I might have eviscerated it in my recent review, but perhaps unsurprisingly, the latest instalment in the 'Fast and the Furious' franchise has grossed a spectacular $1 billion at the international box office in just 17 days, joining an elite club of 20 such films - and marks a first for Universal Pictures.

While 1993's 'Jurassic Park' grossed over $1 billion in its combined 1993 and 2013 releases, 'Furious 7' has become the first film to gross that amount in it's initial release. Vice-Chairman of NBC Universal Ron Meyer wrote in a blog-post that "I am incredibly proud of the motion picture team at Universal, the cast and filmmakers of the FAST & FURIOUS for all they have done to take our original idea and evolve it into a huge, global, blockbuster franchise."

As a comparison, the first 'The Fast and the Furious' film in 2001 grossed $207 million worldwide. How's that for stock appreciation? It remains to be seen whether June's release of the much-anticipated 'Jurassic World' can top it, and it's predecessor. After some mediocre years for the 103 year old studio, they'll certainly be hoping.

The Iranian government has a growing cyber arsenal capable of launching more attacks against political rivals and foreign governments, according to the Norse cybersecurity firm and the American Enterprise Institute. Even with international sanctions, the country has been able to create tools used for reconnaissance and intelligence collection from compromised targets.

"Cyber gives them a usable weapon, in ways nuclear technology does not," said Frederick Kagan, director of the American Enterprise Institute's Critical Threats Project, in a statement published by the New York Times. "And it has a degree of plausible deniability that is attractive to many countries."

There is concern that Iran would spend even more money to help develop its cyberweapons - but the country has already continually improved its current attack capabilities. China and Russia have developed capable cyberattack efforts, but cybersecurity experts show the most concern that North Korea and Iran are trying to improve their hacking tools.

There were at least 29 million US healthcare records stolen between 2010 and 2013 in data breaches, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). More than 58 percent of data breaches occurred by theft, with two-thirds of the incidents caused by electronic data that was stored on laptops, USB drives, and other portable media.

Stanford University and Kaiser Permanente researchers studied data breaches that involved at least 500 victims or more, so the 29 million figure could actually be even higher. It's also worth noting that some healthcare patients could have been victimized more than once, as some data may have been duplicated.

Cybersecurity professionals believe 2015 could be the year of healthcare record chaos, as Anthem suffered a breach - and more could be on the way.

Small businesses are a lucrative target for cybercriminals trying to launch ransomware malware attacks, and the problem is only getting worse. Careless employees are tricked, typically using phishing emails, and the custom malware encrypts various files - demanding a ransom payment or the files will be permanently encrypted.

"They set the ransom so low that, as violated as I feel and as much as I wanted to fight, at the end of the day I realized I can pay and get back to work," said Mark Stefanick, president of Advantage Benefits Solutions, in a statement published by the Wall Street Journal. Stefanick chose to pay the $400 ransom so files were quickly decrypted and his company could get back to normal operation.

Around 30 percent of ransomware victims choose to pay the ransom to end the cyberattack, according to Trend Micro chief cybersecurity officer Tom Kellerman. There were at least 250,000 new ransomware samples studied by Intel Security during Q4 2014, a whopping 155 percent increase quarter-over-quarter.

For the first time since launching in 2009, the Microsoft Bing search engine now has over 20 percent market share of the US desktop search market, according to comScore.

Google still leads the way with 64.4 percent of the increasingly competitive market, while Bing has 20.1 percent - Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and other companies are trying to adapt to a growing mobile market.

Bing has been a major effort for Microsoft, which has continually dumped money and development time into Bing. The search engine is now integrated into Xbox, Office, Windows and the Windows Phone, as Microsoft wants to try to lure users away from Google.

Star Wars: Battlefront is shaping up to be one of the best-looking games of the year, with the unveiling of the gameplay trailer yesterday, the Star Wars community has been super excited.

We've now found out that Battlefront will be running at 60FPS on both the Xbox One and PS4 thanks to DICE Producer Craig McLeod. He said: "We're making sure, first and foremost, to ensure it runs at 60 frames per second on everything because that's what delivers the best gameplay experience". McLeod continued: "When you couple the talent that we have in the office with the technology and new generation of consoles has allowed us to achieve, that's how you can get these environments that you're seeing which simply wasn't possible before".

The gameplay trailer that the studio released was running at 1080p with 8x MSAA enabled and a very high level of adaptive tessellation has lead to gamers looking at one of the best graphics in a game yet. With a 60FPS target, we should expect no level of MSAA to be used, or at the maximum possibly 2x MSAA on the consoles, and whatever your VGA card is capable of on the PC.

Samsung released their Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 edge handsets a little over a week ago now, with Qualcomm feeling the loss of getting its Snapdragon processors into the new handsets.

With the previous Galaxy S smartphones, Samsung has usually had its Exynos processor in certain models, while Qualcomm's Snapdragon processor makes it into another. Not this time around, and rightly so since Qualcomm reportedly asks for 2.5 to 5% of the selling price of every handset that is powered by its Snapdragon processor. This is a big chunk of sales, especially when handsets are spilling over the $1000 mark.

Samsung has thus saved itself many millions of dollars by opting for its own Exynos processor in the Galaxy S6 and S6 edge, and after giving Qualcomm $9.2 billion in royalties over four years, this has come to an end. Qualcomm continues to expand its pile of cash, which is hovering at around the $30 billion mark right now. Most of this $30 billion has been made from the patent and licensing royalties, and not just from its processors - a smart move by Qualcomm.

Fresh from the 2015 'Star Wars' Celebration in Anaheim which saw the release of the second teaser from 'The Force Awakens', and the first tantalising render of a Stormtrooper, Electronic Arts have now released the first trailer for the much anticipated game, which promises to originate from "game engine footage".

DICE also made the interesting admission that the game omits a story narrative, but hinges on separate missions, including locales from the original 'Star Wars' trilogy. EA will make available a free downloadable content pack called the 'Battle of Jakku'; the new desert planet glimpsed in both 'Force Awakens' trailers (previously assumed to be Tatooine) and which will serve as a prequel to the film.

The latest 'Battlefront' is the third in the franchise, and the first in a decade. The title will also mark the first 'Star Wars' game to be released for current-gen consoles. 'Battlefront' is scheduled for release on November 17, 2015 for Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

A hacker group with support from the Chinese government has operated for more than 10 years without being detected, able to compromise information from companies and reporters, according to FireEye. Many of the attacks started with social engineering, with victims unknowingly installing the Mysterious Eagle malware onto PCs - so the hacker group could remotely monitor and control the compromised systems.

The APT30 group has been in operation from 2004 and was able to collect information "about journalists, dissidents and political developments in relation to China targeting government and military organizations, and targeting economic sectors of interest to China's economy."

The Chinese government has long been accused of funding cybercriminal groups aimed at compromising western targets - much of the attention is focused on the US government and companies with US customers.

Most headlines featuring hackers tend to focus on cybercriminals trying to breach security protocols for criminal gain - but there is a growing effort to support "white hat" hackers working in an ethnical manner to find security bugs.

"There are actually a lot of good hackers out there that are revealing vulnerabilities and bugs in technology that we all rely on," said Keren Elazari, analyst for GigaOM Research, while speaking during the Atlantic Security Conference, in a statement to CBC's "Mainstreet" program. "A lot of companies are still kind of reluctant to open their doors to hackers... that's something I'm trying to change."

Google, Facebook, Tesla, and other companies rely on so-called "bug bounty" programs that provide cash and other incentives for coders. It can be difficult for internal programmers to try to work out bugs and vulnerabilities in their own software, so having outside help can be critical.