AS HEARD ON: WGAN Mornings News with Matt Gagnon: Mail-in Voting and Post Office Technology, Facial Recognition in these Riotous Protests and Alexa bug and iOT

Good morning everybody!

I was on with Matt this morning and we had a good discussion about election technology and mail-in voting and what we learned from a study this week that makes it completely unreliable.  Then we got into Facial Recognition and how it is being used in these riotous protests in some cities.  Then a word of warning about Alexa and its latest updates and how it can put your business at risk if your remote workers have these devices on their networks that they use to connect to you. 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:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] We now exposed our businesses as well, but these particular vulnerabilities were made public last week. We're talking about more than 200 million Alexa devices.

Good morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. I was on with Mr. Gagnon this morning. I learned a new word from Matt, this morning. You learn something new every day.

We went into a couple of things you can do to protect your business and your home because we're connecting our homes to our businesses, now with people working from home. Things you can do to protect it from these "internet of things" devices, because yeah, yeah another hack this time against Alexa, at least a big red warning.

So here we go with Mr. Gagnon.

Matt Gagnon: [00:00:46] Craig Peterson. He is our tech guru. He joins us every Wednesday at this time. You also hear him on Saturdays at one o'clock for the show that he has on this very network friends.

Craig, welcome to the program.

Craig Peterson: [00:00:56] Hey, good morning.

What's this rumor I hear about you and maybe being a Karen or something.

Matt Gagnon: [00:01:04] I'm sorry. I don't know what you're talking about.

I, by the way, I thought we've all decided that the Karen equivalent for men was Dave.

Craig Peterson: [00:01:09] Dave, okay. I only found out about this recently. My wife's name is Karen and somebody used Karen as an insult and I had to dig into it more. And man, this is a weird world.

I never knew

Matt Gagnon: [00:01:24] you did not know about the Karen phenomenon. I'm a little surprised with as much time as you spend on the worldwide web, the internet.

Craig Peterson: [00:01:32] I'm always on the tech side. The latest Adam's family movie, the cartoon one. Have you seen that one? And it's really quite funny. There's a lady in there that apparently is the stereotypical Karen, her hair is almost taller than she is. She's trying to run everyone's life. Anyway, we learn something new every day.

Matt Gagnon: [00:01:54] Yes we do. We do indeed.

So Craig Peterson let's move on to our tech topics though, because we are just days, actually a little bit more than two months away from the presidential election.

And as we approach it, there are some additional security worries that are mounting. Tell us about what those are.

Craig Peterson: [00:02:11] Oh man. Yeah, this is really something.

Matt Gagnon: [00:02:15] I don't want bum anybody out or anything,

Craig Peterson: [00:02:16] I was just shaking my head back in the year 2000 with a whole Florida thing. You might remember they were using the card punches from IBM machines, and Hollerith code and everything else, but they had to punch through using a little stylus what they were voting for. There were hanging CHADS where it wasn't punched out all the way, everything else. It just became so obvious to me back then that technology is really not a solution for a lot of this voting. Now we've got a report out about this red-blue team thing.

Now, if you're in the military and of course, a lot of us are, a lot of us have been here in the Northeast. We have some of the highest per capita military populations of anywhere or ex-military in the country. You're familiar with the concept red team blue team is where you have one team that's attacking and another team that's defending.

We've taken that over the years and have started using it in cybersecurity. So we'll have people who are attacking systems and people who are trying to defend them. In fact, every one of our military academies puts is their students through red team blue team drills. Well, there was just one about the election this year and they found that it was cheap and easy to completely throw all of the counts out of whack.

Particularly, if we use mail-in ballot. They showed a feature that the machines have in the post office. You've gotten letters before, obviously, Matt, it's a barcode that sprayed near the bottom of the letter on the front. That's a code that tells the machine how to route it and ultimately it ends up in the right stack, if you will, for your post person to bring by your home.

Those codes that are on those pieces of mail are also used for programming the machines. It is easy enough. All someone has to do, and these codes are known. Is spray a code on the bottom of a piece of mail and it gets run through the machine and resets the machine. They went on and on it's a great article talking about all of the things that could be done.

Very cheaply, very easy to completely throw chaos into the mix, as to who really won the election. Another example here of how president Trump really was leading the curve. This was not just Republicans on this. This was military people. This was also Democrats who were on this. This is a really big study. It's surprising to me that I haven't really heard about it on the news.

Matt Gagnon: [00:05:05] I'm not surprised. you're talking to Craig Peterson our tech guru, who is joining us as he does every Wednesday to talk about the world of technology.

 In nonpolitical news. We've heard a lot in Portland here about facial recognition technology.

They've been debating that in the city council for a little while, but what to do with it, how to use it, how not to use it, et cetera. Apparently police in Miami, in New York city have been arresting protestors using facial recognition matches, which is interesting.

Craig Peterson: [00:05:31] Yeah, they've been using a lot of this technology all over the world.

Particularly here in the US, we've had this stuff going on at an Oregon and many other cities. And the police would much rather not arrest someone in the middle of a protest. Where there are people that are gonna throw bricks or rocks or whatever at them, and cause more violence to come from that. So what they've been doing is using facial recognition technology to track people.

So the very violent people at this point are the only ones that are being used for. And they, it, them as they leave the area and then they have been arresting them a little bit later, once there were a few blocks away from the protests that are going on. Now, this is a really interesting problem because it's not just the camera's on the street.

It's not like the streets of London. If we're talking about aerial surveillance that is using facial recognition. Everything from drones through planes. All of these cameras that are on the street, even police cars in these cities now have cameras on them there. As they're driving around, they checked license plates to see if there's any outstanding tickets or warrants.

They track the people that are walking down in the streets at the side of the street and they do it all because it's according to the courts, we have no expectation of privacy when we're out in public.

Matt Gagnon: [00:06:57] Speaking with Craig Peterson, our tech guru. He joins us for a tech update every Wednesday at this time.

Lastly, Craig, do you want to talk to you a little bit about my Amazon Alexa? Apparently there are new flaws in the patch to Amazon. Alexa, what is this mean for people who are working at home particularly?

Craig Peterson: [00:07:15] Yeah, this is a bad thing. It's not just Alexa. We've seen them in pretty much every one of these smart devices that we have in our homes.

Now we're connecting our homes to our businesses because we have workers that are working from home. Those home networks have these Alexa and the Google homes and everything else on them we're using VPNs. People don't use these things. Are now exposed in our businesses as well, but these particular vulnerabilities were made public last week.

We're talking about more than 200 million Alexa devices, right? There are patches that have already been released for some of this. There are more patches that are on the way, but be very careful. My suggestion to everyone is don't use just the router that you got from the phone company or from the cable company.

Don't just run out to a big-box retailer and buy a little router for your home. Get at least a prosumer router. I really liked Cisco. I sell Cisco. Cisco has a really nice whole line called the GO routers and they let you split up your or network in your home so that you can put things like your Alexa or your Google home or your Roku, et cetera, on a completely separate network.

So it has no access to anything else. Any other computers, it cannot be used as a jumping-off point to hack your home computers or the business computers, if it's on another network. So again, I like GO hardware from Cisco. You can find it on Amazon.  There are some others out there. Make sure you segment your network and keep everything up to date.

Matt Gagnon: [00:08:56] That's Craig Peterson. You hear him here on the weekends. Saturdays at one o'clock is when his show is he gets into these and more stories with more depth and detail.

Craig, we appreciate you joining us as always on Wednesdays. And we'll talk to you again next week.

Craig Peterson: [00:09:09] Hey, take care of Matt.

I put a little word of warning out there. I got a call from a listener. Who has attended a number of my webinars and understood a little bit about some of the VPN stuff going on, but he has a client who has offices down in Columbia, down South. He had a, apparently a person within the organization. Who was moderately high up a manager on Tinder swiping and found a girl and woke up the next morning with his laptop gone and apparently been drugged.

So just a bit of a warning. The old stuff is still out there. These honey traps, as they called them, we gotta be very careful about that. Of course, Laptop stolen. Was he using the right kind of technology? No. Did he have the whole disc encrypted? No.

Now, these bad guys have all of his business information right there in their hands.  Anyhow. Just a word of caution, it's still happening. Take care of everybody. We'll be back Saturday and we are just hustling and hustling and keep an eye out mid-September.

Make sure you're on my email list so you can find out about it. Just all kinds of great free stuff for you guys. I got to get you trained

Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Take care, everybody. Bye-bye.

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