AS HEARD ON: WGAN Mornings with Ken and Matt: Business Email Compromise, Phishing and Jeff Bezos Phone Hack and more

Good morning everybody!

I was on with Ken and Matt. We had a good discussion about Business Email Compromise, what it is, who is at risk and what we can do about it. Then it was onto the Jeff Bezos Phone Hack. So here we go with Ken and Matt.

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

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Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig
They scraped every picture on the internet that they could get their hands on. That is against the usage of rules and agreements of all these websites. If you had a picture posted on Facebook that was publicly accessible or on Twitter

Craig
Good morning, everybody. Of course, this is Craig Peterson on WGAN, up in Maine, on their morning drive show. There is some very concerning stuff going on to news statistics out that we talked about this week about fishing and BEC type email attacks. We are going to get into it right now.

Ken
We are back ladies and gentlemen it is 738 on the WGAN morning news with Ken and Matt on Wednesday, which means it's time to talk to Craig Peterson, our tech guru, to go over all the things about technology that affect our daily lives here today. Craig, How are you this morning?

Craig
Good morning, doing well

Ken
Well, let's start talking about some techniques, shall we? How many organizations last year, got phished, successfully?

Craig
Yeah, this is a huge trend that's been going on. You know, we keep hearing these warnings FBI has issued an alert out, and we will talk about it here on the show. It is really getting down to the brass tacks because we're, we're all somehow making some money, right? Whether or not you are getting paid because you know nothing about an oil company, or perhaps you are getting paid because you're working hard and getting up at 3 am every day. Those organizations, every one of them, right now got phished. Of course, you know what phishing is those of those types of emails that encourage you to click on something, maybe download something, etc. There are some new statistics out right now. They are kind of a little scary. You know, I'm not even sure these are that accurate because they say that nearly 90% of organizations around the world are targets of this whole business email compromise, type of scam, fear, spear-phishing attacks, which is a very, very big deal. And I think it's probably closer to 100% of organizations. I don't know you guys probably both have gotten those emails, right, supposedly, from your bank, etc. Absolutely. Yeah. I don't see why it's only 90%. But it's, it's very, very bad. It's very high. They're looking at global data from 50 million simulated phishing attacks. They got sent out to the customers of one company by their security firm, Proofpoint. They sent them over the one year but the part that's most alarming to me because you know, 100% that's not news. But unfortunately, more than half of the people that got these simulated phishing attacks opened the email and clicked on a link, and they were convinced to do it. That's the scary part. Another big story this week is telling us a little bit about what the results of that are the cost of it, and it's happening more, we are getting better. Okay. It used to be that it was 90% of people would open these emails. So we are getting better, but the costs are even increasing.

Matt
We are talking to Craig Peterson, he is our tech guru, and he joins us at this time every Wednesday to go over what's happening in the world of technology. I am always fascinated by this evolving facial recognition technology. I'm thinking of a man walking into the Gap or whatever, like in Minority Report, and they scan your eyes, or they just know they know who you are. They say Welcome back to the store. How did you enjoy those jeans that you just bought? Would you like to look at something new, etc.? The real utility of it, at least right now, is in terms of security and things like that. So obviously London is now adopting its facial recognition technology for police to us. Europe is considering a ban on it. Talk to us about where we stand with the use of this technology for law enforcement, and I guess beyond.

Craig
Last weekend, on my show, of course, Saturdays at 1 pm here on the same station, but and my show last weekend, I went into quite a bit of detail about this one company that had been operating kind of underground. They did something that this is frankly illegal. They scraped every picture available on the internet they could grab. That's against the usage of rules and agreements of all these websites. If you had an image posted on Facebook that was publicly accessible or on Twitter or on these online photo album sites that you can share photos. They have it. They have over 3 billion social media pictures. What they're doing is selling subscriptions to police departments. These police departments pay as little as $10,000 a year, can take a picture from some security cameras somewhere, and run it through this software. It's an app that runs on your phone. And it will tell the police where it has seen you before online. The police have been hindered over the years by only having pictures in their database of people who had interactions with police. You know you get arrested, they take photos and fingerprints. Now they have been able to identify hundreds or thousands of people that were involved in crimes were unsolved crimes, which is kind of interesting. So what London's doing now is they're taking that same type of technique. By the way, there are lawsuits against this company. Right now, it's in use in New York City. A lot of police departments are using it. But London's taking that type of technology because it's one thing to have faces. London has been, it's the most surveilled city in the world outside of China. And that means there's a lot of cameras out there. For years the city of London has been taking all of that information and use it to track people as they moved around London. Now with this newer technology that we're starting to see where it's tying it into social media posts to pictures that can find almost anywhere. They're worried about what they're calling a breakthrough assault on our rights. And we're starting to see this here in the UK is where the US is well, and it's very, very scary in the facial recognition is 80 ish percent accurate in some cases, is in the worst cases it's about 80% inaccurate, which is terrible. I think this is dangerous technology in the wrong hands, and it can easily be misused. The wrong hands don't mean like the guys in the White House. The wrong hands imply someone who has access to this type of database, who wants to find the name and phone number of that person they saw in this coffee shop. So they can call them up and try and get a date. It could be that simple. So I'm getting very concerned about it. Our law enforcement here in the US has relaxed the established rules of evidence that have been around for a long time and retaining things like our photos. When should they be keeping it that many police departments have cameras, video cameras on the cars as they drive around? In some jurisdictions, it means taking pictures of your license plate or photos of all of the occupants. When it finds an active ticket against the owner of the vehicle or the vehicle itself, you will be pulled over all automatically. Frankly, this type of activity concerns me because it's there will be mismatches. There will be people accused that shouldn't be. And honestly, I think we should be secure in it and have that type of privacy.

Matt
We were talking to Craig Peterson. He is our tech guru. You hear him every Wednesday at 738. You can listen to him on Saturday at one o'clock as well. You can go to Craig Peterson dot com anytime you want, and hear what he has to say. You know, we said it earlier, Craig about Jeff Bezos and the hacking of his phone. What's the latest on that? Should we be concerned?

Craig
It presents an interesting problem because Jeff Bezos was using a piece of software on his smartphone that many people use has called WhatsApp. It was bought by Facebook some time ago. What happened is that the Saudi Crown Prince was upset with the stories in the Washington Post that were written by Jamal Khashoggi. Khashoggi had written articles, news stories for The Washington Post. The Saudi crown prince had met Jeff Bezos at a party, and they exchanged WhatsApp phone numbers. That's how you communicate, and WhatsApp, you have a phone number associated with your account. So now, they can talk to each other using WhatsApp, and WhatsApp is an app designed for secure communications that encrypted from end to end. Let's get into a little bit more meat of your question, which is what happened here behind the scenes? Well, it turned out the watch app had a bug in the way it has handled or maybe even still handles access to your photos and videos and other information contacts on your phone. And apparently, someone used the Saudi Crown Princes account WhatsApp account, sent a video to Jeff Bezos. That video had in it some malware that gave them full access to Jeff Bezos, and his phone and everything on it. Well, the phone numbers of probably the contacts, but videos and photographs. And Jeff Bezos notices his phone was slow, which by the way, is the number one reason I get phone calls for security. But the email slows the slow phone computers not working right. Jeff took his phone to one of these places that did some cyber forensic analysis on the phone. They discovered why yes, indeed, the amount of data that's being sent by your phone is 100 6,000,000% higher than usual. It is posting videos, etc. out to the Saudi Crown Prince. Guess what ended up happening? We ended up with the most expensive divorce in history with Jeff Bezos and his wife because those videos and photos leaked. So that's the basics of what happened here.

Ken
Craig Peterson joins us at this time every Wednesday to go over what's happening in the world of technology today being no exception to that, Craig, as always, we appreciate you joining us here, and we will talk to you again next week.

Craig
Hey, gentlemen, take care. I'm going to talk more about this weekend on my show at one o'clock on Saturday. I want to get into what can you do to prevent this sort of thing? What should you do? So we'll cover that in more detail on Saturday.

Ken
We'll be looking forward to that.

Craig
Okay, take care, guys.

Craig 
Hey, everybody, make sure you are on my email list. So you get all of this and more. Just Go to Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe. I keep pretty much everything up there on the site. Again, Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe. We'll talk to you again on Saturday. Bye-bye

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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