AS HEARD ON - The Jim Polito Show - WTAG 580 AM: Tracking Stolen IPhones and New Coronavirus Business Threat

Welcome!

Good morning, everybody. I was on with Jim Polito and we discussed how Apple is tracking stolen phones from their stores and a new threat due to the aftereffects of Coronavirus for businesses.  Here we go with Jim.

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Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: Think about your sales guy, walking out with your entire client list, order history, everything they've done and going to a competitor. Think about your, it, people that might've been designing things or your engineers or the people who put together your systems, whatever it might be, having all of your designs in their hand.

[00:00:22] Hey, good morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. I had a little bit of a different tack this morning with Jim and talked about the, the real risk here right now to businesses. About Coronavirus, but you know, I've never explained it this way. It came to me yesterday when we were talking about one of the clients and what the right thing was for us to do to help them out. So here we go with Jim. Here he is.

[00:00:57] Jim Polito: Wow. We've got some great stuff for you today. with our tech talk guru and all around. Great guy, Craig Peterson morning, sir.

[00:01:09] Craig Peterson: Hey, good morning, Jim.

[00:01:11] Jim Polito: Hey, you're getting ready for a Canada day. It's you know, July 1st is right around the corner. You gotta, you gotta celebrate.

[00:01:20] Craig Peterson: Yeah, I know. I know. I know you can't even cross the border. Can't do anything. Nothing. Yeah. One of my daughters was married on Friday, out in Kentucky. We were out there in Kentucky and it was interesting times. Let me tell ya.  They were all disappointed. I of course, set up the streaming and we streamed the whole ceremony and stuff.

[00:01:42]You know, Canadians just not allowed down here. You know, some might think maybe they should have done that years ago, before I made it down. I just don't.

[00:01:52] Jim Polito: Well, I meant to ask you about the wedding. Cause I know you were down there in bourbon country and, trying to put on a wedding in the, in the age of the Rona, you know? So I'm glad you were able to share it. With all the folks from Canada, but it seems to me that the Molson trucks are still rolling across the border though, you know.

[00:02:13] Craig Peterson: Important stuff. Yeah.

[00:02:14] Jim Polito: Well, I was just kinda thinking you could have, like they do from Mexico. You could have smuggled the whole family up in a truck.

[00:02:25]Craig Peterson: Laughing

[00:02:25] Jim Polito: Why not? No, it is Royal, crown Royal. Seagram's all that stuff. Alright. Hey, this is, this is making me laugh so hard. the the folks who smashed the windows at the Apple stores and they stole iPhone devices. And now, well, we'll, I'll, I'll let you finish the story, Craig. Cause I think this is, this is sweet justice.

[00:02:57] Craig Peterson: You had mentioned earlier that these stolen iPhones or now essentially useless.  If you asked me Jim, I would say that they're more than useless, much worse, because Apple, in case you don't know, all of the phones that are on the displays in the store, Will only work in the store, ever. They have a special operating system on them that allows the phone to keep track of where it is. If it leaves the store, it will stop working.

[00:03:29] So, all of the phones have stopped working, but there is one part of the phone, Jim, that still works when it's outside the store.

[00:03:37] Jim Polito: And that is the tracking. Isn't it?

[00:03:41] Craig Peterson: You got it? Absolutely. So the pictures that have been posted on Twitter, which by the way, is another great way to find out who the guy that stole the phone is, showing the displays on some of these phones saying, please return to Apple Walnut street.

[00:03:58] This device has been disabled and is being tracked. Local authorities will be alerted. They are passing the information over to the authorities. Unlike some of these cities that have asked, Hey, send pictures of looters and ended up with K-pop pictures and videos coming in to report to the police.

[00:04:18] The police are actually following up on this because Apple will give them the absolute precise location of all of these stolen phones.

[00:04:28] Jim Polito: Oh, I love it. That is fantastic. I love to hear that stuff. All right. Here's something I don't want to hear. You know, Craig, you've done an excellent job on educating our listening audience to, on how to protect themselves, protect their privacy, protect their personal information, all that.

[00:04:50] But, you sent me a piece here that, Basically the biggest threat to your personal data is an employee leaving the company that has your personal data. Is that that's an accurate statement. Isn't it?

[00:05:13] Craig Peterson: Yeah, it absolutely is. In many of our businesses trying to stay alive took some kind of knee jerk actions in order to do that.

[00:05:23]We were just at a pizza shop right out there in a Wooster.  I've fixed a bunch of security problems. This is a pizza shop. I was shocked how much money they're making right now, by the way. Thank God. So many restaurants are just struggling so badly, but their business has doubled since the Coronavirus thing came in.

[00:05:44] And, they have the credit card processing clean machine, a little server there that keeps track of all of their sales, point of sale stuff, et cetera. They got audited by the payment card industry, the PCI people. And they said, Hey, we have two weeks here before they show up again.

[00:06:04]We've got to get all our security together. So we went in there and had a look at that payment card industry, little report, and we cleaned everything up. Now we found on their server had some malicious back doors that have been installed, because again, they just had the local computer guys set it up for them.

[00:06:25] Jim Polito: Yeah, exactly.

[00:06:26]Craig Peterson: Apparently all out the credit card data had been stolen from their machine. That means, now ,that there's, I think it's $120 fine per credit card that they've processed over the last year. So incredible, fine. Well, again, part of this is because people are sent home, businesses set up VPNs.

[00:06:49] We've got another one. This is a government subcontractor that we went to last week. And they had set up a VPN so people could work from home  Isn't this wonderful, isn't that wonderful. It turns out that what he had done was not compliant at all. If they had been audited by the government contractor, they would have lost all of the government contracts because again, malicious software all over the place, backdoors Chinese back doors.

[00:07:19] So I really want to warn businesses. Yeah, you had to stay afloat. You had to do something. Pull up your socks now !This is the time to do it. What Jim was talking about here is employees stealing our business information when they leave your employ. So think about all of the employees that brought it from drive into the office, copied the files onto the some drive and went home to work.

[00:07:50]Well now they have your business, personal information your intellectual property, personal information about your customers, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. more than 80% of employees that are planning to leave their job, bring the business's data with them. Guess what we just did by giving them some drives and letting them have full access to all of this data from home. Number one, they've got the data and 60% of insider threats to businesses are from insiders and they already have your data. And then number two, we allow those employees to connect from home heaven forbid. And do you using their home computers to connect to our business offices? When we are in for a major problem for most small businesses coming up.

[00:08:47] Jim Polito: And, you know, the old expression, it's a cliche. Oh, it was an inside job, you know, like it looks like, a jewelry store was robbed, but it wasn't, you know, somebody who worked there set it up. It was an inside job. this is what you're talking about here. Only the theft of data, which is just as valuable as jewelry.

[00:09:11] Craig Peterson: Yeah. Think about your sales guy, walking out with your entire client list, order history, everything they've done and going to a competitor. Think about your IT people that might've been designing things or your engineers or the people who put together your systems, whatever it might be, having all of your designs in their hands.

[00:09:34] This is huge. And, and we've seen it with Tesla. Where again in the autonomous auto business, people walked out the door with the plan of their employer and took them to the next employer or folks who I can test all of these guys lost due to everywhere they can afford it. How about you? You've got to make sure that you pull up your socks on this thing, because this is another way Coronavirus is going to be destroying businesses.

[00:10:06] This insider threat, where we were just trying to keep our head above water.

[00:10:12] Jim Polito: All right. You heard it all here and there's a lot more and you can get your hands on it easily. All that you have to do is text my name, Jim, to this number.

[00:10:27] Craig Peterson: Well, you can text it to [phone], or when you can just email [email protected]. That's M E @craigpeterson.com. That's a pretty easy address. M E at Craig peterson.com.

[00:10:45] Jim Polito: Craig, congratulations on the wedding. And, I'm not surprised that you pulled it off as  a technical celebration and we look forward to catching up with you next week. All right.

[00:10:58] Craig Peterson: Take care of Jim.

[00:10:59] Jim Polito: All right. Take care. Craig, Craig Peterson, everybody all around. Great guy. Okay. Today.

 

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