The Convenience and Dangers of Connected IoT and more on Tech Talk With Craig Peterson today on Maine's WGAN Saturday Show [10-19-19]

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We are closing up today's show with a warning about all these connected devices that you have in your homes and offices.  Tune in to find out why you must be worried about IoT gadgets.

For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com

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Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Craig
Hello, everybody, welcome back, Craig Peterson here, we have had quite a day today. It's been pretty heavy actually, on the security stuff, I usually talk about a few other things like last week with Tesla and the farting car, right? And what you need to do or to just stay safe with these electric cars that are driving around, that isn't making any noise. There are new laws, rules, and regulations in places that are requiring them to make noise. And so, Elon Musk said, Well, if I have to make a noise, and so farting was one of them. Another one that I would actually do is remember that bit from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, where the guys going around with the coconuts caught pack pack pack pack, right? pretend he has a horse, and that's one of the sounds of the Tesla will be able to make, apparently in the near future.

So, today we have talked about IBM without encryption. It's really the end to our privacy, which is a very, very big deal. The FBI is urging businesses to use biometric factors to authorize users. Now really what they're talking about is two-factor authentication. But biometrics is an easy factor. And that's like on my iPhone, I've got this little thumbprint thing to unlock it. And that's also true with our visual face recognition. Because that's also now letting us login the phone identifies biometrics. cyber theft is a huge problem in the United States and around the world. China has been very, very involved in it and I don't know why people tend to overlook this right. The media seems to downplay it, but try that just came out with an airliner I was talking about earlier, that apparently is composed almost entirely out of stolen parts and pieces from the United States of America and from Europe.

All of this, by the way, you'll find online that Craig Peterson dot com, I got the videos and everything else up there. tamper protection has been added now to Microsoft defender antivirus, only certain versions of it will have it. But I was talking about what versions those are, what you can do what you should do with Microsoft defender, and their new camper protection, which I think is a great idea. And I also talked about how you can for free, basically, get about 85 maybe 80% secure systems by just going with some of the built-in Microsoft software. So that was a little bit earlier today. We talked also about the Tor browser and what the Tor Browser means to you and me the origins of it, and what you can use it for.

Facebook's Libra cryptocurrency and cryptocurrencies in general. You know, I love the idea of crypto currencies. But the implementation so far it's been bad. And I was actually hoping that Facebook could pull it off. But I talked about that and what's going to happen with their announcement for next year. And of course, we just in the last, the last section here talked about this fake iOS jailbreak site. And you got to be careful with that it's been lowering in some of the iOS users and been causing real problems. And this goes back to Apple's problem that they have right now. with being able to crack almost every modern version of Apple's chips they use to run well, it's not the chips themselves. It's the bootstrapping process, but it's a really big deal. So bottom line, do not try and route your phones right route jailbreak the same thing. So right now I want to talk about it here. In our last segment of the day, I want to talk about IoT. This is, of course, the Internet of Things. 

There's kind of a funny article out this week, they actually did surveys of some of the people who are in security in IT security, and they surveyed them about the Internet of Things and which devices are they most concerned about? And I think this was actually a joke on the part of you know, the security guys. But the number one thing they were afraid of was their IoT toilet.

Which is frankly pretty funny if he asked me because it, it is connected to the internet now you look at these Japanese Charlie's been they've been real fancy for a long time, right? We may Some of us may have learned about that in the movie cars with tone meter. But these, these toilets are getting fancier and fancier. And they're monitoring themselves. They try and get rid of odors they sometimes the days built in, but that was the number one thing they were worried about. Why are they worried about things like toilets? Well, when was the last time you upgraded the software on your computer? If you're like most people, over 50%, about 56% of people have Windows computers that have not been updated. That is a very, very big deal. That's a huge number. Well, well, let's look at that a little bit further. When was the last time you updated the firmware in your light bulb? Because a lot of us have these lights overhead that we can control with our Siri device, right? The Apple Home, we might control them with our Amazon Alexa or Google Home. We're talking about having real computers. There's a computer in that light, but it might only be all on a single chip, but it's a computer. And when we're talking about fancier things like our security cameras, that security camera has an entire computer in it. And it uses that to control the camera control the lighting, control the internet connection, and so to do the recording of its recording locally. When was the last time you updated the firmware and those devices and we've talked on the show before about many of these camera systems coming from China come pre-infected with spyware? And then they're used to launch other attacks. There are even warnings if you are really a security professional. I know most of you aren't most of you are like me. You're kind of the de facto IT person. You've been assigned security as part of you're you know, another half your role, right? And you have to learn more and more about that, the security. But we're not out there updating all of these devices all of the time. And that's a huge problem. So some security researchers have said, Okay, here's what we're going to do, I'm going to scan the internet for devices that are vulnerable to this particular security problem. And when I find them, I'm going to use that security vulnerability to break into them. And since I cannot fix their device, I'm going to break the device. Now breaking the device means the device now becomes worthless. You can't do anything with it. There is no longer any way to recover it unless you really know what you're doing right. And that's something that somebody that knows how to do a factory reset might be able to do in some cases that might be booked for life. It'll never work ever again.

So the security researcher researchers going on and breaking people's devices. That's a very, very bad idea. Because what could happen is you might be breaking the device that is being used by someone that has a home monitor for their breathing machine. And now that home monitor can't get out because their firewall was just bricked or the router was just bricked, we can't do that sort of thing. That is not the way to fix the problem. And I don't get it, you know, how can somebody say their security researcher, they're trying to make the internet a safer place, and at the same time, they might be leading to the death of someone? guaranteed? Okay. So all of these devices that I've been talking about are part of the Internet of Things. Right? That's what I was just talking about here. IoT attacks up eight fold. A huge, huge number.

Now, there's a company called Kaspersky. Remember, I warned you don't use Kaspersky, the federal government says don't use them. They are security company. They've had a lot of great stuff. But the problem with Kaspersky is they're in Russia, and they have direct ties to the Kremlin. So we're worried about the Kremlin having access to our networks because of the Kaspersky software that's in it. Well, Kaspersky put up something called honey pots. And we've used them for some of our clients in the past where we needed you to know, they were under direct attack, okay, and then find out who was attacking. So these honey pots are machines that are set up on a network that are purposely out of date, they're purposely not patched up so that when somebody scans them and finds a vulnerability, they will then try and do something with that vulnerability. So they'll often just install software that gives them remote control over that machine and they'll get back to it at a later date, or they will just sell it and they sell these remote control networks of computers. So when they're using a honeypot, they know, Hey, wait a minute, somebody from North Korea just broke in using this particular type of hack and this software.

And we got to close the deal, right? We got to make sure it's patched up. So on one network of these honey pots put in place by Kaspersky, they saw 105 million attacks on Internet of Things devices, 105 million attacks on IoT devices. In this one network, they had set up compared with just 12 million in the first half of 2018. So in other words, Kaspersky saw an eight-fold increase in attacks on these devices in the first half of 2018 scary and sad all of the same time. Okay. Now Kaspersky is honey pots found that most of these attacks were not very sophisticated, but they didn't have to be. They were what is called quiet attacks, they came in, they found the vulnerability, they exploded the vulnerability, they put something in place to let them remote control, and they just let it sit. Then, later on, they come back and they as part of a button that they might use those machines to attack other machines to do denial of service attack, etc, etc, etc. And by the way, they found that one particular attack was the most successful kind of 39% of the infections, all kinds of great stats. Now, who's responsible? According to Kaspersky, their honey pot was attacked 30% of the time by China 19% from Brazil 12% from Egypt. And that's a big change from last year where Brazil was the leading the tax source. So things are changing. But in some ways, the more things change, the more they stay the same. We are seeing the tax, they are coming from China. They're all coming from all these places. And it's against the agenda thing. So make sure you update the software, on your Windows machines on your max on your Android devices, on your light bulbs or your light switches, anything that's connected to a network. Make sure it's updated. Hey, everybody, have a great week. Make sure you pick up my reboot guide, Craig peterson.com slash Quick Start. And we'll be chatting next week. You can also text me by the way 855-385-5553 Take care, everybody. Have a great week and we'll be back next week with more. Bye-Bye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

 

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