AS HEARD ON: WGAN Mornings News with Matt Gagnon: Online safety for kids, Wordpress Vulnerability and Apples newest iOS release

Good morning everybody!

I was on with Matt this morning and we began with talking about how to protect your kids when they are on the internet doing their school work and I gave a tip that will really help you.  Then we discussed a Wordpress vulnerability and Apple's newest iOS update. 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] That will stop your kids from going to no malicious sites and some of the darker corners of the internet. Absolutely free. Check it out.

Good morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here, and that was me with Mr. Matt this morning. It's been one of those interesting weeks. Monday of course, was a holiday.

So I wasn't on the air. Tuesday, there was a problem with the board over at the next radio station that I'm normally on Tuesday mornings. WTAG would Jim Polito and this morning it all seemed to go all right. So here we go with Matt.

Matt Gagnon: [00:00:38] It's seven 36 on the WGAN and morning news on Wednesday morning, which means Craig Peterson joins us as he always does at this time.

Craig, how are you?

Craig Peterson: [00:00:46] Hey, good morning.

Matt Gagnon: [00:00:48] Doing all right. Thanks for asking

Craig Peterson: [00:00:49] Confusing stuff, elections, and everything. My gosh,

Matt Gagnon: [00:00:53] Indeed. So Craig let's get right into things here. Lots of topics to go into, but, cybersecurity and going back to school would be, I think, topical for us here to begin with, because of course, as I'm sure, most people in Maine were going back to school as of yesterday, whether they were physically going back to school or if it was remote, they were going back to school.

So why should cybersecurity be on your back school list?

Craig Peterson: [00:01:16] it's important because frankly, our kids are now being exposed to who knows what, when they're online. So the basics are your child is going online. Hopefully, they're just going to the school site. But how many of us are monitoring our kids very closely. The bottom line is they're not.

And then, on the second side of this, we've got the schools themselves who are terribly overloaded and those poor school workers who are trying to do the, IT now has to protect all of the school systems from ultimately all of this malware that's coming in. From the students' computers that are hooked up to the school, depending on how this is working.

So think about it for just a sec, your kids might be writing a paper and sending in maybe a word doc. We already know about problems with word docs and cybersecurity, where the macros that can be in some of those word docs. Can be misused. Then that gets sent into the teacher whose computers now infected.

It may be stored on a server at the school that's now infecting more and more kids. So we've gotta be careful on both sides here, both the school and the parents.

I have a quick piece of advice. There's some software out there you can get it free, or you can pay for it. I advise you to pay for it. A very inexpensive it's called Umbrella.

Again, it's by Cisco, a very good in stopping some of the ransomware spread and you can get a version of Umbrella, right there, free from their website that will stop your kids from going to no malicious sites and some of the darker corners of the internet. Absolutely free. Check it out. It's called Cisco Umbrella.

Matt Gagnon: [00:03:04] There are many dark corners of the internet, Craig Peterson, our tech guru joins us at this time as he does every Wednesday.

Craig, I am a, on the side, an amateur WordPress developer. I noticed in the number of things that you had to talk about here today, that one of those things was that there was a gigantic security flaw in WordPress sites. About 350,000 of them have been affected in some fashion. What's up with this?

Craig Peterson: [00:03:28] Yeah, this is a very, again, very big call for people to pay attention. We know we've got to update our laptops, our phones, even. Although sometimes you can't get updates on some of the older pieces of equipment, which I respond to that. Hey, get the newer pieces of equipment, if you can't get updates.

When you're talking about WordPress, this is software that used to manage the content on your website. Most smaller companies use WordPress as the basis for their website. So the big question is when was the last time. You did an update on your WordPress site because again, it's software, it needs to be updated.

There's a package that you're referring to here called file manager, which is a plugin. It advances, it augments the features. WordPress has. It has a huge vulnerability in it and people just have not been updating.

Now in the WordPress side, there are some plugins that you can get that will automatically update your website for you and update your plugins for you. I use those all the time. worth looking into. Depending on where your WordPress site is hosted, some hosting facilities will do some updates to your WordPress site, most of them are afraid of breaking your site.

Personally, I use WP-engine. Is the name of the site for hosting some of my WordPress sites, just the basic ones. They do keep it up to date. They've got great tech support. They cost a little bit more. In fact, it's a lot more.

Matt Gagnon: [00:05:09] Yea they do.

Craig Peterson: [00:05:10] Have a look at those. At the very least use one of these free plugins that will do updates for you automatically.

Matt Gagnon: [00:05:17] Finally Craig, before I let you go, I do also want to bring up the new iOS update because we're living in a pandemic world and the new update has a system apparently inside of it that helps to fight against the pandemic a little bit in some fashion. What does that actually entail?

Craig Peterson: [00:05:32] Yea, this was not expected, frankly, here?

This is the new release of iOS. In fact, there is a little battle going on over the new. Releases that are coming out as well. We've got Facebook fighting back on it. There was this plan that we talked about Matt, where Apple and Google had a pandemic tracker who you've come in contact with. Well, Apple included it in the latest version of iOS as 13.7.

People are a little bit concerned about it, but Apple does have it set up in such a way that it's not squealing or reporting on you.  It does allow you to participate if you want to. It will prompt you to opt-in, to receive notifications. If this contract tracing data shows that you may have been exposed.

So it's up to you. You can use it, or not use it, but it wasn't a surprise. We knew they were working on it, but we didn't know. That they were about to release it.

Matt Gagnon: [00:06:32] Craig Peterson our tech guru. He joins us at this time every Wednesday to go over the world of technology. Of course, you can hear more details about this on his show, which has heard on this very station on Saturdays

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

Craig Peterson: [00:06:45] Hey take care of Matt. Thanks.

Matt Gagnon: [00:06:47] You bet. Thanks a lot.

Craig Peterson: [00:06:48] Hey everybody starting next week, we are planning to have some major changes up on the website, a new type of email. We're going to be sending out a couple of midweek emails with long-tail stuff.  n other words, some information you need to know. Just reminding you, letting you know what's new that you can read in two or three minutes, just trying to keep this simple for everybody and keep everybody up to date.

So keep an eye out for that. Everybody who has subscribed to my email list over at craigpeterson.com will be getting those.

 So have a great rest of the week and we'll be back on Saturday. Take care, everybody. Bye-bye.

 

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