How Content Delivery Networks Help and Hurt You
Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity
Release Date: 06/08/2021
ShinyHunters Got FBI Records. Craig’s Question Is Which Contractor Was Holding Them.
Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity
A listener asked Matt to ask Craig about the theft of FBI data, and Craig started with who holds it. Much of what the federal government keeps — background-check records, applications to the FBI, even the designs of weapons made by defense contractors — sits with third parties. The group behind this one is called ShinyHunters; its reported leader was arrested by Dutch police the day before the show. Craig’s point was the gap between the government and its vendors: last week every federal agency was required to patch ScreenConnect, a remote-support tool with a serious vulnerability....
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Craig Puts It at 60%: The Share of New Web Content Written by AI
Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity
OpenAI launched ChatGPT 6, Sol, and Luna this month, claiming Sol makes about half as many mistakes as the models before it. Matt asked whether that is real progress. Craig’s answer was yes, with a catch: the models are not getting smarter. The companies, Anthropic included, have rewritten the code around them so the AI runs the same prompt again and again from different angles and then votes on the most likely answer. The new models use about twice the tokens of the old ones. “And they get a 50% better answer.” Matt: “There seems to be a correlation here.” The second half was about...
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Jeff and Heidi Want a Robot Bartender for Their Home Bar. Craig Says It Runs About $400.
Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity
Jeff and Heidi hold happy hour at the bar in their house at 6:03, and Heidi has decided what it is missing: a robot bartender. Jeff’s terms were that he picks how it looks and she picks what it says. Craig’s answer was that the hardware already exists. Bars now have table-top machines that check your ID card and make any drink you order; those start around $30,000, and home versions run about $400. The conversation half is ChatGPT or Claude, spoken rather than typed. It started with a more serious question. Elon Musk and Sam Altman both say AI development should slow down, so why not...
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Microsoft Shipped Almost 700 Patches in One Patch Tuesday — Six Times a Normal Month
Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity
This was the biggest Patch Tuesday on record: Microsoft pushed close to 700 patches in a single month, roughly six times the usual volume. Craig's follow-up question is the one that actually decides whether a machine is exposed. Microsoft is patching Microsoft. Who is patching everything else? Windows Update never touches third-party software — it barely updates Windows itself, Craig said, and it does nothing for the average of 62 other programs sitting on a typical computer, many of which are being actively exploited right now. He named Adobe Reader and WinZip specifically: the current...
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Craig Left Quebec in the 1970s, When a Driver's License Ran $300 and Registering the Family Wagon Ran $3,000
Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity
Craig grew up in Canada and left in the 1970s, and this week he put numbers on why. A driver's license in Quebec cost $300 a year. Registration on the family station wagon cost $3,000 a year. Both figures in 1970s dollars. Auto insurance, by contrast, was free — which Craig turned into the sharpest point of the segment: his father remarried, his stepmother got her license at 26, and she totaled three cars. Craig's question was not about her driving. It was about what happens to the premium. "How much does insurance go up? How much is the risk? Zero, of course, because there is no insurance....
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Craig Has Done IT Work for More Than 5,000 Businesses — and Deliberately Shrank the Company
Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity
Craig added it up recently: more than 5,000 businesses have had IT services from him over the years. He also used to carry 50 employees to support them. He described cutting that back on purpose — "it's way too many" — down to a family business handling a small number of customers, on the reasoning that the headaches of supporting that many clients with that many staff cost more than they returned. It is an unusual thing for a vendor to say out loud on the radio, and it was the first thing out of his mouth. The bulk of the segment was Craig on juries, prompted by a trial in the news. His...
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A Client Said No Twice to a VPN Prompt, and the Login Traced Back to a Chinese Net Block
Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity
On Monday, a client of Craig's was driving down the road when a prompt appeared in the authentication app on his phone: was he trying to log into the company VPN? He said no. It appeared again. He said no again. Craig's team got him on the phone, changed his passwords, and started digging. The login was coming from a data center in New York — until Craig looked at the actual net block, which traced back to China. The attacker already had the man's email address, his VPN contact information, and his password. The prompt on his phone was the only thing standing in the way, and it worked...
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The Anti-Data-Center Argument Everyone's Making Turns Out to Be China's
Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity
Central Virginia has neighbors close to blows in the street over new data centers. Craig's number for the other side of the ledger: one community found that without the tax revenue a data center brings in, property taxes on every home would rise $5,800 a year. Add $250,000-a-year electrician jobs, emissions cut more than 90% once a site is required to generate its own power, and a mandated 20% energy surplus handed back to the grid, and the case against building locally gets a lot thinner than the protest signs suggest. Then the turn: Jeff points out that a lot of the people fighting these...
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Boston Scientific Can't Ship a Single Box, and Nobody Will Officially Say Why
Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity
A friend of Jim's at Boston Scientific told him the company has come to a complete stop: nothing shipping, nothing receiving, product sitting in the warehouse untouched. Nobody at the company would say who's behind it. Craig's read: this fits a pattern he's now seeing constantly, with both Russia and Iran running AI-assisted attacks against U.S. contractors — including military suppliers whose cybersecurity, despite the assumption, is often not what it should be. Craig had his own live example from the day before. A client — a parts distributor supplying components that end up in military...
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The Time They Once Hacked Our Routers to Patch Them
Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity
The FBI, CIA, NSA, CISA and others issued a warning about active AI-driven attacks on American critical infrastructure. Craig, who ran the FBI's InfraGard online training program, explains what's actually exposed: old controllers that open and close valves, set flow rates, decide how much acid or base goes into the water — many of them reachable directly from the internet, on networks that have been comprehensively mapped for years. Several water systems have already been shut down; one town lost power along with its water. Josh, who works InfraGard in his own homeland security practice,...
info_outline[As Heard 2021-06-08 on WTAG, WHYN, WHJJ. Fastly CDN failure]
Hi, so glad you are joining me today. I was speaking with Mr. Polito about a couple of different things. One, this problem you might have noticed with all of these major websites, CNN, all the way through the government of the United Kingdom going offline. So I explain how sites work on the larger scale site. And I also got into what happened here. What was the problem?
[00:00:28] And then we got a little bit more into the question about Putin he's meeting with president Biden. As he been testing, president Biden. Some people really think that he has mean that Putin is trying to see how far he can go. So we get into that and I think I disprove the absolute certainty.
[00:00:51] Some people have been expressing.
[00:00:54] Jim Polito: [00:00:54] Right now, I want to get this guy on board. He is our good friend and tech talk guru, Craig Peterson. I think it was just recently the birthday of the man who's credited with inventing the internet. No, not Al gore. And I just want to remind you that if you're on the internet, you may be using, or part of your search on the internet may have.
[00:01:16] Some code that was written by the great Craig Peterson and he joins us now. Good morning, sir.
[00:01:24] Craig Peterson: [00:01:24] Good morning. Yeah. Back in the day. I remember when,
[00:01:29] Jim Polito: [00:01:29] so let's get to this. Yeah, let's get to this. I want to get to Putin Biden and cyber attacks. And your take on that. But first we just had a, some kind of a crash of of a cloud, what out on the west coast.
[00:01:47] But obviously when something like that happens, that affects all of these, right?
[00:01:53] Craig Peterson: [00:01:53] Yeah. Yeah. It's something that Trump of Aqua knows a lot about. And
[00:01:58]Jim Polito: [00:01:58] Please don't bring Tommy we'll be into this. It's certainly even, I know it's a different type of cloud.
[00:02:06] Craig Peterson: [00:02:06] Oh, okay. Yeah. Here's what the happened to have here.
[00:02:10]Let's talk about what happens with normal websites when things are working properly, there are distributed servers all over the world and this company, Fastly has 80 data centers located everywhere. And the idea is you go to one of these bigger websites and that website has a quick look at you saying, where are you?
[00:02:31] Oh, okay. You're in Western mass. So we have a data center close to you. So now it's feeding the website, which is, the pictures and the texts and everything. It's feeding that website to you from Western mass. Does that make sense to have it come from California? It's going to slow it down and it's just going to be annoying.
[00:02:54] Or if you're in Europe or South Africa, right? So these are all distributed data centers and they're called a content delivery network. And there's a few of them out there. I use one that Amazon provides Fastly has their own content delivery network, so that all of this content, particularly the big content, like if you're watching a video on CNN, that's going to be delivered.
[00:03:19] Through Fastly is content delivery network somewhere close to you. That's the whole idea behind it. And apparently what happened this morning is just tons of major sites like Reddit, Spotify, Twitch, the UK government, Hulu HBO for a PayPal Vineo goes on and on CNN, New York times, BBC Bloomberg financial times all went offline.
[00:03:43] And that was due to a problem with this content delivery network at Astley. And it looks like right now, according to everything I've seen out of Fastly this morning and researching it, that they had a bug and it wasn't a hack that they weren't hit with ransomware, but they had a bug in their content delivery network.
[00:04:05] They were able to get it up and running in about an hour. It wasn't a big, long outage, and these are the types of things that happen with these very complex networks nowadays. It's amazing. It doesn't happen more often.
[00:04:18] Jim Polito: [00:04:18] I'm glad to hear that from you that it's amazing to hear it doesn't happen more often.
[00:04:22] I'm glad to hear that. Now let's get to something that is happening more often. More and more attacks out of Russia. And which Putin
[00:04:31] Craig Peterson: [00:04:31] says, I don't know what they're all about. I have no
[00:04:35] Jim Polito: [00:04:35] idea ask squirrel, is protect, pretending he doesn't know anything about it. And but in fact he does is, and Putin and bind are gonna meet in the next few days is, the whole G seven summit is going on.
[00:04:50] Is this Putin testing Biden? Like how much can I get away with. This guy pops my dog, does he will test the limits? Like how much can I get away with until they say, Hey, No sit or whatever.
[00:05:06] Craig Peterson: [00:05:06] Yeah, this is this is a problem. W every time a president's coming to offer Obama was this way.
[00:05:14]It happened to a lesser degree with Bush and others, and it did not happen at all with Trump. The Russians, the Chinese and others have tested the president of North Korea. If you look at China right now, flying over Taiwan. And in their air space, threatening our country by taking over Taiwan.
[00:05:36] And we've talked about it before. That's where our major production of chips is when you're talking about this whole cyber security thing. And again, it smells like Russia. And the main reason that smells like Russia is this ransomware has killed switches in it. Let's say, if you have a Russian or one of a dozen other keyboards, then we will immediately stop and it doesn't install the software.
[00:06:06] So there's two, two reasons. And I'm sending out an email about that with a little video training on how to put a virtual fresher keyboard on your computer to everyone that's on my email list. So if you're on my list, You're going to find out how to do it. It's very easy. And it's going to stop almost all of this Russian malware, but here's the big question.
[00:06:28] Is it in fact, a the reason for this, because it's gluten and he doesn't want to mess around with all of these former Soviet states or is it bad guys saying I don't want to go to a Russian Gulag. We don't really know, but what we do know is what's your word just leading towards, which is we've had taxed against all of our major infrastructure.
[00:06:54] Yeah, every piece of it. And we're seeing releases from the FBI that none of the infrastructure is safe. We've in fact had some statements about that. Look at the statement on CNN did last Sunday, two days ago, where one of the secretaries of the byte administration I forget her name now said that we are not safe.
[00:07:16] Our infrastructure is not safe. And we've got rep Michael McCall from Texas saying that the cyber incursions absolutely are Poutine's way of testing, president Biden. How are we going to respond? Yeah. And it's a big, it's a big question, Jim, because if there's a missile that launches from Russian territory, we know where it launched from.
[00:07:40] We can send something in and blow up that missile silo or whatever it might be. If there is a hack. And if it's a somewhat indiscriminant hack, which many of these are, but maybe even more directed hack, all we know is the tools they were using. Look like they were Russian. What is China? It's trying to convince us that it's Russia and is using these tricks and Russian tools.
[00:08:08] Yes. You're getting it from
[00:08:09] Jim Polito: [00:08:09] China, James Bond on me right now. Like specter would always like in, from Russia with love, make the free world think it was the right, the Soviets and make the Soviet thing. It's the free world. When, in fact, right in the middle. It's specter. Yeah.
[00:08:25] It's it's right out of it's right out of the James Bond novels.
[00:08:29]Craig Peterson: [00:08:29] Then how about Carver? Where he, tomorrow never dies. He's launching his own metals, trying to get both sides to fight. And we were warned decades ago about the military industrial complex. Yeah, exactly. That this is going to be a problem.
[00:08:48] So let's throw that into the mix. Who's to say some nefarious guy, like the car for character from James Bond, isn't manipulated. We just don't know we can see fingerprints, but as we know for mission impossible, those can be faked
[00:09:07] Jim Polito: [00:09:07] as well. Yeah. We're talking with correct. Greg Peterson, our tech talk guru and all around great guy.
[00:09:12] And it is interesting. I know last week it was fascinating when you told us one of the ways to protect yourself from Russian hacking is to have this virtual rushing keyboard. And most of their hacking will ignore you because, okay. We don't want to go after one of our own, but you're saying, yeah, how do we know?
[00:09:30] That's not the Chinese making it look like it's the Russians, you can't trust anybody. In this and my fear is, and we step out of tech now and we go into politics. My fear is that Biden is not considered a someone who's going to be tough on Right nations for doing this, that he's going to be weak and they just want to know to what extent can we get away with it?
[00:09:55] And if they get away with it with this, then that's going to embolden them, say the Chinese oh, we're going to take time one. We're going to take Taiwan. What's she going to do? During the Obama Biden administration Putin took the Crimea. Boom just grabbed right now. This is ours, not yours. And we let it happen.
[00:10:14]Craig Peterson: [00:10:14] They did respond, Jim president Obama said that he told them to
[00:10:18] Jim Polito: [00:10:18] stop it. That was over the hacking of the election. Like I told them to stop it now. That's great.
[00:10:26] Craig Peterson: [00:10:26] That's great.
[00:10:28] Jim Polito: [00:10:28] Yeah. Yeah. We do know there's a response. Yeah, exactly. So
[00:10:33] Craig Peterson: [00:10:33] there's only one thing we can do here, Jim. And that is we have to protect ourselves.
[00:10:38]You were talking to earlier today. About the training that you're doing there. And other companies are doing that is ultimately important. However, the problem is it's never a hundred percent, nothing's ever 100% and there are. I hate to say this, the industry I'm in is I'm trying to protect businesses, right?
[00:11:00] And government agencies, counties, cities, everything from hackers. And the thing I hate to say is. It is full of charlatans. It's full of them. All of these people's shell
[00:11:14] Jim Polito: [00:11:14] oil. We can
[00:11:15] Craig Peterson: [00:11:15] help ya. Yeah. Yeah. We can help you get in. We got there.
[00:11:19] Jim Polito: [00:11:19] I got Charlie working on you, Ray, on your server over there. He's got it all hooked up.
[00:11:24] You're going to be fine. Nobody's going to be able to get in tight as a group.
[00:11:28] Craig Peterson: [00:11:28] Yeah. And includes the big names, you've got McAfee out there. John McAfee saying McAfee. Antivirus is useless. Yeah, he's on video saying that. Okay. Yeah. The Norton software, same problem. One of their senior executives admitted that their software's useless.
[00:11:46]You've got to have a full stack. None of this is good enough to protect you. I hate to say this, but Microsoft. And they're lying to you that you have been lied to and that's why you got hacked. Yeah. So Microsoft has some great tools. Now they're finally pulling up their socks. You can use Microsoft windows defender, make sure you have it.
[00:12:09] Make sure your software is up to date. This sounds like a broken record, shorty. Yeah, the majority of computers are not up to date and get a good next generation firewall. Cisco has the best at the high end, these firepower firewalls with the FMCs and stuff. No doubt. But the fact that major companies like colonial don't have these things in place blows my mind.
[00:12:37] But again, it goes right back to you don't know what you don't know. Yeah, you
[00:12:42] Jim Polito: [00:12:42] don't, you don't well, so how can folks get in touch with you? How do they do it? Okay.
[00:12:50] Craig Peterson: [00:12:50] It out this thing on how to do the Russian keyboard, I've got it recorded. I got to edit it, but how to put it onto your computer, the right ways to do that.
[00:12:58] And that's going to be in the newsletter and you can get that and stay in Todd fight, just going to Craig peterson.com/subscribe. That's Craig Peterson with an o.com/subscribe. And you'll get my weekly newsletter. I have these little three minute trainings that I'm putting together and you'll get all of it and that's all free.
[00:13:20]If you want to hire me, that's fine. But this is all free because we've got to stop these bad guys. All right,
[00:13:27] Jim Polito: [00:13:27] Craig, thank you as usual, always a pleasure. And we'll talk to you next week.
[00:13:32] Craig Peterson: [00:13:32] Thanks again, Jim.
[00:13:32] Jim Polito: [00:13:32] Thank you. Bye-bye.