Seven Hundred Patches, and Windows Update Only Covers Microsoft
Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity
Release Date: 07/21/2026
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...
info_outline
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....
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outlineMicrosoft shipped more than 700 security patches in a single recent stretch. The host's reaction is the honest one — do they not test any of this? — and Craig's answer is the part that matters more: those 700 cover Microsoft's own software, and not even all of it. Everything else on the machine stays exactly where it was.
That is the whole segment in one line. Windows Update never touches third-party software. Adobe Reader, the PDF tools, the utilities, the things installed years ago and never thought about again — none of it is in that count.
Craig also explains what changed about timing. For years the math ran in your favor: a flaw was found, and it took somewhere between six months and a year before anyone built something that could use it. That was your slack. You could wait for a quiet weekend. That window has closed to roughly a day, which means a patch you postpone is no longer a patch you postponed.
Also in this segment:
- Why the loan robocalls keep coming, what the callback is actually fishing for, and why the number always looks local
- Apple pushing security updates more visibly and more often, and why that is the right instinct
- China's open-source model strategy, the new K3 release at about a third of the cost, and whether the U.S. would ever do the same
Craig previews Thursday's free Insider Session at 2 p.m.: the top three unpatched programs likely on your computer right now, how to check, and how to fix them.
Free newsletter and Insider Session announcements: CraigPeterson.com