Articles by John P. Mello Jr.

With news of massive data breaches becoming almost a weekly occurrence, consumers are beginning to lose their patience with the custodians of their personal information Survey results from 2,000 consumers released last week by HyTrust, suggest that 51 percent of those polled would bolt from any business involved in a data breach that compromised pe...

Banks and businesses toiled over the weekend to crush a bug in a widely used open source operating system The flaw has been in Unix for some 25 years, but it was revealed just last week. If exploited by an attacker, the vulnerability in BASH (Bourne-Again SHell) could be used to inject malicious code or take command of a system or device....

Apple on Thursday announced it's preparing iOS 8.0.2 -- which will include a fix for problems triggered by iOS 8.0.1 -- and plans to release it in the next few days In a rare move, Apple on Wednesday suspended downloads of iOS 8.0.1, which aimed to fix problems uncovered after the launch of iOS 8.

Apple's Touch ID fingerprint scanner is a step up from passcodes for protecting iPhones, but it's far from totally secure, as a researcher showed on Monday Lookout Mobile Security's Marc Rogers fooled Touch ID on Apple's new iPhone 6 by crafting a false fingerprint from a do-it-yourself forgery kit that cost about US$200 to assemble....

The pernicious program Citadel has been around for awhile, but it's using some new tricks on new targets From its humble origins as a "man in the browser" thief of banking credentials, Citadel has become a knave of all trades. Once it lands on a computer, it can be configured in a number of ways with a file from a server operated by Web predators....

Apple's iPhone 6 and 6 Plus went on sale Friday and shattered previous opening-weekend records, selling more than 10 million units during the period. Those sales may just be the start of a virtuous cycle for Apple -- a cycle that could include new product introductions and weighty revenue growth "Sales for iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus exceeded our ex...

With data thefts and cybersnooping making headlines daily, security has started to capture the attention of the disciples of the digital lifestyle -- and if the latest version of iOS is any indication, it's catching the attention of Apple, too Along with nifty features like Hand Off and Family Sharing, iOS 8 contains a number of significant securit...

Apple made the latest version of its iOS mobile operating system available for download on Wednesday, and while it looks familiar, it contains lots of new delights not only for fans, but also for its legions of developers "There isn't a significant change to the user interface, so if you already have iOS 7, you're going to immediately know how to u...

Panasonic on Monday introduced the Lumix DMC-LX100, a point-and-shoot camera that supports the latest in high-quality video -- 3840 x 2160 4K video at 30 frames per second -- as well as 1920 x 1080 HD video, which can be stored in AVCHD progressive or MP4 format The LX100 (pictured above) takes advantage of its 4K support to create 8-megapixel phot...

American teens spend a lot more time online than older Web surfers, yet it doesn't seem to increase their vulnerability to malicious activity Teens last year spent a little more than four hours a day on the Net, while adults in the 50-to-64 age bracket burned two hours, 41 minutes online daily, MarketingCharts found....

Despite the efforts of some big name tech players, consumers have been reluctant to turn their smartphones into wallets. That could be about to change with Apple Pay Apple Pay is the new mobile payment system Apple introduced with its iPhone 6 and 6 Plus earlier this week.

Despite the growing momentum behind cloud computing in recent times, security concerns have been a drag on adoption. IBM sought to reduce that resistance by announcing on Monday that it would start using Intel chip technology to better secure its SoftLayer cloud platform When combined with hardware manufactured using Intel's Trusted Execution Techn...

Apple is almost never first to market in a product category, but when it does make its splash, it usually swamps all boats. That seems to be the case once again in the smartwatch space "Every other watch in the market is a beta version compared to what you're seeing coming from Apple," Michael Morgan, an independent mobile industry analyst, told th...

Worried about the NSA spying on your smartphone? How about online hackers? Truth be told, the greatest threat to your confidential information is a lot closer to you -- namely, your partner That's what a recent survey of more than 13,000 people in the United States revealed.

A US$5 stock drop, a hacker attack on celebrities using your cloud, and charges of worker abuse in the factory of an overseas supplier aren't the kind of news a company wants to see as it's poised to announce a refresh of its iconic product, but that's what Apple must deal with this week The Labor Day weekend was barely over when news broke that a ...

Recommending movies and TV shows you've watched on Netflix to individual Facebook friends just got easier. The company on Tuesday launched a new social recommendation feature that lets users pick and choose the contacts they'd like to interact with after viewing a video Netflix previously allowed its members to recommend what they'd watched to thei...

If you want to see an IT pro twitch, bring up Shadow IT in a conversation "Shadow IT" is a term applied to technology deployed by an organization's users outside the purview of the IT department. It's bothersome to system shepherds because it can open up an organization to data leakages. It's also growing....

Hackers appear to have stolen data from JPMorgan Chase and at least one other U.S. bank in retaliation for economic sanctions against Russia The raid on the banks' computer systems resulted in the theft of gigabytes of sensitive data, Bloomberg reported Wednesday evening....

The recent data breach at Community Health Systems, in which Chinese hackers stole the personal information of 4.3 million patients, was another sign of a disturbing trend that security researchers at Websense have been observing for months: Healthcare providers are coming under cyberattack at an alarming rate "We've seen a 600 percent increase in ...

Instagram on Tuesday released Hyperlapse, a free iPhone app that takes the jitters out of time-lapse video. It was just two weeks ago that Microsoft demonstrated a similar technology that bears the same name The Instagram app "is the most impressive effect to hit smartphone video in recent memory," Ross Rubin, principal analyst with Reticle Researc...