Articles by John P. Mello Jr

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...

A ransomware attack darkened the video surveillance system of the District of Columbia's police department eight days before the presidential inauguration of Donald J. Trump Video storage devices for 70 percent of the CCTV system were unable to record anything between Jan. 12 and Jan. 15, as police techies scrambled to combat malicious software fou...

China this week announced new measures to further restrict its citizens' access to the Internet The 14-month campaign appears designed to crack down on the use of Web platforms and services unapproved by the government, and on virtual private networks, which can used to access those platforms and services covertly....

Apple on Tuesday alerted its development community that it will be raising prices on apps sold through its App Store in the United Kingdom Several factors influence App Store price tiers internationally, including currency exchange rates, business practices, taxes, and the cost of doing business, Apple said, noting that the factors vary by region a...

Microsoft has fortified the latest version of Windows to make it more secure than previous editions, but the strongest protections will be available only to those willing to pay a steep price for them Windows 10 Anniversary Update has introduced many mitigation techniques in core Windows components and the Microsoft Edge browser, helping protect cu...

Medical device maker St. Jude Medical on Monday began deploying software designed to protect its remote monitoring system for implantable pacemaker and defibrillator devices The move came on the heels of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's warning that the company's Merlin@home Transmitter contained vulnerabilities that could be exploited by ha...

It seems like yesterday -- not 10 years ago -- that Steve Jobs took the stage at MacWorld to debut Apple's latest new gadget: the iPhone The iPhone was three devices in one, he declared at Moscone West in San Francisco. It was a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough Internet communications device....

Las Vegas is arguably the gambling capital of the world, but it's also the king city for ransomware, based on recent research Among the world's nations, the United States ranked highest in ransomware incidents, according to a Malwarebytes report on the prevalence and distribution of extortion apps. The area of the country that logged the most incid...

Lenovo watchers expected the company to announce a number of new laptops when CES rolled around, but the company surprised on Tuesday when it also unveiled new products aimed at the home technology market "The Smart Assistant and Smart Storage line probably caught everyone off guard," said Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst at Moor Insights and St...

More security vulnerabilities will appear in the software of Adobe and Apple than in Microsoft's, more attacks on the Internet's infrastructure will occur, and cybersecurity events will stoke international tensions. Those are a few of the predictions for 2017 that security experts shared with TechNewsWorld Users of Apple desktops and laptops for ye...