AS HEARD ON NH Today with Jack Heath WGIR-AM 610: Proof: VPNs Are Not The Panacea You Have Been Led to Believe
Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity
Release Date: 07/27/2020
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,...
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After You Log In to the Fake Bank, They Send You to the Real One
Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity
The detail that makes this scam land is not the fake website. It's what happens two seconds after you use it. Craig walks the whole sequence. Attackers use AI to build a pixel-accurate copy of a bank's site — he uses Bank of America as the example and is careful to say he's picking on the scammers, not the bank. They send a wide net of email claiming fraudulent activity on your account, knowing that some fraction of any list banks there. You click, you land on the copy, you enter your username and password. Then the clever part. They immediately redirect you to the real bank's site, which...
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Five Federal Agencies, One Warning — and an Argument About the Singularity
Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity
The NSA, CISA, the FBI, the Department of Energy and the EPA put out a joint advisory last Wednesday, and the language is unusually direct: AI dramatically reduces the technical skill and the time required to attack industrial control systems. Those controllers run public works. A great many of them are reachable from the internet, and their locations are not a secret. That sets up the larger conversation. Ray Kurzweil wrote The Singularity Is Near twenty years ago, predicting broadly human-level machine intelligence by 2029 and human-machine integration by 2045. Elon Musk and others now say...
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People Would Rather Live Next to a Nuclear Plant Than a Data Center
Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity
Matt opens with a poll finding he calls one of the great PR failures of our time: people would rather have a nuclear power plant built next door than a data center. Pennsylvania's governor has now signed legislation that effectively stops data centers unless they clear a long approvals process. Craig's answer isn't a defense of data centers so much as a description of what a few counties actually did. They said yes — on conditions. Generate your own power, and 20% more than you use, fed back into our grid. And pay full property tax, none of the abatement deals. It worked well enough that...
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Good Monday morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. I was on with Jack Heath this morning discussing what we learned about VPNs. BTW, if you have been listening to me for a while I have been telling you this -- but now there is Proof in Black and White that I what shared with you is TRUE! Here we go with Jack.
These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit
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Automated Machine Generated Transcript:
[00:00:00] Craig Peterson: So these VPN services said they did not keep logs of what you were doing online. They were not tracking you. Guess what was in this data that was found online?
Hey, good morning everybody. Craig Peterson here. I can't believe summer's almost half over. Well, that's what. It happens, right? Anyhow, I was on with Jack this morning and they had the most major I told you so, and I hate to say this, but if you're using VPNs, man, listen in because a huge, huge problem came out just last week.
Jack Heath: Craig Peterson, a tech talk guy joins us his show air Saturdays. Here are these iHeart stations on the tech talk side, Craig. Good morning. One of these stories. Locally is more people falling victim to scams?
What else do you have for us?
[00:01:00] Craig Peterson: Oh man. I'm afraid. I have an I told you so, here this morning about VPN's. People have been using virtual private networks and the FBI came out with a warning a few weeks ago. Well, now we have discovered a group of seven of these free VPN apps that left all of their data exposed online. 1.2 terabytes of your personal data. So if you're using one of these free VPN services, which I warn against all of the time, in fact using a VPN service is usually worse than not using a VPN service. It turns out. Not just their email, their home addresses passwords in plain text, IP addresses, but all of these VPN services said they did not keep logs of what you were doing online.
[00:02:00]They were not tracking. You get within this data that was found online. Every place you visited, where you went, your passwords, the whole nine yards. You cannot trust them. These VPN services, particularly the free VPN services. It's not going to make you safer.
Jack Heath: Well, good, a good lesson learned. What about, um, the scam seemed to be going up as people do more virtual stuff.
I'm not surprised people are going to try and take advantage of a bad situation. Is it ending? I mean, the basics don't open something. If you don't recognize it. Don't don't don't don't if a spam call comes through don't call and say, you know, here's my credit information, but is there anything new we should be doing to avoid these any good blockers or anything?
Good. You know the way to kind of knock out the crap coming through, or is it just something that they're always going to get through?
Craig Peterson: Well, we've got some really good news because of what's been happening over at the FCC and the FTC, actually. And that is that most now of the major cell phone carriers are able to block text messages.
[00:03:00] If they look like they are a scam. So for instance, You guys I know are familiar with what happened with President Trump's text here that over the last week. Okay. And that is that his texts, he was sending out to his supporters were blocked. Now that's part of this automatic system, where if it looks like it might be a scam, it might be a spam-sending it out to thousands or millions of people it will be blocked.
So yeah. Good news on that front T-Mobile has really taken a forward front position on this, which also now includes Sprint, but they're all kind of doing this and that is you are not going to be getting these text messages at the volume your before that are scams when you click on them or respond to them, or heaven forbid you callback a number that you don't recognize where they will be billing you $10-$20 for that phone call that number you didn't recognize. Those are all on a down surge right now.
Jack Heath: All right, Craig Peterson. [00:04:00] Thank you very much. Craig Peterson.com. Make it a good Monday. Enjoy the heat.
Craig Peterson: Take care.
Jack Heath: All right. Hey,
Craig Peterson: Were you, one of the people that went to my, one of my trips I did on VPNs, I did a bunch in February this year, not just VPNs, but general pieces of training.
I'm going to do a lot more of them coming up. Probably back to school time in early September, but before then I'm going to be doing a bunch of smaller things and kind of getting my ducks in a row, working on some courses and stuff that we're going to be doing. We've also got some really great hardware done for you packs we're working on, but anyways.
Those pieces of training that I did in February, I told you so, right. Right? How many of you guys dropped your VPN and services because I told you exactly what was going on? Now we have. Proof. Right.
This has nothing to do with the general security problems businesses are [00:05:00] having because of VPNs and the misuse of VPN's.
Anyway, I'm going to have to do that one again, obviously updated, but, O M G this is a very, very big deal.
Take care, everybody. We'll be back tomorrow. Bye-bye.
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