AS HEARD ON: WGAN Mornings with Ken and Matt: Setting up a New Computer and Protecting Yourself from Ransomware.

Good morning everybody!

I was on with Ken and Marty (who was sitting in for Matt.) We had a good discussion Setting up a new computer and How you can protect yourself from Ransomware. Here we go with Ken and Marty.

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

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Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig
John McAfee, here's the guy that started the Anti-Virus movement by many arguments, saying, our software is useless. Don't buy it.

Craig
Hey, I was on with it was Marty this morning in place of Matt and Ken Altshuler, and of course, yesterday was the big election day in Maine on Super Tuesday. We didn't talk about that, really because we spoke about Marty's new computer and what you should do with a new computer, so I gave him the advice that I give all of my employees. It is what we do when you get a brand new computing device.

Ken
Well, now Craig Peterson is on. How are you?

Craig
Hey, good. Yeah, blame it on rank choice voting, I think.

Marty
So everybody's second choice.

Ken
Let's start talking about ransomware, shall we? I mean, so does ransomware work? Do people pay ransoms?

Craig
You'd have to ask the question, right? How Does it still work? Ransomware has been around for two years. Well, it goes back further than that. It was two years ago certainly had the vast, huge, massive hit on ransoms. That has brought down multinational companies for weeks, in some cases, very, very big deal. It's kind of fallen off. People aren't thinking much about it anymore. They're not protecting themselves. Now we've got this warning that's come out about ransomware. It is back with a vengeance. Kind of what you alluded to here, Ken has happened. We're no longer just seeing ransomware encrypting our data. What's happening now is ransomware gets onto your computer, and it's a whole new generation. What it does now is it starts poking around your computer, looking for Word documents, looking for your spreadsheets, and in your case, I think it would be what Word Perfect documents.

Ken
Word Perfect. The best word processing program ever made. Oh, all the legal guys like eight and a half by 14 and all that.

Craig
Yeah, yeah, exactly. It looks for those, and then it sends them back to the bad guys. Then the bad guys have a look at them and say, Okay, is there any real value here might there be something else on that computer? Can we spread laterally throughout the organization? Then they will hop on your computer unbeknownst to you because your laptop called home when it got this new kind of Once they've got all of the data off your computer that they want, then they probably will encrypt all of your data for the heck of it. They will put a ransom up on your screen. Now what they're doing, and this is up dramatically now we're talking about more than seven and a half billion dollars here in the US ransomware the last couple of years. What they're doing now is they're saying, Hey, I'll pay up Ken, or we're going to release all of your client files, even though nobody can read the WordPerfect files anymore. All of your client files to the internet, all of your personal information, your trade secrets, intellectual property, pay up, or else. The FBI is warning about this increase in is a new type of ransomware. It grew by 100% over the last two quarters. It is getting dramatic is getting out of control. What people need to do here is to protect themselves. Backups. However, having backups would help with the encryption, right? Because you can restore your files from the backup. But, it's not going to help with the, "Hey, we're going to release all of your information if you don't pay up." We have to start doing penetration tests on our systems, making sure that they're relatively safe. I'm going to have some training on that coming up. Starting next week, on some of the things you can do just some free training. Absolutely. I'm not selling anything in this course, right. I do have some classes for sale, but I'm trying to help out because, man alive there is some nasty stuff happening right now to home users, as well. It's the businesses that are more likely to pay this type of violence. What Jack Sparrow type of ransom. Yeah, that's something we don't want. I hope people will, will take advantage of that and avoid that in their business.

Marty
So Craig Marty here. A question that just came up for me at my nonprofit ET-tech is that we just bought a new HP laptop and it has
McAfee antivirus on it now. I hate that program, to be frank. It takes forever. And I've said to my staff, and we don't need that. Whatever comes with Windows Windows Defender is fine. Delete McAfee. Was that the right call?

Craig
Oh, Marty, Marty. Marty. You're right. Here's the dirty secret right now when it comes to antivirus software. It is 100% ineffective, 100% useless when it comes to these modern types of attacks. When you're talking about McAfee, Norton, it's just mind-blowing here. John McAfee has a video out on YouTube that you can watch anytime you'd like. We're here. Here's John McAfee. The guy that started the industry by many arguments, saying, our software is useless. Don't buy it. Right. Oh, he doesn't own the company anymore, but that's what he's saying. You've got one of the top people over at Symantec Norton. There, I think he was VP of Marketing, if I remember right, getting caught saying at any event here after a couple of drinks, that their software is useless, and of course, losing his job shortly after that. The antivirus software industry is trying to mess with us. Frankly, now that McAfee probably paid about $2 to Microsoft or, in this case, HP is more likely about two bucks HP to have their software installed on your computer because they hope you're just going to go ahead and do it. So here are the basics of what you're going to do. It ties in with these tutorials that I'm going to have in the next few weeks because the right thing to do is get rid of all of that kind of extortion where they get onto your computer when you buy it new. So the first thing I do, Marty is a completely erase the computer, I mean, completely reformat the disk, and reinstall Windows without all that extra crap on it. And then, I turned on Windows Defender and made sure it's turned on and make sure you turn on automatic updates. Then I go in and configure Windows Firewall because, for some reason, Microsoft shipped it with a firewall. Yet the way they have everything turned on makes the firewall almost entirely useless, which drives me crazy. There's a configuration that you have to do on that, and I'll be talking about that a little bit if you listen to my show on Saturday at one o'clock
I'll be starting to talk about these things. Next week, I'm going to have a lot more, but one o'clock every Saturday, by the way. So, Marty, you are right, you are going to get a lot of defense, just by turning on Windows Defender. I would also advise that you to use OpenDNS or Umbrella, you can use a free version, and there's a paid version that is going to stop this type of ransomware we just talked about. Right there with the OpenDNS, even the free version. For my customers, I use the commercial version, which I sell to them and support them. That's number one. There are several other things you should do to try and keep your computers safe. I'm going to go through step-by-step what to do and how to turn all these things on. On the browsers, you can turn on a few different things. You're going to want to have Ghostery on there, you're going to have Ublock Origin on there, and you are also going to have Privacy Badger on there. Those are few things that I'll be talking about in these webinars coming up and showing you guys exactly what to do and how to do it.

Marty
We are talking to our tech guru Craig who joins us every Wednesday at 730. Let's go to Shark Tank. One of the judges or sharks of Shark Tank lost, for $200,000, which kind of drop in the bucket for me, but probably hurt her a little bit, but then got it back. Yeah. How did she get it back is my question because the FBI warns you that you're not getting that money back?

Craig
Yeah, ever. It's gone. They're saying that, after 90 seconds, the money is out of the country, which is true, in this case, as well. And what happened is this is a business email compromise here real quick. And there was a bad guy who did a little bit of research on Barbara Cochran, who is this one of these Investors over in Shark Tank. They found out who her assistant is. They found out who her bookkeeper is. And they sent some fake emails and the bookkeeper wired some money 388,000 bucks to a bank over in Germany based on the email. The big mistake on the bookkeeper's part was that the bookkeeper responded to the email asking for the money to be wired. The email address of the assistant was one character off. So they just kind of faked it. Then they found out about it because when the bookkeeper wired the money. The bookkeeper forwarded the wire confirmation to the assistant using the correct email address. The assistant said what the heck's going on here, called the bank immediately, and was able to get the German bank to freeze the account before it got wired out in this case, to China. Usually, it's Eastern European countries that have people that are doing this, but in this case, it was China. Surprisingly enough, Barbara Corcoran got back all of her money minus wire fees from his from this bank over in Germany. And you're right can this like never happens you never get your money back. Yeah, I was shocked about it. I mean, that was unbelievable. Yeah, it was shocking to her too. So be careful on these emails. Always confirm with a phone call. You know, use it. Just stop and think about what would do? Well, ten certainly would not send an email you never get. He gets his dial phone, their rotary phone, and he would call someone, and that's what you should do. You know this, this new tech is terrific. But in reality, pay close, close attention, particularly when it comes to stuff like this. I've worked with companies that have had all of their money stolen, and we worked with the FBI to start investigations for them. Although they will investigate, you never get your money back, right.

Ken
Craig Peterson, our tech guru, joining us as he does every Wednesday. Thank you so much, Craig. Appreciate it. We'll talk to you next week.

Craig
Thanks, guys. Bye-bye.

Ken
Okay. All right. Let's get CBS News and when we come back

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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