Articles by John P. Mello Jr.

Reports of a data breach of TurboTax have been overblown, according to Intuit which owns the tax preparation platform Several news outlets recently reported that an unspecified number of TurboTax accounts were compromised in a wave of credential stuffing attacks. Those kinds of attacks exploit credentials stolen from other websites and reused at th...

Microsoft quietly edited a document on its website over the weekend to reveal it's planning to end support for Windows 10 Home and Pro on October 14, 2025 The revelation comes just before Microsoft's "What's Next Windows" event scheduled for June 24 and amidst hints from CEO Satya Nadella that a major new version of Windows is in the wings....

A configuration error in the systems of a content delivery provider knocked out numerous websites and apps around the globe Tuesday The provider, Fastly, which supports brands like CNN, The Guardian, the New York Times, Hulu, Reddit, HBO Max and Spotify, experienced the outage at about 5:49 a.m. Eastern time in the U.S. and began to recover at 6:39...

Apple on Monday revealed dozens of new features in the latest versions of its mobile and desktop operating systems at the kickoff of its annual Worldwide Developers Conference "There were lots of incremental improvements in the areas of health and security," observed Kevin Krewell, a principal analyst with Tirias Research, a high-tech research and ...

More than 25 million work-from-home jobs could be created in non-technology industries in the coming years, according to the operator of a global marketplace for freelance workers "For the first time, companies in industries like manufacturing, agriculture and mining recognized that many of their professional services jobs did not need to be done o...

A Russian-language dark web marketplace called Hydra, which is known to facilitate the illegal sale of narcotics, has seen cryptocurrency transactions soar over the last five years from US$9.4 million in 2016 to $1.37 billion in 2020 According to a report released Tuesday by Flashpoint and Chainalysis, Hydra's crypto business began accelerating in ...

Researchers at the University College London are giving new meaning to the expression "all thumbs." They've taken an award-winning graduate project from the Royal College of Art in London and are using it to test the brain's reaction to coping with additional body parts....

Claims of losses from cryptocurrency scams skyrocketed from October 2020 to March 2021, according to a report released Monday by the Federal Trade Commission In its Consumer Protection Data Spotlight newsletter, the FTC revealed that during the October to March period, nearly 7,000 consumers reported losing US$80 million. That compares to only 570 ...

Twitter is adding some new powerful features to its repertoire that users will be able to access for a price The new premium offering, called Twitter Blue, will cost $2.99 a month and allow users to "undo" tweets, as well as create collections of their favorite tweets, according to independent researcher Jane Manchun Wong....

Two out of three global CISOs feel unprepared to cope with a cyberattack, according to an annual survey released Wednesday by a cybersecurity and compliance company The 2021 edition of Proofpoint's Voice of the CISO report -- based on a survey of more than 1,400 CISOs in 14 countries -- found 66 percent of the executives acknowledged their organiza...

More than 90 percent of U.S. users of the latest version of Apple's mobile operating system are taking advantage of a new feature to block an application's ability to track their activity on their phones. This is bad news for advertisers According to research updated Saturday by Flurry, an analytics company owned by the Verizon Media Group, 96 perc...

The software industry fueled jobs and GDP growth in the United States in 2020, according to a report released Tuesday by an international software research organization The report by Software.org: the BSA Foundation found the software industry supported more than 15.8 million jobs in 2020, a 5.9 percent jump from 2018; and supported $US1.9 billion ...

Numerous CEOs doubt of the value of social media marketing, according to a new survey by a mobile payments platform The research by Bango, which surveyed more than 200 CEOs, maintains that poor digital marketing practices and meaningless metrics are "putting the board to sleep."

A powerful hardware-based threat detection technology is being integrated into a Microsoft enterprise security product to help protect businesses from cryptojacking malware The move, which integrates Intel Threat Detection Technology with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, was announced Monday in a blog written by Karthik Selvaraj, principal research...

The notorious Emotet botnet software began uninstalling itself from some one million computers Sunday According to SecurityWeek, the uninstall command was part of an update sent to the infected computers by law enforcement servers in the Netherlands after Emotet's infrastructure was compromised in January during a multinational operation mounted by...

Apple introduced a new version of its iMac desktop and a powerful upgrade of its iPad Pro tablet at an online event Tuesday. Both new products are based on Apple's new M1 chip "The whole thing about this event is broadening the use of the M1 chip across all Apple's computers now -- laptops, desktops and iPads," Tim Bajarin, president of Creative St...

DuckDuckGo has announced an add-on to the Chrome browser that blocks Google's new scheme to provide marketers with information for targeting advertising at Internet users The scheme called FLoC -- Federated Learning of Cohorts -- is being tested in Chrome, in some cases without the knowledge of the browser's users....

A set of flaws in a widely used network communication protocol that could affect millions of devices was revealed Monday by security researchers The nine vulnerabilities discovered by Forescout Research Labs and JSOF Research dramatically increase the attack surface of at least 100 million Internet of Things devices, exposing them to potential atta...

Microsoft on Monday announced it is purchasing Nuance Communications, a natural language to computer processing company, in a deal valued at $19.7 billion In the all-cash transaction, Microsoft will acquire all of Nuance's outstanding stock for US$56 a share, a 23 percent premium over the share price at the close of the market last Friday. The deal...

Businesses fearful their workers may be targeted by fraudsters will want to take a look at the free Tax Scam Awareness Kit offered by Proofpoint, a data protection company in Sunnyvale, Calif The kit, for both Windows and macOS, includes materials for an employee education campaign about tax fraud, three educational videos, an infographic, answers ...