Articles by John P. Mello Jr

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 ...

A rich cache of data on some 533 million Facebook users was posted to a hacker forum over the weekend and is available to download for practically free. The information is from a data breach that occurred in 2019, but hasn't been widely available until now The data was posted to an English-speaking cybercriminal forum called RaidForums by a hacker ...

Online businesses are losing potential customers and substantial amounts of revenue because they're dependent on traditional password systems and outdated customer authentication models, says a report released Tuesday by an access and identity management company Lost customers and revenues are caused by password sharing and friction created at webs...

If the United States wants to out-compete China in key technology markets, Congress and the Biden Administration must act now, maintained a Washington, D.C. think tank in a report released Monday "With the rise of China, the U.S. economic and technology environment has fundamentally and inexorably changed," explained the report by the Information T...

Creating a smooth functioning interface for smart glasses that allows its wearers to operate in an augmented reality world has proven to be a challenging task, but Facebook believes it may have a solution on the human wrist In a blog published last week, the company revealed it has been working on a wrist controller for its AR glasses....

A Big Bang of cash is needed to bring rural Americans into the Information Age, according to a report released Monday by a Washington, D.C. think tank Nearly one-in-five rural Americans don't have broadband Internet access, but that could change with the use of carefully targeted subsidies through a process known as a reverse auction, noted the rep...

A new social media platform based on voice messaging launched Monday Called Swell, free apps for the platform can be found in Apple's App Store and in Google Play....

Malicious online actors used email as their prime vehicle for delivering malware to their victims in the last quarter of 2020, HP and Bromium reported Tuesday The HP-Bromium Threat Insights Report found that 88 percent of malware was delivered by email into its targets' inboxes, many times evading measures at email gateways to filter out the infect...

Microsoft on Monday reported that multiple malicious actors were taking advantage of vulnerabilities in the company's Exchange software last week to attack systems at organizations that have failed to patch the flaws To help organizations that haven't deployed Microsoft's security tools, the company released the malware hashes and known malicious f...

Skeptics of giving computers control over high-risk activities like driving cars were given some ammunition last week when researchers at OpenAI discovered their two-month-old machine vision system could be tricked with a pen and paper into misidentifying objects The AI laboratory published a paper March 4 that revealed their new system could be fo...