Welcome! Russia offered 1 Million to Cripple Tesla plus more on Tech Talk with Craig Peterson on WGAN

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Craig talks about a Russian that offered someone 1 Million to cripple Tesla.  Wow.

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Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Hopefully you were able to get those seven signed. Actually, I think I got closer to 10 or maybe 11. Okay. It was a dozen. These are signs that you are up to be a victim of a ransomware attack. we're going to talk now about a direct attack. Bad guys.

hi everybody. Craig Peterson here. Thanks for joining me today. If you missed what we were just talking about, you can find it [email protected] or of course your favorite podcast app. I knew there was a word for it and the things they're joining me here in WGAN I'm on all. So every Wednesday with Mr. Matt. Gagnon at about seven 30. We discuss the latest topics of the week and next week's topics will be next week.

I don't know what they will be right now because we monitor a whole lot of different news feeds and try and figure out what are the top stories you guys need to know to understand a little bit more about the tech that's out there as well as of course, security is cybersecurity is what I do.

When people are ready to move their business to the next level, that's when they contact me. I'm not somebody out there constantly pounding on people. I really want you to come and engage me when it's your time. I wish more businesses were that way. I just despise it. When I'm getting nothing but pitches from some of these companies out there.

I just don't think it's worthwhile. So that's what I do anyway. I've been doing that now for about 30 years, which is a long time. That in this case is cybersecurity. I don't even want to mention how long I've been doing networking and the whole internet thing, because that goes back to the mid-seventies.

Oh my gosh. It makes me almost feel like I'm a little old. let's talk about an article here from ARS Technica. This week, we talked about Elon Musk about him just today, in fact about, Oh, just phenomenal thing he's doing to help people who have these physical. Disabilities. Everything from, you're missing a hand, all the way up through you are locked in and it's just phenomenal.

Don't know what he's doing there with his Starlink. It's just incredible with what's going to be happening very soon now. With these lower earth orbit satellites. We talked about this one a couple of weeks ago. I gave you the web URL to go to, you can get the internet from him for two bucks a month, which is just phenomenal, but it, you can't just get it.

You have to be accepted as part of this beta program and everything. So I think he's doing it right. But if you do get in, I think it's a pretty darn cool thing. he has also of course got space X, the boring company, as I mentioned earlier, but he has this Gigafactory. This is really a cool thing. It is located out in the middle of nowhere in Nevada and what he's doing there is designing and building really next-generation, whole new technology, as much as he can do it right now, batteries.

Think about what he's doing with his cars, he needs batteries, and the batteries he's been using tended to be basically the same batteries that are in your laptop. Then he puts them by the hundreds, into the car and Presto Magico. He has a battery pack. He's trying to move beyond that. Use some newer technology.

We talked to him about a year or so ago about some of the new lithium Blass batteries that were being developed. It's very cool. They are out there now by the way. Yeah, they have some very interesting. properties basically you can charge them up almost instantly. It just, there's just so many so fast.

And these were invented by the guy that invented the lithium cobalt oxide and the lithium-ion phosphate electrical materials. Of course, that led to lithium-ion batteries. So this guy's very into it. Internal back I came back, by the way, is researching the battery to see if they can't use it.

To store extra power. Cause remember Hydro-Quebec is very much based on hydroelectric dams. in fact, in most of Canada, certainly Ontario and Quebec, they don't talk about the power lines down or that there's a power company truck outside. It's always hydro it's a hydro company. If you're not familiar with that terminology, you might think that the water department is outside, but it's not.

But how do you store the electricity that you're making from? Let's say you have solar roof panels. How do you store it on a massive scale from a nuclear power plant or a hydro plant tour, a windmill farm? There that's a huge problem with it. What happens when. The sun just doesn't come out because it's been snowing for a week.

You don't have any power, right? Not if you're entirely reliant on it. Just those solar cells. If the wind stops blowing, you're not going to get any power out of those wonderful big turbines that are sitting out there in the field. It's again and again, that's one of the nice things about high hydro too, by the way, is that.

It is easy to store that is Tricity. Cause all you have to do is slow down the flow of the water. Let it back up a little bit. Who cares? Slow it down during the evening when there's less demand overnight and then speed it up again in the daytime. It's something that kind of what has been done in some of these hotels up in bed, I guess before where to keep them or air conditioning costs down.

They want to use that electricity at night cheaper. What do they do? Some of these hotels have massive. Freeze plants at night time, they'll go ahead and freeze huge amounts of water. While the electricity is cheap and then during the day they will use that water. Now, the ice there it'll melt and they'll use that for cooling for the whole casino.

It's really quite cool what they're doing, but storage, the energy is the big problem for the future when we're getting less and less reliant on. Petroleum products. So very cool glass batteries. There are other technologies that are out there. But what was happening here is that Elon Musk built this huge factory that had all kinds of problems too, by the way.

We talked about this before a couple of years ago when this w factory first started getting going, but the factory is under attack. It's interesting to see here because we've got an arrest now, apparently, and this was divulged on Tuesday in a criminal complaint and it accused a Russian man of offering a million dollars to the employee of this Nevada company.

In exchange for the employee in infecting the company's network. So there's a different way of getting ransomware or spyware, the company, isn't it. You pay somebody some money and in exchange, when that was all done, he was going to, and really cripple. Tesla this whole factory, the code from the FBI sting that by the way, recorded this guy face to face discussing their proposal.

He says the purpose of the conspiracy was to recruit an employee of a company to transmit well, malware provided by the co-conspirators into the company's computer system. Exfiltrate data from the company's network and threatened to disclose the data online, unless the company paid the co-conspirators ransom demand.

Now, this isn't just happening with Tesla. This is happening every day. It's happened already to thousands of businesses. You've got a hundred employees, you got 200 employees and we come in there and we find that there's data being exfiltrated. How did these back doors get into your network? Did they get in because of what it was apparently happening here, where the Russians were trying to hire somebody to get in?

Was it a fishing attack? Was it some malware that was brought in? it's really hard to say, apparently, this Russian who was 27 years old, traveled from Russia to Nevada, and then. That trip rear-ended in him meeting with this unnamed employee multiple times. The initial offer was a half a million dollars and that failed to clinch the deal.

And so the defendant doubled the offer. Not so according to prosecutors, this is all alleged. They certainly do seem to have some evidence here, but we'll see. We'll see as time goes on, exactly what ends upcoming. From all of this, but the idea behind this is something that's very prevalent right now, and it is the bad guys want to get your data exfiltrated which means remove it from the computers now own model mean remove as in delete, get a copy of it, and then threatened to release it.

Now think about what kind of a position that puts your business in they're threatening to release this information. It could be patient information. It could be information that is about your accounts payable or receivables bank accounts. Maybe your customers. Bank accounts or other information like social security numbers, credit cards, et cetera.

So a lot of people will pay more for that. Then they'll pay for a decryption key for your standard malware. That's out there ransomware. Okay. So it's a different kind. We're seeing it more and more, or I'm getting alerts from the FBI about it more and more., it's interesting to see what he did. This is a, and an old tactic.

I don't know that it was the Russian government involved, or it was just organized crime. Isn't that kind of sad too. It's almost equating their government with organized crime, but apparently this guy wind dine booze the employee. When discussing. Particularly sensitive details had conversations in cars, interesting.

The FBI had surveillance in the restaurants and bars and otherwise, the employee recorded it. So this is a very big deal. Obviously very ostentatious money, the audacity, and recklessness of this Russian that was doing it, which also makes you think it really wasn't the Russian government that was directly behind this, but one of the benefits.

So your typical cybercrime is you don't have to expose yourselves by flying to the United States or. Other risky jurisdictions to have malware installed on a company's computer network. There are much better and easier ways to do that. All right. Stick around. Cause when we come back, we are going to be talking about a confirmation from a story we had just a couple of weeks ago.

I was talking about something. Everybody needs to hear. You're listening to Craig Peterson on WGAN and online Craig peterson.com.

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