Articles by John P. Mello Jr

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....

The White House last week released its National Strategy for Information Sharing and Safeguarding without much fanfare. The document attempts to address a common complaint lodged against government when it comes to information sharing with the private sector: Uncle Sam likes to receive, but isn't so keen on giving "This National Strategy for Inform...

The findings weren't very sweet when researchers tested Android 4.2 Jelly Bean's beefed-up security Of the 1,260 malware samples the team at North Carolina State University tossed at the OS, only 15 percent of them were detected by Google's app verification service....

Twitter raised the ante Tuesday in its competition with Instagram for the hearts and eyes of smartphone shutterbugs by introducing image filtering to its mobile applications for Android and iOS The debut of the filter feature comes on the heels of moves by Facebook-owned Instagram to limit its members' ability to post their photos directly to Twitt...

A number of law enforcement groups are lobbying Congress to add provisions to a bill revamping the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) that would require wireless carriers to archive text messages for as long as two years. There may be reasons for companies to archive messages -- but simply functioning as a record-keeping arm for law enforcement is not one of them, privacy advocates maintain...

In 1972, we marveled at the beauty of our planet in a photo taken by the crew of Apollo 17 on its way to the moon. Dubbed the "Blue Marble," the iconic image depicted a blue-and-white globe floating in the blackness of space. On Thursday, we were treated to a different view of Island Earth, one with the undeniable stamp of humanity on it NASA and t...

Facebook on Tuesday introduced a new messaging app for Android smartphones that can be used by members and non-Facebookers alike, a move aimed at building an alternative to SMS text messaging ...

A bill to protect email privacy cleared a key U.S. Senate committee last week, buoying the spirits of privacy advocates The proposed law would close a loophole in the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which allows the government to peep on email more than 180 days old without a warrant....

Mozilla has made its Web browser more social -- and more secure -- with the release of Firefox 17 The latest version of the foundation's popular browser includes a plug-in that displays notifications and instant messages from Facebook in a sidebar....