Articles by John P. Mello Jr

Hackers are like gold miners. Once they find a rich vein for their malware, they mine it until it's dry.Point-of-sale terminals are such a vein, and it doesn't appear that it's one that's about to run dry any time soon Following the success of the Target breach in 2013, the hacker underground was quick to rush more POS malware to market....

Google may have contributed to violating the First Amendment rights of three journalists working for WikiLeaks two and a half years ago, when it turned over to the FBI all their email, subscriber information and metadata Google informed the journalists -- Sarah Harrison, Kristinn Hrafnsson and Joseph Farrrell -- about its actions last month....

BlackBerry CEO John Chen set off a barrage of online chatter Wednesday when he proposed that any rules the United States adopts to preserve Net neutrality also should guarantee application neutrality Chen made the proposal in a letter to the chairmen and ranking members of two U.S. congressional panels -- the Senate Committee on Commerce and the Ho...

Millions of Net surfers use obvious passwords to log on to websites, but their numbers appear to be declining SplashData on Tuesday published its annual list of the top 25 most common -- thus worst -- passwords leaked online. In the top spot was "123456," followed by "password" and "12345."

Businesses spend an average of US$1.27 million a year chasing cyberthreats that turn out to be dead ends. That is one of the findings in a report released last week on the cost of containing malware In a typical week, an organization can receive nearly 17,000 malware alerts, although only 19 percent of them are considered reliable, according to the...

Apple will introduce a stylus to accompany its expected new, larger iPad, an analyst with a good scorecard in predicting Apple products wrote in a research note on Sunday Speculation about a 12.9-inch iPad Pro to be launched this year has been grist for the rumor mill for months, but the prediction of an Apple stylus is a new development....

Verizon advertising partner Turn is using the carrier's Unique Identifier Header, or UIDH, to maintain tracking cookies on smartphones even after privacy-minded users have deleted them, Jonathan Mayer, a computer scientist and lawyer at Stanford University, reported this week Turn shares the cookies with dozens of major websites and advertising net...

Security questions recently have been raised about Docker, a promising technology for running applications in the cloud. Docker is an open source initiative that allows applications to be run in containers for flexibility and mobility only dreamt of in the past "Since the 70s, programmers have been talking about reusable code and the ability to mig...

Recent research from security firm Cloudmark has raised doubt about the purported connection between North Korea and last November's intrusion on Sony Pictures Entertainment's computer networks The FBI last week continued to press its case that North Korea was behind the cyberattack, which flooded the Net with intellectual property, confidential co...

FBI Director James Comey has "very high confidence" that North Korea was behind last November's cyberattack on Sony, he said at a cybersecurity forum held last week at Fordham University. The attack resulted in large amounts of intellectual property, confidential communications and employee data being posted on the Internet for public view New evid...

A proposed national data breach reporting law, aimed primarily at protecting consumer privacy, headlined several initiatives the Obama administration announced Monday The Personal Data Notification & Protection Act clarifies the obligations of companies when there's been a data breach. It includes a requirement to notify customers within 30 days o...

An estimated US$5.2 million was stolen over the weekend from Bitstamp, a digital currency exchange.It has suspended services pending an investigation The company assured its customers that bitcoins held with Bitstamp prior to suspension of services were completely safe and would be honored in full....

Ever since smartphone makers started incorporating fingerprint scanners as a means of unlocking mobile phones, the Chaos Computer Club has attacked the technology with vigor Not long after Apple added Touch ID to its iPhones, the German hackers demonstrated how to lift prints from a surface and create a flexible pad containing the print that could ...

Concern over government surveillance has been so heightened by confidential information leaked by former intelligence hand Edward Snowden that writers in free countries are as worried as those in autocratic nations, according to a report released Monday by the PEN American Center Three-quarters of writers in countries classified as "free" by Freedo...

Instagram recently added some new filters -- the first time it has done so in two years The addition of the five new filters brings the total number in the app to 24....

Check Point Software Technologies recently revealed a flaw in millions of routers that allows the devices to be controlled by hackers The company's Malware and Vulnerability Group detected 12 million Internet-connected devices that have the flaw....

Privacy's future appears muddy at best, judging from a survey released Thursday by the Pew Research Center and Elon University's Imagining the Internet Center More than 2,500 Internet experts and analysts were narrowly divided on whether policy makers and technology innovators would create a secure, popularly accepted and trusted privacy-rights inf...

A group of some 150 companies last week moved closer to eliminating the bane of many an online user: the password The FIDO Alliance, which counts among its members Microsoft, PayPal, Google, Bank of America, Visa and MasterCard, released version 1.0 of its open specifications for strong authentication on the Internet without the use of passwords....

On behalf of Sony Pictures Entertainment, high-powered attorney David Boies sent a letter to a number of news outlets Sunday demanding that the organizations refrain from publishing stories based on material hackers recently stole from the company and that they destroy any of the pilfered data in their possession The letter to the news organization...

Microsoft last week began to accept bitcoins as payment for digital content purchases Bitcoins can be credited to a Microsoft account by anyone in the United States at the currency's market value -- currently around US$352 per bitcoin -- and used to buy content at the Windows Store or stores that carry Xbox games, music and video. ...