Craig Peterson - America's Leading CyberSecurity Coach
America’s Leading Security Coach to Small Business, the FBI, Homeland Security, Department of Defense, Department of Energy, The Whitehouse, all major DoD contractors, including Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed, BAE, and more. Dozens of US State, County, and City governments. School Districts, Hospitals, Doctors, and Clinics. All major financial institutions in the United States, including The Federal Reserve, Fidelity, Bank of America, Visa, M/C, etc. Providing Network Security since 1991.
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App Tracking Traps a Catholic Priest. How It Can Affect You, Too
07/28/2021
App Tracking Traps a Catholic Priest. How It Can Affect You, Too
App Tracking Traps a Catholic Priest. How It Can Affect You, Too Craig Peterson: I've got two hot topics for you this morning. One about this Catholic priest that ended up resigning and how that happened to tie into this Grindr account. And how it affects you because this type of technology used to convict him in the court of public opinion is something that. It could also easily be used against you. [00:00:25] And, by the way, it probably is. Now the next thing is this chip shortage. I've got a quote here from the Intel CEO. When is the chip shortage going to go away? When can we get out? Play stations and our new cars. So here we go. [00:00:43] Matt Gagnon: I'm going to start. With a story that I think I covered maybe a week or two ago, and I went on a pre prolonged grant. I know you may or may not have heard me do it, but it was about this Catholic priest issue. I know you know about this in some depth and detail, as I said before. But there is this issue here. [00:01:00] He was essentially outed as having visited gay bars and had done several other things. We'll just say using Grindr, right? All these types of things. And of course, being a high-ranking Catholic official, the accusations of hypocrisy and whatnot come and blah, blah, blah, et cetera. [00:01:18] What's interesting about the story, though, to me, Craig is, the media covered it as a hypocrite priest has been found out. But how that information was discovered is not only creepy but really scary. So I want you to tell me exactly how this happened and what implications do you think it has for our privacy going forward? [00:01:39] Because this is about a heck of a lot more than one Catholic priest. This is about Greg Peterson and what he's up to when I don't know. What does it do? [00:01:46] Craig Peterson: Yeah, it absolutely is everyone. Every one of you guys that are listening right now could affect you. Here are the basics of what happened. As Matt just explained, he was outed here because he was using an app. [00:02:00] Now it wasn't just because of this one. That was being used. And then, again, how many times do I know Matt? You said this. I've heard from you many times. "You are the product." There's something free. It's not free. So behind the scenes, what happened is some people thought that maybe. Bishop was doing something that you weren't supposed to be doing. [00:02:22] They figured they would look into it a little more, trying to figure out some more details. And so they went to some of these apps and bought information. Now Grindr is one of these hookup apps, and they went to Grindr and bought location data. And it's anonymized, right? That's what we're always telling everybody. [00:02:44] Oh yeah. Yeah. I [00:02:45] Matt Gagnon: [00:02:45] don't have your name, right? They don't. Yeah. They may give you some information to people who asked for that data, but it doesn't have things that would identify you. [00:02:52] Craig Peterson: [00:02:52] Like the NSA. Don't worry. It's just anonymized. They say this stuff all of the time. However, there are many studies you can find online on how to de-anonymize data. [00:03:05] One of the easiest ways, for instance, to find out where Matt lives is, if you know an app or you suspect a few apps you might be using, you just buy the data from those apps about their users. You can now narrow it down because this phone tends to sleep at the same place every day. And that's true for you too. [00:03:24] And in this particular case, this clergyman was using this app in various places. So at least the app went to some of these capital meetings, high-level meetings, et cetera. And so they put all of this data together and added two and two together and then confronted him saying, Hey, listen, we know it's you. [00:03:47] There was no indisputable evidence of it. There was evidence that he went to all of these different meetings, and he was in all of them, and he was the only person that was all of them. And then his, this must be there for his phone, and it must be him. So this is all legal data. Now I want to add one more layer to the top of this. [00:04:06] It's legal. You can buy it. I can buy it. And the federal government is buying it because they're not allowed to track it as supposedly helpful. But, still, there's a lot of evidence that they are. And because the feds, advertisers, and others have been buying all of this data and putting it together, they also track and de-anonymize them. [00:04:28] Matt Gagnon: That's, I think, an excellent explanation. Thank you for doing that, Craig, because it's such a technical thing. I think that's what many of these companies rely on because it's difficult to understand how this even works. So the public getting fired up about it is pretty tricky, right? [00:04:42]You got to understand it, to know what to be, even opposed to, and ultimately the selling of your data anonymized or not is occurring, and it's a problem. And The inevitable question really comes here. Craig, if you don't like this, what do you do about it? Is there any way to fight against this in some fashion? [00:05:01]There's certainly, I suppose, political changes that could be made, and maybe law is different, but maybe there are things in your life you could do right now that. Would Lakey make you less susceptible to this? [00:05:12]Craig Peterson: [00:05:12] This is really big. And the data also is being bought by advertisers, obviously roadside services. [00:05:21] And one of the creepiest things too is you go to a specific type of a clinic and all of a sudden you start seeing ads about a competitor or maybe how, what you shouldn't be doing there. So what do you do about it? Here's another problem. Our phone carriers were caught about two, three years ago selling your real-time location data to these data brokers. [00:05:45] And I've had a few of them on my show before, in years past, but it's just. Don't put apps on your phone that you don't need. The iOS, Apple phones, and Android phones can turn off tracking and turn it off on an individual app basis. Now that doesn't mean that your phone can't. [00:06:10] Because they can. All right. But what it does mean is that a specific app might not have access to your location just because you're playing Tetris. So apple has even gone further now. It has made it so that the apps cannot find out what other apps are on the phone and even go to a website on your computer or phone, even though you might have cookies turned off. [00:06:35] And you've done that. Some of the other things that I've advised people to do. Yeah. The computer can still report which apps are installed and to a website, to any website the same thing with your phone. Apple's taken some fundamental, extra steps to try and block all of that. So far in the Google ecosystem. It's still more open. [00:06:56] Yeah. Delete the apps you don't need. Turn off tracking in your settings for pretty much everything. Obviously, you need it for maps. And if you are using Google maps, talking about selling your data, [00:07:11] Matt Gagnon: [00:07:11] indeed. All right. Kirk Peterson, I have a couple other questions for you here. I'm not sure if we'll get a time for all of them. [00:07:16] However, I did want to talk a bit about the chip shortage here because I continually get frustrated by my inability to buy a PlayStation, which is now a. Five month-long problem for me that trying to buy one of these things. But it's so much more than that. I was talking to somebody else. Maybe last week it was talking about trying to buy a car and you can't even, they don't even have stock. [00:07:36] Like they don't even have the car at all. And manufacturers are now starting to make their cars differently. So that they don't require the chips that there's a shortage of so that they can actually produce the vehicles. Again, I'm hearing things about crank windows in cars, like just crazy stuff here because of this chip shortage. [00:07:51] And it might last into 2023. Is that [00:07:55] Craig Peterson: [00:07:55] right? Yeah. Yeah. And that's what the CEO over at Intel is saying. Now, this is going to last a while. Everybody made mistakes here during the lockdown. We had never had this before, where the government forced businesses to shut down. If you are in business, you are an important business, or you'd be out of it, of business. [00:08:14] That's just the way it goes. And that's true for the whole chip supplier, right? So we have a long way to go as well. He's saying right now, and they are rebuilding manufacturing capability. Now here's part of the problem with the capacity is the. As they're made up, the newer trips keep getting smaller and require different ship fabrication techniques and fabrication plants. [00:08:39] That's a huge deal when you get right down to it. And what it means is look at the apple with their M1 chip, and they have just this high-speed chip of Apple's, making its own fabrication, plants, et cetera. So the chips that they're wanting today cannot be made with older fabrication plants. [00:08:59] Now, some of them have been brought online, and some of those fabrication plants are making older chips. You are right about cars. I drive a 1980 Mercedes-Benz diesel. There, there are no electronics to speak of in this car. And my kids said, Hey, do you know your car's worth like $10,000? It was I. It was just amazing. [00:09:21] You're absolutely right. The car manufacturers are dropping things, and they are lowering the prices supposedly. But, still, they're lowering the prices based on what that costs them. So, for instance, in some of these higher-end cars where you might have a smart charger that you just put your phone on, you don't have to plug anything in, and it charges up. [00:09:42]They'll give you a $40 credit. But how are you going to install that later on? How are you going to install electric ones? That was when they put in 10 old ranks. So this is really a big problem. It's hitting everybody. It's tremendously hurting my business. I'm not getting compensated for it because it's taken us forever. We ordered a box of desks for our clients in November. [00:10:07] They showed up this last month. So we're going to have to live with this. Probably into 20, 23, and maybe even longer. It should start letting up sometime next year. But your PlayStation Matt is still a way off. [00:10:24] Matt Gagnon: Wonderful. Thanks a lot. Craig Peterson, our tech guru, joins us at this time every week. We will talk to you again, sir, next week.
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Intel Tells Us How Long the Shortage Will Last & Explosive Spyware Report
07/26/2021
Intel Tells Us How Long the Shortage Will Last & Explosive Spyware Report
Intel Tells Us How Long the Shortage Will Last [automated transcript] We're looking at a big chip shortage. You probably heard a little bit about it, but how long is it going to last? And we've got this explosive report out right now about spyware and some of the cyber hacking and what's happening with Android versus iOS. What should you be using, 50% of Americans are using Android, and the rest is split up mostly with Apple. iOS. So what's going on there? This is a research group that says, my goodness. The media outlets just aren't reporting the truth. So here we go with Mr. Chris Ryan. [00:00:40] Chris Ryan: A couple of things we're going to get today with Craig Peterson are the host of tech talk first design, the chip shortage, and how long that may last. [00:00:47] The second is a fascinating report on spies where I think a lot of us feel that our phones, and even to a large extent, our laptops are safe because we maybe haven't experienced any overt issues with cybersecurity whether or not that's true. We'll talk about it in a second. Craig Peterson joins us right now. Craig, how are you? [00:01:08] Craig Peterson: Good morning. I'm doing great this morning. [00:01:11] Chris Ryan: So we get into a couple of not great stories, though. As into the Intel, CEO says the chip shortage could last until 2023, as we continue to hear about supply chain issues and how they lead to the inflation of consumer costs. What do you think of this particular story, and how do you think it will affect those issues that we see with various shortages. [00:01:36] Craig Peterson: Yeah, this is a huge deal because, of course, when we're talking about chip shortages, we're talking about affecting everything. It's harder to get a car. For instance, that's driven up the price of used cars, as well as new cars. I mean your computers. We're trying to order them for some of our clients. [00:01:54] And we have seen some of the delivery times out six months, we just about two or three weeks ago. We just got it. Some discount in that we had ordered in November last year. So think about how long it is. And now we've got the wall street journal reporting after the Intel company posted second-quarter earnings on Thursday and the Intel CEO saying we have a long way to go yet. [00:02:22] And what they're trying to do. Rebuild infrastructure and build new infrastructure capacity. We have to remember that this is partially due to the lockdown, but the other side of this is competition. These chips keep getting faster at an order. Yeah. Faster. They have to get smaller internally. That's that nanometers thing that you keep hearing about with chip sizes and densities. [00:02:49] So these older fabrication plans that they couldn't bring back online and that they are, in some cases, bringing back online cannot make the newest chip. So it's a constant gain. So one of the biggest problems we have is. Building brand new chip fabrication plans over the whole lockdown thing. And most of them are in Taiwan. [00:03:11] So this could go until 2023, frankly. [00:03:15] Chris Ryan: And it also shows how tied our productivity and our consumption-based economy are into what's taking place in other countries as well. We've talked a lot about COVID in this country, but there are. Countries that are out there where we see some meager rates of vaccination, China. [00:03:35] We obviously don't know much about them, but Japan, Taiwan vaccination rates are meager there. So we talk obviously a lot about the US side of things, but many of these supply chain issues are driven by the economic and health environments in a foreign country. [00:03:56] Craig Peterson: Sure, we have a worldwide economy. [00:03:59] We've got Australia now completely locked down. There are parts from Australia that we need as well as all of these other countries. For example, India's vaccination rate is less than 3% right now. And we require a lot of support from India as well as part. So as we move forward continually the worldwide. [00:04:20] Source and really the source of everything I can know I can dock is going to be worldwide, and more and more of these countries are going to be playing a bigger part. That's Craig [00:04:28] Chris Ryan: Peterson, he's the host of tech talk on news radio six, 10, and 96, 7 Saturdays and Sundays at 11:30 AM. Interesting reports on Android and iOS. [00:04:39] Security. And, I think that many individuals who have not experienced identity theft have not experienced significant cyber attacks against them, they feel that they're safe, and they're not really. That's safe. So I want to get your thoughts on that and B what leads to even if you are vulnerable, what leads to that way, an extended period of time, which you don't experience anything, and the kind of that complacency set. [00:05:10]Craig Peterson: Many of our devices have been hacked. So if you think it hasn't been you by not know, they're doing everything from not ransoming your phone or random your computer, but using your computer to mine. Coin. And that can be a real problem when it says mark phone and all of a sudden your battery keeps dying after half an hour. [00:05:33] It just keeps getting on. It might be used right now for Bitcoin mining, all the ways through, of course, some of the ransoms that are visible so much. Mean now; there is happening in the background. Your computer could be used for one of these botnets to attack others and do other major things. Now, what we're concerned about on the security or cybersecurity researcher side is being able to get into these devices and get into the systems to examine them. [00:06:07] We've got this Pegasus malware, right? Which apparently has been used against some 50,000 journalists and government people, agencies, and others. And they, all you had to do was open your phone, open a message, no cocaine involved. And your phone has been. IOS, which is Apple's operating system, has been relatively closed. [00:06:30] That's a pro in some ways, and it's a con and others, and we've had all kinds of security researchers over the years here complaining about that while apple made some major changes and has now provided security researchers—access to absolutely everything and also great logging Android. [00:06:51] Unfortunately, the assumption is if it's Android, anti-virus can not protect it because Android is really a hodgepodge that was thrown together. It's thrown on to thousands of different models of phones that are out there. So we are. Better than one with an apple, people assume an apple is going to be more secure. [00:07:13] So they're being held to a higher standard, and they are stepping up frankly, to the plate here, Chris, [00:07:20] Chris Ryan: [00:07:20] you, if you are a business owner, a public official, a person that holds a government position, something that is, would be very intriguing too. Packer or to an organization. And you have questions about your security and whether you are secure, and how do you go about creating an environment where you feel comfortable? [00:07:43]Particularly if you are not all that knowledgeable on the topic of cybersecurity. [00:07:49] Craig Peterson: I read a great article yesterday. And it was talking about how we, as a whole, pretty much everyone thinks that you can't do anything about it. So we're just going to give up and [00:08:03] Chris Ryan: yeah, if I were to get targeted, I get targeted. [00:08:04] But I think that even when you think about somebody like throw Brad Pitt out there, right? Brad Pitt has to be the target of just about every single hacking organization imaginable. You would assume to want to get information, access to capital, ransomware, whatever. If you are the higher, you move up the food chain as a public official or a celebrity that you would be accustomed to being hacked by. [00:08:27] Everyone. What do you do if you are concerned about that? [00:08:31]Craig Peterson: some things can be done, but you cannot use the standard software. We already know that the Norton antivirus and all these other basic antiviruses do not work. They don't protect you against modern threats. In fact, more than 70%. [00:08:48] Of the threats this year on cannot be stopped by the wonderful little antivirus software we've had for years. So you have to move up to the next level. We're working right now with a small bank. Who's trying to really secure everything because of these sorts of problems. But I, If you are in a position where you are bigger targets than usual, you have to take extra steps. [00:09:15] You have to use advanced malware protection. In all of these years, I've been securing computers out for 30 years. We have never, ever, I had a client that had ransomware, and we're talking about multinational clients all the way on, down through your local dentist. So it can. Done, but you can't just rely on the technology that was invented 20 years ago. [00:09:39] Just top ad guys, but it is there, but you're going to have to Lord and get the right people involved. Craig. Thank you so much. Take care.
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Google's Being Sued by the States -- And it doesn't look good for them
07/21/2021
Google's Being Sued by the States -- And it doesn't look good for them
Google's Being Sued by the States -- And it doesn't look good for them Craig Peterson: We talked earlier about Amazon and how much trouble they're in right now, Google apparently is in a similar boat. We had just this week, dozens of state attorneys, general suing Google on antitrust grounds. [00:00:16] You can reach me online. Just me. M E Craig peterson.com or what most people do is they just hit reply to my newsletter. [00:00:25] Hopefully you're on my newsletter, right? That goes out every week. If you're on that newsletter you can just hit reply and ask me questions. Any questions you want? I'm more than glad to answer them. I know most of you guys, you're not business people. I am still glad to answer your questions for you to keep you on the right track. [00:00:42] The whole idea here is it's to keep you going. Safer. And if you're a business person, what the heck, maybe I can help you out as well while the here is a problem. And it's a very big problem. We have these absolutely huge companies that are using their market position in order to really control the entire world. [00:01:09] Now it's a very big problem because you have companies that are sitting on billions of dollars in cash who can and do keep their competition out of the market. Now, one of the ways that keep them out, and I've mentioned this before, Microsoft has done this multiple times as lost lawsuits about it, particularly over in Europe, but they find somebody who might be a competitor and they basically squeeze them out of them. [00:01:39] Even though they're not necessarily even a direct competitor. One of the things Facebook does is they buy companies for 10, a hundred times sometimes more. Then they're actually worth, would you take 50 million for your company? That's worth 50 million? You might not. [00:01:56] Would you take 500 million for the company? How about a billion dollars? That's where it starts becoming very questionable about what they're doing. One of the things that Google is allegedly doing right now is preemptively squashing com competing app stores. When you look at Google and the Google Android ecosystem, who sells the most Android devices out there, right? [00:02:24] The high-end devices, the number one seller of Android phones is of course, Sam. And Samsung started to put a store too. An app store. So you could buy Samsung, Sam sung apps now, apple and Google, both charge about the same rates as a general rule. It's 30% for these bigger companies that they have to pay the app store, okay. I'm okay with that. They both spent the time to build the platform, to monitor it, to try and keep the app store clean and guides. That's definitely worth something. But what if Samsung came along and said, okay, we're only going to charge 10% royalty. In our app store and the apps will run on all of our Samsung Android phones. [00:03:13] So it's still using the Google operating system. It's still Android. It will probably run on other than Samsung phones as well. That's the whole nature of, but that hasn't happened. And why hasn't it happened? These state attorneys general are saying that what has happened is the Samsung galaxy store got squashed by Google. [00:03:41] So it could maintain its monopoly on Android app distribution. So it says that Google engaged in a bunch of different anti-competitive practices. They offered large app developers, profit share, and agree. In exchange for exclusive exclusivity. Okay. I can see that the apple iPhone came out. Do you remember this exclusively on ATN T's network? [00:04:08] Is that a problem? They're saying also the Google created unnecessary hurdles for what's called sideloading. So sideloading is where you might go to another app store in order to install something. Or maybe it's something that you want to put on your site. It's not fully approved by the Google play store. [00:04:29] So that's the basics of what the side loaning is all about. So saying that they made that even harder. Okay. From Google standpoint, do we really want to. Allow anything to run on our phones. And here's the question, here's why, right? What do I do for living cyber security? What is one of the things you have to do for cybersecurity? [00:04:51]You've got to put in special routers, special firewalls and software on servers and computers. Whoever touches a computer last owns the next problem. That's been my mantra forever. So if we installed some software on a computer or we had the customer installed some software on a computer, and there's a problem who they get. [00:05:14] They're going to call me, right? Because I was the last one to touch their computer. And at that point now I have to show, okay, it wasn't me. It was this other piece of software. QuickBooks is a piece of junk, you know what, whatever it is, I'm going to have to justify it. And frankly, I'm probably going to have to fix it. [00:05:33] So Google is saying. We don't want all of these app stores that might have apps that are not secure apps, that crash apps that might cause problems with the Android ecosystem. I think that's perfectly legitimate. Apparently these state attorneys general don't think it is. And here's the last one. This is a. [00:05:56] Attempting to buy off Samsung to limit competition from the Samsung galaxy app store. Now, Google is saying that this lawsuit is merit lesson. I can see a whole bunch of legitimate argument on their part. They also said, quote, and this is an article from ARS Technica. It's a strange, it's strange that a group of state attorneys general. [00:06:21] Chose to file a lawsuit, attacking a system that provides more openness and choice than the others. In other words, are taking a jab at apple because apple is very closed for the reasons I just decided to hear that Google I'm sure is going to argue as to why they are closed. Okay. Apparently the state attorneys general are saying, quote, Google promised repeatedly that Android would be the basis for an open ecosystem in which industry participants could freely compete. [00:06:56] Google has not kept its word. Instead. Google has taken steps to close the ecosystem from competition and insert itself as the middleman between app developers. Consumers. Okay. Can, so can you see that they're also complaining this 30% commission. It's a monopoly rent that unfairly burdens consumers and developers, and K-12, you could argue that I don't fall for that one personally. [00:07:24] Now the buy-off is where I think that there's a lot. Yep. Teeth in this particular lawsuit. Cause they're saying that we've got the commission rate argument, right? We've got those. It's not as open as you said, it would be. But these attorneys general have spent a lot of time dissecting Google's alleged efforts to keep competing app stores at bay by, and they said Google was willing to offer Samsung myriad benefits and concessions in order to prevent Samsung's galaxy store from being built out. [00:08:00]Again, Is that a huge problem. If you've got a big customer or a potential partner coming to you and saying, okay, I want a few concessions here. I'm not going to pay 30%, or I want to have some of you, my developers in house with your people so that they can short circuit some of the problems that always develop those are. [00:08:25] In the business in business period. And when it comes to software development, right? People, businesses have we'll use apple again as an example jam, which is a really great set of software to help manage your devices. Jan PF, you might want to check it out. So jam had their engineers camp out at Apple's headquarters, apparently four months while they were working on. [00:08:52] Some of the, their software for the next release of Apple's iOS and Mac iOS. Is that unfair? Yeah, in a way it is right because here I am little Mr. Small developer and I'm not gaining access to Apple's top engineers and able to send mine out there to live with apple engineers and ask questions and help them debug my software. [00:09:18] But it happens every day. Makes sense. So it says though the galaxy store was not nearly as popular as the play store. Google feared that Samsung would develop into a strong competitor, especially since the company sells a majority of high-end Android phones in the us ARS Technica says Google was particularly concerned that Samsung would get an exclusive game. [00:09:43] For the store to attract more users, which Samsung did do in 2018, when it partnered with epic to launch fortnight exclusively on the galaxy store. And that one, move that one game. That one app. Costs Google millions of dollars in revenue. So we'll see what happens here. They make other claims in there. Apparently it even offered a Google offered to white label, the play stores, the galaxy store, so that Samsung could maintain its branding, all kinds of negotiations, the types of things I've seen before, the types of things that are. [00:10:23] Particularly uncommon, but a European commission is also going after them with an antitrust investigation. They've done that a few years ago with this is a problem. These companies are huge and we don't let them fail. Look at what happened. GM and Chrysler, both got bail and the federal government Chrysler got bailouts twice. [00:10:45] The free market. You never would have had that happen. The best part of Chrysler would still exist and those weak parts would have been gone. That's what bankruptcy law is all about GM. The same thing, the best parts of GM would have remained. We would have probably had better cars today. Then we have, if DM GM had been allowed to go bankrupt and yeah, it's going to hurt people, but guess what? [00:11:11] It's hurting people right now from the other side. And when I see this happening as well at Google and Amazon, of course they haven't gone bankrupt, but they both along with Facebook and a few others, they're both huge. Huge and they control so much of the market. So what's the best way forward. What do you think I'd love to hear from you? [00:11:32] Just drop me an email. [email protected] What is the solution to this? Hey, make sure you get my newsletter. We got all of this information, of course, a whole lot more comes out every week. May be semi-weekly here fairly soon. See how it goes, but go to Craig, Peter sohn.com/subscribe. You'll get my free newsletter and you'll keep up to date on what you need to do to keep yourself safe. [00:12:02] Craig peterson.com.
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Recommendations to Turn Off Your Printers - eCar Fire Warning
07/21/2021
Recommendations to Turn Off Your Printers - eCar Fire Warning
Recommendations to Turn Off Your Printers - eCar Fire Warning Craig Peterson: Hey, we got another emergency patch out from our friends at Microsoft. And in this case, it has to do with printers and remote printer access. Do you have employees working from home? Microsoft has their big monthly patches that they release. They also have weekly patches that they released that are for slightly more critical vulnerabilities. And then they have. Patches that are released because there is a severe problem going on right now while that's what we are staring down. There is a vulnerability called print nightmare, and this is located in the windows print. Spooler serve. Now the windows print spooler services, what it sounds like. This is the service that handles all of your print jobs. So if you are using this service, Turns out there's a serious bug and Microsoft tried to patch it once and failed. [00:01:10] And they've got another patch out right now seems to be working, but organizations are really urged to deploy these patches as soon as possible or deceased. Inbound remote printing until they can be applied. So that's why I said, if you have people who are working from home, because many of us turned on remote desktop and you better make sure that's properly patched up so that people could. [00:01:37] Then and get a desktop. Although Microsoft has an interesting solution that is going to be announced in early August about having your own windows machine there in their cloud. So it looks like you'll be able to have windows machine for about 35 bucks a month. Microsoft will have to keep it up to date. [00:01:56] I think that's a very cool thing, but they're coming out with that here very shortly. Within the next month or so, we'll see what happens, but this is a problem because if it's exposed to the internet, We're expecting to actually already be seeing active exploit. Now here's the problem Microsoft's trying to solve. [00:02:19] We have three different types of patches. You have the monthly patches that they release. You have your, which of the patch Tuesday. You also have patches that are released every week, which are more critical. And then these types of patches, these are patches for what are called. Zero day attacks. There is nothing normal out there, a regular stuff that would catch this and stop it. [00:02:46] Now, the advanced malware protection that we use from Cisco, it will catch this sort of thing, but it'll only catch it after it's been seen a few times and then identified, obviously by now it's been identified. So it's pretty darn cool. So Microsoft's monthly updates. Last month included a patch for another vulnerability in the windows print spooler service. [00:03:11] And it was initially called a local privilege ex escalation issue. That means that you had to be on that computer in order to gain access to these advanced privileges and features. Turns out that it wasn't entirely just local. And now there is a new one where it can be exploited to get remote code execution and not just privileged privilege, escalation. [00:03:39] That means that they can now run programs on your computer. And with privilege escalation, they can run those programs as whomever they might want to do. So this is pretty big Blackhat USA conference coming right up and they are going to be hosting one of their talks called diving into spooler and what they did to discover these local and remote. [00:04:09] Vulnerabilities in the windows print spooler Hey, it's definitely a problem. There is a proof of concept exploit out there, and that means that the bad guys are not too long from coming up with their own. So there you go. Again, patch it up close and remote access, at least for the time being. To your print spooler because it could be a very big deal. [00:04:34] Another thing you could do is disable the prince Pooler service. You can just use stop service dash name spooler dash force, and that will. Pop it right on down. Okay. And then by the way, in case your machine reboots, you probably wouldn't do a set service dash named spooler dash start-up type disabled in order to make sure it doesn't restart, but there'll a lot to worry about right now, a whole lot, frankly, to worry about right now because of the Russians are coming. [00:05:06] Here's another one. This is Chevy bolt. Now, I have had some major complaints about Tesla and the way Tesla has these door handles that recess in entirely and how it has happened that during an accident, those door handles don't pop out and people cannot be extracted from cars. And the biggest problem you have in an accident with a car full of batteries is. [00:05:34] Of course the high voltage and current that's stored in the batteries that now when they, it out, it starts a toxic fire. Very nasty. Just this week, the national highway traffic safety administration issued an alert for all 2017 to 2019 Chevy. Owners now I know a lot of these bolt owners are actually government agencies. [00:05:59] They're not individuals, but I thought I'd bring it up. Anyways. There was a fire in a Vermont state representatives. Car's name's Timothy Brown. And his Chevy bolt decided it was going to catch on fire. Now, there was a recall by GM of these Chevy volts that had this problem, and apparently it doesn't entirely. [00:06:26] Fix it, they are still plaguing GM. And man, in this particular case this rep of course in Vermont being a I don't know, leftist, I have to assume, but a fan of electric cars, his car. Sad they're burning, which is pretty bad, ironic, but this happened when was this? Oh, it looks like this happened just a couple of weeks ago. [00:06:52] He's the state chairman in Vermont of the house committee on energy and technology. I've been supporting electric vehicles go sponsor bills relating to electric. And plug-in. So now his 2019 Chevy bolt course caught in fire, caught on fire, and there are others out there. 68,000 cars. All right. So two phases to the recall first phase is a temporary solution. [00:07:20] The second one is a more permanent one. Apparently this has to do with the batteries spontaneous. Catching fire. So this isn't something that's related to a car accident. It's a spontaneous combustion problem. That's not too good. It's a defect in the LG chem battery packs that are in these cars. So here you go. [00:07:43] If you drive to work every day and you charge your Chevy bolt every night, the United States, federal government is telling you to stop doing that. Yes. If you have a Chevy bolt, they're advising you to not charge it at night. I'm not sure when you're going to charge it. Cause the idea is you charge it at night. [00:08:03] You drive in the day, right? So they're saying there's, you can't do that. If you have to charge it at night, make sure you park the car away from any structures and definitely do not park your Chevy volt. That might be part of this. Recall inside a garage. How's that for bad, the original recall, by the way, came out in November, 2020 for potential fire hazard in the, again, the high voltage battery pack, those cells could possibly heat up and ignite internally. [00:08:35] Yeah. And if that fire spreads of the rest of the car and spreads to the building it's parked in or nearby building. Yeah. So keep an eye out. If you have a Chevy bolt, this is the type of problem in a phase as we start more and more to move into the electric vehicle realm. Yeah. Eventually it'll all get worked out, but it isn't perfect today. [00:08:57] Hey, visit me online Craig peterson.com and keep up with the latest in what you have to do with technology.
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COVID's Biggest Victim? The Traditional Workplace
07/21/2021
COVID's Biggest Victim? The Traditional Workplace
COVID's Biggest Victim? The Traditional Workplace Craig Peterson: Work from home is a huge deal, especially for a couple of segments of our society. And I want to talk a little bit about that now, as employees are returning to work, should they be returning to the office? There is a great article here this last week in Forbes magazine by Dana Brownley. And it was one of their editors' picks, and Forbes picked it, I think, for excellent reason. And that is so many of us have been working from home. And for many of us, it's been a godsend. I've worked from home now for over 20 years. And for me, it's been a godsend because my priority was helping to raise our eight children. And it's hard to do that, and it's hard to homeschool them if you are not at home. So that's what I had done. And I was very privileged to be able to do that. [00:00:54] And our kids have all turned out amazing. Many people are caregivers, and it isn't necessarily just kids. But right now, I'm looking at a survey that was conducted. It's called the Prudential May 2021 pulse of the American worker survey. And they're showing the 2000 respondents that 38% identified themselves as caregivers, with nearly 40% of those providing care. [00:01:25] For school-age children, when you are starting to look at benefits packages, many families need to be able to have some form of childcare. And what has snuck in because of the lockdown is that many of us can work from home. So many of us have been more productive at home. And then, on top of it, all we can take. [00:01:52] Of our family. So let's look at the stats. We told you about school-age children. That's about 40%, 32% are taking care of young children. And this is 40% of all workers. Okay. People 30% are caring for someone with a disability, some health issue. And 23% are taking care of older adults. [00:02:20] That's 40% of the workforce. That is a lot of people. A lot of people, 38% is the exact number. So there, many of these caregivers are returning. Really a traditional work environment where they're going to the office, but they have unique needs. And I think every last one of us has to consider that and look at it and figure out how we can make things work. [00:02:51] And when we look at the numbers again for the caregivers, 45% say that they've considered leaving the workforce entirely. Due to personal demands. And 53% are saying that they would retrain for a career in a different field or industry. If they had the opportunity, we have some of our best people out there that are taking care of the kids of our loved ones. [00:03:21] Our parents. And again, look at mine, a situation here where I was at home helping to take care of our kids along with my wife. Neither one of us could have carried on a regular job and homeschooled eight kids. Neither one of us could have done that. What kind of talent might we be losing? Squeezing these people out of our workforce, particularly when we've now proven that most businesses can allow their workers to work from home. [00:03:57] Now, they found in the survey that there were three primary types of support caregivers, and these types are looking for different types of flexibility. Number one, they're saying that 42% wanted increased workplace flexibility. No, that makes a whole lot of sense. So they can work from home. [00:04:20]Maybe some of your best employees or people who want to work in another part of the country. I have a friend; his brother-in-law is a real good programmer in this one particular type of programming. I think it's sales and he is living there now in a completely different country on the other side of the world. [00:04:42] And yet. He's still doing programming for these people here in the United States, talking about workplace flexibility. He is sitting over there not far from China and is enjoying himself. He loves it there. And of course, his costs are much lower, et cetera, et cetera. So consider that, not just that there might be working from home, but maybe they want to take the kids over to Europe, live there for six weeks. [00:05:10] There's a lot of things people want. So that's 42% of our people that are working. Okay. Increased workplace place. Flexibility. The number two increased paid time off by 38%. Again, something we got to consider seriously. Now I know how hard it is to be able to fill in for someone that's on vacation or. Maybe they're caring for a loved one. [00:05:38] Maybe they just had a baby, et cetera, but it's essential when you get right down to it. Because again, who's better for raising our children, us, or a stranger who's going to more or less warehouse them. You have to keep a look at that. There's a great article from the Harvard business school. [00:05:59] It's titled. COVID killed the traditional workplace. What should companies do now? That's an excellent question because now the lockdown is mostly behind us. Executives can't expect the offices to run the same way they did to come in and do the same things they always did. But in reality, Harvard business school faculty members are saying there are ways to keep our employees happy and productive. [00:06:32] And that is exactly what we're talking about. But, no, for many caretaker takers caregivers, I should say paid time off is more valuable than a pay increase. And that's particularly true for those who are at the higher end of the pay scale. It gives them a lot more flexibility. They can get away sometimes from all of their responsibilities and obligations, which is just so important. [00:06:57] There's here's another one. This is a job list survey from CNBC. The article entitled here's how much money workers would give up for better. Life balance. And they go in, in that particular article and say that the average worker who says they currently have work-life balance, it would take an extra $10,000 in pay per year for them to give up their personal time. [00:07:20] I'm not sure that's right. I think it would be a lot more than that. And it also says just 30% of workers said they'd give up part of their pay for a better work-life balance. And the threshold varies by the type of worker. So that's where we, I think, really get into it now. So those are the first two, the third one is 37%. [00:07:41] So these are all within 4% of each other—a greater commitment to health and wellbeing. Now I've seen studies before saying businesses that put in a gym and put in workout rooms, et cetera. They never actually see them use—the way they expect for them to be used. And I don't think that's what people are talking about here, but we really are thinking a lot more about health and wellbeing since so many of us have been scared because of the COVID outbreak, but maybe I should be paying more attention to our health. [00:08:17]But we also have the mental health look at all of the problems we've seen from so many mental health issues because of the. Down. So Harvard again came out and said for employers that we need to signal the health of facilities. It's crucial to attracting people back. So again, The right kinds of air filters, right? [00:08:39] Kinds of lighting, make sure people feel safe while they're in the office and maybe cut back the number of days they have to be there. Hey, stick around. We'll be right back. We got a lot more to cover. You're listening to Craig Peterson, of course, and visit me online. Craig peterson.com.
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The FBI Weaponized Google Pixel Phones!
07/20/2021
The FBI Weaponized Google Pixel Phones!
The FBI Weaponized Google Pixel 4a Phones! If you look into buying a used Google Pixel 2a, I've got some news for you. The FBI has been very busy, and they've conned the con man. I love this story. The FBI has been trying to track bad guys for a very long time, and there've been several ways they've done it. We know obviously about phone taps. We've seen those before the old days. I don't know if you've ever been to one of the original. Telephone switching stations were all not even original, but the types they had in the late sixties and early seventies. I remember going to see one, and all of these switches were going. [00:00:43] People were dialing the phones and everything. It was just so cool. And back then, to trace a phone call, what they had to do is find the original. Sore. So they would go to that row, that column, that exact little unit that was hooked up directly to your phone. And then they would see, okay, this is in position this, and then go to that next switch. [00:01:08] Okay. Position that next switch, position that, and go all the way through. That's the really older days, not the old days where you had somebody that was at a switchboard doing it. Nowadays, of course, it's all done by computers. The telephone company turns your voice into a digital signal, and it's usually done right in your local neighborhood. [00:01:29] It isn't even done at the central office anymore. So by the time your voice is outside the central office, it's digital. It's hauled on nowadays, even partially an internet protocol. Network. They used to use different protocols back in the day. And so, it makes it quite easy for them to tap your line. Now, of course, there's the legal side of this. [00:01:53] Do they have the legal right to do it to the need a court order or what kind of a court order? Do they need it, right? All of that stuff. But that is the side. It's effortless to find out where calls went, where they came from, and to listen in because it's just digital—Data's completely copyable with absolutely no particular problems at all in copying it. [00:02:17]Last month. The FBI and the Australian federal police acknowledged that they had indeed been working on this encrypted device. And the company was called a nom, which is a fake company and a nom sole. 12,000 smartphones to criminal syndicates around the world. That's the wording that the police used. [00:02:45] So these were being sold as secure devices. They did things like they removed the cell leader, modem functionality they'd changed the boot ROMs. They removed the GPS. So the idea was, Hey, you missed your badge. You can use one of our Anom phones, and it's using a special version of the Android operating system, and you can send messages back and forth. [00:03:10] It's a completely secure messenger service with end-to-end encryption, right? Like we're always being promised. And so what happened is bad guys started referring. Bad guys to this, right? Cause if they wanted to talk to the other guy, they both needed these Anom phones. Otherwise, they wouldn't be able to talk to each other. [00:03:31]And so they were recommending the use of these phones to their friends that were in the illegal businesses as well. So this I'm just chocolate is so great. So the FBI weaponized. Android phones, at least this particular model of it. And there's a whole community in the Android world. It doesn't exist in the iPhone world because this is much harder to do in the iPhone world, but they call themselves the model. [00:04:03] Community. And so they'll get a phone from some vendor. They'll make some changes to it that led to maybe change networks or do other fancy things. So they, after the FBI, used some of this technology. The modding community and did some just amazing things with this custom rom. Now you're going to love this part. [00:04:24] Okay. So when you boot this phone up, this is according to ARS Technica. The phone will have, of course, a little boot screen and. The highest custom from here is the boot loader and other things, but it showed an arcane, oh, S boot screen that's the name, arcane O S and every place, the normal Android distribution that comes from Google with the. [00:04:52] B I's arcane. Oh, west green. It's just phenomenal that these guys would do this and would fall for it. So the FBI told the criminals, Hey alleged criminals, Hey, these are secure devices, the really focused on security, and there is a pin scrambling fee. What would happen if on your phone? [00:05:14]You might enter pin some phones, you might use a fingerprint, or he might use a face ID. This was a security feature. And what happened is normally you've got what, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0. And you type in your pin, and off you go, what this did, is it scrambled it? So it might be nine too. [00:05:34]Just the scramble of the digits up so that when you enter your pin, you're not always touching the screen in the same place so that people could not guess your code from the fingerprints you're leaving behind. Now, this is also interesting. It, this is a great way to do it. If you're doing it for real, having to run an anonymous phone, they had two different interfaces on the phone, and a different one would pop up depending on. Pin you typed into the lock screen. So the first pin would show a bunch of non-functional apps that are pretty popular in the app store, like Tinder, Instagram, Facebook, Netflix, candy crush games. [00:06:18] So if somebody is checking out your phone, forcing you to unlock it, they're not going to find budge. And by the way, none of those things work. But. If I had designed it, I would have made them so that they would work. So you can fool some of us by trying to rob us and steal your phone. [00:06:32] The second pin you could enter tells you chose your pins, but it was supposed to be the secure section. She didn't have the phone. So it had a clock, a calculator, and the settings. But the calculator app actually opened a login screen to a nom as an anonymous. And that, again, the bad guys are told all that's a secure, encrypted way to chat. [00:06:57]This is just amazing. So they will do use that. So they go into the calculator app and now allowed them to chat with their friends. But what they did not realize. Is, it was actually sending all of the messages also un-encrypted to the FBI. Okay, absolutely amazing. Amazing. So now, some of these bad guys are selling their phones online. [00:07:28] I remember I warned you at the very beginning. If you're going to buy a pixel for a, you want to listen to this first because the bad guys are selling. Their phones are online. And so, several people have been trying to figure it out—some posts on Reddit and elsewhere. You guys know how to deal with this arcane. [00:07:48] S, how can I reset this? What should I do? Okay. A lot of confused people. How do I fix this thing? You're not going to be able to fix it. Okay. By the way, this thing I think is really cool because the guy who he bought it legit guy bought it use. You said the installed operating system is arcane O S 10. [00:08:06] The system updater says that Archana, YC 11 is available for download, but I don't want to do it in case it makes something even harder to fix. So maybe the FBI is bad. At sending out updates and fixes, most of the Google Android vendors are out there, and I'm just laughing all the way through here. [00:08:27]So, there are some things that a tech-savvy user should know. So I want you guys to pay attention to this, particularly if you're using an Android device. So the first thing is when you start up a newer Android phone when it's made in the last few years, The first thing that happened is that Google runs something called verified boot, which makes sure the operating system has not been modified. [00:08:58] So, the operating system from the device manufacturer will be signed using a cryptographically secured. What was happening here is these devices were failing verified boot, of course, because the FBI had modified the boot ROMs. And if your device fails, verified boot, your Android device either could be an unlocked boot loader or a relaunch boot loader with tampered software. [00:09:27] It's going to show a message. And, in this case, the FDA FBI devices have a message that says your device is loading a different operating system, complete with their yellow exclamation point icon and a link for Google support pages. Phenomenal. And by the way, the article I'm sending this out in my newsletter, but it says. [00:09:54] How resistance changes. Google has an order. So it sent them to the legitimate Google support. So there you go. There's a perfect little piece of advice right now. The FBI changed many Android operating systems and tripped out many Android settings that might've revealed something about the fact that it really was a spy device system settings for app storage, and accounts have been removed. [00:10:23] So pay attention, right? If your machine boots up, the plane's about the bootloader, you've got a problem, and it isn't just Android. Obviously, Apple will do that. The newer versions of windows are starting to do that as well with TPMS, and windows 11 is really going to bring a lot of that to the forum. [00:10:44] Hey, you're listening to Craig Peterson, and you can find me online. Craig peterson.com. Check it out and stick around.
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How Could Facebook Do a Better Job at Controlling Disinformation?
07/19/2021
How Could Facebook Do a Better Job at Controlling Disinformation?
How Could Facebook Do a Better Job at Controlling Disinformation? Hello, everybody. Great discussion this morning about Facebook and what is going on with their monitoring and controlling some of the topics. Should they have something in place that really stops false information? How could they do that? And what's their real motivation behind all of this. With Mr. Christopher Ryan, we also got into how the general services administration has completely messed up. Again, it's authorization, this FedRAMP authorization. Why are our federal agencies using some tools like zoom that have been proven to be very insecure, and they're using them with the blessing of GSA, who says they're secure. [00:00:50] So here we go. [00:00:52] Chris Ryan: Craig Peterson is the host of tech talk on news radio 610, 96.7. You can check him out Saturdays and Sundays at 1130. Craig, how are you?. Hey, good morning. Doing great. Appreciate being with us. So one of the topics we did we've delved into today is social media giants and censorship of quote-unquote misinformation is. The white house weighed in on this last week and criticized Facebook as a purveyor of misinformation based upon allowing individuals platforms to push forward their opinions. [00:01:27] From a media standpoint, we have gatekeepers available and able to squelch misinformation and provide a great environment that can provide the most accurate information possible. Is there any way, shape, or form that a Facebook or a Twitter can? Have any sort of an algorithm or staffing or personnel; this is not even whether you should do it or shouldn't do it. [00:01:55] Is any way feasible or possible for them to strike down misinformation? [00:02:03] Craig Peterson: [00:02:03] Yeah. This is a tough one. It's easy enough. You've got, of course, Justin sitting there with the big button, and the Eaton cut us off at any point. But when it comes to Facebook or Twitter or any of these other big places you have, what is it now? [00:02:20] Billion active users per month, just on Facebook. So what you were asking about is there some algorithm. Obviously, people can't do this, and the answer is I have, yeah, a fascinating article. I'll be talking about it next Saturday. How about IBM's Watson? You probably remember Watson pretty well. [00:02:39] It was going to rule the world. It won jeopardy. It was absolutely amazing. And it really hasn't done much since then. One of the most advanced AIS we've had, and Microsoft and Google both have them; China's working on artificial intelligence to try and figure it out. But the biggest problem that we have is. [00:02:59] What is the sentiment there. How can you tell an article is criticizing something legitimately, or if they are endorsing something that might be a bad idea, then who gets to choose? What's a good idea. What's a bad idea. This isn't easy to do [00:03:16] Chris Ryan: [00:03:16] Chris. And there are no rules either. I said before; I don't think it was appropriate for social media to ban Trump. [00:03:24] I don't; I think that many individuals push forward misinformation and tr and lack truth and their intent is not good. And they're still allowed to do whatever they wish. So I think that you have to create a. A platform and an infrastructure to determine what the role should be. [00:03:45]And what, how many times do you get to push things forward that aren't true or et cetera? There are no rules. [00:03:51] Craig Peterson: [00:03:51] Yeah. I look at this and a profit motive on the part of Facebook, certainly in these others. And that is, they want your watch. The Facebook channel. They want you on that feed all day long. [00:04:05] So the more that you aren't interested in a topic or position, maybe a position is totally false. Maybe you are flat earth, or the more information they're going to feed you—the how the earth is flat and less about anything else. So what we've ended up with now with these social media sites is something that really polarizes us even more than we were polarized before because we see more and more information that confirms our suspicions and where we're at. [00:04:36] So I see that as an even bigger problem because we're frankly, Getting isolated. We don't have the editorial in the newspaper that might be left, might be right. It might be the center. As time goes on by these submitted authors, it's showing you what you want to see. And that's a big, [00:04:56] Chris Ryan: [00:04:56] right. And the Facebook feed has also changed over the years where initially it was just your friends, basically, and their information more and more, the feed has gotten filled. [00:05:07]Topics that they have determined that you're interested in and sources that may or may not be accurate that present that information. And this has happened to me, and I'm sure it happens to everybody else. Know, You may click on the art, one of those articles, and be interested in it. [00:05:22] And then the next thing 50% of your feed is similar articles or ads that are associated with things that you have looked up. So the Facebook feed has changed dramatically. Over the years to the point where it was initially, there weren't many ads, and you wonder how they made their money to the point of which now, where there are a lot of ads. [00:05:43] And they're also continually feeding you information on topics that you're interested in. [00:05:49] Craig Peterson: [00:05:49] Yeah. And topics that, again, might be correct, might be false. And what Facebook [00:05:54] Chris Ryan: [00:05:54] is doing you, in fact, giving you information that may not be accurate. So not just your friends, Facebook itself is providing you with information that may be false. [00:06:04] Craig Peterson: [00:06:04] Remember the days in Facebook, or again earlier on where if you followed someone, if you liked someone, you would see their posts, they would show up in your stream. Now Facebook realizes, oh my goodness, you've got hundreds of friends out there. They're all posting stuff. And Facebook decides what you want to see. [00:06:26] Many of the celebrities dropped off of Facebook because people that wanted to see their posts were no longer seeing them because. Facebook was moderating it. So we've come full circle under discussion. Facebook is doing moderation, and the moderation they're doing is, again, isolating us and dividing us even more. [00:06:46] That's a huge problem. What's the solution. I w was this day and age. I'm not exactly sure because they, the algorithms. They could be doing more moderation. Should they be doing it? And, of course, that's the whole discussion around section 320. [00:07:02] Chris Ryan: Exactly. So let's talk a little bit about zoom; an article has come out about zoom and its cybersecurity issues, and the GSA is blocked. [00:07:12] Senator Ron Wyden reviewed documents used to approve zoom for government use in government meetings. And that this is not just the federal level. It happens all the time at the local level as well. And there were initial concerns about cybersecurity and zoom, but a lot of those concerns and the topic of conversation about them seem to go away during the course of the pandemic; how safe is zoom, and obviously, you haven't. [00:07:39] Individuals, whether it's from a non-profit private sector or government perspective, who are discussing compassionate things on zoom. And they assume that no one is listening, but are they? [00:07:52] Craig Peterson: Yeah, that's a terrible assumption, particularly when it comes to zoom. The big concern here in this particular article that appeared in the tech crunch has to do with the investigation that's done by the fed. [00:08:06] So we know there's obviously information that needs to be kept secret other classified information, and then there's information that might be damaging. And what's happened here is the general services administration gave zoom their authorizations. FedRAMP authorization saying, yeah, go ahead and use it. [00:08:25] It's going to be fine. Everything's great. Turned out. Zoom was not encrypting these sessions from end to end. In fact, routing some of our conversations live through Chinese. They're using Chinese programmers to write this stuff. They installed back doors on Macs, just all kinds of incredible, terrible stuff that zoom hadn't been doing. [00:08:50] And some of it is alleged continuing to do. And yet, somehow, it received this authorization from the GSA. How that. Did that happen? Now, there are some secure ways to speak online. Really WebEx is the only one that is fully authorized, and then you have to have the right version of it. Microsoft teams have some stuff that is also authorized and. [00:09:19] Truly end to end. Zoom is not to be trusted, but what really concerns me is it looked like the federal government delving into any of these tools to verify whether or not they appear to be safe was terribly flawed. And that's exactly what the Senator has been trying to do and why and how, and they're just not providing the information. [00:09:43] Chris Ryan: [00:09:43] I have a basic theory. Applies, I think to tech and social media; if something is free, ask why and figure out why is this free? Why are you able to do it for free? What is in it for the company, and then decide whether or not you want to use it? But I think that people are all in, on giving their information, using. [00:10:06] These things and they don't really understand what the business platform is? How is this being used? And I think that is something that individuals should be cognizant of. Craig has always thanked you so much. Take care. That was Craig Peterson. He is the host of tech talk.
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Amazon Is In For a Rough Ride
07/16/2021
Amazon Is In For a Rough Ride
Amazon Is In For a Rough Ride Did you know that Amazon has a new CEO? I remember back in the nineties; I pledge that I would never use Amazon again because they filed and were awarded a patent on technology everybody was using. Jeff Bezos is out of a job. [00:00:19] This is a guy that grew a company that all they did initially really was book sales, and they had a warehouse the size of the Amazon, right? Because they wanted to represent everybody. They had every book ever published, and to a large degree. They did. They had a whole lot of bucks, and then I've expanded, of course, beyond that. [00:00:47]And beyond that, to the point today where they are doing some well, again, shady things I mentioned in the intro that I was concerned about what Amazon was doing with pat. They got a patent on this one-click purchase. Now I have been a fan of patents for a long time. I do not like the patent law as it exists today. [00:01:14] And in fact, I haven't liked it for quite some time, but this patent law where you don't have to show that there was no prior art and frankly, the prior art does not matter at all. I think that's huge. And I've had a number of patent attorneys on my show, talking about it and talking about what we may want to change. [00:01:37]Jeff Bezos grew it to today, where it really is the number one provider of online services is. You might, in fact, almost certainly are using Amazon's services, whether you realize it or not to go to most, any website, any of the big ones they're probably using Amazon's web services. They're probably using Amazon storage, and Amazon has dozens and dozens of different services. [00:02:09] So it's a very big deal. And Jeff Bezos, who's the guy that started all of that, sat down stepped on. I should say. Now it's rare that the founder of a company ends up taking the company public. Public, basically, that just doesn't really happen because all of a sudden, when you're public, your whole job changes, and no longer can you make a decision, a snap decision about something, and then go ahead and do it. [00:02:37] You've got to be very careful about what you do when you do it, how you do it, you have to announce it and everything, but just an amazing man being able to take it—all of that. And by the way, he have the largest settlement, a divorce settlement in history with his ex-wife. It's amazing, but he is still the world's richest human. [00:02:59] Now he has this company called blue origin, which is his rocket company. He's got the Bezos earth fund, and he's still chairman of Amazon's board. So he's not going anywhere. However, we've got this new guy, Andy Jassy, who has stepped in as the CEO of Amazon. He was the head of Amazon's online services, which is absolutely huge. It's their most profitable arm by far. So he's taking this whole thing over when Amazon, frankly, is in a lot of trouble. Now they're basics of, Hey, there, the money that they're making, their profits and everything, that's all well and good, but there are ongoing antitrust investigations. [00:03:52] There's a battle with labor. And we're talking about, of course, big labor here—the unions. There's increased competition in the cloud space. Just look at what happened with the US military in there. I think it was at least a billion dollar. I can't remember the exact number, a cloud contract because Amazon was battling Microsoft Azure and it was awarded. [00:04:20] And then just a couple of weeks ago it was pulled back again. They're also seeing increased competition in their online services from Google. And I use some of those Google services. In fact, if you go to Craig peterson.com, it's actually right now using some of those Google services. So they are really getting nailed from a whole bunch of different directions. [00:04:45] And this guy Jassy has worked there since 97. But he may be the perfect person to guide Amazon through. W really now we're talking about the middle-aged, that's the time when you're supposed to buy your convertible, buy your motorcycle, et cetera. The middle aged years. And in this case, there's some problems. [00:05:10] Here's a quote I want to read from this Yahoo article is actually I think AP yeah. Yahoo finance. This Yahoo article and it's from Harvard business school, because we've got regulators who are circling, and this may be the main reason Jeff stepped down. I don't know, but quote, you may want somebody who has the confidence of the chair. [00:05:35] And the board you want somebody who understands the strategy and was part of it and knows where the bodies are buried and the mistakes that have been made and how to move forward. This is from Harvard business school, professor of business administration. Rosabeth Moss Kanter, and I think she's right. [00:05:58] Absolutely because this road ahead for him is going to be tough. But the fact that he ran their most profitable division tells you something, it tells you a lot and he might be the exact right guy to be able to do that. Amazon's now got a market capitalization of about $2 trillion, which is huge. [00:06:20] And it's certainly enough to get some of these regulators. Paint a lot of attention to what's going on. We've got the Washington DC attorney general, who has accused them of violating the district of Columbia's antitrust act. And that has to do with, for bidding third-party resellers, from offering cheaper rates for their products on competing sites. [00:06:43] Cause remember what Amazon does. About half or more. In fact, I think now of their products are not actually sold by Amazon. They're certainly not Amazon products. They are products from resellers who are just selling on Amazon. They're using Amazon is their platform. And that way Amazon will manage the inventory. [00:07:06] It'll warehouse a little ship it out. It'll handle the returns. Yeah. What Amazon is doing is charging these sellers for the space in the warehouses, which is perfectly legitimate and taking a percentage of the deals. Are there other websites that might give these sellers or resellers or stuff they're importing from China or wherever. [00:07:31] Might there be other sites that give them better deals? Will you bet there are sites out there. So that's why she's suing them. Federal regulators look like they might be coming in as well. The federal trade commission's newly appointed chairman. She's a fierce critic of the. Amazon way of doing business and she made herself a name by publishing an article for Yale's law journal titled Amazon's antitrust paradox. [00:08:01] So before she was even appointed to the federal trade commission, she was already calling for changes in the current antitrust regulatory framework. And that might be widely invited administration has appointed her, but there's six antitrust bills. Targeting big tech right now that are working their way through the house of representatives. [00:08:24] And we've talked about some of those already, and, I do not like these huge tech companies that are making crazy profits and using those profits to keep other people out. And Amazon's one of the largest employers in the country. And after years of complaints from somewhere house workers, we've got the labor unions now in the mix trying to take action. [00:08:49] Now, I don't have a single problem with labor unions while at some of their tactics, I have problems with, I don't have a problem with the labor union. In the private space. I have a huge problem with I'm in government space. And we could talk about that at some point, but I don't have a problem with them trying to organize inside Amazon. [00:09:12] So the international brotherhood of Teamsters. Yeah. I remember the guys that drive the horses. They announced that they're going to begin working to organize Amazon workers. So that might succeed. There was another one in Alabama that had failed. So are you getting the hint here? This is huge. It's huge. [00:09:32]By the way, Amazon's offering warehouse workers starting pay at $15 per hour plus benefits. So that doesn't seem too bad. If you ask them. But again, with the pandemic, all of the stuff going on there been a lot of calls for Amazon to quote, treat its workers better. So we'll see. We'll see what happens. [00:09:53] Other problems with Amazon that we've talked about before are things like fake reviews. You and I, we look at the reviews, it's critical in us buying things. Isn't it. We look at the reviews and say, oh, wow. Jeepers. There's 500 reviews here and it's four and a half stars. Okay. So I can have confidence that this product is good. [00:10:17] It's going to work. And yet some of these sellers, what they're doing is bribing people to give a good review. So they'll say, Hey, you buy my product. And then they send the product in with, along with the product is a little note saying, Hey, if you give me a review and send me a link, I'll send you an extra battery or whatever it might be. [00:10:39] That has been a real problem for Amazon, even worse than that, because at least those people might give an honest review, right? Worse than that is that some of these reviews are paid for. So some of the sellers it's alleged are going out there. They are hiring. People and paying them to give reviews. Now, those ones are very obvious. [00:11:04] If you look at the reviews, so don't just look at there's 500 and the average is 4.5. Look at some of the reviews in the wording. So I've seen reviews where it was for a massager, and there was talking about what a great. A set of wheels that has on it. And they work really well. And it's very smooth when you're out, riding it on the trails. [00:11:27] Wait a minute wait, we're talking about a massager here. We're not talking about a bicycle, so that's one of the ways to tell if the reviews are fake, they're don't even talk about the product at all, or any of its real features. The other one is look at the wording because most of these fake reviews. [00:11:45] Don't use English, so good. All right. Okay. Thanks for being with me. I want to make sure you stick around and visit me online. In the meantime, go to Craig peterson.com. If you sign up for my free newsletter, you'll be getting that every week with all of the details. I'll try and catch you up and you can listen to my podcast, right from there. [00:12:09] CraigPeterson.com. That's Peterson with an O.
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Kaseya and the Problem with Managed Service Providers
07/16/2021
Kaseya and the Problem with Managed Service Providers
Kaseya and the Problem with Managed Service Providers We have really in front of us, a critical warning. We're trying to figure out what should we do or to stop people from attacking us. That's a problem. What should we do? Many of us have gone out to managed services providers, and now they have let us down. Did you hear about the Kaseya hack? It has had a huge impact on people. It's absolutely crazy. Or you heard about a thousand companies that got together and they have hired a negotiator in order to negotiate the ransom with the bad guys that have ransom there. It is huge. It's huge. But let's talk about why this happened, because I think there are many things that you and I have overlooked here over the years, this ransomware God guy, gang called REvil, R E V I L has targeted cause say, or customers through. [00:01:04] Say, but it isn't just kissy customers. It's really cause say, is customers for the most part. Now your head might be spinning a little bit, but here's, what's happening. I'm a business owner. You guys know that right now. Let's say that I don't do cybersecurity for businesses. That's what I do. [00:01:24] But let's say I make widget. I as a widget maker, do not have enough knowledge about computers to, to really do it myself. So let's say I've grown and I've got 20 employees. The odds are very good that my office manager is the one in charge of the computer. The office manager probably orders. [00:01:49] Computers probably tries to figure out what's going wrong. By the time of it at 50 computers or 50 employees, I've probably got a full-time it person who goes around and tries to take care of things. But before I've got that, full-time it person I'm probably going to outsource it. And by the way, a lot of companies, it's more like a hundred to 200 employees before they get someone who's really dedicated to it. [00:02:18] So then that awkward teenage stage between where the office managers trying to do it. And finally the office manager can try and hire an it professional. Is where they go and outsource it. You talk to various types of companies. What are in the industry called break, fix shops. That's usually the first stop which is calling them up saying I've got a broken computer. [00:02:44] Can you fix it? And maybe they can, maybe they can't. And then a lot of break fix shops have tried to level out their income so that they have predictable monthly income so that they can hire the right number of people for the number of customers that they have. Although I've got to say most of them are badly overbooked. [00:03:04]Now that they've hired those people, they this outsource break fix shop. They come in and say, okay here's what we can do for X amount per month per computer or employee, we will take care of those computers for you. One of the things that they'll promise to do is that they will take care of your cybersecurity for you. [00:03:25] Now, cybersecurity is frankly, a specialty. It is not something that everybody can do. Even if you're using some of the best stuff in the world, like what we do, we have Cisco hardware, we have Cisco software that we run advanced malware protection. So that's the best of the top of the line. [00:03:45] Most smaller businesses aren't going to want to pay for it, even though they might be able to afford it. Push those people out right now, because we're talking about, you were talking about a smaller business. So what does that outsourced it provider do for you? They might change their name and call themselves a managed services provider. [00:04:06] And that's all well and good, but they need help as well. So I'm making widgets. I have this break fix shop that came in and fixed my computers a few times. And now they're handling my cyber security. Isn't that wall well, and goods was wonderful. So now they're handling, supposedly my cybersecurity. But they know they can't do it themselves and it would be too expensive to do it because they went cheap. [00:04:33]You bought the least expensive option or, close to the least expensive option. So wait, and by the way, cheap in this case means that it's under $150 per. Person slash workstation per month. That's what it costs to get this stuff done. So you might be paying 25 or maybe even $50. They can't do it for that. [00:04:57] So what do they do? They go to a company like. Now they also have some others. They have what are called arm AMS that keep track of some basic stuff for you, but they go to Garcia and say, okay, Casia we want you to monitor the computers, keep them up to date, et cetera for. Now did I, the widget manufacturer go ahead and hire to take care of stuff. [00:05:23] Did Kasiah even do it themselves or did they outsource it? Do I even know the Kaseya exists because it's really Kaseya that is managing my computers doing. We have, there has a software that doing the upgrade on my computers. This is a real problem because the widget maker, Nope, I didn't hire KSA. I didn't even know they existed. [00:05:49] I trusted my local. Your local guy is not taking care of your cybersecurity. Almost completely guaranteed. There's very few companies like mine out there that we actually do it ourselves because we have looked at Kaseya. We've looked at all of these platforms. Every last one of them has had major problems. [00:06:12] So here comes Casia with over a hundred thousand customers that gets hacked and distributes the hack to all of its customers that are running some of these on-premise devices that are trying to manage the networks for not Cassias clients, but for KSA as clients, client. Okay. Do you see how this is the level of indirection? [00:06:35] You see how this is going to affect? This is a huge problem. And Casia not only have we warned some of these companies, like Kaseya about major design flaws in their software, but cause say his own engineers apparently about three years ago, warned Cacia about major design flaws in the software that they were using. [00:07:01] So they knew about this. They were warned months, if not years in advance about it. So what does it say you do? They're concerned about profit and features, so they just keep adding features as alleged by their former employees instead of fixing the security problems. Cause it would be too hard to fix, take too long cost too much, and it isn't going to increase our revenue. [00:07:26] Are you sitting down? Can you believe this is one of the major operators out there, major operators that is, is behind your manager services provider and your break fix shop that's who's doing it out there. So there are probably far more than that this thousand Kaseya clients that have gathered together to try and negotiate the ranch. [00:07:57] And I got to say, I, I would be extremely disappointed if Kaseya customers didn't gather together and Sue them in a very big way. Curly sins, people claiming to be former Cacia employees are saying they warned the company about major flaws in their software. And that is what hit all of Cassias customers. [00:08:24] Customers. This is incredible here. This is a much different style of relationship that companies have typically, right? Yeah. Okay. Law firms they'll outsource stuff, right? So let's say there's some maritime law. They'll go to a maritime law firm. They'll outsource it. So yeah, there are some models where this is done, but this is done routinely. [00:08:49] In the cybersecurity space. It's not something we do. We stuck our toe toes into that pond and we didn't like it. We didn't want our customers to be hurt by this sort of thing. But anyway, there you have it. Okay. There, you have it all about profit and not about you. And by the way, it's also about how much you're willing to pay.
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Predictions About Olympic Cyberattacks
07/16/2021
Predictions About Olympic Cyberattacks
Predictions About Olympic Cyberattacks We're all excited about the upcoming Olympic games. And so are the hackers. Oh my goodness. I just finished reading a report by the cyber threat Alliance about what they're expecting to happen at these Olympic Games in Tokyo. The Olympics have always been a huge target when it comes to the bad guys. [00:00:23] You might remember there have been abductions at the Olympics before where some of the Olympic competitors were held at gunpoint. Of course, we're not going to forget that one anytime soon. And looking back through the last few Olympics, there have been many different types of attacks, some more successful than others, frankly, but looking at this report, they were talking about the 2008 Beijing Olympic. [00:00:51] The attacks then were relatively limited. There were about a 12 million cyber alerts per day. Now this is part of the problem with cyber security. You get so many alerts. What do you do? How do you. Bond and none of those 12 million cyber alerts per day resulted in a successful attack. Now that was back in 2008, there were some scams like ticket scams are always are, but nothing big. [00:01:23] The next one was the London Olympic. In 2012 and the London Olympic, they had pretty much low level attacks and they didn't result in any real high impact cyber security event. And the most significant event back in 2012 was evidence. Credible cyber threat against electrical infrastructure. That was of course in place for those Olympic games. [00:01:50] There was a distributed denial of service attack on the power systems. Nothing much really happened, no real impact. Then 2016 Rio de Janeiro. They were starting to pay more attention to cyber security for very good reasons. Frankly, there was a large scale denial of service attack that was carried out by this bot net. [00:02:16] Let me explain what that is. A denial of service attack is where you might have a website for instance. Providing service to your customers that might be going there to look at your catalog, maybe buy some things. It might be a government agency. It might be an important part of the Olympics in this case and their critical infrastructure. [00:02:37] So denied service means you either knock it off the air or so people can't get it. Or there's also the distributed denial of service attack. Now D dos are the distributed ones are where you have hundreds or thousands of computers out on the internet, all over the place that are trying to get to maybe the home page, maybe the purchase page. [00:03:04] And because the coming from all over the internet, they're very hard to shut. And that's where we have the botnets coming in, too. Botnets are groups of computers that have been compromised by the hackers. So what they do now is they command, for instance, you're a home computer that you don't even know is under the control of one of these bad guys, your home computer now, issues or requests. [00:03:33] Hey, yeah, give me the home page of Olympics 2020. And off it'll go dutifly and try and get the homepage. That's all well, and good. If the load on the server is what they're expecting. You've been to sites, right? You hear something mentioned on the radio and like Craig peterson.com. Now, because I mentioned my website, Craig Peterson, S O n.com. [00:03:58] And there are people listening. Some of you guys are going to go to my website. Now the normal traffic of having dozens of new people go to my website is not going to bring the site down. However, here's the other side of this? What happens if maybe two or three times as much traffic as I expect is going to come to the site? [00:04:22]I've compensated for that. We should be able to handle that just fine. But what happens if all of a sudden it's a thousand times what we're expecting because there's 20, 30, 40,000 cases. Peter is out there that are trying to get my homepage or in this case, the Olympic. Homepage. Obviously the server's not going to be able to respond and it's either going to crash or and I'm sure they set this up the right way. [00:04:49] It's going to deliver a message saying the servers over loaded right now. Try again a little bit. And by the way, if you get that message on a website saying, Hey, try it in a few minutes, please try it in a few minutes. Don't just hit reload because that's going to put even more load on that poor little overloaded server. [00:05:10] Now what they had here coming in 2016 at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics was a staggering 540 gigabytes. Per second worth of people requesting homepages. That is insane. That is a lot of bandwidth. And the fact that they apparently had that much bandwidth available coming in is also amazing, but also remember people are looking at videos. [00:05:41] Am I. To get the insider scoop, add some stuff happening behind the scenes. Now, many of the attacks in 2016 started before the Olympic games, even. And what they were doing is attacking different parts of the Olympics infrastructure operationally. So it's a problem. It's a very big problem. They survived that whole thing. [00:06:09] And by the way, the Brazilian government ended up trying to protect the world cup back in 2014 as well by spending a whole lot of money and time on this. But remember, Even back in 2008, we were talking about 12 million cyber alerts per day. How can you staff up for that back then? It was back then. [00:06:32] We're seeing some of our clients being hit with hundreds of cyber attacks a minute and multiple per second, sometimes 10 20, 30. Per second. It's just incredible. What happens? In fact, divide those numbers out 12 million divided by how many seconds in a day. It just shows you how amazingly huge it is. [00:06:56] Now we have seen time. Past where a country like North Korea, for instance, doesn't like what Sony pictures is doing. So North Korea then attacks Sony pictures. And in the case of Sony, they downloaded a bunch of confidential information. They released it. They embarrassed some people now, hardly anybody got fired. [00:07:16] It's absolutely amazing. But anyway, What's happening right now is Russia. Think about all of the Russian attacks against our businesses and our critical infrastructure as a country, they have been huge, massive attacks. We have now Russia at a point where they are getting massive amounts of. built up. [00:07:45] Why? Because they submitted doped samples in 2019 to the Olympic committee. Yeah. So this was a, the McLaren report released by the world anti-doping agency. Describe what we're really systematic effort by the Russian government to really undermine the drug testing process. We've also seen the Russians in the past because they've been caught doing this. [00:08:14] And the Chinese as well, putting in some of the competitors, particularly into things like gymnastics that were too young to compete based on the Olympic rules that were in place. So we had all of this happen during, and after the 2014 Sochi winter Olympics. Guess what those restrictions on their athletes are still in place and in place in a very big way, they will not play the Russian national Anthem at the ceremonies at the Olympics. [00:08:48] And they will not allow the Russian flag to be carried. In fact, their athletes have to carry a neutral. Flag. So expect some serious attacks from Russia against the Olympics. And remember the Olympics. There are no spectators. Everybody's going to be watching this thing on a line. So it's going to be interesting. [00:09:14] We'll keep an eye and let you know how things go. Stick around. Visit me online. CraigPeterson.com.
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Facebook Confirms Its Asking People to Report "Extremists"
07/16/2021
Facebook Confirms Its Asking People to Report "Extremists"
Facebook Confirms Its Asking People to Report "Extremists" Reporting on your neighbors is something you would expect from a socialist government, right? A communist government, a fascist government, any form of socialist government. Now Facebook is doing exactly that and it's going to interfere with our lives. Facebook has now confirmed what it's calling a test of its "do-you-know" an extremist prompt and that's got me really rather worried. And it has a lot of other people worried as well. I was talking to a friend of mine who was also in the media biz, who was saying just over the last couple of weeks. He's received this a bunch of times. And I mentioned this to another friend of mine who is not in the media business. And he said that he got it as well. [00:00:48] And he said his was: are YOU an extremist? Which I think is interesting. First of all, extremist is not defined. And of course, with these people who are monitoring accounts on Facebook, announce where their definition of extremist is going to be. The definition of an extremist by the government going to very political parties is going to Berry very, and we're talking about this anti-extremist promt, not just asking you if you are an extremist, like my friend said he got, but it's asking if you know someone else who is an extremist or who may become an extremist. [00:01:28] That is absolutely amazing to me. Amazing. It's bad enough that the government has picked winners. It has this whole section to 10, you've heard about before in the FCC rules that says we know if you're Facebook or Google, no one can Sue you for anything that you do. That is absolutely insane as far as I'm concerned, but there will be lawsuits on this they're already been filed. [00:01:58] Why would Facebook block thought that it didn't think was appropriate? The whole idea behind the first amendment? Isn't just that it applies to the federal government. It is a code of conduct for all of us. It's a code of conduct for these massive multimedia platforms. We should be allowing all kinds of speech and we should not allow people to hide because what they've done now is they've moved to other platforms. [00:02:29] The don't do this kind of monitoring and they are current carrying on their speed. If someone comes out and says something that is racist, that is violent, that is, is threatening to commit a crime. We know about it. If it's out there in the open, we all have the crazy neighbor that everybody in the neighborhood knows about because they are, and they're saying it, Facebook starting to block it. [00:02:55]We're just not going to know. And then what do they do? If you report someone who is saying some things that you think might be extreme, things like you should check voter ID at the voting booth. There are people that think that's extreme and they report you what's likely to happen. We know already that one of the things that many people who have been doing online is reporting people. [00:03:22] They don't like as someone who is posting things that are violent or extreme and getting their stuff blocked and demonetized in some cases, but just plain old blocked. It's a great little tool for people to shut up. Other people, just shut them down, shut them up. They can't say it anymore just because they disagree with the content that's already in place. [00:03:48] Now what's going to happen. If someone is reported as being, not an extremist or on the road to extremism, what liability is there on Facebook's side? What liability is there with, for instance, the FBI or local one force. There are obvious things that should be reported to law enforcement. If someone's saying they're going to harm themselves or harm someone else then we need to have a closer look at that. [00:04:14] If you actually have the belief that they will and can do that. I was as a mandated reporter for 10 years because I was in emergency medical services. If I thought someone was trying to commit harm to themselves or someone else, I was mandated to report, but I have to think that I can't just use the reporting tools as a way to shut up my political opponents. [00:04:43] So someone reports another person as being an extremist of Facebook, Facebook then sends it to who are they going to send it to the FBI? What's the FBI going to do well. The FBI is mandated to report again in their reports and investigate. So what are they going to do for the investigation? It needs to rise to a level of the FBI thinks that this might be an illegal activity so that they can investigate it. [00:05:11] They can hopefully stop something before it happens. Something violent, something nasty. But what does the investigation take ground? I'm taking you all the way down the road here. The investigation is going to include them having a look at what you said, looking at the people who are within your social network. [00:05:32] So who do you. Two. Who do you follow? Who follows you? They may start looking at your phone. Who are you calling? What SMS messages are you receiving? Where are you hanging out? Where's your phone going every day? Who goes to that bar that you like to hang out at? Oh my goodness. You went to a gun range. [00:05:50] Who's at that gun range and so very quick. The investigation is all of a sudden roping everybody and all of your family members, all of your closest friends, anybody that might've liked something that you had said recently, even though it might not have been extremist. And so now by having Facebook looking for extremists and people who might be on the road to extremism and counting on you to report them, they have opened up a can of worms. [00:06:22] Huge can of worms and remember too, with the FBI and with others, including the NSA and the CIA, they have this multi hop rule. I think it's three hops now. So if they suspect you of something and what is suspect you, is it the fact that someone reported you as being an extremist, just because they disagree with you politically, they disagree with your religion. [00:06:48] Is that enough for them to suspect it. So now they can monitor not just your stuff, but anyone that has talked to you or liked you and anyone that has talked to them or It doesn't take long. I think that whole Kevin bacon thing, right? Everybody in Hollywood's within five degrees of Kevin bacon. In fact, I think everybody in the United States is within five degrees of Kevin bacon. [00:07:12] In other words, they can hop through opt to five people and connect to anyone in the country. That is absolutely huge. Absolutely huge. According to the verge. Facebook is doing this in response to the Christ church call for action campaign Christchurch. Remember in New Zealand and there was an atrocity that was committed there. [00:07:41] These hate and dangerous organizations. That's what they're up to. They're trying to stop all of this. And it goes back to March in 2019. I think it was this attacking Christchurch. Obviously a terrible thing. People knew about this person and their radical approaches. The police have been informed, but nothing happened. [00:08:05] So now we want even more monitoring to go on. At least Facebook does. This is really a problem. There's all kinds of bad behavior online. We hide behind our supposedly anonymity. Look at the terrible thing. Some people say online about you name it, right? Different people, kids in high school, either people in other walks of life. [00:08:33] It is terrible. So Facebook has this support page titled what can I do to prevent rattling? Radek radicalization. There we go. I knew I could say it. It's a really good question. Yeah. They've got links on that page to life after hate exit USA program, which Facebook says help people find a way out of hate and violence. [00:08:57] I'm all great with that. I think that's a good thing. It's not a bad thing, but now having them report people that someone. In their non-inferior wisdom decides might be hate speech or might be on a road to extremism because remember anybody that voted for Donald Trump is considered to be someone who's on the road to extremism, or is an extremist. [00:09:22] For voting for him, the worst president ever. How many times have you heard that sort of thing? It has happened all of the time. And so we've got to be very careful about these open reporting things that are online. We have to be careful about reporting. Other people, it brings to mind two things. [00:09:41] One is two TV shows. One is one. That apple produced and you can watch, and it's all about this guy. You were a reporter, a news anchor, and he was supposedly sexually harassing someone and yeah, he was to a degree, but the crime and the punishment was just totally out of whack. And one of my wife's favorite shows the It was the good wife and now it's a good fight. [00:10:12] That's what it is in season five, episode three. It is delving into this in a very big way. What happens when you report someone? Should they be reported? You've got to think twice about that. Even when, again, I was in EMS, what happens if I report someone potential neglect potential child abuse here, they can go through hell. [00:10:37] So be very careful. I don't like this move by. But you probably figured that out already, right? Hey, you stick around. We've got a lot more to talk about today and I also want to encourage you. If you haven't already go to my website, sign up for the newsletter. Craig peterson.com/subscribe and get all of the latest and most important technology news in your mailbox.
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Facebook - Olympics - Amazon - Managed Services
07/16/2021
Facebook - Olympics - Amazon - Managed Services
2021-07-17 1122 Craig Peterson (2): Reporting on your neighbors is something you would expect from a socialist government, right? A communist government, a fascist government, any form of a socialist government. Now Facebook is doing exactly that, and it's going to interfere with our lives. [00:00:16] Facebook has now confirmed what it's calling a test of its "do-you-know" an extremist prompt, and that's got me really rather worried. [00:00:28] And it has a lot of other people worried as well. I was talking to a friend of mine who was also in the media biz, who was saying just over the last couple of weeks. He's received this a bunch of times. And I mentioned this to another friend of mine who is not in the media business. And he said that he got it as well. [00:00:48] And he said it was: are YOU an extremist? Which I think is interesting. First of all, an extremist is not defined. And of course, with these people who are monitoring accounts on Facebook, announce where their definition of extremist is going to be. The definition of an extremist by the government going to very political parties is going to Berry very, and we're talking about this anti-extremist prom, not just asking you if you are an extremist, like my friend said he got, but it's asking if you know someone else who is an extremist or who may become an extremist. [00:01:28] That is absolutely amazing to me. Amazing. It's bad enough that the government has picked winners. It has this whole section to 10, you've heard about before in the FCC rules that say we know if you're Facebook or Google, no one can Sue you for anything that you do. That is absolutely insane as far as I'm concerned, but there will be lawsuits on this they've already been filed. [00:01:58] Why would Facebook block thought that it didn't think was appropriate? The whole idea behind the first amendment? It isn't just that it applies to the federal government. It is a code of conduct for all of us. It's a code of conduct for these massive multimedia platforms. We should be allowing all kinds of speech, and we should not allow people to hide because what they've done now is they've moved to other platforms. [00:02:29] They don't do this kind of monitoring, and they are currently carrying on their speed. If someone comes out and says something that is racist, that is violent, that is, is threatening to commit a crime. We know about it. If it's out there in the open, we all have the crazy neighbor that everybody in the neighborhood knows about because they are, and they're saying it, Facebook is starting to block it. [00:02:55]We're just not going to know. And then what do they do? If you report someone who is saying some things that you think might be extreme, things like you should check voter ID at the voting booth. There are people that think that's extreme, and they report to you what's likely to happen. We know already that one of the things that many people who have been doing online is reporting people. [00:03:22] They don't like someone who is posting things that are violent or extreme and getting their stuff blocked and demonetized in some cases, but just plain old blocked. It's a great little tool for people to shut up. Other people, just shut them down, shut them up. They can't say it anymore just because they disagree with the content that's already in place. [00:03:48] Now, what's going to happen. If someone is reported as being not an extremist or on the road to extremism, what liability is there on Facebook's side? What liability is there with, for instance, the FBI or local one force. There are obvious things that should be reported to law enforcement. If someone's saying they're going to harm themselves or harm someone else, then we need to have a closer look at that. [00:04:14] If you actually have the belief that they will and can do that. I was a mandated reporter for 10 years because I was in emergency medical services. If I thought someone was trying to commit harm to themselves or someone else, I was mandated to report, but I have to think that I can't just use the reporting tools as a way to shut up my political opponents. [00:04:43] So someone reports another person as being an extremist of Facebook; Facebook then sends it to who are they going to send it to the FBI? What's the FBI going to do well. The FBI is mandated to report again in their reports and investigate. So what are they going to do for the investigation? It needs to rise to a level of the FBI thinks that this might be an illegal activity so that they can investigate it. [00:05:11] They can hopefully stop something before it happens. Something violent, something nasty. But what does the investigation take ground? I'm taking you all the way down the road here. The investigation is going to include them having a look at what you said, looking at the people who are within your social network. [00:05:32] So who do you. Two. Who do you follow? Who follows you? They may start looking at your phone. Who are you calling? What SMS messages are you receiving? Where are you hanging out? Where's your phone going every day? Who goes to that bar that you like to hang out at? Oh my goodness. You went to a gun range. [00:05:50] Who's at that gun range and so very quick. The investigation is all of a sudden roping everybody and all of your family members, all of your closest friends, anybody that might've liked something that you had said recently, even though it might not have been extremist. And so now, by having Facebook looking for extremists and people who might be on the road to extremism and counting on you to report them, they have opened up a can of worms. [00:06:22] Huge can of worms and remember too, with the FBI and with others, including the NSA and the CIA, they have this multi-hop rule. I think it's three hops now. So if they suspect you of something and what is suspect you, is it the fact that someone reported you as being an extremist, just because they disagree with you politically, they disagree with your religion. [00:06:48] Is that enough for them to suspect it. So now they can monitor not just your stuff, but anyone that has talked to you or liked you and anyone that has talked to them or It doesn't take long. I think that whole Kevin bacon thing, right? Everybody in Hollywood's within five degrees of Kevin bacon. In fact, I think everybody in the United States is within five degrees of Kevin bacon. [00:07:12] In other words, they can hop through opt to five people and connect to anyone in the country. That is absolutely huge. Absolutely huge. According to the verge. Facebook is doing this in response to the Christ church call for action campaign Christchurch. Remember in New Zealand, and there was an atrocity that was committed there. [00:07:41] These hate and dangerous organizations. That's what they're up to. They're trying to stop all of this. And it went back to March 2019. I think it was this attacking Christchurch. Obviously a terrible thing. People knew about this person and their radical approaches. The police have been informed, but nothing happened. [00:08:05] So now we want even more monitoring to go on. At least Facebook does. This is really a problem. There are all kinds of bad behavior online. We hide behind our supposed anonymity. Look at the terrible thing. Some people say online about you name it, right? Different people, kids in high school, either people in other walks of life. [00:08:33] It is terrible. So Facebook has this support page titled what I can do to prevent rattling? Radek radicalization. There we go. I knew I could say it. It's a really good question. Yeah. They've got links on that page to the life after hate exit USA program, which Facebook says help people find a way out of hate and violence. [00:08:57] I'm all great with that. I think that's a good thing. It's not a bad thing, but now having them report people that someone. In their non-inferior wisdom, decides might be hate speech or might be on the road to extremism because remember anybody that voted for Donald Trump is considered to be someone who's on the road to extremism or is an extremist. [00:09:22] For voting for him, the worst president ever. How many times have you heard that sort of thing? It has happened all of the time. And so we've got to be very careful about these open reporting things that are online. We have to be careful about reporting. Other people, it brings to mind two things. [00:09:41] One is two TV shows. One is one. That apple produced and you can watch, and it's all about this guy. You were a reporter, a news anchor, and he was supposedly sexually harassing someone, and yeah, he was to a degree, but the crime and the punishment were just totally out of whack. And one of my wife's favorite shows It was the good wife, and now it's a good fight. [00:10:12] That's what it is in season five, episode three. It is delving into this in a very big way. What happens when you report someone? Should they be reported? You've got to think twice about that. Even when, again, I was in EMS, what happens if I report someone potential neglect potential child abuse here, they can go through hell. [00:10:37] So be very careful. I don't like this move by. But you probably figured that out already, right? Hey, you stick around. We've got a lot more to talk about today, and I also want to encourage you. If you haven't already, go to my website, sign up for the newsletter. Craig peterson.com/subscribe and get all of the latest and most important technology news in your mailbox. [00:11:04]Craig Peterson: We're all excited about the upcoming Olympic games. And so are the hackers. Oh my goodness. I just finished reading a report by the cyber threat Alliance about what they're expecting to happen at these Olympic Games in Tokyo. [00:11:22] The Olympics have always been a huge target when it comes to the bad guys. [00:11:28] You might remember there have been abductions at the Olympics before where some of the Olympic competitors were held at gunpoint. Of course, we're not going to forget that one anytime soon. And looking back through the last few Olympics, there have been many different types of attacks, some more successful than others, frankly, but looking at this report, they were talking about the 2008 Beijing Olympic. [00:11:56] The attacks then were relatively limited. There were about 12 million cyber alerts per day. Now, this is part of the problem with cybersecurity. You get so many alerts. What do you do? How do you? Bond and none of those 12 million cyber alerts per day resulted in a successful attack. Now that was back in 2008; there were some scams like ticket scams are always are, but nothing big. [00:12:27] The next one was the London Olympics. In 2012 and the London Olympics, they had pretty much low-level attacks, and they didn't result in any real high-impact cybersecurity event. And the most significant event back in 2012 was evidence. The credible cyber threat against electrical infrastructure. That was, of course, in place for those Olympic games. [00:12:55] There was a distributed denial-of service attack on the power systems. Nothing much really happened, no real impact. Then 2016 Rio de Janeiro. They were starting to pay more attention to cybersecurity for very good reasons. Frankly, there was a large-scale denial of service attack that was carried out by this botnet. [00:13:21] Let me explain what that is. A denial of service attack is where you might have a website, for instance. Providing service to your customers that might be going there to look at your catalog, maybe buy some things. It might be a government agency. It might be an important part of the Olympics in this case and their critical infrastructure. [00:13:42] So denied service means you either knock it off the air, or so people can't get it. Or there's also the distributed denial of service attack. Now DDOS are the distributed ones where you have hundreds or thousands of computers out on the internet, all over the place that are trying to get to maybe the home page, maybe the purchase page. [00:14:09] And because they coming from all over the internet, they're very hard to shut. And that's where we have the botnets coming in, too. Botnets are groups of computers that have been compromised by hackers. So what they do now is they command, for instance, you're a home computer that you don't even know is under the control of one of these bad guys, your home computer now, issues or requests. [00:14:37] Hey, yeah, give me the home page of Olympics 2020. And off it'll go dutifully and try and get the homepage. That's all well and good. Suppose the load on the server is what they're expecting. You've been to sites, right? You hear something mentioned on the radio and like Craig peterson.com now, because I mentioned my website, Craig Peterson, S O n.com. [00:15:03] And there are people listening. Some of you guys are going to go to my website. Now the normal traffic of having dozens of new people go to my website is not going to bring the site down. However, here's the other side of this? What happens if maybe two or three times as much traffic as I expect is going to come to the site? [00:15:27]I've compensated for that. We should be able to handle that just fine. But what happens if all of a sudden it's a thousand times what we're expecting because there are 20, 30, 40,000 cases. Peter is out there that are trying to get my homepage or, in this case, the Olympic. Homepage. Obviously, the server's not going to be able to respond, and it's either going to crash or and I'm sure they set this up the right way. [00:15:53] It's going to deliver a message saying the servers overloaded right now. Try a little bit again. And by the way, if you get that message on a website saying, Hey, try it in a few minutes, please try it in a few minutes. Don't just hit reload because that's going to put even more load on that poor little overloaded server. [00:16:15] Now what they had here coming in 2016 at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics was a staggering 540 gigabytes. Per second worth of people requesting homepages. That is insane. That is a lot of bandwidth. And the fact that they apparently had that much bandwidth available coming in is also amazing, but also remember people are looking at videos. [00:16:46] Am I. To get the insider scoop, add some stuff happening behind the scenes. Now, many of the attacks in 2016 started before the Olympic games even. And what they were doing is attacking different parts of the Olympics infrastructure operationally. So it's a problem. It's a very big problem. They survived that whole thing. [00:17:14] And by the way, the Brazilian government ended up trying to protect the world cup back in 2014 as well by spending a whole lot of money and time on this. But remember, Even back in 2008, we were talking about 12 million cyber alerts per day. How can you staff up for that back then? It was back then. [00:17:37] We're seeing some of our clients being hit with hundreds of cyber attacks a minute and multiple per second, sometimes 10, 20, 30 per second. It's just incredible. What happens? In fact, divide those numbers out 12 million divided by how many seconds in a day. It just shows you how amazingly huge it is. [00:18:01] Now we have seen time. Past where a country like North Korea, for instance, doesn't like what Sony pictures are doing. So North Korea then attacks Sony pictures. And in the case of Sony, they downloaded a bunch of confidential information. They released it. They embarrassed some people now; hardly anybody got fired. [00:18:21] It's absolutely amazing. But anyway, What's happening right now is Russia. Think about all of the Russian attacks against our businesses and our critical infrastructure as a country; they have been huge, massive attacks. We have now Russia at a point where they are getting massive amounts of. built up. [00:18:50] Why? Because they submitted doped samples in 2019 to the Olympic committee. Yeah. So this was a the McLaren report released by the world anti-doping agency. Describe what we're really systematic effort by the Russian government to really undermine the drug testing process. We've also seen the Russians in the past because they've been caught doing this. [00:19:19] And the Chinese as well, putting in some of the competitors, particularly into things like gymnastics that were too young to compete based on the Olympic rules that were in place. So we had all of this happen during and after the 2014 Sochi winter Olympics. Guess what? Those restrictions on their athletes are still in place, and in place in a very big way; they will not play the Russian national Anthem at the ceremonies at the Olympics. [00:19:53] And they will not allow the Russian flag to be carried. In fact, their athletes have to carry a neutral. Flag. So expect some serious attacks from Russia against the Olympics. And remember the Olympics. There are no spectators. Everybody's going to be watching this thing on a line. So it's going to be interesting. [00:20:19] We'll keep an eye and let you know how things go. Stick around. Visit me online. Craig peterson.com. [00:20:27]We have really in front of us a critical warning. We're trying to figure out what we should do or to stop people from attacking us. That's a problem. What should we do? Many of us have gone out to managed services providers, and now they have let us down. Did you hear about the Kaseya hack? [00:20:47] It has been a huge impact on people. It's absolutely crazy. Or you heard about a thousand companies that got together, and they have hired a negotiator in order to negotiate the ransom with the bad guys that have ransom there. It is huge. It's huge. But let's talk about why this happened, because I think there are many things that you and I have overlooked here over the years; this ransomware God guy, gang called REvil, R E V I L has targeted cause say, or customers through. [00:21:32] Say, but it isn't just kissy customers. It's really cause, say, it is customers for the most part. Now your head might be spinning a little bit, but here's what's happening. I'm a business owner. You guys know that right now. Let's say that I don't do cybersecurity for businesses. That's what I do. [00:21:52] But let's say I make a widget. I was a widget maker, do not have enough knowledge about computers, to really do it myself. So let's say I've grown and I've got 20 employees. The odds are very good that my office manager is the one in charge of the computer. The office manager probably orders. [00:22:17] Computers probably tries to figure out what's going wrong. By the time of it at 50 computers or 50 employees, I've probably got a full-time it person who goes around and tries to take care of things. But before I've got that full-time IT person I'm probably going to outsource it. And by the way, a lot of companies, it's more like a hundred to 200 employees before they get someone who's really dedicated to it. [00:22:46] So then that awkward teenage stage between where the office managers trying to do it. And finally the office manager can try and hire an it professional. Is where they go and outsource it. You talk to various types of companies. What are in the industry called break, fix shops. That's usually the first stop which is calling them up saying I've got a broken computer. [00:23:12] Can you fix it? And maybe they can, maybe they can't. And then a lot of break fix shops have tried to level out their income so that they have predictable monthly income so that they can hire the right number of people for the number of customers that they have. Although I've got to say most of them are badly overbooked. [00:23:32]Now that they've hired those people, they this outsource break fix shop. They come in and say, okay here's what we can do for X amount per month per computer or employee, we will take care of those computers...
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The New Anti-Robocall Technology is Coming Online
07/16/2021
The New Anti-Robocall Technology is Coming Online
The New Anti-Robocall Technology is Coming Online I know everybody I talk to hates these robo calls. They're happening all of the time. What are we doing about it? The FCC has made some changes and they just went into place. So we're going to talk about STIR/SHAKEN, right? Of course the government has to come up with some really cute acronyms and that's what's turned, shaken are, but here is what's happened. We have the ability to over TCPI P send phone calls. In fact, in my phone, I have a phone that's hooked up to T-Mobile and it is using wifi. [00:00:38] So when I'm making a phone call, it is going over my wifi in the office or at my house or wherever. It doesn't even use the regular salad or network, unless it has to why? Because it's all TCP IP. And then on top of it, sometimes with LTE and now always with five G you are using TCP IP. So your voice is converted into a digital signal. [00:01:10] Right there on your phone. And it is handled as data, just like pretty much any other data would be handled. Now our cell phones, of course, for a long time have been digital and have been in coding it, but they have not been using it as regular TCPI peop. So what the federal communications realized is since most of the tracks. [00:01:35] That we have on our phone networks nowadays is actually internet traffic. It's TCP IP. Why don't we add a little bit to the protocol? And they came up with this whole new way of being able to track the originator of a phone call right now, if you have a landline, this is not going to benefit you at all. [00:02:02] And we're going to talk about the different carriers here, but they don't have to comply these landline operators for another couple of years. Although the FCC right now is circulating a petition and is trying to make it so they have to comply. More quickly, but the nation's largest phone companies have met this deadline that was set by the FCC to put this new anti robocall technology in place. [00:02:31] But I want to warn you guys that does not mean that it is going to stop all of these robo calls anytime. Soon where it's not going to stop, but you might have noticed that at the end of June, there was a noticeable cutback in some of these robocalls. Now these are the scammers that are calling us and are pretending that they are a local phone number, right? [00:02:59] Their biggest trick is, yeah, I've got the same area code and first three digits, I'll call it a prefix as you do. So you should answer that phone. They announced at the FCC last Wednesday that quote, the largest voice service providers are now using stir shaken caller ID authentication standards in their internet protocol networks in accordance with the June 30th deadline set by the FCC. [00:03:26] This widespread implementation helps protect consumers against malicious. Spoofed robo calls and helps law enforcement track the bad. So it, I think is a very good idea. It's a step in the right direction. It is going to help a whole lot at T and T Verizon T-Mobile and us cellular have all put these in place. [00:03:54] In March, the FCC denied petitions for deadline extension from Verizon and us cellular are saying that they didn't meet the high standard of undue hardship. I think that makes sense. You've got to force these guys. Sometimes Verizon was saying that they had a small area of their fiber based home phone network that would not be able to meet it. [00:04:17] So again, it's landline. Versus the home phone that work, many of us have it. Comcast provides it as well, but basically if it's it IP based, they didn't have any sort of exceptions. So Verizon is now exchanging the stir shaken enabled phone calls with wireless carer carriers. It represents about 80% of the U S wireless industry. [00:04:45] Verizon said this week, so 80%. Yeah, you should have seen a bit of a drop more than 135 million calls a day are currently being exchanged between Verizon and the other carriers with the number of calls that are being exchanged using this tracking technology grow. It's also been deployed on IP enabled wire line phone networks operated by Comcast charter at and T Verizon and many others. [00:05:17] So we're pretty happy about this. We'll see what ends up happening in general, but some care companies that carry a lot of robo calls are not yet required to follow the stir shaken technology and the rules around. Because there's an exemption for carriers with a hundred thousand or fewer customers. So that's going to be a bit of a problem, but think about how you have to roll out technology. [00:05:46] Rolling it out via these big carriers and doing that first is seeing where the holes are in the technology. What's not working properly. That's the way to handle it. And then by having the big carriers do it, they're going to bear the brunt of the expense. Because always right. Those big screen TVs used to be five to 10,000. [00:06:12] I remember $15,000. That's a very big deal. And then it goes down and down. Now you can buy them at Walmart for 300 bucks. So having the big guys do at first makes a lot of sense. It's going to prove the technology, improve the technology, drive the costs down, and then you can bet that these smaller carriers are also going to be required to do this fairly soon. [00:06:38] So the way the protocols are working is they are using tokens and to verify. The accuracy of the caller ID. So they're using public key cryptology. For those of you who know what that is using digital certificate, getting major us companies to adopt. It really was very big milestone. I'm very glad they finally did it by the way. [00:07:01] Stir, shaken. Ordered by Congress and FCC chairman as PI. You remember him? He did a lot of great things to help out communications, but he was only having voluntary compliance. And so it didn't lead to like widespread adoption. So this law really forced them into it. And they're now. So we'll see what happens. [00:07:28] Small carriers are exempt for now. Landlines. Aren't doing it. There's a lot of the TDM based stuff out there, but it's going to happen. There's also a gap in, at and T network right now. So we'll see. What ends up happening? Hey, I want to encourage you guys. If you have not already to sign up for my newsletter, I don't spam you, right? [00:07:50] I'm not one of these robo spammers that we see out there that are just sending all kinds of garbage all the time I put together. Usually six to eight, sometimes as many as 10 articles every week that I think you need to see. And when I put them together, make them available for you. It makes just a huge difference in people's lives. [00:08:13] I get thank you notes. Everybody. Not everybody, but I get thank you notes every week from people who read that newsletter and thing. They thank me for my time and all of the effort that we put into this. This is an effort of love by my wife and I, so do that. It will help. I give all kinds of great advice and warn you about things that are happening right now. [00:08:37] Just spend a minute, go to Craig peterson.com and you'll see right there in the home page, scroll down a little bit. There'll be a little red line at the top where you can put in your email address and I'll sign the app. And I will be sending you some special reports that are really going to help you out right away. [00:08:56] So do that right now. CraigPeterson.com/subscribe
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60% of Used Amazon Echos Can Be Compromised
07/15/2021
60% of Used Amazon Echos Can Be Compromised
60% of Used Amazon Echos Can Be Compromised Don't Sell Used Google Home, Nest, Echos, etc.! The majority of Americans, at least those of middle income and higher, have the smart devices in their homes. It's everything from the Amazon echo all the way up through our thermostats. Are these a good idea? And what do we do when we get rid of them? IoT, you might've seen that before. And it stands for the internet of things, and these devices are actually computers on them. Have even more than one computer. Some of them have a lot of processing power. You look at some of these speakers, like the apple; the big apple speaker has some amazing processing belt right into it. Of course, it also has a number of different ways that you can use it with Siri and everything else that's in it. But if you're going to sell these things, if you're going to sell your echo dot or other things, what should you be looking at? How can you do this? I had a listener who reached out to me. [00:00:56] This was only a couple of weeks ago, and he had a problem. All of a sudden, he was getting charges from Amazon for things. Did not order. So he asked me what's the right way to go here. And, being the coach that I am, I pointed him in the right direction, which was pointed him at the Amazon security people. [00:01:20] So he got a hold of them and spoke with them. It turned out that his Amazon echo that he had was what was used to order all of these items. And guess what? He didn't have that Amazon echo; he had sold that Amazon echo, and when he sold it if somebody bought it right, a used echo online and was using it to order things and have them shipped, not to his house. [00:01:53] Elsewhere. So it is a really big potential problem that has been looked into, and there is a group of researchers on the Northeastern university who bought. 86 use devices. And this is an article from Ars Technica, Dan Gooden, who wrote this and what he, what they found over the 16 months is that 61% of these devices that they bought 61% had not been reset at all. [00:02:33] No, that to me is not terribly surprising, but it's horrific. If you're trying to keep your data safe because think of what these smart devices have in them. They've got your location; they've got your wifi networks and passwords. They may have account information; what did you go ahead and link it to which accounts are on. [00:03:00] There are a whole bunch of things that can be gleaned from them. Now he, this listener, said that he had reset his device, and you can and should do that if you're going to give it to someone in the family, which is what I would recommend as opposed to selling it. And I'll tell you why. These devices have inside of them a particular type of memory it's called NAND flash memory. [00:03:32] And the memory is you can think of it in similar ways to your solid-state desk drive. Back in the old days, the operating system would say, go ahead and write this block of data. This 512 byte block out to Track 17 sector one, and it would go ahead and write it to track 17 sector. But the problem with NAND devices and most SSDs all of them, frankly, is that you can only write so many times before the memory goes bad and it can be 10,000 to a hundred thousand times. [00:04:13] And if you've ever wondered, why is this solid state disc so much more expensive than the other ones? Usually it's because it's using better memory that can take more. Cycles read cycles, do it all you want all day long, cycles is the problem. So they have come up with some technology that they build into these that does a level. [00:04:36] And what that means is track 17 sector. One is really located here at position X. And then if you right track 17 sector one, again, it's really located at a completely different position. Y so that the right now get leveled across the entire division. Okay. You don't really have to understand that in great detail, but I know there's a few of you guys being the best and brightest that really want to understand that a little bit better. [00:05:05] So that's why certain flash memory, certain SSDs are more expensive than others. Now here's the problem. When we're talking about these smart home devices, they're using this type of memory and NAND flash memory has a problem in Ohio has a few problems, but the biggest problem is it's not terribly reliable. [00:05:30] Especially the type of Nan flash they use in these inexpensive devices. So it's not terribly reliable. So it builds in check sums, right? So those out at the same time, so that when a treat him back, he can say, whoa, wait a minute. This is block is bad. And then it can recreate the block on that flash memory, which is really great. [00:05:52] Now, when you erase your device, It doesn't really, excuse me. When you reset your device, it doesn't really erase your device. I want you to think of windows as an example. You might know that if you delete a file from your windows computer, it's not actually deleted. It's actually still there. It just reallocates the space that file was using. [00:06:18] So it can use it for yet. Another file. So you you delete something it's still there. So when you're getting rid of that computer, what you used to do with a spinning hard disk is you would run multiple rights on that desk, solving entire desk. You'd drive zeros, you'd write ones, you'd write random patterns and you'd be. [00:06:43] And there are fancier ways to do it, the government, and it, many of the government contractors actually shred the desks. They have shredding machines, you can feed a whole computer into these things are just amazing. And then they send it off for recycling. What we do is we remove the platters inside the desk, the aluminum platters, and we melt them down in a furnace that we. [00:07:10] I still had furnace. Now there's nothing readable on it. Cause all comes out as a big blob of aluminum. One word. Resetting your device just like deleting a file on your windows. Computer does not actually remove it. And nowadays we're reusing this leveling technology in these SSDs and NAND chips. [00:07:34] We are really not getting rid of it. It might not be rewritten for a very long time. Because again of the leveling technology. So there's another process you can do known as off chip, which will require you to completely just assemble a desalt or the flash memory, and then mess around with it a little bit more. [00:07:57] But here's the problem. Even though the listener said that he had reset factory reset his device before he sold it. It still had all of his information on the device. So all of the bad guys had to do is remove those chips and. And right inside, there was his Amazon account information, password, everything, it needed, the key to make orders with Amazon. [00:08:29] Now that is a problem. If you ask me and it isn't just Amazon, this isn't just echo devices. We're talking about. The same thing can be true for that smart thermostat that you bought that Google thermostat, that smart. Doorbell that you have on the front of your house, though, those all contain this type of memory. [00:08:51] So what I tend to do is take a hammer to. If you don't have a, what do you call it now where you can melt it down a furnace where you can melt them down, specifically designed for doing this type of thing. Then here's what I advise you to do. Get a drill with L fairly large bit. You want at least a three-quarter inch metal bit that you can put on to that drill. [00:09:16] I used to use a drill press that we have and drill three. Large holes into the platter. So you don't have to open up the disc drive at all, but you'll notice there's a round section of the drive. That's where you want to drill into that round section of the drive, three big holes. And that disc is for all intents and purposes unrecoverable. [00:09:40] So the bad guys can't get your bank information. They ha they can't get it. That spreadsheet that you have with all your passwords, you not in person Best and brightest come on guys. And they can't get anything off of that. So when I'm talking about IOT devices, what do we do? What do we do? [00:09:59]Basically, I would say don't sell them. They're cheap enough. You can get an accurate. For well, under 50 bucks, 80 bucks at the high end for the ones with the video and everything built into them. When you're done with it personally, I would destroy it, physically destroy it. Cause that's the only way to make sure your data is not going to be. [00:10:25] Hey, stick around. You're listening to Craig Peter son. Make sure you get my newsletter. The free one is at CraigPeterson.com/subscribe.
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FBI Using a "Honeypot" for a Massive Sting Operation & Olympic Cybersecurity
07/14/2021
FBI Using a "Honeypot" for a Massive Sting Operation & Olympic Cybersecurity
FBI Using a "Honeypot" for a Massive Sting Operation & Olympic Cybersecurity This time, the FBI didn't just set up a sting, they set up a honeypot. And I talked about it with Mr. Matt Gagnon coming right up. Along with a couple of other major points this week, including what has been happening with the Olympics and cybersecurity. So here we go. [00:00:22] Matt Gagnon: Craig. Let's get into some of these topics, if you can. I had an interesting conversation yesterday with some folks about tech policy what's been going on censorship, et cetera. It's obviously a pretty common topic when you talk to especially conservative minded folk they're pretty upset about what's going on there there. And one of the, one of the people I was talking to who said to me that that's, somebody must have dimed them out that they had a Facebook post that was blocked because Facebook. [00:00:48] Was maybe notified that they did something and it was pulled down here that does that brings to mind this story about the, do you know an extremist prompt at Facebook? Are they testing something like that where you basically are diming out your neighbors and seeing stuff. And then all of a sudden you're reporting to the authorities at Facebook, that somebody has a opinion that is just not okay. [00:01:08] Craig Peterson: [00:01:08] Yeah, this, where could this possibly lead? This is a crazy, they are doing that. Facebook has admitted it and you know what shocked me the most about this isn't that? Hey, the two known extremist, or are you an extremist? And the Alicia. People C N until you reported on this, which just shocked talk to me, frankly, but they say this is part of a, what they're calling a redirect initiative. [00:01:35] So if you're looking at for something, they'll send you somewhere else. If they don't think what you're looking for is appropriate. And then they're asking you, are you an extreme Mister? True. Oh my gosh. People don't you read history? Where is this going to take us? I don't [00:01:54] Matt Gagnon: [00:01:54] know. It's a good question, Craig. [00:01:56]Clearly this is part of the evolving narrative here of exactly how social media companies are trying to moderate content and deal with their perception of what extremism is and whatnot. I, to me though, I have this question, maybe you can answer it. Is a market, just not at play here. With Facebook, continuing to do things like this and alienating like half the country, ha and beyond our country, right? [00:02:21] I This is happening all over the world, right? Is there not a market for a company that doesn't do things like this, that doesn't moderate it's its content like that? Can we not have something out there? That clearly, takes out violent content and real threats and just like sick, disgusting racism or whatever, but more or less is a free speech zone. [00:02:39] Otherwise you're telling me that couldn't survive. In today's world. What's wrong with that? Why can't it happen? Where's the market. [00:02:46] Craig Peterson: [00:02:46] If you're going to survive something like that as a startup, you need, first of all, the seed information, you need people to start signing up and you need money coming in. [00:02:56] And Facebook is doing everything that can anybody that's a startup that looks promising, whether it's WhatsApp or Instagram, they will be purchased. They'll be bought out. Now, these guys might be saying I'm going to have a free speech platform. It's going to be absolutely fantastic. We know what's happened with a couple of those already, but what Facebook does is they come along and say your company is worth about $50 million. [00:03:23] How about, I give you a billion for it and wildly over overvalued. Then Microsoft does much the same thing with potential competitors and drives them out of business or buys them out of business. So the Facebook is in a very interesting spot. Plus then there's the whole section two 10. And w you can shoo newspaper out of existence, but if a newspaper publishes a story and that story is not factually accurate, they go out of business. [00:03:55] So newspaper takes some time, tries to do some investigation, gets multiple sources to confirm, and then publishes in story. Facebook doesn't have to worry about any of that stuff. So why are they doing this in the first place? And they are wildly profitable to the terms of hundreds of billions of dollars. [00:04:14] And they just don't care. They have what they have morals, is what they called. And they're saying we cannot allow this to happen. And they are leading the country down the Primrose path. Although the numbers seem to be showing a lot of people ditching Facebook, and there are some other platforms that are trying to get charted, trying to go. [00:04:39] But it just isn't happening there. This is not a free market system and we don't have one in this country. We haven't had full free markets for over a hundred years now, entirely regulated. They pick the winners and specifically the government has picked Facebook and Google is to have those winners by providing them with legal cover. [00:05:02] I think we've got to pull back the kimono and looked at what's really happening. [00:05:07] Matt Gagnon: [00:05:07] Greg Peters on joining us as he always does on Wednesdays at this time, talking over tech topics, Craig, one of the other things that's happening in the world soon here is the Olympics. I've been watching a lot of Olympic trials, a lot of things on TV as we prepare for this, I'm an Olympics nerd. [00:05:22] So I love this stuff and there's obviously a lot of competition at the Olympics, but there's a different darker background of competition out there. And it's the cybersecurity experts trying to protect the infrastructure at the Olympics. Again. The bad guys, as you might say. And how does that play out? [00:05:36] Because this is, nobody's really reporting on it. Nobody talks about this much, but this is a really big part of this gigantic event. [00:05:42]Craig Peterson: [00:05:42] Think about what's happening in Japan right now. They are having these Olympic kind of, trials things. If you will, where we're losing. Four out of five of the basketball games. [00:05:53] I can't believe that part, but here's the bottom line. No rule be no spectators. Everyone in the world. That's interested in seeing the Olympics have to watch it online. Somehow all of the major news networks are getting their feeds and a lot of that going over the internet. There's a lot of exposure. We have all of the people who are competing, who are using special apps who have special electronic controls. [00:06:22] We had a huge problem last time around in 2018 with the Olympic winter Olympics, because there were some cybercriminals that managed to bring the whole thing down. So we are really on our toes worldwide. Now, including here in the U S what a target. It's a beautiful place for the bad guys to go make a name for themselves, ransom, et cetera, et cetera. [00:06:46] So there are whole teams. I've got a little bit of insight information here, but there's whole teams of people around the world that are monitoring. What's going on, are looking into everything that looks like they're being probed. Everyone. So 10 show hat. They are really staying on top of it. And these teams, Matt are some of the best in the world or teams I've worked with before. [00:07:11] So knock on wood. It'll be okay. But the Olympics, they are a huge hacking targets. [00:07:16]Matt Gagnon: [00:07:16] Finally, I want to also ask you about speaking of the bad guys and trying to take them on here. There's ways of trapping them and the FBI created an interesting one here. Google pixel is involved in this very interesting story here. [00:07:26]Did they use a honeypot to basically entice some of these people in and then trap them and then get them out of this work? [00:07:36] Craig Peterson: [00:07:36] It's Winnie the Pooh is such his head in there. He got the stock. The FBI came up with a real interesting concept that is a bad guys. Want to be able to communicate privately? [00:07:47] So they modified some pixels now and they did it in such a way that they turn off the cellular. They turn off, they remove cellular, they remove the GPS trackers, they removed a bunch of things. And then they sold these phones on the black market or out on the dark web saying, no, these phones are going to keep you safe because of this, that, and the other thing. [00:08:12] And we've got a special operating system. They called these devices and arm and the bad guys started using, and they didn't really do any research talking to them and they were recommending it to each other. These hacker groups, these criminal organizations that were smuggling people, right? Kidnapping people was selling arms on the dark web, et cetera. [00:08:35] They started using it for Nona miscommunications. What they didn't know. Is everything that was sent on these devices, everything that was done with them was sent to the FBI. So what some of us went to Interpol and others. So the concept is great. Let's turn off the cell. Let's turn off the GPS that's to remove them from the device. [00:08:58] The problem was they didn't know good law enforcement. Was in fact monitoring everything that was being said there more than 12,000 smartphones like this that were out in circulation and heavy use by the bad guys. And now you can buy one of your very own FBI monitored phones on eBay. People started to buy them because they are based on a Google pixel foray. [00:09:22] Custom firmware in them, which is a bit of a problem. And they do have arcane OOS as well, but people are trying to figure out why can't I get my phone to work? I just bought on eBay, but they have been shutting down major criminal organizations worldwide. Because of this honey pot, they really got stuck. [00:09:44] They got [00:09:44] Matt Gagnon: [00:09:44] them. It makes it basically, it's a way of, it's a way of trying to learn from it and it works ultimately. So Craig Peterson, our tech guru joins us on Wednesdays at this time. Unfortunately, Greg we're out of time, so we have to stop here, but again, you can hear them on Saturdays. Thanks a lot, Craig. [00:09:57] And we will talk to you again. Next [00:09:59] Craig Peterson: [00:09:59] week. All right. Take care. There's nothing that helps this show get out better than having you subscribe to the podcast. I appreciate you guys listening. I can't tell you how much, because it does help get the word out. And that's what I'm trying to do is help everybody understand what's going on. [00:10:16] Please, whatever platform you're listening on. Go ahead and subscribe. And if you wouldn't mind, give me a five-star rating. And the 800 pound gorilla is still our friends over at apple iTunes. Believe it or not when it comes to the ratings of these different podcasts. So if you could go there the easy. [00:10:38] Craig peterson.com/itunes. That'll automatically redirect you to my page on iTunes. Craig peterson.com/itunes. Oh, by the way, in case you didn't know, I'm also on YouTube now posting a lot of these podcasts as little videos. Yeah you'll see when you get there and that's at CraigPeterson.com/youtube. [00:11:01] Take care everybody. Bye bye.
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Facebook's Extremist Prompt Leads To... - What to Do About Ransomware?
07/13/2021
Facebook's Extremist Prompt Leads To... - What to Do About Ransomware?
Facebook's Extremist Prompt Leads To... What to Do About Ransomware? We got hacked again as a country and what's being done about it. What's the Biden administration doing? They sent us special Envoy over to Russia. Yeah, Senator former Senator John Kerry. But what's he talking about? The climate deal. This is hurting us badly here in the United States. It's hurting at least a third of our businesses every year. Just this year alone. Ransomware payments have gone up threefold. It is incredible. What's happening and he's doing nothing about it. And then we, so we've got to talk about this Facebook protest prompt that they've come up with now. Hey, do you know someone. Might be an extremist or it might be, become an extremist. Do you realize what's going to happen? If everybody's starts to reporting on everybody else? We already know that we've got these trolls out there that report people, that report posts just because they don't like the person. Now, what are we going to do? Start FBI investigations. Every time someone says someone is an extremist, just cause they don't like them. What is an extremist? Anyways, we get into that. So here we go with Mr. Jim Polito. [00:01:14]Jim Polito: Two things. I want to two things. I want to talk about one the weak and feckless response of Joe Biden to the latest hack by the Russians. But before we get into that, So Facebook really was asking you to rat out your neighbors like 1984, like George Orwell's, 1984, Facebook. [00:01:39] Admitted that they were asking people to identify extremists using the social media website. [00:01:47] Craig Peterson: [00:01:47] Yeah, they did. And you know what, Jim, this is shocking to me. We've looked at Google before and compared it to duck, duck go, and how Google just doesn't, it blocks things. CNN has been one of those similar, I don't even want to call it a news source. [00:02:02] But even CNN business reported this, but some Facebook users here in the us were getting prompts. If they were worried about someone that they might know might be coming an extremist. This is shocking to me. Absolutely shocked. And show them my wife likes to watch the good fight where, which is these are the lawyers. [00:02:28] And they tend to be very leftist. The latest episode, season five, episode three, she called me in, and then I had to look at this. They were dealing. This situation where we have now people reporting on other people and because someone who might've done something, and maybe you help them out a bit at one point in your life, all of a sudden the FBI is in your life to try to figure out what's happening. [00:02:54] They are asking you now to report on other people. This is crazy what this is going to lead to. And yeah, Facebook's doing it. And even CNN reporter. [00:03:05] Jim Polito: [00:03:05] Wow. We're talking with tech talk guru, Craig Peterson. So because people sent me screen grabs of it and things like that, that they were being asked if they knew I knew an extremist, and please define extra what's the definition of extremist. [00:03:22]I just talked about Joe Biden and the DNC, wanting to team up with a phone carrier. To monitor and correct anti-vaccination messages. Did you hear this one? I'm sure you did actually. I'll send it to you. I'll send it to you. This is it was from political. And that's why it wasn't from a Craig Peterson type website. [00:03:46] It was from Politico was Fred was running the websites. It dumb people like myself read. Okay. But anyway, Politico said that the DNC, the the Biden administration they want to scrutinize phone and social media messages for misinformation. And they're asking what do they call them? SMS short message service carriers. [00:04:13] They want them to they wanna have fact-checkers more aggressively work with SMS carriers to dispel misinformation about vaccines. That's a quite, that's quite a little propaganda outfit you got going there. Remember [00:04:28] Craig Peterson: [00:04:28] if you're sending a text message, that message is stored. Remember a Strzok and Paige, right? [00:04:34] The whole thing with the FBI lovers and their text messages showing up. If you're using your apple phone. And you're using messages to send messages to other apple users. If it's blue, it means it's encrypted end to end and they cannot monitor. They cannot report to. If it's green, which is an unfortunate choice of colors, that means it's sending it by this old protocol. [00:04:58] That was actually a hack of, for the cell phone industry. It's a green means it's in the clear, but the fact Tim there, they're going to monitor that. And then what are they going to do? Start prying into your life and everybody, it's. Wow. [00:05:15] Jim Polito: [00:05:15] Yeah. This is not good between that, the messages, all of this I'm fine with. [00:05:20]If the administration wants to get their message out there about vaccinations and this and that's fine but don't do it. Don't do it the way you're doing it. That's Orwellian truly is our Wellington. [00:05:33]Craig Peterson: [00:05:33] It's. It sets things up. For, if let's say you love Biden and we've got the all have the stab of then okay, fine. [00:05:44] What's so what happens if another Trump it's an, that you absolutely hate you want the next administration or the one after that to have this kind of information? [00:05:53] Jim Polito: [00:05:53] I don't. Yeah. I know. All right, let's get to, let's get to the latest with Vladimir Putin and with Joe Biden. I don't know if you saw the clip. [00:06:03] I don't have it here handy. Joe Biden. The other day, someone asked him a reporter, asked him about the latest cyber attacks and he tried to pull a card from his pocket, said, oh, I just got briefed on that. He was all over the place. Didn't know what to say. I'll have more to say about it later. That's. [00:06:21] Twofold one, it speaks to his cognitive ability, but two, it speaks to what is the response been from this government? He had the summit with him and said, here's 14 things. I don't want you to touch. And yet Putin turns around and touches [00:06:37] Craig Peterson: [00:06:37] them. Yeah, he sure does. The response. [00:06:42] And we, of course, Biden just sends an Envoy over to Russia meeting with Putin. John Barry, he's talking about climate change. [00:06:55] He's [00:06:55] not [00:06:56] Jim Polito: [00:06:56] talking about cyber attacks. He's talking about climate change. [00:07:02] Craig Peterson: [00:07:02] We, yeah. And we now have as many, I've seen numbers as high as a hundred thousand businesses that were part of this latest attack that came from Russia. This cyber attack, this ransomware. In fact, I know of a thousand businesses that got together and they hired an attorney in order to try and negotiate. [00:07:26] This is an attorney that negotiates with ransomwares right. We started the United States Navy to deal with ransoms coming in, out of the middle. Yeah, 200 years ago, the Marine Corps and the Navy, this is in saying what is happening. Trump of course put some pretty severe restrictions on Moscow in Russia to try and crack down on this. [00:07:51] And we had to remember, again, the old Biden administration saying things like, oh, I told him to stop it right. We have to respond. [00:08:06] Jim Polito: [00:08:06] I don't know. I'd like to think. Craig that there's some back channel stuff that your people, the guys like you understand and know about, and it's being done to slap him on the hand as the hand tries to reach over and grab again, I'd like to think that the really smart people on our side are doing that and send it the message without being public about it. [00:08:29] Cause I would have not have a problem with that, but I don't even feel like I don't even feel like that's how. I don't even [00:08:36] Craig Peterson: [00:08:36] feel like. We are a kind of slot them back at them. There, there aren't too many automated systems that'll do that. We're being hacked to hack back. The big problem with this is we're pretty darn insurers coming from Russia, but let's say that you're in the battle. [00:08:55] And someone's shooting that too. First of all, someone shooting at you, where it's coming from inside of BAE systems has systems that are put onto our helicopters that notice exactly where the fire is coming from and return fire automatically. Okay. And wouldn't that be great. The problem is Jim that somebody hacked your home computer. [00:09:17] It's now part of what's called a bot net. Somebody had somebody else's computer, same bot, and there may be a different one on and on. There are hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide that have been hacked. So the Russians go into a computer in Vancouver, BC, which is then connects to a computer in Vancouver, Washington that connects to Washington DC. [00:09:38] And it took trying to hack. If you returned fire, you're going at somebody's home computer in Washington. And you get it. And then that home in Washington state, of course now let's say the FBI shows up and says, okay, something's coming from here. We've got to see your computer. They get on the computer. [00:09:56]Guess what? It's now in Vancouver, BC, which is now an international problem. And who knows, maybe they went to China first. Maybe they went somewhere else. The only way we can do this is serious economic pressure. We have. Fight back that way, because this is the exact same type of thing that happens in a war with skirmishes going on. [00:10:19] And they are winning by taking money. We're trying to negotiate with them right now and say, okay, we'll just pay you $70 million. If you unlock all of these computers, it's insanity. We keep doing the same. [00:10:34] Jim Polito: [00:10:34] Over and over again, Craig I got to run. How can folks get more information from you? And I know that you talk about these things on the weekend show. [00:10:42] Exactly. [00:10:42] Craig Peterson: [00:10:42] Just visit Craig peterson.com. "Peterson", S O N. [00:10:47] Jim Polito: [00:10:47] Craig and I guarantee you, I will celebrate Canada day next year. We won't let it. We won't let it be past Greg. Thanks so much for your time, buddy. [00:10:56] Craig Peterson: [00:10:56] Thanks.
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How the "Billionaire" Space Race Will Affect You
07/12/2021
How the "Billionaire" Space Race Will Affect You
What Does the "Billionaire" Space Race Mean to You? We have Sir Richard Branson up in space. The race of the billionaires, Jeff Bezos, of course being another one. What does this mean to us? Does this mean that space is solely for the rich? Is it going to help our businesses, our economy, what's behind all of this, and where are we going? That's exactly what I discussed this morning with Mr. Christopher Ryan. Let's find out how it's going to affect you and me. [00:00:29] Chris Ryan: Yeah, Richard Branson is in the news day, Sir Richard Branson to you, Craig, as he reached the outer space and was able to bring individuals up there and do in your view, is this going to be a thing where commercial space travel is going to be something that we see and have access to. No average Americans. [00:00:52] To me, I feel like it's taken decades for even this type of space flight to take place. And I feel we are still so far away from an average Joe, like you, or I will be able to afford to go into. The areas almost to outer space. [00:01:12] Craig Peterson (2): [00:01:12] Yeah, the black-blue yonder, as it were. First of all, let's get something straight here. Sir Richard Branson made it almost into space, correct? They were 80 kilometers out. A hundred is generally considered. But where we're headed here is not really getting into space, which I think is totally cool. Where we're headed is being able to get up to those sorts of altitudes and then travel around the world. [00:01:39] So we could see a trip from Boston to Tokyo taking just a few hours, rather than thinking the better part of a day. [00:01:48] Chris Ryan: [00:01:48] Yeah. And very often, when we see these types of things, I mentioned this earlier, it leads to thoughts of what else is possible. And you may look at this and be like, oh, okay, it's these fancy-free billionaires trying to say they wanted outer space when they're actually, in the. [00:02:04] Area between the black and the blue and achieving levels of weightlessness, et cetera. But the time that traveled took place and the propulsion of the flight indicates that higher speed. So travel is right around the corner. And to many, that may be as attractive as the actual joy ride aspect of it. [00:02:25]You're going to be going at a great, at a greater speed. So some people that's not going to be what they want, maybe there'll be able to achieve elements within the aircraft in which people don't feel as though they're traveling at the speeds that they are certainly in this particular. [00:02:40] A joy ride. That is exactly what they wanted. They want you to feel the propulsion. They want to feel the waitlist. They want all those elements. As we know, most commercial airline folks don't want to feel like they're dry; they're going 500 miles an hour. They want to feel. [00:02:55] Relaxed during that. [00:02:57] Craig Peterson: [00:02:57] And you have the problem of having the Sonic boom when you're lower in the atmosphere going those higher speeds you don't hear. But I think what we're ultimately looking at is as a whole change where our speeds really get into higher altitudes. And if we look at the history. [00:03:15] In the tech business, we will remember when these flat-screen TVs, oh my gosh. 48 inches, only $15,000. And, of course, they'd never be achievable. We'd never be able to own those things, but people bought them. The people that had the money. Now you go to Walmart, and you can buy one of those for 150 bucks. [00:03:35] That's where this is all going. All of these people competing with the billionaires in space. They are funding the research and development for the types of flights. You and I, Chris, will be able to afford it. It's not going to be as expensive as the Concord was. It's not going to be cheap, but it is going to provide real. [00:03:57] And I think that's a fantastic thing. Yeah. Now [00:04:00] Chris Ryan: [00:04:00] the 90 inch TV is something that is not out of the realm of possibility for individuals creating basically their own movie theaters to view sporting events, political shows, and movies, as they wish to in their home. And you're absolutely right. I The there, and as I mentioned before, this. [00:04:16]Creates an environment where we start to think further about exploration and what is next; very often, people will look at the current state of technology and say this is where we're going to be. What more could we possibly do, but to scientists and inventors, it's always wondering what is next and what is possible, looking at the optimal, and figuring out a path to get here. [00:04:42] Yeah. [00:04:42] Craig Peterson: [00:04:42] And w where we're looking right now, NASA is working on this as are others, is having a space station in orbit that is designed for refueling and trips. So if a Virgin can get you up into lower space as work or one of these others, and then from there now you get onto another ship to go to Mars, or maybe the moon colony. [00:05:06] The biggest problem we have in the largest expenditure of fuel is getting to. So point that at that edge. So we're going to be able to see tourism in space that normal people could afford. And that's going to allow us to colonize other planets, which of course, has been a wish of Elon Musk and many others for generations. [00:05:28]What happens if we have another catastrophic event here that we. With the dinosaurs that wipes out everything, we're gone, but this is really the next step. And it's absolutely amazing. I'm so excited about what's ahead. [00:05:46] Chris Ryan: [00:05:46] Do you think we are from that? Cause you mentioned this had been the talk of generations now at this point and decade after decade, even this type of space travel to lower space has been talked about. [00:05:57] And two commercial flights have been talked about for decades. At this point, I feel like we're still really far away from anything of that nature taking place. And I'd be surprised to see colonization until the latter portion of my lifetime. [00:06:13] Craig Peterson: [00:06:13] Yeah, you're probably right about that. However, as far as the moon goes, I think we will see. [00:06:20] Stop starting, but it's not going to be your regular person. As you had mentioned, it's going to be the scientist. It's going to be the real explorers who are going there. But the original plan for the moon launch in the sixties was to have a refueling station in orbit around them. And that's been in the back of everybody's mind for a long time. [00:06:38] I think that within the next 20 years, we will have that station up in space. That is the halfway point of here. That you can go to, and from there, continue onto the moon. And Elon Musk is really into Mars. And I don't know; he might just jump past everybody else who was there. There's a massive rocket that he's building to truly colonize Mars. [00:07:03] He's thinking he's going to be doing this. You ask him, and it's within the next year or two, but the scientists are saying within the next five years, So we might be surprised because technology can jump just like [00:07:15] Chris Ryan: [00:07:15] that. Yeah. Then, in conclusion, I think that this goes to a broader message about where we are at as Americans. [00:07:24] And we spend all this time fighting over the political scraps instead of having a vision. Towards the future and the things that we can achieve together as Americans and whether it's a disease, whether it's expiration underwater into outer space the new inventions like we need to get back to a place where we're not focused on the little things that divide us as human beings but focused on what we want to achieve and talking about that. [00:07:54] And not. Figuring out which Mame is the best to mock Trump or Biden, but to focus upon our society's mutual and shared goals. And to me, this type of stuff, that's talk about tech, the topic about inventions, the talk about what we could do, what we could optimize, optimize moving forward. [00:08:14] That needs to be at the forefront. And that's what people are looking for in politicians too. They want somebody that's going to say; this is what we want to do. This is what we're going to do. And this is how we're going. I think we've [00:08:25] Craig Peterson: [00:08:25] got to move towards looking to that future. Being excited about it rather than having the parties digging up. [00:08:32] Tribalism. [00:08:33] Chris Ryan: [00:08:33] I agree that Craig has always thank you so much. Take care. Craig Peterson host of tech talk on news radio six, 10 and 96, 7 Saturday and Sundays at 1130.
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Being Green Now Includes New Nuclear Plants - It's The Only Solution
07/09/2021
Being Green Now Includes New Nuclear Plants - It's The Only Solution
Being Green Now Includes New Nuclear Plants - It's The Only Solution Whether or not, you believe there is a climate crisis or this man caused the only thing that's been constant here on earth has been change. And particularly the weather it's been much hotter and much colder than it is right now. I do believe that we have climate crises from time to time. [00:00:24]We know that there were cavemen and women living during the ice age. And I think they might call that a crisis. We've also had times where people. We're going and having a great life, the garden of Eden, you might think where the carbon dioxide levels were much higher than they are today. And that means the plants were greener. [00:00:49] They grew more verdun to everything else. Okay. So there is a whole lot of change and it's been going on for. Now the statistics I've seen that make a lot of sense to me, show that there is warming going on. Now that doesn't mean that we're not going to about to drop into an ice age or mini ice age. Heck we had one of those back in the day. [00:01:14]In the 18 hundreds or 17 hundreds over in England, a little mini ice age. So it happens and it swings both ways, but I remember very well back in the seventies, everyone was saying, oh, we're about to go into an ice age. We've got to do something about it. And we had science telling us that we needed to spread oil on the polar ice caps and on the Sahara desert in order to. [00:01:42] Get more heat to stay here on the earth. Or we were about to enter a major ice age. Look it up. It's there. You might not want to use the Google because they do sensors stuff pretty heavily that they don't want you to see. So use duck go, but even Google. Has articles on this. I guess they're not all bad. [00:02:04] So we've got to be very careful when we're looking at solutions that maybe are less than 1% our fault. In fact, it looks like it's far less than 1%. Our fault global warming is usually from the sun and the sun goes through cycles. So you have to be careful about those cycles and what you know, what's going on. [00:02:29] So what I don't want to see us do is severely hurt ourselves. Hurting our economy is hurting people. People end up just struggling and in major depression and committing suicide. Look at what happened with the lockdowns that we just had and the year 2020. It was a bad thing. So do we really want to need jerk and cause serious harm to a lot of people. [00:02:58] Now I am an environmentalist, the original type of environmentalist, right? Duck hunters were probably the most original of all of them and hunters in general, where duck hunters bought thousands of acres of land and put it into production. So that it could be left in its pristine state. So I'm really into all of that stuff. [00:03:22] I'm think that makes sense. I don't think it makes sense for government to do it, but I think it makes sense. So here's what I'm struggling with right now. We've got people who used to drive Prius's who are now driving electric cars. Electric cars are highly toxic. They're using minerals that are mined in toxic places. [00:03:48] They're using processes to process those minerals that are toxic as well. And it's been done in countries that are not controlling their toxic waste. No, even the plastic in the oceans, it's coming from seven rivers, none of them in the United States, but all of them, India, China, those are the primary ones. [00:04:13] So what are we supposed to do with these cars? It's not only toxic in manufacturing, the cars and their batteries. It's toxic to dispose of them. We have no good way to dispose of the Carter, the batteries from your test. No good way to do it. Highly toxic, much, much worse, much, much worse than a diesel Humvee. [00:04:37] So if we want electric cars and I can see why, I love the idea of electric cars. Absolutely love them. They're faster. They're comfortable. They're quiet. And they don't have tailpipe emissions. Now, remember that it's tail pipe emissions. It's not they're green because they're anything but green don't let anyone fool you into thinking that they are. [00:05:01] How do we make the electricity? We've got a lot of people running around, out there who are saying when it comes to electricity and electrical generation, nuclear is terrible. It's going to kill us all. And they're thinking about Jane Fonda running around there, the China syndrome movie from the seventies, and they think of Chernobyl. [00:05:20] That is technology in both of those cases. That's 50 to 70 years old. The new nuclear technology can no more have a meltdown than a ball that set at the bottom of a mountain is going to roll uphill. The new nuclear technology that we have today is not in widespread use because the regulations that are in place from the federal government still require 1950s to 1970s technology. [00:05:55] They don't take into account this new technology, six generation nuclear. They cannot melt down because they use basic physics to keep control. Of the nuclear reactions and what happens afterwards? Look at Chernobyl. Look at the China syndrome stuff. Look at what happened at three mile island and all of those cases, they had systems that had to be active systems. [00:06:20] They had pumps to pump cooling water in. What happens then when you don't have power like Fukushima, they have their generators so low that any sort of a flood. Would make those diesel generators shut down and then you have the meltdown, like they had it Fukushima, reactor. None of that is possible with the modern reactor. [00:06:45] On April 30th, the Indian point nuclear plant in New York. This is an article from a Yahoo news was shut down 30 miles north of New York city. So it had provided electricity. The in fact, the overwhelming majority of New York city's carbon free electricity for decades, union jobs for a thousand people, federal regulators said the plant was perfectly safe, but Andrew Cuomo. [00:07:14] The brilliant man running the state of New York is a key figure behind this. He said that the shuttering of this nuclear plan brought us a big step closer to achieving our aggressive, clean energy goals. These new nuclear plants, aren't going to melt down. And by the way, these new nuclear plants generate almost no way. [00:07:38] After 20 years, the nuclear material is replaced and recycled. It is recycled back into other nuclear power generators. It, this stuff is absolutely amazing. So what happened after Cuomo shut down the Indian point nuclear power plant? The first full month, according to again, AP associated press the full and they are no conservative. [00:08:06] The first full month without the plant has seen a 46% increase in the average carbon intensity of statewide electric and generation Y while they had to switch over to natural gas, they burning natural gas. They had to switch over to coal in some cases, right? What are they going to do? New York generated 9.3 terawatt hours, electricity and average carbon intensity of 174 kilograms per megawatt hour may was the first month after two year process of shutting down Indian points to one gigawatt reactor. [00:08:47] Okay. So one gigawatt out of 9.3 terawatts okay. That's 9,300 gigawatts. Okay. So it's a small percentage of the actual electricity that was generated. And yet it accounted for so much clean energy that it ended up changing the amount and the amount of carbon emissions by 46%. When you look at it from a clean energy generation standpoint, it's absolutely amazing nightmares should have seen coming and German nuclear power. [00:09:21] In Germany provided about a third of the country's power in 2000, and then they had this green party thing, it says, oh, we're all against, this is terrible. And so they can get a lot good. And they managed to close plans, citing health and safety concerns. So they went from a third of their electrical power coming from nuclear to 11%. [00:09:45] We have two. Smart, not people we absolutely do. There's a recent paper that showed over the last two decades where we've been closing nuclear plants slowly but surely led to our carbon dioxide increase of 36 mega tons a year with increased air pollution predicted to kill 1100 people annually. Does that make sense to you guys? [00:10:11] What's going on. So giving the stakes of global warming that these same people are constantly talking about why are we doing what we are doing? Why is there so much hostility to it? I've found a really interesting quote in here and it's from someone you might've heard. Yeah. Alexandria, Ocasio, Cortez. [00:10:38] Remember her green new deal that would end up costing every American family, $120,000 plus after some initial hesitation now AP is reporting that AOC has said her green new deal leaves the door open for nuclear power. Jeremy Corbyn over in the UK. You've heard of him, his labor party and the former Brazilian president Luis de Salva. [00:11:02] And Bolivia's ecosocialist former president evil. Miralis have all said that nuclear is an idea whose time may well have. So let's pay attention here. Let's wake up. Okay. We've got to make sure that we are doing the right thing. Oh, and the writer of this AP story. Yeah. He's the author of the socialist manifesto, the case for radical politics in an era of extreme inequality. [00:11:35] So I have some hope. This guy is a radical socialist slash communist, frankly, fascist. And even he thinks we need to give the new nuclear another chance. [00:11:48] Hey, check me out online. Subscribe right now to my newsletter. Get it every week. Doesn't cost you a dime. I have a free newsletter. Craig peterson.com/subscribe.
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Microsoft Windows 11 vs Apple Cybersecurity - Which Should You Use?
07/09/2021
Microsoft Windows 11 vs Apple Cybersecurity - Which Should You Use?
We've talked about a lot of the cybersecurity problems. I'm going to talk now about what Microsoft is doing with Windows 11, a lot of hardware out there right now, anyways, will not run windows 11. So what is Microsoft doing to solve this problem? Microsoft has been blamed for many of the problems we've had with computers and computer security for a long time. And between us, they're doing these things that caused security problems because of us, because of the users of windows. Microsoft seems to continually try and support the older software and older hardware till very recently, you could still run windows XP 95, 98 programs on your windows machine, on your new windows. [00:01:05] Back then Microsoft. I had shoe horned in the internet protocols and tried to, make it secure. They ended up buying. I'm trying to remember now, cause I worked on this code. Way back when I think it was the spider implementation of TCPI P out of Ireland, that Microsoft ended up using as a base. [00:01:25] And I fixed quite a few bugs in that, and there were many more to come, but I wasn't focused on cybersecurity back then on the software. And frankly, most people weren't Microsoft just wanted. Out and they wanted to make sure they were compatible with the older software. So where we, you and I are part of the problem. [00:01:47] We complain when Microsoft comes up with something that's not compatible. And as a programmer, I complain every time. But not just Microsoft, but apple or Linux or whatever it is, comes up with a new interface, a new quote, better way of doing things unquote with their systems, whatever it might be. And, I guess it's nice to bellyache, but in most of these cases, they're making changes to help make the systems better and often better means more secure. [00:02:23] And that's what they're doing right now with Microsoft windows 11. So they had an announcement here this last week, talking about. A requirement for a TPM chip. Now TPM means trusted platform module, and the basics of a trusted platform module are to have on the chip and most. So the case is the modern Intel chips. [00:02:53] So ones that have been out for four years or so, as well as some of them more modern AMD chips have this TPM built in. And what the TPM is as trusted platform module is a small amount of storage that gives you the ability to store keys and to do basic cryptography. Now they're requiring the TPM 2.0 implementation for windows 11, which makes sense. [00:03:27] It has a little bit stronger encryption in it, but in the windows world, what this is going to do is make sure that the brute force attacks that can happen at boot time don't work. So they're trying to brute force the way into that trusted platform module and to make sure that the rest of the boot is not interfered. [00:03:54] So that's all Microsoft is going to be doing with it. It that's a good thing, frankly. I think it's a very good thing for them to start using this. Many of us have computers already that have TPMS built in and the TPM 2.0, and with MTPM sitting there, it isn't doing us any good. So Microsoft is going to take care of that. [00:04:16] So I'm happy about that. It's going to help with secure. But it's not very good, frankly. That is only a small part of the security problem you and I have because our security problem extends to all kinds of things. So let's talk about what apple has done because. Yeah. You know what I'm about to say, right? [00:04:39] I'm about to say that apple has done it correctly. The TPMS wish they could be. They dream of being an apple T2 because this T2 processor that apple has had for awhile has a lot more functionality. It has what apple calls, their secure enclave processor. So if you have an iPhone, for instance, that does face ID or fingerprint ID. [00:05:06] All of that information is stored in this secure enclave. That means it is not sending your face up to apple. It is not sending your fingerprint up to apple is not sending it anywhere. It keeps it locally on the desk. In fact, this apple T2 chip also processes all of your disc activity. So your solid state storage that's on your device. [00:05:34] Goes through this T2 chip audio, video image, signal processing, SSD controller, the secure enclave, AEs cryptography engine and the system management controller all live inside this T2 chip. Okay. So a TPM, like what Microsoft is going to be using is kindergarten compared to what apple is. Which doesn't mean there aren't bugs or haven't been bugs in the T2 chip, but it is designed for security and it's a really cool, and it has this other function that the enclave micro with the Encore, the microphone is always disabled. [00:06:16] Whenever the lid is shut on that laptop. Because again, it goes through this T two chip. So it's helping to preserve your privacy. Even if the phone were to be hacked, it couldn't get at it because the electrical signals for again, audio video the disc controller, all go through the apple T2 chip, and apple has tried very hard to try and make sure that they are secure. [00:06:47] So maybe Apple's slipped a little bit recently, but their T2 chip is absolutely. I'm going to quote here professor Buchanan he calls it a work of art compared with this loan. TPM chip is what he says. Oh, absolutely amazing. It is a problem. In fact, do you remember this whole list, Sonya and hack? [00:07:11] A couple of years back where Estonia had issued ID cards to everybody and they could be used for financial transactions, et cetera. And about half of them were completely hackable. Again, it was a T2 chip flaw because they were not generating proper random keys when they were making these codes. So it's interesting. [00:07:37] We could really get into that and the history of it and the NSA and what they did, blah, blah, blah. But it's really a good thing to follow. This is the TPM chip. Thank goodness. Microsoft is raising the bar again, and that means that the leader. Microsoft surface tablet, the high-end one, the $5,000 tablet. [00:07:59] Which does not have a TPM 2.0 chip will not work with windows 11. So keep an eye on this. I'll keep an eye on it for you as well. The, this means basically that app, that not apple, that Microsoft is going to have to change up his game a little bit, and they might decide to not require TPM 2.0 because even hardware Microsoft has been selling does not support this very baseline. [00:08:28] Primitive cybersecurity that basically only protects your booting. Okay. So again, apple wins whole hands down now. You're I think you're starting to get the idea of why I recommend apple over anything, Microsoft and now apple making their own chips makes me really happy. They'll be able to be even more secure. [00:08:50] I'm using an M1 based apple mini right now, and I am just amazed at how good. This little device is very fast and quite secure. All right, everybody stick around. There's a whole lot more to talk about and we're going to get into it in some detail all here, but if we really want to fight the climate crisis, we've absolutely got to embrace nuclear power. [00:09:19] Hey, make sure you are on my newsletter list. I have a free newsletter. Go to Craig peterson.com/subscribe and get that every week.
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Do You Use Outsourced I.T.? Odds Are You're at Risk of Ransomware
07/09/2021
Do You Use Outsourced I.T.? Odds Are You're at Risk of Ransomware
You might've heard me talk about this already, or you heard about it elsewhere. This US technology firm is called Kaseya. They're headquartered in Miami and they are used by businesses and governments around the world. And they're spreading ransom. A week ago on Friday, a flood of ransomware hit hundreds of companies around the world. [00:00:25] We're thinking now it may have been thousands. We don't have good numbers yet, but we're talking about grocery stores, public broadcasting schools, national railway system. They were all here. With ransomware. Now this is the modern ransomware, we think which encrypts your files, but also poles your data. So that later on, it can extort money from you. [00:00:55] Okay. Very bad stuff. It really caused disruption in Sweden. They was incredible and forced hundreds of businesses to close. Now, every one of these victims had something in common. They had network management and remote controls, software developed by casinos. Now cause say it is used by, I think their their counters like a hundred thousand customers. [00:01:25] So it's used by a lot of companies worldwide and they make software that allows other companies. So a third party there's yet another company here allows them to monitor that third party companies computer. So let me just lay this out for you. Here's how this works. You're a small business. You have it people, but they're busy just trying to keep windows up to date. [00:01:55] And they're also trying to help your people understand how best to use computers, evaluate new software. Doing things, the, it, people should be doing, cyber security is a major specialty nowadays. It's something that you have to focus heavily on. And as you focus, you're still getting behind. [00:02:16] So as that small business with a couple of people, maybe there's one person that has to deal with computers, right? It's often the office manager, that person. Now needs help when it comes to cyber security. In fact, that person needs help when it comes to keeping these computers up to date, because there's patches from Microsoft, for the operating system, for all of the Microsoft 365 stuff, there's patches for all of the Adobe software there's patches for you. [00:02:49] You've probably gotten QuickBooks or some other accounting software that needs patches. It's just difficult. If not impossible, to keep up with all of this. And then, your users are probably using Google Chrome. They might be using safari or some other browser, those off to be kept up to date. So one that small business person does is they go to a managed services provider and they say, Mr managed services provider would you take care of all of my computer problems for me? [00:03:20]And off they go, right? The managed services provider, maybe they have a few different ways of working, but maybe they go ahead and they say here's what we'll do for a fixed amount per month per computer or per employee. We will take care of your computers for you. So we'll go ahead and patch them, keep them up to date. [00:03:40] If they fail, we'll fix them. We'll replace parts in them, all of that sort of stuff. That makes sense to you. So they contact this managed services provider who takes over their network. How does that manage services provider? Run the network. They don't do it the same way that small business used to do it. [00:04:01] They can't afford to, if they're going to charge you cheap money, they are using what's called an RMS. And the RMM in this case, we'll go ahead and it will remotely manage all of these computers for the managed services provider for that it outsourcing company. So it'll check the releases of software to let them know, okay, here's what we need to upgrade, et cetera. [00:04:31] In fact, it'll even do the upgrades most of the time. And then when you call in or you file a ticket, that also goes into the RMM. So they have a full history of what's happened. What's going on over there and they can hire cheap people that don't understand computers. And for most businesses, they think that's just fine, by the way, this is my nemesis. [00:04:52]We don't use Kaseya, but that MSP is using cassette. It might be using solar winds for some of this stuff. It might be using some of these other products. Now, the reason we don't use them is because all of them have failed our security test. So my company is called mainstream and we. Are a managed services provider, a managed security services provider to be more exact. [00:05:22] And we've been doing managed services work since the early 1990s for other companies. And so we've tried every major player in the game out there. We've used them. We tried them. We tried to figure out, okay, is this going to work? And we've looked for flaws in their design, major flaws, major security flaws. [00:05:44] And every one that we have found major flaws with, obviously we canceled. So we done basically a 30 day trial and we canceled them. Connect wise you name it. Okay. Major flaws and this company, cause also has major flaws, but you, the small business owner, you, the small business office manager, you did not choose. [00:06:10] You had nothing to do that you hired an it outsourcing firm and, seemed to make sense at the time. And it probably does make sense, but that it outsourcing firm is in what we in the industry call a race to the bottom. They have to get their costs down to a couple of bucks a month per person. [00:06:30] That works for you. Do you think they can really do a good job for a couple of bucks a month? No, obviously they can't. So you get companies like mine that we use people that are well-educated that all have. All of our people have major cybersecurity training. All of our people know. How to fix the problems. [00:06:53] And we run scans daily on all of our customers to check and see what's up, what needs to be upgraded or what needs to be fixed, what needs to be changed. Does that make sense to you guys? So that's what we do. And that's why there are nemesis, right? It costs us. Or what we charge basically is $125 a month per. [00:07:15] Person and we'll keep the computers secure. Nothing's perfect. But we have yet to be breached in those 30 years. So we'll keep them up-to-date and we'll have the special advanced malware protection stuff on them and every yeah. Thing else. But these other guys that are out there, our nemesis, they're not charging 125 bucks per person. [00:07:37] Or per computer or it's more for server? No. They're charging 25 bucks or 50 bucks a person there. And they can do that because they can afford to do that. They don't have what's necessary in the backend to keep their customers secure. So these probably thousands of companies we know of at least hundreds have been hacked. [00:08:05] With ransomware because of a decision they made about a company, this it outsource provider that they just didn't know enough about to be able to even evaluate that in a nutshell is the problem with cyber security today. Even if you were to try and hire people to work for you and build out your cyber security infrastructure at your business and running it. [00:08:35] How could you evaluate those people or the tools they use in 10 real quick. And Casia told all of their direct customers to immediately turn off all of the systems that had anything to do with Kaseya. Okay. This is going to happen again, people, and it's going to happen again and again, and I get it. [00:08:58] A lot of small businesses can't afford people like me. I don't know what the best answer is, but we're going to talk about Microsoft and their answer.
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The IRS Was Hacked? Was Your Data Stolen?
07/09/2021
The IRS Was Hacked? Was Your Data Stolen?
Hey, do you trust that all of the information you share with the IRS is being kept safe? As a general rule, it probably has been, but what we're finding right now is maybe it hasn't, maybe there's been a leak. There is a lot to talk about when we're talking about the IRS. [00:00:19] They of course have all of the information that they can get their hands on. They're already overloaded and we've got the Biden administration now looking for even more data to go to the IRS. You probably already know that if you do a transaction at a bank above $10,000, that it gets reported to the IRS and probably the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, and any other three-letter agency that you can think of course, that doesn't include the BATF. [00:00:52] Because they're not a three-letter agency as much as they want to meet, but the IRS has records on everything, already that they know what your social security number is, what your name is, what your address is. They also have information about. The business you work for or businesses you work for, they know what you do for a living. [00:01:13] They know that you have debt and what that debt is. They know your business relationships, your family status, who you're married to, who your children are, if you have disabilities, because of course you put that on your tax forms and. Bunch of other personal data. Why do the bad guys, Rob banks, or at least they used to because that's where the money is. [00:01:38]So where are the bad guys going right now? We're going to talk more about that a little bit later on today. And if you miss it, you can catch my podcast as well at Craig peterson.com/podcast. But they're going after businesses that take care of cybersecurity. Businesses. So this is a very big deal, but nearly every American has complied voluntarily with paying our taxes, that there's a whole idea behind this system and with the Biden administration now looking at all of this and saying what we want to do now is not the $10,000 limit. That's for wimps. We want to know. Any money that goes into, or out of all taxpayers savings checking or any other accounts or the value of more than just $500. [00:02:31] So what the Biden administration is looking to do is turn every financial institution into a full-time IRS agent, basically providing them with all of this additional data. And then there's also plans that have been drawn up in Washington, DC. To move us away from the dollar and move us to a virtual dollar. [00:02:55] And there's even planned. This is just unbelievable. If I had said this stuff a few years back, no one would have believed me. There's also plans to say if you have more than a certain amount of money in your bank, we're only going to give you like a 0.6 equivalent. So they're going to take away 40% of the value of your. [00:03:13] And if you don't have much money heck we'll just go ahead and give you one and a half to two times as much money as you have in your account. It is incredible here. And with the privacy breaches we have seen in the federal government announced. This really isn't something we can put up with. We can't have them going after everything all of the time, because it just becomes too big, a target. [00:03:40] And I'm not just talking about a target for the typical bad guys. I'm talking about a target as well for. Bureaucrats that have gone out of control. That used to be that if you were going to be prosecuted, they would have heard a story from someone. So it's yeah. Janie just cared. Jenny just killed her husband. [00:04:03] So the police hear about it because there's a rumor floating around town. They go to talk to Janie, trying to look for her husband and they don't find her. Huh? And so now suspicion rises and they start investigating, they'll pull Jamie's credit card records. Look at what told booze she drove through. [00:04:23] They'll look at anything that they can to try and put it together. Who did Jamie call her phone records and talk to those people, try and put together a picture of what happened. But if we devolve into one of these just terrible socialist state that have popped up and failed every time around the world, then what can happen. [00:04:46] And what always happens is yeah. Yeah. The laws are there, but they're only enforced against people that they don't like. And that's a bad thing. So people that they don't like, I don't know, political people is usually what happened. Here in this country, think of what happened with Al Capone. They went after him under tax laws. [00:05:08]And in both cases, they're trying to go after a person or people, not crime. So Al Capone. Okay. You could argue, he was doing all of these crimes, getting money through extortion and murder and everything else. So they're investigating that and they found out, oh, he didn't pay his taxes. [00:05:27] Let's go after him for that. Okay. You could argue that. But what we can see with the government, having all of this information, think about all of our smartphones and our Alexa's and our Google homes and our cars. They all. Everything all of the time. And if the government wants to come after you, they can. [00:05:48] I remember 30 years ago reading an article saying before he get out of bed in the morning, you've probably broken about 20 law. It nowadays, it's probably more like 50 laws. There's so many of them. There's 20,000 laws. At least there was back then 30 years ago, there were 20,000 laws just on gun control. [00:06:09] Okay. It's insane. You cannot live your day without breaking a law. So what did they do while they selectively enforce? They selectively prosecute. So what happens here while the IRS. Perhaps selectively leaked information. Yeah. This is a story I'm looking at right now that came from Fox news. [00:06:30] And they're saying that ProPublica published a story that this is just incredible. Okay. That had information in it. That was apparently from the IRS. Now, this is bad because this is information that wasn't available anywhere else than the IRS. This is information that was private. The IRS, none of this information is supposed to get out, they, you can go after president Donald Trump for tax evasion. Come on guys. First of all, that you can't Sue the president. It's crazy. Everybody would be suing the president that they didn't like a president Biden would have thousands of lawsuits against him right now. And he'd never be able to get a thing done that he was elected to do because he'd have to constantly be responding to lawsuits. [00:07:21] That's how things were established initially here in this country. And I made a lot of. Pretty close to initially in this country, it made a whole lot of sense. If the IRS has given all this information, that's a real big problem. So the IRS security systems or procedures might've been severely compromised and all those data stolen, right? [00:07:41] You might've had one or more IRS employees committing felonies by providing what is legally protected, private, taxpayer information to outside. Or a ProPublica could have just made it up entirely. Who knows this story and ProPublica, I don't really want you guys to go there. You can, if you want to do a little research, obviously, but I don't want them to get the hits and clicks and everything else, but these apparently are trolls. [00:08:11] I've never before seen taxpayer information. June 8th that published this protected taxpayer data in a highly partisan yeah. Surprises, ProPublica, centralized, and misleading. Our article targeting people by name. This is all from this Fox news story. We don't know the scale of this was obviously a breach of some sort. [00:08:36] Was it a cybersecurity breach or not? I don't like any government agency having any information that absolutely doesn't have to have. And on the case of the IRS, they are, it's easy to argue. They need access to. Records, at least the ones we send them. If they think there's a discrepancy, we'll then have a look at the discrepancy, figure out what went wrong, but they don't need to have everything. [00:09:06] This reminds me of what happened with the national security agency. Just sucking in all of the data. It could possibly find it. Denying it and then ultimately saying we're just collecting general information. No one's identified in any of this and think of what happened, Mike Flynn, think of what happened with some of these other people in government, where they were identified and there's games that they're playing. [00:09:34] No, we just don't have time to talk about this today but basically what happens is they can monitor communications that go outside of the country. So apparently they are purposely routing, targeted it data out of the United States. And then back in, so you could sending an email to someone in Washington, DC, or making a phone call and you. [00:10:00] Phone call your email is purposely being routed by government out of the country. And there's some evidence that this is happening. There's certainly a lot of accusations. I get it. Okay. We need to crack down on people who are evading paying taxes that are owed under the law, but forcing these financial institutions to provide the IRS even more private financial information is going to embolden IRS P. [00:10:28] To do what just happened with ProPublica. It's going to also in Bolden the hackers, and we've got a story coming up too, about the value of Bitcoin going up and the hacks, ransomware hacks going up along with it because of the value. So we'll be talking about all of this stuff today. There's a whole lot to talk about, I want to make sure you are on my email list. [00:10:51] CraigPeterson.com. You can subscribe right there and you can get all of these articles I had talked about and more every week. Stick around. I'll be right back.
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Destroy, Don't Resell, Your Amazon Echo or Google Home
07/07/2021
Destroy, Don't Resell, Your Amazon Echo or Google Home
[As heard on WGAN 2021-07-07] Good morning, everybody. We've got this massive attack underway. It's hitting businesses, and they're using supply chain attacks just like they did with Solar Winds. However, this one might actually be a little more fatal. A lot of businesses out there. So we talked about that this morning—this Kaseya hack. [00:00:21] We also talked about selling your smart device. Is it a good thing? I got a report from a listener about a whole bunch of Amazon orders that they had not made. So I'll tell you a little bit about that. And also, IRS looks like there might've been a data breach of what's going on. And frankly, what is the Biden administration proposing? [00:00:47] That's going to make things way worse when it comes to data breaches at the I R S in the future. So here we go with Mr. Matt Gagnon. [00:00:57] Matt Gagnon: And we're back 7:36 WGAN morning news. A pleasure to have you on this fine Wednesday morning. Thanks for listening. Craig Peterson, our tech guru joins us every Wednesday at this time. [00:01:07] And of course you also hear them on this very station on Saturdays at one o'clock Craig, Welcome back to the program. Good to talk to you as well. [00:01:14] Craig Peterson: [00:01:14] Hey, thanks. Glad to be here. Have a great independence day with the family. They all came in from literally all over the world. So it was cool. Yes, indeed. [00:01:24]Matt Gagnon: [00:01:24] I hope you had a good one and and thanks for joining us now on this July 7th. So Craig, I know that we have, obviously every week we have a, some, topics that we want to chat about, but I did want to bring up this big gigantic. That happened as well. If you don't mind going off script a little bit here and talking about what what what we're learning about this stuff. [00:01:41] I was just checking out some stuff this morning about how it still remains unclear how many businesses were actually hit by this gigantic ransomware attack. And and of course now, Demands for $70 million and everything else. It's all very reminiscent of earlier tax in the year where we paid ransom. [00:01:59] And then you got, keys to decode things and it didn't even really work. And then they had to do it their own way. It's just part of this evolving story that is ransomware attacks. It seems to be getting worse and worse. And I just wanted to maybe get your thoughts on the effect of this. [00:02:12] And is it getting worse? Is, are we going to see more? Yeah. [00:02:15]What we're looking at is called a supply chain attack. So think of maybe a company that makes boxes for instance, and they, of course they need stuff from the supply chain. They're going to have glue. They're going to have staples are going to have various other things. [00:02:31] And they trust the, the incoming staples and glue, et cetera, are going to hold the boxes together. That's what we're seeing here. We're seeing a company in this case, it's a technology firm called they're based down in Florida that provides services for businesses and governments, world wide. [00:02:52] And the beautiful thinking about this from the hacker standpoint is they don't have to hack a hundred thousand companies. All they have to do is hack. Company and that's cause say, yeah. So cause they provide services for managed services providers. These are the, it shops, the businesses that you're using to manage your computers, your networks, your security, and the software. [00:03:22] This can say a thought. Has full administrative rights to these networks. So if you can compromise one piece of software, you now have the ability to compromise a hundred thousand businesses and install ransomware steal information. Ever you want to do so we're still not sure as you pointed out what the actual ultimate problems are going to be for businesses because not only managed services providers use cause say, but so do government agencies, we. [00:04:00] Major problems in Sweden were major. Portions of their economy were completely shut down, including mass transit. We've seen these problems before. And what happened really is people are putting their trust in these managed services provider, which I'm one, that's what we do for businesses. We do it for everything from doctor's office. [00:04:25] All the way through government contractors, DOD contractors, but we do not use these tools because they are not safe. We have some of our own that are completely isolated. We've got to really change what we're doing because. Is absolutely huge. And we really just don't know what the ultimate problem or, the results of this damage is going to be. [00:04:54] It's very scary stuff. Obviously a brave new world. We live in Craig Peterson, our tech guru joins us on Wednesdays at this time. Craig, moving on to other stories here. Been frustrating for me to wait for the tax man, the IRS to actually get me back my refund. I still don't have it. I'm one of, one of those people that still has been a Saturday sitting here waiting and delaying and blah, blah, blah, et cetera. [00:05:16]But our tax system, really works on trust, right? Trust that your data and information will be more or less secure with the IRS trust that the IRS is actually going to give you back the money you deserve when you file your taxes correctly, lots of trust involved in the system. But what happens then when the IRS itself has a data breach, all that information, all that stuff, I keep handing them every year is now basically open it's open season on that. [00:05:40]That's not a good thing. [00:05:42] Craig Peterson: [00:05:42] No, it's not, they know your family status. You're filing joint married or separate, whatever might be of what businesses you do business with, because that has to be disclosed. When you're saying this is where the income comes from, what debt you have. Medical or disability status and just a whole bunch of other things this year, including whether or not you have been toying and you've made money off of Bitcoin. [00:06:07] So all of that goes into databases and we're really concerned right now because president Biden has said that he is going to have the IRS. Force disclosure of even more sensitive information on almost every American taxpayer. So this is part of the government gathering, everything going in and out of our accounts. [00:06:34] In fact, the Biden administration is now trying to get the banks to report any transaction that anyone makes a more than $600. Which is turning our banks and financial institutions into full time, basically IRS agents, which is a real problem. So ProPublica published a story that had information that was only a bit. [00:07:00] Through the tax records and named a number of people and some private information. So we're not exactly sure what's happened here. Obviously, if the IRS might have been breached, it might be some insiders that are releasing information to her political opponents, which is not what the IRS is supposed to be doing, but we have all of this data. [00:07:26] You can. The IRS is a major target of Russia and China already has all of the background checks for secret clearance and above of every federal government employee and military member as of a couple of years ago. So it's a huge target. I don't like the idea of the government requiring even more information going to them because it's going to become a huge or. [00:07:54] Matt Gagnon: [00:07:54] And finally, Greg, I also want to ask about this this story that I was reading about selling your Amazon echo, your Google home any sort of device like this. I know a lot of people have privacy concerns, you go to sell it, right? Does your information go with it? [00:08:10]Should you be. Doing something special factory wipes or something beyond that, maybe hitting it with a sledgehammer. What should I be doing in order to make sure that my information is not handed on to the next group of people that have my stuff? [00:08:22]Craig Peterson: [00:08:22] There was a little bit of a study that was just done where this group went online and bought a number of these devices. [00:08:29] The Amazon echo was, you mentioned. Google home devices and a few others. This is at Northeastern university and they got almost a hundred of them from E-bay and the flea market. And then they started to have a look at them. The first thing you should do, if you are going to resell them is do a factory reset. [00:08:50] And that makes it a lot harder for people to get information off of them. But it is frankly, between you and me. It's very easy. Even after a factory reset to pull off information like the wifi information, the location that the device was used at the, even the account information of the person that had the. [00:09:15] Device. And I have actually had a listener that contacted me saying my Amazon account now has been hacked and has been used to order stuff. And so they worked with the fraud department at Amazon to figure out what had happened. And according to this listener, the front department reported back that they had ordered things from their Amazon echo device. [00:09:39] They had sold online app. A factory wipe. So you mentioned the sledgehammer trick and that is very effective at that, but I'm worried about these. I don't think I would resell mine. I think I would destroy them. But the big thing that you have to worry about are the hard desks and storage devices that are on our computers. [00:10:07] Take a drink. Drill three holes safely into the disc area, the round area on a desk, and pretty much anywhere in the center, if it's an SSD, if it's one of these solid state desks and make some nice big holes in it and throw it out in the trash, we actually remove the platters from the desk and we melt them down. [00:10:30] We have a furnace, we melt them in for our client. That's the only thing. That's a hundred percent, but the. Put a nice drill through those hard disks or SSDs and a sledgehammer to these smart drives are not smart. Drive smart devices and you'll feel much better as long as you do it safely. Get a little aggression out too. [00:10:51] Matt Gagnon: [00:10:51] Indeed. All right. Craig Peterson never have aggressive feelings when you joined the program. Always good to talk to you and get the lowdown on technological stories. Appreciate it. Good luck on Saturday, of course. And we'll talk to you again next week, sir.
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Nuclear Power Is Now Clean Power - Massive Breach Affecting I.T. Outsourcing
07/06/2021
Nuclear Power Is Now Clean Power - Massive Breach Affecting I.T. Outsourcing
[As heard on WTAG, WHJJ, WHYN on 2021-07-06] Good morning, everybody. This morning, I got to talk about this IRS data breach. We're supposed to trust them what happened here. We're actually not quite sure. And apparently, neither does the IRS. We also got into a climate battle. Should we be doing something more with nuclear power? So we got into that in some detail as well. [00:00:24] So here we go. [00:00:25] Pat Desmarais: [00:00:25] Craig Peterson joins us. Craig is the Jim Polito show tech expert and has some great stories to talk about Craig. Good morning. [00:00:34] Craig Peterson: [00:00:34] Hey, good morning Pat. [00:00:36] Pat Desmarais: [00:00:36] Sorry, we can't meet in person, my friend, but it is what it is. The phone will have to do. Hey, you got some great stuff for us to go back and forth about one of these stories I have now. [00:00:47] Part of, and it has to do with our tax system and sensitive information that you and I give these people, the IRS, and you're referencing a story that published sensitive information from people. And they got it from the IRS information that people file because they were filing their taxes. [00:01:09]Craig, what's up. [00:01:10] Craig Peterson: [00:01:10] Yeah, that's exactly what's happened. We have so much information at the federal government level, including people who have had secret background clearances, top-secret clearances, any clearances, and all of this data has been stolen, at least from the office of management and budget. [00:01:31] They've lost. Data the guys that control all of the information about all of the employees, all of that was stolen by China. And now we're finding that the IRS something happened there, it was either hacked, or there were some major leaks from the IRS. Now what we have to do as citizens. [00:01:53] Isn't file our taxes. It's called a voluntary system, but that doesn't mean that they won't come after you if you don't pay. But it's voluntary in that. We have to give them that information. Now, this is two-sided. We have private information, princess things like our social security numbers that have gotten out. [00:02:13] Probably every person in the country's social security number, at least almost everybody's has already gotten into that habit of the bad guys, but can we trust the IRS? Can we trust the feds with handling some of our most sensitive information? And because, as you pointed out, some of this information was given to the IRS. [00:02:36] Has it been published online? Pro Publica has a story that puts this information out there. And we can only assume one of a few things they've been hacked or maybe one or more IRS employees committed felonies by putting this information out there. And by the way, it's legally protected. They're not allowed to do that. [00:02:57] Maybe within pro-public Publica story is false and alleged information's manufactured. We're not sure exactly what's happened here, pat; I don't hold out a lot of hope. I think that maybe they're yet another victim of the hat. And [00:03:13] Pat Desmarais: [00:03:13] Craig, correct me if I'm wrong, but this is something that has been reported now for a few days. [00:03:18] I know that smaller companies, many had been reported being hacked. Is that true? And what is going on technologically here? It seems like it increasingly is not wise. Like I hate it, Craig, when I'm asked to give my social security number online, I hate it. I hate it. I hate it. I don't like doing that. [00:03:40]This is the stuff secure or not. [00:03:43] Craig Peterson: [00:03:43] Yeah. Yeah. W one of the bad things worse is if your social security number is stolen and is misused, it can take you up to 300 hours to recover your information, your good credit, et cetera. And that 300 hours is usually during working hours because you've got to call the banks. [00:04:02] You've maybe have to call a car manufacturer, finance agents, whatever it might be. It's crazy. And the IRS. Will the social security administration will not give you a new social security number. Now, what you're talking about is this, Kasaya hack. We had solar winds hack here just a few months ago, which was devastating to many federal agencies and businesses nationwide. [00:04:29] And now we've got you. Say it is a company that provides tools that are used by many what are called managed services providers. So these MSPs will want to keep their prices down their costs down. So they have this automated system that kind of takes care of everything. But what we see now is, again, a supply chain hack. [00:04:54] In other words, you are a business and you would like a little bit of security and you'd like your machines to be updated. So you hire a managed services provider that MSP uses another service provider in this case, to actually do the grunt work for them. So that is the supply chain to you as a small business. [00:05:16] But this hat now is showing that it's been pretty darn deep. We don't even know how far it goes yet. Sweden basically got shut down their banks their transit systems here in the U S there are hundreds of companies that have now received ransomware. And it's in place. And by the way, also that leads to extortions after the fact. [00:05:42] But they have this in place because of their supply chain, because their managed services provider was using software that as it turns out was not safe. And now they're in trouble. As a regular businesses. So to answer your question, pat, where we are not safe, we can not push off our responsibility to keep our businesses safe or to keep us as individuals safe. [00:06:11] We can't push it off to someone else and we certainly can't push it off to the federal government. We're in a tight spot here. And Microsoft is responding in much the same way. Apple responded almost 10 years ago. And Microsoft is tightening up things dramatically in windows 11. They're using special chips that are going to be on boards and computers that now will. [00:06:35] Down your secrets, your passwords and things, which is a good thing, but we're still looking at ply chain attacks. You as a business are trying to trust someone else to take care of your computers and pat, they're just not taking care of them. Yeah. [00:06:51] Pat Desmarais: [00:06:51] Good information. And it's almost like we're being victimized by modern day. [00:06:55]Technological, Bonnie and Clyde's correct. All right. Correct. Craig Peterson joins us here. The Jim Polito show tech expert. Let's switch gears. I'm a big nuclear power proponent. I know it's not the in thing people seem to want to decommission them. More than anything else. I don't even know if we build any new nuclear power plants, but you had a story up there about the nuclear power plant in New York. [00:07:19] And there's evidence that, Hey, look at, you want to reduce the carbon footprint. You took this nuclear power plant offline, and you actually increased carbon emissions at the same time. Talk to us about that. [00:07:33] Craig Peterson: [00:07:33] Yeah, 46 per cent increase in the average carbon intensity of electrical generation, because nuclear is safe, particularly the new nuclear plants. [00:07:46] Now we're still regulating our nuclear plants as though it's 92. This deed, if you can believe that 70 year old regulations in place, we now are up to about the seventh generation of nuclear power and the way these are set up, don't think Jane. Don't think of the China syndrome, right? Where are you going to have this meltdown? [00:08:08] And everyone's going to die. That is impossible. Now these nuclear designs, and there are designs that are being put in place. Pat. They're not all out there yet. A lot of people haven't really. There's 70 years behind up to date, but these nuclear plants are designed that if there is a failure of part of a system, the basic physics of it will not allow it to get out of control. [00:08:38] So you can consider these nuclear plants like a ball. You have a big ball. It's nice and round. And you've got a flat hill. That ball is not about to roll up there. Tell because of physics and that's what they've done with these new designs and when people, so they didn't, they just, him. Down the physics of them, it cannot happen. [00:09:01] And people have been worried about, oh my gosh, all this nuclear waste is just terrible. That was 70 years ago. People that newest designs, if we can change these regulations are such that the nuclear waste is crazy. Minimally. And it's nowhere near as concentrated, and it can be recycled back into these newest generations of nuclear plants. [00:09:25] So the [00:09:25] Pat Desmarais: [00:09:25] story that you have, Craig. The story that you have is the Indian point nuclear power plant, which is 30 miles north of New York city. Are there any in America at all? Craig knew these technologically advanced ones that you're referencing is any new nuclear plants being built in a way. [00:09:46] Craig Peterson: [00:09:46] Only very small scale ones. [00:09:48] The us military now is taking some of these designs and they've got in fact right now, a bunch of bids out because they want small nuclear plants that fit into the back of a trailer from just a regular tractor trailer that they can bring out to different areas to provide power for them. So on that, Gail, the answer's. [00:10:10] Yes. There are a couple of companies that are making them on a similar scale where they will run a small town from a nuclear plant that is buried in the ground. And doesn't have to be touched for 20 years. So yes, but the large-scale ones. No, they it's just, it's crazy. If he asked me, they're just shutting them down. [00:10:32] They're not building the new ones, even though the new tech pat is amazing. [00:10:36] Pat Desmarais: [00:10:36] Yeah, that my criticism is not, I live on Cape Cod, so they shut the one down in Plymouth. Craig, as you probably know, I didn't have a problem with that, but my thing was, are you going to build a new one? Oh God. No, but it's but the technology is so improved. [00:10:50] No no. So I think you're right. A lot of this is, your horse and buggy thinking on nuclear power. You're thinking of technology from 50, 70 years. [00:10:58]Craig Peterson: [00:10:58] Yeah. You're absolutely right. Dan, so many people got scared by that China's syndrome movie, and they're just not understanding what's happening out there, [00:11:07] Pat Desmarais: [00:11:07] It's like mirror in a crate, people saw reefer madness and they think that's what pot is all about. You know what I'm saying? People see movies and it screws them all up. I've always thought that. All right, I enjoyed this. I don't know what made me think of that. Craig, Peter son, [00:11:24] Craig Peterson: [00:11:24] very much Alexandria Ocassio Cortez is onboard with you and me. She said her green new deal leaves the door open for this new nuclear power. [00:11:35] Pat Desmarais: [00:11:35] Yeah. There's no carbon print or you still have the the radioactive stuff you have to deal with. You still have to, you have to take care of that and store it. I'm a big proponent of you spend all this money on Yucca mountain. Use Yucca mountain. [00:11:47]It's controversial and I realize that, but I love what you're saying and it makes perfect sense that we ought to, we want to deal with global warming, carbon footprint. [00:11:57] Let's embrace nuclear power. It's clean other countries do it. Craig Peterson. I wish I had a little bit more time with you. I've very much enjoyed this conversation and I can see why they they bring you around. Great information. I appreciate it, sir. I hope that we do. Thanks now, Craig Peterson, the tech expert on the Jim Pollito show. [00:12:17] Great information there wholeheartedly agree about what he was saying about nuclear power. And we ought to expand our minds a little bit folks on the new technology, the new type of nuclear power plant, just sayin'.
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One in Five Manufacturing Companies Targeted by Hackers - And It's Hurting You
07/01/2021
One in Five Manufacturing Companies Targeted by Hackers - And It's Hurting You
We've got a new study out, and its showing that one in five manufacturing companies are not only targeted by cyber attacks, but are getting nailed and getting nailed badly. [00:00:19]This is a bigger problem, than I think most of us realize, and I have a few manufacturing clients who have been nailed badly by cyber attacks. Very badly. There is a new study out that looked at this it's called the manufacturing cybersecurity. Index. And this is a report that has the results of surveys of 567 manufacturing employees. [00:00:50] Now that is quite a few and most of these people were in fact, in the it side of things, some of them were specifically in the cyber securities. That one was most interesting about this. Isn't the fact that just that one out of five manufacturing companies is targeted by cyber attacks, but what the response, what the thoughts of these people that run the companies are. [00:01:18] And I say that because I am just constantly amazed at how businesses just are not paying attention to this, and this is proof again, and here's what it is. Information stealing malware makes up about a third of attacks, but companies are worried about what ransomware, the worried about ransomware shutting down production. [00:01:46] That is a very big deal because of course it does, but what is going to hurt you more? And that's what you got to figure out. That's what companies have to really look. These numbers that we're looking at are according to this article I'm reading at a dark reading, which is a great site. If you haven't been there before, and you'd like to follow some of these things in the cybersecurity world, definitely check it out. [00:02:15] Dark reading, very easy to very easy to look at lots of good stuff. But Robert limos is a contributing writer over there. And he's the guy that wrote that. And so he is saying that more than one third of all manufacturing firms are attacked every month. That's absolutely amazing. Now, of course not all manufacturing employees really know when a company is being attacked, but ransomware attacks that they know, because usually that means much of the company is shut down when it happens. [00:02:54]Because ransomware attacks have this major impact on the business and the other types of attacks. information most of the time companies never find out unless it's too late again, it's usually ransom or extortion. They're two sides of the same coin. So an extortion attack might be where they get onto a network. [00:03:19] Exfiltrate data. And then they say, Hey, listen, we've got all of this data. Do you want us to post your bank, account numbers, customer information, your intellectual property, your plans, whatever it is, you want us to post them online? Huh? And if not pay out. Okay. So this is, I think a very big problem. [00:03:39] There are major blocks between it information technology and security teams. And I also have to point out that most it decisions nowadays most what would normally be an information technology decision is actually being handled by a line of business matters. Who chose the software you're using to track your customers? [00:04:06] It was probably the sales guy, right? There's the, it's not, the CEO is not the it director. It's the director of sales or marketing or the accounting people who decided to use QuickBooks online as opposed to using something else. All of these types of decisions are out of the hands of it and are way out of the hands of the cybersecurity. [00:04:34] That's because of this massive changing landscape out there. It's absolutely huge. Now there's a survey also of 250 information technology workers, and they found that 61% of the companies experienced a cybersecurity incident affecting their factories. 61%. Of manufacturers had a cybersecurity incident that affected the factories and three quarters of those incidences took production offline. [00:05:07] That's according to another report that came out in March, just mindblowing. Isn't it. So ransomware accounts for only 13% of these attempted attacks on devices. But the information thieves account for 31% of the attacks and file us attacks account for 28%. So here's a quote from morphous sec. These are the guys that produced the first report. [00:05:37] I mentioned, although these sobering threats are certainly not limited to the manufacturing industry, cyber attackers are acutely aware of the data manufacturing facilities have on hand, right? Think about all of that data, think about all of the intellectual property. So it goes on. In fact, some cyber crime groups have even been using ransomware as a smoke screen for cyber attacks, designed to steal intellectual property, increasing the damage they can inflict in the long run as they bully victims. [00:06:12] By threatening to leak data if they don't pay. Now, I've warned about that before. If you've got something that looks like a ransomware attack happening, pops up on your screen, it's got that classic red screen ransomware page. That may just be a smoke screen. You may not have ransomware. [00:06:31] Your files may not be encrypted because what most of these guys nowadays are doing is making additional money offers, stealing your files solid. It depends on the group and this isn't what dark side does, but some other groups do and they can really socket. Ever since the authorities disrupted the emo tech network in January, we've seen attacks split into and smaller groups are increasingly working together in new ways. [00:07:00] And these highly targeted groups are very dangerous because they can execute multi-faceted attacks, giving the collective expertise. Again, it's just like business. If you're trying to sell something, you need to narrow down and you need to get as narrow as possible. And that means the cyber groups are specializing in a specific industry and they're specializing in a specific way. [00:07:29] To attack. This is really fascinating. And there's a few reports that come out every year. Verizon has a very good one on cyber attacks. Statistics. IBM has one gardener of course always does their little thing on the side. Those tend to be, and more narrowly focused, but this is the first time we've seen this report. [00:07:51] So we don't have any sort of comparative data from prior years. But what the, what these guys are saying is that in that the pandemic has shifted attack trends and ransomware has grown from single digit percentages to 13%. As I mentioned already, almost two thirds of surveyed employees believe that the chance of a breach increased because of remote work. [00:08:19] And we know that's true. BI has been warning about that. We've seen it again and again. So be very careful. Okay. Most of these manufacturing companies have had people working from home during the lockdown, nearly two thirds said that it has increased the risk of a breach. And let me tell you, it really has. [00:08:40] And so keep all of that in mind, if you are in manufacturing or if you're concerned about our manufacturing base here in the us man, is there something to be worried about? And that's a shame. How do we conduct business? How do we keep our economy going? If our manufacturers are getting knocked down or getting knocked out of the game, Hey, visit me online. [00:09:04] CraigPeterson.com. You'll find all of this all on my podcast and much more.
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Using Bootleg Software? It May Have Come With Vigilante Malware
06/30/2021
Using Bootleg Software? It May Have Come With Vigilante Malware
Well, you probably know again here, because you're the best and brightest, what a vigilante is. Well, I bet you haven't really heard about this type of vigilante before, and it is causing havoc for as many as 40% of computers. [00:00:17]Well, vigilantes have throughout history decided that they were going to take the launch of their own hands. [00:00:24] Now, way back when there wasn't law enforcement, et cetera, that's just what you did. And then we ended up with the tribes and our tribes would decide, okay, what's going to happen to this person. And you know, one of the worst things that could possibly happen way back. Caveman days. And after frankly, the worst thing that could happen to you is getting banished because having a group of people who are living together, cooperating together, working together makes all of the difference when it comes to survive. [00:01:00] And being kicked out of that tribe out of that group meant you had a very low chance of long-term survival. And if you went into another group, they'd really be suspicious about you because where did you come from? Did somebody kick you out because you did something really, really bad? You know, I kind of wonder if that's not deeply ingrained inside of us from all of those. [00:01:26] Centuries millennia with that whole type of process in place where we see someone that's different than us. And we kind of wonder, right. If you think that's where that might've come from. Interesting thought. I don't know that I've ever seen any studies about that. So vigilantes, nowadays are people who they're not going to the chieftain. [00:01:47] They're not going to the local police department or the prosecutor who a, whoever it might be. They are taking the law as it were into their own hands. Now it's not necessarily even the law, they just decide that they want something to happen in a particular way. And by having that happen in that particular way, they now have control. [00:02:13] Right. They're making the law as it were not just enforcing it. We have a lot of malware out there and there's a lot of different types. You might remember what Sony did, Sony. Decided they didn't like people ripping their CDs. And so they went ahead and installed an automatic installer for windows computers. [00:02:36] So if you tried to play your favorite Sony CD, right. Audio CD, listen to some music, it would automatically install some what. You and I would call malware on your computer and it would look at everything you were doing on your computer. To try and make sure that you were not trying to make a copy of the desk, not just a copy, but what we call ripping it. [00:03:07] In other words, you have a CD and you have an MP3 player. How do you get the CD on the MP3 player? Cause you can't just stick it into an MP3 player, so you have to rip it and that converts it from the CD format into an MP3 format. So it's all digital. You can take it away. And I have really griped about the music industry before, because they make way more money off of CDs than they ever did off of records. [00:03:36] Just because of how cheap it is. It costs them like 10 cents, not even to make a CD. And it costs them a couple of bucks to make a record back in the. So they decided they would do digital without thinking twice about while digital means you can a perfect copy, perfect coffee copy of that desk. And so it's only, he said, I'll go, well, here's what we're going to do. [00:04:00] We're going to make this. And so it installed itself. Way down deep inside the operating system. It watched as you loaded up desks and watched what you did that is malware. And that was Sony being frankly, a vigilant. Yeah. They said, Hey, it's for copyright protection, but there was no encryption on CDs. [00:04:24] There still isn't on compact discs. When we're talking about music desks, there is encryption on DVDs and that's what they did in order to say, well, you can't rip it because it's an encryption. Past the digital communications millennial act. And then from that act, they were able to now have controls. Hey, listen, if it's something's encrypted, you can't even try to dig. [00:04:47] Okay. Pretty, pretty big deal. So there's a whole lot to this whole vigilante thing. And someone is added again, in this case, we found a researcher who has found something you just don't really see very often, you know, outside that sone thing, but it's booby trapped file. Yeah, there's these files that are out there on the internet on a bunch of torrent sites and others that are pirated software and they have a booby trap inside. [00:05:25] Now the pirated software is typically things like a Microsoft windows or all of their different software, right word. And you name it all the way across the line. They also, by the way, have put some of this malware into games because there's a lot of people that run games and they grabbed these cracked games from the inside. [00:05:52] So we're talking about boob bootleg talk. And so what this person or people, or whoever it is, is doing according to Sofos labs, principal researcher, his name is Andrew Brandt is get getting these people to install this software that has. A booby trap and that what it does is you think you're just installing the game or whatever it might be. [00:06:22] But in reality, you're installing software that sends. The file name that was executed to an attacker controlled server. So it knows, oh, you're trying to run Microsoft word and it sends along your IP address of your computers. And then what it does is this vigilante software. It tries to modify the victim's computers so they can no longer. [00:06:50] Access some, 1000 other pirate sites, like the pirate bay.com, which is a very popular site out. Oh, out there. So this is obviously not your typical malware, not at all. And they are doing this same type of thing. That's so needed way back in the day, modifying your computer so that you can not do something that may be illegal. [00:07:19] It may be mostly, most of the time, he illegal, hard to say, but in reality, they're modifying it without you knowing. It's a very, very big deal. So people are using software, kind of like this vigilante software to steal stuff. Usually it's passwords, or maybe your keystrokes or cookies or your intellectual property access Eve, the people are even using ad networks, advertising networks to deliver software. [00:07:51] But that will mind cryptocurrency for them. Okay. But those are all theft. That's what the motive is, but not in this case. These samples really only did a few things and none of them follow the motive for malware criminals. It's fascinating. He had a thing that he posted over there on Twitter, kind of talking about it, but once the victims executed this Trojan file, it gets sent out to a server and I'm sure the FBI is tracking down this server. [00:08:24]It's one flourish. She drew.com in pronounceable. And it's it's not the one fee share, which is the name of a Cod storage provider, but it's pretty close to it. And it sends it out. I'm looking at the list of all of these websites that it tries to block by going into your hosts file. But it's an interesting way to approach it. [00:08:48] Isn't it, frankly, by mapping the domains for all of these torrent sites and pirate site. To your local host, the malware is making sure that your computer, I can't access those websites. Okay. Anyways, if it happens to you just go in and edit the host file. It's really quite that simple. All right. Stick around everybody. [00:09:10] But while you're waiting, go ahead, go online, go to CraigPeterson.com. Once you're there. You can easily subscribe to my newsletter and keep up-to-date on everything. CraigPeterson.com.
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How Will the Next Power Failure Affect Your Life? Hackers, or Nature. Both Will Result in Death.
06/30/2021
How Will the Next Power Failure Affect Your Life? Hackers, or Nature. Both Will Result in Death.
[As heard on WGAN 2021-06-30] From man-caused like hackers through the environmental causes, like the sun, we could lose power. We've got a heat waves. We've got cold weather. We've got everything in between. What happens if we lose power, what do we need to do? That's what I discussed this morning with Mr. Matt Gagnon [00:00:24] Matt Gagnon: [00:00:24] Craig Peterson joins us every Wednesday at this time to go over what's happening in the world of technology. [00:00:29] He also joins this very station on Saturday. And talks about many of these very same issues in more depth of detail. Craig, welcome back to the program. Nice to have you as always, sir. [00:00:39]Craig Peterson: [00:00:39] Hey, thanks. Glad to be here in such a nice or arm day, you said this tongue in his cheek. [00:00:45] Matt Gagnon: [00:00:45] I believe oppressive heat is the word you press. [00:00:47]Craig Peterson: [00:00:47] I grew up in in Canada and part of it was Northern Canada and the 70 degree day was like summertime. So my blood, I don't know my hips historically. I did the whole thing with the, the DNA in tracing ancestry. It's all from Northern. But you've Norwegian, et cetera. I think I am one of those minorities that is really heavily oppressed and should probably be getting free air conditioning. [00:01:17] Cause my blood is just too, I don't know, sick, I guess for this. [00:01:20] Matt Gagnon: [00:01:20] Yeah. I'm very sympathetic to you, Greg. And I think it does. I would say dovetail nicely into the question I was planning to ask you about. During heat waves here, that we've had so many different infrastructure attacks, hackers are getting into our energy. [00:01:33] Great. And whatnot. That could be a bit of a deadly combination in the middle of a heat wave. Could it not? I would be concerned. I learned about that if I had your stick blood. So what should we all be concerned about as it relates to our security, as in, in terms of our energy grid end. [00:01:47]Craig Peterson: [00:01:47] We need to spend some serious money. [00:01:50] Think of that collapse that has happened down in Florida of that condo building. And the fact is that they had to spend millions to fix that building. In fact, it was like $120,000 per rev. Our grid, our electric grid, our water stations need the same type of investment. We have to tighten this stuff up because as you pointed out, we're seeing people dying right now because of the heat and the lack of air conditioning. [00:02:23] Look at our grid. How many times has been attacked? And the problems that have come from it. Plus of course the whole nature thing which could destroy our grid would just one nasty solar flare. And we really have a combination of things that could cause serious damage. So if our enemies decide what they want to do is just. [00:02:46] All kinds of confusion, people dying from the heat and in the wintertime, of course, also from the cold, they have the ability to shut down our grids. We really need to focus in on this. The price of electricity is going to go up even more if they do this, but it's an absolute necessity. Cause remember. [00:03:09] Harrington event, which happened in the mid 18 hundreds, where there was a massive solar flare and it hit us here in the United States in a very bad way. But back then, it was just the, the Telegraph machines, one of those events, like the Harrington event happening now would put us back in the 18 hundreds for months and possibly years for some parts of this country, because we can't. [00:03:36] Protect ourselves adequately from even that let alone the hackers out. There [00:03:41] Matt Gagnon: [00:03:41] it is. Craig Peterson who joins us, he's our tech guru. And we hear from him every single Wednesday at this very time to talk over the world of technology. Another thing I've noticed too, spinning off into a totally different direction. [00:03:53] Craig has obviously the criticism of, and hatred of. The big tech companies continues to grow. I think, and what's interesting about it is that there's a lot of distrust and dislike of them in a bipartisan way, right? There's a there's Republicans that don't like them, obviously because of the free speech issue. [00:04:09] And there's a lot of left wing folks who also don't like them for entirely unrelated issues and reasons. But now there's a house committee which has approved a bill that could potentially break up Amazon, apple, Google, et cetera. What is [00:04:22] Craig Peterson: [00:04:22] this all about? Yeah, this is a very big deal because these big tech companies keep getting bigger and they use techniques. [00:04:31] The key competitors out of the marketplace and the techniques include buying companies that are worth tens of millions of dollars for a billion dollars, just so they don't have any competition. So we have this bill that was approved called the ending platform. Monopolies. Which came out with true bipartisan support came out of that committee. [00:04:56] And the question is, what do you do, Matt? These companies are really doing things that are not technically against the antitrust act, so that we have act here in the S. But in reality, are it certainly by the spirit of that law because they are keeping competition out. Now, I would like to say that the free market would take care of this, but again, we don't really have a free market. [00:05:26] And also the amount of control these people have is such that their profit margins are insane. Every one of these. Tech companies we're talking about. And then I include apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon. Every one of them has billions of dollars in cash sitting there in the bank to keep them. In that position. [00:05:50] So it reminds me of the robber barons way back when the late 18 hundreds, early 19 hundreds, the controlled so many of our industries here in the United States, they cause the antitrust laws to be put into place. Something has to be done. And yeah. I just don't know, Matt I'm not somebody who really trusts government any more than I trust to any of these big tech companies. [00:06:15]Matt Gagnon: [00:06:15] It's a question of who do you hate more right in the end of the day. All right. Final question for you, Greg. I'd like to go in this direction because we heard about John McAfee, recently passed away under not at all suspicious circumstances. Epstein didn't kill himself by the way. [00:06:29]McAfee of course is the Titan nor was the Titan, the originator of a big antivirus software company, which many of us have had installed on our computers against our will and had to deal with in some way. Antivirus software is in and of itself interesting. Cause I was just reading somewhere that a lot of antivirus software actually misses. [00:06:48] A gigantic amount of malware that ends up being on computers. Is this a problem? And if it is what do you do about this? There's just going to have to make your peace with the fact that your computer is infested with malware now or are there other options? [00:07:01] Craig Peterson: [00:07:01] Yeah, McAfee of course had tattooed on his body. [00:07:05] Find me dead. I did not kill myself. We know that he was not suicide. In Spain, the Spanish jail, your questions are really good. One because we're seeing as 70%. Mentoree antivirus software this year has missed 77 0% of the attacks that have been coming this year and McAfee himself came out and said that the McAfee antivirus software is useless against today's threats. [00:07:39] One of the senior executives at Symantec, which of course has Norton and other antivirus products, all. Came out and said our software's useless against modern threats. So to answer your question, there are some things you can do. And I'm going to go into this in more detail this weekend. I think it's an important thing here on our July 4th weekend independence day. [00:08:03] The bottom line is antivirus software no longer can protect you is using outdated technology. It's using signatures. So what happens is you can just like with a virus, you can get the virus and the body now knows those. T-cells remember how to fight that virus in the future. Antivirus software is much the same. [00:08:30] It's looking for. Things that have been seen before. That's not what's happening anymore. We're seeing all new threats, just constantly. We're seeing phishing attacks and the, it gets around the antivirus software. There are some solutions or some things you can do. And frankly, if you're running windows, There's some pre things you can do. [00:08:53] And I'm going to also, it's part of the series I've been doing. I'm going to be releasing this to people on my newsletter. I made a video last week, in fact about some things you can do. All right. But you have to sign up. You have to go to Craig peterson.com/subscribe. And you have to listen on Saturday from one till three, because we will be talking more about this as well. [00:09:15] Matt Gagnon: [00:09:15] And there you go. Promoting the show on the weekend. I love doing it. Craig Peterson, our tech guru always joins us on Wednesdays at this time. I appreciate it, Craig. Thanks so much. And we'll talk to you again very soon, sir. [00:09:24] Craig Peterson: [00:09:24] Take care, Matt.
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Our loss of privacy is bigger than you think - and what to start doing about it
06/30/2021
Our loss of privacy is bigger than you think - and what to start doing about it
[As heard on WTAG, WHYN, WHJJ on 2021-06] You might have an idea of how much privacy has been lost. I went through a lot of the details today. The idea is to help you understand what you're doing to yourself by using all of these different new technologies and what can you do right now to start getting your privacy under control? So here we go with Mr. Polito. [00:00:29] Jim Polito: Our good friend tech talk guru Craig Peterson has talked about this before. When you click that, "I accept" in the terms and conditions for something online, he is always explained what's going on there. And how, in many instances, as you are the product for that app, the app is in the product. [00:00:48]Now there are more concerns about just clicking "I accept." Joining us now. We accept our good friend here every week at this time, Craig Peterson the tech talk guru. Good morning, sir. [00:01:02] Craig Peterson: [00:01:02] Hey, good morning. Click away. It's quite a thing. Isn't it. Where does this article come from? We're talking about, did you notice this? [00:01:10] The daily mail came out of the UK, not in America. [00:01:15] Jim Polito: [00:01:15] Yeah, I know. Very interesting. And I just happened to have the daily mail app on my phone because it's one of the stops I make in show prep. So there's a warning. And of course, Greg, this doesn't come as any surprise probably to regular listeners because you've been talking about all the things that are included in there. [00:01:36] And but what's the latest concern. [00:01:38]Craig Peterson: [00:01:38] What they did is they put it all together and it's rare that you see this. So they started Dawn. What's the first thing you do while you check at your phone, I would actually put it back even a few hours. What do you do at night with your smartphone? You plug it in and it's sitting right there next to you. [00:01:57]So now you've got all of these busy bodies that the tech companies cause remember. Apps, many of these are tracking use. They're not free. They're gathering information about you. So they know every night Jim puts his phone here and oh, buys the ways. So does this woman and this guy. Oh, okay. That's where Jim Pollito lives, right? [00:02:21] So it's your smartphone manufacturer, particularly if it's Google, but it's true for apple app developers or mobile phone company, intelligence agencies. If they're watching you, which happens all the time. But all they're doing is collecting metadata. [00:02:43] Yeah. That's exactly what it's used for, what time you're waking up where, who you're sharing your Baird bed with? Where are you going when you go to work? If you're speeding, when you're going to work, right? It's anybody's guess where all of this stuff is ending up at now. We're adding ring doorbells that we have on the front of our home. [00:03:04] Please more than I think it's 1500 right now. Police departments are taking these feeds from ring. So now they have cameras in all of the neighborhoods. We have facial recognition from those ring cameras and from all the other cameras are putting around our home. So they know where we are, who we are. [00:03:23] Vizio. A TV manufacturer has been caught. Watching us through a camera, hidden camera and the TV, listening to what we're saying. And even if the company isn't doing now, like your Samsung TV, they are tracking exactly what you're watching, where it's going. Facebook has been accused with. They're a wonderful little portal device, which is a, something that allows you to talk to someone. [00:03:50] Face time. They've been accused of listening in on everything you're saying, because people including my son last week, he was at his girlfriend's house. She has the two of these Facebook portals. They started talking about maybe getting a hammock. Talking about it, not on a conversation on the portal at all. [00:04:09] And all of a sudden what starts happening, their feeds are showing ads for hammocks, even though they hadn't looked for them before. So our cars are logging the places we're going. They're tracking how fast we're going. We have legislators right here in mass who are looking at it saying these electric cars, oh my gosh, we're not getting our gas taxes, which we don't bother using to fix the roads. [00:04:34] That would be a terrible. It was electric cars. Aren't paying gas taxes. We want the cars to report on you and tell them how many miles you drove in math. And from that, they will send you a bill every year. If you want to, re-register your electric car. We were doing DNA testing kits for health reasons. [00:04:55] Maybe we were trying to find out if we truly are Italian or. That genetic information is up for grabs anybody who's willing to pay for it. This is a surveillance state at something even the Staci weren't able to do. They only had files on about a third of the population of east Germany intelligence agencies today here in the us. [00:05:17] Remember. Our information that was being kept by the federal government, including all the background check information for people that have secret top secret and other clearances, all of that information was stolen by China. We're giving this away. We are not keeping it safe. We're on top of all of this, Jim, we're telling people we're going on social media. [00:05:40] Oh yeah. I'm going away for a week. We're going to a w wherever on vacation, it's going to be a great time. So now even the bad guys know this is amazing. We have right now started to enter the days of artificial intelligence. Yeah. And it's not like you and I, the way we think it's putting pieces of a puzzle together, that's what computer artificial intelligence is all about. [00:06:06] And all of this stuff that we're allowing to be tracked from the national health service all the way on down in the UK and in the UK. This is really something we've got to start pulling our wings. And we're talking [00:06:20] Jim Polito: [00:06:20] with our good friend tech talk guru, Craig Peterson, Craig here's the thing. [00:06:25] So the reason that Facebook and these other places can offer all these services for free is because we are the customer and then they sell that information. You've just laid out the scenario about how those things get stolen, but they sell that information. Is this something where the government steps in with better regulation? [00:06:47] Or is this something where the marketplace says, Hey, do you want something like Facebook? Okay. Pay me $5 a month and you can have it, and then we won't try to do all this stuff, you've got to pay you to have this service. [00:07:01]Craig Peterson: [00:07:01] Facebook did try that at one point they were floating the idea. [00:07:05] But I want you to consider one other thing here, Jim, when you're talking about this, when has government ever decided they needed less information about the people? [00:07:21] Jim Polito: [00:07:21] Yeah. Yeah. You're rife. They don't, they want to know everything. Cause then they want to tax it. They want to regulate it. They want to, whatever. And here I am just bringing up regulation, but yeah. [00:07:33] Craig Peterson: [00:07:33] That's exactly what they're going to do. That's what they do. The job of a bureaucrat data. [00:07:38] I have Ribeiro grad in this country, whether they're working for the town of pod talk at Rhode Island, or they're working for the federal government, every bureaucrat in the country has one job don't get fired. And then the second job is grow my faith. Yeah. And that means that even if they were to pass laws, you remember, we already had laws about the federal government not watching us. [00:08:04] And then we found out, oh, wait a minute, eight T and T had been feeding the federal government, all of the information about all of the phone calls in the country since 1950. Yeah, there were laws against it. Okay. It, even if they say, okay, you can't use this information, you're gathering from marketing is what I'm more at about, frankly, because if I'm looking to buy an F-150 truck, I'd love to see offers on F150 trucks. [00:08:32] Okay. So being able to track me in my searches make sense. I'm extremely worried about. Everything else. And I'm very worried about this artificial intelligence being used, frankly, for evil. And it already is with some of these phishing attacks. It's this is just something it's something Facebook, by the way, even teams shadow profiles on people who don't even have accounts, because when you join Facebook, Facebook says, Hey, you want me to find your friends so you can link into them? [00:09:05] Yeah. Just upload your contacts to. Who did [00:09:11] Jim Polito: [00:09:11] so Craig, in the short time we have left what do you do? What do you do. [00:09:16] Craig Peterson: [00:09:16] I'm having a meeting about that today. In fact, there's some friends, I have a couple of attorney friends, and some other friends who are looking at this and saying, this is nuts. [00:09:25] What do we do? Apple is the only one. So you've found manufacturers out there that really does have your privacy in mind to a large degree. They have mostly been keeping us safe. That is generally speaking the best thing that you can do, but don't volunteer information, post himself up on Facebook. [00:09:47] You're posting pictures that have the GPS coordinates of where it was taken. Facebook has based. So recognition don't do that. Get away from doing that sort of thing. Also be careful with the information that you're sharing with any other company out there, Google some of these free photo services, et cetera, et cetera, that pulling it all together. [00:10:10] Facebook's given Microsoft search engine, the ability to see Facebook friends without their consent. It gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read and even delete Facebook users. Private messages. Don't use these companies, mark Zuckerberg, the allegations are all out there that Facebook was started using illegal methods. [00:10:32]Crazy illegal methods scraping the the horrible. Book, if you will, of students and having people rate how good looking that woman is. Okay. All well and good, I guess if you were a teenager, but come on, this is not an ethical company. Google is not, they've even removed this slope. [00:10:52] Don't be evil from their website, stop using them things like duck, go for your searches posted up there. Don't make sure you turn off GPS tracking on everything you can paying attention. Apple now has this new feature that will tell you every app. Exactly what that app is supposedly doing in collecting data and doing with your data and make intelligent choices. [00:11:19] Jim Polito: [00:11:19] I got it. Craig, how do folks get more information? [00:11:23]Craig Peterson: [00:11:23] The easiest way is just go to Craig peterson.com. That's Frank Peterson with an o.com and you can subscribe to my newsletter. You'll get all of this stuff. You'll get also links to all of them like podcasts and nerves about I do about a dozen a week. [00:11:39] Believe it or not. Wow. And you'll be able to listen to those and you can listen to them on the iHeart radio app. Just go to Craig peterson.com/iheart or click on the iHeart logo. On my homepage, [00:11:51] Jim Polito: [00:11:51] Craig Peterson, everybody. He's the man, Craig. Thanks so much. We'll talk with you next week.
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Why Hydrogen Fuel Cells Won't Be Like the Hindenburg
06/28/2021
Why Hydrogen Fuel Cells Won't Be Like the Hindenburg
We've got some really cool news that some people have interpreted as bad news. And this has to do with general motors and their hydrogen fuel cell. This is a very interesting story. I've always been fascinated with the Hindenburg and what happened there. And I did a lot of investigations. And of course, there was the initial investigation that happened back in 1937. When the Hindenburg actually crashed, I found online, you can buy pieces of the Hindenburg online. [00:00:35] There's this kind of an auction house. You can get a small square of the fab. Of the Hindenburgs outer shell for 99 bucks. I found them online. I didn't buy any, although I was thinking, that might actually be cool, but what am I going to do with it? Rights to get on a wall then what w what was interesting about it and about the fabric was what the German engineers had. [00:01:01] Now we know that you can use helium and helium is a great little gas it's inert. It's not going to catch fire. It is also lighter than air. There's a lunch, a lot of others, great properties that has, you can use it for super cooling things that you can't with. Most other gases, helium is much better for super cooling than oxygen is. [00:01:23] And hydrogen is Excel. Helium is getting hard to find the United States had a strategic reserve of helium. Now, to me, that makes sense because we did at one point need helium. We had dirge bubbles. We still do. We still use helium to send weather balloon. Been various other things, but then the federal government decided ELA. [00:01:48] We don't need to keep this reserve anymore. So they sold it off. As of next year, there won't be anything left in that strategic reserve. So where do we get helium? We get it from regular old oil mine. So they drill a hole it's created by the breakdown of various elements in the soil, primarily some of the hard rocks. [00:02:14] And as they break down and decay, they produce helium as one of the byproducts. Now what's been happening in the reason we are in. A helium shortage. Number three in fact, is that we are now fracking. Fracking Lutz is extract a lot more natural gas and a lot more , which is what we're really trying to do and keep some of those costs down. [00:02:44] But it also does not create as much helium and that's. And it's a really big problem when you get right down to it and you're trying to figure out if we're going to fill up a balloon, that's going to go up. What are we going to do now? Approximately a quarter of all of the helium that's news out there goes into these birthday balloons. [00:03:09] Okay. So yeah, it's it's kinda cool, but it's not an absolutely necessary thing, frankly, but it is used in all kinds of other things, including experiments. You remember? I said that helium is used to super cool thing. Think of these massive hydraulic colliders, some of the other experiments that are going on, where we have a magnet. [00:03:37] Now, one of the biggest, most important things we're doing with magnets right now is trying to create a container for nuclear fusion. Now nuclear fusion doesn't have the byproducts of nuclear fusion. Although we've solved most of those vision problems, you don't have this highly radioactive stuff anymore that we used to have in the old reactors. [00:04:01] Although we haven't been building new ones for what, 40 years now. But those particular types of containers, if you will, are built by these big magnets. So these magnets hold it in place. And in order to get the amount of power we need to, to these magnet, we have to super cool them. We have to super cool, the power supplies, and that is typically using helium. [00:04:27] So we've had to shut down some of these experiments. Because we don't have enough helium so much for the strategic reserve, that is almost completely depleted. And by the way, the federal government in its infinite wisdom sold that helium off at a fraction of fair market value. That's a problem because it just went crazy. [00:04:52] People were using it for things that just weren't that important. And now many of our experiments are getting shut down, but in the world war two era and pre-World war II era Germany had a problem trying to get helium itself. Germany doesn't have a whole lot of oil reserves and it had to buy everything. [00:05:12] And the United States really didn't want to sell here. To Germany. So what Germany did and you guys probably all know this from your history lessons, cause you are the best and brightest hydrogen was used. And because hydrogen was used it was a flammable gas. And when there was a spark, when it was trying to land. [00:05:36] It went up, it caught fire. Now what's really interesting is if you look at the pictures that were taken of it burning, there were obviously elements other than hydrogen, because hydrogen burns beautifully pure. You can't really even see it. And what would normally happen is you wouldn't have. Poof. [00:05:58] And the whole thing just burns up. You'd have a hole and that hole be shooting a flame out as it was ignited, right as the hydrogen was ignited and the whole, my discontinue to get a a little bigger until there's no pressurized hydrogen anymore. And the fire's over, but that's not what happened with the Hindenburg. [00:06:18] She caught fire. Because of that spark and it had that spark because of the weather conditions at the time, they just weren't being cautious enough. In fact, that was the very last large dirigible Airship. Ever made, frankly it's crazy, yeah. We got the Goodyear blimp, we got some of these others and they need the helium to fill them up. [00:06:43] And then over time it was kinda like a swimming pool. You filled it up and you, all you have to do is just add a little bit more now, and then you don't have to, because of leakage, you don't have to completely refill it all of the time. So what ended up happening is they had hydrogen on board. [00:07:02] Had the spark started a flame and then the cloth material that coated this massive container holding all of the hydrogen caught fire, but it didn't just catch fire. What happened was it caught fire and. It burned very quickly because effectively the entire outside surface of the Hindenburg was coated with rocket fuel. [00:07:30] Some of the same components that go into gunpowder aluminum powder, which gave it that kind of silver shine. They really messed up. So people are looking at what is happening now with general motors. Tech fuel cell technology and other a little bit worried because this technology was developed for cars. [00:07:51] It is being used in some parts of the world, in some parts of the country. I know California has some hydrogen cars on the road with a fuel cell. Now they're not burning hydrogen. In order to transport the car, they're actually allowing a chemical process to occur. So the hydrogen atom is attracted to the oxygen atom and they use a membrane so that they're trying to get together. [00:08:18] And that's what produces electricity. And then what is the result when you have two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom and they combine H two O so the only. Final end product here coming out of that car is pure. Which is cool. So GM says wait a minute. Now we have this technology, why don't we try and make airplanes a little bit more efficient? [00:08:45] And so they're saying you don't, you're taking off with two tons of water on board. How about we put a hydrogen fuel cell in there. You will be well to generate electricity. Now that's a very big deal because now that electricity doesn't have to be generated by the turbines of the gas engine. And on top of it all, you don't have to take off with two tons of water on board because we can generate water as your. [00:09:16] And of course, they're not going to coat it with a rocket fuel. They are going to put it in one of these really cool containers that is considered to be very safe. So it's very cool. So the litmus test, according to our friends over at general motors, he this is a GM executive. Director Charlie frees. [00:09:36] He says our technology can address customer needs in a wide range of uses on land, sea, air, or rail. And this collaboration we could open up new possibilities for aircraft transitioning to alternative energy, power sources. Now I don't expect a plane to be actually flying on this any time soon. [00:09:58]Hydrogen is a great little fuel, but it doesn't provide enough energy to get that jet off the ground at all, but it does provide enough energy to supplement it so good for them. I think this is a good use frankly, of the hydrogen fuel cells, as long as we can avoid it leaking and causing other major problems. [00:10:21] But I think that can be solved. Look at what we've been able to do now. These containers for the pretty much everything that can be hit by a train at full speed and not. So I think we got this covered. All right, everybody stick around. We'll be right back. And we're going to talk about it. A new type of vigilante that you may not have heard of before. [00:10:46] Of course, you're listening to Craig Peterson. Check me out online. CraigPeterson.com.
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You're not going to want to click "I Agree" anymore
06/28/2021
You're not going to want to click "I Agree" anymore
[ As heard on WGIR, WQSO, and WKXL on 2021-06-28] Privacy is gone. We started talking this morning with Mr. Christopher Ryan, and we got into our privacy. There's a great article that I'll have this weekend in my newsletter from the Daily Mail about about this whole thing. And it's titled "Read This and You Won't Click 'I Agree' Ever Again". So we got into that and also into this new bill here, it's called the ending platform monopoly, please act, can we split up these huge companies, these social media companies, et cetera, that are providing various platforms. Should we split them up? [00:00:37] This is a real interesting topic and one that's going to affect every last one of us. And of course, Chris and I both had opinions. [00:00:46] Chris Ryan: [00:00:46] I am Chris Ryan. Craig Peterson is the host tech talk on news radio six, 10 and 96. 7 Saturdays and Sundays at 11:30 AM. [00:00:54] One of the more fascinating things about the tech environment is how. Either we don't care or it's unbeknownst to us that we allow for tech companies to spy on us and to have an inner track basically to our minds and to our souls were for many years, we always wondered why other people were thinking, right? [00:01:19] Like what does that person thinking? And there was no way to ever really. But now there are ways to know, because we look into things on Google. We look into things via searches and we like certain things. We agree on certain things. And as a result of that we at some points in time are just giving the money, the giving information to tech companies, but at other points in time, We're actually showing via social media, who we are in ways that we never would have done in the past and employers, friends, everybody get a completely different view of a person's true inner feelings and how their mind works via social media that we never had before. [00:02:02] Craig Peterson: [00:02:02] It is potentially a huge problem. We've got these busy bodies, if you will, that are listening to basically all of the signals we're sending out. We tell them where we live. You may not have given them your address, but if you have apps on your phone that you guaranteed that smartphone now who stays in the same house every night, they know where you. [00:02:26] They know what you're like because of what you're searching for online, the website you're going to, they know what you say with some of these devices. My son I had was over his girlfriend's house and had a conversation with her about getting a hammock in front of one of these little portals from our friends at Facebook. [00:02:46]Immediately ad started showing up for all of us. So we're telling these tech companies, everything that we're doing, we have microphones in our rooms, our television visions, Vizio, which is one of the major manufacturers was caught watching us. Who is looking at the TV when they're looking at it so they can get better ratings. [00:03:09] Microphones are being used. The spy agencies worldwide now have direct access to us. It's a real problem. And it's a problem for you and me, not just for someone that's a high tech. High value target. It's a problem for you and me because now all of this information is also available to the regular bad guys. [00:03:30] That's what they're using for fishing. They're getting you to do things on marketers are getting you to do things. Obviously the PI getting all this information and showing you the right information at the right time, the bad guys are getting you to do things by clicking on it. So links going to websites that are actually going to cause you harm. [00:03:51] And we're seeing huge increases in all of this, Chris. Right? [00:03:56] Chris Ryan: [00:03:56] And it's the, those types of things are happening behind the scenes, but it's also a lot of the outward things. What do you post about, what do you say? How do you interact with other people? All of these types of things are accessible to the public at times, and also accessible, behind the scenes as well. [00:04:13] And it allows for a catalog to be built on you as an individual. And we are. Insight into our inner thinkings and our process that we would never have thought about that our parents would have never thought about doing before. And as a result of that there is a lot of things that take place out in society that, may we may not understand, or we may not completely comprehend, but a lot of it has to do with. [00:04:46] Behavior on social media and our inability to know when to say things and when not to say things, and that is a huge problem. [00:04:56] Craig Peterson: [00:04:56] It is knowing when to shut up. It's right there in politics as well. The Obama campaign was the first to mine. Incredible amounts of data from Facebook. Incredible. [00:05:09] Far more access than anyone had ever had before Facebook just literally gave it to them. And then you had the Trump campaign come along and the higher, the Cambridge Analytica guys who had access to much less data than the Obama campaign had. But in both cases you were saying. Ads that were so tightly targeted at people and individuals that you really were being manipulated because they know what you're saying. [00:05:37] They know what you're doing, they know who your friends are, and they put it all together now to lead you down that Primrose path, whatever. See, that's where I really get concerned. We are absolutely being manipulated. And as you pointed out, Chris we're being manipulated voluntarily. We're telling them everything we possibly can about us when we're posting on these various sites. [00:06:04] Chris Ryan: [00:06:04] That's a really good point. How's judiciary committee approved antitrust legislation that could prohibit platform operators like Amazon, apple, Google, and Facebook from favoring, their own products and services. And the legislation could even break up industry giants by forcing them to eliminate or sell certain divisions. [00:06:21] I don't see any way shape or form that this becomes law. That being said there is a public desire. For law to come to fruition that creates a more even playing field breaks up big tech breaks up these corporate giants and creates an environment where there is more shared prosperity. And. I'm curious as to what your thoughts are on this and what direction this goes and does do these companies need to be broken up in your view, a and B given how tightly they're able to control political figures via donations and power and things of that nature. [00:07:06] Is there any way that these big tech companies get back? [00:07:10]Craig Peterson: [00:07:10] It's a great question. And I would love to say that let the marketplace take care of it, but these companies are so incredibly profitable. The odds of them going under are very slim. Look at how long now we've had Facebook and Google out there. [00:07:27] I'm sure their predecessors died. Their predecessors, trying to have went that way. My space out, et cetera. But these people have had so much control, so much money, so much profit that the opposite they are going to be corrected by the marketplace are slim. Because part of the problem, Chris, with these huge guys is they keep everybody else out of the market. [00:07:52] Get Instagram, a company that was worth maybe $50 million. Facebook has been out there paying a billion dollars to buy their perspective competition. And they've done it multiple times. Google has done it multiple times. We're talking about a hundred times what the company is worth, just so they don't have to face competition. [00:08:16] So now that brings in this ending platform monopolies, right? That you just mentioned will that help? Yeah, but yeah, I don't know. How do you break them up? There's obvious ways you can slice them up, but is there the stomach for the federal government to get involved in this? And we're just giving it all to these companies with margins, proper margins that are insane. [00:08:41]Chris Ryan: [00:08:41] As always. [00:08:41] Craig, thank you so much. Appreciate your time. Hey, take care. Craig Peterson, joining us here on Hampshire day. Host of tech talk on news radio 610 and 96.7 Saturdays and Sundays at 11:30.
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Vigilante Malware affecting 40% of software - Google and Apple Improving Your Privacy
06/26/2021
Vigilante Malware affecting 40% of software - Google and Apple Improving Your Privacy
[Weekly Show #1119 2021-06-26] We've got some really cool news that some people have interpreted as bad news. And this has to do with general motors and their hydrogen fuel cell. This is a very interesting story. [00:00:13] I've always been fascinated with the Hindenburg and what happened there. And I did a lot of investigations. And of course the, there was the initial investigation that happened back in 1937. When the Hindenburg actually crash, I found online, you can buy pieces of the Hindenburg online. [00:00:35] There's this kind of an auction house. You can get a small square of the fab. Of the Hindenburgs outer shell for 99 bucks. I found them online. I didn't buy any, although I was thinking, that might actually be cool, but what am I going to do with it? Rights to get on a wall then what w what was interesting about it and about the fabric was what the German engineers had. [00:01:01] Now we know that you can use helium and helium is a great little gas it's inert. It's not going to catch fire. It is also lighter than air. There's a lunch, a lot of others, great properties that has, you can use it for super cooling things that you can't with. Most other gases, helium is much better for super cooling than oxygen is. [00:01:23] And hydrogen is Excel. Helium is getting hard to find the United States had a strategic reserve of helium. Now, to me, that makes sense because we did at one point need helium. We had dirge bubbles. We still do. We still use helium to send weather balloon. Been various other things, but then the federal government decided ELA. [00:01:48] We don't need to keep this reserve anymore. So they sold it off. As of next year, there won't be anything left in that strategic reserve. So where do we get helium? We get it from regular old oil mine. So they drill a hole it's created by the breakdown of various elements in the soil, primarily some of the hard rocks. [00:02:14] And as they break down and decay, they produce helium as one of the byproducts. Now what's been happening in the reason we are in. A helium shortage. Number three in fact, is that we are now fracking. Fracking Lutz is extract a lot more natural gas and a lot more , which is what we're really trying to do and keep some of those costs down. [00:02:44] But it also does not create as much helium and that's. And it's a really big problem when you get right down to it and you're trying to figure out if we're going to fill up a balloon, that's going to go up. What are we going to do now? Approximately a quarter of all of the helium that's news out there goes into these birthday balloons. [00:03:09] Okay. So yeah, it's it's kinda cool, but it's not an absolutely necessary thing, frankly, but it is used in all kinds of other things, including experiments. You remember? I said that helium is used to super cool thing. Think of these massive hydraulic colliders, some of the other experiments that are going on, where we have a magnet. [00:03:37] Now, one of the biggest, most important things we're doing with magnets right now is trying to create a container for nuclear fusion. Now nuclear fusion doesn't have the byproducts of nuclear fusion. Although we've solved most of those vision problems, you don't have this highly radioactive stuff anymore that we used to have in the old reactors. [00:04:01] Although we haven't been building new ones for what, 40 years now. But those particular types of containers, if you will, are built by these big magnets. So these magnets hold it in place. And in order to get the amount of power we need to, to these magnet, we have to super cool them. We have to super cool, the power supplies, and that is typically using helium. [00:04:27] So we've had to shut down some of these experiments. Because we don't have enough helium so much for the strategic reserve, that is almost completely depleted. And by the way, the federal government in its infinite wisdom sold that helium off at a fraction of fair market value. That's a problem because it just went crazy. [00:04:52] People were using it for things that just weren't that important. And now many of our experiments are getting shut down, but in the world war two era and pre-World war II era Germany had a problem trying to get helium itself. Germany doesn't have a whole lot of oil reserves and it had to buy everything. [00:05:12] And the United States really didn't want to sell here. To Germany. So what Germany did and you guys probably all know this from your history lessons, cause you are the best and brightest hydrogen was used. And because hydrogen was used it was a flammable gas. And when there was a spark, when it was trying to land. [00:05:36] It went up, it caught fire. Now what's really interesting is if you look at the pictures that were taken of it burning, there were obviously elements other than hydrogen, because hydrogen burns beautifully pure. You can't really even see it. And what would normally happen is you wouldn't have. Poof. [00:05:58] And the whole thing just burns up. You'd have a hole and that hole be shooting a flame out as it was ignited, right as the hydrogen was ignited and the whole, my discontinue to get a a little bigger until there's no pressurized hydrogen anymore. And the fire's over, but that's not what happened with the Hindenburg. [00:06:18] She caught fire. Because of that spark and it had that spark because of the weather conditions at the time, they just weren't being cautious enough. In fact, that was the very last large dirigible Airship. Ever made, frankly it's crazy, yeah. We got the Goodyear blimp, we got some of these others and they need the helium to fill them up. [00:06:43] And then over time it was kinda like a swimming pool. You filled it up and you, all you have to do is just add a little bit more now, and then you don't have to, because of leakage, you don't have to completely refill it all of the time. So what ended up happening is they had hydrogen on board. [00:07:02] Had the spark started a flame and then the cloth material that coated this massive container holding all of the hydrogen caught fire, but it didn't just catch fire. What happened was it caught fire and. It burned very quickly because effectively the entire outside surface of the Hindenburg was coated with rocket fuel. [00:07:30] Some of the same components that go into gunpowder aluminum powder, which gave it that kind of silver shine. They really messed up. So people are looking at what is happening now with general motors. Tech fuel cell technology and other a little bit worried because this technology was developed for cars. [00:07:51] It is being used in some parts of the world, in some parts of the country. I know California has some hydrogen cars on the road with a fuel cell. Now they're not burning hydrogen. In order to transport the car, they're actually allowing a chemical process to occur. So the hydrogen atom is attracted to the oxygen atom and they use a membrane so that they're trying to get together. [00:08:18] And that's what produces electricity. And then what is the result when you have two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom and they combine H two O so the only. Final end product here coming out of that car is pure. Which is cool. So GM says wait a minute. Now we have this technology, why don't we try and make airplanes a little bit more efficient? [00:08:45] And so they're saying you don't, you're taking off with two tons of water on board. How about we put a hydrogen fuel cell in there. You will be well to generate electricity. Now that's a very big deal because now that electricity doesn't have to be generated by the turbines of the gas engine. And on top of it all, you don't have to take off with two tons of water on board because we can generate water as your. [00:09:16] And of course, they're not going to coat it with a rocket fuel. They are going to put it in one of these really cool containers that is considered to be very safe. So it's very cool. So the litmus test, according to our friends over at general motors, he this is a GM executive. Director Charlie frees. [00:09:36] He says our technology can address customer needs in a wide range of uses on land, sea, air, or rail. And this collaboration we could open up new possibilities for aircraft transitioning to alternative energy, power sources. Now I don't expect a plane to be actually flying on this any time soon. [00:09:58]Hydrogen is a great little fuel, but it doesn't provide enough energy to get that jet off the ground at all, but it does provide enough energy to supplement it so good for them. I think this is a good use frankly, of the hydrogen fuel cells, as long as we can avoid it leaking and causing other major problems. [00:10:21] But I think that can be solved. Look at what we've been able to do now. These containers for the pretty much everything that can be hit by a train at full speed and not. So I think we got this covered. All right, everybody stick around. We'll be right back. And we're going to talk about it. A new type of vigilante that you may not have heard of before. [00:10:46] Of course, you're listening to Craig Peterson. Check me out online. CraigPeterson.com. [00:10:52]Well, you probably know again here, because you're the best and brightest, what a vigilante is. Well, I bet you haven't really heard about this type of vigilante before, and it is causing havoc for as many as 40% of computers. [00:11:10]Well, vigilantes have throughout history decided that they were going to take the launch of their own hands. [00:11:16] Now, way back when there wasn't law enforcement, et cetera, that's just what you did. And then we ended up with the tribes and our tribes would decide, okay, what's going to happen to this person. And you know, one of the worst things that could possibly happen way back. Caveman days. And after frankly, the worst thing that could happen to you is getting banished because having a group of people who are living together, cooperating together, working together makes all of the difference when it comes to survive. [00:11:53] And being kicked out of that tribe out of that group meant you had a very low chance of long-term survival. And if you went into another group, they'd really be suspicious about you because where did you come from? Did somebody kick you out because you did something really, really bad? You know, I kind of wonder if that's not deeply ingrained inside of us from all of those. [00:12:19] Centuries millennia with that whole type of process in place where we see someone that's different than us. And we kind of wonder, right. If you think that's where that might've come from. Interesting thought. I don't know that I've ever seen any studies about that. So vigilantes, nowadays are people who they're not going to the chieftain. [00:12:40] They're not going to the local police department or the prosecutor who a, whoever it might be. They are taking the law as it were into their own hands. Now it's not necessarily even the law, they just decide that they want something to happen in a particular way. And by having that happen in that particular way, they now have control. [00:13:06] Right. They're making the law as it were not just enforcing it. We have a lot of malware out there and there's a lot of different types. You might remember what Sony did, Sony. Decided they didn't like people ripping their CDs. And so they went ahead and installed an automatic installer for windows computers. [00:13:29] So if you tried to play your favorite Sony CD, right. Audio CD, listen to some music, it would automatically install some what. You and I would call malware on your computer and it would look at everything you were doing on your computer. To try and make sure that you were not trying to make a copy of the desk, not just a copy, but what we call ripping it. [00:14:00] In other words, you have a CD and you have an MP3 player. How do you get the CD on the MP3 player? Cause you can't just stick it into an MP3 player, so you have to rip it and that converts it from the CD format into an MP3 format. So it's all digital. You can take it away. And I have really griped about the music industry before, because they make way more money off of CDs than they ever did off of records. [00:14:28] Just because of how cheap it is. It costs them like 10 cents, not even to make a CD. And it costs them a couple of bucks to make a record back in the. So they decided they would do digital without thinking twice about while digital means you can a perfect copy, perfect coffee copy of that desk. And so it's only, he said, I'll go, well, here's what we're going to do. [00:14:53] We're going to make this. And so it installed itself. Way down deep inside the operating system. It watched as you loaded up desks and watched what you did that is malware. And that was Sony being frankly, a vigilant. Yeah. They said, Hey, it's for copyright protection, but there was no encryption on CDs. [00:15:16] There still isn't on compact discs. When we're talking about music desks, there is encryption on DVDs and that's what they did in order to say, well, you can't rip it because it's an encryption. Past the digital communications millennial act. And then from that act, they were able to now have controls. Hey, listen, if it's something's encrypted, you can't even try to dig. [00:15:40] Okay. Pretty, pretty big deal. So there's a whole lot to this whole vigilante thing. And someone is added again, in this case, we found a researcher who has found something you just don't really see very often, you know, outside that sone thing, but it's booby trapped file. Yeah, there's these files that are out there on the internet on a bunch of torrent sites and others that are pirated software and they have a booby trap inside. [00:16:18] Now the pirated software is typically things like a Microsoft windows or all of their different software, right word. And you name it all the way across the line. They also, by the way, have put some of this malware into games because there's a lot of people that run games and they grabbed these cracked games from the inside. [00:16:45] So we're talking about boob bootleg talk. And so what this person or people, or whoever it is, is doing according to Sofos labs, principal researcher, his name is Andrew Brandt is get getting these people to install this software that has. A booby trap and that what it does is you think you're just installing the game or whatever it might be. [00:17:15] But in reality, you're installing software that sends. The file name that was executed to an attacker controlled server. So it knows, oh, you're trying to run Microsoft word and it sends along your IP address of your computers. And then what it does is this vigilante software. It tries to modify the victim's computers so they can no longer. [00:17:43] Access some, 1000 other pirate sites, like the pirate bay.com, which is a very popular site out. Oh, out there. So this is obviously not your typical malware, not at all. And they are doing this same type of thing. That's so needed way back in the day, modifying your computer so that you can not do something that may be illegal. [00:18:11] It may be mostly, most of the time, he illegal, hard to say, but in reality, they're modifying it without you knowing. It's a very, very big deal. So people are using software, kind of like this vigilante software to steal stuff. Usually it's passwords, or maybe your keystrokes or cookies or your intellectual property access Eve, the people are even using ad networks, advertising networks to deliver software. [00:18:44] But that will mind cryptocurrency for them. Okay. But those are all theft. That's what the motive is, but not in this case. These samples really only did a few things and none of them follow the motive for malware criminals. It's fascinating. He had a thing that he posted over there on Twitter, kind of talking about it, but once the victims executed this Trojan file, it gets sent out to a server and I'm sure the FBI is tracking down this server. [00:19:16]It's one flourish. She drew.com in pronounceable. And it's it's not the one fee share, which is the name of a Cod storage provider, but it's pretty close to it. And it sends it out. I'm looking at the list of all of these websites that it tries to block by going into your hosts file. But it's an interesting way to approach it. [00:19:41] Isn't it, frankly, by mapping the domains for all of these torrent sites and pirate site. To your local host, the malware is making sure that your computer, I can't access those websites. Okay. Anyways, if it happens to you just go in and edit the host file. It's really quite that simple. All right. Stick around everybody. [00:20:03] But while you're waiting, go ahead, go online, go to CraigPeterson.com. Once you're there. You can easily subscribe to my newsletter and keep up-to-date on everything. CraigPeterson.com. [00:20:18]We've been worrying about what is happening with ransomware with a cyber attacks and where is it coming from? We've got a new study out, did showing that one in five manufacturing companies are not only targeted by cyber attacks, but are getting nailed and getting nailed back. [00:20:38]This is a bigger problem, and I think most of us realize, and I have a few manufacturing clients who have been nailed badly by cyber attacks. Very badly. There is a new study out that looked at this it's called the manufacturing cybersecurity. Index. And this is a report that has the results of surveys of 567 manufacturing employees. [00:21:08] Now that is quite a few and most of these people were in fact, in the it side of things, some of them were specifically in the cyber securities. That one was most interesting about this. Isn't the fact that just that one out of five manufacturing companies is targeted by cyber attacks, but what the response, what the thoughts of these people that run the companies are. [00:21:37] And I say that because I am just constantly amazed at how businesses just are not paying attention to this, and this is proof again, and here's what it is. Information stealing malware makes up about a third of attacks, but companies are worried about what ransomware, the worried about ransomware shutting down production. [00:22:05] That is a very big deal because of course it does, but what is going to hurt you more? And that's what you got to figure out. That's what companies have to really look. These numbers that we're looking at are according to this article I'm reading at a dark reading, which is a great site. If you haven't been there before, and you'd like to follow some of these things in the cybersecurity world, definitely check it out. [00:22:34] Dark reading, very easy to very easy to look at lots of good stuff. But Robert limos is a contributing writer over there. And he's the guy that wrote that. And so he is saying that more than one third of all manufacturing firms are attacked every month. That's absolutely amazing. Now, of course not all manufacturing employees really know when a company is being attacked, but ransomware attacks that they know, because usually that means much of the company is shut down when it happens. [00:23:12]Because ransomware attacks have this major impact on the business and the other types of attacks. information most of the time companies never find out unless it's too late again, it's usually ransom or extortion. They're two sides of the same coin. So an extortion attack might be where they get onto a network. [00:23:37] Exfiltrate data. And then they say, Hey, listen, we've got all of this data. Do you want us to post your bank, account numbers, customer information, your intellectual property, your plans, whatever it is, you want us to post them online? Huh? And if not pay out. Okay. So this is, I think a very big problem. [00:23:58] There are major blocks between it information technology and security teams. And I...
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