AS HEARD ON: WGAN Mornings News with Matt Gagnon: What Twitter is doing and More about Twitter Hack and the FBI warns about Airline Booking Sites

Good morning everybody!

I was on with Matt this morning and we had a good discussion about Twitter's technology and what they are doing with banning and censoring people and organizations and what we learned since last week about the Twitter hack.  Also, the FBI is warning us about being sure who you are booking with when it comes to travel.  The bad guys are trying to trick you so be careful. and cyberthreats   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:

[00:00:00] Matt Gagnon: About the time we talked to Craig Peterson every week. Yes it is. And he's with us right now, Craig, how are you this morning?

Hey, good morning. Doing pretty good.

Pleaure to have you as always. So our tech guru needs to lead things off here by talking about Twitter. So I was just doing that with the whole Q Anon thing.

And I suppose you can weigh in on that if you want to. But the other thing that's really big with Twitter here that we need to chat about. Is this Twitter breach, which exposed, its own employees. I think, you know, this whole Barack Obama and Elon Musk and all those other, prominent accounts were, were hacked.

And it really was because of the back end employees. Was it not.

Craig Peterson: Yeah, this is kind of a niche that's teen trick. It looks right now with the police investigations. Of course, the FBI is involved with this, that it was some kids that did this and they were able to get some inside people inside of Twitter here, contractors or [00:01:00] employees.

To use Twitter's, what I call "God-mode," to take control of various accounts. And including, as you mentioned, a few, you've probably heard of like this Joe Biden guy, Kanye West Jeff Bezos, and many others. And what they were trying to do is persuade people to send them Bitcoin. So Joe Biden, for instance, on the Joe Biden accounts was saying, Hey, if you send me Bitcoin, this is a chance for me to give back.

And for the next 30 minutes, if you send me Bitcoin, I'll double it. So if you send me a thousand dollars in Bitcoin, I'll send you $2,000 back. And there's postings out on Twitter of pictures, of this ,what I'm calling God-mode, with Beyonce's account and a few other people's accounts. So it looks like it was probably a social engineering attack.

It was probably conducted by just [00:02:00] some kids and they were able to get some employees inside to give them access to absolutely everything.

Matt Gagnon: We're talking with Craig Peterson. He is our tech guru and he joins us now to talk about the world of technology. Do you have any, I just mentioned it a moment ago, but I'm sure you're, you're a little bit up on this whole Q Anon thing.

I mean, it seems to be a part of a, now a much more forceful and aggressive Twitter in terms of policing the speech that's on its own platform, which. You know, by the way, a, if that was going to be what they do, where the heck was this stuff like six or eight years ago. But, B this, this is, this is going into some really squirrely territory, in my opinion.

What do you think about this, Craig?

Craig Peterson: Yeah, I agree with that. It Twitter, just the public square where people can stand there and say almost anything or is Twitter something that should be a little bit more regulated here where if [00:03:00] they're going to start to censor things, what are they going to censor, where's the line.

We already know that the. Person who was responsible for basically censoring president Trump's tweet was an avid Trump hater. That was working for Twitter. It, this whole thing is really quite a bit of a problem right now. The Feds are looking into how should we be regulating Twitter?

Are they as a phone company or can they be liable for the types of things that they say? Like, for instance say a newspaper, is because newspaper does edit what it is they're going to publish. And when you look at the Q Anon stuff, some of it is turned out to be right. Some of it's turned out to be wrong, but conspiracy theories and language that we just don't want to hear, frankly, should not be governed by this [00:04:00] private organization. And last you have the ability to Sue them for what would it you been being with Twitter, slander or libel, right? Is it the, really, the written word? The lot of questions that we just haven't really been able to answer yet.

Matt Gagnon: We're speaking with Craig Peterson, our tech guru joins us at this time every Wednesday to go over the world of technology.

So turning our gears somewhere else, here, not that there are very many air travelers right now, but the FBI has issued a cyber security warning to air travelers that are actually going around the country right now. So what is that warning all about Craig?

Craig Peterson: Yeah, this is kind of an interesting problem here because so many of us are booking online.

We are going online and, and, as part of that, we're going to the website to see if, has our flight's been canceled. It is, is a flight leaving on time. Something we've done for many years now, frankly, but right now the FBI is trying to raise some [00:05:00] awareness about the creation of a number of websites that are faked to look like the real deal, not just websites for Boston, Logan, or whatever, major airports out there, but they're also faking the website of the major.

Airlines now, typically it involves having the carrier or two that is misspelled because many of us misspelled words, we're tied beam in and the airlines, frankly, weren't smart enough to grab misspellings of their names, but they're saying this is a real threat for travelers. They have had a lot of reports from people coming in saying there are fake websites out there for airports and all over the whole aviation industry.

So be very, very careful. These websites do feature whatever organization or businesses logo, their fonts or color schemes or writing style. But in fact, they're just fooling users into thinking the site's [00:06:00] authentic and safe to use.

Matt Gagnon: And Craig, before I let you go, I do have to ask you about this resurgence of the emoTet spam Trojan thing.

So that's kind of been dormant for a while. Kind of a, what, what is what's happening with it now? Yeah, this is

Craig Peterson: hate this stuff, man. here's, what's been happening. People who have not been securing their machines properly. Their machines have been taken over and they become part of what's called a botnet.

Now you, you wouldn't know unless you were using more professional software, right? Your, your regular antivirus, your Norton, et cetera, is not going to pick this up. You need to do it right. And that's part of what we try and talk about on the weekends, how to do it, right. How to keep your business and personal computers safe.

But what's happening right now is they are using these machines again, part of this bot net to spam people. So there's a spam Trojan called as [00:07:00] you mentioned, emotet.  It is sending out malicious emails again by the millions. And it has, it's been dormant really now since early this year, which has been nice because the amount of spam has been down, but it is coming back up again.

It is sending malicious documents. It's utilizing URLs in there that you click on. And many times it's using hacked WordPress sites. So remember if your business and you have an online website. Make sure you remember to patch it up as well. It's not just your laptops, your windows, desktops, it's your servers.

It's your web servers. And in many cases, the hosting sites that we're using to host our WordPress and other websites, that many cases they are not being kept up to date by the vendor. You have to do it [00:08:00] yourself.

Matt Gagnon: His name is Greg Peterson. You hear him on this very network on Saturdays at one o'clock for his show, where he goes into much of this in more detail.

Craig, thanks so much for joining us this morning and giving us the tech update. We'll talk again next week.

Craig Peterson: Hey, take care of Mr. Matt.

Matt Gagnon: Appreciate it.

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