Articles by John P. Mello Jr.

Two federal agencies are reportedly probing the relationship between Microsoft and business partners in China, Italy and Romania that allegedly bribed foreign officials to land software contracts Lawyers at the U.S. Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission are investigating accusations made by a whistleblower who formerly worked fo...

Just when we thought the spam scourge was over, it appears it's making a comeback After four straight quarters of decline, spam volumes on the Internet rose 92 percent in February, according to security firm Eleven Research Team....

Computer printers aren't typically linked with the word "subversive," but that's the mission of a new site for 3D printer files Defcad was announced Tuesday at the South by Southwest Interactive conference. It is designed to give 3D printer enthusiasts access to files that allow them to create objects with their printers -- even if those objects ar...

Phishing and spear phishing have long been thought to be mutually exclusive hacking tricks, but cybercrooks have found a way to combine the two in a technique called longline phishing "The technique allows you to hit a lot of people very quickly and largely go undetected," Dave Jevans, founder and CTO of Marble Security and founder of the Anti-Phis...

After taking it on the chin for its alleged attacks on U.S. media outlets -- and for its army reportedly backing hackers engaged in cyberespionage around the world -- China returned fire The government claimed its defense and military ministries' websites are being bombarded with 144,000 hacking attacks a month from the U.S. However, China didn't t...

Still smarting from a recent attack on its systems, Facebook started its week with a discovery by researchers at Bitdefender that an infected add-on at the Chrome Web Store was planting malware on its members' computers. The malware, among other things, was padding the Like counts on dummy Facebook pages Once the pages, which are often completely d...

While it's a nasty pill to swallow for old-line security folks, the perimeter isn't what it used to be. The days when a company could hide behind its firewall and feel secure are gone Pockets of resistance to that notion still exist, but the message is getting through to security pros. "It's a painful message to receive if you're someone in traditi...

Intel is getting inside Internet TV What's been grist for rumor mills for weeks was finally confirmed Tuesday. Intel's TV offering -- which won't be branded with the Intel name -- will be a combination hardware, software and content package designed to "delight" consumers, said Erik Huggers, general manager for Intel Media, during the All Things D ...

While many Americans watched the wrap-up of the Super Bowl Feb. 3, the band of hackers called Anonymous broke into a Web-facing server at the Federal Reserve and pilfered a list of some 4000 people who work in the banking industry -- many of them ranking executives at banks and credit unions Later in the week, the Fed acknowledged the break-in. "Th...

Tired of Facebook? You're not alone More than half (61 percent) of the members of the social network have taken a break from it from time to time, and more than a quarter (27 percent) told researchers they planned to spend less time there in the future, according to a report released Tuesday by the Pew Internet Project....

After The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal revealed last week that their computer systems had been compromised by Chinese hackers, the Journal reported that the FBI has been probing attacks on U.S. media outlets for more than a year The newspaper said the attacks are part of a long-running pattern by a "foreign entity" to compromise secur...

Citing national security concerns, the U.S. Department of Justice on Tuesday asked the Federal Communications Commission to put the brakes on the pending Sprint-Softbank merger The DoJ, FBI and U.S. Department of Homeland Security are reviewing the buy for national security, law enforcement and public safety concerns, according to a letter Justice ...

It was inevitable. As computing has evolved, so has its nemesis: malware. in play"2012 is truly the year we entered the post-PC era as cybercriminals moved to embrace Android, social media platforms, and even Macs with their attacks," Trend Micro declared in its annual Security Roundup last week.

For Oracle and its Java programming language, the hurt just keeps on coming Fresh vulnerabilities have been discovered less than a week after Oracle updated Java to address two security flaws being exploited by hackers -- but wait, there's more. Net bandits launched a phishing campaign pushing bogus security updates for the software....

Facebook may have given phishers a reason to rejoice last week when it announced a new way to search for information about its billion members Graph Search allows a Facebook member to use semantic search to find and aggregate information about people on the social network....

Finding anything on Facebook has been a difficult exercise for years, but that's about to change After a year of intense, secret development, the social network on Tuesday rolled out its new search technology called "Graph Search."

A zero-day flaw in Oracle's Java programming language could make as many as 100 million computers connected to the Internet vulnerable to attack by cybercriminals The threat posed by the Java vulnerability was considered so serious that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security urged computer users to turn off Java on their machines....

A security researcher has hacked Windows RT to allow it to run desktop applications by bypassing the OS's security systems. The jailbreaking isn't dangerous to users' systems, he insists "It cannot at this point be exploited without the user actually wanting it, so it's not dangerous," researcher C.L. Roker told TechNewsWorld....

Google spotted an impostor certificate on Christmas Eve and took quick action, but the event is calling into question the reliability of Secure Socket Layer security Turktrust, a Turkish Web certificate authority, acknowledged it gave two entities the power to create certificates when it shouldn't have....

Iran boasted last week that its malware fighters fended off another attack on its infrastructure by the notorious Stuxnet computer worm Stuxnet targeted a power plant and some other industries in the southern part of the country, but Iranian computer experts were able to thwart the attack, a provincial civil defense official claimed....