Craig Peterson - America's Leading Security Coach
Sleep at night knowing what's going on with your cybersecurity - America’s Leading Security Coach - FBI InfraGard Webinar Moderator - Network Security Since 1991 CraigPeterson.com
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Welcome! The Insecurity of DNS over HTTPS, Internet Archive's VHS Vault, Data Minimization and more on Tech Talk with Craig Peterson on WGAN
03/27/2020
Welcome! The Insecurity of DNS over HTTPS, Internet Archive's VHS Vault, Data Minimization and more on Tech Talk with Craig Peterson on WGAN
This week is a replay of the show aired originally on 7 Mar 2020 Welcome! We are going to hit a number of topics today from the world of Technology. I am quite disappointed with Mozilla, they are letting marketers and politicians define their technology. Listen in to find out why I feel that way. Compliance is an issue for many companies and I have some solutions that will help you and it includes a diet but probably not the kind you are thinking. Do you ever get nostalgic for "the good old days?" Well, I have something that might help, listen in to find out more. I will tell you happened to one of the Sharks from Shark Tank? How you can prevent it from happening to you and more. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Related Articles: --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Hello everybody, Craig Peterson here on WGAN and, of course, online at Craig Peterson, dot com and heard streaming all over the world on your favorite streaming site. I'm so glad to be here today and be able to talk with you a little bit about what are the top news stories this week? How can you keep safe that's kind of one of my themes because I freaked out when my company got attacked some years ago. You know, just a regular business guy trying to run a small business and man did hurt me bad back in the day. I'm just trying to get all of the information I've put together over the years and learn, and I continue to study this stuff and continue to look at what are the best ways to defend ourselves. I try and get all of that and put it together into neat packages for you. One of them, of course, is the radio show. I also get on with Facebook Lives. YouTube lives, and also do various types of pieces of training and tutorials and things out there. Where in fact, for the next course I have coming up, we're going to have implementation calls, where we are talking specifically about what to do when you do it. So you try and implement something, you have some issues. I'm going to get on the phone with you guys. So I think that's going to be great. And then the upcoming class here in a few weeks. And then, of course, the tutorials leading up to that class where I'll take your questions live, sometimes those little tutorial sessions on, you know what it's webinar technology. On these webinars, sometimes we go a couple of hours so I can answer all of your questions. That's what it's about here. All right, because I understand most people, not I know I'm this way too. I get contacted by somebody, and they're trying to sell me something that happened just over the weekend. Last weekend somebody knocked at the door, trying to sell windows, right. I think it was like Renewal by Andersen or something like that. And they were walking around knocking on doors. I see you know, immediately just knee jerk said, No, No thanks, my windows are fine. It got me to thinking about the whole situation in the security realm. Because that's what we do, right? What we've been doing for years decades, sometimes we have the antivirus software, every once in a while when we hear about a real big vulnerability, we go ahead and apply patches. You know, it's been the same old, same old, but we just can't do that anymore. And because really, we see huge, huge problems and businesses going out of business because of them. So that's what this is all about. So if you're a new listener, welcome. If you've been listening to me for a while, of course, Welcome, Welcome to you too. And I want to get this information out. So one of the best ways to make sure you have all of the latest information you need is to go online go to Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe, and that'll get you on my email list. Then once you're there, you will be able to keep up on up to date on things I do, try and get those out. I have a newsletter that's every Saturday morning. Then when I'm doing training, I'll send something that's a little out of the band if I'm doing a live or various other things. I thought because of the way it works with the emails I send out, if you want to unsubscribe, you will be guaranteed to never hear from me again. Maybe that's a great thing that is right for some people. But for other people, I came to realize that perhaps they didn't care about the training, they just wanted the newsletter, or perhaps they wanted the pieces of training but didn't want any emails. Some wanted on courses but not other courses, etc., etc. So I'm going to try and do something a little bit different right now, and there's a pretty nasty warning as a footnote. If you unsubscribe, I can't send you anything anymore. I won't send you anything even if you want a course, you'll not hear from me again, because you unsubscribed and marked as somebody that doesn't ever want to hear from me again. That's fine. I know we all have our lives, and maybe you think you're safe enough. Perhaps you're going to reach out to me when everything falls apart around you. At which point, I can't respond to you because I will have your email blocked. That is because I don't want to bother you. I want to comply with the can-spam app act. Although, you know, most people don't seem to care about that as well as the GDPR. Also, The New California regulations, the Massachusetts regulations, and new federal regulations that are going into effect. They all place requirements on when and where I'm not supposed to contact you. If you say No. Then No means no, right. I'm going to change things a little bit with these upcoming training and courses that I'm going to be doing. I'm going to make it so you can just unsubscribe from those, so you're not going to lose contact with me. I've had some people complain, and in the end, it becomes a bit of a pain to try and add them back in. We're going to try and make this a little bit easier for you guys, so keep an eye out for that. You already know right based on what I'm saying, as well as what I've done in the past that I won't spam you guys, I don't sell your name to other people your email address. Most of you I know are kind of the older generations, the younger guys they don't care we've already talked about that. They will sell their email address and name for a donut. But us older folk were a little bit more cautious about it. I think that's probably a good thing. We're less likely to get ripped off the senior population in some ways less likely to get ripped off, and other ways more likely get ripped off. It's interesting. Again, we tend to trust phone calls more. You know what I have, frankly, I don't answer my phone anymore. It just goes to voicemail. And I have somebody else look at it because there are so many scams coming in. But we tend to trust the phones more in the generation, you know, the men and women older than me, other baby boomers, they are a little bit more susceptible to those types of scams. So be careful with those types of scams as well just you know, be careful all the way around, frankly. And that brings us to our first story of the day today. And this is something I found that I thought was cool. So I thought I'd share it with you. It's a tech thing. I was just a few weeks ago talking on the radio. One of the radio shows I appear on as a guest. And we were talking about Betamax versus VHS. And I knew I knew that the radio host I was talking to there's no way he just loves tech. There's no way he did not have Betamax. And he did. He had hundreds, apparently of beta tapes in his closet. But this is all about that Era of the 1990s. I'm sure you guys had VCRs right back in the day. And of course, the winner of that war was VHS, and it wasn't because it was better technology, but we're not going to delve into that right now. And those VHS tapes, at this point, about 20,000 of them have been put into an online vault. Now, if you've never used the Wayback Machine, you have to check it out. You can find it online. At archive.org, that's the name of it. It is an Internet Archive, and it shows web pages going way back, you can look at my web page from back in the very, very, very early days of the Internet. When you know, love the not the Internet, but of when the whole web thing came about, which was 9293 is when it started to go. I didn't have a webpage back in 85. When I first registered my domain that's been around for a while. And then, of course, I was using other domains. Before that, I've used my ham radio call sign is my domain. And before that, but the Wayback Machine is this archive, you can browse the history of any major site, many miners sites that are out there. They have used it in court cases. It's used by me, just for kind of memories of things as the way they were. Now you can use it for something brand new. I didn't know that they had, and that is They've got something out there on the Wayback Machine that's called the VHS vault V-H-S just like the VHS tapes that we had or that ken didn't have because he had Betamax. Right now, I'm looking at says there are almost 21,000 results. So they've taken these VHS tapes that were submitted, and they have effectively ripped them. They've turned them into digital video, right. And some of these are just amazing, like a warm-up to Traci Lords. It's an exercise program. Of course, Traci Lords was involved in some adult films back in the day. Man, I love this mystery science theater. 3000 Timothy Leary is a guest on MTV with John Lennon, Les Miserables from 1935, rush to judgment. There are some many cool things The Lion King in full VHS tapes. Now some of this information is probably still copyrighted, but as a general rule, archive.org doesn't get nailed for copyright violations. SpongeBob SquarePants Oh, this is the Fairy Fairy Godmother I think is what this cartoon was called and trying to remember my kids used to like it. Some bootleg tapes, everything, but you can find it online I think you would have a gas looking through these. I want you to go to archive.org as you're listening to the show, or maybe some other time during the week, you're sitting there watching some TV with your smartphone or your computer. Archive.org and look for the VHS vault. The actual URL is archive.org slash details slash VHS vault. You will see all kinds of fun stuff that's in there. They have many different collections You can search this you can go in by year when They did it. They have Flemish dog collection. There's another one. There are collections I've used in some of the training videos I put together. There are collections of old black and white art, and pencil art, and engineering diagrams that are well, well auto copyright and you'll find all that stuff@archive.org Check it out, I think you will have a gas checking it out. If you're like me, it's certainly brought back a lot of memories. When we get back, we're going to be talking about something that you should be doing, whether you're a home user or business user. You know, the things that we have to be worried about are the things that can be stolen from us, right, in the online world. Okay, this is what we will be talking about. What can be taken from us, but also what can be used to kind of hold our feet to the fire in ransomware. So we're going to talk about how to reduce your risk with Craig Peterson here on WGAN Stick around. We'll be right back. Hey everybody Craig Peterson back here on WGAN online, and of course, at Craig Peterson dot com. Yeah, you know it by now, right? Well, hopefully, you had a chance to look@archive.org, definitely check it out. It's called the Wayback Machine, at least that was its original name. And they may still have that domain, the Wayback machine.com. But now it's known as archive.org. It is a wonderful, wonderful trip down memory lane, at least for me. If, if you are a little bit older, you might remember the Internet back in the days fun looking at some of the original search pages at AltaVista. Man, I miss AltaVista. I used to like to use the Boolean algebra that you could do in AltaVista. By the way, if you are a geek like me when it comes to searching and you want to be able to dig into it. There's a tool I use, and I think that you'd like it also. It's not cheap, that's for sure, but not that expensive either, but it's called DEVONthink, D-E-V-O-N T-H-I-N-K. It allows you to set up searches using all kinds of Boolean constructs, which is very, very, very handy, at least as far as I'm concerned. You can set it up to do automatic search sets every day looking for different things. It's one of the tools I use to find the information that we talk about here on this show because so much of it just isn't generally speaking, available. It certainly isn't spoken about by the mainstream media, right? You know that right. That's why you listen to the show and why you follow me. I am on LinkedIn. I'm on Facebook. I'm on Twitter, YouTube, and my website as well. I appreciate all you guys who do follow and who comment. Now, if you're a business person, this is for you, but there are some things that you can do as an individual as well that are going to make a big difference for yourself and your safety online. Businesses are concerned about the GDPR, which we've talked about on the show before. That's the European privacy regulation. We're also very concerned right now with CCPA. I just had a company that makes optics. I use their optics here in the studio if you have ever seen me on a webinar or one of these videos or pop up training or anything. I'm in the studio, and my cameras here the lenses use the glass made by this company. I had no idea, but they reached out to us due to their operations in California. They have a sales operation there because, again, they're selling their optical glass for use in lenses, and all kinds of other devices. They reached out because they were concerned about what is happening, what could happen with these new California privacy regulations? Is it going to mess up their business? How is it going to mess up their business? How is it going to make things better or worse? I think they had some outstanding questions. So they called us in, and they paid us to do an audit of the systems they have. How are the systems working? What is it that we need to be worried about? You know, it's something that takes a few weeks and a couple of on-site visits in New York? New York State, which by the way, is going to have their own set of privacy regulations that are going to affect them pretty dramatically. But basically, what it came down to was if they were compliant with the European regulations, they were probably most of the way towards the California regulations. So they think that they're compliant. But when we got in and started having to look at it, it turned out No, no, no. They are not anywhere near compliant with either set of regulations. Even though their IT people told them they are because they have full-time programmers who are programming their systems. They thought, Oh, no, no, we're fine. We're fine. No, they weren't. So what do you do if your regular business? Enough moaning and groaning about the optical manufacturer, who has fantastic optics, which is why I use them. Let's talk about you. Let's talk about your business, your small business, your larger business, this is true, you should be paying attention if you are a medium or large business as well. One of the best things you can do, and it is hard to get through to a lot of CEOs and other business owners. But one of the best things you can do to reduce your risks is to reduce the data that you are maintaining. Right? If you want to reduce the chance of getting shot at, don't go out in the streets where they're shooting, right? If you want to reduce the risk of having your data stolen, then don't have the data out there for them to steal. If you don't want to get nailed by one of these new regulations, that says, hey, personally identifiable information has to be maintained in this way and that way. If someone asks you what data do you have on me? Do you realize now you only have one week to respond? You must provide that data to them. If you have any sort of a California Nexus or European Nexus, in other words, doing business in either one of those places. Now, it's down to I think five days it's not a week to respond, saying, Here's all of the data that we have about you. That's what you have to be able to do. We have to be able to do it right now. You also have to be able to tell them, here are all of the people within my organization as well our contractors that saw your data and had access to your data. That is a very, very big deal, frankly. The landscape is constantly changing your obligations for that data, and the data disclosure and the data-keeping keeps getting more strict. What's the right thing for you to do? Ultimately, well, it's to get rid of the damn data, right? It's a very, very solid first step in reducing your risk. Now I'm going to be publishing next week, a little guide that you can use yourself, right, you don't have to have me involved, or anything else is just for you, that you can use to do an inventory of all of the data that you have in your business. What we've done is we've gone through and looked at different parts of the businesses that we've worked with over the years and evaluated the kind of data they often have. You have to do that first, right? You must identify what your risks are. You must determine what data you have. I'll make that available for those people on my email list. It will be part of this ramp-up here, a precursor to the pieces of training that I will be doing. There will be different free pieces of training and tutorials in my ramp-up to my courses. You don't have to be in the course to participate in the free tutorials, okay? You don't have to buy anything from me. It is all free, no hype or anything else. Okay. I'm not trying to hard-sell anybody I want to help you. That is the first step -- doing this inventory the data you have, and it is one of the best things you can do. Put your company on a data diet. Now, you know, last week we had Barry Friedman on the show, talking about a sugar diet. Right. It's a lot like that, and it's getting rid of these addictive pieces of data that we keep on our clients on our prospects, everything else that's out there, right. Let's look at it as a lens. When you're looking at your data when you're doing an inventory of these data assets, ask yourself, do I need this? Will this provide what I need? Think about maybe like a food diet as Barry does with sugar? Do I need sugar? We know is sugar going to provide us the nutrients that we need? The answer to that is no. When it comes to sugar, right. We found that out from Barry last week. But we need to work to minimize sensitive data and ask ourselves, do we need this sensitive data to conduct business right now? And will we need this sensitive data to conduct business in the future? If the answer's no, securely dispose of that data. It is the only way to comply with these regulations that are already in place here in the US and Europe as well. All right, when we get back, we're going to talk about how did we get here? How did we? How did ransomware grow to be a multi-billion dollar industry? What did we do to get here? What should we do to try and get beyond all of this? You're listening to Craig Peterson on WGAN. And of course online at Craig Peterson. dot com, live on youtube, live on Facebook everywhere out there. Stick around. We'll be right back. Hey, welcome back, everybody, Craig Peterson here on WGAN, and of course online at Craig Peterson dot com. In case you missed it. We've been busy today talking about the internet archives VHS vault. Again, that's archive.org. Check it out. It is kind of cool. We just talked about reducing risk using the cheapest mechanism possible. Data minimization will save you money and help you be...
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AS HEARD ON: WGAN Mornings with Ken and Matt: Diagnosing Computer Issues, Remote Work, The technology providing information and minor diagnosis of Coronavirus and more
03/25/2020
AS HEARD ON: WGAN Mornings with Ken and Matt: Diagnosing Computer Issues, Remote Work, The technology providing information and minor diagnosis of Coronavirus and more
Good morning everybody! I was on with Ken and Matt and we had a good discussion about how Remote Diagnostics, Remote Work and Coronaviruses, and AI and how this is changing our world. These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Matt We're back again, and it is 7:38 on the WGAN Morning News with Ken and Matt. We are now talking to Craig Peterson is our tech guru. And he joins us now. Ken Mr. Craig, your timing couldn't be better because I got a new MacBook because my keys kept falling off the butterfly keyboard, which sucked him. I don't know why Apple did it. So I installed on I migrate everything over. And now, when I put on Chrome, and I tried to Google, I get this thing called Rona that comes on air express or something. And I clicked on it to see what it was and at someplace in Tel Aviv, that that says Nitsa. And so what's fascinating to me, by the way, Craig, I'm sure you can't do tech support from the phone right now. But uh, he got a brand new computer and did nothing. I didn't know it was already there. And on my last laptop. I mean, I thought it I identified it as like malware, right. His previous laptop, I sort of found a way around it or whatever, but like he just doesn't do anything and it's there also. Craig Yeah, but it must have happened when you migrated from your old one, hidden deep somewhere, and got installed during migration. Ken Yeah. Oh, that's why you pulled it from the old computer. I thought it was off my old computer. No, it wasn't I hit it. When I did that screen, I hit it so well, should I email Google? Should I email Chrome? Or I throw the computer against the wall? That is another option. I mean, what's this guy? If I email this guy in Tel Aviv, and said, what's this? Craig Yeah, don't do that. Don't do that. For the love of God. Don't do that. Matt They did a scan. They didn't find it. I've done so, give me suggestions. Craig Well, it sounds like you got a good tech support guy there locally to figure it out. But it looks like this is coming from Google, isn't it? He's got Chrome. It comes up from Chrome. I didn't know you didn't Google. Ken When I hit a web Chrome, it comes up instead of saying, "Google," it says, "Search." And then it's a smart search. It has this air Express, Facebook, Twitter, and it's just a standard launch page, but it has this Ollie Express thing next to it. Craig It's malware. Yeah, something new, but they got installed a while ago, a month ago and migrated. Well, that sort of thing takes a little bit to fix, and I definitely can do it. I bring it down virtually. Ken I wonder if I find the mouse if my guy can do it. Craig Yeah, usually the migration, it's not a big problem. And it's, there's a lot of these types of things go around. Well, of course, the biggest one is when people install these toolbars on their browsers. There's nothing but spyware in there. It doesn't sound like that. Matt would notice the difference. The toolbar Yeah, Matt The toolbar Yeah. No, I actually, that's the first thought I had too. I tried to get rid of it. I went to see if it was an extension. It was an extension. Yeah, I think I put Malwarebytes on his computer too. It's got Malwarebytes, and I ran it, and it found nothing. So this is probably not nasty, it's just annoying. Craig Yes. Matt It's trying to sell him something. Craig Yeah. Well, hey guys, I've got to bring something up here that I did almost a week ago now. There are millions of people who are working from home currently. Remote workers, many people even trying to figure out how to start a little business at home. I almost didn't wake up for this morning. Because I've been putting on these webinars, there are nine different webinars on topics related to security, not installing these nasty browser extensions. I did two webinars yesterday. These webinars are free. We talked about a browser extension you can put onto Chrome and other browsers, that is going to save your laptop battery, it's going to speed things up. It's just going to do a whole bunch of great stuff for you. I wanted to bring up today that I again, a bunch of people signed up. My next one is on Thursday. I'm going to do two on Thursday, two on Friday, one on Sunday. And then every day next week, I'm going to be doing two of them. And we're covering all kinds of topics, including some extensions that do stop malware on your browsers. We're going to go into VPN, when can you use them? When should you use them that Norton VPN isn't going to help you at all when it's time to get into the office, using a VPN versus remote desktop software. We're going to be covering your firewalls, and What kind of a firewall should you have? The attacks prevalent right now for home users? For a network router slash firewall? How should you be trading at a Wi-Fi? What do you need to know about Wi-Fi? All of this stuff and all free. And unlike that nastiness that you've got to your machine can I'm not sitting there trying to sell you anything. These are free, and we're talking about 10 hours plus worth of some training here. I'm working from home and doing it securely. And what I'd like to do is ask people to take a couple of minutes right now, because whether you are a retiree, or you are running a 500 person company, this information is something you need to have. And we've had a great response. I love the feedback people have been giving. So that's kind of given me a little bit more energy to do this. But if you are interested, You need to be on my email list because that's where I put the announcements out. I am not one of these marketers and new million pieces of emails a day. But if you go to Craig Peterson comm slash subscribe. It is so important right now because I'm getting notifications every day almost from the FBI, about new scans that the bad guys are running against people who are working from home. It is nuts. So these are not just me lecturing, these are two, and as they are LIVE. I'm answering all your questions, live. I'm showing you how to do things. And it's I hate to say this sounds a little self-serving, but it is thousands of dollars worth of training that I'm doing for free This is to help people out. Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe to attend You're going to need you can have a computer you can use your tablet you can use your phone, your smartphone that is and make sure you've got a piece of paper and a pencil ready and handy to do stuff. And anyone who attends gets replays. I have specialized training and special thank you things are people that participate because I know it's a lot of work for you too, but, but I want to get this out right now. It is just it's so important. I don't want you to get nailed or badly by these bad guys. Matt we're talking to Craig Peterson, he's our tech guru, and he joins us at this time every Wednesday to go over what's happening in the world of technology. No topic gets discussed without Coronavirus as part of it. Ladies and gentlemen, and so that is no exception for you, Craig, companies are trying to respond to this whole thing, and it's making them turn to what appears to be artificial intelligence. Are we creating Skynet here, in response to the Coronavirus? Should I be worried about this? Unknown Speaker 8:08 I heard that Prince Charles tested positive for Coronavirus this morning. Testing positive looks like the world might be coming to an end. Who knows, right? Yeah, here's the trick. We have a lot of companies who don't have all of the workers, and there was just a new story here at the bottom of the hour talking about the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard and some of the ironworkers trying to say, Hey, listen, we this is kind of dangerous for us. Workers are just not showing up, or they're being told not to show up. It depends on the company. The big tech companies are trying to use this artificial intelligence now. I don't like the definition that pins these days are using When it comes to artificial intelligence, that word has changed. We used to think of AI and man you too as kind of a Skynet thing. Right? Right? It the computers making decisions, it's learning, it's advancing that smarter than we are, etc., etc. We don't have that yet. It hasn't happened. And there's a lot of warnings about what might happen if that were to happen. But we don't have it. It's not artificial intelligence, and it's barely even machine learning. What it is, is pattern matching. Companies like Facebook, and many others out there right now YouTube, where you're putting content on the site, and people want to make sure that you're not racist, like saying things like President Trump is excellent, which would be horrific. If someone were to say that on Facebook, for instance, tongue firmly planted in cheek there Unknown Speaker 10:02 Who is going to censor the internet now? While they're turning more heavily to computers, machine language programming is looking for patterns, and those particular patterns are what they're calling AI. It is not artificial intelligence. There's throwing that term around again. So Skynet is not a threat. But if you are trying to start a new ad campaign on Facebook, for instance, all ads are reviewed by Facebook. It is going to take longer to get it approved, and there's going to be many more false positives. That is because AI, as they call it, is a little bit more of a curmudgeon than the people who review some of these ads and articles and posts and everything else. So yeah, it this is going to force some movement forward on this AI type front, but the singularity I think, man it is still many, many years away. Matt It is still coming, though. It is today. Ken You just wish to be here fast. Well, we're talking to Craig Peterson, our tech guru joins us every Wednesday at 738. before we let you go, Coronaviruses are the story of the year, or the websites and have that the talk about screening is well you can't go to a website to get screened, but there is useful information on testing. Craig Yeah, it didn't come out, believe it or not, you can go to google.com slash Covid-19 and find information there. The symptoms are listed there. Of course, they're all over the place. The CDC has, among many others, but one of Google's companies that the company they own did launch just a few days after President Trump announced is called Verily, this primary site allows people to go on and answer a few questions. It comes up with a diagnosis of, yeah, you probably got it, which you could have got that same diagnosis from your cousin. It is very, very simple. They're adding in now where you can go to get tested because, of course, as you guys already know, they don't want you just showing up in the emergency room of a hospital, with potentially Coronavirus where you can spread it. We already know hospitals are the worst place to go if you're sick, because you can catch diseases there, you just can't get anywhere else. They don't want to add Covid-19 to that list. So you can check it out. google.com slash subscribe if you want a little more information. Unknown Speaker 12:48 All right. Greg Peterson, our tech guru. He joins us now as he always does on Wednesdays to go over the world of technology. We're going to leave it there, Craig. So we appreciate you joining us as always, and we will talk to you next week. Unknown Speaker 13:00 All right, I'll be on Saturday, of course, at 1 pm cover some more of these topics everyone needs to know. And then again that URL to sign up as Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe in here guys. Thanks a lot, Greg. Unknown Speaker 13:15 Great. Let's go to the break room, ladies and gentlemen. Go to Eric. He's got all the top stories of the day. Transcribed by https://otter.ai --- More stories and tech updates at: Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553
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AS HEARD ON - The Jim Polito Show - WTAG 580 AM: Top Tips for Remote Working and Working From Home and more
03/24/2020
AS HEARD ON - The Jim Polito Show - WTAG 580 AM: Top Tips for Remote Working and Working From Home and more
Welcome! Hey everyone. I hope you are all doing well during this period of social distancing we are experiencing due to the Covid-19 pandemic. If you are new to doing remote work or working from home then you are going to want to attend the series of webinars on tools, techniques, and tactics you can use to make this easier for you. These are all offered at no charge. Later next week, I will be offering a live training course on securing your computers, networks, and browsers. This will be deeply discounted. No pressure, but if you are interested, I would appreciate your business. I was on with Jim Polito who was sitting in his kitchen under self-quarantine because he recently traveled overseas. We discussed some Top Tips for Remote Working and Working From Home. So, here we go with Jim Polito. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Craig There is a special plug-in that goes into your browsers, which helps to improve the whole browser experience. You use less memory, you will use less battery if you're on a laptop, and maybe you're out a little bit. That's the kind of the scope of what we're doing. We're getting into security as well. I'm going to teach you the tools, techniques, and tactics that I use, Jim. Craig This morning I was on with Jim Polito course, Craig Peterson here. And I spent a little time talking about the webinars, and what I have learned from more than 20 years of working from home and with my family. I will tell you the things that work for all of us. So listen in here we go. Jim He is the man, and this is the guy you want to turn to in times like these. I'm talking about our tech talk guru, Craig Peterson. Good morning, Craig. Craig Good Morning. I guess I am the man of the hour. I can't believe how many people have work from home questions. Jim Listen, let's start by just letting everybody know at the end of this segment, you can get all of this information plus more. You can get on his list, which is an excellent thing, especially now. Because you will send great information along to people, and you won't try to sell them anything or anything else. It's just that's how it is. But that we'll talk about at the end, but you've got some webinars going on. Before we get to our topics at hand, you have a pretty significant announcement. Craig Yeah, this is a very, very big thing. I think for so many people. We have, as you might know, I've been doing webinars for the FBI is infragard program. That's where The FBI works with critical infrastructure and critical businesses in several areas. Now, I guess based on what you were saying this morning. I've been doing these for quite a while. And the whole idea is to help businesses understand what they need to do. And we get some information from the FBI. They'll tell us stuff that they'll tell anybody, and then they keep everything that keeps us up at night, close to their chest. Yeah. Here's what I'm going to do. I have been doing webinars now for quite a few years, and we have some brand new ones. I have nine different remote work or work from home type of webinars coming up over the next two weeks. We're going delve into a different topic each day. I'm going to make them available to people who sign up. That is important as these are going to be LIVE. I will stay on and answer everybody's questions. The ones that I've done so far, they have been averaging about an hour and a half long. We're going to have one at 4 pm. Today, one at 9 pm tonight, and we're going to be talking about how to a special plug-in for your browsers, that helps to improve the whole browser experience. It will help you use less memory, you use less battery if you're on a laptop, and you step out for a little bit. That's the scope of what we're doing, and we will be getting into security as well. I'm going to teach you the tools, techniques, and tactics that I use, Jim. The way people sign up is they can just go to my website, Craig Peterson dot com slash Jim. There's a special sign-up there. Craig Peterson dot com slash Jim. It is just teaching and is free for everybody. Even though maybe you're a little bit older, you're not working anymore. Although aimed at remote workers, both for the business owner and the people working from home. If you're a little bit older, you're not working anymore, and you are still going to get a lot of benefit out of these webinars because you're going to learn a lot more about security. I'm going to give you all these free tools I use. We'll talk a little bit about some of the paid tools that we use, but it's all about remote working in this day and age. Jim That's great. You know what I'll do, we always podcast this segment. And what I'll do is I'll put up a link in that podcast posting at WTAG dot com on the Jim Polito Show page. When I broadcast this later this morning, I'll put that link up so people can get it now. I used some of the information you sent me. I mean, all of it was fascinating. However, I want to zero in on one thing. The big gamble that tech companies are making right now. As you know, they say necessity is the mother of invention. These companies must now take a more in-depth look at artificial intelligence. Not that companies aren't already using it, including our artificial intelligence right here at iHeart. But artificial intelligence in terms of these big tech companies, and it's kind of a gamble right now, why don't you explain that? Craig Yeah, it is because their people, you know, they aren't able to go into work. We've been using it in the tech industry for quite a while. We have used it to work with foreign workers as well. That has been wonderful for them because it helps to move them up to the food ladder if you will by increasing their pay. You know, it used to be that we would always outsource to India and it was very cheap. Then India's wages now are almost on par depending on what type of work it is with US workers. Currently, India is outsourcing to China. It's great. It's been lifting all the boats in that ocean everybody has been doing a little bit better. But we're at the point now where we need to have some more advanced technology. We're talking about hundreds of hours worth of videos being uploaded to YouTube every minute. There is no way that you could hire enough people to review all of those as an example. So what we see now is an acceleration via this artificial intelligence type mechanism reviewing videos. We see our posts on Facebook, for instance, and you're having problems getting your advertising approved. BTW that is another reason to use iHeart to get your messages out, which I heard is also using AI to accept these ads. So, overall, this is the trend, it's going to be here it started before the whole Covid-19 virus thing. However, with many people quarantining, you can't find a laptop to buy anywhere in the known universe, because they are all gone. Many of these businesses now no longer have the workers that they used to have even. So they've turned more to artificial intelligence. That means that there are all kinds of false negatives about some of the stuff you're posting. Which means things you're posting may get blocked more often than usual. Things you post, videos you upload might not get approved. And this is an overall trend. You know, they call it artificial intelligence, Jim. But the way I've been looking at it is not even machine learning. It's just some heavy programming that looks for patterns looking for keywords that have been getting a little bit smarter as time goes on. It's not like, like in science fiction movies, where artificial intelligence becomes self-aware. It is. I mean, frankly, what Tommy be our meteorologist does with the models is a form of artificial intelligence because the models continue to learn. They adapt and regurgitate what they learn. They're not self-aware. They're not reasoning they're doing what we have programmed them to do. They're looking for pattern matches. That is what they're looking for, and you know what, with this coronavirus pandemic, the whole artificial intelligence pattern matching thing has been a huge win. We're able to run simulations. Not just against known drugs that a drug company might want to try but against basically every material and combination of materials and minerals and bacterium, etc., etc. Even those that we could even think of using. We can run the simulations inside these artificial bits of intelligence that have learned a little bit about these patterns. We see these types of vaccines and medications delivered in just an incredible time. Things that would take years are now taking hours literally, and we are moving towards the point very, very soon. We already have some of this where we will have drugs ready. These vaccines you name it made specifically for us. So there will be a Jim Polito pill the Jim Polito can take that will deal with all of the issues he has. That's all thanks to this artificial intelligence, this machine learning that's going on right now. Jim I don't think people want to take the Jim Polito pill, to be honest with you. I understand the metaphor there, Craig, but I just you know, nobody wants to be a middle-aged chubby and loudmouth and be stupid when it comes to tech, right. We're talking with Craig Peterson, our tech talk guru. Artificial intelligence is a big tech gamble right now. His webinars, which you can sign up for from him, and at the end of his segment, and we're going to tell you how you can get all of this information from him. Jim Craig, if I could just shift back, again, to working from home. I know you're going to discuss this in the webinars, and in the short time we have left, could you give me kind of just a brief bit of some of the things that you've learned over the 22 years of working from home, not because you had to, but because it worked for you? Craig Yeah, it did. There are some basics that I have found work well for both my wife and I. Now I even have kids that work from home, too. In 22 years of working from home, the number one thing that I've learned is you have to have not just a separate space, but multiple separate areas. Most of us have various job functions that we're performing, and you need to have a different place for each job function, especially if you're kind of an entrepreneur or you're trying to start a home business. Now, this doesn't mean you have to have different rooms, don't get me wrong, but don't sit in that chair you use to watch TV. Or if you only have one chair, turn it around, and, you know, face a different window have different environments. That's number one. Number two is one that I found very, very helpful, and that is to use the Pomodoro Technique. We mentioned that last week, and that is to take 20 minutes and then a 10-minute break. So that you're very, very focused on it. You have to get up and walk around. I sit on a big balance ball, and I have a desk that goes up and down. I can be standing, and I can be sitting in a chair like I am right now. Or I can be on one of these balance balls. Because if you don't, and may not think of it but you have To get up, you have to keep moving. And then the third most important thing, again, not technology-wise, is that your family has to respect your workspace. Think of different ways you could do it. Most people, it's advised to dress up as you would usually for work. And if your family sees you in work clothes, they're supposed to leave you alone. But you know, the workaround I have on that that has worked exceptionally well for me, is when it's that break time when I've done my 20 minutes of hard work. Then a 10-minute break, I walk into the rest of the house, go to the kitchen, walk around, get a cup of water, and talk to the family. That way, they don't have to interrupt me when I'm working hard. And then the technology side, make sure you are safe, and I mean safe and so Friday, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. I'm going to be talking specifically about some important security things you have to be doing in the webinars. And I've got right I'm doing two today to Thursday to on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, all the way through next week because I want to help everybody because these tech issues on security just get so complicated so fast. Still, those are my tips right there, and they have gotten me a long way. Jim I'll tell you, you know, the first day I did the show on the pajamas, but on the second day, I only thought about it. Now I'm up and dressed. You know, the thing is, I wear pretty much the same clothes to go to work that I do on the weekend. But no, I got up showered did the same thing that I would do. You know other than getting in the car and driving, everything I did was the same. I like you, take breaks during the commercials in our show when I don't have work to do. When I'm back in the studio, I walk around the building, you know I get out of the studio, and it refreshes my brain and resets it. Here it's perfect because I can get up from the table and the little broadcast area I have here. I can talk to Kathy, pet the dog, whatever, you know, that kind of stuff. It does help, but then I go back into the mode, and I'm in my little you know area here. It works. Look, it is time to get folks the immediate information. When I podcast, this will have a link, but you can give the link now to if you want. So, one thing to get on Craig's email list, you text My name Jim, J-I-M to this number. Craig Here 855-385-5563. So let's just Jim 2855385 5553 Jim All right, standard data and tax rates apply. Then, Craig, I'm going to put this with the podcast the address for the to be able to find out about the webinars you're doing for working at home. All right, there you go. It's Craig Peterson, of course. Craig Peterson dot com slash, Jim. Craig That's the only place you'll find it right now you guys are getting a heads up. You're going to be some of the first ones to be able to get in and ask questions. I am not advertising it generally right now. It's because I want to start small and help people as much as I can. Craig Peterson dot com slash Jim. Jim Craig, you're the best. We appreciate it. Especially in these times, folks you want to get on Craig's list. I don't mean the website. I mean, Craig Peterson, and if you can, attend some of those webinars. Craig, I will talk to you next week. Stay safe. Craig All right. Thanks. Take care. Bye-bye. Jim All right, and I will podcast that this morning. A final word when we return. You're listening to the Jim Polito show from my kitchen with pops. It is your safe space. The Jim Polito show, where we serve hot drinks. Transcribed by https://otter.ai --- More stories and tech updates at: Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553
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Welcome! Remote Work, Patches, Updates, Security, Tools and more on Tech Talk with Craig Peterson on WGAN
03/20/2020
Welcome! Remote Work, Patches, Updates, Security, Tools and more on Tech Talk with Craig Peterson on WGAN
Welcome! Today's show will cover all the different aspects of remote work. During the Coronavirus Pandemic, social distancing, and self and mandated quarantines there is a lot of technology to talk about. If you are not on my email list, sign up at Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe. It is a busy show -- so stay tuned. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Related Articles: --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Hey, hello, and welcome everybody to the show. Of course, we put this out on as a podcast as well and all of your favorite podcasting sites, and we're heard right here on WGAN every Saturday from one until 3 pm. Of course, I'm on with Ken and Matt for their morning drive show, which is every Wednesday at 738. Well, their morning drive shows every day. As you might expect, we have a lot of coronavirus related stuff today. But this is not going to be so much on the medical side. It is going to be more on the - How do you work from home? How do you make your business a success, when you have many of your workers who are out for whatever reason. We'll be talking about the technologies of working from home, as well as what the FCC is doing to help make our lives a little bit easier in this set Coronavirus match. You might have seen and how viruses in and of themselves are kind of a big problem. If he were to ask me, we're going to talk about this massive Atlanta based money laundering operation that the FBI brought down. A colossal business email compromised bust that also brought down dozens of different bad guys. What they did and how they're trying to take advantage of the coronavirus to steal even more money from you. Some free upgrades that have come from Comcast and T Mobile. We probably we'll talk a little bit about what WebEx is doing for us as well when it comes to free conferencing systems and team systems for 90 days or more. We will discuss how the more secure businesses out there are making it very difficult, in fact, almost impossible, in some cases, absolutely impossible to work from home and some advice from my wife and me. I've been working at home for more than 20 years, what have we learned over those years, and what have other people been saying that I thought might make a reasonable discussion. Now you'll find all of this, of course, on my website at Craig Peterson dot com, we try and post all of these articles up for everybody to be able to see. And we'll also be talking about this a little bit more in some of our webinars. You might have attended my webinars this week. Last Sunday, I had a great webinar well attended. We covered a lot of ground frankly, about the whole work from home thing and VPNs and some of the technology you should and should not be using. We're probably this week going to start up this coming week and have some specialized ones as well. We're going to be talking about VPNs, the hardware and software you need, and the routers in your home office. Some of the plugins you should be using and what you can do about DNS. So that'll all be coming up this week. There's only one way to find out about this and to get registered. These are free and are essential for you as a worker, as a business owner, or as a manager. All of those people you're going to benefit a lot by checking in with me on these webinars. So how do you get on? Easy just go to Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe. I am not one of these spammers. I'm not one of these internet marketers. I haven't been in the online space now for many, many decades. And it's kind of scary to think about blizzards four-plus decades actually in the whole networking space, and the computer security space for this as well. So I guess you could say I've seen it all, at least most of it. And so I've been taking questions from everybody. What do you want? What don't you want to see? If you do sign up for the list, by the way, I've got three little surprises that will come your way some great gifts of information that are available for you just for the clicking and signing up. Again Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe, keep an eye on your mail mailbox because I will be letting you know about these other webinars that are coming up this next week. You know, being the tech guy that I am. Sometimes, I think it's kind of like the cobblers kids without any shoes or repaired shoes. In my case, it was ill-repaired technology and of course, when you needed it, you know just isn't there for you. This week, the problem I've been having has been with my email. If you responded to me, I have to apologize because my email system has not been working correctly. You already know I have thousands of people on my email lists, and I've been trying to keep everybody up to date on Saturday mornings, you get my special emails about what the news is this week. Then pretty much once a month, more or less a week after Microsoft's Patch Tuesday, I tell you what the most critical patches are to install and apply and give you all that information. If you haven't caught that one yet, its because we haven't sent it out, however, we have the very first of that edition all set and ready to go, and we'll probably be sending that out pretty darn soon. And what we're trying to do is save you a lot of time, Microsoft had over 100 critical patches this week, and there's no way that a regular company can keep up with all of these patches. So what do you do? That's what these exclusive newsletters are for, telling you here are the most critical ones, the ones that are in the wild right now. Bad guys are using them. That's easy for them to use to get into your system. So How can you protect yourself? All of that stuff in that newsletter? So I think it's going to be handy. It's one of the things we've heard the most complaints about from people is just what patches Do I need to apply because you can't possibly patch them all. I also had a great discussion this week that I want to bring up while we're talking about patches. And this is for the listener, in fact, in Maine, and a business owner, small business owner, and he is using Android devices sticking with the Google devices. Google makes a phone called a pixel. It's not necessarily the best of the Android devices out there in many measures. But the good news about it is the Google does release updates for it, and those updates can cover all of the critical patches that you need. But the point I made to him, and I want to make sure it is clear for everybody who's listening is that most of the vendors In the Android world do not support vices devices for more than two years. So you only get two years' worth of patch support. And that includes Samsung. And it frankly, if I were buying an Android device, I would probably buy the Samsung Galaxy more or less top of the line, because I know they'll be supporting that for two years. So first of all, check when the device came out. So if you're buying a new Samsung Galaxy phone, and it came out eight months ago, remember, that's eight months off of the two years' worth of support. So you're going to get what a year and four months' worth of support, hopefully, out of Samsung, and then after that, the problem is you're not going to be able to get patches anymore, and that means your security is going to go right down the drain. Keep that in mind. So our basic rule of thumb when it comes to Android devices, if you're going to buy them, you need to buy a new phone every year to make sure That you're able to get the updates. If you are using an Apple phone, you're good to go for five years, five years. So again, the same trick applies. When did Apple released that phone, and you're getting going to get support for five years from when it was released. So with the Apple phones, we advise every four years or just keep an ear to the ground. Apple's good about not only giving you the updates, and automatically installing them, but also having them not break your phones as well as letting you know when the end of life is for each device. We recently saw the end of life for the iPhone six. The six S is going to be coming up later on this year. So you know, if you have a success, you're probably going to have to replace it. Then the sevens will probably be good until next year. They just last, right, and Apple supports them and keeps all of these security patches up-to-date, which is super duper exciting. For us, particularly in this day and age, one of the things I mentioned this week on one of these webinars was, hey guys huge deal here. Because what we're finding is that we're at war and you may not realize it, they're certainly not talking about it on TV. And I'm not talking about coronavirus. I'm talking about war with real live enemies. Just like in the old days, we've got Iran we've got China, and we've got Russia all attacking us actively attacking us. But this is a war in cyberspace. We're not attacking them anywhere like they're attacking us. And it isn't just bad guys living in those countries. We're talking about a war that has been declared by and is officially being run by their government. Now we have retaliated for some of these cyber strikes. Still, it is a real war, and we can expect more of it. We can expect it to increase here with the coronavirus spread because we're all kind of distracted, aren't we? From soup to nuts, the military is distracted. So we have to make sure that we are covering ourselves with security, and that's part of what I will cover in these webinars coming up. I begin with the basics of remote work, including what to look out for and what you need to know. In these webinars, I always answer all the questions everybody has so that you can get the right answers. And I am just you know, it's content-rich, where we're, we're answering your questions, we're giving you all the information we can, and I'm going to be selling here probably in the next week or two, a more advanced course. That does a deep dive step by step all of the tactics and things you need to do and how to do it to lock down your Windows computers, lock down your network, your Wi-Fi, etc. I've heard from so many people that it's confusing going online, searching Google trying to find the information, and no one has it appropriately organized because everybody has their little bit. So we're going to be doing a full paid course on that one. It is for anybody who has to maintain computers, primarily for businesses, where you have to keep these things secure. It will help you make sure the security is going to work for you. Okay, so to subscribe, make sure you get on those lists by going to Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe. And when we get back, we're going to be talking about working from home some of the things to consider from the tech side. You're listening to Craig Peterson on WGAN. Hi, everybody, Craig Peterson back here. I was feeling kind of punky this weekend. If anybody else kind of felt that way. I don't think it was the coronavirus or Covid-19. I have been, maybe about a week feeling run down. I was kind of moving slowly, and it was not much fun, but I'm feeling so much better right now. That's why I didn't have as many of these webinars last week that I wanted to have. I was going to try and do like one a day, but I ended up with more like one last week. Next week is going to be bigger better. I am feeling well. We're going to talk a lot more. Now that you guys have had a little experience working at home and answer even more questions than we could have answered before now that you kind of know what you don't know right a little bit. Get you safe, get your safe at home and get you're using the right tools. We have even put together a little survey to help you check your preparedness to work remotely. We're going to be releasing information about some of the tools and hopefully help you find some tools that are going to help you at home help you with everything from efficiency, through security at with your work at home setups. And we're we set up a Facebook group, and I'm not sure if we're going to use it right away. You know, when I surveyed you guys a couple of weeks ago, there was only I think there's only like one or 2% of people that wanted to do these lives on Facebook. zero percent, by the way, that wanted to do them on YouTube. And the vast majority of people wanted to do regular webinars, so we did it on zoom. I may use WebEx as well depends how many people sign up because my zoom only supports 100 people, my WebEx, which is what I've used for Some of my bigger training supports up to 10,000 people. So we'll you know, we'll see. But you have to sign up. Just go to Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe. And that will also be sending you a few really kind of cool cheat sheets and things that I think you could use. And so all of this is free, absolutely free. And then you will find out about the webinars that I'm doing this week as we do some deep dive webinars as well this week, so it should be a great week, coming up this week. All right, so let's get right down to it. Now. Our first topic really for this week. Well, maybe our next one, right. But this is from the verge. And Kim Lyons wrote this, and it's about how to work from home. And I when I did my surveys of you guys who are on my email list this last week, actually we can half ago, I found that the majority of you who went to the webinar that I held Last Sunday, said that you had never really worked from home before, that this was the very first time. So congratulations to you, I suspect you're like most of these people. We were able to answer all of their questions in the webinar. That's what they're for is to get the information out and answer your questions. It can be kind of fun, and it is kind of different. Many people are just sitting at home in their pajamas and till noon. Now it's time to get back to work because we're looking at an extended period. If you're in the 80-year-old range, even above 70, many of us are still working right. Above 70 years old, you are in the kind of that critical age range where the recommendations are that for the next three months, you need to limit going outside and meeting with people heavily. If you are above 60 or above now, they are warning us that again, and you need to be very, very careful. Although most of these deaths are people who are 80 and older, anybody with the compromised system must be careful, and down till about 25 years of age. So if you are one of these say diabetics or you have emphysema, COPD, or many underlying illnesses, you've got to be very, very careful. So for you, this might be an extended period, we might be tar talking, you know what to see here, March to April, May, mid-June, July, maybe even August that you're going to want to be working from home. So there are a few ways that you can be productive at home, and you know, again, we go into a lot of detail in the webinars. It is just a quick radio hit right today. So, Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe to make sure You're signed up. If you're planning to work from home for an extended period, here are some things that you might want to consider. Remember, too, that the best ways to work at home are going to vary from person to person. What you have to do is figure out what helps you to stay focused and to separate your work life from your home life. And this is something that frankly, I have had a hard time doing. Because you already know I give away a lot of time. And I'm doing that right now too. You'll probably see another email from me this week, where we're volleying to volunteering to spend 15 minutes half an hour with you on the phone to help you with whatever setup you have. And we can even do remote tech support for you. Anything that you need help with, and we're just volunteering this for free for people. Again, you can just email me at Craig Peterson dot com. If you want some more information if you're having trouble if you're trying to make this work me at Craig Peterson dot com, and you're just having trouble with that. But the problem I've had over the last couple of decades of working at home is that separating my work life from my home life. I get up in the morning, and one of the first things I do is I pull out that laptop, and I start checking my email, I'm checking my client's systems, I'm checking our systems, I'm checking on the VPN that clients are using. I'm checking the firewall logs to from our clients as well as for us. Just see if anyone has been trying to hack in. Then we have a look at the alerts that have come up from those firewalls, and other you know, emergencies that might be pending, and solve all of those. Then I get up, and I do my running and some weightlifting down in the basement. I have this great treadmill that one of my daughters had bought for herself. It is a Livestrong brand, from back when Lance Armstrong wasn't a bad word and is a great treadmill. Then I go up, and I shower, and I get back to work. I work all day and then when the evening comes, and we might turn on a TV show while I am, What? Yes, while I'm working on my laptop, and taking care of things for people. That's what I do. Right? I love helping people. I remember when I was about 20 years old, maybe it was 19. And one of my coaches told me, he said he sat us all down. He said I want you to write your obituary right now. You're 20 years old, give or take, write your obituary. What Would you like your headstone to say, try and get it that short? Just a headstone? So we're not talking about multiple paragraphs, you're just talking about multiple words, frankly, what would you like it to say? And I thought about that seriously thought about it. You know what, it has been the mantra for my life here for another 40 years after that, and that is he helped others. That's what I wanted on my headstone. And that's what I've done, right? My wife and I, we've raised together our eight kids, we homeschooled them, all the way up to college. They've gone on to have just extraordinary lives. I still have two of them working with me, which is a real blessing. It's been wonderful. So I haven't solved this problem of separating my home life from my business life because, for me, they've been one-in-the-same. There might be something I need to do with my family during the day. And so I will do it. Because that's the most important thing to me, there might be something that comes up for a client, and I might have to work at it even overnight all night long to get them to the point where they have a smooth operation the very next day at work. That's what I'll do. That's what my family will do. That's what we do for our customers and friends and have forever. And I don't know if that's a bad thing or not, you know if you're going to be doing that if you don't want to do that, but you have to make the decision. Where are you going to draw the line? Okay, we're going to continue this discussion when we get back after the break. We're going to talk about some other things you should be looking at when we talk when we're thinking about the physical side of working from home. You're listening to Craig Peterson right here on WGAN, and on the podcast and streaming pretty much everywhere. Stick around. We'll be right back. Hello, everybody, welcome back, Craig Peterson here, on WGAN, and of course, online streaming sites everywhere. Just look for me, Craig Peterson, on your favorite streaming app. I listen to podcasts all the time and use them. You know, I mentioned in the last segment that I spent some time in the morning every day on the treadmill, trying to keep my heart rate up into that right range and double-check with your doctor if you have a question about what that range is. It used to be kind of your maximum heart rate was 200 minus your age. I'm not sure what it is. Now, I've heard people say it was...
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AS HEARD ON - The Jim Polito Show - WTAG 580 AM: New Movie Technology, Coronavirus, Remote Work and more
03/17/2020
AS HEARD ON - The Jim Polito Show - WTAG 580 AM: New Movie Technology, Coronavirus, Remote Work and more
Welcome! and Happy St. Patricks Day! Hey everyone please go out and support your local businesses today by ordering St. Patrick Day meals. Many were completely stocked for large crowds for this holiday and have terrific specials on these meals for take-out or delivery. Good morning, everybody. I was on with Jim Polito who was sitting in his kitchen under self-quarantine because he recently traveled overseas. We discussed some of the ways people can make this new remote work, work for them and keep their employer safe. So, here we go with Jim Polito. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Craig And you take a 10-minute break, and then you sit down again, set yourself another 20-minute goal, and get it done. It is amazingly effective. And I want people to think of social media a little bit differently when you're working from home. That 10-minute break. You could go on social media because that might be the only way you have contact with another person. There are some of my top tips Craig There are some of my top tips with Mr. Jim Polito this morning. You notice none of them had to do with security because I think the most significant issues people have when working from home, typically are the mental issues. So that's kind of what I went over with Jim this morning. If you want to attend one of my webinars, these free webinars I'm doing all week this week, probably into next week as well. Make sure you sign up go to Craig Peterson comm slash subscribe. By the way, Jim is just back From Italy in self-quarantine in his kitchen, it yeah, it Yeah, I don't want you to think about that too much. Okay, here we go. Unknown Speaker 1:12 Joining us now is our good friend and tech chalk guru, Craig Peterson. Good morning, sir. Unknown Speaker 1:19 Hey, good morning, Jim. Yeah, I've been doing this work-at-home thing now for well over 20 years, and my wife and I have learned a lot of lessons. I've learned a lot of lessons about productivity and tools. And, of course, you mentioned the security side of it, which is a big deal. And so what I started doing this week is I started on Sunday, I held a kind of free for all webinar where I invited people to, and we spent a couple of hours together. In fact, in this webinar, we talked about people's situations. What the issues were. I'm going to be doing it again today. I think what I'm going to try and do is something at about three o'clock this afternoon, and then probably at about seven o'clock this evening, and I'll do it two or three more times this week, just going over what tools can help them. One of the tricks I've learned over the years? What do you need to worry about from a security standpoint? You know, when should you be using that laptop? When should you remote to a desktop at work? Why is the remote desktop one of the most prominent security exploits known to man? And how can you work around that? So obviously, Jim, as usual, this is just all for free. I'm not trying to, you know, beat you down and sell you something. If you want my services, that's fine. I'm even offering 15-minute calls with anybody that needs some tech support to help them try and figure stuff out, and all of that you can get Just go to my website that Craig Peterson dot com make sure you sign up there. It's on the homepage and every page. If you scroll down a little bit, you'll see a pop up at the top of the screen and just put your name and email address in there. As Jim's always telling everybody, I'm not one to spam you. But I do want to keep you guys informed. I am offering this for free. I have courses that you can buy that go into more depth, but I do take time to answer everyone's question during these webinars. I got a lot of great, positive feedback. Jim We're talking with Craig Peterson, our tech talk guru. Now, Craig, what's probably the most important thing people should do while working from home. Now I know our company has set up, what are these VPNs and all this stuff? What's the most important thing people should do? Craig Well, also, as part of the webinar, I went into some details about why VPNs' can make it worse for you and your security for your business. So don't think that a VPN is a panacea. All those paid VPN Services that you hear advertised on the radio are not going to help you get into the office. They're designed to provide a little bit of security. But, in a more direct answer to your question, what's the most important thing? I think personally, with over 20 years of experience doing this, that it has to do with separation. So President Trump is right. You have to separate yourself from your usual living area if you can. All separating has to mean is something that's going to give you that psychological hint. That's going to help with your subconscious too. Okay, I'm sitting in this chair facing this direction in this part of the room. That helps a lot to train your body as to what you should be doing. Then you also need to get a whip and, and use that lightly on any family members that decide to walk-in because now look at mom and dad are home now so I can just walk in anytime and ask any question, right? In the honey-do list, I'm going both ways. So make sure they understand, hey, I'm working to leave me alone. Here's another thing that I found to be extremely helpful when working from home. And that is to use a technique that came from Italy. It's called the Pomodoro Technique. You might want to look that up that's Italian, very poorly pronounced on my part. Jim Italian for Tomato, and tomatoes are the best. Craig Yeah, exactly. Think about you and I, were younger, our moms had these kitchen timers shaped like tomatoes, or maybe you had an egg one. You twist the top of it, and it was a 30-minute timer. The Pomodoro technique is simple enough, and you set yourself a 15-minute or 20-minute goal. 20 -minute seems to be optimal, at least for me. Okay, I'm going to do this particular piece of research to get this part done, right. It's something you can do in 20 minutes. You set that timer and let it run for 20 minutes. When it goes off, the task over whether or not it is done. You finished that work for this time period. You can extend a little bit if you'd like to, but no more than about 10 minutes, get up and walk around. It is time to go and get your glass of water, to go and chat with the spouse or kids, whatever it might be. You take a 10-minute break, and then you set down again, set yourself another 20-minute goal, and get it done. It is amazingly effective. I want people to think of social media a little bit differently when you're working from home. That 10- minute break. You could go on social media because that might be the only way you have contact with another person if you're at home working alone. It's not necessarily an evil thing. Just make sure you don't get sucked into it. They design social media to be sticky and to keep you around. So those are the big ones. Also, again, if you're on my email list, just go to Craig Peterson dot com and sign up. I'll be going through the more technical side of working at home. What you can do, what you shouldn't do, to make working at home, work for you without creating problems not just for you, but security problems to the business's network. Jim All right, Craig, this is great. I know we wanted to touch on the coronavirus, not the virus itself, but I know included in the information you'll be sending to people. So you add my name to this number, Craig 855 385 5553. I'll be sending out a text to everybody on and texts today as well. Just text Jim to 855 385 5553 Jim Standard data and tax rates apply. As you know, Craig Peterson will always take care of you. He is a calm and reassuring voice and presence in all the chaos. Craig, Thank you so much. Well, Catch you next week. Craig Take care. Bye-bye. Jim All righty. Okay when we return Transcribed by --- More stories and tech updates at: Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553
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Welcome! Rampant Intellectual Property Theft by China, Scams - Airbnb, VRBO and CoronaVirus Phishing, ACLU and DHS and more on Tech Talk with Craig Peterson on WGAN
03/13/2020
Welcome! Rampant Intellectual Property Theft by China, Scams - Airbnb, VRBO and CoronaVirus Phishing, ACLU and DHS and more on Tech Talk with Craig Peterson on WGAN
Welcome! Today's show is a repeat of the Show aired on February 15, 2020. There is a ton of stuff going on in the world of Technology, and this show will hit several topics today. If you are on my email list, it has current articles that you need to read. If you are not on my email list, sign up at Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe. There are some scams that are getting more and more prevalent with Airbnb and VRBO that we will talk about. Also, phishing scams using the Coronavirus as a way to trick you into clicking. The ACLU is filing suit against DHS. China is stealing our Intellectual Property. Shadow IT becoming more and more of a problem and even more on Tech Talk With Craig Peterson today on WGAN. It is a busy show -- so stay tuned. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Related Articles: --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Hey everybody, welcome, welcome. Craig Peterson here on, WGIR, you can also hear me every Monday morning at 737 with Jack Heath, where we discuss some of the latest topics in technology. Of course, nowadays, you can't talk about technology without security, which is what I've been doing in my business now for about 30 years. I was coerced into it. Maybe one of these days, I'll share that whole story with you. It can get to be kind of a long one. But today we are going through some of the problems that I've seen out there lately. I have on my podcast this week that you can get at Craig peterson.com slash Iheart, Craig peterson.com slash Iheart. I spent quite a bit of time talking about recent problems people have been finding with Airbnb with VRBO, and I go through some of the problems I recently have had with both of those services. And I think it's well worth listening to because I've gotten to the point right now where I will not use either Airbnb or VRBO, I don't think ever again. My experiences with them have just been so overwhelmingly negative, anyhow you'll find that online, and you can subscribe there as well at Craig peterson.com slash I heart. That like is going to take you to the I heart app. You might be listening to me right now, in fact, on Iheart streaming on these AM and FM stations. If you are, kudos to you, but you can also get all of my content by going and subscribing, Craig peterson.com slash I heart, and I'm also on every other major podcast streaming platform that's out there. But first, I just want to make mention of this other article that came out last month in January. It's talking about computer literate millennials and Generation Z. These are the people that grew up with the internet. They've had the internet pretty much their whole lives. They've found meaning the Federal Trade Commission found that people ages 39 and under are more likely to report fraud than the 40 plus crowd. Now, here's the thinking here. It isn't that the younger kids millennials and Generation Z, it isn't as though they are less afraid to report that money stolen from them. It appears that they are more likely to fall victim to fraud. 25% more likely. Now the millennials are less likely to fall for a scam over the phone and people over 40, but 77% More likely, Millennials are 77% more likely to get duped by email scams and 90% more likely to lose money on a fake check scam. Now, the thinking behind this is that those of us who are a little bit older, we hold the whole internet thing with a little bit more skepticism than our children and grandchildren do. Because we know that there are scammers out there and we've heard all the horror stories, whereas the younger kids are looking at it as well. It's the internet, and they just give their stuff away. We already know that there are studies that show that the millennials will give their email address or weigh in trade for a single donut. Okay. They don't value a lot of this stuff. And, you know, to me, well, it's a little bit concerning, and it should be to you. But let's get into the latest scam that's out there right now. It isn't the Airbnb scam, which has been out there for a few years now. As I said, hey, I've been burned, what, four or five times by this overall personally. I am jaded, and I just don't use it anymore period. It's a real shame because there are some good people out there. But this has to do with what's been happening with the Coronavirus. It is a huge deal. We had one day this week, where 15,000 new cases were reported. The Chinese changed how they tracked and diagnosed cases. So they're saying hey, listen, it's you know, it's Change. Don't expect this to indicate that more viruses are spreading out there. And frankly, I look at it and say, Well, maybe there are there aren't. But what we're seeing are some rather sophisticated phishing scams going on. Phishing, of course, this is the one spelled with a Ph. It is where an attacker tricks you into doing something. It might be clicking a link. It might be responding to an email. It might also be a phishing scam over the phone or, you know, SMS a text one which is called smishing. A whole new type of phishing this going on right now. Well, last week, IBM and Kaspersky now Kaspersky is an anti-virus company. They are also trying to stop the general spread of malware. They are a Russian firm, and the State Department and FBI have warned us about using their software, but they do have good information. When I see Kaspersky combined with IBM, a company I do respect, then that does kind of make my ears stand up, if you will. IBM and Kaspersky caught hackers in Japan, trying to spread malware through emails. And the emails had links about the coronavirus outbreak that started Of course and won China last month in January. And now adding cell phones to the list. Of course, Cisco, to the list, they have found phishing emails from cybercriminals, purporting to be from the Center for Disease Control, as well as the World Health Organization and what they're trying to do the bad guys his deal your email credentials and other information. The emails are coming from several domains, including CDC dash gov.org, which, of course, is not the real CDC website. So be very careful if you are trying to find out information about the CDC, or about the spread of Coronavirus about flu in general. For instance, in my home state of New Hampshire, we have I think it's seven deaths so far this year reported g attributed to the flu in general, not the Coronavirus. Every year about 12 to 16,000 people in the United States die from the flu. So far we've only got 14 cases reported of Coronavirus So, at this stage everybody, this is nothing to get all freaky worried about. Okay, so calm down. If you want more, go to CDC.gov. CDC Centers for Disease Control cdc.gov. And it tells you what to do now this Coronavirus has an official name now it's called Covin-19, co vi d dash 19 because there are multiple versions of Coronaviruses and viruses. And we have had a report in the past about Coronaviruses, and they have killed people previously. So you'll see right at the top of the CDC, gov website, information about the Coronavirus and it spread. It is a respiratory disease. It is potentially fatal. It doesn't seem to be any more fatal than some of the other viruses that we've had. So let's put all of this in context. And when you get an email from someone saying hey, Look at this, click on this link, it's going to get you information about the Coronavirus, it's going to let you track the spread of, etc. don't respond. And you, if you get a text message, don't respond. I got one because I'm a member of the Great and Powerful media, right. I got one last week that was sent out to members of the media saying, Hey, we got this new tracking site. You just can't be cautious enough when it comes to this. So if you go to CDC Gov at the top, you'll see the description here about the Covin-19. And you can click on that, and it'll show you a global map about where it has been reported what is happening. I'm looking at one. It's about one day behind it looks like right now for Covin-19. But you can see all of the countries that have been reporting it and then you can also So look at the hard statistics. People under investigation in the United States exactly how many 14 positives you'll see that there. Of course, it changes daily. How many negative how many pending? The people are under investigation. Remember, the airplane full of workers from the State Department that came back from China. They have now been under quarantine for more than 14 days. They released them all from quarantine because it turns out that nobody had that virus, so just because you have the flow doesn't mean it's Coronavirus. More cases over on the left coast and the Midwest, which is kind of surprising to me than there are on the East Coast or the Mid Atlantic, etc., etc. So have a look there. Do not respond to emails or texts or phone calls. Okay. Just be very, very careful. Hackers are imitating this sort of thing. Then the other side of this is they are sending out messages, seeking donations, and they're asking for Bitcoin donations to the World Health Organization. I can tell you right now, the World Health Organization, the CDC, they are not taking Bitcoin donations, okay? Don't go and donate, right. Again the CDC gov.org is the bad guys cdc.gov is the good guys. The scam page is elementary. it might have taken the scammers just a few minutes to put together. It's very effective. It looks legit. And the FBI and, of course, also Homeland Security are taking down these pages as soon as they can, but they can't always get rid of them right away. And companies we got to be proud. We've got a chain, train our employees not to follow up on these scams. So again, that's part of why I publish my newsletters. I report on the biggest scams that are going on. I try and keep it down to just a few a week. You can share them with your employees, share them with your family, but you have to get them to share them. Go to Craig peterson.com slash subscribe. Now, we're going to talk a little bit about this whole thing with the ACLU and their current fight. I spoke about something similar to this a couple of years ago, man, maybe actually the first time was probably about ten years ago. There are companies out there, and they gather information about us. They're called Data brokers. And I have visited some of these data brokers sites themselves. I mean physical site, where the company operates where they have their data collections, to help them with security problems that they have. And to help prevent problems from occurring, right. That's what I do for a living full time. And it was probably ten years ago, the radio show that I talked with some of these companies. But what they do is they take what's called open source information that's used a lot by government or investigations. And you can use open-source information yourself. All you do is go to Google, for instance, and do a search. That's the open-source information. It's anything that anyone can gain access to, without having to be a police officer without having to go and really kind of, you know, get a court order kind of be surreptitious and how you gather that's open source. So the data break brokers will take all of that, and that can include depending on States your living driver's license information. It can include information about the mortgage for your home. It can include you know the ownership of your home, and it can include just all kinds of stuff. And that becomes very, very difficult to control. Because all of your information is out there. It's available for free or for cheap on the internet. So these data brokers, they might buy it from the county, they might get it an open-source. Some of these documents are going to contain like your mortgage is going to contain your signature. The deed to your home is going to contain the signature, the automobiles that you own. There's going to be UCC filings with the Secretary of State's office, detailing what cars you own, who the lien holders are, and how much money is involved, all of this stuff. So it all gets pulled into these days. databases I mentioned on the show a few months ago, a couple of months ago that we were out in Las Vegas at a wedding. And of course, you know, doing work while I'm out there sitting on the couch, doing work for some of our Las Vegas clients when there was a knock at the door. Who's there? Well, it's an insurance investigator investigating an accident that had a fatality. And of course, the insurance company had been asked to payout. They came to this home because they had information that the person involved had contact with someone at this address, which indeed she did. It was her sister, and the driver had been responsible for this fake fatal death. The driver listed was one of my sisters in law, who had died six months before the accident. It was all fake. The insurance investigator showed my wife all of this information she had that they had purchased from one of these data brokers. It had listed my deceased sister in law's relatives, everybody every address she had ever had. It had names and contact information for some of my kids as well. Now, it was not all correct or organized. When I've looked at the data brokers' information about me, only about half of it is right, but the other half is entirely incorrect. That's still the case because they had a lot of utterly false information. People that they said were relatives that weren't. People we'd never heard of before, they identified as direct relatives of hers. The insurance company purchased all of this information from a Data Broker, in collections, this is called a skip trace. It's called a skip trace for people who jumped bail, etc. Man, we should talk about this whole bail thing, and the idiocy and New York state that is spreading countrywide dog, the bounty hunter and his wife Beth had been fighting this for a long time because it's making us much, much less safe. But anyhow, that's not a topic for today's show. It's not a political topic, because it's undeniable what's already happening with the increase in the crime rate, New York anyways. What the government is doing now and this is part of what I was warning about a decade ago, is the federal government, the FBI, the NSA, the CIA, of the IRS, you name it. They are limited in how they can collect information, we kind of already knew that, right? They knew that they had to get a search warrant for certain things, right? They can follow you around if you do not expect privacy, etc., etc. So obviously, federal government agencies can use open-source information to see what you're doing online. But how about the closed source stuff? How about this information that the data brokers are collecting? Some of it comes from the people who lent you money. Some of it they're getting from places where you have to pay to get that information. What's happened here now is that the ACLU has filed a suit, according to The Wall Street Journal, against Homeland Security and Homeland Security through its Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency. As well as Customs and Border Protection, is buying Gilo geolocation data from these data brokers. It's using it to investigate suspects who have allegedly committed immigration violations. So let me boil all that down into plain English. You might be using games on your smartphone, and you might be using all kinds of apps on your smartphone. If you have a smartphone, you probably are, frankly, not using 90-95% of those apps that you have downloaded. But many of those apps are tracking you. And that information is being sold to data brokers. So think about that for a minute. Remember that free app and how you've heard me and many others for so many years. Say, hey, you're not the customer. You are the product. But what's happening here now is that the ACLU is saying to the federal government, hey, you cannot, you cannot buy this information that you are not allowed to collect yourself. You cannot buy it from data brokers or these app developers who are selling it. Interesting question, interesting problem, isn't it? What should they do? What should you do? What can you do? It is going to play out in court. I suspect it's going to come down on the side of the Department of Homeland Security because this information is generally available to anyone willing to pay for it. So now the government stepped forward, saying we are will pay for it. By the way, it's down to local law enforcement as well, who, in many cases, are also buying information from the data brokers. Have you ever set up a company Amazon account? Have you ever set up an account for a company account for Uber? Maybe it's not a company account. Perhaps it's your account that you're using for Uber or something else? How about using something like Constant Contact to send out emails to your customers? How about salesforce.com, where we've seen a shift over the years from what used to be kind of the glass castle, where you had a central computer room in that computer room was a mainframe. And those mainframes were astounding. They still are. And that mainframe in that glass room was controlled by professional Information Technology people, people that knew what they were doing at least at the time, right? Then we started seeing some changes. You remember the apple two and VisiCalc Visicalc was kind of the killer application. And if you wanted to do numbers, then you bought an apple, you purchased a little apple two. And you then pulled data and people were asking that glass house, they were asking it, Hey, can you give us data because we want to put together some spreadsheet. People put together spreadsheets without really understanding the implications of the numbers they were using without understanding how to audit a spreadsheet to make sure that the figures included were correct. They didn't understand the double journaling. They didn't understand the cross-referencing of the information. They started a bit of a movement away from that glass house from that glass castle from it. They said hey, we could figure this out, why are we going to pay it all of this fake budget money to do something for us and we can do it for ourselves and do it cheaper. Frankly, that's a problem I still face with many organizations, if you can believe it, who think they can do security themselves, which is impossible for almost any organization. In this day and age, any small-medium business must have full-time external professionals who are helping your internal IT people. The internal IT should be doing what they do best, which is helping your business use information technology, to its best use, assisting people to be more efficient, finding new ways of doing things, etc. Instead of that, what most businesses do is they have these various silos, like sales and marketing and accounting. And each one of those silos, those lines company does things their way. So the sales guys, they're out, and they said, Hey, we're going to use Salesforce. And we're going to tie that into Constant Contact. And then you have your accounting people saying, well, we're going to use QuickBooks Online. Or maybe they're going to use one of Oracle's accounting systems. And then the manufacturing people say, Well, we are going to use this particular era p program, which is going to be great for manufacturing. And we've decided that we're going to use Survey Monkey to collect information from our customers from our vendors. You see where I'm going, each one of these lines of business is going out there and making what are in actuality, information technology decisions. They're making decisions about what type of technology to use, which is one level, but then the next Next Level is they're using it. And they're putting the business's information at risk. It...
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AS HEARD ON: WGAN Mornings with Ken and Matt: Cisco's WebEx Offer for Businesses, Coronavirus Remote Working and Apps and more
03/13/2020
AS HEARD ON: WGAN Mornings with Ken and Matt: Cisco's WebEx Offer for Businesses, Coronavirus Remote Working and Apps and more
Good morning everybody! I was on with Ken and Matt and we had a good discussion about how Coronaviruses were affecting businesses and Cisco's WebEx offer for collaborating securely. We also talked about how Apple is tightening up the types of Apps that will be in their AppStore. Here we go with Ken and Matt. These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Craig But particularly those that are in regulated or sensitive industries. Of course, we have those right down in the south of Maine, think of those in the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard where a lot of people work. Apple, because they are trying to be sensitive to all of these security needs are even tightening them up more for businesses that deal with this. The new standard for military contracts is the CMMC, and it is coming out in June. Craig Good morning, everybody. Craig Peterson, here. They have this "Eggs and Issues" thing over in Portland, which is kind of cool. In New Hampshire, we call it "Politics and Eggs" that happens every once in a while, but Eggs and Issues, seems to be I don't know monthly. Anyhow, Ken and Matt, were over there this morning and we had an excellent chance to chat about a couple of things. I wanted to cover in better detail, and I think I did a better job with Ken and Matt than I did yesterday on WTAG talking about Coronavirus, work from home issues, and also the Mandalorian. I took a little bit of a different angle on it, which is kind of ironic because we're talking about how they shot the video for the TV show. Matt Craig Peterson, our tech guru, joins us as he always does on Wednesdays at this time to go over the world of technology. Craig, welcome to the program. Craig Hey, good morning, gentlemen. Ken You know, it's rare where I see a topic from you that just excites me as much as talking about The Mandalorian. I mean, because we never talk about lifestyle issues here. So this is so exciting. How does the Mandalorian deal with tech issues, pray-tell? Craig That almost sounds sarcastic. Ken No No, no, we love the Mandalorian Craig Okay, okay. For those who don't know, the Mandalorian is a new science fiction series that's in the Star Wars universe released recently here by Industrial Light and Magic. It is a significant change in how movies they make movies. You've seen over the years, variations, of course, I was watching Hogan's Heroes the other day, and upfront, it said CBS in color. Ken and I both remember our first color televisions and things. And then moviemaking TV making moved into the world, of course, where we have greenscreens, and they use greenscreens when an actor is trying to talk to something that isn't there. Think of the Lord of the Rings movies for that one. It had Golem who was this character that was a guy, and they put these little like golf ball things on him so that computers could track his movement and the That was neat because they put this character in that was kind of there the actor could interact with this character. But the computers put in the actual figure ultimately. And then the complete green screens that we've seen more and more of where the only thing that the actor seizes, the table, the actor, city mat, or the chair that they're in, perhaps a couple of items scattered around the room, the whole rest of the room is green. And after all of the filming is done, and it's in production, they add in all the scenery, they said the room, they said everything else. Well, what they did was the Mandalorian is entirely different. They built this room, if you will, in a stage that was 21 by 75 feet, and it was entirely screens, digital screens all around them. The actors now saw everything going on around them. The cameras were shooting on the stage exactly what would end up being in the film, if you will, at the end? It's amazing. So the actors can see these virtual objects, the directors can see the objects. One of the things that were cool about this and I watched some video of it as the Mandalorian was filmed on this stage, is that the director could say, Hey, I don't like that building's placement, and change it right there almost instantly, and move things around. Everything on the screens is dependent on the camera angles. Think about all the incredible mathematics involved in this type of production. If you look at this stage, with the naked eye, you'd see all kinds of mess and distortions in some cases. Still, the camera was seeing everything perfect. They also use these LED panels that were displaying everything to provide excellent lighting. And they had an iPad that was there, and they were able to move the lights around, brighten this up dim that up. It usually would take out a whole bunch of time. The specific names for these people are gaffers, and they are responsible for moving and setting up lights. No need for any of those people. Amazing. The crews, the director, all of the creative people, all of these subdirectories could be more flexible in production, try different approaches, and do it almost instantly. And they did all of this using video game technology. It is absolutely the future. It's going to cut production costs a lot and increase the quality of production. It's just amazing, mainly if you saw the Mandalorian. It's just a whole new thing that came right out of Industrial Light and Magic. Matt We are talking to Craig Peterson, our tech guru, who joins us at this time every Wednesday to go over what's happening in the world of technology. Craig, I don't think we can get around asking you a coronavirus question, and I did notice that Cisco is telling you to use WebEx stay at home. Don't go to those meetings. Use WebEx. Craig Yeah. Now I've got to say Cisco is something that I sell and use, but it is the only, believe me, conferencing teamwork application available, but is secure. Zoom is a very, very popular one. I'm sure a lot of people use it. I've even used it. Continue to use it off and on with people that only have the availability of zoom. But the zoom has had some major security problems. And I don't mean like a breach. I mean, what ad is designed this because it allowed direct access into your networks at the office for hackers and viruses and everything else. So all those who may be one of the easier ones to use, it is not one of the safer ones. Also, with something like WebEx, you get the advantage of the team collaboration. So obviously, I'm a proponent. You can tell by the way I'm talking about it. It just works, and it's now free due to the Coronavirus as many businesses are having people work at home. It's free for companies to use. So seriously, consider using something like this. I've used slack before, which is pretty good. But again, it's not a secure end to end platform. WebEx, I think, is the hands-down winner. A lot of businesses are going to be looking at VPN. two factor authentication tokens are something that we've talked about on the show before. Now's the time you should be using them. I've got to say, if you want to know more, I do webinars where I cover these things all the time. They are 100% completely free, not trying to sell you anything, and I've got some coming up. I'm going to try and do webinars on Thursday, Friday, and Sunday, on how to work safely from home. We're probably going to have them not just for an end-user, but also for small businesses. I teach people how they can use self-service portals to make their life a little bit easier so that the people who are trying to work from home can kind of set things up themselves and what are the pros and cons. We're putting together a little playbook, all of this stuff. I hope to get you to the point where you can work from home relatively safely. Still, I do like WebEx. I have used zoom, and it's a reasonable alternative if you're not worried about some of the significant security errors that have been made by the designers of zoom. Ken We're talking with Craig Peterson, our tech guru. You can always go to Craig Peterson dot com by the way if you want to get all of this information also you can hear him on Saturdays at one o'clock on WGAN. Yeah. Um, so I'm a big user of Apple's App Store because I like apps. I understand they have a new policy to fight spam and abuse. But there some negatives to that? Craig Yeah, there, there always are some negatives. I think the pros outweigh them, however. We talked about how Google just got rid of basically millions of apps if you will. The Google Chrome Store, they just got rid of apps that people downloaded millions of times because they were spying on people and uploading the information. They got rid of those in the Google Play Store, which by the way, again, is a reason only to use the official app stores from Android. Of course, it's the Google Play Store, and for iOS, it's the Apple App Store. What Apple's done now is they've tightened up the review guidelines, because Apple reviews every app that's on the store, to help make sure that they're safe. They, of course, require apps to meet the guidelines, right. But there, they've expanded the definition of a BAM app. In other words, apps that are using the push notifications to serve ads to users, and they're limiting this the submissions of these types of apps, to trusted organizations, etc. but particularly those that are in regulated or sensitive industries. Of course, we have those right down types of industries right here in southern Maine. Think of Portsmouth Naval Shipyard where a lot of people work. Apple, because they are trying to be sensitive to all of these security needs, is even tightening them up more for businesses that deal with this. It's now called CMMC. It's the new standard coming out in June for military-affiliated companies. Anyways, there's a little bit of controversy here. But I think, ultimately, Ken, things are going to be good. It is an excellent thing. And I'll be talking more about this and VPN stuff, working from home as well. This weekend. If you want to sign up for the courses. Go to Craig Peterson dot com you can sign up right there on the homepage or any page, just sign up for my mailing list, and I'll make sure you know about them, and I'll talk more about this on Saturday. At 1 pm right here. Matt Indeed that is Craig Peterson. Ladies gentlemen. He is our tech guru, and he joins us at this time every Wednesday to go over the world of technology. Craig, thank you as always, and we will talk to you again next week, sir. Craig Gentlemen, thank you very much. Bye Bye. Thanks. All right. Ken All right, we will take a quick break here. We will go into the newsroom. Transcribed by --- More stories and tech updates at: Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553
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AS HEARD ON - The Jim Polito Show - WTAG 580 AM: New Movie Technology, Coronavirus, Remote Work and more
03/10/2020
AS HEARD ON - The Jim Polito Show - WTAG 580 AM: New Movie Technology, Coronavirus, Remote Work and more
Welcome! Good morning, everybody. I was on with Steve Fornier who was sitting in for the vacationing Jim Polito this morning. We discussed a some of the new technology being used in the film industry that is coming from the gaming sector and the new LED soundstages and the difference that is making for actors and filmmakers. Then we discussed the Coronavirus and remote work and online education. So, here we go with Steve Fornier. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Craig Allowing them onto the Business Network, which now gives bad guys access to all of the personal information, intellectual property, and everything else that's sitting there on that corporate network. There are so many issues with this. Craig Good morning. Craig Peterson here. Mr. Jim Polito is out touring Ireland right now. He called in to the show this morning, saying that all of the St. Patrick's Day parades in Ireland have been canceled. We know that they canceled our local parade in Boston, which is one of the biggest in the country, and I think New York City, which might be the most prominent St. Patrick's Day parade, as well. He was telling us a little bit about the difference between the Irish marches and the parades here in the US and Boston. Well, of course, the Irish ones tend to be a little bit more Catholic. Ours tend to be a little less religious. Anyhow, I was on Steve Fornier, he's the producer over in Springfield on those iHeart stations. We talked a little about two things. First of all, some very cool new technology for moviemaking and then a bit about working from home with the Coronavirus. That's right. So here we go with Steve. Steve Tech Talk's Craig Peterson in the house, and I don't know if I've ever actually had the pleasure, so this would be great. It's Steve Fornier, how are you doing today? Craig Doing well. How are you doing, Steve? Hey, you are doing a great job, by the way. Steve Hey, thanks I am trying Craig I think we met sideways once or twice, and I think you were on with Jim, and he had you kind of jump in, so yeah, man. I believe we have met. Steve Yeah, that's they usually just like to keep me out on the side. Let me out of my cage, now and again. Let's talk about movies. Because I haven't seen the Mandalorian, but I do remember the day, maybe the PlayStation two time frame where they started putting movies into video games. I thought that was the coolest thing. Now it seems like they're shooting movies with video game technology. Can you tell us a little bit about that process? Craig Yeah, this is cool. I remember the very first movie they shot using almost entirely green screens. That's been the way it's been for quite a while now. So what will happen is, let's say that there's a desk and a chair, maybe some flowers and one or two other things in the room, those will be real. Then the whole rest of the set is green. You know, think of movies like Jack Black's King Kong, right, Steve? So there he's trying to pretend, and he imagines what's all around him, you know, the jungle scene, the King Kong himself, right, all of these other things. They may get to interact with another actor, but for many, that's not necessarily even the case. And that makes it difficult for actors. It makes it difficult for the director, the production staff, there's remember, there's not just even one director, there's somebody who's in charge of the found somebody who's in charge of the lighting of the cameras, the camera angles, etc. Steve Well, Michael Jordan, I always give him credit because he's not an actor. But in Space Jam, he had to act with a bunch of cartoons. I bet Bugs Bunny was not standing there on stage next to Michael Jordan. He's not on set. Craig Yeah, but what they do for Michael Jordan in that movie in Space Jam. They had little puppets on sticks that they move around, so he kind of know where to look what to do. Then they remove them afterward. They're not like full puppets but little green things on a stick, right. The Mandalorian, which is quite a good show. It is slower-paced than many. Think of it like Breaking Bad in a movie. They shoot the Mandalorian using an entirely whole new technology in a soundstage. As we've been talking about with green screens and such. Television screens surround the soundstage. The roof was all screens though all Walls are screens. Everything covered with screens. As you mentioned here, Steve, this is using some of the technology from video games. It is amazing. So there's the actor on an LED set, and he can see all of the backgrounds. Nothing is greenscreen. It is a whole new change and an entirely different way of doing it. Steve I would like to take a vacation in one of these things. Just plop me in that thing with a chair and put on a beautiful Sunset over seascape and let me hang out on that thing for three days. That sounds fantastic. Yeah. Craig Like a holodeck, right on Star Trek. Are you familiar with that? Steve Oh, yeah, of course, of course. But I have to assume from an editing perspective, that it makes it a lot easier to edit because it would reduce the process. The time it takes with the green screens removing puppets inserting the characters. I imagine on the back end of things it's got to make the production faster. Craig What surprised me was looking at an article with pictures of the whole stage, including the cameras. Now, remember, again, the camera director and the film director and everybody can see what's going on, which is enormous. And they are in real-time said you know what? That building there in the background is distracting. Let's move it over as though it's 50 feet to the right. Wow. And they were able to do it right then. Right live. The other thing that surprised me about it was that if you look at it with your regular eyes, it seems severely distorted. I mean, like the straight line isn't necessarily straight, right it can be going off in all kinds of weird angles, some of them are curved, and it's all rendered based on what the camera sees and what the camera is seeing. So the camera sees everything correctly. The actors can see what's around them. They can even see the horizon. They can see the sunrise. They can see the bad guys coming at them. They're not there, but now they have something to act around. It's like a 75-foot long set 21 feet tall, and it is impressive. So expect this to be used more and more in the future. It can be the deck of a ship that can be the middle of a desert. It can be anywhere it can be your vacation with Jim right now over in Italy, right? You go to one of these. Steve Yeah, it could be the next video game at Disney World where you're in one of these things, and you got stormtroopers coming at you, and you can use lightsabers and do all kinds of stuff. It sounds like all kinds of different use. Yeah. Craig Very cool. Steve Yeah, we're talking with Craig Peterson, our tech guru, and you know, let's move on here to the Coronavirus. At the same time, we still have time here, Craig, because everybody's telling their employees just work from home, don't bother coming in, take your work laptop, go home, set it up, connect to the VPN, and we'll do everything remotely. But when everybody's doing that, it is taxing the World Wide Web in general. Craig Yeah, I have training coming up tomorrow. I'm going to repeat this a couple of times because I think it's essential. We're going to do a webinar on working from home because there are so many things people in Businesses just don't understand. And I've been shocked to see what some of them even slightly larger businesses are doing. Working from home is a whole different world. You've got your home computer that might not have patches installed. It probably isn't patched up to date, right? So you have security issues there. Many businesses have people VPN into the office. That can allow that potentially infected home computer or another computer on the network, and it's enabling them onto the Business Network, which now gives bad guys access to all of the personal information and intellectual property and everything else that's sitting there on that corporate network. There are so many issues with this. So I'm going to go through and explain what some of the better ways to do it are. When should you use a VPN? What kind of VPN should you use? And when should you Just try and remote to your desktop that works? What are the pros and cons of that? What kind of people can do that? Or can't do it. I'm going to go through the critical approaches that tactics and tools to get the most from remote work. And if you want to know about this, just go right now to Craig Peterson dot com if you sign up, it comes up on the top of the screen sign up for my mailing list. I'll be sending out an email later today. But this whole trend of working from home, Steve, I think is going to stick because of the aside the myriad of security problems. Yeah. That I think companies are going to have Steve, though. The bottom line is that as a rule, people are more productive working at home. They get more done in the people love it. Right who likes to get stuck in a traffic jam, right? Steve Oh, yeah, I mean, look, I gotta I buzz through. Have concocted a little radio studio in the basement, you know, because I'd rather have to if I'm an emergency do stuff from home than have to, you know, it's a short drive, but have to have it in here and do it, you know? Craig Yeah, it's, I think it's a great environment for most people. And most of the time at work, people are wasting money. Of course, you can make money in the meantime. Of course, you can waste-time at home, right? Get sucked into Facebook or something that you don't want to do. But there are tools for that as well. I use a few. We know we could talk about those. Because these are going to be live webinars. I'll answer everybody's questions. But it is, I think, going to change the economy, this Coronavirus, not not the virus itself, but the panic that's ensued. And so many employers have not tried to have people work at home. They haven't tried to use these digital collaboration systems, which we'll also talk about what they haven't tried to use. We don't things like zoom or WebEx, by the way, zoom, extremely unsafe, very poorly designed versus WebEx. You know, some of these things like, like WebEx has its teams, the same thing people use slack for, etc. We will cover all of those you understand it, and that's the point, Steve, I don't think most businesses have looked into these seriously enough as they grow in popularity. There are businesses, I think, Steve, that we are going to see some significant improvements in productivity, and they're just going to let more and more employees work at home. However, IBM last year pulled back on the whole work at home thing. IBM found for them, anyway, it was more important to have people bump into each other in the hallways and have an impromptu discussion than to have everybody really kind of siloed away. Unknown Speaker 11:57 Real quick, Craig. While I have you on that same topic. Let's talk about college campuses because we're seeing her in Mass colleges sending everybody home and saying work online. Is this the kind of thing that I mean, we've seen a lot of these universities trend online? If there are going to be campuses shutting down for periods, and we know how expensive colleges is, is it something that we could see trending in the college environment? Craig Yeah, it already is. Steve, we're seeing colleges that are now 100% online, and are doing very well. Two of my kids got their MBAs almost entirely remotely, and it's worked out very well for them. So yeah, watch out colleges, with your big fancy campuses and high tuitions. They are getting threatened. Steve, I think it's going to make a big difference. Steve Yeah, Craig, we get it. You have smart kids. Thanks for rubbing it in. I know. If you want to take part in that webinar tomorrow, which btw, sounds fascinating, and I feel like I need to be a part of that. I go home and fire up that VPN, and I don't pay any attention to it, and I probably should. If you want more information like this, from Craig, you can text My name Steve to this number? Craig You can text Steve 855-385-5553, or you can email me anytime with a question. Just meet me at Craig Peterson dot com or text Steve to 855 385 5553. Steve Excellent. Standard data and text rates apply. Again, Craig doesn't bother you or anything, but he does give you the updated stuff. I mean, still, everyone everywhere in all departments and all facets of life is trying to adjust to this Coronavirus. Craig is this staying ahead of it in his line of work. So we appreciate that Craig, thanks for the time as always, and we'll catch up next week. Craig Hey, take care of Steve. Thanks again. Craig It is happening. Keep an eye out on your email Wednesday. I'm planning on having one of these at four, and I may try and do one in the evening as well on Wednesday and then another one Thursday. Watch for my emails today. Take everybody, talk to you tomorrow. Bye-bye Transcribed by --- More stories and tech updates at: Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553
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AS HEARD ON NH Today with Jack Heath WGIR-AM 610: Security for Businesses When Employees are Working at Home and More
03/09/2020
AS HEARD ON NH Today with Jack Heath WGIR-AM 610: Security for Businesses When Employees are Working at Home and More
Welcome, Good Monday morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. I was on with Jack Heath this morning. We discussed the Coronavirus, Covid-19, the different tools that can be used for remote work and the security issues that businesses are facing during these quarantines. Here we go with Jack. These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Jack Unlike stay quarantined for a couple of weeks, what do they say? Justin 12 days, 14 days come self-quarantine, Justin something like that. Yeah. And I think the worry is Jack that's going to be impactful on the economy. Justin Yeah, I think that Yeah. I don't think anybody's panicking, per se and nobody's telling anybody Jack I know some who are. Justin Now I don't think that's the case. At least not in this country in other countries. You see it because it's more widespread in other countries. But the issue is, if the same number of people got the Covid-19 has got the flu, then you would see, you know, what was three and a half percent death rate right now that wouldn't be the same. If more people got it, but you're looking at, you know, way more people dying. If this spread is real. Jack I'm not saying it's not there. It's just fear is not always rational. And there's a lot of it, for example, you know, like if and I'm using an example from my past years of media, I used to be asked by people, why does the media cover a homicide so much when it only impacts the victim and you know, a handful of people? It's because it's dramatic. So, if you had a couple of like, terrible crimes in your town, what do people do? They lock their doors. They take precautions. They react, even if the odds of it happening to them are very few. So, I'm saying I, you know, it's like any fear factor people get they get nervous. Sure. That's what's going to impact a lot in this economy. People are going to postpone things change things to try and not get this and maybe the only way to limit the spread, right. Justin There's so much that's still unknown about it. I think one of the fears that I'm not going to get into it, but the handling of it hasn't been excellent so far. Hopefully, that changes. I think those factors in as well. Yeah, Jack Yeah, well, some people, of course. Then other people going on to live their life without any deviation because I tend to think that typically in this time of year, we are pretty well trained, or should be on how not to get The flu. Regular influenza, you know, if you go to the gym, if you go to the pub, wash your hands, if you get sick, do something about it fairly quickly. Don't try and spread it. These are all things that help but believe it or not, some people forget all right. We're going to keep it posted. Chuck's not a great start to start the mock markets. We'll come back with him in a moment, Craig Peterson, on the Tech Talk side of things, Craig. Good morning to you, sir. How are you? Craig Hey, good morning. You know, there's a lot of talk going on right now about working from home. I've got a few tips for people. I'll be doing a Facebook Live or two this week, trying to run through some of these things because there's so much to consider when it comes to working at home. First off, you're probably going to want to use some teleconferencing platform. There are many of them out there, but there's only one that's secure. And believe it or not, we have some serious issues when it comes to remote workers in most businesses. We will see because of this Major increases in business attacks. So, number one, WebEx, which is made by Cisco. It is a company that I deal with all the time we use it, and we sell it. WebEx made by Cisco is by far the most secure teleconferencing platform. They have WebEx teams that let you work together as teams kind of like Slack, but much more secure. It's available for free right now, because of the Coronavirus. So have a look at that over WebEx. VPNs are something that many businesses are all of a sudden started using. Then there are these screen sharing desk sharing and Remote Desktop Software people are going to use so they can hop on their computer at work, a great idea. However, it's going to be a terrible problem for businesses because business computers are usually secure. They're typically up to date with their networks are protected. When you are putting a VPN in, you're allowing unprotected computers in the home environment or at the coffee shop, who knows where now you're letting them direct access to your company's networks, and it's going to cause nightmares. There is a lot to know there's a lot to learn. I'm going to do a couple of free things this week, and I am not selling a darn thing. I will be helping businesses understand more about this. If you are interested you can email me at Craig Peterson dot com if you want to hop on to one or more of those live calls, I'll do it this week. Even emails are going to be an issue because people are going to be sending them using mobile devices. This, Jack, this is going to be nuts from a security standpoint. Jack Well, I'm sure, and there'll be people that always take advantage of people in a tough situation and the other. Still, the other thing too technology will help minimize some of this quarantine cost to the economy because people can, in some cases, work from home. Many many cases today, but you know physical construction, remodeling, hospitality, healthcare, there are other things you can do telemedicine is going to help a lot. But sometimes you need to, and if you're a healthcare worker, you need to go to the hospital to work. If you're a work in the restaurant industry, you need to make the food, you need to go clean something if you're so you, technology will help here, but it won't solve everything. But Thank you, Craig. Craig Most businesses are just not ready for it yet, Jack. Take care, Jack. Jack Craig Peterson with the Tech Talk side of things. You know, many businesses are putting plans together. What happens if one employee tests positive and has to go home? What if they worked in an area near 20 other employees. Do you begin to see multiple effects? Unknown Speaker 5:46 All right. I wish there were better news in the economy. Transcribed by --- More stories and tech updates at: Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: Message Input: Message #techtalk Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553
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Welcome! The Insecurity of DNS over HTTPS, Internet Archive's VHS Vault, Data Minimization and more on Tech Talk with Craig Peterson on WGAN
03/06/2020
Welcome! The Insecurity of DNS over HTTPS, Internet Archive's VHS Vault, Data Minimization and more on Tech Talk with Craig Peterson on WGAN
Welcome! We are going to hit a number of topics today from the world of Technology. I am quite disappointed with Mozilla, they are letting marketers and politicians define their technology. Listen in to find out why I feel that way. Compliance is an issue for many companies and I have some solutions that will help you and it includes a diet but probably not the kind you are thinking. Do you ever get nostalgic for "the good old days?" Well, I have something that might help, listen in to find out more. I will tell you happened to one of the Sharks from Shark Tank? How you can prevent it from happening to you and more. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Related Articles: --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Hello everybody, Craig Peterson here on WGAN and, of course, online at Craig Peterson, dot com and heard streaming all over the world on your favorite streaming site. I'm so glad to be here today and be able to talk with you a little bit about what are the top news stories this week? How can you keep safe that's kind of one of my themes because I freaked out when my company got attacked some years ago. You know, just a regular business guy trying to run a small business and man did hurt me bad back in the day. I'm just trying to get all of the information I've put together over the years and learn, and I continue to study this stuff and continue to look at what are the best ways to defend ourselves. I try and get all of that and put it together into neat packages for you. One of them, of course, is the radio show. I also get on with Facebook Lives. YouTube lives, and also do various types of pieces of training and tutorials and things out there. Where in fact, for the next course I have coming up, we're going to have implementation calls, where we are talking specifically about what to do when you do it. So you try and implement something, you have some issues. I'm going to get on the phone with you guys. So I think that's going to be great. And then the upcoming class here in a few weeks. And then, of course, the tutorials leading up to that class where I'll take your questions live, sometimes those little tutorial sessions on, you know what it's webinar technology. On these webinars, sometimes we go a couple of hours so I can answer all of your questions. That's what it's about here. All right, because I understand most people, not I know I'm this way too. I get contacted by somebody, and they're trying to sell me something that happened just over the weekend. Last weekend somebody knocked at the door, trying to sell windows, right. I think it was like Renewal by Andersen or something like that. And they were walking around knocking on doors. I see you know, immediately just knee jerk said, No, No thanks, my windows are fine. It got me to thinking about the whole situation in the security realm. Because that's what we do, right? What we've been doing for years decades, sometimes we have the antivirus software, every once in a while when we hear about a real big vulnerability, we go ahead and apply patches. You know, it's been the same old, same old, but we just can't do that anymore. And because really, we see huge, huge problems and businesses going out of business because of them. So that's what this is all about. So if you're a new listener, welcome. If you've been listening to me for a while, of course, Welcome, Welcome to you too. And I want to get this information out. So one of the best ways to make sure you have all of the latest information you need is to go online go to Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe, and that'll get you on my email list. Then once you're there, you will be able to keep up on up to date on things I do, try and get those out. I have a newsletter that's every Saturday morning. Then when I'm doing training, I'll send something that's a little out of the band if I'm doing a live or various other things. I thought because of the way it works with the emails I send out, if you want to unsubscribe, you will be guaranteed to never hear from me again. Maybe that's a great thing that is right for some people. But for other people, I came to realize that perhaps they didn't care about the training, they just wanted the newsletter, or perhaps they wanted the pieces of training but didn't want any emails. Some wanted on courses but not other courses, etc., etc. So I'm going to try and do something a little bit different right now, and there's a pretty nasty warning as a footnote. If you unsubscribe, I can't send you anything anymore. I won't send you anything even if you want a course, you'll not hear from me again, because you unsubscribed and marked as somebody that doesn't ever want to hear from me again. That's fine. I know we all have our lives, and maybe you think you're safe enough. Perhaps you're going to reach out to me when everything falls apart around you. At which point, I can't respond to you because I will have your email blocked. That is because I don't want to bother you. I want to comply with the can-spam app act. Although, you know, most people don't seem to care about that as well as the GDPR. Also, The New California regulations, the Massachusetts regulations, and new federal regulations that are going into effect. They all place requirements on when and where I'm not supposed to contact you. If you say No. Then No means no, right. I'm going to change things a little bit with these upcoming training and courses that I'm going to be doing. I'm going to make it so you can just unsubscribe from those, so you're not going to lose contact with me. I've had some people complain, and in the end, it becomes a bit of a pain to try and add them back in. We're going to try and make this a little bit easier for you guys, so keep an eye out for that. You already know right based on what I'm saying, as well as what I've done in the past that I won't spam you guys, I don't sell your name to other people your email address. Most of you I know are kind of the older generations, the younger guys they don't care we've already talked about that. They will sell their email address and name for a donut. But us older folk were a little bit more cautious about it. I think that's probably a good thing. We're less likely to get ripped off the senior population in some ways less likely to get ripped off, and other ways more likely get ripped off. It's interesting. Again, we tend to trust phone calls more. You know what I have, frankly, I don't answer my phone anymore. It just goes to voicemail. And I have somebody else look at it because there are so many scams coming in. But we tend to trust the phones more in the generation, you know, the men and women older than me, other baby boomers, they are a little bit more susceptible to those types of scams. So be careful with those types of scams as well just you know, be careful all the way around, frankly. And that brings us to our first story of the day today. And this is something I found that I thought was cool. So I thought I'd share it with you. It's a tech thing. I was just a few weeks ago talking on the radio. One of the radio shows I appear on as a guest. And we were talking about Betamax versus VHS. And I knew I knew that the radio host I was talking to there's no way he just loves tech. There's no way he did not have Betamax. And he did. He had hundreds, apparently of beta tapes in his closet. But this is all about that Era of the 1990s. I'm sure you guys had VCRs right back in the day. And of course, the winner of that war was VHS, and it wasn't because it was better technology, but we're not going to delve into that right now. And those VHS tapes, at this point, about 20,000 of them have been put into an online vault. Now, if you've never used the Wayback Machine, you have to check it out. You can find it online. At archive.org, that's the name of it. It is an Internet Archive, and it shows web pages going way back, you can look at my web page from back in the very, very, very early days of the Internet. When you know, love the not the Internet, but of when the whole web thing came about, which was 9293 is when it started to go. I didn't have a webpage back in 85. When I first registered my domain that's been around for a while. And then, of course, I was using other domains. Before that, I've used my ham radio call sign is my domain. And before that, but the Wayback Machine is this archive, you can browse the history of any major site, many miners sites that are out there. They have used it in court cases. It's used by me, just for kind of memories of things as the way they were. Now you can use it for something brand new. I didn't know that they had, and that is They've got something out there on the Wayback Machine that's called the VHS vault V-H-S just like the VHS tapes that we had or that ken didn't have because he had Betamax. Right now, I'm looking at says there are almost 21,000 results. So they've taken these VHS tapes that were submitted, and they have effectively ripped them. They've turned them into digital video, right. And some of these are just amazing, like a warm-up to Traci Lords. It's an exercise program. Of course, Traci Lords was involved in some adult films back in the day. Man, I love this mystery science theater. 3000 Timothy Leary is a guest on MTV with John Lennon, Les Miserables from 1935, rush to judgment. There are some many cool things The Lion King in full VHS tapes. Now some of this information is probably still copyrighted, but as a general rule, archive.org doesn't get nailed for copyright violations. SpongeBob SquarePants Oh, this is the Fairy Fairy Godmother I think is what this cartoon was called and trying to remember my kids used to like it. Some bootleg tapes, everything, but you can find it online I think you would have a gas looking through these. I want you to go to archive.org as you're listening to the show, or maybe some other time during the week, you're sitting there watching some TV with your smartphone or your computer. Archive.org and look for the VHS vault. The actual URL is archive.org slash details slash VHS vault. You will see all kinds of fun stuff that's in there. They have many different collections You can search this you can go in by year when They did it. They have Flemish dog collection. There's another one. There are collections I've used in some of the training videos I put together. There are collections of old black and white art, and pencil art, and engineering diagrams that are well, well auto copyright and you'll find all that stuff@archive.org Check it out, I think you will have a gas checking it out. If you're like me, it's certainly brought back a lot of memories. When we get back, we're going to be talking about something that you should be doing, whether you're a home user or business user. You know, the things that we have to be worried about are the things that can be stolen from us, right, in the online world. Okay, this is what we will be talking about. What can be taken from us, but also what can be used to kind of hold our feet to the fire in ransomware. So we're going to talk about how to reduce your risk with Craig Peterson here on WGAN Stick around. We'll be right back. Hey everybody Craig Peterson back here on WGAN online, and of course, at Craig Peterson dot com. Yeah, you know it by now, right? Well, hopefully, you had a chance to look@archive.org, definitely check it out. It's called the Wayback Machine, at least that was its original name. And they may still have that domain, the Wayback machine.com. But now it's known as archive.org. It is a wonderful, wonderful trip down memory lane, at least for me. If, if you are a little bit older, you might remember the Internet back in the days fun looking at some of the original search pages at AltaVista. Man, I miss AltaVista. I used to like to use the Boolean algebra that you could do in AltaVista. By the way, if you are a geek like me when it comes to searching and you want to be able to dig into it. There's a tool I use, and I think that you'd like it also. It's not cheap, that's for sure, but not that expensive either, but it's called DEVONthink, D-E-V-O-N T-H-I-N-K. It allows you to set up searches using all kinds of Boolean constructs, which is very, very, very handy, at least as far as I'm concerned. You can set it up to do automatic search sets every day looking for different things. It's one of the tools I use to find the information that we talk about here on this show because so much of it just isn't generally speaking, available. It certainly isn't spoken about by the mainstream media, right? You know that right. That's why you listen to the show and why you follow me. I am on LinkedIn. I'm on Facebook. I'm on Twitter, YouTube, and my website as well. I appreciate all you guys who do follow and who comment. Now, if you're a business person, this is for you, but there are some things that you can do as an individual as well that are going to make a big difference for yourself and your safety online. Businesses are concerned about the GDPR, which we've talked about on the show before. That's the European privacy regulation. We're also very concerned right now with CCPA. I just had a company that makes optics. I use their optics here in the studio if you have ever seen me on a webinar or one of these videos or pop up training or anything. I'm in the studio, and my cameras here the lenses use the glass made by this company. I had no idea, but they reached out to us due to their operations in California. They have a sales operation there because, again, they're selling their optical glass for use in lenses, and all kinds of other devices. They reached out because they were concerned about what is happening, what could happen with these new California privacy regulations? Is it going to mess up their business? How is it going to mess up their business? How is it going to make things better or worse? I think they had some outstanding questions. So they called us in, and they paid us to do an audit of the systems they have. How are the systems working? What is it that we need to be worried about? You know, it's something that takes a few weeks and a couple of on-site visits in New York? New York State, which by the way, is going to have their own set of privacy regulations that are going to affect them pretty dramatically. But basically, what it came down to was if they were compliant with the European regulations, they were probably most of the way towards the California regulations. So they think that they're compliant. But when we got in and started having to look at it, it turned out No, no, no. They are not anywhere near compliant with either set of regulations. Even though their IT people told them they are because they have full-time programmers who are programming their systems. They thought, Oh, no, no, we're fine. We're fine. No, they weren't. So what do you do if your regular business? Enough moaning and groaning about the optical manufacturer, who has fantastic optics, which is why I use them. Let's talk about you. Let's talk about your business, your small business, your larger business, this is true, you should be paying attention if you are a medium or large business as well. One of the best things you can do, and it is hard to get through to a lot of CEOs and other business owners. But one of the best things you can do to reduce your risks is to reduce the data that you are maintaining. Right? If you want to reduce the chance of getting shot at, don't go out in the streets where they're shooting, right? If you want to reduce the risk of having your data stolen, then don't have the data out there for them to steal. If you don't want to get nailed by one of these new regulations, that says, hey, personally identifiable information has to be maintained in this way and that way. If someone asks you what data do you have on me? Do you realize now you only have one week to respond? You must provide that data to them. If you have any sort of a California Nexus or European Nexus, in other words, doing business in either one of those places. Now, it's down to I think five days it's not a week to respond, saying, Here's all of the data that we have about you. That's what you have to be able to do. We have to be able to do it right now. You also have to be able to tell them, here are all of the people within my organization as well our contractors that saw your data and had access to your data. That is a very, very big deal, frankly. The landscape is constantly changing your obligations for that data, and the data disclosure and the data-keeping keeps getting more strict. What's the right thing for you to do? Ultimately, well, it's to get rid of the damn data, right? It's a very, very solid first step in reducing your risk. Now I'm going to be publishing next week, a little guide that you can use yourself, right, you don't have to have me involved, or anything else is just for you, that you can use to do an inventory of all of the data that you have in your business. What we've done is we've gone through and looked at different parts of the businesses that we've worked with over the years and evaluated the kind of data they often have. You have to do that first, right? You must identify what your risks are. You must determine what data you have. I'll make that available for those people on my email list. It will be part of this ramp-up here, a precursor to the pieces of training that I will be doing. There will be different free pieces of training and tutorials in my ramp-up to my courses. You don't have to be in the course to participate in the free tutorials, okay? You don't have to buy anything from me. It is all free, no hype or anything else. Okay. I'm not trying to hard-sell anybody I want to help you. That is the first step -- doing this inventory the data you have, and it is one of the best things you can do. Put your company on a data diet. Now, you know, last week we had Barry Friedman on the show, talking about a sugar diet. Right. It's a lot like that, and it's getting rid of these addictive pieces of data that we keep on our clients on our prospects, everything else that's out there, right. Let's look at it as a lens. When you're looking at your data when you're doing an inventory of these data assets, ask yourself, do I need this? Will this provide what I need? Think about maybe like a food diet as Barry does with sugar? Do I need sugar? We know is sugar going to provide us the nutrients that we need? The answer to that is no. When it comes to sugar, right. We found that out from Barry last week. But we need to work to minimize sensitive data and ask ourselves, do we need this sensitive data to conduct business right now? And will we need this sensitive data to conduct business in the future? If the answer's no, securely dispose of that data. It is the only way to comply with these regulations that are already in place here in the US and Europe as well. All right, when we get back, we're going to talk about how did we get here? How did we? How did ransomware grow to be a multi-billion dollar industry? What did we do to get here? What should we do to try and get beyond all of this? You're listening to Craig Peterson on WGAN. And of course online at Craig Peterson. dot com, live on youtube, live on Facebook everywhere out there. Stick around. We'll be right back. Hey, welcome back, everybody, Craig Peterson here on WGAN, and of course online at Craig Peterson dot com. In case you missed it. We've been busy today talking about the internet archives VHS vault. Again, that's archive.org. Check it out. It is kind of cool. We just talked about reducing risk using the cheapest mechanism possible. Data minimization will save you money and help you be compliant. Now I'm going to talk about ransomware. We've been warned...
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AS HEARD ON: WGAN Mornings with Ken and Matt: Setting up a New Computer and Protecting Yourself from Ransomware.
03/05/2020
AS HEARD ON: WGAN Mornings with Ken and Matt: Setting up a New Computer and Protecting Yourself from Ransomware.
Good morning everybody! I was on with Ken and Marty (who was sitting in for Matt.) We had a good discussion Setting up a new computer and How you can protect yourself from Ransomware. Here we go with Ken and Marty. These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Craig John McAfee, here's the guy that started the Anti-Virus movement by many arguments, saying, our software is useless. Don't buy it. Craig Hey, I was on with it was Marty this morning in place of Matt and Ken Altshuler, and of course, yesterday was the big election day in Maine on Super Tuesday. We didn't talk about that, really because we spoke about Marty's new computer and what you should do with a new computer, so I gave him the advice that I give all of my employees. It is what we do when you get a brand new computing device. Ken Well, now Craig Peterson is on. How are you? Craig Hey, good. Yeah, blame it on rank choice voting, I think. Marty So everybody's second choice. Ken Let's start talking about ransomware, shall we? I mean, so does ransomware work? Do people pay ransoms? Craig You'd have to ask the question, right? How Does it still work? Ransomware has been around for two years. Well, it goes back further than that. It was two years ago certainly had the vast, huge, massive hit on ransoms. That has brought down multinational companies for weeks, in some cases, very, very big deal. It's kind of fallen off. People aren't thinking much about it anymore. They're not protecting themselves. Now we've got this warning that's come out about ransomware. It is back with a vengeance. Kind of what you alluded to here, Ken has happened. We're no longer just seeing ransomware encrypting our data. What's happening now is ransomware gets onto your computer, and it's a whole new generation. What it does now is it starts poking around your computer, looking for Word documents, looking for your spreadsheets, and in your case, I think it would be what Word Perfect documents. Ken Word Perfect. The best word processing program ever made. Oh, all the legal guys like eight and a half by 14 and all that. Craig Yeah, yeah, exactly. It looks for those, and then it sends them back to the bad guys. Then the bad guys have a look at them and say, Okay, is there any real value here might there be something else on that computer? Can we spread laterally throughout the organization? Then they will hop on your computer unbeknownst to you because your laptop called home when it got this new kind of Once they've got all of the data off your computer that they want, then they probably will encrypt all of your data for the heck of it. They will put a ransom up on your screen. Now what they're doing, and this is up dramatically now we're talking about more than seven and a half billion dollars here in the US ransomware the last couple of years. What they're doing now is they're saying, Hey, I'll pay up Ken, or we're going to release all of your client files, even though nobody can read the WordPerfect files anymore. All of your client files to the internet, all of your personal information, your trade secrets, intellectual property, pay up, or else. The FBI is warning about this increase in is a new type of ransomware. It grew by 100% over the last two quarters. It is getting dramatic is getting out of control. What people need to do here is to protect themselves. Backups. However, having backups would help with the encryption, right? Because you can restore your files from the backup. But, it's not going to help with the, "Hey, we're going to release all of your information if you don't pay up." We have to start doing penetration tests on our systems, making sure that they're relatively safe. I'm going to have some training on that coming up. Starting next week, on some of the things you can do just some free training. Absolutely. I'm not selling anything in this course, right. I do have some classes for sale, but I'm trying to help out because, man alive there is some nasty stuff happening right now to home users, as well. It's the businesses that are more likely to pay this type of violence. What Jack Sparrow type of ransom. Yeah, that's something we don't want. I hope people will, will take advantage of that and avoid that in their business. Marty So Craig Marty here. A question that just came up for me at my nonprofit ET-tech is that we just bought a new HP laptop and it has McAfee antivirus on it now. I hate that program, to be frank. It takes forever. And I've said to my staff, and we don't need that. Whatever comes with Windows Windows Defender is fine. Delete McAfee. Was that the right call? Craig Oh, Marty, Marty. Marty. You're right. Here's the dirty secret right now when it comes to antivirus software. It is 100% ineffective, 100% useless when it comes to these modern types of attacks. When you're talking about McAfee, Norton, it's just mind-blowing here. John McAfee has a video out on YouTube that you can watch anytime you'd like. We're here. Here's John McAfee. The guy that started the industry by many arguments, saying, our software is useless. Don't buy it. Right. Oh, he doesn't own the company anymore, but that's what he's saying. You've got one of the top people over at Symantec Norton. There, I think he was VP of Marketing, if I remember right, getting caught saying at any event here after a couple of drinks, that their software is useless, and of course, losing his job shortly after that. The antivirus software industry is trying to mess with us. Frankly, now that McAfee probably paid about $2 to Microsoft or, in this case, HP is more likely about two bucks HP to have their software installed on your computer because they hope you're just going to go ahead and do it. So here are the basics of what you're going to do. It ties in with these tutorials that I'm going to have in the next few weeks because the right thing to do is get rid of all of that kind of extortion where they get onto your computer when you buy it new. So the first thing I do, Marty is a completely erase the computer, I mean, completely reformat the disk, and reinstall Windows without all that extra crap on it. And then, I turned on Windows Defender and made sure it's turned on and make sure you turn on automatic updates. Then I go in and configure Windows Firewall because, for some reason, Microsoft shipped it with a firewall. Yet the way they have everything turned on makes the firewall almost entirely useless, which drives me crazy. There's a configuration that you have to do on that, and I'll be talking about that a little bit if you listen to my show on Saturday at one o'clock I'll be starting to talk about these things. Next week, I'm going to have a lot more, but one o'clock every Saturday, by the way. So, Marty, you are right, you are going to get a lot of defense, just by turning on Windows Defender. I would also advise that you to use OpenDNS or Umbrella, you can use a free version, and there's a paid version that is going to stop this type of ransomware we just talked about. Right there with the OpenDNS, even the free version. For my customers, I use the commercial version, which I sell to them and support them. That's number one. There are several other things you should do to try and keep your computers safe. I'm going to go through step-by-step what to do and how to turn all these things on. On the browsers, you can turn on a few different things. You're going to want to have Ghostery on there, you're going to have Ublock Origin on there, and you are also going to have Privacy Badger on there. Those are few things that I'll be talking about in these webinars coming up and showing you guys exactly what to do and how to do it. Marty We are talking to our tech guru Craig who joins us every Wednesday at 730. Let's go to Shark Tank. One of the judges or sharks of Shark Tank lost, for $200,000, which kind of drop in the bucket for me, but probably hurt her a little bit, but then got it back. Yeah. How did she get it back is my question because the FBI warns you that you're not getting that money back? Craig Yeah, ever. It's gone. They're saying that, after 90 seconds, the money is out of the country, which is true, in this case, as well. And what happened is this is a business email compromise here real quick. And there was a bad guy who did a little bit of research on Barbara Cochran, who is this one of these Investors over in Shark Tank. They found out who her assistant is. They found out who her bookkeeper is. And they sent some fake emails and the bookkeeper wired some money 388,000 bucks to a bank over in Germany based on the email. The big mistake on the bookkeeper's part was that the bookkeeper responded to the email asking for the money to be wired. The email address of the assistant was one character off. So they just kind of faked it. Then they found out about it because when the bookkeeper wired the money. The bookkeeper forwarded the wire confirmation to the assistant using the correct email address. The assistant said what the heck's going on here, called the bank immediately, and was able to get the German bank to freeze the account before it got wired out in this case, to China. Usually, it's Eastern European countries that have people that are doing this, but in this case, it was China. Surprisingly enough, Barbara Corcoran got back all of her money minus wire fees from his from this bank over in Germany. And you're right can this like never happens you never get your money back. Yeah, I was shocked about it. I mean, that was unbelievable. Yeah, it was shocking to her too. So be careful on these emails. Always confirm with a phone call. You know, use it. Just stop and think about what would do? Well, ten certainly would not send an email you never get. He gets his dial phone, their rotary phone, and he would call someone, and that's what you should do. You know this, this new tech is terrific. But in reality, pay close, close attention, particularly when it comes to stuff like this. I've worked with companies that have had all of their money stolen, and we worked with the FBI to start investigations for them. Although they will investigate, you never get your money back, right. Ken Craig Peterson, our tech guru, joining us as he does every Wednesday. Thank you so much, Craig. Appreciate it. We'll talk to you next week. Craig Thanks, guys. Bye-bye. Ken Okay. All right. Let's get CBS News and when we come back Transcribed by --- More stories and tech updates at: Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553
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AS HEARD ON - The Jim Polito Show - WTAG 580 AM: A One Second Victim - Business Email Compromise and more
03/04/2020
AS HEARD ON - The Jim Polito Show - WTAG 580 AM: A One Second Victim - Business Email Compromise and more
Welcome! Good morning, everybody. I was on with Mr. Jim Polito this morning and we discussed a one-second mistake that can cost millions - Business Email Compromise. So, here we go with Mr. Polito. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Craig Millions transferred electronically. I have a copy of the email in front of me right now I'm looking at it. It seems like it's from a German company. Supposedly, it's for some renovations in the building. It is what scammers do. They look at you, and they look at your business, they looked at what would be a kind of typical ask for your business. In this case, that's what they did. They knew Barbara, and they found out who her executive assistant is and what the executive assistant email address is, who bookkeeper is, and the bookkeeper's email addresses. Craig Good morning, everybody. It is something that really could happen. It happened to Barbara, and I don't want to happen to you. So listen in as we go through some details. I hope again that this is going to help you from becoming a victim. Jim Here he is. He is our tech talk guru, and he is our good friend, and it's great to have him on our side. I'm talking about Craig Peterson. Good morning, sir. Craig Good morning, Mr. James. Jim How are you, buddy? Craig I'm doing great. I'm excited. Today's Super Tuesday. Maybe Finally we can finalize of this stuff today. Well, I don't know. Jim I think we're heading into a brokered convention. But we'll see. We'll see. But I wanted to start with you today with something exciting. My wife is a big fan of Shark Tank. I understand that one of the sharks got tanked out of $400,000 and didn't have any equity in that $400,000 Craig Oh man, I wonder what trades you made. Yeah. It is an example of what, Jim, you and I have talked about for how long now? It is the whole concept of business email compromise. Jim Yeah, you have said, it happens to the smaller businesses too. That is the weak point, the weak link in the chain, and they are more susceptible to the hacks. Craig They are. There tends to be less training for the employees. One of the most significant risks you have, and I've seen people who've analyzed this who stay maybe 80% of a company's risk. One of the most significant risks out there is our employees. It's our not typically lower-paid, but not necessarily, who will click on stuff. Now this story about Barbara is interesting. Barbara Corcoran is one of these investors over there on Shark Tank. She's a big-time real estate investor. That's what she's been doing forever. That's how she made her money. It's interesting to read through what happened, and this one, Jim, it did have a happy ending. We typically don't see this at all. There was an invoice that forwarded to her bookkeeper that supposedly came from her executive assistant. Now, there was one minor difference here. Maybe the bookkeeper should have noticed. There was one character different in the email address that sent it. Jim So, a difference you've taught us about this before? Craig Yeah, exactly. The scammer posing as her executive assistant, forwarded this fake invoice earlier last week, requesting that a payment of $388,700 and 11 cents be transferred electronically. I have a copy of the email in front of me right now I'm looking at it. It seems like it's from a German company. Supposedly, it's for some renovations in the building. It is what scammers do. They look at you, and they look at your business, they looked at what would be a kind of typical ask for your business. In this case, that's what they did. They knew Barbara, and they found out who her executive assistant is and what the executive assistant email address is, who bookkeeper is, and the bookkeeper's email addresses. Now, you know, Jim, it's pretty easy to find most of this stuff out. It was interesting to me that I sat down with the FBI because we had pulled them in on an investigation where we found that some criminal activities going on against a small local company. They have eight employees. I sat down with the FBI. The first thing the FBI did when I did the report was they went to my website, my business website. They just tried to find out the lay of the land? Who are the people that work there? Who are the executives who are the accountants? You know, they were impressed because I didn't have any of it on my website. If you go to @mainstream.net, you'll see that under who works here, who are executives are it says due to security concerns, we don't post any of it. Yeah, exactly. But you know, what people do, right? Look at your website, or Facebook, Jim All that information is right there. Craig Now, what do we give out? Then when talking about Facebook, but you and I mentioned our wives on our Facebook page. Yeah, you and I know, well, I think both of us know not to say, Hey, I'm going to Italy. I'm going to Ireland. Next week, although obviously in your case, yeah, you're tied in with the business. Yeah. Typically, we don't mention anything like that until after the fact, so right here, that means we are relatively safe. In this case, what happened is they invested what probably amounted to 10 or 20 hours doing some research. It was thought that they're probably from Eastern Europe will tell you what happened here specifically. Jim Big surprise, Eastern Europe. What a big surprise. Craig Yeah, exactly. And 400 grand How long will that last? You know, if you're in a country where the average person makes five grand a year, do a little mental math on that. That's going to last you and your family for a long time. For what? Divide that 400,000 by 20 hours, how much an hour? That's a nice payday. It is. Barbara said, Hey, listen, when talking to experts, I'm not counting on getting me this money back. She had an excellent attitude about this whole thing because, indeed, her accountant did wire it. How they found out about this was that when the accountant wired the money, the accountant CC'ed the executive assistant, and using the correct address. Okay, so initially, the bookkeeper just replied to the email from the scammers thinking it was the legitimate executive assistant, and she wires the money. After wiring the money, she copies the real address of executive assistant who says wait a minute, hold-on now, let's stop this. People, when this happens, you don't get your money back. The FBI says it's 90 seconds. It's 90 seconds from the time that they get that wired money that it is out of the country. And pretty much gone. Jim 90 seconds. It just reminds me of like, what was that movie? Craig Gone 90 seconds. Yeah. Like, boom, there it is. You can watch it go by on the computer screen. Jim That's it. I like to think that Steve McQueen's version was better than the remake of Nicolas Cage. Yeah. Craig Yeah, exactly. So here's the good news and the weird news, it never happened. They were able to contact the bank that the bookkeeper had wired the money to, and they responded quickly, right? So the German bank was able to freeze the funds in the account. Before the scammer knew it was in the account and transferred it out. Here's where it was going. In this case, it was going to China. Jim Oh, so it wasn't our friends in Eastern Europe. Craig It wasn't in this case, and it is not common, it was China. It makes you kind of wonder who in China? Much of the criminal activity in China is, of course, sponsored by their socialist government. So here's the bottom line. One hundred fourteen thousand people reported being a victim of this type of scam last year. We're talking 10s of millions of dollars in losses. According to the FBI's internet crime report. It is huge. It is a common way hackers are going after you. If it is in China or Eastern Europe, do you know who the next most person probably knows? Jim Right, it's your roommate. It's someone you know, who's going to hack. Yeah, right, right. Yeah, we're talking with Craig Peterson, Tech Talk guru, and at the end will tell you how you can get more information from him. Craig, you know what, before we run out of time, I want to talk about this because it caught my fancy here, this VHS vault? Pretty, pretty good idea. Why don't you explain it to everyone? Craig Yeah, there's a web service out there that, when started, was called the Wayback Machine. Now it's called archive.org. It is the coolest thing ever. I go on there, and I looked at old versions of my website. One time, I lost my website, and the Wayback Machine had a copy of it. It clones all of the websites, and you can go back to your favorite website and look at it as it evolved over now decades. And they got this cool new thing that you just mentioned, which is what's called the VHS vault. And if you go org, you'll see they have several different types of vaults there are. I use this one all the time where there are these ink drawings. Yeah, the 1800s of patent pictures and other things, and they've got them all there. But the VHS vault as of right now has 20,701 videos in there. And these are old VHS tapes from the years gone by some of them back, not the tapes, but the content in 1922. And wow, you can watch it in its original brilliant 480 lines if you're lucky, worth of resolution right. None of it is the stuff that you can generally find out there. It is such a cool flashback right near the top. The Beatles Let it be, and the original 35 millimeter was you know, put up there, and They're in their collection. It's called the VHS vault. You'll find it and all this other cool stuff at archive.org Jim Sounds pretty cool. All right, Craig, they can find more. And when I mean they I mean our audience, if they text My name to this number Craig 855-385-5553. Text Jim to 855-385-5553 Jim Standard data and text rates apply, Craig Peterson will provide you with updates. There's no charge for this. He won't try to sell you anything, and he won't hack you, Craig, thanks so much. We look forward to talking with you next week. Unknown Speaker 12:41 Take care, Jim. Bye-bye. All right, a final word about Hillary Clinton. When we return, you're listening to the Jim Polito show, your safe space. Transcribed by https://otter.ai --- More stories and tech updates at: Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553
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AS HEARD ON NH Today with Jack Heath WGIR-AM 610: The Technology and Spread of the Coronavirus, Business Email Compromise and More
03/02/2020
AS HEARD ON NH Today with Jack Heath WGIR-AM 610: The Technology and Spread of the Coronavirus, Business Email Compromise and More
Welcome, Good Monday morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. I was on with Jack Heath this morning. We discussed the Coronavirus, Covid-19 and its spread and how Technology is helping and hurting. Here we go with Jack. These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Craig A scammer posed as her executive assistant and forwarded the bookkeeper for Corcoran an invoice earlier last week requesting payment of over $388,000 to a company over in Germany. As it turns out that the email was not from the executive assistant to the bookkeeper but a scammer. The bookkeeper, not carefully checking the email, went ahead and paid the invoice, and Barbara lost 400 grand that she says she'll never be able to get back. Craig Hey, good morning, everybody. Craig Peterson, here. I was on with Jack Heath all over New Hampshire, also parts of Maine and, of course, Vermont and Mass. It is a northeast-wide show, and we talked about the Coronavirus, some of my experience as an EMT with some advanced certifications back in the day. The things I think are going to happen this year, and how it will affect businesses and individuals between As the scammers are using it too. Jack Right now, Craig Peterson, our tech talk guy, joins us live now on the Autofair listener line. Good morning, Craig. Craig Good morning, jack. Jack Well, I have asked you before can technology will help us here a little bit. What's on your docket this morning? Craig Yeah, there's a couple of interesting technology things. You know, for about a decade, I was a volunteer in emergency medicine, and I had some advanced certifications, I remember some of these prior diseases pretty darn well. We were concerned about what we should do back then. It was about 15 years ago, we knew that we needed to take some extra precautions, and we did. We weren't running around with face masks during SARS and h1n1 because we understood back then what caused the transmission and what we needed to do. You're correct about washing your hands. There's warning that even if you are wearing a face mask, most of them are just dust rated. Dust rated face masks, after a few hours, will be full of moisture coming up from your lungs and can transmit through that face mask. If you keep it around longer, the viral strand can make you sick. So yeah, do be a little cautious. I think we're going to see a lot fewer just general cases of the flu this year too. As we're going to be a lot more conscious than we have been in years past about washing hands and not touching your face. And the reason you watch him every time you go to the bathroom isn't so much that necessarily you're handling anything dirty in the bathroom, but most people go to the toilet a few times a day. So it's a good time to wash your hands. It is a way to help you remember to do it. It's kind of like changing the batteries in your fire alarms when the clock changes, which of course, is coming up soon. Yeah, it's just a good little reminder to do it. Speaking of reminders, There's something that just happened. The Barbara Corcoran, you might know her she's one of the investors over on Shark Tank. Big, big time into real estate. It is a warning is for pretty much anybody with email, which is everybody. She lost nearly $400,000 here just a couple of weeks ago to one of these business email scams that the FBI has issued warnings against. This scammer posed as her executive assistant and forwarded the bookkeeper for Corcoran an invoice earlier last week requesting payment of over $388,000 to accompany over in Germany. As it turns out that the email was not from the executive assistant to the bookkeeper but a scammer. The bookkeeper, not carefully checking the email, went ahead and paid the invoice, and Barbara lost 400 grand that she says she'll never be able to get back. So be very careful. The FBI is warning about these BEC scams. They're up big time. Ransomware is back with a vengeance. Jack, a lot of it is coming in emails that looked like they are talking about the Coronavirus and giving you some advice, some tips on the spread and things. So be very, very careful. We're all interested in it, and we all want to know more. Well, many of the scammers understand that when we get a little emotional, we are more susceptible and vulnerable. It might look like something, unfortunately, when that happens. That's a good example. With this person on Shark Tank. It just gives the scumbags the scammers more motivation like Oh, we got almost $400,000. All they need is one or two victims to make this worth it, right. To make it work not just for them, but for the whole family, $400,000 in Eastern Europe will support an entire family for maybe even a decade, depending on where they live. So for them, it's a lot of money. It's well worth the effort. For us. I have seen businesses whose operating accounts have been emptied by these types of scams. So be careful. You've got this scam, and we got the other ones around the Covid-19 that are giving us ransomware. Now even backups aren't good enough for ransomware anymore because they're holding our data hostage. Saying we will release this data, your intellectual property, the personally identifiable information that you have, will release it to the world if you don't pay us. The scammers are taking advantage of this Coronavirus. Jack We are talking to Craig Peterson here. He is at Craig Peterson, dot com. Thank you, Craig. Of course, Justin, I still want to know who the folks are behind the one where that says you have, a distant, distant relative you didn't know you're related to in Africa who has passed away. You can get in on the $19 million inheritance if you help them, you know, be the executor of the estate and help them and explain that you'll get your fair share. People believe that. I don't Justin I don't need relatives in Nigeria to scam me. I got ones right here and a handful. Why is it always someone from Nigeria? Craig Nigerian prince, Jack. The Nigerian prince scams were coming from Nigeria Believe it or not, and you still see them every once in a while the Nigerians were the original online scammers with these email scams. I made a lot of money over the years, and I knew quite a bit about it because I got involved I designed a system to stop the Nigerian scam way back when, Yeah, that was me. Anyhow, we've got more coming up for you this coming week. We think it's going to be next week these new tutorials we're putting together. Once you're done, with locking-down any Windows or Mac computer yourself, you can lock down your small business network, and you can be able to stop worrying about being a victim of the bad guys. All of that is coming up in the next few weeks ahead. There's a lot to be able to do here. So anyhow, we're so excited about it. We want to help you out with this because I know as a business guy, how it almost destroyed my business getting hacked. And I've spent years trying to figure out what the right way to do this is so that you don't have to that's coming up probably next week, Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe, make sure you're on my email list. All right, everybody, take care. We will be chatting again tomorrow. Bye-bye. Transcribed by https://otter.ai --- More stories and tech updates at: Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: Message Input: Message #techtalk Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553
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Welcome! Big Tech and Our Kids, Cloud Software not a Panacea, Regulatory compliance and Liability and more on Tech Talk with Craig Peterson on WGAN
02/28/2020
Welcome! Big Tech and Our Kids, Cloud Software not a Panacea, Regulatory compliance and Liability and more on Tech Talk with Craig Peterson on WGAN
Welcome! We are going to hit a number of topics today from the world of Technology and I have a special guest today who will discuss a subject close that I feel is important for my listeners as well. We are going to talk about some of the dangers of using the cloud and why you need to be careful. Passphrases beat Passwords, Malware on Macs, Ransomware, Cloud Liability and How Big Tech is taking advantage of our kids. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Related Articles: --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Craig Hey, good morning, everybody, Craig Peterson here. I am not doing the Facebook Live this week. If you watched it last week, I'd love to know what you think. Of course, it's something I am more than glad to do. We're busy, so I don't want to do something that people aren't going to like. We're thinking about trying to do something a little bit different, where we go ahead and instead of just the radio show when we do these Lives. We're going to use those for deep dive so you can ask questions and all of that sort of stuff. I think that's going to work out pretty darn well. We'll see how that goes. We're, you know, we're just trying a few different things here as time goes on. Hey, I got a great interview coming up with a friend of mine. He has been sugar-free now for years, you know, is a tech show right then, and there's no particular tech behind this. You know, if you listen to me for a while that I have had a weight problem, okay. Ever since I was a kid, I had a belly on me. The bottom of my rib cage there in the center kind of points out as I get a ski jump from my belly over the years. I've had this constant battle with my weight, and I lost 80 pounds, I put 40 back on throughout about 15, almost 20 years. I guess that's not too bad. Now I've taken it off again. I've talked about what I did to do that. I want you to hear what Barry has to say. I invited him on. He's an incredible guy and done so many interesting things over his life. He has a book out there, and he had a membership site. He was helping people for a while to get rid of their sugar addictions, but he's going to give us some tips and tricks and some points as well coming up a little bit later on today. I want to discuss a fair amount today about "The Cloud" because so many people think it's a panacea. They think by using the cloud somehow relieves them from the regulatory liability of these regulations that are out there and some of the things that you're supposed to comply with, right? In some cases, if you are a subcontractor selling stuff to a military contractor, there's now a ten-year prison sentence plus all of these fines and things that can nail you. So people are thinking, well, we'll just move to the cloud, right? It's going to make it easier. It's going to make it cheaper. And you know, the first pass on those numbers might be the case it might be cheaper. But what I have found in doing a little bit more digging is that many companies are now abandoning the cloud. And when I found they were abandoning the cloud, that's when I started getting interested trying to figure out why what's going on here. Here. And so I dug into it, and I'm going to share that with you today. I think that's an essential thing for businesses. I've got a new report out from the FBI this week that's backing me up from five years ago. I think that's kind of cool. So we'll talk about what the FBI is warning and telling us to do. From our security standpoint. We're going to also talk about some of the intricacies of cloud security. Still, Mac malware on Max, this is kind of interesting, isn't it because we all been kind of conditioned to think the Macs are malware-free, due to their secure design. They use software designed in the university environment for networking, unlike windows. You know, so when you think about the Mac and you think that you are completely free of malware, that is not the case. We'll talk about what kinds of malware you are likely to be exposed to that could kind of nail you. We're going to talk about business ransomware, you do not hear much about it, because you know, there was such a big deal a year to two years ago, but it is on the rise again. So we'll talk about that and how that's affecting business. We're also going to talk about the fact that if you are in business, face it, and you're a tech business. There are no two ways about it, right? As a business person, now you have to use technology. So how do you do it? How do you take care of your security and your technology, when the Calvary is incoming, they're not there? You're just like every other business out there. That means you have to develop some technical prowess and expertise. You have to be also the guys that take care of your security. Maybe you'll bring in professional services firms to help you out. Companies like mine can come in and design your network or redesign your network. Or maybe have accountants come in and look over your bookkeeping. Maybe help to improve some efficiencies in the business. Maybe you bring a legal team in to make sure that you're not going to get nailed by some of these regulations out there. The bottom line is that we are all tech businesses in this day and age. That's something that I don't think most people consider. We'll get into that a little bit later on today. We're also going to be talking about big tech, taking advantage of our kids some new lawsuits filed under the children's online privacy protection act or COPPA, against some of the biggest companies out there in the online world. These are all big deals, I think. That's what we're going to be talking about today. If you want to two, you can get all of these different segments from my weekly radio shows my appearances on TV and radio at my website at Craig Peterson dot com, and you can listen to them individually. You can also subscribe to the podcast. What we've been doing with the radio show since the whole radio show from soup to nuts is an hour and a half long every week is to put it out as one long show. Thanks to a suggestion from a few listeners and one guy that kind of pushed me over the edge in making it that way. If you subscribe to the podcast on any of the major podcasting services, you are going to get a one hour and a half, a 90-minute podcast that covers all the latest news of the week. I appreciate everybody that's doing that. Of course, our numbers have gone down a little bit in the podcast downloads because there are fewer downloads instead of the show being a different podcast is now one podcast, but I think it is better. There was an event that was held by the FBI infragard program in New Hampshire here last week. I didn't go as I was just tied up. They hold it the morning, every couple of months, and most of the time, I just can't go. But the event was called "The Calvary is not coming." They weren't talking about Covid-19 The coronavirus. They were talking about our infrastructure, our businesses when we get attacked. I work with the FBI on cases and help them understand what's going on with attacks against our customers like when Iran or China, Russia, or even others are trying to attack our customers by doing some nasty stuff with our customers, right? Our customer's data that we just don't want to have happened. We just didn't want that information to get out. While preparing these tutorials, the pop-up-trainings, and coursework, it brought to mind this idea of the Calvary, and whether or not they're coming. You and I, we are the people who are responsible for the security in the businesses we work in, right? And that can end up meaning that it's all on our shoulders. So this whole Calvary thing got me to thinking that I think there's a great analogy here. We are the Calvary, I'm the Calvary, and that is the director Action I've been going anyways, not with that specific wording, that particular name, okay. But that's the direction I've always been going. But now I think I'm going to get way more specific about that. Because you are the Calvary, you are the people that your family goes to when there's a problem. You are the people who are relied on by the business owner. Maybe you are the business owner, and the buck stops with you when it comes to technology when it comes to security when it comes to making everything work, right. That's the way it is with me, right? I'm the business owner, and yet the tech buck, the security buck stops with me. And so that's the approach I'm going to be taking here. We are the Calvary. I am the Calvary. You are the Calvary every one of you, right? You listen to this tech show to understand technology a little bit better because you're the person that others go to who is going to answer their questions. Who's going to fix their problems. I think it's great, but I also feel a huge responsibility to help you with that. I kind of woke up in more than one time over the last few months with nightmares, that's the wrong word, but how do I help you? How do I help you guys best? What are the things you need to know that is going to be easy? It is a question that we need to work on need to understand. We need to make work for us and our families, our business families as well as our families. That's my theme. I have already got five tutorials in the can where I'm doing screenshots, and I am showing you what to do while you're watching my desktop as I am doing things. I'm installing an extension, or I'm locking down a Windows computer, or I'm configuring a firewall. I am doing all of these things you have to do for everybody or that you have to understand. That's where we're going. I am committed to this. I think I have a message that that works that people can understand, right? The Calvary isn't coming. You are the Calvary. We are the Calvary, each one of us, and that's what we will be covering. So keep an eye on that. Make sure you're on my email list because these tutorials, although free, you can only get them if you subscribe. Craig Peterson dot com is where you're going to find it online. Craig Peterson dot com. Make sure you also use subscribe to the podcast, I'd appreciate it if you enjoy these. A subscription always helps us out and helps get the word out even further. We'll be right back listening to Craig Peterson on WGAN and, of course, online at Craig Peterson dot com. Hi guys, welcome back. Craig Peterson here on WGAN. In online, of course, Craig Peterson dot com. We're going to talk about the cloud and what stuff you need to worry about and what you don't. I was at my chiropractor's just this week and talking with him, and he has moved his practice in with another chiropractor. It's a little bit bigger, they've got massage therapists, and now there are four chiropractors in practice there. He was asking because he was concerned, they have a system there that is cloud-based, and you know, time was they would have a server there in the office, maybe in the basement, and they would have their little firewall, they try and keep things safe. Now that it's out in the cloud, their worried. We're going to be getting into that in a few minutes. And then also coming up here at the top of the hour. I've got my friend Barry who's going to be joining us, and we're going to be discussing sugar, which is, yeah, I guess there's kind of a tech angle to the sugar side, right? Like the high fructose corn syrup and the problems coming from that, of course, we're not going to talk about that part of it, but what he's done and the book he has as well as what you can do. First off, let's talk about our first cloud topic of the day. And this is about businesses in danger, and how they're in danger now from the cloud. The cloud, as I mentioned in the last segment, is not a panacea; it does not relieve you of any responsibility for the data that is in the cloud. So, for instance, if you have patient data, if you have data that is privileged or personally identifiable, putting it into a cloud vendor's hand does not relieve you of that responsibility. If you want to check it out with most of the major vendors out there like Google, for instance, you can find their statements online of what it is that they will accept responsibility for, which is nothing. And that's particularly true if you're not using the business type services. For instance, with Office 365, if you are using their email service, for example, and you're on their lower tier of the platform, you're not going to get security. You're not going to get the ability to block some of the most malicious types of emails that might be coming in. It's not backed up. They are not going to have some of the multi-factor-authentication that you really should have tied in with things, maybe like DUO or others, alright. Just because there is a cloud-service does not mean it's safe. Just because a company like Microsoft with its Office 365 does have some pretty darn secure services. Don't assume that the lower end service is they have are going to be safe for you either. And there's a great article I have up on my website right now. And it's from Health Net security. And it's talking about this subject and saying that 44% of malicious threats are cloud-enabled nowadays. Think about that. It's huge. Time was when the risks were what viruses and we know anti-virus software now is pretty much good for nothing, right? Because the anti-virus software is not going to protect you from modern threats. But that's what it was. It was all this virus stuff that might spread and worms that might cover the basics. But now we're seeing that cybercriminals are using the cloud because it's been an effective method for them to hide their attacks. Because the cloud vendor again, it's you know, friendly. Glee, this is you know, saying, you see a lot, aren't I? Frankly, when you get right down to it, if you are in a big cloud vendor like Microsoft or Google or an Amazon. Or even some of these smaller guys that are still pretty big, you're not even noticeable. Would they notice if you moved to another cloud provider? You will not change their bottom line or their top line. You're not even a rounding error. How much do you think that they care about you individually? What can you do when you get hacked, and you're in the cloud? What can you do when their cloud network goes down? What can you do when their software isn't working when a rollout of their latest release doesn't work? Or maybe it just doesn't work for you and 10,000 other people, which is nothing, right? Because Yeah, well, we got millions of subscribers 10,000 Some people Yeah, well, we'll get right on that for you, sir. Right, because you're not even in the 1%. Lots of problems here. And when we're talking about the security side, yeah, in some ways, it's going to be more secure. But in many ways, it's not. Here's a quote here from a threat company that they do a lot of research is called net scope and scale P. and Ray can Aziz is the threat research director over there. And he's saying, and we are seeing increasingly complex thread techniques being used across cloud applications, spanning from Cloud phishing and malware delivery, to cloud absolute control and ultimately, cloud data exfiltration. Of course, data exfiltration is where the bad guys are stealing your bank account information, stealing nutritional property, stealing your customer's information, etc. Or research Research shows the sophistication and scale of the cloud-enabled Kill Chain to increase, requiring security defenses that understand thousands of cloud apps to keep pace with attackers and block cloud threats. For these reasons, any enterprise using the cloud needs to modernize and extend its security architecture. In other words, what he's saying is any business because we know when he's an enterprise, I want to bring up a critical point. I was doing some work and doing some training with a bunch of accountants in Ireland. The largest group of accountants in Ireland, and I was explaining some of the security problems that we see here and around the world and that they see there, and they started talking about enterprises. Now I note in enterprises, right, and enterprise is big business. You think of enterprises here in the United States, and you're thinking about you know, the multi-billion dollar profit that some of these vast enterprises get. An enterprise means any business, right? It's an enterprise for a kid to set up a lemonade stand at the side of the road and sell lemonade to passers-by. That's an enterprise. So they're saying here, and I agree that every business, no matter how small, needs to understand the threat and understand that cloud apps aren't the answer and you have to take care of it yourself. The Calvary isn't coming. Your end Nat not even in that you're not a rounding error when it comes to the amount of money these companies made and make every year. So you have to be your own Calvary. Now, when we're stuck talking about businesses here, they're saying that 89% of companies are In the cloud Now, that doesn't mean they're hundred percent in the cloud, it just means you're using the cloud service. I bet you when you got right down to it, that those numbers are probably really 100%. People are using some of the services that maybe you shouldn't be using, right. They're using Google Docs and Sheets and all of those types of things. I use Grammarly all of the time, and some of those things can leak data. So we're trying to be careful not to use some of the cloud services when it comes to more confidential data. But really, it's 100%. Think about everything you're doing, all of the collaboration tools, and people are using Slack, which is not secure. And they're using that to share information within the team. You know, it's a great productivity application, sweb mail apps, those are probably the most popular and used today, people using Gmail or I mentioned office 365. I have a friend who still uses Yahoo, who knew that they were still in business doing email, right? There, the average company is using 142 different cloud applications. And I'm what I'm just trying to do here. Now, I'm not trying to scare you away from using the cloud. It isn't just a scare tactic. I'm not trying to sell you a listen. You need to have multiple layers, and you have to buy them for me, right? What I want you to do here, my whole goal of talking about this today is to get you to pay attention to what you're doing, and the data that you have up there. We're going to talk about this more when we get back. We'll finish this up. We're talking about the new FBI, released this week, what they're saying about security and what you can do to help. So stick around. You're listening to Craig Peterson on WGAN. We'll be right back. Hey, welcome back, everybody, Craig Peterson here, WGAN online at Craig Peterson dot com. We're going to talk here about the FBI his latest recommendation from their press release this week. We've got more coming up about cloud security. Ransomware is on the rise again, what type is it? What's it doing? And at the top of the hour, I've got Barry Friedman joining us. We're going to talk about sugar, and the impact of sugar. Now, this isn't an entirely tech-related topic, but I know you're going to appreciate this. He is a great guy. He's got an excellent little book out. It's been up for quite a few years now. It is this concept that he has about sugar and what to do with it, and about it has helped to change my life. I figured I would share it with you. It's one of the things I find essential. Let's finish up our first cloud topic of the day because I want you guys to think about your use of the cloud. When you get into the larger businesses, it's looking like the average of these Fortune 500 companies. The real big ones, but not like the, you know, absolutely massive ones. Those guys are using...
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AS HEARD ON: WGAN Mornings with Ken and Matt: Election Technology, FBI and Homeland Security Passwords and Passphrases
02/27/2020
AS HEARD ON: WGAN Mornings with Ken and Matt: Election Technology, FBI and Homeland Security Passwords and Passphrases
Good morning everybody! I was on with Matt and Marty (who was sitting in for Ken.) We had a good discussion about election technology and what different states are doing to assure that they are secure. We also talked about the FBI and Homeland Security about Passwords and Passphrases and security. Here we go These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Craig If the Secretaries of State get hacked, I'm not sure we can feel comfortable. Would they even know that hacking occurred? If they did, it would be much after the fact. Craig So well, this morning, I was talking on WGAN in their affiliates about some of the voting technology, you know, Super Tuesday is coming up. I compared some of the election technology in different states. What's good. What's bad. We talked about the new FBI press release that came out, that is I hope going to have a significant impact on security. It is fascinating stuff. So here we go. Craig By the way, I talked a little bit about our tutorials and coming up. Yeah, man, You won't believe the work that went into these all for you. It is part of my give back. I am not trying to sell you, upsell you, or anything else with these. Anyways, here we go with this morning on Ken and Matt more. Joe things technology.t tech guru Craig Peterson is on right now on the WGAN Morning News with Ken and Matt. Matt Alright, we're back ladies gentlemen it is 738 on the WGAN morning news with Ken and also Matt. There is no Ken today. There is a Marty Groman he is over there. He is still wearing the Mardi Gras beads. Marty I am, Yeah, the party's just wearing off now. How many Mardi Gras jokes Do you get to do? Is it a party for me? Matt You know, I should have a whole roster of them. Marty But you don't work out times in the early 90s. Back in the good old days. The real Mardi Gras. Yeah, way down there. The crew of Baucus indeed. Matt Well, I don't know if Craig Peterson's ever been to Mardi Gras, but he joins us now to go over what's happening in the world of technology. Craig, How are you this week? Craig Hey, I'm doing well. Yeah, there's a lot of party stuff. A Marty McFly, Cartoon Network has one of their top shows right now as Marty character in it to see. So yeah, he's getting around. Marty Everyone's getting on the bandwagon. Matt I don't know how to segue. So we're going to go ahead and just move into the attack already. Well, we do have an election coming up. Craig Peterson. Of course, in South Carolina, we've already seen a few primaries as well. And they've all gone smoothly with no trouble as we all know. There is an evolving question, though, that every time we have an election, we sort of debate and talk about and ask ourselves a very similar question? How can we make sure that these things are on the up and up? How do we make sure that our voting is secure? How do we make sure that it is all done correctly, and that nobody hacking and changing votes and manipulating things? On a more fundamental level? How do we protect our elections in technology? Craig Yeah, real big question a big problem. There are a few states have and, in fact, quite a few now that are using these election machines that we've grown to know and love, where we have a piece of paper effectively. And you fill in those little ovals there using the pencil or felt tip pen, right. You guys are familiar with those, right? Because you voted, right. Yeah. Those are right now, anyway, the best type of technology used for voting. There are other states and go all the way on the other side, and use these touchscreen voting machines that are running Windows XP. Now Windows XP hasn't been supported for many, many, many years, and they are connecting them to networks. When you vote, you just you touch the screen saying you're voting for so and so but some of these machines, they've got configured steal tickets. So you say, I'm voting Republican, or I'm voting Democrat. Or maybe you have Libertarian in that in a state right. People have repeatedly complained that the machines are improperly registering their votes. They'll say I'm voting for President Trump but somehow was recorded for Bernie Sanders. Right? That's, that's kind of the nightmare scenario. We don't want to see this Fall. If you vote and your votes not counted or correctly counted. When these things hit the news, and there is no audit trail like in some of these states, all you have is this computer that identifies that you voted for Bernie Sanders, even though you meant to vote for Donald J. Trump. They hit the news, all of a sudden everyone's all worried that somehow maybe my vote didn't count. Maybe there's cheating going on. Both of these could be true when using some of these types of technology. So there is a $10 million contract that has been awarded, it was awarded last year to come up with a secure voting machine. It looks like it's going to be more of a secure method of voting. There are so many ways that voting can be hacked. I just mentioned the machines themselves. If they are connected to a network ever, there is a potential for hacking. Optical Scanning machines used in New Hampshire are never connected to networks. They're loaded up, they put a little, basically a thumb drive into them, and they dump what the load is all about. But ultimately, there are multiple places that it could be hacked and could be hacked at the Secretary of State's office, where they're compiling all the votes from all of these machines throughout the state. It could be hacked again at the Secretary of State's office but on the website, where they post results, and where the federal government goes to get the results from the Secretaries of State. There's nothing fancy about how the votes are collected nationally. So your question going right back to it, Matt, have Can we trust the election? How can we trust the vote? Right now, I'd say here in Maine we are in pretty good shape. In the majority of states are in pretty good shape. There was a lot of money. I can't remember the numbers, exact number but a lot of money that was set aside and given to states to upgrade their voting machines. The temptation is always as we talked to with Ken here about this a couple of weeks ago. Should we buy the Betamax right or buy the newest, greatest latest, and coolest technology? We see right now from the FBI and Homeland Security reports, generally speaking at this point, it doesn't look like there will be a lot of problems this year. There was disclosed some significant issues in few states in the 2016 election with problems with hacking attempt, explicitly directed at the Secretaries of States in several different countries. Those Secretaries of State have been informed about it, those of them that come out recently. Ultimately, I guess we won't know how good it is until sometime after the fact. That part of it doesn't make me feel warm and fuzzy, is that the average time to figure out a hack occurred is your business is around six months. If the Secretaries of State get hacked, I'm not sure we can feel comfortable, would even know that they've been hacked. If they did, it wouldn't be much after the fact. So just let's stick with the old fashioned way for now, because it's the best way, the brand new way, by the way, that $10 million award. It looks like they are leaning towards a paper solution as well. So it's an electronic voting machine. And you touch the screen so that you vote for people you want. It spits out a piece of paper with your votes on it, you then take that piece of paper with your votes on it, and you give it to ever to whoever is, is running that little local election, they run it through a scanning machine. That is not much different from what we're doing today. And that's, that's a suggestion as to what the most secure type of voting will be. Marty Craig, it's, it's Marty. So yeah, it fills in the Oval for you then. But let me ask you if I may change topics on you a little bit. These trackers kind of drive me bonkers, right. When I when I visit, you know, the onion dot com or something the banner ads seem like they take forever to load. I added the DuckDuckGo extension to Google Chrome, and it cut that right off. I mean, what is your take was was that a good idea? A bad or bad idea? Craig Well, we've just had over 500 extensions removed from the Chrome extensions store, store, even though they're free, right, you have to pay for them. And as a general rule, I advise against using those extensions. In about two weeks, Marty, I'm going to have some training that I'm going to be releasing that's free. I'm not trying to upsell you or trying to sell you anything about some of these extensions that are going to keep your information safe. Now DuckDuckGo is well known as one of the best guys out there when it comes to blocking your tracking. Some of the others that I'm going to be covering in training include Ghostery, and you should be using HTTPS anywhere, which does something a little bit different. pundants amazing. You block origin and others. I'm going to go through those a couple of hours worth of training that I'll be releasing here in a couple of weeks, but Marty, I think you're right, use DuckDuckGo for your search engine. And there are more and more these extensions that are trying to keep your privacy. And I haven't looked at goes. But as a rule, those guys have been great and make sites load faster. Over to you. Marty That's what it does. Craig Ultimately, you know, all of these different extensions that I just mentioned in there, we're going to be doing this training on all of them will make it load faster. And you take a site like forbes.com that just has a crazy number of trackers on it. And the ads that you mentioned, like the ads, loading, and taking time, it makes Forbes go from about it took four minutes for me the other day to completely load everything on Forbes homepage. It was that bad. Then when I turned on these blocker extensions, it went from four minutes down to five seconds. So they're not only tracking us, but they're making our lives miserable. Trying defined to stuff we're looking for on the page. Right, Marty kids are there cluttered with all this junk too, right? Marty Yeah, it's awful. I frankly, I don't miss it. But it does make it all a little bit cleaner. But back over to Matt, I think you had a question. Sure. Matt I got one more quick one for you before we let you go, Craig. The password that I am going to be required to change in like, I think, a couple of days here at the radio station is among the 8000 different passwords that I have to change all the time. And there are no new recommendations. I understand it from the FBI that we are using passphrases instead of complex passwords. So like instead of d3, 724 dashes, but you know, period, whatever, some crazy combination of letters, whatever we should be using passphrases Why don't you explain that a little bit. Craig Yeah, well, get this quick. I'm going to go into this more on my show on Saturday at 1 pm So you can tune in there. And it's a two-hour show, and we go into quite a bit of depth on some of these things. But I'm glad you brought it up because this is one of the essential pieces of advice in the security world in the last five years. About five years ago, a study came out saying that rather than those types of complicated passwords that you just mentioned is not practical based on today's technology. Here's the bottom line recommendation from the FBI and from the research that's been out there, use a string for random words together, and just put a dash in between each of the terms, or space, whatever you'd like. A passphrase is something that might make sense to you, something that might not make sense at all, but something you can remember, and that's the essential part. Now, if your business, like for instance, Matt, your business might require some more company passwords, you might want to share this article with them. So you still might have to have those crazy ones or numbers, letters, uppercase, lowercase, special symbols, etc. But in reality, those are not the best passwords nowadays, make sure it's at least 15 characters long. Throw a few non-related words. For instance, making America great again would be a lousy password. Marty I thought I was going to use I can't drive 65. So there you go. That's probably not one to use now that you mentioned on the air Marty, that's true. Craig Yeah. But those types of passwords are the best. Matt All right, well, Craig Peterson He is our tech guru. He joins us at this time every Wednesday to go over what's happening. Excuse me in the world of technology. Craig one more time promo for the show, when is it? What time where can you listen to it? What are you going to be talking about? Give me that one more time before you go and then, and then we'll say thanks. Craig Okay. I'm not the automaton that Marty is when you ask that question. The show this Saturday, every Saturday from one till three, I talked about the latest in technology with an emphasis on security. We're going to be talking about some of the cloud services that businesses are using thinking that somehow they're safer, right? But how to make it safer. We'll talk a little bit more about the passwords. Ransomware is on the rise right now. Apple Macintoshes. It turns out there's more malware out there and get a few more things as well. But this weekend shows Saturday at one we're kind of focusing on cloud software. Matt All right, his name is Craig Peterson. He is our tech guru. He joins us at this time every Wednesday to go over what's happening in the world of technology. Today was no exception to that, Craig, thank you very much. And we will talk to you again next week, sir. Craig Gentlemen, take care. Bye-Bye. All right. Appreciate it, Craig. Transcribed by --- More stories and tech updates at: Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553
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AS HEARD ON - The Jim Polito Show - WTAG 580 AM: Passwords, Data Collection, Big Tech and more
02/25/2020
AS HEARD ON - The Jim Polito Show - WTAG 580 AM: Passwords, Data Collection, Big Tech and more
Welcome! Good morning, everybody. I was on with Mr. Jim Polito this morning and we discussed Passwords, huge databases, data collection by Big Tech and our schools, COPPA and Google. So, here we go with Mr. Polito. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Craig Now we've got the New Mexico Attorney General, who I'm sure will be joined by other attorneys general to file suit on this. We've got this children's online Privacy Protection Act, which has been around for quite a while that says any personal data for a child under the age of 13. If you collect that data on a child, you have to have explicit permission from the parents. Craig Good morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. And that was me chatting with Mr. Jim Polito over in Worcester and Springfield, Mass, two biggest that's the second and third-biggest cities in Mass and we got talking about the new FBI recommendations. Also, a new lawsuit filed against Google. It is going to be the next big thing for governments going after companies like Google and other data aggregators who are collecting data on our kids through programs they sponsor in our schools. I can't believe what the schools are doing to the kids right now when it comes to their privacy. By the way, a bit of a warning. It was kind of scratchy this morning. I'm not sure what was going on. But anyhow, here we go. Jim Popular segment here on the show. It happens every Tuesday. At this time. I'm talking about our good friend and Tech Talk guru, who just happens to be from Canada, originally. Craig Peterson. Good morning, sir. Craig Good morning, Jim. Jim All right, Craig, I want to start with this. You know, we're in the political season now. You know, campaign slogans and phrases and all that but, so maybe that's this is an excellent time to change your password because the FBI is saying, Hey, get rid of that password, and come up with a pass. phrase, you know, like, make America great again, maybe not that one. It might be a little too obvious for some people, but they're saying phrases tell us about this. Craig It goes way back to the password came out oh my gosh, Dec, many, many, many decades ago. And it was a way to restrict access to a computer, and very few people were trying to break into them. Most of them didn't have a, you know, external wire. And what's an easy way to do this? Well, let's just have a password, and it was just simple, and it was enough to keep people out. And then we moved to the point where what happened is people had guys who got onto computers can steal the password files, and they had programs that would run through those password files and try and crack the passwords. You know, and that's when they came up with the idea, hey, listen, you got to have uppercase, lowercase digits, special characters, all of this other stuff. And today, it has changed the game. Today, as a result of all of these breaches is we have these large password data files. I have a copy of one of them, as well. I've been using to research these vast troves of data containing billions of actual people's passwords that they have used on a website, anything from their bank through Facebook or Google. It brings up the big problem, Jim, of using the same password on multiple sites, because what the bad guys are doing is they use that password file, passwords, billions of them, and they basically against you, or a cat online to try to break-in. So instead of trying to do something, that's computation, Generally intensive, they just say, Hey, listen, there really, there's about 10% of the people that use somewhere around the top 5% of all the passwords out there. So let's just go ahead, and we'll try those what the FBI is saying. If you use a string of words, as you had mentioned, you know, those bag of things, which by the way, as you pointed out, is a bad word because all people can use it. But if you use a string of words that are at least 15 characters long, it can take a hacker who's trying to make a brute force attack, and it can take that hacker good 100 years to break into your account. So it's simple advice. Most businesses are still aren't following it. It is something that I've been talking about for a few years now since I read some outstanding studies, not passports, I'm looking at how the hackers are working out there, and it goes back to 2015. So it's been about five years since I read some of those first ones. But the FBI his advice now, is it a longer password? Relying on simple words even and no special characters will take a crack and require more computational resources and, and therefore is much safer? Jim Wow. We're talking with Craig Peterson, our checkout guru, FBI recommending come up with a phrase. Don't use a password. A at the end of this segment will give you a little word that you can use. That word is going to be Jim, and you're going to get more information from Craig Peterson, but we'll tell you about that at the end of the segment. Okay, so I'm feeling safer. There. All right, now, here's where I'm not feeling safe. And it's for the kiddies. Okay, so Google is being sued. For misusing school kids, private data is this again, one of those cases where Google says I use this product, we have our this software for free. For free. Yeah. And then whenever it's free, you're the product, right? Craig Absolutely. It's like the free VPNs out there. You know, they're worse than not using a VPN. In this case, what we're talking about, is Google suite right here in Brockton, Mass. We've got a school tool that's using it. But Google has something called a Chromebook. We've talked about this before on the show. It is a Google Chromebook for the average user is the safest device to use out there. Okay, it is not more reliable than a MacBook but is much safer than a Windows laptop. There's a Chromebook, and the real, real exciting thing for schools is Yeah, they can be very cheap. Yeah. Right. Jim Like instead of buying an iPad for every kid in the school, which is expensive by the Chromebook, Craig 450 bucks, yeah. Cheap. They go only up to 1000 depending on what you want. But it's Google we're talking about here. So even though they are secure from a hacker getting into them standpoint, that doesn't mean that Google isn't tracking what you're doing. Enter the problem here. The cost for access to free tools, as we know, is paid for by Google having our data, right. Google's providing low and no-cost hardware and software tools to students and schools. In addition to just statistics nationwide, and now we've got the New Mexico attorney general who I'm sure will be joined by other attorneys general to file suit on this. We've got this children's online Privacy Protection Act, which has been around for quite a while that says any personal data for a child under the age of 13. If you collect that data on a child, you have to have explicit permission from the parents. It applies to websites, apps, any sort of digital platform, and they collected data from the kids. And the New Mexico Attorney General is saying, Wait a minute. Well, you are collecting the data, and it resides in your cloud. So what are you doing with this? You're violating federal law, in this case, also New Mexico law? Yep. And Sue is alleging that Google deliberately is just stealing school districts and Parents about data collection, and how much better Could it be for Google? Right? They want to ask consumers for life, and then they start with you. Jim Well, how about that commercial that was so popular and useful that aired during the Super Bowl. It was a gentleman who was a widower. He was talking to Google. He was talking about his wife, who passed away, and it showed how it would remember all these things about her and bring up memories and thoughts. And okay, yeah, what better way to start that is when you're a kid. Google knows your whole life so that when you're dying, and your life is flashing before your eyes, Google will do it for you. They'll insert a couple of advertisements probably. For Funeral Directors, they'll put in you know, an ad in for a funeral during Hey, and you're dying now. Why don't you tell you folks about our services Craig Do you want to go to such a funeral home? Google and Apple and Microsoft, etc., all want our private data. They all want to be the repository of all of this information about us over the years. You know you can pick who doesn't go to Dr. Google when they when something goes wrong, right? Or you're trying to figure out what the symptoms mean, what's going on Google does track that, by the way, Google has a flow tracker, on the number of people who are searching for symptoms. Remember now to the federal government is restricted and cannot obtain or gather specific information on illegal under federal law, right? So what is the what are they started to do? Go into these third party companies like the Googles that have the data on us, and the federal government even though they can't track it, also though they can collect it. Our private industry has no restrictions on doing that. And so the federal and state governments they're just bypassing the law and go into these data aggregators to get whatever data they want about it. Jim All right. So look, here's what you need to do you need to arm yourself and know all of these things. And the way that you do it is you get on board with Craig Peterson. Craig Peterson will provide you with this information for free, and you are not the product. He does it as a service to members and listeners of the show. So all you do is Text my name, Jim, to this number 855-385-5553 Texting Jim to 855-385-5553 standard data and text rates apply. Craig Peterson will not rip you off. And Craig, thanks so much. We'll talk to you next week. Craig All right, Jim. Bye-bye. All right. Craig 12:17 I'm sorry, that was terrible audio. I don't know I am debating whether or not I should even share that with you. I'm not sure what happened there. But, you know, say lovey like air. Anyhow, have a great day. And we'll be back tomorrow, hopefully with better audio. And then, of course, we got the show this weekend. And we're still working on our man. These tutorials are going to be amazing. By the time you finish these tutorials, you're going to be able to lock down any Windows or Mac computer yourself, and you're going to be able to lock down your small business network so that you're not going to be a victim of the bad guys. Best of all this is free. And if it was wasn't enough. You're going to know how to test everything yourself to make sure they can't get in. How was that for amazing, you guys, man. We're putting a lot of work into this, but you are going to love it. I think this is going to be the turning point in your security. Anyhow, have a great day. We'll be back tomorrow. Bye-bye Transcribed by --- More stories and tech updates at: Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553
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AS HEARD ON NH Today with Jack Heath WGIR-AM 610: The Technology and Spread of the Coronavirus and More
02/24/2020
AS HEARD ON NH Today with Jack Heath WGIR-AM 610: The Technology and Spread of the Coronavirus and More
Welcome, Good Monday morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. I was on with Jack Heath this morning. We discussed the Coronavirus, Covid-19 and its spread and how Technology is helping and hurting. Here we go with Jack. These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Craig So there we go this morning with Jack Heath Craig Peterson here, and let's get into it. We talked quite a bit about some different aspects of what's happening with technology and the Coronavirus, the Covid-19. Jack Joining us on the Autofair listener lines, our regular contributor Craig Peterson. Craig, I want to take a few moments, we just had Nick Bayless and talking about this Coronavirus concerns economically. Nearly 80,000 confirmed cases, and even if we need to keep perspective on this and not get paranoid, but is technology going to save the day here or not? Craig Well, there are two sides to this tech's getting influenced by it. We see at right now Apple and Amsterdam. I shouldn't say both are looking at a real downturn, Orders coming ahead. Samsung is even found at least one infected employee on their manufacturing floors in South Korea and has shut down all manufacturing operations. Apple says that iPhone that we were looking for in September that inexpensive iPhone is probably not going to be able to meet those dates. Yet technology is undoubtedly being used to track it, but it's also being used against us now. We have warnings out there about some of the text messages, emails, etc., that we're getting, saying, hey, download this tracker, go to this website. Click on this to find out about Coronaviruses in the area right now. Those are the negatives. On the positive side, there are trackers used by professionals that are collecting and correlating all of these symptoms. We actually have a couple of companies now using artificial intelligence. To watch the spread, to try and figure out what's going on there. We've already got technology that has looked at the virus and DNA has mapped it, and is changing the whole world of vaccines, instead of the vaccines, taking years sometimes to develop, we're talking about months away before we have a viable vaccine. Then it'll need testing, etc. Technology is doing to help this as well as causing problems. Society now versus the Spanish flu in 1918, we're very mobile, we have people taking this virus everywhere around the world. It's a two-edged sword here, Jack. Jack Well, what about vaccinations, and can technology? You know, Ken, because Nick Bayliss, our healthcare expert earlier, was saying there's more than one sort of strain of this grow virus can cause vaccines with more tech knowledge today get done faster and out faster, yes or no? Craig Oh, it's a lot faster. It's easily ten times faster than it used to be. Plus, we're able to do now is we're able to use some of this artificial intelligence to check millions of potential solutions, you know, cures in some cases. But in the case of most viruses, we're talking about having a vaccine, and we're able to test millions of them a day virtually. So it is going to be dramatic. I don't think we're going to see some of the horrific numbers that people have talked about deaths worldwide, but we do have to be careful. It is going to hurt the economy. Technology has seen some of the problems already. A lack of manufacturing, initially, but ultimately, potentially even the consumer side of things. Yeah, but you Look at the car parts and the accessory market for automobiles. Many, many brands and manufacturers move on China when you look at South Korea and the numbers of people not going to factories and working and staying home because the case looks at Italy, you can see the contagion. I think you're right on the fatalities. But we are now at 80,000. And we could see hundreds of thousands of cases globally for this thing is contained or at least a couple hundred thousand I would think and Nick Phil concurred with that. So it's certainly going to spread the question Will you know where and I guess the pockets that are worse than others? Well, here's something for New Hampshire businesses and businesses worldwide. And that is most jobs, obviously not manufacturing, but most regular jobs we can do from home. And there is already a whole movement afoot. for employees to work at home to stay at home. You've got to be very careful about the security side because These computers at home are not part of a secured network that there might exist in the office if you will. But I think that the technology side of things could help stop the spread. Have your employees work from home as they can. And the latest version just came out last week and other studies showing that people working from home are more productive in most cases than they are in the office. Jack Yeah, you're not going to get this as a water cooler, even a story. I mean, even a study out of Harvard Business School was remarking on that that, you know, three days of work with companies on people to work at home is showing more productivity once you start seeing the top line going up. You'll see that happening more curves are commuting people, don't you people live in Atlanta, DC, terrible commuting areas. Boston, Massachusetts, is a terrible commuting area. I don't know why I didn't want to work there. No, I'm kidding. I like to have fun in Massachusetts and Maine's expense. But anyway, you'll see that that work at home thing for a lot of reasons makes more sense. All right, Craig Peterson from tech talk, I appreciate it, Craig. Thanks, Jack. Transcribed by https://otter.ai --- More stories and tech updates at: Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: Message Input: Message #techtalk Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553
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Welcome! Election and Voting and the use of Technology, Poorly written apps and Bad Chrome Extension and more on Tech Talk with Craig Peterson on WGAN
02/22/2020
Welcome! Election and Voting and the use of Technology, Poorly written apps and Bad Chrome Extension and more on Tech Talk with Craig Peterson on WGAN
Welcome! We are going to hit a number of topics today from the world of Technology. Primaries and Caucuses are underway and with that always comes the topic of technology and security and it is no different this year. Apps are being developed and brought to market without being fully tested. Extensions are being created that have ulterior purposes and are being downloaded by thousands and even more, on Tech Talk With Craig Peterson today on WGAN. It is a busy show -- so stay tuned. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Related Articles: --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Hey, welcome, everybody. Craig Peterson here on WGAN. And we're live on Facebook. And we, of course, can be found over my website as well Craig Peterson, calm. We got a lot of topics for today's show. But we're going to start with the one that is really on everybody's minds right now is we see more of these primary elections beginning to come up, and we see problems. Well, I don't know, or are they problems or features? I guess they are problems with some of the election technology that has been used over in Iowa. New Hampshire's technology was rather straightforward as the Secretary of State in New Hampshire says, and it's hard to hack a pencil, although they're not using pencils. In New Hampshire. They are using felt pens, which are hard to hack as well. And these cards can like the cardboard that you would have in the back of a shirt when you purchase it. It's that type of cardboard that is not shiny or glossy, and then it goes through an optical reader that scans the ballot and places it in the bottom of that machine. An election official stands there to make sure that the balance legitimate. That you are not trying to stuff the ballot box, and that machine counts your vote. Now the unfortunate thing is those machines are kind of old in most states, some of them, I think maybe all of them are still running Windows XP, but there's no easy way to get it the operating system. It's never connected to a network. Even though some of these machines that have been examined and have patch levels zero or in other words, no patches of Windows XP, which is quite surprising when you get down to it. That is a big problem in many many cases. In New Hampshire, the primary went pretty well. Of course this weekend, the next one coming up, which is in Nevada. The Nevada caucuses. I don't know what to believe anymore because I've heard both sides of this. One that voting in Nevada is using the same technology that was used over in Iowa, which to me would be just a shocker and a whole big dismayed because it was just so terrible. As I've said on the radio before, in fact, this week when I was on with Ken and Matt, I think it was, might have been with Jim, I'm trying to remember who it was, which show. I pointed out how in when we're looking at some of this technology, we all well, not all of us, but some of us love the latest greatest technology. I'm one of those guys that like to stick with something that I know works and explore current technologies and newer things. But so many times we get just bamboozled as taxpayers because the people that are in control of the purse strings, they like the latest coolest stuff. They buy equipment from people they know hence the app and iOS. Former Hillary Clinton staffers ran the company chosen for use in Iowa, and I don't know how much vetting they did. We do know that the code wasn't checked. Homeland Security had offered. We also had offers coming in from Federal Investigation Bureaus and from several security companies saying, Hey, listen, we'd be glad to have a look at this. It was all closed source. It wasn't open-source where you can have a look at that software and say, yes, indeed, everything's legit. That is excellent software. People can find bugs in it. If they find a bug, they can report it, and it can get fixed, right? There are so many different things that they could have done when we're talking about trying to make this secure. I see Mary just joined us here on the Facebook Live and which is cool. She and I have worked several elections in the pas,t and we've been monitoring them. I have a son that's been one of these election officials. You know, part-time people that get pulled in to watch the voter checklist and things in New Hampshire, you have to have an ID to vote, which is weird, you know. I liked the way we did it here, Maine's doing the same thing. Most New England states are in fact as northern New England are doing the same thing where we have a felt pen, we have a piece of paper, we mark it down on that piece of paper, and we can then count it later on. If there's a problem, right? You can just go to that paper that sits in the closet, pull out the stack, bring it with you. And once you've done that, you can have a bunch of people sit around and think about Florida 20 years ago and what happened there with the hanging chads. They at least had a physical card they could look at although you know pregnant chats, hanging chads got to be quite the mess. So now we're getting concerned because of this new voting app that's out there. It's called Votz. V-O-T-Z is how they spell it. It's not the same one that was used the caucuses in Iowa. The app that the Democratic Party was using was trying to take the tabulations that were made by the people who were at all of these different precincts and figure out what the vote tallies were and then supposedly put it into the app and it gets sent up. This vote app that we're talking about right now goes a few steps beyond that. They want military personnel, and people are overseas to use it when they can't necessarily vote when they want to vote. It's, you know, panacea, maybe it's something we can get to in someday, but four states are going to use it this year. It has not undergone the trials that really should have gone down. And it's using a buzzword that I think got people's attention. And they're saying, Oh yeah, this is going to be safe because it's using this buzzword called blockchain technology. Blockchain technology is what used behind various cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin and some of the others, to help secure the transaction. So the whole log is it signed each record inside the register is signed. Just because it has blockchain doesn't mean it's secure and doesn't make it properly designed. I've got a quote here in this article from MIT, is computer science artificial intelligence lab saying the whole thing is sloppy. It looks sloppy. It's in Georgetown Law. It's awe-inspiring. They were able to find such a pervasive set of vulnerabilities, said Matt Blaze and election security expert and computer science professor at Georgetown Law School. But we should also remember it's ultimately unsurprising that they would be able to do so because of every expert has warned against Internet voting as being vulnerable to flaws exactly like this goes on. The University of Michigan here Alex Halderman, saying that it makes vote seemed like a sham. So it is a sham. I think I think it's a real problem. But we're going to do it anyways and four states, including West Virginia, this year is going to be a mass. We've already seen what happened in Iowa. We saw excellent voting happen in New Hampshire. We're not sure what's happening this weekend in Nevada, then Super Tuesday is right on the heels. Some of these states are using these voting apps. Some of them are using the apps used in caucuses. I think thank goodness there aren't very many caucuses in the country. And we'll see, but one thing is guaranteed, and that is it will be quite the debacle. It is going to end up being a problem for everybody involved because they didn't vet this technology. Now, I reported on this a couple of weeks ago, this $10 million grant set aside by the Department of Defense grant, ultimately, and it was to design a voting machine that would be secure. A voting machine that we could trust. I think that's just wonderful. It hasn't really been tested yet. They brought it last year to one of these conferences like Black Hat and Defcon. They brought it out there. Every year there is a voting machine village where they have all kinds of voting machines there. They are asking people to go ahead and try and hack into the voting machines. We had a 15-year old that was able to hack a voting machine right there, and they compromised every voting machine except for the device under development on this $10 million contract. Now, that might seem impressive, and that might be kind of encouraging to some of us. I think it kind of is in some ways. However, the reason they did not hack it was it didn't work. They were not able to get it online and did not get it online until Sunday, which was the last day of the conference. And so no one got to test it out. But that was last year. Let's get them a little real a little bit under their belt, a little water under that bridge sometime, and they will be able to do it. And you know, I think they'll be able to do it ultimately, but I still will be the biggest proponent of a pencil and a piece of paper or a felt tip pen. The software, By the way, those votes VOATz software is being used in Denver, parts of Oregon, Utah and Washington State, we'll see what happens. West Virginia, as I said, is going to use it. But for disabled voters, the federal government requires all states to have electronic voting machines that can be used by disabled voters. I know here where I live in New Hampshire, we have a thing I don't know they might have passed. Now they're kind of getting old. Twins, twin women, and one of them was pretty much deaf, and the other one was pretty much blind. So they were able to help each other out in a massive way, which is kind of cool and get right down to it. But what they did is they kind of both helped each other to vote, but we all have in every precinct people who are there who can help people with disabilities. I don't like this requirement to have electronic voting machines. But the MIT researchers, these other researchers all agree with me. I'm very concerned about the Android phone and Android as a platform for people to use. I don't know if you are if you're using Android, you know, I'm always saying use iPhones much, much more secure. But I also am not looking at an iOS as being the problem. Cure-all for some of the voting machines. Anyhow, we are live on Facebook, as I'm putting the show together and shout out to everybody who is on there and asking questions. I appreciate it. And I will go back in and answer questions for anybody a little bit later on who has them, and I want you to stick around. I will be back here after the commercial break. We're going to be talking more about the latest in technology. We're going to be getting into these Iranian hackers that have been hacking VPN. If you think your VPN is safe. We've got another thing coming. So we're going to shut this one down. And we will be right back. Thanks for joining us, of course, Craig Peterson dot com. Hello, everybody. Welcome back. Craig Peterson here on WGAN and affiliates. You'll find me online at Craig peterson.com. And, of course, online at Facebook. I'm doing this Live on Facebook, and also out at YouTube. And we're going to talk right now about VPN. So hopefully, you have some understanding of them. But some exciting statistics came up this week from our friends in government. The FBI has been warning us a lot lately about what's been happening over in Iran what they've been doing, and we don't have kinetic war. In other words, we're not shooting at each other, which is a good thing, right? But Iranian hackers have been right at the forefront of trying to hack into our systems, and they've been relatively successful. I have a few clients that are in the defense industry, because we do, of course, the higher security stuff, right. And they have been under constant attack from Iran for about six, eight weeks now ever since the last little tussle with Iran might have been longer than that. And we're seeing sustained efforts to hack into them. Well, now we're getting a report from our friends over at ZD net here about Iranian hackers targeting these VPN services. So I thought I'd start by kind of explaining to everybody a little bit more about VPN services, what they are, what they offer. And because I'm hearing ads about this all the time, and frankly, it's driving me crazy, because the ads are telling me that Yeah, Craig you need a VPN because it's the only way you're going to be safe. It's the only way you're going to be secure in your day. You've got companies out there that used to be known for anti-virus, which of course nowadays we know antivirus software is zero percent effective against the latest hacks that are out there. So antivirus software companies are trying to figure out what's another way that we can make some money because people are starting to realize that this is a scam. And it's been a scam for a lot of years. You know, antivirus worked pretty well 15 years ago. It doesn't work at all today, as I just mentioned for the latest now malware nastiness that's out there. So some of these companies one that comes to mind. It was purchased not too long ago by another anti-malware company is running a lot of ads. They're saying this we need our VPN you need our credit watch. They've tied in, with one of these companies that watch your credit looking for transactions, it might be a bad guy, and I'm a little concerned because here's what usually is going on in the VPN industry. Running a good VPN is expensive. When you are using a VPN, all of your data, depending on what type of a VPN, how it's employed is encrypted from point to point. We're talking about the right ones and not those that you hear the ads for when you're using those types of VPNs. Your data is transmitted up to the VPN service provider. Then once it gets there, it is sent out to the internet. So let's say you're trying to go to my site, Craig Peterson, dot com. If you're using a VPN, your web browser is going to ask the VPN server Hey, can I get the Craig Peterson dot com? What's the best way to do it? How can I get there, and the VPN server will say Hold on a second. I'll get that page for you. Then the VPN server goes out to Craig Peterson dot com gets the page and sends it back to you. Now, that would be a caching or proxy VPN server. And some of them will just pass packets through. But the big concern I have is twofold. One of them is this whole Iran thing, and we'll get into that in just a minute. Because it isn't only Iran. But the other one remembers if something is free, or if it's inexpensive, who's the product? You the product! And since you're the product, what do you think they're making money off of selling your personal information, that's how they make their money. And that is a big problem as far as I'm concerned. So what some of these VPN services are doing is they are tracking you online. Some of them go the next step, and they're actually acting as full proxies, and they are sometimes acting as a man in the middle attacks. They're injecting things into your data stream that you weren't expecting. So where you think you're getting the VPN to have some security, and to have some privacy. Some of these VPN services are the exact opposite. They are reducing your privacy because what they're doing now is taking your data and selling it to the highest bidder that's out there, right. So I think that's a problem. And if you think it's a problem, maybe you shouldn't use some of these cheap VPN services. And I haven't gotten any I actually like, okay, I've heard advertisements on these radio stations, my shows airing on and I've checked them out, and I'm not comfortable with any of them. And the only VPNs I use or VPNs that I run, but remember, your data still has to hit the internet at some point. Remember, you're using one of these VPN services. versus your data is going to the VPN service provider. And at that point, it hits the internet. So it's now out on the internet. Well, if you're trying to make sure your data doesn't get on the internet, and people aren't hacking you, you've lost because your information does have to get to the internet. How are Internet Service Providers supposed to get to your bank? How are they supposed to get to my website? How did they suppose to get to Facebook or Google or YouTube? They have to go over the whole internet as well. If you're using one of these services, and they're going out to the internet. What do you think is a bigger target you at home, using the internet via your cable company or your telco or maybe your smart device. Is that one device a big target, or do you think that perhaps its the VPN service providers that are the bigger target, right? I'm not sure I need an answer because it's kind of a rhetorical question. The most significant marks out there when it comes to VPNs are these VPN service providers. And we're seeing warnings out there right now that Iranian hackers have targeted pulse secure, which has VPN software that they sell to businesses, shown to be insecure. Pulse Secure for the net. Another example of one of these security companies, right that has a VPN service, Palo Alto Networks, a company I have never used and never recommended either. I haven't recommended any of these companies to anybody ever. We've gone up against Palo Alto Networks in some proposals and contracts and, and they won them because of all the whiz-bang, not because they were the best of the safest, and so So there you go, Paul secure Fortinet, Palo Alto, and Citrix VPN are now being used to provide a back door into larger companies. So if you're a business person, I'm going to put these right now into this channel so that you can look it up for you or business and seeing and write this in as a comment over here in the Facebook Live that you can find online. Yes, go to Craig Peterson, calm slash Facebook. It'll take you to my Facebook channel. But there's the list of them. It is from an article that's out there on ZDnet. I think they have been publishing some great information lately. I've been using them in a number of my alerts that I send out as part of my Saturday morning emails. But some of these attacks have happened according to this firm called clear sky that Iranian hackers have targeted companies. From the IT telecommunications, oil, gas, aviation government and security sectors, why because that's where all the real money is. The particular report is dispelling frankly, the notion that it's their Russian and Chinese hackers or maybe North Korean because the Iranian hackers don't know what they're doing right. I've heard that before all Iran, don't worry about it. They know what they're doing. When in fact, yes, within hours of being disclosed, the Iranian hackers were right in there. It's terrifying. So keep an eye out. I look. Again, online at Craig Peterson, calm you'll find this article, and a whole lot more. Make sure you ask your IT department if you're using any of these VPN services or software. And by the way, in most of these cases, you can get patches to fix it. When we come back. We're going to be talking about Coronavirus and the new challenges right here on WGAN. Hey, welcome back Craig Peterson here WGAN and online at Craig Peterson dot com, of course, on Facebook as well. I am live on Facebook, and you can ask questions there you can watch this whole show as it unfurls, and you will find me there. You can ask questions almost anytime. We try and keep you up to date on what is happening out there in the world of technology. Well, you might not have thought of coronavirus as anything more than just a piece of nastiness, right. The virus I know some people are saying well you know we haven't had as many deaths from the...
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AS HEARD ON: WGAN Mornings with Ken and Matt: Election and Voting Technology, Phishing and Coronavirus Covid-19
02/21/2020
AS HEARD ON: WGAN Mornings with Ken and Matt: Election and Voting Technology, Phishing and Coronavirus Covid-19
Good morning everybody! I was on with Ken and Matt. We had a good discussion about the upcoming Nevada Caucus and if they will experience some of the same issues as in Iowa. We also discussed the cybercriminal phishing emails being sent out with the warnings about the Coronavirus that if clicked on will infect your machine and network and also why you should delete apps that you do not use to protect your privacy. These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Craig saying, Wow, cool new technology is going to be great. Hey, I have a buddy that worked for Hillary Clinton and ran this, and he's got this company, and he's got this voting software. That's what tends to happen. And they're looking for the latest the greatest the coolest the neatest and yeah, we can brag about how wonderful this all is. When in reality, it ain't there. Craig Hi everybody Craig Peterson here, of course, and I got into this thing. I don't know, and maybe it was too much this morning about technology. I was comparing what's been happening with some of the technology for voting to laserdiscs and Betamax, etc. But we went this morning with canon Matt talked about that couple of other things, including the Coronavirus. So here we go. Ken Back again 738 on the WGAN morning news with Ken and Matt. It's time now, ladies and gentlemen, to talk to Craig Peterson. Craig Is your phone working now? Ken Did that last-minute somebody was a tech expert series tell me how to fix his phone of a manufacturer.?We have a tech guru, and I would like to ask about that. But I am going to ask you a quick question. You know, we've had some primaries and the Nevada primaries coming up or the caucus, and it's looking like it's going to go smoothly, but there may be some security flaws. Can you tell us as a tech guru, what the hell is going on? Craig Well, you know, this whole thing with the voting and technology and what to do you know, we talked last week about you know, where the governor here in Maine and of course Secretary of State and John Richardson was on and on, I had said, you know, the, I think the smartest thing I think it was brilliant. Stick with an unhackable felt tip pen, Right? I still say that. I also get concerned when the government gets involved with consumer technology, and when they get involved with almost anything. But indeed what technology because the government ends up trying to pick winners or losers, right? And when I'm talking about tech, what's the best tech? And so the government gets involved and says, Oh, this is the best tech, or that's the best tech, and then you dig into it. And you find out that Hillary Clinton's former staffers are the people who founded and we're running the company that came up with a software that just thoroughly discredited the Iowa caucuses. This coming Saturday, as Matt was kind of jumping in there, looks like it's going to be a mess as well. How do we secure our elections because it's not like we can have the normal process of the best technology wins? Well, maybe that's not always the case because I'm sure Ken, you must have bought a Betamax video recorders Ken Betamax? Craig I don't know why anybody would buy a VHS Betamax was so superior to VHS. Ken I have had here this brand new mike 700 Matt Am I correct? Betamax was better technology. There's no question, are we talking about the LaserDisc while we're at it? Oh yeah, that was even better. That was amazing that the laserdiscs amazing size CD that I had, you know, I had to put like seven of them just to watch a movie. Don't touch the surface. I remember for some reason, even though the school was crumbling, and a cockroach once fell from the ceiling and landed on my book. Okay, even with all that, they somehow found a way to buy a LaserDisc player, and I remember the occasional like, you know, Friday, you know, day, where you weren't, going to do anything. Where they would play a movie in class or whatever. They had to, like, take that thing out, and then put a new disk in like five times before the movie was over because it didn't have any sort of capacity to put a film on it. But I'm glad we spent all that money. It was worth it. Craig That's my point. Why did they buy the LaserDisc player? Because it was cool? Yeah, exactly. So now here we are looking at our Super Tuesday coming up. We're looking at all of these other elections that are happening. All of these people, these people, what do you mean, these people are out there saying, Wow, cool. New technology is going to be great. Hey, I have a buddy that worked for Hillary Clinton and ran this. And he's got this company, and he's got this voting software. That's what tends to happen. And they're looking for the latest, the greatest, the coolest, the neatest. And yeah, we can brag about how wonderful this all is. When in reality it ain't there. And now we're looking at another mobile voting app yet another one. It is being used in four different states this year, including West Virginia. What could possibly go wrong here? And this new voting mobile app, it's called Votez V-O-T-E-z. Isn't that cute? And it is just full of some of the most basic flaws ever. But you know what, guys? It's using blockchain technology, which is going to solve all of the world's security problems. This is sloppy. We need to stick with the standard. We need to have a government and a voting system people are confident in. The people say, yeah, our votes were counted. If there was a question about the tabulation or the ballots properly-being cast, you pull the silly things out of a closet, and you have a look at them. Let's not run headfirst. Over the cliff into some cool technology, and then with a whole bunch of Betamax tapes in our closet. Matt Do you know how many beta tapes I have in my closet? Ken I would say probably 500. Craig Yeah, yeah. And you know what those the quality of those is not quite DVD quality. It's still good, but you just can't find anything that well. Ken The other thing I don't have, I don't know where my Betamax is. Anymore. By the way, I don't want you to know I did not. I will bet every FBI instruction. I did not steal any movies. I just want you to know. Craig You know, you've got those things sitting there, Ken, and it was great technology for today, but it's gotten so much easier nowadays. Anyhow, that's my stance on voting. Stick with a piece of paper and unhackable pencil or felt tip pen. Keep the silly things after people have voted those wonderful little cards, keep those for at least a couple of years. Do spot audits, a lot of these states are their secretaries of state are not doing spot audits. I think that they have to do those just again to keep confidence in the system. And Matt, you're probably there with me. I am probably there with you, sir. We're talking to Craig Peterson, our tech guru. He joins us every once a while. Usually, Wednesdays, to talk about what's happening in the world of technology. Speaking of security, I have a lot of Chrome extensions on Chrome, and clearly, I am now surrendering all of my information to everyone. Tell me why. Craig Okay, my here's my general advice to everybody. I gave this out a little earlier in the week as well. The primary recommendation is not to have too many apps on your phones and other devices. Over the last couple of years, we have found that a lot of those apps are leaking data. And last weekend on my show, I talked about how the Department of Homeland Security is buying that data to track people say, Okay, so now we can find out where you are where you have been. It was about six, eight weeks ago, that the New York Times was able to track President Trump's whereabouts as he was moving around, because they were able to follow one of the phones of Secret Service personnel, according to the article that they wrote. This is a real problem. Now we've found that there are more than 500 browser extensions that have been secretly uploading our personal and private data to websites that are then selling it. The number one most evil thing to put onto your browser is one of those browser extensions, and it's a tab type thing. That gives you quicker searches and tells you there's a deal on this page on this site right now. A lot of people have installed those things. Well, if you have and I have seen so many people with this, get rid of them now. Delete your browser extensions, these Chrome extensions that you're not using, or that you don't need. Now, I've got some tutorials coming out in a couple of weeks about three Google Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera, browser extensions that I absolutely love, that are not stealing your data. I've got some training on how to know what's what. You know if that if you guys have one of these Chrome browsers, it is just overloaded with extensions. You got to delete these things, because some of them are evil. Some of them are even mining Bitcoin for bad guys in Eastern Europe, and you don't even know it. You know, here we are talking about having the privatization. I shouldn't say, of the two major electric companies in Maine, to save Maine taxpayers are ratepayers, in this case, some money, which is always great to save money. Still, we got to have an in-depth look at some of these things. And we have some of the highest electric rates in the country. Analyze things up. Why do we want to allow the browser extensions that will show us a cute little cat video every day? What do we want to have that browser extension burning our electricity to make Bitcoin money for somebody else? We've got to stop doing this sort of thing. Just delete any apps you're using. Remove the browser extensions you don't absolutely need and be a little safer online. Matt We are talking to our tech guru Craig joins us every Wednesday at 730 dot com. Get the information firsthand or to listen to him on w ga and in the afternoon on Saturday at one o'clock. Before we let you go, Craig, I don't know if you've heard about the Coronavirus, and please do not play the Mexican hat dance. Craig Whatever I do, I will not play the Mexican hat dance. Ken I was the last thing I will do. I will not play it. I don't want to trigger. Any technological issues for Mr. Peterson Craig One of my sons is a teetotaler. There was a joke going around about something about lime and salt being the cure. But anyway. Yeah, be very, very careful, everybody. I'm glad you brought this up. Ken, we're out of time. So really, really quickly. The bad guys always Take advantage of things in the news. And one of the big things in the news now, and I'll be talking about this more on my show on Saturday at one, is the Coronavirus, Of course, you know it is called now called covid-19. Don't open emails saying hey, here's a tracker for the Coronavirus. Don't do any of this stuff. There are so many fake emails and now fake text messages coming out from these people. It helped us to get overwhelmed. That's a really really bad thing. Don't do it. People the bad guys are saying Coronaviruses that trying to get your open stuff. If you want to g, the Coronavirus goes online to cdc.gov simple site to remember cdc.gov, not CDC dash org.gov. There are so many fake sites out there, just cdc.gov right at the top they've got stuff on covid-19 this respiratory disease, and they have trackers. Still, you know what right now you're more likely to die from the flu, and we are at the height of regular flu season, and they're even tracking that@cdc.gov so there you can keep an eye on everybody. Ken All right, that's Greg Peterson ladies and gentlemen. I appreciate it as always, Craig, and we will talk to you again very soon. Craig Take care, guys. Bye. Thanks, all right. Why don't we take a quick break quick Craig 13:27 A Shout out to all of you guys out there listening to me, of course, every week it kind of goes up, which is terrific, and it's so so appreciated. I had contact by the way from one of our listeners, a longtime listener, and a bit of a friend frankly always enjoy chatting with him. He's a little bit older kind of like me, and he has been out there freaking out about what to do now with his career. He went to a small school that taught cybersecurity stuff for a few months and put some money into that. Now he's out looking for a job. Is anybody else in that kind of a boat, because I think this might make a fascinating series or segment or segments or however it turns out for the listeners here, what if you are a little bit older in life? You are looking to change careers, maybe, perhaps you've always been interested in the whole security side of things. And you want to get involved with that. Let me know just send an email to me at Craig peterson.com. And we'll kind of go from there and see where this takes us. But I find this fascinating I I want to help you guys and gals out there with, you know, making your life a little bit better and helping you to make other people's lives a little bit better too because I suspect you're a lot like me, frankly. And that's why you're such great and regular listeners. Anyhow, take care and everybody. We're getting closer and closer to having some of those tutorials ready. I got another one edited yesterday, he says making a sigh, Oh my gosh this has been so painful I've had to learn a different video editor because I when I was using just can't handle the type of content that I'm generating here for these tutorials. It is on some of the best things you can do for cybersecurity for your family, for your business all free, even the tools tutoring alone are free. So this is going to be a huge one I think for pretty much everybody anyways, me at Greg Peterson calm or sign up for my mailing list just at Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe. Take care, everybody. We'll be back with a weekend show again this week. Bye-bye. Transcribed by https://otter.ai --- More stories and tech updates at: Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553
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AS HEARD ON - The Jim Polito Show - WTAG 580 AM: Apps, tracking, selling info and election security
02/18/2020
AS HEARD ON - The Jim Polito Show - WTAG 580 AM: Apps, tracking, selling info and election security
Welcome! Good morning, everybody. I was on with Mr. Jim Polito this morning and as you know today is Primary Day in New Hampshire it is the Big Day for our State Sport - Politics. That means it is the day to address voter manipulation, voter fraud, low tech solutions and why apps are not the answer. So, here we go with Mr. Polito. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Craig You've got this free little cute little game, isn't this fun to play? Well, that game is tracking you everywhere you're going. They sell that information to Marketers. Now the Department of Homeland Security is even buying that data of where you are which apps you're using. Just because you have these apps installed on your phone. Craig Good morning, Craig Peterson, here. That's me with Danny, and it was pretty much all about voting technologies, the new stuff that's coming out the problems we have right now. And my predictions for not just this election, but frankly for the next two or three presidential cycles. Danny Yes, it is Tuesday. 840 You know what time that is? It is time for tech talk guru Craig Peterson. Hi Craig. Craig Hey, good morning, Danny. Craig I've got a little clarification about info from one of your former guests this morning. An earlier guest, I should say this morning. He was talking quite rightly by the about all of these apps and what's been in the news, in fact, just this week about apps and how dangerous they can be how they've been tracking, Google just removed a whole bunch of extensions from the Google Chrome Store. I want to go into slightly more detail if you want it to be secure. Don't download an app you don't need. Another thing I've said forever, Danny, is that you should go through your phone, at least every month, and delete apps you're not using. You know, most of us have a lot of apps. I think the last stat I SAW said that about 95% of the apps that we've downloaded only get used once. It's like we're never using them. Delete them off of your phone, off of your tablet, whatever it is you have. I want to add one more thing from a safety standpoint. Even if you are using an app fairly regularly, go ahead and delete it anyway, and then reinstall it. When you reinstall it now, it's going to ask for permission. You're going to be able to have a closer look at that app that again. It may be one you use every day like Google Maps. Believe that when you reinstall it and pay close attention to the permissions that it wants to access. By the way, just because it doesn't ask for permission to share some of your information doesn't mean it's not going to, all right. But as a general rule, those permissions are correct. It's more confusing on Android than it is iOS. Android kind of pushes you on to you the decision about whether or not you should be installing that app. On the iOS side, it's a lot more straightforward than Apple's a little bit better about it. He had some super points. But I go one step further. Just delete the silly things, mainly if you're not using them, as you mentioned, bringing up the app and permitting it. Danny So what kind of permission should people be looking for Craig to allow it not to? Craig Yeah, there you go. Well, let's have a look at the most costly divorce in history, which we talked about a couple of weeks ago. Right. So you have Bezos. Yeah, exactly. Billions of dollars in a divorce settlement. How did that all start? Well, that started because he was using WhatsApp, which is an app that is now part of Facebook's family. What WhatsApp had done here is accepted a video, and Jeff Bezos had allowed WhatsApp access to his photos and his videos. Even though you might think, oh, what's the harm and giving it access to my pictures or videos, maybe you're not going to get the virus the Jeff Besos got, but the app has access to your photos, your videos or other things. If there's a bug in the app, if there's something malicious going on, you're going to lose that data. What should you give an app permission to do? That? I think one of the worse things you can do is to permit access to know your location. That data is used and sold. You know, you've got this free little cute little game. Isn't this fun to play? And that game is tracking you everywhere you're going it's been sold to Marketers. Now the Department of Homeland Security is even buying that data of where you are which apps you're using, just because you have these apps installed on your phone. In answer directly to your question, do not give them access to your location unless you absolutely want to. I'm even reluctant to give Google Maps access to my location. Right? But slightly paranoid on that front. As far as photos and videos and things, again, just don't give them access. I think we're at the point now, where the bottom line is, you should only have a half a dozen apps on your phone on your tablet. And they should be apps from the big guys. You know Apple's apps, Microsoft apps, Google's apps, they are moderately trustworthy. And pretty much everything else. I think you shouldn't say bye-bye to them. ya know, Danny Ya know, that's kind of it sounds like a good plan. We are talking with Tech Talk Guru Craig Peterson, all about apps, and the security behind apps and then allowing permissions and them using your data to sell, and basically, you become the client. Correct. So these free apps not necessarily free, buddy. Craig No, they're not. And here's another trick, right? If you want to use something, and the app is available, most of the time, there's a website you can go to instead. So, for instance, you might download The let's use Iheart as an example. All right, so IHeart Radio has an app. I use it all the time, right? I'm, I listened to it to listen to my favorite radio shows listen to the gym in the morning. Iheart also has a website that you can visit. Okay, so rather than having the app, just use the browser that comes with your phone, use Safari, which is a good browser on iOS, use one of the Firefox browsers from Mozilla, those are all very good. If someone's twisting your arm with a gun to your head, use Google Chrome. Use the browser to get the data you want to you can stream music from your browser, you can listen to it hard from your browser, you can do all of the reading of news that you might want to do from your browser and avoid the cute apps. Aren't they wonderful? Aren't they fun? But you know what? There are so many Very few apps that can be classified as safe, that it's just not worth it. Danny Speaking of Google Chrome, speaking of extensions, speaking of people, basically using your uploading your private information, the Google Chrome extension, Craig. There were some issues there aren't there. Craig Yeah, absolutely. Now I've got some tutorials coming out starting next week, and about some extensions that you might want to use, and they will improve your browsing experience will improve your security, etc. What I think they're talking about here is a problem, Danny, where 500 Chrome extensions, Google Chrome extensions, were identified as secretly uploading people's data, millions of times. These things get downloaded. It's incredible what's happened, more than 1.7 million installations. So again, I still know people who are downloading browser bar extensions for Google Chrome for all of their different browsers, right. And it's a little browser bar extension that gives you a feature to search quickly or watch the stock market, etc. Those are the evilest things and prone to guys. Don't install, never install these little browser extensions that are just going to show you one or two things, because so many of them are sketchy. Many are fraudulent. Some of them are advertising as a service. Some of them will automatically, just from your browser, be clicking on ads on other websites you are not even visiting. Yes, they can click on an advertisement on a site you're not visiting just to increase their revenue. The estimate is that 40 to 60% of all paid advertising Non the internet pay per click advertising 20 60% of that is fraudulent. It's these. Yeah, these extensions, Danny, that we're installing that is supposedly giving us some sort of advantage or some neat little thing. Don't install those. Make sure if you're on my email list, you'll find out about this next week. But make sure you are on that list, which is just a Craig Peterson dot com. You can attend these tutorials for free. I'm not selling anything, right. It's all about the extensions that are going to make you safe. Not these 500 identified as making you less safe. You know what, Danny, some of them are even doing Bitcoin mining using your computer and slowing down your computer. They're making your browsing experience horrible because it's so slow. Things are happening in the background that you don't know are being done. They're using your electricity. We have some of the highest electric rates in the nation here in the northeast. And it's all for their benefit and gain and nothing for you. I'm glad you brought it up. Danny, don't install an extension unless you have to. It's kind of like the app thing. Danny Yeah, we try to keep yourself as safe as possible. But something you have to do is make sure it's something that isn't going to come and backfire on you ultimately. Because we are talking with our tech expert Craig Peterson. Craig, we only have a few minutes left. But the one story I did want to get into here, the mobile voting app. Who would have thought this is ever a good idea? Craig heard off and on about what's going to happen Saturday in Nevada with their caucuses. They paid I think it was $60,000 to the same company that completely messed up the Iowa caucuses and they're saying yeah, we're going to do it. No, we're not going to do it. You're going to do it with the latest I heard yesterday was there not going to do it again. But there is an app called a vote to VOA t z. And this is something that supposedly allows you to vote from home vote from overseas. They've been trying to sell this to the military, for our military personnel stationed overseas. And this is crazy. The election is promoting its use of blockchain technology, which is like a vast buzzword nowadays. And people associate blockchain technology with absolutely safe, nothing could go wrong. They ignore the man behind the curtain. It is not secure. There are four states right now that are still planning on using this votes app that is being used in West Virginia. And it has some of the most basic security flaws in it. It allows other people to Steve votes intercept votes change votes, as they're being transmitted from the mobile phones to the company's voting server. If you can This is absolutely crazy. MIT put together a research paper that was released last Thursday. We're not there yet. Don't use these things. You know, the only thing that's really safe is a pencil or maybe a felt tip pen. Because you can't hack, a felt tip pen and a piece of paper. Right, much harder to do, obviously, this imbalance studying before, but you can do it on a wholesale basis like you can with some of these voting apps. Danny Yeah, what's this one right here? Just say someone to be able just to change votes like that. It seems as though the security and some of the features and noted have a voting type app. They have far away from Craig. Craig Oh, yeah, end up partner of Homeland Security's warning against it New York Times, even covered on it. They were the first ones to report this research out of MIT. We're going to see a lot of problems of voting over the next few cycles, maybe ten plus years, frankly, as you know, You know, the idiocy tends to tie down in the money, right? Who owns the company, for instance, with the backhoe debacle that happened overnight Iowa, the disaster that was going to happen this weekend in Nevada and still may have been that company that made that software to tally the votes was owned and operated by Hillary Clinton staffers. Okay. So, yeah, accurately. And now the democratic Democratic Party says, Oh, it's great. We know you, Hey, buddy. Yeah, we're going to do it for you, right? Until we can get rid of this phony crony capitalism stuff, which exists all over the place, and we make real decisions. This voting stuff just isn't going to work. Right. And you know, Danny, I hold a zero trust. The government's going to be able to get this right. But you know, another five to 10 years, I think, maybe we will have a reasonably smooth roll road ahead of us. There's a $10 million funding project that came out of the Department of Defense to make an unhackable voting system. So I got my fingers crossed because I know these guys are on the right track. Danny Well, I'm sure when they come up with something, you'll have a forest Craig Craig is always some great stuff, unfortunately, to get to everything. If somebody wants to hear more, how do they do so? Craig Well, you can go to Craig Peterson, dot com or they can text Danny, to me at 855-385-5553. That's 855-385-5553. Danny As always, data rates do apply. Craig, thank you so much for the time. We'll talk to you next week. Craig Take care, Danny, bye-bye. Danny It's Craig, always with some great stuff can be scary. But Craig gets us through it. As he said, watch out for your extensions. Watch out for the app to clean up the apps, and yeah, what's the make you think that Hillary Clinton can get a voting app? Right? But yeah, our servers were secured in New York. Yeah, okay. Everyone believes that one. Anyways, I'll take one last time out. Well. Craig We've been working on this now for six weeks, eight weeks, we've got some fantastic free tutorials coming up. Frankly, these are going to improve your security posture. By what at least 90%. I'm serious about that when you are online, so it's going to help with security transformation plus a course and everything else. So free stuff, and some paid material, but you are going to love it all. I guarantee it. I've never been so excited about something before. Anyhow, keep an eye out. Make sure you're signed up. Craig Peterson, dot com slash subscribe. We'll be back tomorrow. Bye-bye. Transcribed by https://otter.ai --- More stories and tech updates at: Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553
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Welcome! Rampant Intellectual Property Theft by China, Scams - Airbnb, VRBO and CoronaVirus Phishing, ACLU and DHS and more on Tech Talk with Craig Peterson on WGAN
02/14/2020
Welcome! Rampant Intellectual Property Theft by China, Scams - Airbnb, VRBO and CoronaVirus Phishing, ACLU and DHS and more on Tech Talk with Craig Peterson on WGAN
Welcome! Today there is a ton of stuff going on in the world of Technology and we are going to hit a number of topics today. There are some scams that are getting more and more prevalent with Airbnb and VRBO that we will talk about. Also, phishing scams using the Coronavirus as a way to trick you into clicking. The ACLU is filing suit against DHS. China is stealing our Intellectual Property. Shadow IT becoming more and more of a problem and even more on Tech Talk With Craig Peterson today on WGAN. It is a busy show -- so stay tuned. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Related Articles: --- Machine Automated Transcript: Hey everybody, welcome, welcome. Craig Peterson here on WGIR, you can also hear me every Monday morning at 737 with Jack Heath, where we discuss some of the latest topics in technology. Of course, nowadays, you can't talk about technology without security, which is what I've been doing in my business now for about 30 years. I was coerced into it. Maybe one of these days, I'll share that whole story with you. It can get to be kind of a long one. But today we are going through some of the problems that I've seen out there lately. I have on my podcast this week that you can get at Craig peterson.com slash Iheart, Craig peterson.com slash Iheart. I spent quite a bit of time talking about recent problems people have been finding with Airbnb with VRBO, and I go through some of the problems I recently have had with both of those services. And I think it's well worth listening to because I've gotten to the point right now where I will not use either Airbnb or VRBO, I don't think ever again. My experiences with them have just been so overwhelmingly negative, anyhow you'll find that online, and you can subscribe there as well at Craig peterson.com slash I heart. That like is going to take you to the I heart app. You might be listening to me right now, in fact, on Iheart streaming on these AM and FM stations. If you are, kudos to you, but you can also get all of my content by going and subscribing, Craig peterson.com slash I heart, and I'm also on every other major podcast streaming platform that's out there. But first, I just want to make mention of this other article that came out last month in January. It's talking about computer literate millennials and Generation Z. These are the people that grew up with the internet. They've had the internet pretty much their whole lives. They've found meaning the Federal Trade Commission found that people ages 39 and under are more likely to report fraud than the 40 plus crowd. Now, here's the thinking here. It isn't that the younger kids millennials and Generation Z, it isn't as though they are less afraid to report that money stolen from them. It appears that they are more likely to fall victim to fraud. 25% more likely. Now the millennials are less likely to fall for a scam over the phone and people over 40, but 77% More likely, Millennials are 77% more likely to get duped by email scams and 90% more likely to lose money on a fake check scam. Now, the thinking behind this is that those of us who are a little bit older, we hold the whole internet thing with a little bit more skepticism than our children and grandchildren do. Because we know that there are scammers out there and we've heard all the horror stories, whereas the younger kids are looking at it as well. It's the internet, and they just give their stuff away. We already know that there are studies that show that the millennials will give their email address or weigh in trade for a single donut. Okay. They don't value a lot of this stuff. And, you know, to me, well, it's a little bit concerning, and it should be to you. But let's get into the latest scam that's out there right now. It isn't the Airbnb scam, which has been out there for a few years now. As I said, hey, I've been burned, what, four or five times by this overall personally. I am jaded, and I just don't use it anymore period. It's a real shame because there are some good people out there. But this has to do with what's been happening with the Coronavirus. It is a huge deal. We had one day this week, where 15,000 new cases were reported. The Chinese changed how they tracked and diagnosed cases. So they're saying hey, listen, it's you know, it's Change. Don't expect this to indicate that more viruses are spreading out there. And frankly, I look at it and say, Well, maybe there are there aren't. But what we're seeing are some rather sophisticated phishing scams going on. Phishing, of course, this is the one spelled with a Ph. It is where an attacker tricks you into doing something. It might be clicking a link. It might be responding to an email. It might also be a phishing scam over the phone or, you know, SMS a text one which is called smishing. A whole new type of phishing this going on right now. Well, last week, IBM and Kaspersky now Kaspersky is an anti-virus company. They are also trying to stop the general spread of malware. They are a Russian firm, and the State Department and FBI have warned us about using their software, but they do have good information. When I see Kaspersky combined with IBM, a company I do respect, then that does kind of make my ears stand up, if you will. IBM and Kaspersky caught hackers in Japan, trying to spread malware through emails. And the emails had links about the coronavirus outbreak that started Of course and won China last month in January. And now adding cell phones to the list. Of course, Cisco, to the list, they have found phishing emails from cybercriminals, purporting to be from the Center for Disease Control, as well as the World Health Organization and what they're trying to do the bad guys his deal your email credentials and other information. The emails are coming from several domains, including CDC dash gov.org, which, of course, is not the real CDC website. So be very careful if you are trying to find out information about the CDC, or about the spread of Coronavirus about flu in general. For instance, in my home state of New Hampshire, we have I think it's seven deaths so far this year reported g attributed to the flu in general, not the Coronavirus. Every year about 12 to 16,000 people in the United States die from the flu. So far we've only got 14 cases reported of Coronavirus So, at this stage everybody, this is nothing to get all freaky worried about. Okay, so calm down. If you want more, go to CDC.gov. CDC Centers for Disease Control cdc.gov. And it tells you what to do now this Coronavirus has an official name now it's called Covin-19, co vi d dash 19 because there are multiple versions of Coronaviruses and viruses. And we have had a report in the past about Coronaviruses, and they have killed people previously. So you'll see right at the top of the CDC, gov website, information about the Coronavirus and it spread. It is a respiratory disease. It is potentially fatal. It doesn't seem to be any more fatal than some of the other viruses that we've had. So let's put all of this in context. And when you get an email from someone saying hey, Look at this, click on this link, it's going to get you information about the Coronavirus, it's going to let you track the spread of, etc. don't respond. And you, if you get a text message, don't respond. I got one because I'm a member of the Great and Powerful media, right. I got one last week that was sent out to members of the media saying, Hey, we got this new tracking site. You just can't be cautious enough when it comes to this. So if you go to CDC Gov at the top, you'll see the description here about the Covin-19. And you can click on that, and it'll show you a global map about where it has been reported what is happening. I'm looking at one. It's about one day behind it looks like right now for Covin-19. But you can see all of the countries that have been reporting it and then you can also So look at the hard statistics. People under investigation in the United States exactly how many 14 positives you'll see that there. Of course, it changes daily. How many negative how many pending? The people are under investigation. Remember, the airplane full of workers from the State Department that came back from China. They have now been under quarantine for more than 14 days. They released them all from quarantine because it turns out that nobody had that virus, so just because you have the flow doesn't mean it's Coronavirus. More cases over on the left coast and the Midwest, which is kind of surprising to me than there are on the East Coast or the Mid Atlantic, etc., etc. So have a look there. Do not respond to emails or texts or phone calls. Okay. Just be very, very careful. Hackers are imitating this sort of thing. Then the other side of this is they are sending out messages, seeking donations, and they're asking for Bitcoin donations to the World Health Organization. I can tell you right now, the World Health Organization, the CDC, they are not taking Bitcoin donations, okay? Don't go and donate, right. Again the CDC gov.org is the bad guys cdc.gov is the good guys. The scam page is elementary. it might have taken the scammers just a few minutes to put together. It's very effective. It looks legit. And the FBI and, of course, also Homeland Security are taking down these pages as soon as they can, but they can't always get rid of them right away. And companies we got to be proud. We've got a chain, train our employees not to follow up on these scams. So again, that's part of why I publish my newsletters. I report on the biggest scams that are going on. I try and keep it down to just a few a week. You can share them with your employees, share them with your family, but you have to get them to share them. Go to Craig peterson.com slash subscribe. Now, we're going to talk a little bit about this whole thing with the ACLU and their current fight. I spoke about something similar to this a couple of years ago, man, maybe actually the first time was probably about ten years ago. There are companies out there, and they gather information about us. They're called Data brokers. And I have visited some of these data brokers sites themselves. I mean physical site, where the company operates where they have their data collections, to help them with security problems that they have. And to help prevent problems from occurring, right. That's what I do for a living full time. And it was probably ten years ago, the radio show that I talked with some of these companies. But what they do is they take what's called open source information that's used a lot by government or investigations. And you can use open-source information yourself. All you do is go to Google, for instance, and do a search. That's the open-source information. It's anything that anyone can gain access to, without having to be a police officer without having to go and really kind of, you know, get a court order kind of be surreptitious and how you gather that's open source. So the data break brokers will take all of that, and that can include depending on States your living driver's license information. It can include information about the mortgage for your home. It can include you know the ownership of your home, and it can include just all kinds of stuff. And that becomes very, very difficult to control. Because all of your information is out there. It's available for free or for cheap on the internet. So these data brokers, they might buy it from the county, they might get it an open-source. Some of these documents are going to contain like your mortgage is going to contain your signature. The deed to your home is going to contain the signature, the automobiles that you own. There's going to be UCC filings with the Secretary of State's office, detailing what cars you own, who the lien holders are, and how much money is involved, all of this stuff. So it all gets pulled into these days. databases I mentioned on the show a few months ago, a couple of months ago that we were out in Las Vegas at a wedding. And of course, you know, doing work while I'm out there sitting on the couch, doing work for some of our Las Vegas clients when there was a knock at the door. Who's there? Well, it's an insurance investigator investigating an accident that had a fatality. And of course, the insurance company had been asked to payout. They came to this home because they had information that the person involved had contact with someone at this address, which indeed she did. It was her sister, and the driver had been responsible for this fake fatal death. The driver listed was one of my sisters in law, who had died six months before the accident. It was all fake. The insurance investigator showed my wife all of this information she had that they had purchased from one of these data brokers. It had listed my deceased sister in law's relatives, everybody every address she had ever had. It had names and contact information for some of my kids as well. Now, it was not all correct or organized. When I've looked at the data brokers' information about me, only about half of it is right, but the other half is entirely incorrect. That's still the case because they had a lot of utterly false information. People that they said were relatives that weren't. People we'd never heard of before, they identified as direct relatives of hers. The insurance company purchased all of this information from a Data Broker, in collections, this is called a skip trace. It's called a skip trace for people who jumped bail, etc. Man, we should talk about this whole bail thing, and the idiocy and New York state that is spreading countrywide dog, the bounty hunter and his wife Beth had been fighting this for a long time because it's making us much, much less safe. But anyhow, that's not a topic for today's show. It's not a political topic, because it's undeniable what's already happening with the increase in the crime rate, New York anyways. What the government is doing now and this is part of what I was warning about a decade ago, is the federal government, the FBI, the NSA, the CIA, of the IRS, you name it. They are limited in how they can collect information, we kind of already knew that, right? They knew that they had to get a search warrant for certain things, right? They can follow you around if you do not expect privacy, etc., etc. So obviously, federal government agencies can use open-source information to see what you're doing online. But how about the closed source stuff? How about this information that the data brokers are collecting? Some of it comes from the people who lent you money. Some of it they're getting from places where you have to pay to get that information. What's happened here now is that the ACLU has filed a suit, according to The Wall Street Journal, against Homeland Security and Homeland Security through its Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency. As well as Customs and Border Protection, is buying Gilo geolocation data from these data brokers. It's using it to investigate suspects who have allegedly committed immigration violations. So let me boil all that down into plain English. You might be using games on your smartphone, and you might be using all kinds of apps on your smartphone. If you have a smartphone, you probably are, frankly, not using 90-95% of those apps that you have downloaded. But many of those apps are tracking you. And that information is being sold to data brokers. So think about that for a minute. Remember that free app and how you've heard me and many others for so many years. Say, hey, you're not the customer. You are the product. But what's happening here now is that the ACLU is saying to the federal government, hey, you cannot, you cannot buy this information that you are not allowed to collect yourself. You cannot buy it from data brokers or these app developers who are selling it. Interesting question, interesting problem, isn't it? What should they do? What should you do? What can you do? It is going to play out in court. I suspect it's going to come down on the side of the Department of Homeland Security because this information is generally available to anyone willing to pay for it. So now the government stepped forward, saying we are will pay for it. By the way, it's down to local law enforcement as well, who, in many cases, are also buying information from the data brokers. Have you ever set up a company Amazon account? Have you ever set up an account for a company account for Uber? Maybe it's not a company account. Perhaps it's your account that you're using for Uber or something else? How about using something like Constant Contact to send out emails to your customers? How about salesforce.com, where we've seen a shift over the years from what used to be kind of the glass castle, where you had a central computer room in that computer room was a mainframe. And those mainframes were astounding. They still are. And that mainframe in that glass room was controlled by professional Information Technology people, people that knew what they were doing at least at the time, right? Then we started seeing some changes. You remember the apple two and VisiCalc Visicalc was kind of the killer application. And if you wanted to do numbers, then you bought an apple, you purchased a little apple two. And you then pulled data and people were asking that glass house, they were asking it, Hey, can you give us data because we want to put together some spreadsheet. People put together spreadsheets without really understanding the implications of the numbers they were using without understanding how to audit a spreadsheet to make sure that the figures included were correct. They didn't understand the double journaling. They didn't understand the cross-referencing of the information. They started a bit of a movement away from that glass house from that glass castle from it. They said hey, we could figure this out, why are we going to pay it all of this fake budget money to do something for us and we can do it for ourselves and do it cheaper. Frankly, that's a problem I still face with many organizations, if you can believe it, who think they can do security themselves, which is impossible for almost any organization. In this day and age, any small-medium business must have full-time external professionals who are helping your internal IT people. The internal IT should be doing what they do best, which is helping your business use information technology, to its best use, assisting people to be more efficient, finding new ways of doing things, etc. Instead of that, what most businesses do is they have these various silos, like sales and marketing and accounting. And each one of those silos, those lines company does things their way. So the sales guys, they're out, and they said, Hey, we're going to use Salesforce. And we're going to tie that into Constant Contact. And then you have your accounting people saying, well, we're going to use QuickBooks Online. Or maybe they're going to use one of Oracle's accounting systems. And then the manufacturing people say, Well, we are going to use this particular era p program, which is going to be great for manufacturing. And we've decided that we're going to use Survey Monkey to collect information from our customers from our vendors. You see where I'm going, each one of these lines of business is going out there and making what are in actuality, information technology decisions. They're making decisions about what type of technology to use, which is one level, but then the next Next Level is they're using it. And they're putting the business's information at risk. It is a huge, huge problem. It's something that I'm going to be addressing with some of this training that I have coming up with a couple of these tutorials correctly tackle these problems. And so if you're on my email list at Craig...
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AS HEARD ON - The Jim Polito Show - WTAG 580 AM: First in the Nation New Hampshire Primary Day and Election Hacking
02/11/2020
AS HEARD ON - The Jim Polito Show - WTAG 580 AM: First in the Nation New Hampshire Primary Day and Election Hacking
Welcome! Good morning, everybody. I was on with Mr. Jim Polito this morning and as you know today is Primary Day in New Hampshire it is the Big Day for our State Sport - Politics. That means it is the day to address voter manipulation, voter fraud, low tech solutions and why apps are not the answer. So, here we go with Mr. Polito. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Craig You know, they don't release their source code, they hold everything close to the chest. They say, Well, you know, it's obscure people don't know what we're doing or how we're doing it; therefore, it's safe. That is never the case, and things are starting to turn around. So there are so many mistakes we could put a whole quarter together and how that poor people about it. Here's how not to do a deployment of software. Craig Hey, good morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here, of course, on with Mr. Jim Polito. How could we be here on New Hampshire voting day without talking about politics and whether or not voting machines are hackable? So let's get into it. Jim Polito There are multiple levels to this one in New Hampshire. But this is important because We're going to Iowa. And we're going to the polls, the technical and have an election joining us now, our tech talk guru and good friend, Craig Peterson. Good morning, sir. Craig Good morning. It sounds like you're going to hit for that Bernie screen there. Yeah. Jim Yeah, yeah. You were not going to do one of those. Hey, can we talk about election technology? I mean, what the heck happened in Iowa? I mean, really? Yeah, I know. We talked about it before, but what the heck happened? Craig Yeah, this is an excellent example of everything you should not do when it comes to launching an app when it comes to rolling out new software, whatever it is. The Iowa Democratic Party man, everybody in there. Should be Jeff can there's no question about it. You know, I work with the FBI, and I'm part of the FBI infragard program. And the FBI is excellent about trying to make sure that everybody's safe. Did you know that Homeland Security, the FBI reached out to the Iowa Democratic Party saying, "Hey, guys, we know you have an app, we know that you're looking to use this for all of the results and we are here to help." What you had in Iowa was a bunch of people that have never rolled out an app before. They built it quickly. Jim, I am talking about hastily built, it wasn't load tested. We already talked about the fact that it was made entirely by insiders of Democratic Party higher-ups inside. It's everything you wouldn't want. You know, if I were them, I would have had a completely dry run on this thing, which they kind of did. They had little test logins for people. And the way they did their dry run was minimal. And this is a dry run, use different account different ways of logging in a different place to log in than the real one. It was just a total disaster. Jim I'll tell you, you know, this is the second time that the Democrats have had a problem with something it refused the help of the FBI. Remember, you know, Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the hacking of the DNC and John Podesta's emails being leaked, okay. They didn't want any help with that, either. Then we have this happening. Now the first one, I think, might have been Russian hackers (phishers). This one, they hacked it up all by themselves and still didn't ask for help from the FBI. And here's the question, Could someone, a bad player from another country, have hacked into that app screwed the whole thing up? I mean, we don't have any evidence yet that it did happen. But the question is, could it have happened? Craig Well, and the answer to that is obviously, yes. One of the big things that we've been doing for years here in the application development business remember, I built some of the most prominent internet properties that ever existed. Jim You helped to invent the internet. That's not a joke, people. He wrote code that is still in use. Craig Yeah, exactly. And some of the big ones like the Big Yellow Super Pages, you've probably heard about that. Yeah. You know that these important things and one of the things that we do to help make sure The safe software systems are secure are we use something called open-source software. And open-source software is software where everyone can look at the code. So, for instance, the best application out there, if you want an end to end security is called signal app. It's free. The source code for this thing is available freely on the internet for anyone to inspect. And that's the opposite of what again, the Democratic Party did in Iowa, which is the used what would be called closed source, something in the industry we call security through obscurity. Jim And look at how well that's worked for Microsoft. Right. Craig You know, they, they don't release their source code but hold everything close. They say, Well, you know, it's obscure. People don't know what we're doing or how we're doing it. Therefore it says that is Never the case, and things are starting to turn around. So there are so many mistakes that we could put a whole course together at Harvard, for people about here's how not to do deploy software. Jim We're talking with our good friend Tech Talk Guru Craig Peterson. At the end of the segment, we're going to tell you how you can get your hands on some of his stuff. Craig will not bother you, so don't worry. So, Craig, that could have happened. They didn't use open source stuff. What about the rest of our election? I mean, they're, they're going to the polls in New Hampshire right now. I mean, can our election be hacked? Craig Yeah, that's a great question. And I think everybody's minds right now. I'm going to be on a TV station up in Burlington, Vermont. Speaking of obscure Jim Very good. Very good. Craig I wonder if the Soviet flag is still on the wall? I doubt it. Jim I wouldn't doubt it. Oh. Craig That's what we're going delve into because I think it's a question everybody's mind. There are multiple levels of hacks or numerous targets for hacks when it comes to our systems in the election. Now, I have to say, New Hampshire is what many people would call a Luddite. New Hampshire says, Hey, listen, we're going to go low tech. And you know what, that's my answer. They have resisted all these fancy computer systems, all of these new-fangled machines. In New Hampshire, when you vote, you use a pencil or a felt tip pen on a piece of paper. Yeah. And that's the only thing that they could hack. Then those ballots are kept so they a manual count can be done if needed. Back in 2000, New Hampshire had the option of using the the the hanging chads technique that used in Florida and New Hampshire avoided that. And now so here are the different levels you could hack the voting machines themselves and New Hampshire, again, is doing a great job. The not connected networked, let alone the internet. So that's step one. The FBI has been warning about is how Secretary of State's offices, websites, because what's been happening is a that is just crazy here. But those websites are being compromised by places like Ukraine, Russia. And others over the years and obviously, China. How are those used? For the ultimate reporting in some states, the local county chairs performing the counts, upload them directly to the website. The data goes on there. That is another place for hacks to occur. And then here's yet another opportunity for hacking, and that is those websites show faults resolved because nationally, their parties are going to the website to the sector state offices and pulling the final results. Then they can also be hacked up on the federal level because, again, they're also using computers. There are so many ways for hacking to happen, but I can feel comfortable in saying that the FBI is keeping a very close eye on this, Homeland Security is keeping a very close eye on this. And, you know, I think we can be moderately comfortable. Those types of hacks aren't happening. But then there's the non-hack hack, which is they buy advertising and try and get people to change their minds. Now, that happened last time around, but the Russians managed to buy ads to try and get your change your vote after the election occurred. Right. So it's right left and center in this day and age, Jim. Jim It is just crazy that the people, the democrats, in this case, won't take the help of the FBI. In protecting these things. I agree with you low tech is the best. Low tech is the best. Sure. You could have some person working in a clerk's office stuff the ballot box, okay, but you couldn't have a political hack that would overturn a question. The Presidential election it would be more difficult to coordinate that many people to do it. Craig Yes. And it's way more difficult today than it was just two years ago or four years ago because they're starting to figure it out. And many states are ditching those completely electronic voting machines. By the way, here, here's something we got to get changed. We have a federal law that requires every state to have electronic voting machines that can be used by the, you know, hearing impaired, sight impaired, etc. I agree we have to provide something that allows these people to vote, but again why not a low tech solution. We should assign a poll worker to help them fill out the ballot, as opposed to having a machine that essentially has a touchpad, which is hackable. Just last year, we had our black hat conference in Vegas. There they had a bunch of voting machines sitting there for hackers to try their skills. Within minutes, they were able to hack into every one of them, and even a high schooler was able to hack them. Jim Well, that's what you get, you know? I mean, there's, there are people like you who get it, you know, when they're very talented, but then we've got these kids who are growing up in a world where they can figure this out. Craig Yes, yeah. And, and it's a feather in their cap to their career. You know, we just had a bill passed in the Senate. That was, I think it's started in the Senate and then sent to the house. It called for white hat hackers. Good guys to try and hack federal government systems. Well, where do you get your chomps to be a white hat hacker? A lot of these kids will look at it and say all I was just a kid. Yeah, I was hacking businesses and government websites and, and I was able to do all of this. Now all of a sudden they get a job in the federal government that's well paid because they were bad guys when they were, you know, young. I get it. Jim All right. So, where can folks get more information from you? I take it that they text my name, Jim, to this number. Craig Absolutely. Couple of ways to do it. You can just go to Craig Peterson calm, or you can text Jim to 855-385-5553. That's just text, Jim to 855-385-5553, standard data and text rates apply. Jim Craig will not try to hack you. And Craig, we love having you every Tuesday at this time. Craig Hey, thanks, Jim. Jim All right. Have a good one, buddy. When we return a fight Word. You're listening, Craig Thanks for being with us. I have been so busy along with my team. You know, I've been saying this for about a month and, and it's right. We have some fantastic free training coming up. We have a course also coming up. It is going to be a killer month. Yes, indeed. That's kind of a hint, a killer month. All right, anyway, take care, everybody. We will be back. Just don't expect as much output from me this week with lives and everything else. Take care. Bye-bye. Transcribed by https://otter.ai --- More stories and tech updates at: Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553
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AS HEARD ON: WGAN Mornings with Ken and Matt: Hacks, Deep Fakes, CEO, Business Email Compromise, IOWA caucuses and more
02/06/2020
AS HEARD ON: WGAN Mornings with Ken and Matt: Hacks, Deep Fakes, CEO, Business Email Compromise, IOWA caucuses and more
Good morning everybody! I was on with Ken and Matt. We had a good discussion about The Iowa Caucus app fiasco, Business Email Compromise, and Deep Fakes what it is, who is at risk and what we can do about it. I went into detail about Passwords and Password Managers and even two-factor authentication and why you need to use them. So here we go with Ken and Matt. These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Craig The problem we see this daily when I get notices from the FBI. It all boils down to personal hygiene, just keeping your data reasonably safe on your part. Craig Hi, everybody, Craig Peterson here. It is Wednesday morning, and that means I was, of course, on with Ken and Matt. We had quite a little discussion because I had provided them with eight different articles. All of them were about major security problems this week. That's why we got into precisely what you can do to get yourself to the 95 percentile when it comes to keeping your account safe online. So here we go with Ken and Matt. Ken It's time to talk to Craig Peterson, our tech guru. He joins us now. As always, at this time, to talk about what's happening in the world of technology. Craig, How are you this morning? Craig Hi gentlemen, good morning. How about those Iowa caucuses? Did they try out the app beforehand? Ken Of course, that is an app that I think Hillary controlled. Craig Yes, the rumors are flying because in fact and ex-staffers of Hillary Clinton, Matt yes, yes. Craig So um, you have, I mean, story after story after story about this thing about Pegasus, and then you have this travel act coming online in the gap. Microsoft Excel security alert. Matt, Should we just stop using computers completely? Craig Oh, man. Well, good. You know it. I have thought about this a lot. What do we do? I think we've got an enormous problem. Here because it's almost like overload, right? Where every week there's new, there are new hits on us. Got Evil Corp. I don't know, did you watch it? Where's it called with Malik Mr. Robot? With one Malik, right or Yeah, that's the guy's name, an actor. Ken Anyways, or do you know? Matt What is it? Rami Malik's Craig Rami. Oh, Robbie, man, I thought the first name was Malik. Oh, yeah. Rami Oh, yes, yes. Joe, he's in this. He's a hacker right. He's all in his head. Weird things are happening, but he's battling Evil Corp., And there's an evil corporation in the news. And it's using Microsoft Excel to deliver this payload this nasty thing. So what are people supposed to do can and it's, are we getting burned out? Just like Nancy Pelosi rips up the speech and you just roll your eyes because it's yet another partisan thing. It is, however, another week with more hacks. But what I think it boils down to isn't just not using computers first of all use them safely. You know the stuff I would say your mother told you, but of course, she did. Because this is this has been many years in the coming. But the stuff you know, to use different passwords on different websites. Use a password manager like one password or LastPass the necessary things, and it's like you don't want to get coronavirus while swash your hands and don't cut your face and conference knees into your elbow. Basic stuff, and you know what the problem can we see real, and I see this every day I'm getting notices from the FBI, but it all boils down to personal Hi Jean, just keeping your data reasonably safe on your part. You know, use a few different email addresses. Don't always use the same learn, have a Google address, but have a couple of others as well. Don't use your business computer for personal things. Don't think of VPN is going to save you because of VPN does minimal things and can make your business network even less safe. Yes, I said it less reliable using the VPN. And what we see this week too, is a vast right. You know, my opinion about antivirus software? Yeah, it is zero percent effective against modern attacks zero percent. And a vast came out this week. And it turns out, and they were selling arrows. Everything you were doing online everything to the highest bidder millions of dollars, so you searched on Google thoroughly, Avast sold it to whoever wanted to pay for it. You went to a porn site Avast told them, anybody, who pays for it all about it. You did anything on your web browser, anything on your computer because remember your antivirus software has access to everything on your computer, have vastly sold that information. So I've said forever. And Matt, I heard you chime in there. But how many times have you even said we are the product when it comes to sites like Facebook? Correct? Ken Yes. Anytime is the answer to your question. Craig Yeah, exactly. And what we're talking about here is free VPN. And free. Free websites aren't free Avast. Where's anti-malware software is not free. So This is stuff I, you know, can I think we've mentioned a million times, and I keep, I hate to flog a dead horse, right. Matt We like horses. Craig But we just have to be more careful. And I bring these things up every week to try and just try and drive the point home. We got to be more cautious because now we're seeing warnings coming out again from the FBI about these deep fakes, which we've talked about before. And I don't remember I know I had this in my stack of stuff last year, last quarter last year. Still, there was a company that had been bought by a German company. The CFO got a call from his boss over in the German company, telling him to wire funds over to the German company, right? He provided him all the information. He'd met this guy in Germany before he talked to him on the phone. He got the instructions, and he did it. It is a form of deep fakes that get used in these business scams. Where it sounds like the CEO. It is not just an email that comes from the CEO's hacked mailbox. It sounds like the CEO in the video, and now we see where it looks like it too. They can't do that live yet, but it's coming. So everybody listening takes a few of just a few minutes a day and start going in changing your account password just the simplest thing you can do it are either you guys using password managers right now. Matt Frankly, No, I'm not. Ken I don't know I like to discount all the advice given to me by Craig Peterson. I have not really no. Okay, right now, go online, sorry, something comes up on my computer say do you want me to save this password? I suppose that's not a password manager, right? You're right, man, because it's your browser giving your password to Google. I trust them. Craig Go to one password dot com right now. The digit one password.com. Check it out. I want you to do this. What does it do? What it does is it ties into your browser, so it can fill out the form for you when that browser is asking you to log in. It provides the latest newest technology that's coming out that's replacing passwords slowly but surely. And it will generate passwords for you to share passwords, multi-word passwords, so one password calm now what I love about it is it works for me. It works for my family, and it works for my business, so it has multiple vaults that you can share. Because here's your next problem. What do I do? In the past, my problem was remembering the password, and once I remember it, then it changes. Craig Yes, you remember one password, and that's the one password. Now you can I have before you go any further corrections? Ken Can I ask one question, though, using a service like that the one password, if you will, what is protecting those institutions from hacking and all of your passwords getting stolen? I mean, how does that not occur at some point when some enterprise with hacker decides that they'd like to have your access to everything you own? Craig Well, one password does not keep any of your passwords unencrypted. And it uses a high level like Pentagon plus level security for all your passwords, so they never leave your computer in what's called cleartext. So there is no way for one password to get Adam last passes the other one to look at Last pass, they have a cheaper version. That's quite good as well. But hopefully, that answers your question. They never get your passwords. They're only on your local computer. You can share them between all of your computers using like iCloud or Dropbox or many other things. But they are always heavily encrypted, which is phenomenal. It is one of the simplest and best things you can do. Because having a complex password that's different on every site number by complex, I don't mean upper-lower digits, special characters, or anything I mean like a 20-30 character long password which LastPass will generate for you so well one password. Having a password like that makes it almost impossible for the bad guys to break into your town. They're not even going to bother while they might be Try, right, but it'll take some more than 100 years to crack your passwords. And they're only stored in your machine, and encrypted, it is easy to use. And with your MacBook Pro that you have can, you can use one password. And when you go to a website, you can say, Okay, give me give him to give that site my login to one password. And with your MacBook Pro, it'll do the fingerprint if you wanted to, instead of you having to type in your one password. There are some helpful integrations, and it's going to work on your smartphones. It's available for Android and Windows as well as Macs and iOS. But guys, you know, this is something you have to do. So I'm going to next week. I'm going to ask you whether or not you had it, and you got it done. Matt So what's the name of this thing again? Craig The one I like best is one password is just the digit one password pa ss w or d dot com Ken Come on, you don't use that one point, to be honest with you. Craig The other one, I like his last pass, you'll find it lastpass.com. But I prefer one password personally. So get it done to change one or two passwords. The way I started doing this years ago when I started using password managers as to when I went to a site to type in my password, I type it in, and I'd immediately go into one password and create a new password for that site. And then, once you've done that, start using two-factor authentication. And one password has that built-in as well. Where it generates a code. Have you seen these little things before where every 30 seconds the code changes, you know? So it'll let you do that, if you o do those two things, you're almost wholly guaranteed never get hacked. It's that simple. Two-factor authentication, one password with a different password for Every site and I only have to remember one password. Ken Yes, exactly. Okay, peace. Matt So Well, I think I'd add that one, check. Ken Anyway, that is your update, ladies gentlemen from Craig Peterson, our tech guru. He joins us every Wednesday at this time to go over what's happening in the world of technology. We appreciate it. As always, Craig and we will talk to you again next week. Craig Gentlemen, take care. Bye-bye. Matt Excellent. All right. Well, why don't we go back into the newsroom? Transcribed by --- More stories and tech updates at: Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553
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AS HEARD ON - The Jim Polito Show - WTAG 580 AM: The problems with the Iowa Caucuses
02/05/2020
AS HEARD ON - The Jim Polito Show - WTAG 580 AM: The problems with the Iowa Caucuses
Welcome! Good morning, everybody. I was on with Mr. Jim Polito this morning and we discussed the debacle that was the Iowa Caucuses and what it means to you as the election season moves forward. In short, test, test, test. So, here we go with Mr. Polito. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Craig Tied into Hillary's campaign staffers that were paid 10s of thousands of dollars by the Iowa Democratic Party. $60,000 was paid to them by the Nevada Democratic Party, who was caucusing in a couple of weeks as well. Craig Morning everybody, Craig Peterson here on with Mr. Jim Polito this morning heard throughout New England, every state New England can listen to and does listen to his show. Amazing guy. I love this guy. We spent time discussing the Iowa caucuses and the software they were using as well as the people behind that software. I will give you some advice about what can you do? It turns out that there are some significant allegations about some Anti-Virus software that was spying on you. So here we go. Jim Well, here we have Craig Peterson on the roster. It's just incredible because we've got a complete meltdown of the Democrat Party in Iowa. Now I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I don't believe it's, well, like Hillary behind the scenes trying to destroy Bernie Sander's chances again, like she did last time. I just think it's general and competence. Let's get in the most competent person when it comes to the internet. This on safer internet day in the US. It's just baffling to me. And so today, the rumors are flying. You know, they're taking pictures of the forms, and they had filled out these caucus chairs of them. They're scorers, and they're texting them, and they had phone line shut up in case there was a problem and the phone line, they had three different numbers people could call, they can't get through the phone lines aren't working, right. It's just a total disaster just like Obamacare was it would But doesn't that invite you to know, now I'm going to ask you to step out of your tech talk Guru shoes and stepping into the ones of you know, being a commentator. Doesn't that invite people saying, Is this a conspiracy? I mean, like we were joking about Hillary and there are connections to Hillary, basically anything in democratic politics is somehow connected to her. But isn't this just inviting the crazy claims of you know, Bernie's people who I've already seen on social media, you know, saying this is another attempt to get Bernie knocked out? Craig Yeah, well, I have. I've had a slogan for four decades now. And that is to "Never attribute to malice that which can easily be attributed to incompetence." So if you see incompetence, just say, okay, you know, this is incompetence. Negligent incompetence, but you know incompetence. Jim Yeah, yeah, exactly. I'm not saying that this point anything that says this is a Hillary thing or even that indicates it is. Craig Still, the rumors are flying because, again, we have this company tied into Hillary's campaign staffers that were paid 10s of thousands of dollars by the Iowa Democratic Party. By the way, the Nevada Democratic Party also paid $60,000 was paid to them, and they are caucusing in a couple of weeks as well. So it's just total incompetence, frankly, Jim We're talking with Tech Talk guru, Craig Peters, on gave us a great explanation. To the mess in Iowa. Now Craig, Let's move on to sup today's safer internet day in the US, and I know that's something you support because your feelings are, hey, passwords, security, things like that. You should always, always be mindful of it not just today, every day, but I want to ask you about something else. The secretive market, the little secret market that is selling my web browsing history. Somebody's making an awful lot of money off of what I searched for our day. Craig Yeah, this is I think kind of interesting because it goes back to you know, you know, I'm always talking about, you know, how to set your passwords what to do, etc. This ties into something else that I've been saying forever. And that is nothing free on the internet. Yes. Nothing right, and so what's come out right now? Is this anti-virus giant called Avast who makes anti-virus software now I'm inserting something here I am pausing discussion business second? And the virus software is zero percent effective against two days attacks on the internet. Wow, zero percent. Okay. So well, let's just say that okay, but antibonding this giant Avast has had a product. They've since canceled it since news Lee doubt was, again, one of these free anti-virus pieces of software out there. And they've got four has 435 million active users and JumpShot, which is this product she has it has data from 100 million places. Allegedly there is what's been going on, reported by motherboard and PC mag. But your Google searches, look upon locations, GPS coordinates, Google Maps, LinkedIn pages, different companies, where did you go? Which specific YouTube videos? Have you watched people visiting porn websites, all of that was tracked by them? That data was uploaded from your computer and sold to advertisers and anybody willing to pay ultimately, collectively, millions of dollars. And it was called an all click feed to track everything users were doing from this free software. Jim Wow. So they then take that information, probably explains why, you know, I get all of these ads for things I've either looked at or had somewhat of an interest in in the past week. I mean, you know, it's crazy. The kind of stuff that comes my way in terms of ads. It's like they know me ultimately. Craig Yeah, it's shocking. And I can tell you how many times I think one of the most common questions is how many times I've had people ask Craig, and he's my phone listening to me. Yeah, and believe me, Facebook, etc., etc. But we're using some computer technology. Now the Colin and artificial intelligence, that term has morphed, I would not call it that. I'd call it machine learning, but they're calling it AI. And now we know they have been harvesting all of this. Those people that have the free or even the cheap VPN services that have a free or cheap anti-virus service. All of that data is getting collected, being put together be mixed in a pot with this machine learning software that says Well, people that watch this video, go to the websites that are looking for a job, etc., etc. are likely to be looking for this pair of shoes. And now you get an act an ad for a couple of shoes, and you wonder why you got it because you weren't looking for shoes. But you know what, those are pretty cool shoes. Yeah, that is it. Jim Craig, quickly, we have just about a minute left. What can people do to protect themselves from this? Craig Man, I am worried that people have just kind of given up because we hear every day about this sort of thing happening. But the bottom line is Be very careful when you're online free is not free. You're the product. Use a web browser like Firefox that's quite well secure. Chrome and never use Chrome again, unless you are forced to -- do not use Microsoft Edge browser. Stick with Firefox and Safari. Right now. Those are the two big ones Safari is an apple Yeah, and those are the two big ones that we know are not tracking you. Jim We are talking to Craig Peterson. You hear that information, folks, what a great day to have him here. But you can have him with you all the time. If you text My name, Jim, to this number 855-385-5553. That's 855-385-5553 standard data, and text rates apply. That will get you information from Craig Peterson and Craig Peterson. Will not bother you will not hack; you will not try to sell you anything. Craig, fantastic segment. I look forward to talking with you next week. Craig Take care, Jim, Jim Take care. All right, a crucial final word. When we return. You're listening to the Jim Pulido show your safe space. Transcribed by https://otter.ai --- More stories and tech updates at: Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553
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AS HEARD ON - The Jim Polito Show - WTAG 580 AM: The problems with the Iowa Caucuses
02/05/2020
AS HEARD ON - The Jim Polito Show - WTAG 580 AM: The problems with the Iowa Caucuses
Welcome! Good morning, everybody. I was on with Mr. Jim Polito this morning and we discussed the debacle that was the Iowa Caucuses and what it means to you as the election season moves forward. In short, test, test, test. So, here we go with Mr. Polito. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Craig Tied into Hillary's campaign staffers that were paid 10s of thousands of dollars by the Iowa Democratic Party. $60,000 was paid to them by the Nevada Democratic Party, who was caucusing in a couple of weeks as well. Craig Morning everybody, Craig Peterson here on with Mr. Jim Polito this morning heard throughout New England, every state New England can listen to and does listen to his show. Amazing guy. I love this guy. We spent time discussing the Iowa caucuses and the software they were using as well as the people behind that software. I will give you some advice about what can you do? It turns out that there are some significant allegations about some Anti-Virus software that was spying on you. So here we go. Jim Well, here we have Craig Peterson on the roster. It's just incredible because we've got a complete meltdown of the Democrat Party in Iowa. Now I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I don't believe it's, well, like Hillary behind the scenes trying to destroy Bernie Sander's chances again, like she did last time. I just think it's general and competence. Let's get in the most competent person when it comes to the internet. This on safer internet day in the US. It's just baffling to me. And so today, the rumors are flying. You know, they're taking pictures of the forms, and they had filled out these caucus chairs of them. They're scorers, and they're texting them, and they had phone line shut up in case there was a problem and the phone line, they had three different numbers people could call, they can't get through the phone lines aren't working, right. It's just a total disaster just like Obamacare was it would But doesn't that invite you to know, now I'm going to ask you to step out of your tech talk Guru shoes and stepping into the ones of you know, being a commentator. Doesn't that invite people saying, Is this a conspiracy? I mean, like we were joking about Hillary and there are connections to Hillary, basically anything in democratic politics is somehow connected to her. But isn't this just inviting the crazy claims of you know, Bernie's people who I've already seen on social media, you know, saying this is another attempt to get Bernie knocked out? Craig Yeah, well, I have. I've had a slogan for four decades now. And that is to "Never attribute to malice that which can easily be attributed to incompetence." So if you see incompetence, just say, okay, you know, this is incompetence. Negligent incompetence, but you know incompetence. Jim Yeah, yeah, exactly. I'm not saying that this point anything that says this is a Hillary thing or even that indicates it is. Craig Still, the rumors are flying because, again, we have this company tied into Hillary's campaign staffers that were paid 10s of thousands of dollars by the Iowa Democratic Party. By the way, the Nevada Democratic Party also paid $60,000 was paid to them, and they are caucusing in a couple of weeks as well. So it's just total incompetence, frankly, Jim We're talking with Tech Talk guru, Craig Peters, on gave us a great explanation. To the mess in Iowa. Now Craig, Let's move on to sup today's safer internet day in the US, and I know that's something you support because your feelings are, hey, passwords, security, things like that. You should always, always be mindful of it not just today, every day, but I want to ask you about something else. The secretive market, the little secret market that is selling my web browsing history. Somebody's making an awful lot of money off of what I searched for our day. Craig Yeah, this is I think kind of interesting because it goes back to you know, you know, I'm always talking about, you know, how to set your passwords what to do, etc. This ties into something else that I've been saying forever. And that is nothing free on the internet. Yes. Nothing right, and so what's come out right now? Is this anti-virus giant called Avast who makes anti-virus software now I'm inserting something here I am pausing discussion business second? And the virus software is zero percent effective against two days attacks on the internet. Wow, zero percent. Okay. So well, let's just say that okay, but antibonding this giant Avast has had a product. They've since canceled it since news Lee doubt was, again, one of these free anti-virus pieces of software out there. And they've got four has 435 million active users and JumpShot, which is this product she has it has data from 100 million places. Allegedly there is what's been going on, reported by motherboard and PC mag. But your Google searches, look upon locations, GPS coordinates, Google Maps, LinkedIn pages, different companies, where did you go? Which specific YouTube videos? Have you watched people visiting porn websites, all of that was tracked by them? That data was uploaded from your computer and sold to advertisers and anybody willing to pay ultimately, collectively, millions of dollars. And it was called an all click feed to track everything users were doing from this free software. Jim Wow. So they then take that information, probably explains why, you know, I get all of these ads for things I've either looked at or had somewhat of an interest in in the past week. I mean, you know, it's crazy. The kind of stuff that comes my way in terms of ads. It's like they know me ultimately. Craig Yeah, it's shocking. And I can tell you how many times I think one of the most common questions is how many times I've had people ask Craig, and he's my phone listening to me. Yeah, and believe me, Facebook, etc., etc. But we're using some computer technology. Now the Colin and artificial intelligence, that term has morphed, I would not call it that. I'd call it machine learning, but they're calling it AI. And now we know they have been harvesting all of this. Those people that have the free or even the cheap VPN services that have a free or cheap anti-virus service. All of that data is getting collected, being put together be mixed in a pot with this machine learning software that says Well, people that watch this video, go to the websites that are looking for a job, etc., etc. are likely to be looking for this pair of shoes. And now you get an act an ad for a couple of shoes, and you wonder why you got it because you weren't looking for shoes. But you know what, those are pretty cool shoes. Yeah, that is it. Jim Craig, quickly, we have just about a minute left. What can people do to protect themselves from this? Craig Man, I am worried that people have just kind of given up because we hear every day about this sort of thing happening. But the bottom line is Be very careful when you're online free is not free. You're the product. Use a web browser like Firefox that's quite well secure. Chrome and never use Chrome again, unless you are forced to -- do not use Microsoft Edge browser. Stick with Firefox and Safari. Right now. Those are the two big ones Safari is an apple Yeah, and those are the two big ones that we know are not tracking you. Jim We are talking to Craig Peterson. You hear that information, folks, what a great day to have him here. But you can have him with you all the time. If you text My name, Jim, to this number 855-385-5553. That's 855-385-5553 standard data, and text rates apply. That will get you information from Craig Peterson and Craig Peterson. Will not bother you will not hack; you will not try to sell you anything. Craig, fantastic segment. I look forward to talking with you next week. Craig Take care, Jim, Jim Take care. All right, a crucial final word. When we return. You're listening to the Jim Pulido show your safe space. Transcribed by https://otter.ai --- More stories and tech updates at: Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553
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AS HEARD ON - The Jim Polito Show - WTAG 580 AM: The problems with the Iowa Caucuses
02/05/2020
AS HEARD ON - The Jim Polito Show - WTAG 580 AM: The problems with the Iowa Caucuses
Welcome! Good morning, everybody. I was on with Mr. Jim Polito this morning and we discussed the debacle that was the Iowa Caucuses and what it means to you as the election season moves forward. In short, test, test, test. So, here we go with Mr. Polito. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Craig Tied into Hillary's campaign staffers that were paid 10s of thousands of dollars by the Iowa Democratic Party. $60,000 was paid to them by the Nevada Democratic Party, who was caucusing in a couple of weeks as well. Craig Morning everybody, Craig Peterson here on with Mr. Jim Polito this morning heard throughout New England, every state New England can listen to and does listen to his show. Amazing guy. I love this guy. We spent time discussing the Iowa caucuses and the software they were using as well as the people behind that software. I will give you some advice about what can you do? It turns out that there are some significant allegations about some Anti-Virus software that was spying on you. So here we go. Jim Well, here we have Craig Peterson on the roster. It's just incredible because we've got a complete meltdown of the Democrat Party in Iowa. Now I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I don't believe it's, well, like Hillary behind the scenes trying to destroy Bernie Sander's chances again, like she did last time. I just think it's general and competence. Let's get in the most competent person when it comes to the internet. This on safer internet day in the US. It's just baffling to me. And so today, the rumors are flying. You know, they're taking pictures of the forms, and they had filled out these caucus chairs of them. They're scorers, and they're texting them, and they had phone line shut up in case there was a problem and the phone line, they had three different numbers people could call, they can't get through the phone lines aren't working, right. It's just a total disaster just like Obamacare was it would But doesn't that invite you to know, now I'm going to ask you to step out of your tech talk Guru shoes and stepping into the ones of you know, being a commentator. Doesn't that invite people saying, Is this a conspiracy? I mean, like we were joking about Hillary and there are connections to Hillary, basically anything in democratic politics is somehow connected to her. But isn't this just inviting the crazy claims of you know, Bernie's people who I've already seen on social media, you know, saying this is another attempt to get Bernie knocked out? Craig Yeah, well, I have. I've had a slogan for four decades now. And that is to "Never attribute to malice that which can easily be attributed to incompetence." So if you see incompetence, just say, okay, you know, this is incompetence. Negligent incompetence, but you know incompetence. Jim Yeah, yeah, exactly. I'm not saying that this point anything that says this is a Hillary thing or even that indicates it is. Craig Still, the rumors are flying because, again, we have this company tied into Hillary's campaign staffers that were paid 10s of thousands of dollars by the Iowa Democratic Party. By the way, the Nevada Democratic Party also paid $60,000 was paid to them, and they are caucusing in a couple of weeks as well. So it's just total incompetence, frankly, Jim We're talking with Tech Talk guru, Craig Peters, on gave us a great explanation. To the mess in Iowa. Now Craig, Let's move on to sup today's safer internet day in the US, and I know that's something you support because your feelings are, hey, passwords, security, things like that. You should always, always be mindful of it not just today, every day, but I want to ask you about something else. The secretive market, the little secret market that is selling my web browsing history. Somebody's making an awful lot of money off of what I searched for our day. Craig Yeah, this is I think kind of interesting because it goes back to you know, you know, I'm always talking about, you know, how to set your passwords what to do, etc. This ties into something else that I've been saying forever. And that is nothing free on the internet. Yes. Nothing right, and so what's come out right now? Is this anti-virus giant called Avast who makes anti-virus software now I'm inserting something here I am pausing discussion business second? And the virus software is zero percent effective against two days attacks on the internet. Wow, zero percent. Okay. So well, let's just say that okay, but antibonding this giant Avast has had a product. They've since canceled it since news Lee doubt was, again, one of these free anti-virus pieces of software out there. And they've got four has 435 million active users and JumpShot, which is this product she has it has data from 100 million places. Allegedly there is what's been going on, reported by motherboard and PC mag. But your Google searches, look upon locations, GPS coordinates, Google Maps, LinkedIn pages, different companies, where did you go? Which specific YouTube videos? Have you watched people visiting porn websites, all of that was tracked by them? That data was uploaded from your computer and sold to advertisers and anybody willing to pay ultimately, collectively, millions of dollars. And it was called an all click feed to track everything users were doing from this free software. Jim Wow. So they then take that information, probably explains why, you know, I get all of these ads for things I've either looked at or had somewhat of an interest in in the past week. I mean, you know, it's crazy. The kind of stuff that comes my way in terms of ads. It's like they know me ultimately. Craig Yeah, it's shocking. And I can tell you how many times I think one of the most common questions is how many times I've had people ask Craig, and he's my phone listening to me. Yeah, and believe me, Facebook, etc., etc. But we're using some computer technology. Now the Colin and artificial intelligence, that term has morphed, I would not call it that. I'd call it machine learning, but they're calling it AI. And now we know they have been harvesting all of this. Those people that have the free or even the cheap VPN services that have a free or cheap anti-virus service. All of that data is getting collected, being put together be mixed in a pot with this machine learning software that says Well, people that watch this video, go to the websites that are looking for a job, etc., etc. are likely to be looking for this pair of shoes. And now you get an act an ad for a couple of shoes, and you wonder why you got it because you weren't looking for shoes. But you know what, those are pretty cool shoes. Yeah, that is it. Jim Craig, quickly, we have just about a minute left. What can people do to protect themselves from this? Craig Man, I am worried that people have just kind of given up because we hear every day about this sort of thing happening. But the bottom line is Be very careful when you're online free is not free. You're the product. Use a web browser like Firefox that's quite well secure. Chrome and never use Chrome again, unless you are forced to -- do not use Microsoft Edge browser. Stick with Firefox and Safari. Right now. Those are the two big ones Safari is an apple Yeah, and those are the two big ones that we know are not tracking you. Jim We are talking to Craig Peterson. You hear that information, folks, what a great day to have him here. But you can have him with you all the time. If you text My name, Jim, to this number 855-385-5553. That's 855-385-5553 standard data, and text rates apply. That will get you information from Craig Peterson and Craig Peterson. Will not bother you will not hack; you will not try to sell you anything. Craig, fantastic segment. I look forward to talking with you next week. Craig Take care, Jim, Jim Take care. All right, a crucial final word. When we return. You're listening to the Jim Pulido show your safe space. Transcribed by https://otter.ai --- More stories and tech updates at: Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553
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AS HEARD ON NH Today with Jack Heath WGIR-AM 610: Chinese Nationals Exfiltrating Our Intellectual Property and Data and More
02/03/2020
AS HEARD ON NH Today with Jack Heath WGIR-AM 610: Chinese Nationals Exfiltrating Our Intellectual Property and Data and More
Welcome, Good Monday morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. I was on with Jack Heath this morning. We talked about an article that Jack posted on Facebook about a Chinese National working for an American Military Contractor who gave our Military Secrets to China. Here we go with Jack. These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - --- Automated Machine Transcript: Craig Taking a laptop, even if you are not a Chinese spy, to China is has a high probability that information on that laptop disappears while you're over there. Craig Hey, good morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. This morning Jack wrote about an article on Facebook about what's been happening here in New England with Chinese infiltration and spying on military companies and contractors. We got into it this morning. Here we go. Jack Heath On top of the lack of social technology, getting US pictures out of places like you know where the host city you have China, basically muscling technology and stealing it allegedly from us. You look at this 10-year engineer, Chinese born American who was just picked up over the weekend by the FBI for allegedly taking his secure Raytheon laptop to China on a trip last year. It is a federal offense for someone with high-security clearance to take technology capable of accessing things like our weapon system technology out of the country. Then the Harvard story. Last week, which you haven't heard much more about the professor, one or two professors charged with getting $50,000 a month from a bogus Chinese University, from the Chinese government to recruit and steal intellectual capital from Harvard. Those are big stories, and it shows the dichotomy between the people having access and the government using it to get more technology for the government and stealing our intellectual capital. Some interest there, and maybe a comment on that Craig Peterson joins us live in the author listener lines, our Tech Talk guy, Good morning, Craig. Craig Hey, good morning, jack. Yeah, and the last few months we've got this Chinese Harvard affiliated cancer researcher caught in December with 21 vials Cells stolen from a lab at a Boston hospital. We've got a Chinese Professor conducting surveillance Research at the University of Kansas indicted in August on charges for his ties to Chinese University. We've got a Chinese PLA Lieutenant posing as a student here at Boston University. The fact that she was a lieutenant in the Chinese military. She was a spy and a Chinese scholar. Another at the University of California. The list goes on and on. You talked a little bit, and you posted on Facebook about the Raytheon employee taking a laptop to China. The company told him not only was it against company policy to travel with a company computer that might have some proprietary information on it but was against federal law. And we see this a lot. There's a lot of ignorance out there amongst people who do take laptops with them to China. I've been warning about that for the last ten years because taking a portable computer, even if you are not a Chinese spy, to China presents a high probability of exfiltration of that data from that laptop while you're over there. Now the infiltration of soft targets in the last few years, our universities where Chinese students are coming over. As I mentioned earlier, Chinese military Lieutenants are coming over to universities posing as students and being assigned to research projects and stealing stuff. The federal ITAR requirements are ones we are dealing with all the time with some of our clients. We have military sub-subcontractors that are making things as simple as screws, Jack, and their products ultimately get used in some military system. Many of these companies are not being careful with our data, and it gets stolen. They have no clue that they're exposing all of us to these dangers. Jack Craig, I think you may know, I'm not sure, but I had the benefit of some of the knowledge learned when I was the US Army War College. I'll keep that quiet. One of the things I did learn is when you look at the global threats to our security in a lot of different things, and we're seeing differences right now with China. Everything in the last year or two or four years politically speaking has been Russia, Russia, the Russians, Russia, Russia, you know, you know, Vladimir Putin. However, the real threat is China. When you look at Russia, I'm not saying Russia did not try to metal. I'm not saying they won't try and metal, and they will try and battle and mess up in our elections. But China's looks like a real threat. They are from a technology stealing point of view, one of the businesses but penetrating universities. Raytheon is a pretty secure fourth-largest defense giant, the real stuff, real concern. Craig It is a considerable concern, and you know, we were talking about the military and You know, the, obviously the contractors and what China's doing. But you see what jacks are doing this to our regular businesses. I have a client that came to me, became a client who came to me because, as it turns out, something was weird with his email. When we started looking into it, and I had one of my fire jumper certified guys get into it more, we found Chinese backdoors in their systems that were actively exfiltrating data out. His designs, the ones he developed over his whole lifetime, he was getting ready to retire. Now the Chinese had all of his intellectual property, all the research methods used to make the products, his customer lists, his pricing. That means he gets to compete against his very own designs made by Chinese manufacturers and sold worldwide. His business is out of business, and we're not even talking about the military here. Jack All right Craig Peterson on this Monday morning. Appreciate it. Craig All right everybody, hopefully, you've been able to check it out online let me know what you think I've been posting these morning interviews over on YouTube and Facebook, doing them as audiograms. I do have all the camera gear, but it takes so much time, and I haven't had time to do it. Let me know what you think you do like these audiograms. By all means, subscribe to my YouTube channel or follow me over on Facebook and drop me a line - at me at Craig Peterson dot com. Take care of everybody. Be back tomorrow. 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Welcome! BEC, Legacy Software, Facial Recognition and more on Tech Talk with Craig Peterson on WGAN
02/01/2020
Welcome! BEC, Legacy Software, Facial Recognition and more on Tech Talk with Craig Peterson on WGAN
Welcome! What a busy busy week in the world of technology. We are going to hit several topics today. Business Email Compromise attacks are running rampant through business. Failure to update older technology is putting businesses at risk. Facial recognition technology is being used but the issue is privacy and how to protect it. Will hit Ransomware, Employee Training, Regulatory Compliance, Online job postings and what precipitated the most expensive divorce. It is going to be a busy show -- so stay tuned. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com I've got some free online privacy training coming up. I have been teaching courses on security for the FBI InfraGard's program. And now I'll share some of the step-by-step tips and tricks that we all can use to keep ourselves and our information safe online. And it won't cost you a dime. --- Related Articles: --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Hey, hello, everybody, Craig Peterson here. Thanks for joining me, whether you are online listening to me on a streaming service, or listening on the radio on my website, kind of everywhere, we are going to be talking about most businesses now what's happening to them? How are they attacking to new statistics out, we'll be talking about how to keep some of your legacy software safe. If you're using Windows seven, or if you're using an older version of the software, because you haven't been keeping it up to date, which is like what all of us right? We're going to talk about what you can do some effectiveness, concerns about privacy, limited facial recognition, adoption, what's going on there. We talked a bit about that last weekend, downtime and costs. If they have gone up here. ransomware attacks are hitting businesses and individuals even harder than at any point in the past. So what's that all about? What are the simple things you can do to help protect yourself against it? We're going to talk about some employee training you need to do if you are a business person, regulatory compliance, what's the perception? What's the reality, we've seen a lot of businesses that are doing what we've been calling pencil whipping some of these forums that are trying to figure out whether or not they have complied with some of the laws, rules, and regulations. We're going to also talk about the Jeff Bezos phone hack today, and about a warning coming out from the FBI about job searches online. So a lot to talk about today. And we are going to start out with half of the organization's worldwide were successfully finished in 2019. But can't even talk right now. This is something that's very concerning. Now. It isn't as bad as it used to be phishing attacks used to be almost 100% effective. Of course, these are the types of attacks where someone sends an email. And the email is trying to get you to help this Prince in Nigeria, or whatever it might be. Those are phishing attacks, I've gotten a lot more sophisticated to the point where they are today, where we warn people to not even put information about who the employees are even physical access or addresses of the businesses, if they are not, obviously a walk-in type store because that is being used online by the bad guys. They go to your website, they figure out who the CEO is, who the CFO is, whatever information they might need. And then they use that now to go after you and go after you in a very bad way, frankly, because we are falling prey to it. And we're going to be talking more a little bit later on a couple more segments about what is the cost to businesses right now. Some of the phishing attacks, because you remember, they will use phishing for a number of different reasons, not the least of which is to get you to install malware on your computer. You know, unbeknownst to you, right? It's not as though you purposely are selling malware. But we're going to talk about that here in just a few minutes. There is a number of companies out there that do various types of simulated phishing attacks. And the idea behind these is that they will go ahead and send your employees emails that are based upon the latest phishing attacks, right, the type of phishing attacks that have been going on for the most part, and they will record whether or not each employee has clicked on a link that they shouldn't have clicked on. So obviously, when they click on it, it goes through the software that's tracking them and knows what they did. And you know, now they're in trouble, right? Because they did what they shouldn't have done and they will usually have some remedial training for these people to help to build awareness, help them understand what it is really what's going on what they should be doing what they maybe shouldn't be doing. All of that stuff pulled together. Well, one of the companies that does this fishing susceptibility testing along with the security awareness training is called proof point. And they take a look at all of their numbers and try and roll them together. So this report that I'm looking at right now is examining global data from nearly 50 million simulated phishing attacks that were sent by proof point customers over a one year period. And they also did third party survey responses for more than 600 information security professionals in all of the major countries out there, not some of the small ones. And they put this all together. So basically, it's 3500 working adults who are sitting paid for that part. Now, here's what they found. Here are the tips for you. If you are a business person if you're responsible for it within an organization number one here in the Help Desk security article is effective security awareness training, must focus on the issues and behaviors that matter most in organizations' mission. Obviously, that's kind of corporate-speak, right? But he's saying that really what we have to do is look at what our assets are, what our mission is, as a company, and you know, value those what is the value of those, what should we be doing, when it comes to our data, the things that we if we lost, we would go out of business or we might get fined, that might come after us, etc, etc. So he goes on to say we recommend taking a people-centric approach to cybersecurity by blending organizational-wide awareness training initiatives, targeted threat driven education. The goal is to empower users to recognize and report attacks again, oh my gosh, you know, this is the sort of thing that you get from a PR agency, right? I doubt the guy actually said that. But it really is about people. We have various types of automation. If you have the basic stuff like you've got antivirus, and you've been listening to my show for a while, you know, anti-virus is zero percent effective against the latest types of attacks. And it is not effective at all. antivirus software in this day and age is pretty much useless. Now, you should be using it as part of a bigger stack of security software and procedures and things. But bottom line, it's just not that useful. And they're also saying that end-user email reporting is critical. They're showing that the number of reported email messages jumped significantly last year. And that's a really big jump at about 67%. So make sure if anyone in your organization has any questions about an email, they're thinking it might be a fake, it might be, you know, a problem phishing, etc, that they forwarded to you. Now we'll go a step further because of my company mainstream, we go ahead and work with the FBI and state investigators. When there are serious problems. Obviously, we will work with the company to it's not as though we're going to squeal on them. But we haven't covered numerous foreign government and also organized crime hacks into businesses. So if you're not reporting it, nobody's going to know and nothing can be done about it. So here are the key takeaways from this last year. More than half it's 55%. I've surveyed organizations dealt with at least one successful phishing attack in 2019. That's a very big deal. That's a very scary thing, frankly. And info security professionals have reported a high frequency of social engineering attempts across all kinds of different methods. 88% reported spear-phishing attacks, 86 business email compromised attacks, those are the ones that are hurting our businesses most and those are the type of things where they're faking that they're a vendor or they're the owner and they're asking people to wire money around. So be very, very careful. smishing is fairly new, but 84% of the businesses are saying that they had SMS and text phishing attacks that's way up. 83% said fishing which is voice fishing, and 81% reported malicious USB drops isn't That's something 65% of the surveyed infosec professionals said that their organization experienced a ransomware infection in 2019. That is high, high high. Now, you know, the FBI advises to never pay a ransom. But a third of all organizations opted to pay the ransom. And we've seen that even in cities that have been attacked by ransom, or that they did pay ransoms. 32% did not have those who negotiated with attackers 9% were hit with follow up ransom demand, and 22% never got access to their data, even after paying the ransom. So keep that in mind. And the other statistic that I've seen before from the FBI says that even if you pay a ransom, the odds are only 50% that you'll get all of your data back. Remember, these guys aren't writing great software. In fact, most of them aren't even writing this software at all. And what that ultimately means is it buggy? What do they really care as long as they get some payments right? organizations are benefiting from the consequent model. 63% of organizations take corrective action with users who repeatedly make mistakes. So I think that's an important thing. Many working adults fail to follow cybersecurity best practices. 45% admit to password reuse, which is one of the biggest sins, frankly, that you can commit is reusing passwords on multiple sites, more than 50% do not password protect home networks. And 90% said they use employer-issued devices for personal activities. These are all things they shouldn't be doing. In addition, 32% of working adults were unfamiliar with VPN services. One of my pieces of training was about VPNs. You might find it I think it's still up on YouTube. But how VPN services are in some cases worse than not using a VPN at all, you've got to be careful because some of these VPN services that are out there, they're actually having new use their service so they can track you online, sell your information. So the VPN service is only charging a few bucks a month, or heaven forbid, free. You really have to wonder just how good is it. So follow those practices need to understand the common cybersecurity terms. I don't maybe I should do a little training on that one too so that people know what's up. And Millennials are continuing to underperform other age groups in fundamental fishing, and when ransomware awareness, so stick around when we come back, we're going to talk about keeping your legacy software safe. Are you still using Windows seven, eight or maybe something else? It's kind of old. Stick around. We'll be right back. You're listening to Craig Peterson on WGAN. Hey, welcome back, everybody, Craig Peterson here. If you have a computer that's been around for a few years, have you stopped and had a close look to see if it's reached its end of life. Now I'm not talking about the hardware is about to fail or fall apart. You know, that's something I think you can deal with and everybody knows to deal with. And more importantly, if the hardware falls apart and stops working, you have to deal with it. But what about the software that's on your computer? What about the software that is, has been installed and it has been there for who knows how long? When was the last time you actually updated it I walk into customers' new customers all of the time, and they are running really old software? And man, I can't tell you how many times I've walked into a place and they've got a database. It's Microsoft SQL Server, server, and they have just got a development version there. They're in. In fact, they bought the software. And the software vendor gave them a free development version of SQL Server. Even though it's in production, even though they're supposed to be paying for a full license, I see it all the time. And then because they don't have a full license, in fact, they don't even have a legal license to use it in the business environment. The next problem happens, which is they've never updated SQL Server. We used to see this all the time with Windows where people were using a hacked version of Microsoft Windows, versions of Windows that were never licensed, never licensed properly. We don't see that as much anymore. But what we are seeing is software that's passed the end of life including windows As of mid-January January 14, 2020, Windows seven Microsoft is no longer supported for security updates, at least unless you pay Microsoft a small boatload full of money. They are providing it, but they are charging money for it. And now the last subscription I saw for security updates for Windows seven was about $80,000 a year. Now, I don't know about you, but I think that's a little bit pricey. So now you end up with the problem of Okay, so I am running old software, maybe even Windows XP, we see that all the time in the manufacturing business, where they're controlling systems and control systems running XP. So what do you do now? Because if you upgrade your base operating system, that means there is software that you're running that may not work with the new version of Windows. And frankly, that's probably the number one reason we see from people who don't upgrade and don't want to upgrade because it's could end up being a very bad thing for them a lot of pain, right? Well, Windows seven is already past its support window. And we're Windows Server 2008 will officially be ended just this past week. So if you're running Windows Server, which a lot of businesses are, right, you're using Active Directory server as much as I don't like it. Most of our customers use it because there's not really a whole lot of other options for them. But it's really significant here that these older operating systems are no longer going to get routine security updates and patches going forward. Windows seven, believe it or not, is 10 years old now. And it's still in style. It still works. And according to StatCounter, Windows seven is still deployed on one out of every four Windows machines. So That means you are probably like everybody else out there and is still running Windows seven or some of your machines. And part of the reason for that may be because you're concerned about doing the upgrade, right, and update. So we're going to talk a little bit about that some things that you can do. But first of all, I want to give you a couple of warnings, because I think I might have to get you out of that feeling of invulnerability that you might have Windows 720 19, there were more than 1000 vulnerabilities that were found over 1000 in just 2019. ingest windows seven alone. So businesses are facing a very real security risk by using any of these products after their security updates pass. But you know, can you migrate? Yeah, obviously the answers. Yes. Can you do it quickly? Well, Not necessarily quickly, and certainly not immediately for most people. So most businesses are finding they're using the sound supported software for months, years or even decades later. And Kaspersky research, which is a Russian company that does all kinds of stuff when it comes to security, they got some pretty decent security software. But the problem you and I think you might find with their security software is it's from Russia, and the US, the federal government has come out and said, Don't use Kaspersky. So I can see that I can see why they're saying that but they're reporting that 40% of very small businesses, so 40% of businesses under about 10 employees, and about 48% of small and mid-sized businesses. So the bigger businesses that should have the ability to do upgrades are still using unsupported software and software that's approaching the end of support. So you got to be very, very careful, okay. And if you're a manufacturing company, or you have industrial control systems, you might have an H HVAC and an air conditioning system in your building that is hooked up to your network connection, so that the technicians can get in remotely to look for problems, maybe the systems call home, to let them know that, you know, your coolant pressures too low or whatever the problem might be. Those types of systems can be some of the worst to some of those, as I mentioned, before, we're finding we're still running Windows XP. And that is way, way out of date. So you know, have a look at all of those to man, we could go on for a long time about the problems that we've seen, and some of the problems that you need to take care of. But when we're talking about 24 seven operations, so we're moving on to the next level. Business kind of manufacturing or maybe you have a help desk where people call it 24/7. And those systems are up and online the whole time, it becomes even more important becomes even more critical. If a new vulnerability is discovered, I really have to emphasize here you have to take extra precautions. So what do you do in the meantime to protect yourself, here are some tips for those of us that are still running older software? And as I said, we're talking about what 50 60% of us frankly, our and a third of us are running unsupported versions of Windows. Number one you could do is buy extended support. Now, this is probably the least attractive option for companies that don't have a lot of cash lying around but it is the most secure. If you're an enterprise customer, you which means, by the way, you have to use any enterprise versions of Windows, not the stuff you got when you bought your laptop from staples or, or just from regular old Dell, okay? But enterprise customers can pay Microsoft for extended support through January 2023. Now, it's very expensive. Okay, so the price is going up every year. So be very careful with it. We're talking about million dollars worth of expensive, okay, so very, very big deal. If you're still running Windows XP, the cost for extended support for an organization with 10,000 plus machines leveled out at just under $2 million a year. real money. It's crazy money. So that's probably out of the question for most of us. So next up, here's what I've done for a lot of customers and I can help you with this if you need this as well. But there are ways to isolate both older machines from your regular network and I'm not just talking about going ahead and doing some network segmentation. I'm talking about having special internal firewalls to isolate these machines, okay, old decommissioned and non-supported operating systems and software that cannot be patched, have to be isolated. Obviously, you also would need to limit user access to the machines and limit what they are doing on those machines and try and keep them safe. And watch for what is called out of band fixes. Some vendors may still issue critical fixes, but you know, keep an eye on it. It could be dangerous. All right sticking around. We're going to talk about this new facial recognition technology that London is adopting. I talked about it this week, a little bit on my radio and TV appearances. But we're going to get into a little bit more because it is coming here to the US as well. Stick around you're listening to Craig Peterson WGAN Online. Welcome, everybody. Craig Peterson here and online at Craig Peterson dot com. If you haven't already, make sure you sign up for my email comes out every week on Saturday...
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AS HEARD ON: WGAN Mornings with Ken and Matt: Business Email Compromise, Phishing and Jeff Bezos Phone Hack and more
01/31/2020
AS HEARD ON: WGAN Mornings with Ken and Matt: Business Email Compromise, Phishing and Jeff Bezos Phone Hack and more
Good morning everybody! I was on with Ken and Matt. We had a good discussion about Business Email Compromise, what it is, who is at risk and what we can do about it. Then it was onto the Jeff Bezos Phone Hack. So here we go with Ken and Matt. These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Craig They scraped every picture on the internet that they could get their hands on. That is against the usage of rules and agreements of all these websites. If you had a picture posted on Facebook that was publicly accessible or on Twitter Craig Good morning, everybody. Of course, this is Craig Peterson on WGAN, up in Maine, on their morning drive show. There is some very concerning stuff going on to news statistics out that we talked about this week about fishing and BEC type email attacks. We are going to get into it right now. Ken We are back ladies and gentlemen it is 738 on the WGAN morning news with Ken and Matt on Wednesday, which means it's time to talk to Craig Peterson, our tech guru, to go over all the things about technology that affect our daily lives here today. Craig, How are you this morning? Craig Good morning, doing well Ken Well, let's start talking about some techniques, shall we? How many organizations last year, got phished, successfully? Craig Yeah, this is a huge trend that's been going on. You know, we keep hearing these warnings FBI has issued an alert out, and we will talk about it here on the show. It is really getting down to the brass tacks because we're, we're all somehow making some money, right? Whether or not you are getting paid because you know nothing about an oil company, or perhaps you are getting paid because you're working hard and getting up at 3 am every day. Those organizations, every one of them, right now got phished. Of course, you know what phishing is those of those types of emails that encourage you to click on something, maybe download something, etc. There are some new statistics out right now. They are kind of a little scary. You know, I'm not even sure these are that accurate because they say that nearly 90% of organizations around the world are targets of this whole business email compromise, type of scam, fear, spear-phishing attacks, which is a very, very big deal. And I think it's probably closer to 100% of organizations. I don't know you guys probably both have gotten those emails, right, supposedly, from your bank, etc. Absolutely. Yeah. I don't see why it's only 90%. But it's, it's very, very bad. It's very high. They're looking at global data from 50 million simulated phishing attacks. They got sent out to the customers of one company by their security firm, Proofpoint. They sent them over the one year but the part that's most alarming to me because you know, 100% that's not news. But unfortunately, more than half of the people that got these simulated phishing attacks opened the email and clicked on a link, and they were convinced to do it. That's the scary part. Another big story this week is telling us a little bit about what the results of that are the cost of it, and it's happening more, we are getting better. Okay. It used to be that it was 90% of people would open these emails. So we are getting better, but the costs are even increasing. Matt We are talking to Craig Peterson, he is our tech guru, and he joins us at this time every Wednesday to go over what's happening in the world of technology. I am always fascinated by this evolving facial recognition technology. I'm thinking of a man walking into the Gap or whatever, like in Minority Report, and they scan your eyes, or they just know they know who you are. They say Welcome back to the store. How did you enjoy those jeans that you just bought? Would you like to look at something new, etc.? The real utility of it, at least right now, is in terms of security and things like that. So obviously London is now adopting its facial recognition technology for police to us. Europe is considering a ban on it. Talk to us about where we stand with the use of this technology for law enforcement, and I guess beyond. Craig Last weekend, on my show, of course, Saturdays at 1 pm here on the same station, but and my show last weekend, I went into quite a bit of detail about this one company that had been operating kind of underground. They did something that this is frankly illegal. They scraped every picture available on the internet they could grab. That's against the usage of rules and agreements of all these websites. If you had an image posted on Facebook that was publicly accessible or on Twitter or on these online photo album sites that you can share photos. They have it. They have over 3 billion social media pictures. What they're doing is selling subscriptions to police departments. These police departments pay as little as $10,000 a year, can take a picture from some security cameras somewhere, and run it through this software. It's an app that runs on your phone. And it will tell the police where it has seen you before online. The police have been hindered over the years by only having pictures in their database of people who had interactions with police. You know you get arrested, they take photos and fingerprints. Now they have been able to identify hundreds or thousands of people that were involved in crimes were unsolved crimes, which is kind of interesting. So what London's doing now is they're taking that same type of technique. By the way, there are lawsuits against this company. Right now, it's in use in New York City. A lot of police departments are using it. But London's taking that type of technology because it's one thing to have faces. London has been, it's the most surveilled city in the world outside of China. And that means there's a lot of cameras out there. For years the city of London has been taking all of that information and use it to track people as they moved around London. Now with this newer technology that we're starting to see where it's tying it into social media posts to pictures that can find almost anywhere. They're worried about what they're calling a breakthrough assault on our rights. And we're starting to see this here in the UK is where the US is well, and it's very, very scary in the facial recognition is 80 ish percent accurate in some cases, is in the worst cases it's about 80% inaccurate, which is terrible. I think this is dangerous technology in the wrong hands, and it can easily be misused. The wrong hands don't mean like the guys in the White House. The wrong hands imply someone who has access to this type of database, who wants to find the name and phone number of that person they saw in this coffee shop. So they can call them up and try and get a date. It could be that simple. So I'm getting very concerned about it. Our law enforcement here in the US has relaxed the established rules of evidence that have been around for a long time and retaining things like our photos. When should they be keeping it that many police departments have cameras, video cameras on the cars as they drive around? In some jurisdictions, it means taking pictures of your license plate or photos of all of the occupants. When it finds an active ticket against the owner of the vehicle or the vehicle itself, you will be pulled over all automatically. Frankly, this type of activity concerns me because it's there will be mismatches. There will be people accused that shouldn't be. And honestly, I think we should be secure in it and have that type of privacy. Matt We were talking to Craig Peterson. He is our tech guru. You hear him every Wednesday at 738. You can listen to him on Saturday at one o'clock as well. You can go to Craig Peterson dot com anytime you want, and hear what he has to say. You know, we said it earlier, Craig about Jeff Bezos and the hacking of his phone. What's the latest on that? Should we be concerned? Craig It presents an interesting problem because Jeff Bezos was using a piece of software on his smartphone that many people use has called WhatsApp. It was bought by Facebook some time ago. What happened is that the Saudi Crown Prince was upset with the stories in the Washington Post that were written by Jamal Khashoggi. Khashoggi had written articles, news stories for The Washington Post. The Saudi crown prince had met Jeff Bezos at a party, and they exchanged WhatsApp phone numbers. That's how you communicate, and WhatsApp, you have a phone number associated with your account. So now, they can talk to each other using WhatsApp, and WhatsApp is an app designed for secure communications that encrypted from end to end. Let's get into a little bit more meat of your question, which is what happened here behind the scenes? Well, it turned out the watch app had a bug in the way it has handled or maybe even still handles access to your photos and videos and other information contacts on your phone. And apparently, someone used the Saudi Crown Princes account WhatsApp account, sent a video to Jeff Bezos. That video had in it some malware that gave them full access to Jeff Bezos, and his phone and everything on it. Well, the phone numbers of probably the contacts, but videos and photographs. And Jeff Bezos notices his phone was slow, which by the way, is the number one reason I get phone calls for security. But the email slows the slow phone computers not working right. Jeff took his phone to one of these places that did some cyber forensic analysis on the phone. They discovered why yes, indeed, the amount of data that's being sent by your phone is 100 6,000,000% higher than usual. It is posting videos, etc. out to the Saudi Crown Prince. Guess what ended up happening? We ended up with the most expensive divorce in history with Jeff Bezos and his wife because those videos and photos leaked. So that's the basics of what happened here. Ken Craig Peterson joins us at this time every Wednesday to go over what's happening in the world of technology today being no exception to that, Craig, as always, we appreciate you joining us here, and we will talk to you again next week. Craig Hey, gentlemen, take care. I'm going to talk more about this weekend on my show at one o'clock on Saturday. I want to get into what can you do to prevent this sort of thing? What should you do? So we'll cover that in more detail on Saturday. Ken We'll be looking forward to that. Craig Okay, take care, guys. Craig Hey, everybody, make sure you are on my email list. So you get all of this and more. Just Go to Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe. I keep pretty much everything up there on the site. Again, Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe. We'll talk to you again on Saturday. Bye-bye Transcribed by https://otter.ai --- More stories and tech updates at: Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553
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AS HEARD ON - The Jim Polito Show - WTAG 580 AM: Fake Jobs being advertised online, Jeff Bezos phone hack and what we can learn from both
01/28/2020
AS HEARD ON - The Jim Polito Show - WTAG 580 AM: Fake Jobs being advertised online, Jeff Bezos phone hack and what we can learn from both
Welcome! Good morning, everybody. I was on with Mr. Jim Polito this morning and we discussed these Fake Jobs that are being offered on-line, spoofed websites and ID theft. Then we got into who was responsible for hacking Jeff Bezos's phone and why we have to be careful who we hire. So, here we go with Mr. Polito. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Craig You know, Make America Great Again, that would not be a great password. Yeah, but some random words strung together are much harder to crack on a computer than anything else because of the way the cracking technologies work nowadays. The cracking technology is much different than it used to be. Craig Morning, everybody that was me with Mr. Jim Polito, and we broke down a couple of things today. First of all, a couple of security things, the truth about your passwords. We went into the whole hack here that led to the most expensive divorce in history, and also employment scams on the rise. Why is it happening? What should you be cautious of if you're looking for a new job? The FBI has a special warning out. So here we go with Jim. Jim Always ahead of the curve. Always bringing us the latest from the world of tech talk, our good friend, Craig Peterson. Good morning, sir. Craig A good morning. You know things are always changing out there in the industry. I'm going to bring something up. You mentioned earlier today. What they're trying to with this Data Privacy Day is to bring some visibility into the whole password problem, right? And you talked about some of the advice that they were giving and, and, what iHeart makes you guys do. What is it? Change your passwords every three months, Jim Yes, every three months. We have to change our password, and it can't be even close to the previous password. Craig That's a widespread thing out there in the industry, just in general. But I got to tell you that the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which is the organization within the federal government that comes out with all of these security standards, change that about a year ago. So You now have something to use against them. Here's why. Here's what's going on. If they make you come up with a new password every three months, what are the odds that it's going to be an excellent password? Next, what are the chances that you're not going to write it down somewhere like where the cleaning lady can find it? Maybe in your drawer, taped to the bottom of your keyboard, or even worse, and I know people are listening that are going to go into the office today and immediately and take down their post-it notes. If you can believe it, people place post-it notes right on their computer. The current recommendations are, you come up with a great phrase. Yeah, you don't have to use special characters and numbers and all this other stuff. But come up with a few random words. Pick four or five words that you can remember that you can associate together. Oh, and you don't have to change it every three months. Once a year is probably enough and phrase with three or four words that are there aren't things like, you know, make America great again, that would not be a de password. Yeah, but some random words that are harder to crack on a computer than anything else because the way the crackers are working nowadays, the cracking technologies is much different than it used to be. So just a quick word of advice to people if you're worried oh my gosh, I don't change my password every three months, and I don't have special characters and digits in it. Best password according to nest is just four maybe five words. random ones strung together and that's your passwords more accessible cookie-cutter type two, Jim But I have a new one it is Could I please MooMoo face banana? No. Can I please use MooMoocen face banana face to the dog patch Craig That would work. I think Jim I think Steve Martin said that one. I'm stealing it from Steve Martin. But yeah, you don't want to use one like that. Then someone if they know that expression will say, Oh, yeah, I remember Steve Martin said that. If they just get a few words they'll say, they'll say, I'd like to guess at solving the puzzle. Especially if you say it on the radio. Craig All right. Well, it's data privacy day. And that's why I brought it up. So great day to have you with us. And a great day to warn people about a new scam. The FBI is talking about, so you think you're applying for a job online? And then maybe we even got the job. And the fact is, you're talking with a scammer online. Unknown Speaker 4:57 Yeah, that's something. Craig The trick behind that right now, the scammers, the bad guys. What are they doing? They always go after the latest stuff, maybe something that's in the news, etc., etc. And you know what, it turns out I don't know, I listened to some of the house hearings. It would seem as though the job markets terrific the economy is falling apart, and we've got the worst president in history. But I think readability is more along the lines of, Hey, you know, I've had this job for 234 years now. If you're a millennial, hey, I've had this job for six months now. I wonder if there's a better job of it. I keep hearing that people are getting paid more. So they're looking for jobs. So you have even though the job market is tight for employers, you have all these people looking for jobs. So the scammers have figured out. You know what, we can get a lot of information from somebody that applies for a job. Because people, people will fill out forms, right, Jim, and they'll give me their social security number, their employment history, their home address their phone number. So people are now going online, they're looking for new jobs to see if they can do a little bit of an upgrade, which makes a whole lot of sense to me. And they are getting the victims to not only give all of this information to them, but they're also even getting people to pay them. And we're talking about these criminals who are, you know, have these fake jobs averaging about $3,000 per person, according to the FBI advisory? Jim Hey $3,000, which also means, by the way, some people were out $100,000 Craig Yeah, exactly. So they're now using the spoof web page to harvest this personally identifiable information. And a spoof website, of course, isn't like instead of going to I heart, you go to I dash hearts calm. Yep. Right. And you don't notice that you went to the wrong website. And the criminals are also they're all putting advertising in legitimate ads from legitimate employers. So you go to the site, it looks real, right? These bad guys are stealing ads from legitimate employers. They're doing everything. But that's because now employees are busy looking for other jobs. Because what the heck, they might just find them. Jim We're talking with Craig Peterson, our good friend Tech Talk guru. I have to be careful. When applying online, make sure you know to whom you're talking. If it sounds too good, it probably is not real. Craig in the time we have left, I want to ask about this week john had the story. Last week, we learned that Jeff Bezos's phone hack that led to the exposure of his affair. It turns out the Saudi prince accused of masterminding the murder of a journalist is the same one charged with the hack on Jeff Bezos's phone, of course, the founder of Amazon. I'll be talking about this a lot more in my on my podcast this weekend, which you can also find on the iHeart as well. Jim There we go. Yeah, and the easiest way to find it is you just go to Craig Peterson dot com. Craig But here's what happened. Guys, man has a media been getting this report wrong. But let's start at a high level. First of all, remember Jeff Bezos bought this fish wrapper out of Washington DC, remember when that happened, right? It was the Washington Post. So he bought this newspaper down in Washington DC, and is, you know, it's been around for a very long time. Okay. It broke some national stories over the years, but it's just gone left. Well, Jeff hired a journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, and he began writing for the Washington Post had been criticizing the Saudi Crown Prince because of the murdering of this Jamal Khashoggi. And then they were saying a lot of nasty things about it. So what ended up happening now apparently, this is all allegations at this point. But apparently, the Saudi Crown Prince got pretty upset that the Washington Post was saying all these bad things about him and that they murdered this. I'll use the term journalist kind of loosely because I think that does apply here in the case of Khashoggi. Yeah, at any rate, he wanted the Crown Prince, apparently to have a little vengeance. So the owner of The Washington Post, ultimately, is Jeff Bezos. Yep, the richest man in the world. Yep. He, here's what he did. And this is kind of interesting because we use these apps all the time. And apps are, you know, they can be significant. They sometimes can be monitored. And there's something called an end to end encryption. And when people are looking at apps to communicate, you want an end to end encryption. In other words, you don't want it set up and in a way that somebody can intercept it. So apparently, Jeff Bezos exists. An App called WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook and does have an end to end encryption. But here's what happened. It looks like they used some of the hacker hacking software that's known as a zero-day attack against whats app. And apparently, there was a bug inside of the WhatsApp app. Now let's think about this for a minute from people that use WhatsApp or use any kind of a chatting or messenger program. If you're using your iPhone, it comes up and says, this half WhatsApp wants access to your photos and videos. And so you're sitting there thinking, Okay, what am I, you know, let's find I'm going to want to share videos and photos. So yeah, go ahead. Let's what WhatsApp has access to, and that's true, obviously on Android as well. A little more confused than Android, but it's right in both cases. So apparently what happened was, there was a bug that some people There's still allegations here, I'm not positive on the reality there is I'm not going to make any names or, or other allegations here. Researchers found a bug in WhatsApp that allowed them to send you a WhatsApp user a video. And that video broke into and took over WhatsApp. And almost immediately after Jeff Bezos received this video from the Saudi prince, you know whether or not it was him as a different story, but received it from the Saudi prince. His phone started exfiltrating data. In other words, all of a sudden, his phone started sending pretty much everything that was in his pictures and videos to Saudi Arabia. And then what do you have, you have the most expensive divorce in history. Jim It was the most expensive divorce in history, how many? Meaning she didn't even get half. It was still, what did she get, like 38,000,000,048 billion bunch of property. Craig Wow, it's tough. It's tough to live on that. So it's he noticed something has just started slowing down. It was sending video data out at a rate of 106,000,000%. Higher than previously. So he noticed something was wrong. And he took it to a forensics group who started having to look at the phone, but it was a bug in WhatsApp. And that kind of concerns me I'm sure it's going to be fixed if it hasn't been already. But you know, this has to do with again, having 100 200 apps on your phone. Think about it, all of those apps on your phone, what bugs do they have in them? How many apps to use. And as part of security awareness today, and I've said this for a long time, delete apps that you do not use frequently. If If you want real secure communications, if you're using iPhone messages is probably all you need messages and FaceTime, they both do a great job. And because Apple's paying close attention to it, bugs like this are likely to get fixed very, very quickly. And this is what happened to this is the new world that we're living in today. All of these application developers and these cool little apps that we have, you know the ones make it look like you're 20 years older or younger are stealing our data in some cases like this morphine app, the data is sent directly to Russia. You lose all rights to any pictures you uploaded. Worse yet, who knows what they're doing with those photos once they get there. So get rid of these apps that you're not using and don't trust them. 100% of you think something weird is happening that might be. And one real quick thing I have to say, and that is that when we get involved with an investigation for business on behalf of a company that thinks they might have been hacking, something might be going on 99% of the time, Jim, we get a call. Something's going on with our email. We're not sure what it is. And then when we dig into it more refined Chinese backdoors Russian hack, Jim yeah. Craig Right now, everyone's attacking our customers. It's just amazing what's happening out there. Jim All right. Now you know what's happening out there. He's told you about the latest security stuff you need to know during this segment. If you want more of this information, get on board with Craig Peterson. All you have to do is text my name, Jim, to this number 855-385-5553. That's just texting Jim to 855-385-5553. Standard data and text rates apply. And Craig Peterson will not annoy you bother you sell you something or hack you. Don't worry about it. Craig, thank you so much. Great segment. We'll talk with you next week. Craig Thanks, Jim. Bye-bye. Craig 16:31 All right. Hey, everybody, I want to let you know we have been working hard creating a new course for you. I will have exclusive giveaways for you as part of the course. It is going to be the best webinar ever, of course, all centered on transforming your security, your security posture, and more. So keep an eye out on your email, Greg peterson.com slash subscribes, but see the only one Didn't find out about it. Take care, everybody. Be back tomorrow. Bye-bye Transcribed by https://otter.ai --- More stories and tech updates at: Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553
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