Articles by John P. Mello Jr.

Just as the Shadow Brokers hacker group started crowing about a dump of never-seen-before flaws in Windows, Microsoft announced it already had fixed most of the exploits "Today, Microsoft triaged a large release of exploits made publicly available by Shadow Brokers," Microsoft Principal Security Group Manager Phillip Misner wrote in a Friday post....

An alleged spam kingpin with possible ties to election meddling in the United States was arrested in Spain last week under a U.S. international warrant The alleged spam czar, Pyotr Levashov, was taken into custody in Barcelona while vacationing with his family, according to news reports....

Screaming sirens serenaded Dallas residents in the early morning hours Saturday after a cyberattack set off the city's emergency warning system All of the city's 156 sirens were set off more than a dozen times, The Dallas Morning News reported....

There are more than three dozen previously unknown flaws that pose a potential threat to consumers using some Samsung TVs, watches and phones, a security researcher reported Monday Hackers could exploit the vulnerabilities found in Samsung's Tizen operating system to gain remote access and control of a variety of the company's products, Amihai Neid...

Imagination on Monday announced that Apple would no longer use its intellectual property, and the company's stock sank faster than a bottomless boat on the news Apple planned to discontinue its use of the company's IP in new products in 15 months to two years, ending the license and royalty agreement between the companies, Imagination said....

UK Home Secretary Amber Rudd on Sunday called for greater government access to encrypted content on mobile apps Apps with end-to-end encryption, like Facebook's WhatsApp, should not be allowed to conceal terrorists' communications from law enforcement, Rudd said in an appearance on The Andrew Marr Show, a BBC broadcast....

Apple on Tuesday announced an iPad update, a red iPhone 7 and 7 Plus, and a new video-editing app for iOS The iPad upgrade has a 9.7-inch, 2048 x 1536-pixel Retina display with 264 pixels per inch, and Apple's A9 64-bit processor....

Apple is stockpiling resources to make a splash in the augmented reality market The company is not only marshaling internal resources behind its AR efforts, but also hiring talented outsiders and acquiring companies with expertise in AR hardware, 3D gaming and virtual reality software, Bloomberg reported Monday....

Facebook on Monday moved to prevent spy applications from accessing its users' data The company has updated its Facebook and Instagram policies to prohibit developers from using data obtained from those platforms in surveillance tools, according to Rob Sherman, deputy chief privacy officer at Facebook....

Malware has been discovered preinstalled on 36 Android phones belonging to two companies, security software maker Check Point reported on Friday "In all instances, the malware was not downloaded to the device as a result of the users' use -- it arrived with it," noted Oren Koriat, a member of Check Point's Mobile Research Team....

Following WikiLeaks' publication earlier this week of classified documents stolen from the CIA, major technology companies, including Apple, Samsung, Microsoft and Cisco, have been scrambling to assess the risks posed to their customers by the revelations The so-called "Vault 7" leak includes information about methods and tools the CIA crafted to h...

WikiLeaks on Tuesday dumped thousands of classified documents onto the Internet, exposing hacking programs used by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency The torrent of data is just the first in a series of dumps WikLeaks is calling "Vault 7." This first installment includes 8,761 documents and files stolen from an isolated high-security network with...

Apple poked a hornet's nest when it removed the standard headphone jack from the iPhone 7. It may do it again by replacing the Lightning port with USB-C in the next iPhone The Lightning port, introduced in 2012, is used to charge and connect accessories to the iPhone, but Apple plans to swap it for USB-C, which the company has been introducing into...

As it approaches its first stock offering next month, Snap, maker of the popular mobile messaging app Snapchat, is positioning itself as a camera company "We feel like we're really at the beginning of what cameras can do," Snap CEO Evan Spiegel explained in a video promoting the company.

Facebook on Monday rolled out a WhatsApp update that could threaten Snapchat's share of the mobile app messaging market The update allows WhatsApp users to share photos and videos through the app's status area. Moreover, like WhatsApp text messages, content shared through status updates is protected by end-to-end encryption....

IBM this week announced Watson for Cyber Security, a powerful new ally for organizations that want to protect their data from Net marauders The new offering bolsters the ability of information security pros to analyze the flood of information from the roughly 200,000 events that pour into their Security Operations Centers, or SOCs, every day....

Apple CEO Tim Cook has called for a campaign against fake news Its purveyors -- largely interested only in getting the most clicks -- are defeating the people who are trying to tell the most truth, he told the UK's Daily Telegraph in an exclusive interview last week....

Dozens of applications for Apple's mobile devices are vulnerable to WiFi snoopers, a security researcher reported this week Will Strafach, CEO of the Sudo Security Group, identified 76 popular iOS apps available at Apple's App Store that were vulnerable to wireless eavesdroppers, even though the connections were supposed to be protected by encrypti...

Twenty percent of the Dark Net was taken offline last week, when a hacker compromised a server hosting some 10,000 websites on the Tor network Tor, designed to hide the identities of its users, is widely used on the Dark Web, which isn't indexed by mainstream search engines and serves as a hub for illegal online activities....

Elon Musk's hyperloop dream began to take shape in reality last weekend as 27 teams, including six from outside the United States, participated in a competition to create the mass transit vehicle of the future The competition in Hawthorne, California, sponsored by SpaceX, which Musk founded, attracted teams made up mostly of students who created po...