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AS HEARD ON: WGAN Mornings with Ken and Matt: Future of Communications and Lying to your Bank and more

Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity

Release Date: 10/16/2019

The Time They Once Hacked Our Routers to Patch Them

Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity

The FBI, CIA, NSA, CISA and others issued a warning about active AI-driven attacks on American critical infrastructure. Craig, who ran the FBI's InfraGard online training program, explains what's actually exposed: old controllers that open and close valves, set flow rates, decide how much acid or base goes into the water — many of them reachable directly from the internet, on networks that have been comprehensively mapped for years. Several water systems have already been shut down; one town lost power along with its water. Josh, who works InfraGard in his own homeland security practice,...

Five Federal Agencies, One Warning — and an Argument About the Singularity

Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity

The NSA, CISA, the FBI, the Department of Energy and the EPA put out a joint advisory last Wednesday, and the language is unusually direct: AI dramatically reduces the technical skill and the time required to attack industrial control systems. Those controllers run public works. A great many of them are reachable from the internet, and their locations are not a secret. That sets up the larger conversation. Ray Kurzweil wrote The Singularity Is Near twenty years ago, predicting broadly human-level machine intelligence by 2029 and human-machine integration by 2045. Elon Musk and others now say...

People Would Rather Live Next to a Nuclear Plant Than a Data Center

Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity

Matt opens with a poll finding he calls one of the great PR failures of our time: people would rather have a nuclear power plant built next door than a data center. Pennsylvania's governor has now signed legislation that effectively stops data centers unless they clear a long approvals process. Craig's answer isn't a defense of data centers so much as a description of what a few counties actually did. They said yes — on conditions. Generate your own power, and 20% more than you use, fed back into our grid. And pay full property tax, none of the abatement deals. It worked well enough that...

1,140 Ransomware Attacks on Industry in One Quarter — 740 of Them Manufacturing

Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity

The numbers carry this segment. Eleven hundred forty ransomware attacks on industrial companies in a single quarter, 740 of them against manufacturers. A recent Patch Tuesday carrying about 570 fixes. An Apple advisory telling anyone whose machine touches a coffee-shop network to update now. Craig's point is narrower and more useful than the headline count. Windows Update patches Microsoft software, and not all of it. The average computer is running roughly 60 other programs it never looks at. Older versions of ordinary things — Adobe Reader is the one he names — are what attackers are...

Fixing Jeff's Wi-Fi, Live On the Air

Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity

Jeff's studio Wi-Fi had been misbehaving for weeks, so this segment became a clinic — and one you can follow along with on your own network, because Craig has Jeff run the test live. The two bands do different jobs. 2.4 GHz travels farther and gets through walls and windows better, but it carries only a few channels, so in an apartment building or a dense neighborhood your neighbors are stepping on you. 5 GHz has the room but not the reach. Anything older than about ten years doesn't have the choice, and Wi-Fi 6, 7 and the coming 8 handle the congestion far better than what came before. Then...

Why Deleting a File on an iPhone Is Different — and How the Senate Got Fauci's Texts Anyway

Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity

When you erase an iPhone and it finishes in a second, nothing was erased. The phone destroyed the encryption key. Craig explains the layer most people miss: every individual file has its own key, so deleting one file destroys that file's key and the contents can never be recovered — unlike Windows, where a deleted file usually sits there waiting for recovery software. Which raises the obvious question about a phone with very few contacts left on it. The answer is mobile device management, the same category of software Craig runs for his clients. MDM lets a central authority control which...

The Same Dollar Shows Up Five or Six Times in AI's Revenue

Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity

Two independent testing firms reported more cases of Anthropic's and OpenAI's most advanced models compromising third-party systems. Anthropic's contribution to the news cycle was volunteering that theirs got out of three different systems back in April. Craig explains why the fix is harder than it sounds. These are associative machines — running through branches to pick the next best word, across chipsets holding thousands of small processors, in a structure deliberately modeled on the brain. We know how to build it and how to feed it. We do not know what happens in the middle. So you...

Two AI Labs Are Arguing About Whose Model Escaped First

Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity

OpenAI's high-end model, under test, ended up breaking into Hugging Face. Then Anthropic said theirs had gotten out three times back in April. Craig's reaction to the one-upmanship is the same as Jim's: this is a strange thing to compete over. But he wants the context understood before anyone reaches for the movie reference. Nobody told these systems to escape. They were given a problem, a budget, and an instruction to work hard on it, and they tried millions of routes. One route was a machine with internet access. That is not a mind waking up — and, as Craig points out, air-gapping ends it....

Jeff Asks the Best Question Anyone Has Asked Craig About AI

Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity

Jeff stops Craig mid-explanation and asks him to dumb it down. If AI is a large language model — if all it does is pick the most likely next word — how does that thing get into a company's computers? Is it just guessing the next digit of a password? Craig's answer is the clearest explanation he has given on air. It started as a language model, literally which word tends to follow which, good enough to produce something that reads as human. What it became is an associative machine, and association isn't limited to words. The same pattern-matching that strings a sentence together recognizes...

It Was Told to Research Competitors. It Hacked Hugging Face.

Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity

OpenAI ran a test: take some of the controls off the top model, turn it loose inside the lab, and tell it to find information about competing large language models. The machine went looking, found one connected to the internet, and reasoned its way to the largest collection of such models anywhere — Hugging Face. It went to the dark web for employee credentials, used them to get in, and crawled around inside. Hugging Face noticed the load on their servers and assumed an attack — but nothing was going after accounts or credit cards. It only wanted model information. Craig's point is that...

More Episodes

Good morning everybody!

I was on with Ken and Matt per usual their base is expanding which is really kind of cool. They are adding stations and things which is quite exciting. Anyhow, I had a good conversation with them about our privacy security or what to do about it and what's in the news right now that the statistics are really getting scary frankly. Especially when I when it comes to small businesses, and of course, we discussed a little bit about what they are doing, what their bosses are doing over there at the Portland radio group, and what maybe you shouldn't be doing if you're that de facto IT person in your organization. I think what the Portland radio group is doing is a great step and it's going to make a huge difference for them.

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

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Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig

Good morning everybody! Craig Peterson here.

I was on with Ken and Matt per usual their base is expanding which is really kind of cool. They are adding stations and things, which is quite exciting. Anyhow, I had a good conversation with them about our privacy security or what to do about it and what's in the news right now that the statistics are really getting scary frankly. Especially when I when it comes to small businesses, and of course, we discussed a little bit about what they are doing, what their bosses are doing over there at the Portland radio group, and what maybe you shouldn't be doing if you're that de facto IT person in your organization. I think what the Portland radio group is doing is a great step and it's going to make a huge difference for them.

Matt Gagnon
Gentlemen, it's his time once again, Craig Peterson tech guru extraordinaire, and host of the Craig Peterson show on this Very Radio Network joins us now as he always does at this time on Wednesdays what's happening, Craig?

Craig
Hey, good morning. I don't get it here. The Red Sox are not in the playoffs now. But you guys are saying.

Ken Altschuler
That is correct, sir. That is correct. I did, however, win the World Series last year. So

Craig
it's okay. Isn't it kind of a weird thing, though, because you'd think if they were such a powerhouse last year, how come they didn't even make it into the playoffs? You know, I'm not a sports guy. You can tell.

Matt
I could give you lots of answers. But we're not here to hear me talk about baseball our way.

Ken
Would you rather talk about Jethro Tull?

Matt
As long as that conversation could go?

Ken
Do you agree with me that the Jethro Tull should absolutely be in the rock Hall of Fame and it's a travesty that they're not?

Craig
I absolutely agree. I don't get it. Why are they putting country music people in and other

Ken
Whitney Houston, Whitney Houston,

Craig
Whitney Houston. I can see like some of the blues and Some of the old some of that eventually turned into rock and roll that makes sense. I can see that one. Well, you know, pop music gab Jessel told definitely, but anyway.

Ken
Yeah. So I was gonna ask you a question about lying on your password recovery questions but before we but but I want you to explain to me how AI systems are going to cause phones to disappear.

Craig
Yeah, this isn't going to be an eventual type of thing. What what's happening is we're putting microphones everywhere. They're in our cars. Our cars now of course have built into the many of them, you know, Wi Fi, it's time into the cellular data network, where we've started to see the rollout of 5g, which is really designed to allow pretty much everything ever manufactured to be on the Internet at very, very high speeds at very low cost. So what we're going to see over the course of the next five years, certainly the next 10 Yours is there will be internet available everywhere via every device you can think of. You know, we've got Levi's with their trucker jacket that has built in internet. Basically, it has remote controls and things, but right into it. So this is what the eventuality is now, tie that into artificial intelligence, and tie all of that into the ability for these systems to understand what we're saying. Now, in reality, it's going to take a while before they really understand it, but they are pretty darn good right now just talking to Alexa. We know that. So put all of this into a big pot and stir it up. Since it's Halloween. We'll call it a big cauldron. And stir it all up. You're going to end up with these artificial intelligence systems that are also just continually getting better and better. With the internet connectivity everywhere microphones everywhere, so to the point where you won't carry Any sort of a device that you would identify as a phone, you might have a little pin on your lapel that talks to you when you talk to it, etc. That might be a little projectors, here, there and everywhere so you can see things as kind of a screen. By the eventually this is all going to be tied right into our brains, it's going to be going into our optic nerves. We are going to become a little bored is when it kind of boils down to But before that, we're just going to be talking to devices and having them read our messages and send our messages and use it as as our communicator with no more phones.

Matt
We are talking to Craig Peterson, our tech guru who joins us now as he always does on Wednesdays at this time. Craig they force us here at the WGA and morning news to watch these security videos trying desperately to drag the employees not just this radio station but all Portland radio group radio stations. into being more secure with their email and stuff. Clicking on those things that say that their downloads and downloading them onto your computer and having a virus and so on and so forth. I believe that we have to watch those videos because more people are falling for it and more attacks are happening from outside. And this is a problem that's getting worse. Am I wrong about that? Am I right about that? Are we seeing a rise in email attacks?

Craig
No, you're absolutely right. In fact, we'll be talking a little bit more about that next week, because there's some new statistics are just coming out right now on that. But we're seeing right now that 76% of us businesses have been attacked, they've experienced a cyber attack in the last year. 76% is absolutely crazy how many organizations have been attacked and 63% of businesses reported the loss of some type of corporate or customer information in the last 12 months. It's absolutely huge and, and frankly, too many businesses are ostrich, ostrich. You're such a work. They're sticking their heads into sand, right? They're saying they're gonna it's not going to happen to me. Now bigger businesses, when you get out of the SMB space, the bigger ones over 500 employees are taking this seriously. They are doing the right things. They're doing what the Portland radio group is doing. They're making sure their employees are trained in what to watch for because most of these bad really bad cyber attacks that have happened besides ransomware have happened because of things employees do and have done and that includes opening emails. So the bad guys are good. They've come a long way from the days when it was you know And my heart goes out to that poor Nigerian prince who lost all his money. And all he needs is Us Bank Account to transfer the money through. And all you have to do is you know, keep a little commission but a lot of use your bank account. Today what they're doing is they are breaking into websites for businesses. And they're stealing all of the data they can get their Well, some of the data that they're stealing and they're going after are your password recovery questions. And they can from that find out all kinds of information. Now this goes back to of course, our friend Sarah Palin. Remember this back in 2008, a 20 year old college student broke into her Yahoo account and stole a bunch of emails from there. How does he do it? While he googled her password recovery question answers. He found out what her zip code was her birthday people will you The name of their dog, their child's birthday wedding date, social security number, but use all of these things to break into account. So the bottom line here is Portland Raider groups doing the right thing by making you watch videos. They should make you watch my videos because they're much more interesting. But, but it is the right thing. Because that is the primary way your email that the bad guys are using to manipulate you by using things like your password recovery questions, to be able to get into your accounts and it's a very, very bad thing. And that's what I'm saying right now. Everybody, you should lie on your bank password recovery questions absolutely should lie on them. When it says what high school did you graduate from? Makeup something don't just use Scooby Doo his high school graduation. But you know poolesville that's not a great one. Completely make something up what high school? Did you graduate from college ended software? And you have to remember all of these answers because you shouldn't be using different answers on every website. So put them all into a password management management program. That's what I do. Use different password recovery questions every time. You can get my password recovery. I have a 10 page thing on passwords. Okay. 10 page special report. So it uncovers password recovery stuff, but what software should you buy? Which ones are free? What should you do? But this is all part of the same thing. And you can get that by the way, just like Craig peterson.com slash password password and get that password recovery thing. But this is complicated. You need to do training with your employees and email. According to the FBI. His latest report is the number one way the bad guys are stealing from our businesses.

Matt
Wouldn't it be easier to just not have computers anymore?

Ken
Seriously, it would be what would it be like if there was no internet? I was a very good typewriter. I mean, I could type again, if I had to. Yeah. People have to use a phone. Although they were scams that way too. Is it done? Okay. Craig Peterson joins us every Wednesday at 738. And you can hear him on Saturday from one to three on WGAN.

Matt
So 76% of us businesses have experienced a cyber attack in the past year.

Craig
Yeah, definitely. You know, it ties all in and it's it's very, very, very big. The SMB space is the space of going after that small medium businesses. Some people call the mass and the, you know, small medium enterprises. And the reason they're going after these smaller businesses, which are basically the under 500 employees, isn't because necessarily that's where the money is, but it's Because that's where they are least prepared for the attack, they're least ready for it. And they leave their money laying around. I picked up some new clients that have had their entire operating account stolen can imagine that you rely on your operating account to pay your bills to pay the vendors, maybe you are using it for payroll as well. And all of a sudden, it's empty. That is a killer for businesses that especially small medium businesses, and so now you're stuck you're in big trouble and they're going after them because they are not ready. Now the some of the stats here also are amazing that it okay 76% of cyber businesses or businesses that cyber attack and 63% of them lost their intellectual property as we mentioned, or customer information the last 12 months but those businesses 63% 50% of them will be out of business in six months. So it's 63% over 76%. And they take 50% of that they will be out of business within six months. And the really scary part is of those somewhere around 30% file for bankruptcy. The week it happens, because they realize that they just can't pay their bills. They're incomplete trouble. So everybody, do what Ken and Matt have been doing. Make sure your employees get training on email, email handling. If you are a home user, a small office, Home Office retiree, make sure you are very careful, basically, nowadays never clicked on anything in the emails is that one of the popular things right now is they're trying to get you to do something. So they'll save things like hey, we've got video of you visiting a porn site. And here's your password. Here's your username and be Cuz you're reusing passwords, it is one of your password. So anyways, I know we're out of time here. But this I can't stress this enough because I've seen so many people, it just breaks my heart that that aren't ready for this. If you're a small business, you have to address this. And you got to take some time and maybe one of the ways to start, if you're interested. Grab it right now, which is Craig peterson.com slash password. That's a great place to start playing some training, do it with your employees and, and protect your business. It's your investment. And if you're the defacto IT person in your organization, you're going to get blamed when this happens to you.

Matt
Well, on that cheery note, ladies, gentlemen, Craig Peterson, our tech guru who has been joining us as he always does on Wednesday morning is is done for the day. So thank you, Craig. Appreciate it as always, and we will talk again next week.

Craig,

Hey guys, thanks a lot. Alright.

Matt

So we're going to take a quick break we'll be back on the other side of the break coming up next on WGAN

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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