1,140 Ransomware Attacks on Industry in One Quarter — 740 of Them Manufacturing
Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity
Release Date: 08/18/2026
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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Office 2021 Stops Getting Security Updates on October 13. Windows Update Won’t Tell You What Else Has.
Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity
On October 13, Microsoft ends support for Office 2021 — Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint stop receiving security patches that day — along with the extended security updates for Windows Server 2012. Danny, sitting in for Jim Polito, asked the obvious follow-up: how does anyone find out what they are running? Craig’s answer started with what people assume covers them. “Most people think, oh, I’ve got antivirus software. I’ve got Windows Update turned on. So, I’m all set. It is not true.” Windows Update does not update all the software on a Windows machine, and antivirus only...
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Senator Warner Wants an AI Oversight Agency. Craig Answers With the Clipper Chip.
Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity
Sen. Mark Warner went to the Senate floor to call for a government body to oversee AI. Craig read the legislation and the senator’s website before the show, and his objection was that the problem it describes is already illegal. Laws against hacking a computer system have been on the books for almost 30 years; people have gone to jail under them, foreign nationals included. “I think what they’re trying to do is get legislation that protects them from the laws that exist.” Jeff played the other side: if the AI gets loose because of “grossly incompetent nitwits that I chose to...
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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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Websites Collected Driver’s License Photos to Check Ages. Craig Says 150 Million Were Stolen.
Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity
Jim came into the segment from a morning on Flock license-plate cameras, and Craig took it one step wider. The technology is old and the courts have ruled on it for years; his discomfort is with how much of our information is collected at all. Websites that must verify your age now ask for a photo of your driver’s license or passport, so Facebook “or whomever” holds government ID for millions of people. Craig said 150 million of those records have been stolen. “So now what are they going to do? How am I going to prove who I am when other people have a copy of all of my information?”...
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The AI “Breakouts” Were Given Hacking Instructions and an Internet Connection
Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity
OpenAI’s model got into Hugging Face. Anthropic said its model had broken into someone first. Then Google said its model had done it before either of them. Jeff wanted to know how these AIs keep “breaking out,” and whether he should picture Robby the Robot fiddling with a lock. Craig spent the previous two weeks reading the published investigations, which go back to May, and said nothing broke out of anything: “These AIs were let loose on networks that had access to the Internet. They were given specific instructions that had 100% to do with hacking and breaking into systems.” The...
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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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Chinese Ships Are Stopping in Canada’s Northern Straits to Map the Sea Floor
Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity
Craig’s wife sent him an article the morning of the show: Chinese ships moving through the straits of northern Canada are not just passing through. International agreements allow transit through territorial waters at a reasonable pace, but these ships are stopping, and it looks like they are measuring the sea floor. Russia is doing it too. The route used to be frozen; now it can be navigated in summer. Craig used it to explain why the U.S. wants a foothold in the North. It was the last stop in a long Canada conversation. Jim opened on British Columbia’s three-year experiment...
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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....
info_outlineThe numbers carry this segment. Eleven hundred forty ransomware attacks on industrial companies in a single quarter, 740 of them against manufacturers. A recent Patch Tuesday carrying about 570 fixes. An Apple advisory telling anyone whose machine touches a coffee-shop network to update now.
Craig's point is narrower and more useful than the headline count. Windows Update patches Microsoft software, and not all of it. The average computer is running roughly 60 other programs it never looks at. Older versions of ordinary things — Adobe Reader is the one he names — are what attackers are actually walking through.
So Craig built the tool nobody was building. It reads every piece of software on a machine against a database of about three and a half million known-vulnerable versions and reports which ones have working exploits behind them. It runs for his business clients and for retirees.
That is the shape of the advice: count what is on the machine, check what is current, and find out what stopped receiving updates and when. Three numbers, and then a decision.
Also in this segment:
- Jim on Quebec City's tourism campaign, and Craig — a former Canadian — on why it genuinely does read as Europe
- The FCC's concerns about spyware in imported robot vacuums
- A teaser for next week: what, if anything, government can actually do about this
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