When Microsoft first released Windows 10, the company boasted that it would try to get its new OS running on a billion devices by 2018.

Time and circumstance have conspired to make that lofty goal unlikely, and the company has since retreated from it.

Microsoft is experimenting with a new feature that may change the look and feel of Windows 10 in some future update.

The new approach is referred to as "Sets," which borrows from the playbook of modern web browsers and groups related applications into tabbed sets, with the groupings defined by project type.

Sometimes hackers opt for a stealthy approach. Other times, their attempts are downright brazen.  That's definitely the case with a newly launched malware campaign that seeks to spread "Proton Mac," a strain of malware designed to steal passwords from Mac users.

Do you own a Mac? Is it running Apple's latest macOS, the "High Sierra?"  If so, be extra careful with who you allow access to your machine.

A security flaw recently discovered by a developer named Lemi Orhan Ergin can easily allow anyone unfettered access to everything on your machine, and by extension, give them an easy "in" to whatever network it's connected to.

Do you use the image hosting service, Imgur? If you do, there's a slight chance that you'll be prompted to change your password the next time you log on. That's because the company's servers were breached in 2014, and the hackers made off with 1.7 million usernames and passwords, which represents just a tiny fraction of the company's 150 million users.

Cottage Health System, a company that operates five hospitals in the Santa Barbara area of California, is the latest firm to have been hit with a hefty fine for losing control of PHI and PII for patients that it serves.

In this case, more than 55,000 patients were impacted between 2013 and 2015.

Cottage Health discovered the breach late in 2013. The company received a voicemail message informing company officers that there was a large file containing PHI of an unspecified number of its patients available online, without encryption or password protection that could prevent unauthorized access.

It has recently come to light that the company was hacked in 2016 in a massive breach that exposed the personal information of more than 57 million Uber users and drivers. A wide range of data was stolen. Where users were concerned, names, email addresses and phone numbers were compromised.

Security researcher Jaromir Jorejsi of Trend Micro has discovered a disturbing new strain of ransomware named qkG that spreads by way of macros inside MS Word.

The ransomware strain targets only Office documents, encrypting them and infecting the Word default document in order to propagate to newly created documents opened via the Office suite on the infected computer.

This past summer, an Italian security researcher named Manuel D'Orso discovered a nasty malware attack aimed at WordPress sites.

Dubbed "Wp-Ved," after the name of the .php file bearing the malicious payload, the attack was relatively small in its scope and scale, with a few scattered attacks starting in the summer and continuing in sporadic fashion to this very day.

Do you have an Android phone? Is it running either Lolipop, Marshmallow or Nougat? Those three account for slightly more than 75 percent of the Android phones in service today, so odds are excellent that you do. If so, you should be aware of a nasty vulnerability that could allow a hacker to perform at-will screen captures and audio recording without your knowledge.