AS HEARD ON: WGAN Mornings News with Matt Gagnon: Malware Targeting Trump Supporting Republicans, US 5G Speeds, Governments and Ransomware

Good morning everybody!

I was on WGAN this morning with Matt Gagnon and started off this morning talking about emails that are targeting Republicans with a particularly nasty trojan.  Then we got into 5G and why the US speeds are so much lower than the speeds in Europe, and then we wrapped it up discussing the Ransomware that has been infecting local and state governments.  Here we go with Matt.

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

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Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] So the whole goal here of five G is twofold. The first goal is we want to be able to have a billion devices connected to our networks and local networks. Plus we also want to have a speed of maybe a gigabit worth of bandwidth.

Woo Wednesday morning gremlins. Craig Peterson here. I was on with Mr.

Matt Gagnon, this morning and had the weirdest thing happened to me here. I'm on the phone, right? I'm talking to the radio station. I'm being interviewed and all of a sudden the podcast starts playing on my phone. It was very distracting.  I'm used to hearing myself. When I'm doing an interview on a radio or TV station, sometimes I hear myself on delay and the delay can be sometimes a few seconds. So I'm used to that. That one I can live with, but having the podcast playing of me on another radio station, while I'm doing an interview with a radio station was just a little too much to handle. I managed to pull my act together, but wow. That was the weirdest thing.

Anyways. Happy Wednesday, everybody takes it for what it is. I suppose we talked about the same things, a little bit, slightly different angles, of course, but some of the same things we talked to Jim Polito about yesterday. So here we go with Mr. Matt Gagnon.

Matt Gagnon: [00:01:29] It is six 36, and it is time to talk to Craig Peterson, our tech guru.

He joins us now as he does every Wednesday at this time.

Craig, how are you?

Hey. C'est nous. Comment ça va ce matin?

Ah, ça va Bien. So Craig is malware targeting Trump supporters? That's a good place to start off. Do you think we're in election season? That's a, it's a nice topic, right?

Craig Peterson: [00:01:51] Yeah. Yeah. Or were you one of these people that pass conspiracy is that

Matt Gagnon: [00:01:56] I am not, of course, a conspiracy theorist, but, but still things like this do happen out there.

So it's worth chatting about.

Craig Peterson: [00:02:03] Well, this is a very big deal. Everybody should pay attention here.  We'll get into this for just a minute here, but the bottom line is there is a very dangerous banking trojan is going around right now. It's called Emotet. Emotet has been around for a long time.

The difference right now, Matt is that this Emotet malware is being sent. In a piece of email that is forwarded from a political action committee supporting Trump. So in other words, they take an email, a legitimate email from a political organization that is supporting president Trump and they forward it. For the subject line.

will have a start of FWD or RE just like you would, when you were forwarding something. Forward to re: and it'll have the body of the message that was forwarded from the legitimate group. It'll have all of the links in it that will all work normally, but there is attached to that email, a word document. That word document, if you were to open it up and become infected is horrific.

What it does it goes through your computer. It scans your network. It actually scans looking for other vulnerabilities. If you're misusing the VPN, which is about 90% of businesses that are using the VPNs, they're not set up right now, your computer at home that gets infected because you're open this mailer, the look perfectly legitimate about President Trump.

Now that malware is going to get onto your business network and spread through the corporate network. This is really, really bad. There's speculation about why is this happening? But I think the bottom line is that this is the ultimate in social engineering and phishing, and it is absolutely targeted at Trump supporters.

Matt Gagnon: [00:03:56] Speaking with Craig Peterson. You hear him on this very network on Saturdays at 1:00 PM, where he goes into all of these details. Much more in-depth and to move on here a little bit, one of them, one of the more fascinating things he had on the list here today that I wanted to talk about is about the average speed of five G in the United States versus what it is elsewhere in the world.  What is going on with this speed difference? And why is it different elsewhere?

Craig Peterson: [00:04:22] Yeah, it has to do with the frequencies that are assigned. The higher the frequency, the wider the bandwidth, the more bandwidth you're going to get for download. So the whole goal here of five G is twofold. The first goal is we want to be able to have a billion devices connected to our networks and local networks plus, we also want to have a speed of maybe a gigabit worth of bandwidth. Well, the US average speed is about twice now, the five G speed twice what our four G LTE speed is. But when we started.

Matt Gagnon: [00:05:00] That's nowhere near that gigabit that you're talking about,

Craig Peterson: [00:05:03] Nowhere near. Absolutely. Absolutely not. So we're talking about give-or-take 50 megabits right now. It will go a little bit faster. T-mobile has lower frequencies.  I have an advanced class ham license, so I've been involved with TCP IP over the air. Multiple different places.

So what the problem is, the bottom line with some of the stuff is, we've gotta be very careful about what we're doing here. I'm having a bit of a problem on my end. Without speeds. T-Mobile is giving us the ability to listen to the signals inside businesses, some of the others like Verizon, they cannot do that.

That's become a bit of a problem. Well, I think for everybody. So sorry, a bit of wandering here on my side, looked a bit of a technical problem.

Matt Gagnon: [00:05:57] No worries, Craig, we're talking to Craig Peterson and technical problems are no problem for him because he's our tech guru. And a final question for you, Craig, before I let you go this evolving story about Tyler technologies and the ransom that they're paying to receive the decryption key is very interesting as well.

Tell me about this thing.

Craig Peterson: [00:06:12] It is interesting we found out that a couple of things, one, most people are paying for the ransoms when the ransoms come up. I can understand that because they want to get their data back. We're also seeing that bottom line, people who are paying for these ransoms out there are also breaking the law and the feds are saying they're going to come after them for paying money to these terrorist groups. That's where paying ransoms do. Tyler Technologies provides software to the majority of states here in the United States to do things like collect taxes and also to just run towns and they got nailed.

It took them about three days. They finally paid the ransom to the guys that had taken over all of their systems and shut down many of the towns and even state operations throughout the country. So, you know, bottom line again, what should we do here? We're now. Rock and hard place where the Feds are saying they may take us criminal charges if we pay a ransom yet we need our data back as well.

Matt Gagnon: [00:07:23] Craig Peterson, our tech talk guru joins us at this time every Wednesday to go over what's happening in the world of technology. Craig, appreciate it as always good luck on Saturday, discussing all these things in more depth of detail. As you can hear a one o'clock on WGAN and thanks a lot, Craig.

Craig Peterson: [00:07:36] All right. Thanks. Bye. Bye. Everybody, we will be back on Saturday. Also, remember if you are on my email list, you'll get all of my articles for this week. What I talked about here on the podcast and on the radio. So keep an eye out and make sure you're subscribed.  craigpeterson.com/subscribe.

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