Welcome! Cybersecurity Audits and New Vehicle lifespan plus more on this Tech Talk with Craig Peterson Podcast

Craig discusses cybersecurity audits and new vehicle lifespan.

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

---

Right To Repair Or A Fight For Survival?

Ring’s latest security camera is a drone that flies around inside your house

Malware Attacks Declined But Became More Evasive in Q2

Elon Musk reveals plans to slash electric battery costs, build $25,000 Tesla

Paying ransomware demands could land you in hot water with the feds

Windows 10 machines running on ARM will be able to emulate x64 apps soon

'It Won't Happen to Me': Employee Apathy Prevails Despite Greater Cybersecurity Awareness

Rise in Remote MacOS Workers Driving Cybersecurity 'Rethink'

A Guide to the NIST Cybersecurity Framework

---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

With our cars being more and more computerized should we be treating them like a computer? Do we have a right to repair? Should we be expecting upgrades? How long should our car last? We're going to get to that and a whole lot more.

Hi everybody. You are listening to Craig Peterson. We're going to get into a number of different security things this week. I've talked about them on the radio, some really cool stuff coming from Elon Musk. Some news about how paying ransomware demands could end up getting you a jail sentence. Yeah. Yeah. It makes sense, once I explain it, okay. So hold on a couple of minutes.

We have some very cool new technology. I talked about Intel before and how disappointed I've been with so much of what they've done over the years. And we are going to talk about Intel's maybe biggest competitor outside of maybe a company might've heard of AMD. We'll be getting to that and employee apathy. MacOS workers really driving a cybersecurity rethink. We'll talk a little bit about the NIST cybersecurity framework because that is getting to be a big deal. I just had this week, a client, actually last Friday that client informed me that their customer had stopped ordering a couple of weeks prior they're trying to figure out why now up until then. My customer had not told me how much this customer was worth to them but they don't buy much. That DOD contractor stopped buying from my client. Now, this is a client that we've had for 20 years, maybe longer and we'd been warning them about the changes that have been occurring. In the regulations regarding cybersecurity.

You might remember me mentioning here on the show a couple of weeks ago, there was an emergency change, right? An emergency order of 48-hour notice to change in what was being. Required of DOD contractors. Now, the department of defense is one thing, right? But how about the rest of us? All those same rules are going into effect for everyone that has any sort of federal contract coming up here within the next three years are affected by this change and their clients. So their client was getting worried and said, Oh, let's wait a minute. yeah. Yeah. They're not fully compliant. And there weren't, and we've been warning about pad, as I said for, at least 18 months and they lost 70% of their business overnight, 70% can you imagine that?  Now they're freaking out and trying to figure out sorta we do now. Hopefully, we'll be able to help them with all of that and they'll survive it.

It turns out that a federal contractor that was a client of theirs was more important, 70% important to their business. That's a lot of business to lose and it took them about two weeks, apparently calling-in daily. Trying to find out from their client. Why did the order stop? What's going on here? Did something get messed up? Is this a billing mistake, an order mistake? Do we need to talk to somebody who is over in purchasing or what do we have to do here?

They finally got an answer from somebody that knew what they were talking about and it turned out that it was because they weren't compliant with these federal regulations. So keep an eye on that.

I just had another conversation on Thursday with a gentleman who indeed is really under the gun here. Now, he asked his IT provider, Hey, am I all set here? And the IT provider said oh yes yes sir you are all set. We're taking care of it for you.

But you already know my response to that, 99% of the time when we walk in, and I say 99, because. I've never seen an exception, but I want to leave a little room for error, right? The margin for error. So maybe it was just saying over 90% of the businesses we go into that think they're compliant are not compliant. If they were to get audited, they'd be in deep trouble.

The case with our client, they weren't even audited. This was it a self-audit form they had pencil whipped and the primary contractor realized, Hey, listen, this doesn't jive with what we've been seeing.

So keep that in mind, everybody. This is a very big deal.

Now I've put together it's about a 300-page long document, but it goes through all of the major cybersecurity standards and I'm calling it an audit preparation kit or an audit kit and I will be glad to send it to anybody that wants it, this is generic. This isn't to use me. This isn't to use Cisco. This isn't to use Mainstream. This is just a compilation of all of the rules that you have to follow based on the different levels within the new CMMC stuff. That's actually been out for a little while, but now they're really pounding the table about it saying you darn well better get this stuff done.

So I'll be glad to send it to you. Just send me an email within the subject line. Just say. Audit kit. I will be more than glad to get that off to you or we can do an audit for you.

We've offered audits for many years and found a lot of things and help put together a plan.

So whatever you want to do there, do it. But whether you're talking to your own internal IT people or external IT people remember most of them are not as familiar with this as they need to be. So getting a copy of this audit kit, looking at it at yourself, having the person who's responsible for IT, review it with the vendor or review it with the internal IT people, you can get your act together.

That's what I'm trying to do. Get you to the point where you can handle it all and really take care of it. That's the bottom line.

Let's get into our cars here. We're going to totally switch subjects. And then this is something that's happening right now in a lot of States in Massachusetts, there is a bill that went through back in 2013, or maybe it was something a ballot question, but it's back on the ballot this year.

Question one in mass and this is a referendum on how can traditional independent automotive repair shops survive in this world. I remember I said at the opening, is it a car or is it a computer? How should we treat it? I remember when odometers on cars, you rolled over at a hundred thousand miles because who expected a car to last a hundred thousand miles.

That's ridiculous. But bottom line now, today we expect most cars to last a quarter-million miles easily, maybe longer. Not to say that there weren't cars from back in the day, that would last that long, but it just wasn't an expected thing. So today we know, okay, I want this car to last me at least a couple hundred thousand miles, maybe a quarter million, however many you want. Before you go and sell the car, right? Doesn't that make sense?

 It seems to make sense to me and vehicles have really gotten a lot better. So if you are going to buy one of these cars that is electric or are very high tech, what are you going to do with that? What are the odds that the car is going to last you? I don't know, quarter-million miles, half a million miles, the electric motors in some of these cars, frankly, should last a hundred thousand miles without even blinking twice and probably will last a million miles with no problem.

Now, the batteries, that's a different deal. We've talked to before about the efficiencies and how your F-150 is probably better for the environment than an electric car, because when you consider the global environment, the conditions that are created in China, all of the shipping that has to go on between Canada, where some of the stuff is mined and how NASA uses it for moonscapes those areas because there's death for hundreds of square miles and shipped from Canada and it goes over to China and it goes to Japan that goes back to China, that goes back to the United States. And you've seen some of those pictures of Beijing and China, I'm sure, and other places where they do a lot of manufacturing where it's deadly to drink the water. You just can't breathe. Everyone wears masks to try and protect their lungs from pollution. So don't sit there all high and mighty thinking you have an electric car or you've got a Prius or one of these other hybrid cars, and you're high and mighty thinking aren't I great because I'm saving the environment versus that guy driving the F150. When you consider how long the F150 lasts when you consider how long those batteries in your car last and how long those batteries' environmental footprint will last and what it took to make those batteries. The F-150 is still the better option worldwide when it comes to pollution, the environment, and being green.

It's so funny. You see these signs out there right now during political seasons that say,  I believe in science. Yet in reality, no, that's not science. It's not science, climate change is happening. It's always happened. We've always had a changing climate. Man's impact on the client is so minuscule there's almost nothing we could do to affect any change in the environment unless we did something stupid. What scientists told us to do in the seventies and some of the so-called scientists are telling us to do now, the models are wrong. They've always been wrong.

These electric cars are our future. It is absolutely going to be our future. What do you expect from your electric car? I have nothing against electric cars. I think their great, just don't think that you're being green by driving an electric car, because you're not. They are cool as heck the technology in them is absolutely amazing and I'd love to own one. All right.

So I want to put that aside. I want you to remember that I love these things and when we get back we're going to talk more about this, the expectations, what's happening with insurance and should question one be on a referendum for this right to repair. What's that all going to mean as well?

Hey, you're listening to Craig Peterson.

Stick around because we'll be right back.

We're going to finish this discussion and of course, we got a whole lot more coming up.

Stick around. We'll be right back. 

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating:

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553