on a s...

For years, U.S. broadband has received a bad rap by comparing it to the European market. That rap -- and the comparison it's founded on -- is dubious, according to a report released Monday by a D.C. tech think tank Comparisons between U.S. and European broadband prices abound, but their respective markets are built on such entirely different cost s...

Getting low-income drivers behind the wheel of electric vehicles is necessary to reduce greenhouse gases in the coming years, according to a report released Monday by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF), a science and technology think tank in Washington, D.C The need for EVs to be a market success is immense given the lack of ...

As criminal activity on the internet continues to accelerate, bug hunting for cash has begun to attract more and more security researchers In its latest annual report, bug bounty platform Intigriti revealed that the number of analysts signing up for its services had increased by 43% from April 2021 to April 2022. For Intigriti alone, that means the...

Digital devices and home networks of corporate executives, board members and high-value employees with access to financial, confidential and proprietary information are ripe targets for malicious actors, according to a study released Tuesday by a cybersecurity services firm The connected home is a prime target for cybercriminals, but few executives...

The Robocalypse -- the time when machines become sentient and start to dominate humans -- has been a popular science fiction subject for some time. It's also worried some scientific minds, most notably the late Stephen Hawking However, the prospect of a sentient machine seemed very far in the future -- if at all -- until last week, when a Google en...

New research from Atlas VPN shows that cloud-native exploits on major cloud service providers (CSPs) declined during the first four months of 2022 Cloud-native exploits dropped by 25%, from 71 exploits in the first four months of 2021 to 53 exploits in the first four months of this year, Atlas researcher Ruta Cizinauskaite told the E-Commerce Times...

Ransomware is the top supply chain risk facing organizations today, according to a survey released Monday by ISACA, an association for IT professionals with 140,000 members in 180 countries The survey, based on responses from more than 1,300 IT pros with supply chain insights, found that nearly three-quarters of the respondents (73%) said ransomwar...

A "Zero Day" vulnerability in a Windows tool that hackers have been exploiting through poisoned Word documents was discovered over the weekend An independent cybersecurity research team known as nao_sec announced in a series of tweets that they'd found the vulnerability in a malicious Word document uploaded to Virus Total, a website for analyzing s...

The director of cybersecurity at the National Security Agency induced a few smirks among cyber pros last week when he told Bloomberg that there wouldn't be any backdoors in the new encryption standards his agency is working on with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) In cybersecurity parlance, a backdoor is a deliberate flaw i...

Events that are streamed live on the net are growing in popularity among internet households, especially live sports, according to a study released by Parks Associates The report, "Livestreaming: The Next Hot Video Market," indicates that more than 40% of U.S. internet households have streamed content over the past three months. More than three out...

A free-speech, anti-censorship browser for conservatives was launched Tuesday Called Tusk, the new browser is the brainchild of Jeff Bermant, a Santa Barbara, Calif. real estate developer and founder of the Cocoon VPN....

Significant exposure to third-party risk could cost e-commerce websites millions of dollars in damages and lost revenue, according to a new study by a maker of security products to protect web and mobile apps Based on an analysis of two billion user sessions on e-commerce websites, the study by Jscrambler found that third-party services running on ...