AS HEARD ON: WGAN Mornings News with Matt Gagnon: Election Interference by Google, Data Breach Costs Going Up, and Improving Remote Work for Businesses

Good morning everybody!

I was on with Matt this morning and we had a good discussion about Google and how they are interfering in our election process.  Then we got into the rising costs for businesses when it comes to data breaches. We wrapped up my segment with a discussion on Businesses and Remote work and what improvements can be made.  Let's get into my conversation with Matt on WGAN.

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

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Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

[00:00:00] Craig Peterson: Hey, Craig Peterson here. I was on with Matt this morning, covering the state of Maine and parts of New Hampshire. We talked about the average cost of a data breach going up. We got into the election interference. Google is showing us via some real stats that are out there. Yeah. Google is interfering.

We've got the three people that were charged for the Twitter hack. If remote work isn't working for you. Hey, I got some tips

Wednesday morning and you know what time it is because Craig Peterson is with us. He's joining us as he always does it this time on Wednesdays to go over what's happening in the world of technology.

Matt Gagnon: Craig, how are you, sir?

Craig Peterson: Of course he is. I'm doing well. Power's back on. It came on about four this morning, so that's good news. And I did get all for those little wondering all my beehives strapped down. So they wouldn't get blown all over the place with the wind last night. That was crazy.

[00:01:00] Excellent news. I'm glad to hear that.

So let's talk about data breaches because I know that, this is increasingly a concern for many businesses and when you have a big data breach like that, it is incredibly expensive for you as a not. It is and it's going up, which is really a surprise for many businesses. Right now, this is a study that was done by IBM.

They're showing that the cost of a data breach, on average, is about 3.86 million, almost $4 million. The average cost of a breach. And the reason it's going up is so many businesses are deciding that somehow the cloud, as it were, is some sort of a panacea. And I just want to remind everybody the cloud is just a word for a rented computer that's all it is. You still have to make sure you've got your patches done. You still have to make sure it's configured. Really the number of Amazon cloud services that have exposed data is absolutely astounding.

[00:02:00] Just like last week we found these VPN services that said they were not loggers that were logging. We found all of that information out because of a misconfigured cloud server. So you've got to really be careful with that. it's absolutely amazing. Amazing how we're just still not paying enough attention to this

Matt Gagnon: Craig Peterson, joining us as he always does on Wednesdays at this time, going over what's happening in the world of technology.

We talked a little bit about this, I think last week, Greg, not this specific story, but this subject and this topic, this idea of tech companies and how they're managing speech online. And, I had mentioned off-hand this thing about Google, basically blacklisting, Breitbart, among others. It's not just them, but, it's a, their latest move to try to, in their words, at least as, try to STEM the tide side of misinformation and crazy things. Yeah. Being set on the internet about, about politics. And that is an extremely dangerous little precedent they've set there.

[00:03:00] So tell us exactly what they did and why and where we're going to go from here with this.

Craig Peterson: Yeah. This is really something. This is really in followup to what we talked about last week. Cause I figured I shouldn't dig into this more, cause I had heard a little bit about Breitbart and what their complaints were. But when you start getting right down to this. The statistics are amazing.

So the best source for this information that I found was Breitbart themselves because they can log how many hits they have, where does it go, come from? What searches were being used. So after May's core search update on May 5th, this year, all of his shotgun, Google search results for Joe Biden never showed Breitbart at all period.

[00:04:00] So Google searches, no

Matt Gagnon: Breitbart wasn't writing on Biden, right?

Craig Peterson: They had been showing about 30,000 impressions for Breitbart links, which is just nice. That's a nice number then after May 5th, both impressions and clicks went to zero. Now that's from a third party company that monitors that sort of stuff.

And looking at some stats here. This is a quote from Dr. Epstein who was looking at some of these stats. He said for the New York Times, the percentage of traffic that's being routed to them, I'm Google on. Joe Biden is about 39%. And right now, overall, of course, Joe Biden, zero going to Breitbart. Zero, going to this fairly right-wing website.

[00:05:00] I think we can agree. But at the moment, Google is responsible for just 9% of Breitbart traffic. So New York times 40% from Google and Breitbart 9%.

Matt Gagnon: Curious to say the least Craig Peterson or tech guru joins us periodically on Wednesdays to go over what's happening in the world of technology.

The other thing I wanted to talk about, speaking of politics here, it's politics, but this Twitter hack that happened a while ago, certainly embroiled a lot of political figures. I know Barack Obama was one of them and it was all about. Bitcoin money and we've apparently found yeah, the hackers and, who are they?

Craig Peterson: Yeah, we really did. the FBI IRS secret service, Florida law enforcement. They're all working together to try and find out what happened here, because it looks like the source was in Florida. This is another warning for businesses out there, but for individuals as well. Because what happened here was a spear-phishing attack against some of the Twitter employees, some specific employees.

[00:06:00] So a 17-year-old kid he's out of operating Tampa Florida. Name's Graham Clark. He's accused of being the mastermind behind what was the biggest security and privacy breach in history. It was you mentioned Obama included Joe Biden, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Kanye West, Apple, and the bottom line is he was able to convince some people that he was from Twitter IT.

So Twitter, the information technology, the support people, and Twitter contacted enough. People in Twitter, got them to give him this. God mode is what I call it. Access was, let them see everything, do everything, et cetera. So he got a couple of his buddies involved, you know what? 17-year-old wouldn't and this whole phone spear-phishing attack.

[00:07:00] Where against calling on the phone. Hey, I'm from IT. We're going to be doing an upgrade two Microsoft on your machine tomorrow. So I want to test it out. I need to know what your username or password is so that I can get on and make sure that Microsoft update works properly. That's happening every day right now, Matt.

Matt Gagnon: And Craig, final question for you before I let you go. We've obviously all had to deal in the last several months with the whole work from home phenomenon and everyone is dealing with the remote office. Yeah. Even still, and now the kids are going back to school. I have this nagging suspicion.

It's going to be yet again, a little bit of a boomerang and there's going to be more people working from home, yet again. what's interesting about this though, is that some companies are finding, it's not all it's cracked up to be.

Craig Peterson: Yeah, it's not. And those companies tend to be companies that took all of their policies and procedures and everything that they were using in the office and pushed it home, The biggest one being how many meetings people used to have to go to.

[00:08:00] It was just crazy. And so they pulled that into the virtual environment and are running it on one of these teams, apps are having to forbid on zoom and they've found that these types of companies that haven't rethought, how do our employees work? What's the best workflow we can possibly have to make our business work.

Those companies that haven't really thought about it, have found some decreases. So one, a 400 person team that was looked at was using, the team app from Microsoft and seeing, I know 11% decrease in hour-plus meetings and a 22% increase in 30-minute meetings. that tends to be a good thing. They also found that their one on one meetings have increased by 18% because you're not bumping into people at the water cooler.

[00:09:00] So if you do have people working from home, step back for a minute, have a look at everything that's going on. Realize that it's the same as people being in the office from their workflow standpoint and make some changes. And you might find that job even though it wasn't working out so well for you before things are going to improve on the worker's side, though. The problem is if you're working at home, you just can't ever leave the office.

Matt Gagnon: It's a never-ending office, right?

Craig Peterson: Yeah. It's my life has been for the last, all about it.

Matt Gagnon: Craig Peterson, and you hear him on this very stage then on Saturdays at one, o'clock where he talks about these issues in much more depth. Craig, we appreciate you giving me a preview of them here this morning as we do every Wednesday. And we'll talk again next week, sir. All right.

Craig Peterson: And of course, as you said, Saturday at one.

Matt Gagnon: Indeed. Thanks a lot, Craig.

Craig Peterson: Hey, we lost power with that whole wind thing going on. And I had to reboot everything in the studio, get it back online. It's been one of those mornings, you know how that all goes. All right, everybody.

[00:10:00] We are working where we've recorded on video the last three weekend shows and we haven't put them anywhere yet.

We've so got some stuff to work out and figure out, but it's coming. We have all, a lot of stuff in the works right now.

So keep an eye out, make sure you subscribe to my newsletter and find out about all of these free pieces of training and all of the stuff going on.

Craig, Peterson.com/subscribe. It's just that easy.

And of course, thanks for listening.

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