Craig Peterson - America's Leading CyberSecurity Coach
America’s Leading Security Coach to Small Business, the FBI, Homeland Security, Department of Defense, Department of Energy, The Whitehouse, all major DoD contractors, including Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed, BAE, and more. Dozens of US State, County, and City governments. School Districts, Hospitals, Doctors, and Clinics. All major financial institutions in the United States, including The Federal Reserve, Fidelity, Bank of America, Visa, M/C, etc. Providing Network Security since 1991.
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Sick Laptop? Uber and Lyft out of Self Driving, DC Police Department Ransomed
05/03/2021
Sick Laptop? Uber and Lyft out of Self Driving, DC Police Department Ransomed
Thanks for downloading Podcast 1111 - May 1, 2021. Uber and Lyft have both sold their self-driving car divisions. Washington DC Police are in a lot of trouble due to Ransomware. The latest trend in Cloud Computing is hazardous. How to tell if your laptop is sick and how to fix it. Costs of Ransomware have doubled in 12 months. Why I think China is threatening Taiwan. Finally, Emotet has been taken down. SpaceX is winning the Satellite-Internet war. For more tech tips, news, and updates, visit - CraigPeterson.com. Articles for this week: --- Automated Machine-Generated Transcript: Podcast 1111 - May 01, 2021 Craig Peterson: Self-driving cars have been all the rage. Well, at least talking about them for what are the last four or five years. Well, Lyft and Uber both had big projects when it came to self-driving cars, and both of them have changed their minds. We're going to talk about that. [00:00:21] Good afternoon, everybody. Craig Peterson, here I've been out for the last couple of weeks. Sorry. I've been here on the weekend, and I'm here again today. We're going to talk about a lot of very interesting stuff that's going on. Hopefully, I can explain to you a little bit about the why that helps you understand the how of what's going on. It's just become so crazy complex. [00:00:48]That also gets into Lyft, this whole self-driving car thing. Uber, you've got every major player kind of in the world getting into this whole game, including, of course, Apple and Google. They both have big projects going on. GM, Ford, and every major manufacturer, Fiat, has an electric car, and of course, they've got aspirations. Hey, by the way, if you really want to cause some problems with Fiat-Chrysler's finances, buy one of their little electric cars, a little E 500. I don't know if you've seen these little Fiats driving around. They're cool little cars, the type of thing you'd expect in a big city or maybe in Europe somewhere. Just these tiny things. Like the smart cars only slightly bigger. Fiat loses $20,000 for every one of these $33,000 little cars you buy. Electric cars. It only goes 87 miles on a charge. That's the killer, right? 87 miles. Are you kidding me? [00:01:52] We'll talk more about this later on because there's some study information out now that talks about people that bought electric cars. How many went back to gas engines, and why? It's interesting when you get into the numbers, the people that are switching back, by the way. Tend to be women more than men, but anyway, so we'll get into that in a few minutes here. [00:02:16] Lyft and Uber, both saw themselves as companies that should be in the self-driving car business. I have learned over the years that you have to focus your business on your business. So what is it? Make your business very narrow don't run after every little opportunity that comes up, don't take every potential customer that comes your way because you probably can't deal with it. It requires a focus, a real focus, in order to be very successful. Otherwise, you can't make your business grow. So because of every customer's different, if everything about the customer's different, you're going to have true experts. [00:03:01] That's the problem I've had over the years because I've always enjoyed a little bit of a change, a little bit of a difference. So, we've helped all kinds of companies from multinationals with their cybersecurity all the way on, down through little guys. [00:03:15] Now, when you think about that, I've been crazy. For all of these years, to quote Paul Simon and my craziness has to do with the fact that they're entirely different beasts. [00:03:26]So, now we're putting together some standardized packages based on what we've been using and selling for more than 20 years now, just to make my life a little bit simpler so, we can handle more clients cause there's more and more them that need it. [00:03:40] So, when we're looking at Uber and Lyft, how does it fit? What is Uber doing? What is Lyft doing? Really? What's the bottom line here. They're getting you from point A to point B. It's really that simple. Isn't it? You want to get to a place. Now, they've added some of these other features like the Uber eats, where you can get Uber to go to a restaurant, pick up a meal, deliver the meal for you. Then you're off and running. That's not bad, but it's still effectively the same business. [00:04:15] When we're talking about autonomous vehicles, it's a completely different business. You're talking about major software development. Lyft looks like it's been spending about a hundred million dollars a year in order to try and develop self-driving cars. [00:04:35] That's expensive. It sure is a lot different than managing people coming from point A to point B. I was out of state. I was down in Florida. Down in Florida, it's difficult to find a Lyft or an Uber driver because so many people are staying home. Why would I bother working when I'm making so much money on unemployment right now? Why would they? [00:05:00]I'm not sure I could particularly blame them for not wanting to work. So Uber and Lyft are now saying, wait a minute. I got go find drivers. I'm going to have people that are going to deliver food that is going to take passengers from point A to point B. That's what they should be focusing on. Isn't it. Making sure the drivers safe. Making sure the passenger safe. I'm not talking about these lockdown-type restrictions. I'm talking about physically safe because we've seen people attacked before. What happens if they're in a car accident? Do we have contact information for the passenger? Do we know they're in a car accident? Can we reasonably get an ambulance there, get treatment, get the police, whatever needs to happen. There's a lot of things you have to worry about—background checks for the drivers. Maybe background checks for the passengers. You've got to collect the money. Maybe you want to put in an override system where people who refer another Lyft driver are going to be able to get a bit of an override on them, make a few extra bucks, make it worth their while to refer driver. [00:06:04]Then you've got all of the streets, the street maps in every city, in every town. How far should you be going as a business like Uber or Lyft? Is your business mapping. Is your business autonomous vehicles? No, of course not. So I think they're smart in getting out of this business, but I want to mention a couple of things about why I think they got in the business in the first place. [00:06:31] GM and Ford probably Chryslers have said that they are thinking the vehicle of the future isn't going to be something you buy. You're not going to go out and buy a car because they're looking at it and saying, let me see, what do you want? I want to get to the train station in the morning, or I want to get to work in the morning, or I might want to have some food delivered to me, or I might want to run to the grocery store. First of all, grocery stores and food delivery can both be done by Uber or Lyft, but getting you from A to B. [00:07:08] They're looking and saying we make the cars, we make the autonomous systems. Why don't we provide vehicles when people need them? So it can take your kid to school in the morning. It can go in five different directions. Cause you're going to have five different cars. Maybe you need five cars this morning cause you've got four kids, and you and your wife and you're all going different places. Here come the cars. They're all scheduled the day before, the week before. However you do it. On Tuesday, all of the cars show up. They take you to where you want to go. That's the business model that the major car manufacturers are looking at. I think it makes a lot of sense. [00:07:51] You don't necessarily need a pickup truck all the time, but I sure need one when I gotta get those sheets of plywood and go here, go there, do things. Frankly, Home Depot and Lowe's are both looking at it, saying we have rental trucks. Maybe they will have some of these in their fleet. Maybe autonomous, maybe not autonomous, but that's how they're looking at it. They don't think you're going to buy a car. [00:08:15] I don't know if you saw the test Cadillac did down in New York City, of course, this was before the lockdown as well. Cadillac had put together this plan, where for now, what was it? $1,500 a month. I think give or take. You could drive a brand new Cadillac, and you'd have that Cadillac for a month. You could, of course keep it for longer, or you could just pay them more. But the idea was why Cadillac buy? Why even go through all of the trouble leasing. Effectively, what you're doing is renting it like you might rent a car from Hertz. [00:08:51]In the future, they don't even think you're going to do that. It's Hey, I want a black car to pick me up from one, two, three wall street and take me to park Avenue, that I think makes a lot of sense. [00:09:03] So Uber and Lyft are both looking at this plan and saying, Whoa, Wait a minute here. What's going to happen when GM and Ford both decide that they are actually in the getting people from point A to point B business. Now, they are stepping on Lyft and Uber's toes in a very big way. I think that's why they decided to get into the autonomous vehicle business. Both of them have gotten. Out of it now. [00:09:37] Lyft sold as a self-driving division to a subsidiary of Toyota called Woven Planet for half a billion dollars. Part of the reason for that, I'm sure, is it takes a lot of money to compete in the self-driving area. [00:09:53]Frankly, if Uber and Lyft can really focus on their core business, not mess around with all this other stuff. They might be able to beat GM Ford, Chrysler, et cetera at this game. [00:10:07] Uber, who was Lyft's main competitor, sold its self-driving business to a startup called Aurora back in December last year. Both of them had been working on these projects for four or five, six years; obviously things are going to change. [00:10:28] The self-driving vehicles are going to be on the roads starting next year. Ish. Ford's made some announcements, so has GM. We'll see ultimately what happens. Waymo, which is Google, of course, alphabet has a small taxi service in the Phoenix area. Nobody else is operating full driverless taxi services in the US yet. [00:10:54]Congratulations to Lyft and Uber for getting out of the self-driving business that not their business. [00:11:01] We see that more and more ransomware, not only is it way up but some police departments have gotten hit with it. [00:11:09] So, we'll tell you what's happening there. You're listening to Craig Peterson. It has been going up and up and hurting more and more people. In this case, we're going to talk about a police department. There's a briefing that the Boston field office of the FBI's giving on ransomware. If you are an infra guard member, FBI Infragard, I ran their training for a couple of years. [00:11:34] They've got another training. Coming up on ransomware and what's been happening out of the Boston field office, which covers all of New England. And I discovered and disclosed a huge hack. And it was the biggest one that the Boston field office said that they'd seen it. It was just absolutely incredible. [00:11:57] What had happened and businesses are just not. Paying attention. They're not paying attention; it isn't just businesses. It's also municipalities. It's counties, its state government, and it's the federal government of all of those. I got to say the federal government is trying the hardest, I think, to pay attention to the problem besides cybersecurity; of course, they take more money from us. [00:12:22] So they and Lee should have a better budget to do it with right. But there's a great little article this week in the newsletter. We usually get that on hold on Sunday morning, but this is by Dan Gordon. Over at ARS Technica. They will always have some great stuff, but some ransomware, bad guys have sand What they're calling stunning ultimatum to Washington. [00:12:50] DC's Metro Politan police department. The police department that handled the massive insurrection on January 6th. He said with his tongue firmly in his cheek, the guys that really know what they're doing down there, Washington DC. Ah, boy. So here's the ultimatum. Pay these ransomware guys $50 million, or they'll leak the identities of confidential informants to street gangs though, this group is called Bulk Locker, at least that's what they call themselves. [00:13:29] And they said on Monday that it had obtained 250 gigabytes worth of sensitive data after hacking. The metropolitan police department. Yeah, Washington DCS, metropolitan police department network. And this Babych site over on the dark web. When you go, there has dozens of images of what appeared to be legitimate, sensitive MPD. [00:13:58] Documents now these have been slightly blocked out so that people don't know what's going on. Exactly. So they've been It's anonymized. Let me put it that way, but it looks like these legit. I'm looking at some of them right now on the ARS Technica site. One screenshot shows a windows directory called disciplinary files. [00:14:24] Each of the 28 files shown lists a name and a check of four of the name shows. They all belong to Washington DC, metropolitan police department, officer's disciplinary actions, and looking at the dates on these files, they are from, they've all been modified anyways, within less well about the last year. [00:14:50] Give or take a little bit less. So that was just the first page of them, by the way. It looks like kids, the officers whose names start with a through E and a few apps, other images that are on, again, this Babych ransomware group's website on the dark web seemed to show persons of interests, names, and photos. [00:15:16] So they, these bad guys put up a screenshot of a folder named gang database, another chief's report lists of arrest and a document listing the name and address of at least one confidential informant. So it's got the date. It was entered, closed. The persons name, position, sex raised. Date of birth, social security number, mailing address, email phone number. [00:15:46] Yeah, the informant. Okay. So they said we advise now there's spelling errors in this. There are grammatical errors in this, which is expected. We advise you to contact us as soon as possible to prevent leakage. This is again on their dark web website. Quote, if no response is received within three days, we will start to contact gangs in order to drain the informant. [00:16:16] In other words, still let the gangs know who the squealers are. Her the informant within the gangs. Now this is classic. This next one. Just absolutely classic Washington. DC's. Public. This is again, metropolitan police departments, public information. Officer Hugh Carreyrou wrote in an email. We are aware of unauthorized access on our server while we determine the full impact and continue to review activity. [00:16:51] We have engaged the FBI to fully investigate this matter. So he didn't answer specific questions about what details, but here's the classic part of this. I bet you dollars per four donuts that they don't have the proper security in place. If you are a city or a County, you have rules which are called CJIS, which is the criminal justice. [00:17:18] I think information system rules for your securing. Of data and it has to do with the networks, how were they cannot be connected and can only be connected in certain ways and what you have to do. And you have to included in all of this log, everything. What do you want to bet they didn't log everything. [00:17:40] So they're calling in the FBI and we've done that too. We've done that when, again, we're not mandated reporters. If we see something suspicious, we call up the client, whether it's a city, a County, a state, a business, a DOD contractor or dentist's office. And we say, we found an indication or multiple usually indications of compromise, which means. [00:18:04] These things make it look like someone got into your systems. We then say this is not what we do here. This is a law enforcement issue, and we think that you should bring in the FBI and then they can talk to the FBI. We can work with the FBI to really figure things out. So the FBI can do the forensic work and make sure they capture everything needed to capture and how needed to be captured, et cetera, et cetera. [00:18:31]It's amazing. What's happening. But they are looking into this. I'm sure the FBI is involved most recently when we've had. Reports where we brought in law enforcement. We worked directly with the FBI, with their data security information, security team, James, and it's just amazing. People were not maintaining good cyber hygiene in this case, Washington DC, metropolitan police department. [00:19:03] Almost certainly. Was hacked by these hackers. They admit the MPD that they, something happened. I bet you, they don't know what happened. They probably broke these CJIS rules that every city, state and town and County has to comply with. It's absolutely amazing. And of course you remember now they've got this dual revenue model when it comes to ransomware. [00:19:32] Pay up now or pay up later, we will extort money from you either way. It's a, it's amazing. Amazing. Apparently this is a Russian group who knows who exactly it is. It's sponsored by the Russian government or not. We really don't know. [00:19:50]Cloud is a sensitive topic with me and it always has been it's hold, it holds a lot. Of promise. And the biggest promise to most businesses was, Hey, use cloud services, it'll save you money. And of course they have used cloud services and in some cases it's saved the money, frankly. [00:20:14] It's rare that it saves them money. It really depends on a lot of things, but if you using a service like Amazon's cloud services, and I'm speaking in generalities here, but it's probably going to cost you more than running your own server. Why do a lot of companies use cloud services? When it comes to general computing. [00:20:35] Now I understand. Why would you use Microsoft's? What does calls Microsoft three 60? It's because Microsoft is going to maintain it. They're going to patch it. I don't have to run a server. I don't have to worry about any of that stuff. Okay. I get that one. How about salesforce.com? I don't use Salesforce. [00:20:54] I use an alternative, but I can see why you'd want to use that. Unfortunately. In both cases, those services have been hacked and the company's data has been stolen. And you got to remember too, that you still bear responsibility for that lost or stolen data, even though you didn't lose or steal it. So keep that in mind, if you are a business now, when you are moving on to what are called containers, the whole world shifts. [00:21:25] Here's what's happening and been happening in computers over the last few years. There's something called containers. When I first heard about containers. I was thinking about these data centers that they put into shipping containers. And so you get a 20 foot or 40 foot shipping container, and all you do is plug in power and internet, and it's often running. [00:21:50] It has racks of computers inside that has all the cooling systems, all the power regulation systems, like while UPS's et cetera, it's got that fans in there to keep the air moving. It's got the tape drives to do the backups, all of this stuff. It's right there. So I that's how I always thought of containers. [00:22:11] That's not the case so much anymore. Those containers still exist. Some of them are used by Microsoft and Amazon still they'll throw containers into different areas, depending on usage. For instance, with the Olympics coming up, you can bet that there will be shipping containers. With huge data centers in them in order to...
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Tech Talk with Craig Peterson Podcast: DHS outsourcing the Terrorist and No-Fly Lists to Big Tech and Private Contractors, Apple De-Lists Apps and Misuse your Information, Autonomous Vehicle Safety
04/10/2021
Tech Talk with Craig Peterson Podcast: DHS outsourcing the Terrorist and No-Fly Lists to Big Tech and Private Contractors, Apple De-Lists Apps and Misuse your Information, Autonomous Vehicle Safety
Welcome! For all of my listeners who purchased my course on Improving Windows Security - THANK YOU! We have a whopper of a warning this week about what the Department of Homeland Security is planning under the Biden Administration -- They are going to let Big Tech and Private Companies create the NO-Fly and Terrorist Watch Lists on their behalf -- Scary beyond measure. Then Apple is doing more to protect your privacy. We have another hack of a Commercial VPN provider and there is more so be sure to Listen in. For more tech tips, news, and updates, visit - CraigPeterson.com. --- Tech Articles Craig Thinks You Should Read: Are self-driving cars safe? Will they ever be? Apple is enforcing its new privacy standards and rejecting apps - --- Automated Machine-Generated Transcript: Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] We're going to be talking about a fender bender in Arizona and when will these autonomous cars be safe, at least measured safe. We've got a new wave of app store rejections from Apple. That means a couple of things, including better privacy for all of us. Hello, everybody. Craig Peterson here. Thanks for joining us today. This is an interesting question, because we are looking at a future that we assume anyways is going to be full of autonomous vehicles. Why autonomous? What does it mean? There are various levels of autonomous, degrees, if you will. Everything from what we have today in a lot of cars, which is an assist cruise control, that'll keep you a certain distance from the car in front of you. We've got assisted braking control, where the car notices, Oh, wait a minute. Someone just hit the brakes right in front of you. I should apply the brakes and it hits the brakes even before your foot is pushing down. Another way to do this is if you slam your foot on the brake, the car assumes you know something that it doesn't, and it increases the force that you're pushing down with. So even though you might just hit the brake fast and not necessarily hard the car will make it hard. If you think about these types of braking, for instance, you can start to realize where we're running into a problem when it comes to defining whether or not autonomous vehicles are safe. Bottom line is autonomous vehicles, which are all the way on the other side of this scale, it started with the brakes and now is hopefully going to end with a car that just drives itself. That's everybody's goal, Ford and GM and Chrysler- Fiat, whatever they're called nowadays of course, these autonomous vehicle companies, such as Tesla. We're going to see a way of measuring them that's different than we've ever seen before. Right now, if you have a motor vehicle, you have a driver's license, most likely. And do you have insurance. Again, most likely and you have insurance because stuff happens. You don't really mean to hit something. You don't mean to wander out of your lane and end up in the woods. Right? There's a lot of different things that can happen to you, including having another driver get into your way. My wife has been rear-ended. I was rear-ended. She had a beautiful little car, a little MG, and I can tell to this day that she absolutely loved that little car and she used to drive it around and go down to work. I think it was at Baxter Travenol and she'd be driving down there, just having a great time in Southern California. While she was at a stoplight and somebody rear-ended her and totaled her car. Which is just an absolute shame that wasn't her fault. Was it? I got rear-ended, I've been ruined it, I think two or three times, never to the point that she was at, where the vehicle had major damage, let alone have to be written off, but it happened right. People aren't attentive. They misjudged the distance. It might be following too close for the conditions, rain or snow or fog or ice. There's a lots of reasons. So we have insurance and we have a driver's license to prove that we indeed at least understand the basics of driving. We passed a test, right? What is it? 70% pass rate, which frankly, isn't such a great rate if you get right down to it. Anyway, how do we measure these cars? I mentioned the rear end collisions for a very specific purpose. These autonomous cars are racking up millions of miles on roads out West, really California, Arizona is a very popular place for them to be tested because they don't have a whole lot of weather conditions to worry about. The roads are there and they're not changing very much, particularly in Southern California. They've all been built and there's not another square inch that isn't paved, including people's front lawn, which just absolutely boggled my mind. Why would you have a cement slab for front lawn anyways? That's California for you. These cars driving millions of miles in California are having accidents. They're not having these types of accidents you and I have. There is a police report that was obtained by the Phoenix new times this last week that revealed a minor Waymo related crash. Now this crash occurred last October and it isn't the only one. This is, kind of, a pattern, but these have not been publicly reported until now. I'm going to read here just a quick paragraph from what the new times in Phoenix had to say, "a white Waymo minivan" Waymo, of course, Google's little spinoff, to make these autonomous vehicles. "A white Waymo mini-van was traveling westbound in the middle of three westbound lanes on Chandler Boulevard in autonomous mode when it unexpectedly breaked for no reason." "A Waymo backup driver behind the wheel at the time told Chandler police that all of a sudden the vehicle began to stop and gave a code to the effect of stop recommended and came to a sudden stop without warning." A red Chevy Silverado pickup behind the vehicle swerved to the right, but clipped its back panel causing minor damage." No one was hurt. Overall Waymo has a pretty strong safety record. By the way, that was from an article over at ARS Technica. They have more than 20 million testing miles in the Southwest United States. If you think about it. I was adding these numbers up, 20 million miles. My wife and I, we have put well more than a million miles on cars. That's what happens when you have eight kids, right? Over the years you rack it up, 250,000 this car, 300,000 on that car. Yeah. It adds up. That's a lot of miles. If you start looking at how many miles the average person drives a year and start doing some comparisons with the accident numbers, you'll see really that the autonomous vehicles are having far fewer accidents. Fewer accidents involving a death, which is actually very good, but the accidents it's having, even though they tend to be minor are usually the fault of the other driver. A large majority, in fact of the accidents where these Waymo vehicles, this is according to Waymo, large majority of those crashes have been the fault of the other driver. So what is the fault of the other driver? Who was at fault here? If that red Chevy Silverado pickup truck hit that Waymo autonomous car, it's the Chevy's fault. Why did the Chevy do it? It isn't just because he's driving a Chevy or because it's red or a pickup, he hit that car most likely, I don't know, I'm not talking to the guy, but most likely because the car did something unexpected. If you read again, that police report it saying that even the driver quote unquote, in, in the Waymo car, this white minivan, who's sitting there to make sure the minivan doesn't run somebody over, that driver said, it was all of a sudden it began to stop. It all of a sudden began to stop and gave this code about a stop recommended and stopped with a warning. Put all of those things in a pot and stirred up and what do you have? You now have a different way of driving. See that Chevy Silverado, if he's a good driver, he's looking ahead right down the road. If you look too close in front of you, you're going to be over-correcting. You're going to be steering all over the place. You're not going to go in a straight line. So with experience, you're looking down the road, two, three, four minimum car lengths ahead. Depends how fast you're going and that's where you're aiming. You don't see an obstruction in front of that Waymo minivan. So you're not starting to slow down. It's just like I come up to your traffic light there's cars in front of me, and that light is red. I'm not going to be accelerating and then leaning on the brake, like so many people do. I see, there's a red light ahead. There's cars stopped at the light. I'm just going to coast to a stop. Right? Save some energy. You save some brake pads. Stop global warming by not heating up those brake pads. It's not something most people expect. I've never been rear-ended by doing that, but I've certainly been given the finger for doing that even though I tend to get to the cars in front of me, right? About the time the light turns green. It's fascinating to look at, but what's going to happen? What is ultimately the way to determine how safe these cars are? We cannot use the types of assessments that our insurance companies are using. Rear end collisions, like this, rarely get anyone killed. That's where the real high expenses come in. The driver in the back is usually considered to be at fault. But, what happens when the self-driving cars suddenly comes to the stop in the middle of the road. It's interesting to think about it, isn't it? Waymo's vehicles sometime hesitate longer than a human would because they have to do all kinds of computations and consider complex situations that they're not used to. If you've ever written code, say a hundred lines of code. It's going to be in case with cars millions of lines, but out of a hundred lines of code, about 90% of it is for the edge conditions. In other words, things that are unlikely to happen. So when something weird happens that car's going to hesitate, and that frankly is a problem, the idiosyncrasies of self driving cars. We're going to talk about a wave of app store rejections by Apple iOS for your iPhone, iPad, et cetera. We'll tell you why right here. You're listening to Craig Peterson, online Craig peterson.com. Apple is making another major change in order to give us more privacy. I just started this, Improving Windows Privacy and Security Course. If you using an Apple iOS device, you're halfway there. Hello, everybody. Craig Peterson here. Thanks for tuning in . You can always hear me [email protected] slash podcast. Apple has been really the only major vendor out there in the smartphone industry to really have security as their prime motivation. Okay, you could argue money istheir prime motivation, right? Apple has always tried to be secure. The hardware is quite secure. They haven't licensed their operating system to third parties and that gives them control. Like you can't have anywhere else. Think about all of the different Android-based smartphones that are out there. There are thousands of different models. Within each model, sometimes there are dozens of different hardware configurations. So, Google comes out with a security patch and sends it on out to the vendors, well actually makes it available for the vendors to pick up. Then the vendors go and grab it, and they have to test it, and they have to work in their own code, and then they have to work in all of the device drivers stuff, and they have to package it up. They have to test it on all of the different models. Just think about Samsung, how many models Samsung has, just by itself, a whole lot of models. It is almost impossible for Android phones to get security patches. Any Android phone that's more than two years old is guaranteed to not get security patches. I talked last weekend about what Samsung is doing to try and solve this. Finally, they must be listening to the show. Samsung had been more or less supporting it's top of the line models for about two years. If you bought a top of the line Galaxy phone from Samsung or another real top hot model, you might get security updates for a couple of years, and that's kind of it. Forget about it beyond that, which is why I said, if you absolutely must use Android, there's only one vendor you can use in that Samsung. There's only one model phone that you can buy, which is Samsung top of the line phone, and you have to replace it every two years. So Samsung has come out now and said, We're going to provide support security support for our phones for five years. So they're trying to compete with Apple here. Apple has long provided support for five years. And as we saw just a couple of weeks ago with this big act of zero day attack against Apple iOS devices. They will actually provide security updates for much longer than five years, but it's way easier to provide security updates for 30 models of phones than it is for a few hundred models, which is what Samsung has. Expect Samsung to narrow down their product line and also to only really be providing support for the top models within their product lines. Now, here's what Apple is doing right now. Apple is starting to reject some of these apps that have been in the app store for a long time, as well as new apps. They're rejecting them for a couple of reasons. The biggest reason is that as of iOS 14.5, Apple is requiring all of the vendors to tell you when you go to the app store, what information of yours they're storing, they're using, and they're selling. Okay. Pretty big deal. Isn't it? It's pretty bad deal, frankly, when you get right down to it for facebook and others. Facebook took out full page ads in major newspapers in the US saying, Oh, Apple can't do this. This is terrible. It's going to destroy a small business. They said, it's going to destroy small business because Facebook can't pry into our lives as much. You know how it is. People say all the time, they're saying, Hey, I, why am I getting these ads? I've never even searched for it and somehow it's coming up. There's a number of reasons why, but the bottom line is called big data. These apps like Facebook use all kinds of big data to figure out what we might like and part of that is based on what our friends are searching for. So, it puts together this massive mesh and figures it all out. Something that the Obama campaign really pioneered when Facebook gave them all of the data that they had on everyone and anyone. I'm sitting here shaking my head because somehow that's okay, but having this Cambridge Analytica company do some of it from a paid standpoint and not get wholesale data somehow that was the most evil thing that ever happened. They forgot about Obama, but you know, I guess that's political. I criticize both sides of the aisle. I am an equal opportunity criticizer. They deserve it. We've got Apple now telling Facebook and every other app developer, you have to tell the users. In fact, if you go right now to your phone, your iPad or your iPhone, or the iPod touch, you'll see if you go to the app and you scroll up. You can open a little tab and that tab will all of a sudden become a very big part of the screen because it's tell me what this app is doing with my data. If you don't tell it, Apple's going to block you from the store. Google has, of course, a bunch of apps. You've probably used them things like Google maps, which I try not to use. Use the Apple maps its gotten much, much better than it was, and they're not tracking you and selling your data like Google does. Google has its own little app for doing searches. Of course, you've got Google Chrome, all these different things from Google. Google stopped updating their apps on the Apple app store because Apple was telling Google, you have to tell people what your doing with their data. Google didn't want to do it. We just want to update the apps, kind of, loophole that was in this whole thing. They can't not update it forever. Now we're seeing rejections of these developers. Here is a few lines again from ARS Technica, from a rejection letter that some developers received. "We found in our review that your app collects user and device information to create a unique identifier for the users, devices, apps that fingerprint the user's device in this way are in violation of the Apple developer program license agreement and are not appropriate for the app store." Now, we're not talking about the fingerprint, as in the fingerprint reader, we're saying that they are looking for unique information about the phone, so they know it's you, they can put it all together. That letter goes on specifically, "your app uses algorithmically converted device and usage data to create a unique identifier in order to track the user." Apple is really making it clear now to developers. To the ire of Facebook and Google and other companies who rely on that type of tracking to maximize the advertising revenue. I can understand that, right. I really can. It's also clear that this app tracking transparency means that apps that are trying to track you by any means without your consent are going to face rejection. Bravo to Apple, yet again. Now I'm not so happy about the statement they made this week. Yeah, Georgia. That's another thing entirely. Stick around everybody. We will be right back talking more about technology. We're going to talk a little bit about what Google's planning to do in order to help with all of these Android developers and people that are selling them. Carriers, et cetera. How's Google is going to help them with their security updates. This is an interesting way to do it. It's exactly what Apple's been doing. You're listening to Craig Peterson. Apple's really gotten into the chip business and it isn't just because they wanted a chip for their iPhone that they could control. In fact, Apple has even gone further and looks like Google's going to do the same. Hello, everybody. Craig Peterson here. Google has been an interesting beast over the years. Remember they used to say that their motto was don't be evil. Then a few years ago they removed it from the website and evil seems to be their middle name, a little bit. One of the things Google has been doing is offering an operating system that can be used and is being used to run almost anything. We're talking mostly, however, about smartphones, certainly by number. That's called Android. Android was a little operating system, of sorts, that was developed by a kid actually Google bought it from him. They have continued to develop on it. It's not a bad little platform. The biggest problems with it really have to do with what I talked about a little earlier, the security, right? Getting the updates. I mentioned how Apple really has a walled garden. They have their own environment where everything is contained so they can control it all. Google cannot control anything other than the Google pixel phone. It cannot control what Samsung is doing with the operating system, Android can run on pretty much any chip that's manufactured from Intel chips, through all of these, a little fast chips, these snapdragons and many others that have been used over the years. There's a lot of them. One of the biggest problems, of course, is the chip set. I've mentioned that Google can come out with an operating system release to fix some security problems, and then those are pushed out, but nothing's done by the carrier or maybe the developer of the handset. What Google's decided to do is make their own walled garden. If you buy an Apple iPhone, you buy an Apple iPad, or you buy a new Apple Mac,...
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AS HEARD ON: WGAN Mornings News with Matt Gagnon: What's with All the Internet Outages Lately and Autonomous Cars -- Will they Ever be Safe?
04/07/2021
AS HEARD ON: WGAN Mornings News with Matt Gagnon: What's with All the Internet Outages Lately and Autonomous Cars -- Will they Ever be Safe?
I was on WGAN this morning with Matt Gagnon. He jumped right in with a question about the problems with the internet and why are there so many outages. Will they continue? What can be done? Then we talked about the Facebook hack and release of the personal information of 533 Million users and we wrapped up with a discussion about how long it will be until we have fully autonomous vehicles. Here we go with Matt. And more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com. --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Craig Peterson: Good morning, everybody. I was on with Mr. Matt Gagnon this morning and he is in Maine, as you probably know. I'm carried there through there are stations in Maine and parts of eastern New Hampshire and Southern Maine. Because of an outage, they had on the internet that hit parts of New Hampshire, as well as Maine he asked me about the internet backbone and much of it was kind of surprising to him. Frankly, I don't think it's really good news. [00:00:31]We also talked a bit about what's happening with autonomous vehicles. Why aren't they just everywhere already? When are we going to consider them safe? So here we go with Mr. Matt. [00:00:44] Matt Gagnon: So Craig, let's get to your topics and what we need to talk about with you here this morning, sir. Okay. So we had a huge power outage recently. We had a huge internet outage recently. Are we worried about this? Like in the future is this a sign of things to come? What caused it? I mean, what's going on here? [00:01:00] Craig Peterson: Yeah. There's well, there's a couple of different reports. One talks about breaks in two different fibers. There's a power problem. Here's, what's really going on behind the scenes. The major internet providers have multiple connections to the internet. Let's explain what the internet is to help really understand it. [00:01:19] The internet is an interconnected network of networks. There is no internet. It doesn't exist as you don't pay your bill to the internet. [00:01:32] Matt Gagnon: A United States Senator once called it a series of tubes as you recall. Right. [00:01:40]Craig Peterson: What happens is all of these different providers that we get it from, like spectrum, for instance, that had the outage. They all get internet connections to other providers. The idea is that the internet can have thousands of networks that are almost, you might call them backbones, but none of them really are right now. [00:02:02] Most of the data on the internet is actually being routed through Amazon who is running these big data centers. Spectrum will have a connection to a network provider over here and another provider over there. There are some major central hubs, if you will, of this internet connectivity. If you lose one piece of fiber and you are connected to the internet at different points using the other pieces of fiber, you're still okay. [00:02:33]If you only have two fiber connections to the internet itself, then you lose both of them. You are off the air. Whether it's because of a break or because of a power failure, it doesn't really matter. If you're going to be really reliable as an internet provider, you have to remember that upstream from you they could go down. [00:02:54] To now the big problem we're seeing now, nowadays. The internet was designed to withstand a nuclear explosion anywhere in the United States. We could lose the entire city of New York and the internet would still run. That's because again, all of these small networks together. [00:03:13] However, as time has gone on, we've seen happen to the internet that's happened in many other industries, there's been consolidation. [00:03:20] I mentioned Amazon handles much of the traffic for the internet, and frankly, Netflix is about half of the internet traffic on any given day. We now have, instead of thousands of these networks connected together, in reality, just a handful. [00:03:37] There's only really about a dozen that you might call backbones that almost everybody connects to. If you lose one of those, we're in big trouble. So, to answer your question, yes, this is something we can continue to expect more and more of. [00:03:53]One of the more troubling things is just within the last year a minor player in the internet backbone business. A small business bought one of the biggest companies out there and they just haven't been taking care of the internet. They were trying to keep the price low. They have people working for them. Some of them are brilliant. We've got a lot of them. This is brand new to them. They have brought the internet down a number of times over the last even six months. This is growing pains. I think it's going to get a little bit worse and I'm not sure it's going to get that much better. [00:04:31] Matt Gagnon: Well, that's a happy thought. Thanks a lot, Craig. Appreciate it. [00:04:33] Craig Peterson, our tech guru. You hear him not only here at this time, every Wednesday, but also on the same radio station you're listening to right now on Saturdays at one o'clock WGAN of course. Check out that for some more in-depth analysis and talk over many of these same topics. [00:04:47] Craig also, the Facebook hack. I have to ask you about here a little bit as well. Apparently, everybody now knows Mark Zuckerberg's phone number because of this. So tell me what happened and what's the fallout from it? [00:04:58] Craig Peterson: Yeah, it's about 533 million Facebook users. Their data was stolen and it has been sold and reused. [00:05:08] Now this type of data is data that is used for phishing, which is trying to fool us. They got all kinds of information about all these half a billion Facebook users. They had Zuck's name, his location, his marriage information, date of birth, Facebook user ID, his phone number. [00:05:28] But they had it on half, a billion, other people as well. [00:05:32] Absolutely crazy, what happened? [00:05:35]The hackers have been selling this information to other bad guys if you will for about two years. They no longer have any, any buyers for this data, you know, half a billion people's personal information. So they posted it openly on the internet for anyone to download, not just their network of friends that have been paying them. [00:06:00]You've just got to love the response that came from our friends over at Facebook when they were asked about it. This was the Daily Mail that asked by the way. The Facebook spokesman said, this is old data that was previously reported on in 2019. Okay, but don't you care that you've got half a billion people's personal information. [00:06:23] It's been resold, sold for quite a while, and just on Saturday, it was posted for free for anyone on the internet. [00:06:33] So, it's okay. Obviously, the same old stuff, right? Make sure you change your password. Use two-factor authentication, get one password as a password manager, but what's really upsetting to me is the nonchalant attitude. [00:06:49] All of these things, businesses have, including the Equifax's of the world. Remember they didn't just steal your basic in personal information, Equifax, they stole everything. They show your income, your job history, they stole your social security number. According to reports out there, it was all of this information and more. No one is going to prison over this. There have been no charges, one or two people lost their jobs. That's the extent of it. [00:07:19] We have to get these large companies to really honor our data, keep it private and respond in a reasonable way. Not, Oh, it's yesterday's news. [00:07:35] Craig Peterson joins us at this time every Wednesday to go over what's happening in the world of technology really quickly. [00:07:40] Matt Gagnon: Craig, we only have a couple of minutes left maybe, but I wanted to ask you about self-driving cars. Does the question continue to remain about these things if they're ever going to be safe? I continue to believe that someday none of us are driving anything any more. Am I right? [00:07:52] Craig Peterson: Yeah, you are absolutely correct. The Jetson's world might come our way. [00:07:56] There are now autonomous cabs, basically, uber's in some cases that will fly. So yeah, it'll eventually be there. The problem we're seeing is how do we evaluate them as you mentioned, are they safe? Well, how do you define safe? One of these autonomous cars is going to react differently in a situation, than a human driver. [00:08:19]That's the problem we've had. Most of the accidents that have happened with the autonomous vehicles that are already on the road have been rear renders. Not them rear-ending somebody, but somebody rear-ending them. We have as drivers, certain expectations as to how another driver's going to behave on the road and these cars do not behave the same way. [00:08:42] So its going to be a little while. If they were all autonomous now, that probably would go away. This is going, this problem, for a good 20 plus years, I think. [00:08:51] Matt Gagnon: All right. Well, Craig Peterson, our tech guru. You can hear him here, not only every Wednesday but on Saturdays at one o'clock. [00:08:56] Thanks a lot, Craig. Appreciate it as always. . We'll talk to you again next week. [00:08:59] Take care, Matt. Bye-bye. [00:09:00] Hey, one last reminder. I have discount coupons for people who are signing up for my Improving Windows Privacy and Security course. [00:09:10]If you haven't signed up yet, you don't have much time because this is closing on Friday night at midnight. [00:09:17] It is a phenomenal course. It is designed for basic users all the way through intermediate. Of course, as usual, I've got the whole guarantee thing going on. I think you're really going to like it. [00:09:29]We're probably gonna do a couple of phone calls as well. Maybe a little webinar you can call in if you'd rather, but all of that is on my email. You know, if you don't sign up right now, you're not going to find out about it. [00:09:41]When it goes onto my site, it is going to be full price. It's only now that you can get the coupon. So you might want to email me M [email protected] If you haven't signed up already, or if you want more details. [00:09:54] I am more than glad to send them to just open your email and send it to me. M [email protected] I'd be glad to send you all the details you'd like. [00:10:04]Of course this weekend I will be back as well. [00:10:07] Take care everybody. [00:10:10] Bye-bye. --- 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: Google Decides What you Can and Cannot See
04/06/2021
AS HEARD ON - The Jim Polito Show - WTAG 580 AM: Google Decides What you Can and Cannot See
Good morning, everybody. I was on this morning on WTAG with Jim Polito. Jim had been discussing doing his Show prep and how frustrated he was that he could not find more attributions for a story he wanted to discuss. I hopped on the phone and explained to him what was happening. Then when I joined him we continued the conversation about how Google is controlling your searches and what you can do about it. Here we go with Jim. For more tech tips, news, and updates, visit - . --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Hello everybody. Boy, did I have an object lesson for Mr. Jim Polito this morning! It was actually a whole lot of fun. We talked about Yemeni terrorists. That doesn't sound like much fun, they have snuck across the border. Terrorists on the terror watch list. At least we apprehended these guys. Do a Google search and you're getting crickets. So, I explained why. I explained how they are obviously suppressing it. The right search engines to use out there. We spent the whole time talking about just that. So here we go with Mr. Polito Jim Polito: [00:00:38] Tomorrow is national beer day, in the United States, it's not a Canadian holiday. See, it goes back to April 7th, 1933, where President Roosevelt, in turning over prohibition, said people could make and brew their own beer as long as it wasn't more than 4% alcohol. How about some of those microbrews out there, Danny, like 10.2%? There's one from the Trappist 10.2%. Danny : [00:01:10] I think it was high as 15 now, yeah. Jim Polito: [00:01:12] It's crazy. Anyway, speaking of beer, which is the national beverage of Canada, we are joined now by our good friend, tech Talk guru. Craig Peterson. Good morning, sir. Craig Peterson: [00:01:26] Hey, good morning. Canada had prohibition too. Jim Polito: [00:01:30] Oh, they did? I didn't know that. Craig Peterson: [00:01:32] Yeah. A few times that you had these municipal bands in the late 19th century provincial bands in the early 20th and national from 1918 to 1920. Jim Polito: [00:01:44] Wow. I learned something. Listen, Craig Peterson: [00:01:47] I love those Trappist beers, by the way. Jim Polito: [00:01:50] Those Trappist beers are great. The problem is they're made under strict rules and there have to be Trappist monks working in the process and there aren't enough Trappist monks to produce the beer for the demand. It's a great beer. I just want you to know that every July 1st I do have a Molson on Canada day. Craig Peterson: [00:02:10] All right. Labatts is acceptable. Jim Polito: [00:02:14] Yeah, Labatts. I used to like Moosehead was a good beer too. Moose. Head was a good beer. Craig Peterson: [00:02:20] Yeah. Jim Polito: [00:02:20] All right. Let's get to this. We're joined now by Craig Peterson and all kidding aside. Craig Peterson, our tech talk guru helped us earlier in the show. We're going to talk about Facebook and the hacking of personal data. But let's get to something that just came up. I'm talking on the show about two Yemenis who are on the terror watch list. It's not getting a lot of attention. They walked across the border, they entered the country illegally and they're on a terror watch list. One of them had a SIM card hidden in his shoe. Some AP reported on it, but you try to find this story through Google and actually social media. It's not there. Craig, could you please explain to me why it's not there? Craig Peterson: [00:03:08] It's very simple. If you do a Google search and there's no real results, it's obviously fake news. Jim Polito: [00:03:19] Folks are mice. Danny's having trouble getting the actual document. That was the release. The folks from the border patrol said Monday, two men who were on the US government watch list for terrorism and also on the no-fly list. They walked across the border. They're Yemeni men and we all know what's going on in Yemen right now. Craig Peterson: [00:03:42] Yeah, it's a real problem. And again, all kidding aside on my part. There is a huge problem that almost no one is aware of in this country. That is, we are now living under an oligarchy. We don't really have any form of democracy anymore. This isn't a Republic. This is an oligarchy that is funded by the tech giants. You might call them tyrants, frankly. We complain about Russian oligarchs, yet we are allowing companies like Google to not only have all kinds of lobbyists in Washington, DC, making sure that their favorite politicians become millionaires, but they are covering for them. If you do Google search this morning on these Yemeni men to try and find out more, almost nothing comes back. There are some good search engines and I talk about these all of the time, but the one that I think right now is one of the best and it's the one that I use for everything except for technical searches. If I'm doing a search on how to do this in programming or whatever I might use Google for that. If there might be any sort of a slight political bent to it, I use duckduckgo. As you saw this morning, There's a huge difference in the result. Jim Polito: [00:05:06] Yes, Danny, you've encouraged me to use duckduckgo and, just like my doctors encouraged me to lose weight and you're both good experts and have my best interests in mind, it doesn't become a priority. I'm telling you, after this morning, I won't be losing any weight, but I will be using duck go from now on, in a lot of my show prep because I really think it was an accident that I found this story. I do intense show prep I'm everywhere. I found this story and again, I don't know, maybe Fox is running with it today. Maybe it'll get a little traction. I don't know. But that these two guys crossed the border. This is exactly what we were talking about. Craig Peterson: [00:05:48] The influence that Google is having on elections is astounding. There was, I should pull up this article here, but I'm not going to Google it. I'm going to duck go it. Who looked at voting in Orange County, California. Now Orange County has always been known as a conservative bastion. The only one other than Northern California in the state of California. So he had a close look at what was going on and the way he looked at it is he spent some time on searches as though they're coming from Orange County. So, he is using the VPN to do that stuff. He was searching on Google and he found a huge manipulation going on. I think is the word he used were 90 to 95% of all the results favored the Democrat. No matter what you were searching for when it came to the issues in the election. It was absolutely amazing. We've also seen Project Veritas, which of course everybody's heard of before. They had an expose, just this is October last year. I think it was. They exposed Google's election influence where senior Google executives named Ashwin Agrawal said there are many ways to influence elections, I think ads are one way another is through search results. YouTube is going to be another one. He said this is a quote from him via ProjectVeritas. The truth is the deep platform is influencing you in a way you didn't sign up for. Okay. Jim Polito: [00:07:24] Wow. Craig Peterson: [00:07:24] It's absolutely insane that we're allowing these oligarchs to run our lives. You were talking earlier today about what's happening with baseball and the major league and where were we going to play. Georgia's evil. We're seeing people now reading a headline and the headline can be absolutely false. Joe Biden's actually getting Pinocchio's, now. Washington Post. Jim Polito: [00:07:51] Oh, yeah. He said you weren't going to be able to vote after five o'clock. Lie. You couldn't get water in the line. Lie. You just can't get water in line from a political party candidate or a movement. Okay. You can get water in line from anybody else. Okay. There wasn't going to be voting on Saturdays. Lie. Two Saturdays are mandated. Lie. It just everybody's not a big deal. Craig Peterson: [00:08:16] They retweet it. They talk about it. They saw the headline, what Joe Biden said. We know that a falsehood repeated enough times, all of a sudden becomes the truth. Jim Polito: [00:08:25] It came from the Nazis. It literally, came from the Nazis. It was Goebbels and Hitler. Repeat the lie enough and it becomes the truth. Craig Peterson: [00:08:36] The bigger, the lie, I don't even want to get into it right now. Jim Polito: [00:08:40] Cause you never want to drag the Nazi card in. This is appropriate. That's the Nazi card that isn't it. Craig Peterson: [00:08:47] You mentioned Hitler and you lose. Jim Polito: [00:08:49] I try not to, other than the Seinfeld episode with the Soup Nazi, I try not to, I try not to do that. Craig Peterson: [00:08:57] We're we are being governed by Oligarchs, because we're using Facebook, we're using Google. We're using some of these platforms that we're getting our news from, quote-unquote, that we're getting our information about the election, about what's happening with our government. In fact, we're being manipulated in a very big way. Yeah, I'm glad. I'm with duck duck go, that's it. You know what, we can get to the Facebook stuff some other time. I know your recommendation is going to be to people. Hey, by the way, you should be changing your password for Facebook and making it a difficult one and using one of those great password management systems. You know what really upsets me about that just real quick. They expose over half a billion people's personal information, including phone numbers, everything. Here's Facebook's response to it when they were asked, you gave away names, phone numbers, email, home addresses. What's going on here, it was all stolen from you? The response. Yeah, that's old news that happened in 2019. You kidding me? That's where the fraud comes from. That's where our information is sitting out there. We've got the phishers out there who are trying to get at the information. We're not keeping our privacy straight, which is why I've got this course started this week on improving your windows, privacy, and security. We have to take control of this. How many people do you know Jim? How many people, the Equifax hack, right? Hundreds of millions of people whose information was exposed. We've got this huge Facebook hack. How many people are serving federal prison sentences of 10 years or more? Jim Polito: [00:10:37] I'm just checking here. Nobody. Craig Peterson: [00:10:43] Exactly. You cannot get a new social security number. They won't give you one. You're not going to move. You bought this house. You're going to be there for a decade and more, your address isn't going to change. We are in so much trouble and the government doesn't care. They're not doing enforcement on this stuff. People are not going to prison. Companies are looking at it as a risk analysis. We've talked about this before. It's just crazy. What's going on and Facebook's response should be enough for everybody to just cancel their account. Yeah. That's Mark Zuckerberg. Craig, this is great. Tell us quickly about how folks can be part of and participate in this great program that you're doing. All right. Just go to Craig peterson.com/subscribe. You'll get my weekly newsletter. You'll get all the show notes that I sent Jim, that we didn't talk much about them today. My whole radio show, which of course airs here as well on Saturday and Sunday. Make sure you're listening to that weekend. I'll let you know about this course on improving your windows privacy and security it's for home users. It's for beginners up to intermediate. I'm trying to help out the people that really aren't techies Jim Polito: [00:11:52] Sounds great. Craig, no, listen. This is while you're invaluable because you can come together with us and show us. Today was a perfect example of that and that's why we really appreciate your time. So, sir, you have a great day and we'll talk to you soon. Craig Peterson: [00:12:07] You too, Jim. Bye-bye. --- 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 WGIR-AM 610:Leaked personal Facebook data and What is DHS thinking by Having Private Contractors to Compile Watch Lists
04/05/2021
AS HEARD ON NH Today WGIR-AM 610:Leaked personal Facebook data and What is DHS thinking by Having Private Contractors to Compile Watch Lists
Welcome, Craig Peterson here. This morning I was on with Chris Ryan on NH Today. We discussed first the big data dump of 533 Million Facebook user accounts available now for free online. Then he hit out of the park with this new news from the DHS who are now going to contract BIG TECH data and private contractors to compile lists of dissidents and create watch lists -- OMG what could possibly go wrong with this? It is outright dumb! Here we go with Chris. These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit. - --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Well, there's another animated Monday morning with Christopher Ryan. We had a chat let's say, you can tone it down a little bit here, about two different things. One, the hackers that leaked the 533 million Facebook users online just posted it up there. We talk about why? What happened? Why aren't they selling it? We talked about, as well as I think Chris understood what I meant when I sent him this article. He hit it out of the park Homeland security. They're going to be using private contractors, big tech, it appears here to help them track down citizens that they feel might be dangerous. What are the repercussions of that? We're getting into it all here with Mr. Chris Ryan. Chris Ryan: [00:00:54] It's right now Craig Peterson. He is the host of Tech Talk, which comes up at 11:30 AM on Saturday. So, I am the opening act for Craig Peterson. Craig Peterson: [00:01:05] Wow. I've got to follow you. Chris Ryan: [00:01:08] Yeah. Me and Gucci. Yeah. Good luck, pal. So let's start with this, Mark Zuckerberg's cell phone number was among leaked personal data for 533 million Facebook users. Hackers were able to get into Facebook and get a hold of Zuckerberg's cell phone, along with personal data from 553 million users. Quite a story there. Craig Peterson: [00:01:35] You heard about that? Yeah. Did you see the response from this Facebook spokesman? He said this is old data, we fixed it in 2019, in August 2019? Yeah. I think is a very, very big deal. It has been sold and resold amongst cybercriminals for quite a while. It's a lot of data. Saturday's leak that happened makes it all essentially free now. That's probably because the hackers just can't sell it anymore. Anybody that wanted your personal information already has it. Right.? Chris Ryan: [00:02:13] It also shows the lack of transparency from Facebook. Right? I mean, that answer is wanting to make it seem like, Oh yeah, everything's fixed now. That was two years ago. But they In my view and to my knowledge did not release that they had been hacked in this substantive way in 2019. If memory serves and now it's like, Oh yeah, this has happened a long time ago. Now that the information has been released because of the lack of ability to sell it. Only now, are they making a public correct? Craig Peterson: [00:02:42] Yeah. That's exactly right. This is information from people, Facebook users in 106 countries. It includes their phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, that's addresses, by the way, birthdate, and email addresses. What this data's been used for, are these phishing scams that we've talked about so many times where people are getting an email, it looks legitimate and it sounds legitimate and it might even be happy birthday from Facebook. In reality, it's a Nigerian Prince that's behind that kid. Chris Ryan: [00:03:17] What do you do if you feel like you've been hacked? You're getting these types of emails. We all get phone calls or text messages, at times, from scammers. What do you do in those circumstances where you feel like you are in jeopardy, but you don't feel like there's a recourse. You call the FBI and you'll be like on hold for eight years and then no one ever gets anything. Local police don't have jurisdiction. Is there any recourse for a person that feels that they're vulnerable and that they've been hacked and that they're getting these types of scams set in their direction? Craig Peterson: [00:03:51] Well, this is just you and me talking here, Chris. The reality is there's not much you can do. There are apps that you can put on your phone to help stop those calls. Things like, Hiya, H I Y A that's what I use. That has a scammer database. You can go to the internet. Crime complaint center online. This is the FBI's center, and you'll see that at ic3.gov. IC3.gov, again. All you have to do is go there. You can report an internet crime, but the reality is there's not much it's going to happen. It's very, very upsetting to me. Sometimes I felt like screaming about this and we'd talk about it frequently on my weekend show, but the problem is you have lost your personal private information. Most of us, don't move every few months. So, that address that they have of our home, that we may have lived in for years, that's not going to change. Our name's not going to change most likely. The social security administration will not give us a new social security number, even when it's been stolen. By the way, probably all of ours have been stolen. Right? So, all you can do is grin and bear, keep an eye out, watch out for your privacy. In fact, this week, I'm starting a course on privacy for windows users, what to do to lock down your windows machine. All you can really do go to I c 3 dot gov report it. If you have had money stolen, it'll tell you about this on this FBI site, but you're going to have to file a police report depending on what has happened. Overall, almost all of our information is out there and you know what, maybe it's okay because all of those people from Equifax, they're all in prison now, aren't they for like 20 or 30 years? Oh, well, nothing happened to them. There were no teeth behind these laws. Our lives are getting just upturned, and then not to add one more thing to this. Chris, we are now looking at some of the use of other ways of authentication. Right? They're talking about having these passes for the Coronavirus vaccine. They're looking to use things like our eye scans, retinal scans, face scans, fingerprint scans. Look at the people at the airports. You might remember that from a year plus ago would go through them, the super-fast lane. Right. Just go up and it would scan their eyes. Well, you think it's hard to change your social security number? How hard is it to get new eyes? Right? We're now in Tom cruise territory here where you can't change your eyes. You can't change your fingerprints. You can't change your face. And yet we're going to use those as identifiers. We should have learned just by having our social security numbers, et cetera, stolen and no real consequences, not just for the people that stole it, but from the people that weren't protecting it. Chris Ryan: [00:06:52] Right. I want to get to a huge story that NBC News is reporting on, but we have not really seen a rise to the forefront of the public consciousness. That is the US Department of Homeland Security. Is getting set to hire public companies and individual contractors outside of government to get data and information on individuals to compile new terrorist watch lists. DHS is going to pay big tech, Google, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, the contracts to hire and organize internal monitoring teams to assist the government by sending information on citizens, they deemed to be Quote dangerous. NBC says that the developments are taking place. The US intelligence apparatus is preparing to go live with the assembly of lists of Americans who could be potential threats to the government and need to be watched. Again, the question here is in regards to where the line is drawn. Are you a dissident, if you use language that is in opposition to the government? The current administration? The past administration? In regards to the president, if you don't like the way the government operates or if you are vociferous in regards to that? Where does the line get drawn? To me, this is a significant piece that the US Department of Homeland Security is engaged in. Craig Peterson: [00:08:14] You hit it out of the park, absolutely. As you're out of the park. The red Sox couldn't hit it out. You just did. The problem here is where is that line? You know what that line of, Oh my gosh, you're obviously a dissident cause you're planning on bombing the world trade center using an airplane. Okay, that's an obvious line, but as it continues to slide, that's a matter of interpretation. So if you have somebody making the decision about something that someone else said, and deciding, well I'm, I'm the decider and I think this is hurtful. This person might be a terrorist. This doesn't work. Look at what we've already had for proof. Some of these horrific things where there have been shootings at school, et cetera, where that shooter, that murderer had been on the police radar. It had been reported. They were threatening to kill people and nothing happened. So now we're going to take an action here that we've never before really done much with and we're going to apply it to the entire nation. We're going to use algorithms that are going to look at what people are saying and classify them as to the degree of risk and then what are we going to do with those people? Are people gonna end up like the Uighurs in China and end up in camps? This is absolutely huge. Chris Ryan: [00:09:41] We got to run, but, I look at this from my perspective as an individual that is often critical of the government. I also am an individual that will use social media and Google in order to do research. So, if there's a pipe bomb that is laid outside of the RNC or the DNC after the insurrection of the US capital during, or actually before, I'm going to research that well. What is a pipe bomb? How does it go about being assembled? What's its lethality? So, now I am a potential dissident who is doing research online about pipe bombs. See what I'm saying, see where this is going. I am Chris Ryan. This is New Hampshire today. Craig Peterson is with us. Thank you so much. Craig Peterson: [00:10:16] There's a hard cut. Hey, you should check your email box. If you haven't already. If you are interested in Improving Your Windows, privacy, and security, I have a course we've been working on it for months. We've gone through multiple iterations. We wanted to make this the best course you have ever had. If you're on my email list, you already know. If you were on it before this whole thing started that I am, in fact, giving you guys a great, great, great, great, great deal. So, check your email box. If you haven't already. Let me know, respond to me, this isn't a click-through autoresponder type thing. This is Karen and I that write these. I want to make these things personal, and I have a communication with you guys, right? I'm tired of all of this tech stuff and trying to twist people's arms and fool them into buying things. So, that will not happen. It does not happen with me. In fact, we were already working on what are we going to do next? We've got some great ideas in place, but right now it's Improving Windows Security. Of course, privacy is the emphasis here in this first set. It is five modules we're releasing over the course of about a month and you can get all of that. I'm even going to throw in, and I haven't told anybody yet, but I'm going to have a couple of live Q&Acalls too, for people if you are a member of this course. If you've bought it you can be on those calls and I'll answer your personal computer questions that is live and on a webinar, you can call in on your phone too. If you're not into the whole, how do I use my camera? I don't even want to use my camera. Isn't this a privacy course? Why are you making me use my camera? You can just go on your phone as well. All right. Everybody keep an eye out for that. If you are not on my email list, if you don't know about this, you can just go to Craig peterson.com/subscribe. You'll get on my list and you'll get some follow-up emails. But this is going to be a busy week for me and I am going to be out for almost two weeks coming up the week after. So busy, busy, busy times. All right, everybody, take care and we'll talk again soon.
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Tech Talk with Craig Peterson Podcast: What really happened in TX, New MAC malware, Apples Electric Vehicles and More
04/03/2021
Tech Talk with Craig Peterson Podcast: What really happened in TX, New MAC malware, Apples Electric Vehicles and More
Welcome! We have had a very busy week this week so this is a reply of the show aired the end of February. I'll be back next week. It was also another busy week on the technology front and we are going to delve into what actually caused the energy problems in Texas. There is a new type of malware that is affecting Macs and it is has a different MO. Then we are going to discuss Apple and their ventures into automated electric cars and what we can expect. Why are states having issues making appointments for vaccines? In a word, it is bureaucratic incompetence. Then we have a new type of hack out there. It is called Buy-to-Infect and there is more so be sure to Listen in. For more tech tips, news, and updates, visit - CraigPeterson.com. --- Tech Articles Craig Thinks You Should Read: --- Automated Machine-Generated Transcript: Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] You probably know I've been doing cybersecurity now for 30 years in the online world. Yeah, that long. I'm afraid I have some confessions to make about our relationships here, cybersecurity people, and employees. Hi everybody. Craig Peterson here. I'm so glad to be here. I'm happy you're here as well. There are so many ways to listen. I got pulled into this whole business of cybersecurity quite literally, kicking and screaming. I had been already involved in the development of the internet and internet protocols for a decade before. In fact, one of the contracts that I had was with a major manufacturer of computer systems. What I did there was design for Unix systems a way to check for malware, a way to manage them remotely. Yes indeed, I made one of the first RMM systems, as we call them nowadays. We also tied that RMM system, of course, into Windows and a few other operating systems. Unix was where I was working at the time. I am what they called an OG in the industry. My gosh, my first job with computer networks was back in 75. Believe it or not a long time ago. Back then, of course, it was mainframe to mainframe basically and some of the basic protocols, the RJE, and stuff. I know I've got a lot of older people who are listening who are saying, yeah, I remember that. It brings back memories. In fact, I got a note just this week from a listener who was saying his first computer was a Sinclair. Do you remember those things? Oh my gosh. It brought back so many memories for us older guys. But it was just such a cool little device with the keys and much different than I'd ever seen before. The XZ81. I just looked it up online so I can remember what the model number was. That was made by Timex. If you can believe that too. It's just. Wow. It had a Z 80 CPU, which of course was like an 8080, which was Intel's, big chip at the time, running at 3.25 megahertz. Yes, indeed. Very cool. I love that computer anyways. I digress. The whole industry at the time was non-existent, yeah. You had antivirus software. We started seeing that in the eighties and we had some terrible operating systems that many people were running like Windows, just absolutely horrific. Remember windows three-point 11 and XP and the millennial edition just some of the most terrible software ever. That's what happens when you have interns? A lot of the code, it came out in one of the lawsuits, for one of these versions of Windows. It was a different world and I had to figure out what was going on because I had some servers that were Unix servers. This was the early nineties and I was hosting email for companies and websites and doing some filtering and things with some kind of precursor to SpamAssassin. It was really something. I had some DECservers, Digital Equipment Corporation. Remember those guys and all of a sudden customers started calling me because the email wasn't working. It turned out it was working, but it was extremely slow and I had to figure out why. I telneted to my server. I got on, started poking around the servers. I had a computer room and the first floor of the building that I owned and I was up on the second floor. Off we go looking around trying to figure out what is going on. It was me actually. I said us, but it was really me. Cause I knew the most about this stuff. There were these processes that just continued to fork and I was trying to figure out why is it creating all these new processes. What's going on? What has happened here? Back then, The internet was a much different place. We trusted everybody. We had fun online. We would spam people who broke our almost unwritten rules of the internet about being kind to other people. What spam was, where the whole term comes from is you would send the script from Monty Python spam and eggs, spam and ham spam, spam, spam routine. You just send it to somebody that was breaking these unwritten rules, like trying to sell something on the internet. Absolutely verboten. What a change to today. I saw some of this stuff going on. I was trying to figure out what it was, but, we trusted everybody. So my mail server was Sendmail, at the time. We still maintain some instances of Sendmail for customers that need that. Nowadays. It's usually more something like postfix in the backend. You might have Zimbra or something out front, but postfix in the backend. We allowed anybody on the internet to get on to our mail server and fix some configuration problems. They didn't have full access to everything. Firewalls weren't then what they are today. In fact, one of our engineers just had to run out to a client who did something we told them not to do. They were using the Sonic wall firewall on their network as well as they had our stuff. So we had a really good Cisco firepower firewall sitting there, and then they have this SonicWall so that they're people, remotely could connect to the Sonic wall firewall, because it's good enough. SonicWall says it's compliant. The SonicWall firewall was being used to scan the network and load stuff. Does that sound familiar? Much to our chagrin. So he had to run out and take care of that today. It sounds like we might have to do a rip and replace over there restore from backups. You have no idea what these bad guys might've done. We've seen Chinese into these networks before, Chinese malware. It's been really bad. Boy, am I wandering all over the place? Back to this, we would allow people to get onto our network to fix things. If something was wrong, if we were misconfigured, they could help us and they could get on and do it because Sendmail configuration was not for the faint-hearted. In the days before Google, right? Eventually, we had Archie and Veronica, and Jughead. They did basic searches across FTP servers. That's my kicking and screaming story. I was trying to run a business where we hosted email for businesses, which we still do to this day, and where we had some, back then we didn't have websites. The web didn't come in into play until a couple of years later, but we did host FTP sites for businesses so that they could share files back and forth. That's what I wanted to do. That was my business. Later on, I ended up helping 80% of my clients find the other web hosts after, these $8 Gator hosting things. We just got a call on that this week. Somebody who'd been a client of ours 20 years ago, went with a guy that charges $5 a month for web hosting. They have personally identifiable information on that site if you can believe it. He was complaining because it wasn't working he was getting a C-panel error anytime he went to the site. We said, Hey, listen, this problem is the guy that you're hosting from. We did a little research and we checked the IP address and how many sites we're at that IP address. This guy that was charging them $5 a month had 150 different websites at that one IP address. Now that's not bad. He was hosting all of these 150 at a site, the charges, the eight to $10 a month for web hosting. He had all of these sites on top of a machine that was already split up hundreds of ways. It's just amazing what people do. Man alive. We got rid of 80% of those customers, the ones that wanted cheap, that's fine, get cheap, and see what happens to you. Some of them, we still maintain a good relationship with and so we help them out from time to time, right? What am I going to do? So somebody calls me, I gotta help them. That's precisely what we do now with this malware problem. What's going on here? We talked already about the Great Suspender and how Google has said, Hey, this now has malware in it, so we're removing it from your web browsers. That to me makes a ton of sense. Why not do that? This is another example of what happened with SolarWinds. This is an example of a supply chain infection. What happened with that? Somebody bought Great Suspender from the developer and then added in this basically malware to the Great Suspender. Just it's a terrible thing. Very surprising, but one of the biggest exploits that are being used by the bad guys right now is the security team's poor relationship with other employees within the organization. I promise we'll get to this a little bit more and explain the bottom line here. What's going on and it goes back to this customer that we just had to run out to. Why did they do what we told them not to do? Stick around. We're getting into the battle between cybersecurity senior officers in companies, owners, business owners, and the, even the employees. There has been such a battle going on. I saw two examples this week. Hi, everybody, it's a difficult world out there, but I find some comfort in listening to, of course, news radio. It keeps me up to date on what's going on. It helps me to really understand the world a lot better. I mentioned that one of my guys just had to run out to a client who did something we absolutely told them not to do. They had been using this company that was a break-fix shop, I guess is the way you would put it. They had a business that would respond to problems and they charge by the hour. I think right now their hourly rate is like 160 bucks or something. It is not cheap, but anyhow, That they would sell people equipment and then move on, right? Your problems aren't my problems. Just leave me alone, go away. It's a beautiful model because their employees at this break-fix shop don't have to understand much. They just have to know more than you do as a customer. There's one level of understanding that you have, and for someone to appear to be an expert, all they have to do is have slightly more understanding. That has bothered me so many times listened to the radio and they talk about somebody that's just this great expert, in reality, of course, they are not. But you don't know. That person talking about the expert doesn't know either because they just don't have enough knowledge. Of course, the person that's labeled the expert isn't going to say anything about it. They were doing what most companies do, which is okay. We know we need a firewall, so let's get a firewall. They went out and they talked to this company and they did their Google research because of course, Dr. Google is an expert on everything. Even with those differing opinions, you're going to go with the opinion that you like the best. That's what they did. They bought a Sonic wall firewall from this vendor, which was a break-fix shop. Now that's all well, and good. The sonic wall is not terrible stuff. They've got some amazing stuff as well. The problem is this device has been out of support for more than two years now. Even though they're not as advanced as some of the systems we can install, not that we always use the most advanced systems. It's not a bad, a little thing for a small business. We warned them that because they were using an out-of-date firewall that they could not get fixes for known vulnerabilities. Now that's a big deal too. Most people are not aware of the vulnerabilities that are on their machines. Do you go out every month and check the firmware versions on your firewall? You should be, even if you're a home user. Are you checking to make sure the firewall that the cable company provided you with is up to date, configured correctly? You've changed the password and the admin username, right? No? Most people haven't. He hadn't, right. He didn't know. We told them we did a little research and said here's your problem. That's part of his cyber health assessment. We told them what kind of firewall do you have? What's the version of software on it and we do that. We have a bunch of people that have asked for cyber health assessments. We've got them on a list because we're busy. So we have to schedule these and make them happen. So we said, do not plug that machine in. Of course, what do they do? They plugged it back in again. So now all of a sudden this morning, we get a wake-up call from our monitors that are running they're on their Cisco firepower firewall, where we have their extensive suite of additional software. This isn't just an off-shelf, Cisco firewall. It's telling us that the SonicWall or something through our, via the SonicWall. Is going through all this customer's network. It's actually attacking the Cisco firewall from inside the network. Absolutely amazing. Why does that happen? In this case, the business owner, and it is a very small business. It has about 5 million in revenue per year, I would guess. It's a small business by every stretch. The owner just doesn't want to spend the money he doesn't absolutely have to spend. He's not looking at this saying I could lose all my intellectual property. I could get sued by these people. I could lose my clients who find out that their data was released. Their orders were released. Everything was stolen. He looks at it and says, Oh wow. It's 200 bucks a month. Wait a minute guy, you have how many employees? You're worried about 200 bucks a month. I personally, I don't understand that. Why would you do that? Now, you're in a poor country. Okay. I get it right. That's a lot of money to spend, but not here in the United States. Doesn't make sense. A lot of this is really the reason I brought it up. It's showing how there is a disconnect between business owners, C-level people, and cybersecurity people. Basically, if you have less than 200 employees, you cannot afford to have your own cybersecurity team. It's impossible. It's way too expensive. Then the numbers start to change outsourced cybersecurity, which is what we do. We do this for this customer and. The in-house cybersecurity people, but we all have the same basic problem. The owner has a problem too, right? He has to weigh the costs of cybersecurity against the risks involved, which is what Equifax did. What so many of these big companies do, right? There's this, the norm Equifax said it's going to be way cheaper to just pay out $10 million in fines. When we get fined by the federal government for losing everyone in the country's personal financial information then it is to do this or we're not going to bother. Man, I'd love to see the smoking gun email on that, where they made that final decision, probably doesn't exist. They're smart enough to know that they would get sued and they have been sued because of this. We've got another problem right now because of people working from home. I mentioned, in fact, this week, you should have gotten an email from me on Thursday. That was a little audio thing that I put together. We call these things, audiograms, and it's a kind of a video that'll play. This particular one is about part of this problem. We've talked extensively about that water plant in Florida, that was hacked for lack of a better term. It might've been an insider thing. It might've been someone external, et cetera, et cetera. The reason it happened is that business, the water plant for a town of 15,000 people, which would be in a normal world, a small business. That small government operation was all of a sudden faced with lockdowns. What do we do? They didn't have a plan. They didn't have a business continuity plan, which is so important. I talked about it extensively last week as well. They had no way to manage this. So what did they do? They went out and bought team viewer licenses for everybody in the business. That put, well not the business, in this case, the agency, that put the agency at risk. That is putting our businesses at risk too, in such a big way. That's what the audiogram I emailed out on Thursday explaining this a bit. So stick around. We're going to continue this conversation. Of course, you're listening to Craig Peterson [email protected] We have people working from home. We didn't really plan for this. We're doing it because of the lockdown. Maybe, you found that it's actually better for your business, from whatever angle. What are the risks here of people taking computers home? Hello. Everybody Craig, Peterson here. So glad to be with you today. Glad you're taking a few minutes out of your day as well to listen in. Now I am very concerned about people using computers that they're taking home. I want to make a definition. Maybe there's a better way of saying this, computers that are used at home, home computers should never be used for work. I'm going to explain why. Computers that are at work probably should not be taken home. We saw the example of this, just this last couple of weeks. I was talking about this wonderful plugin that I've been using and recommending people use here for a very long time, called the Great Suspender. We've talked at length really about what happened there with the company being bought and then becoming evil, right? Just buying their way into 2 million people's computers. Sometimes these Chrome extensions that are installed on personal computers get automatically installed and synchronized to your work devices. In fact, that's the default. If you log into Chrome and you're using Google Chrome as your browser and you log into it on your home computer, and when you log into your same account over on your business computer. All of a sudden, now it's syncing. It's syncing things like passwords, which you should not be having Google store for you. You should definitely be using a good password manager and there are a few out there. If you're not familiar with them or don't know which one to use or how to use them. I have a great little special report on passwords and using password managers. I'd be glad to send it to you. Just email [email protected] and I'll send that on-off, right? I'm not making a dime off of that. I want to make you safer. I don't want to have happened to you what's happened to millions of Americans, including my best buddy who had his information stolen. I've been after him to use password managers. He never did it. I don't know why. Until his paycheck got stolen. Then he came over and I explained it and set it up with them and really helped him out. Maybe we should do a whole webinar showing you how to use these password managers, how to get them set up because it is a little bit tricky. It's certainly different than you're used to. Many people are using their browser Chrome in this example, to save passwords. When you go to a website, you'll automatically have the password there. Maybe you've got it set up so that it'll automatically log you in with all kinds of cool stuff. But there is a very big problem and that is that there is a huge risk with running these extensions, like the Great Suspender. The Great Suspender was approved by Google. It was in the Google store. You could download it from their app store. Absolutely free. ...
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AS HEARD ON: WGAN Mornings News with Matt Gagnon: What actually runs the Suez Canal?, Twitter Hacking Conviction and Scams People Fall For, Bitcoin Not Just for Ransoms Now,
03/31/2021
AS HEARD ON: WGAN Mornings News with Matt Gagnon: What actually runs the Suez Canal?, Twitter Hacking Conviction and Scams People Fall For, Bitcoin Not Just for Ransoms Now,
Good morning everybody! I was on WGAN this morning with Matt Gagnon. I talked about the Suez Canal blockage by the M/V Ever Given and what really runs the Suez Canal. Then we got into Scams that people fall for and the conviction of the Celebrity Twitter Hacker. Then we talked about Bitcoin and its meteoric rise in price and who now will take Bitcoin as payment in a commercial transaction. Here we go with Matt. And more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com. --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Fun with Mr. Matt Gagnon this morning is we talked a little bit about Tesla. Again. I had to bring up this whole thing with the Suez canal and of course, wedging that cargo ship. We also talked a little bit about this teen who hacked some blue check Twitter accounts and is now serving time. So here we go. Matt Gagnon: [00:00:24] We are back again, at seven 36 on Wednesday morning, which is a great time to talk to Craig Peterson, our tech guru. He joins us at this time every week, Craig, how are you? Good morning, sir. Craig Peterson: [00:00:34] It is a great time. I'm doing well. Matt Gagnon: [00:00:37] Well, Craig, let's be honest. Is it ever a bad time to talk to Craig Peterson? Craig Peterson: [00:00:43] Probably not. You know, I have three kids in the maritime industry and you probably heard about the Suez cargo ship and what is going on. Matt Gagnon: [00:00:52] I don't know. I must've missed it. Didn't I don't know. I do know that I ordered something from Amazon, which was delayed and I'm guessing maybe it was on the boat. Craig Peterson: [00:01:00] Maybe it's fascinating too, to talk to my kids about this because one of my daughters was in fact, commanding a ship going through the Suez canal five years ago on the very day that ship managed to get stuck. Interesting conversations with her not just about the whole idea of saving all of that money from fuel. The way it works is they charge a million-plus bucks to go through a canal, either the one here in America or the one over there. It costs more than that in fuel to go around the Horn or the Cape, depending on which you're in. These ships go through and just like any Harbor in the world, they have pilots. These pilots are well-trained. We got a lot of them, Mariners, here in Maine, listening to the show. I got an email from one this week. In fact, my daughter and I were talking, to her and her friends and they were saying, I'm not sure that any of these pilots that run the ships through the Suez canal could actually get a Maine boating license. It doesn't matter what you're hauling. There's two things you have to haul on your ship if you want to make it through the Suez canal. And that is cartons of Marlboro Reds and bags of M&Ms because you have to bribe these guys in order to take you through the canal. I was not surprised. When I saw this massive ship having run aground right there in the canal. Matt Gagnon: [00:02:29] See, I was making lots of jokes about teenagers, parallel parking. To me, that's what it kind of looked like, right? Like, Oh no, I gotta get outta here. Oh no, now I'm stuck right here. Craig Peterson: [00:02:38] Exactly. Matt Gagnon: [00:02:40] Well, Craig Peterson can be heard on this very station on Saturdays at one o'clock. If you want to hear any of this stuff in more depth and detail, and we have a few things to get to Craig, so let's move on. Look. Not that this was ever something that I thought was a good idea, but I think we now have ample evidence that hacking into famous people's Twitter accounts is probably not going to give you a good time, right? Some prison for the hackers that got into a couple of really prominent accounts. Tell me about the story. Craig Peterson: [00:03:05] Yeah, this was a big deal. What happened is this guy managed to get into president Obama's account, Elon Musk's account, Joe Biden's account back when, and he said that he listened to everybody we're just so excited about everything and how well things are going. If you send me Bitcoin, I'll send you back triple. What it is that you sent me. So send me 10 Bitcoin. I'll send you back 300. Amazingly, this guy collected more than a hundred grand worth of Bitcoin. People were sending him fractional Bitcoin too. Turns out it was a teenager. The kid was about 17 years old. He hacked these accounts using the good old-fashioned way. In other words, they had terrible passwords. Matt Gagnon: [00:03:57] Yeah. Craig Peterson: [00:03:57] He got into these things and was able to just con people out of money. It's totally amazing. We still apparently fall for this Nigerian scam. It basically what it is. Who is going to do that Matt? Matt Gagnon: [00:04:12] Don't know, but people clearly do because this is continually a problem and so they definitely do. Craig Peterson: [00:04:18] Yeah, it is. Now we've got a new version that they've started up. You were talking about what happened a year ago. We only have them lockdown for about two weeks. So the rest of this is just all our imagination. But because of that all of this personal protective equipment and stuff, there were scams going on, hospitals, the federal government buying hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of personal protective equipment. That was completely not up to spec. It was trash. California spent millions of dollars on stuff that wasn't even delivered. Scammers are out there. Everybody we've got to be careful and they're going after us to another way. That is many of us are lonely. So we're looking for friends online. We're finding friends online and they're scamming us another way by saying, Oh my, you know, my mother she's been really ill, of course, they build-up to this right over the course of weeks. So you say, Oh, how is she? It's not really a joke, but says, okay, well she needs this surgery and it's going to cost $5,000. They con people now particularly our more seasoned citizens into sending them money. The FBI has been warning about that one again, too. So we've gotta be really careful. Look at everything. Inspect that email pay close attention to them. Phishing training needs to happen for employees because of business email compromises. But this kid is going to serve time as a juvenile. Cause he was 17 at the time he reached a plea deal and there was a minimum 10-year mandatory sentence for what he did. Apparently, he's going to serve about three years in the juvenile facility. Matt Gagnon: [00:06:05] Craig Peterson joins us at this time every Wednesday to go over what's happening in the world to technology. You mentioned Bitcoin, quite a bit in that little story you just told me here. I can't resist asking about Elon Musk. And the fact that they're going to be apparently accepting Bitcoin and he's not going to convert it. He's going to keep the Bitcoin itself. Is he's going to use it as currency more than just an investment? I had a really interesting conversation with somebody about this recently about whether or not someday in the future, there might be a possibility that a Bitcoin or other cryptocurrency type of thing could actually serve as true currency and not just an investment. Which a lot of people are doing it right now. This is, to me, this is the thing that's required for that to work, right? Is that people are using it as a mechanism of trade on its own, as its own thing, rather than using it as a sort of an intermediary. What do you think about this decision by Musk? Craig Peterson: [00:06:56] Currency our government issues only has value because you can spend it places like you were saying. Right? Correct. Where can you spend Bitcoin? Well, the number one thing Bitcoin has been spent on is paying ransoms. Elon Musk recently bought a billion and a half dollars worth of Bitcoin, but that's not uncommon. We're finding more and more companies, particularly over the last year where ransomware payments have tripled in 2020, companies are buying Bitcoin as insurance in case they get ransomware. So rather than cleaning up their technical act. Yes. Let's just get some money to set aside for paying a ransom when that time comes because we're incompetent. I don't know it's part of their planning, right? So he bought some. Hard to say why Bitcoin and a lot of people are saying it's going to go much higher than it is. Other people are saying it's going to fall. I'm certainly not an investment advisor. By having Musk now say we will accept Bitcoin as a means of trade as you said, I think it gets it a lot closer. You know, we started out, with the pizza story. You might remember the Bitcoin's very first purchase, 10,000 Bitcoins for two Papa John's pizzas. Now it's one Bitcoin for an electric car from Elon Musk. We've got this whole new genre of people buying digital artwork for millions of dollars that can be replicated duplicated like that perfectly. It's not like the Mona Lisa. This whole world's going crazy. Governments are very big into trying to come up with a cryptocurrency. The part I don't like is that it obviously all trade, if it was forced onto one of these cryptocurrencies is more readily tracked, which is what the government's after. So that they can tax it and they can track transactions. They can track everything, including what might be an illegal transaction for drugs or things. Although, drugs are getting more and more legal every time you turned around. We'll see what happens. Governments really want this, but they haven't figured out how to master yet. Elon obviously thinks it's worthwhile to take Bitcoin. Maybe he figures a Bitcoin at 50,000 today is going to be a hundred thousand next year and it's a great investment for Tesla. It's hard to say he hasn't announced it. Matt Gagnon: [00:09:27] Indeed. All right. Well, Craig Peterson joins us on Wednesdays to talk about all these ends. So many more stories, Craig, good luck on Saturday talking about these very things. We'll talk to you again next week. Craig Peterson: [00:09:38] Take care, Matt Thanks a lot. The drama continues. I, and Karen worked all day, Monday, Tuesday to do what we thought would just take an hour or two in getting everything ready for this course, the final stuff, getting it up in a membership site, and everything. It is now 99% ready. I have a couple more things to do. You'll be getting emails about the Improving Windows Security course. I'm going to throw in a couple more bonuses, we will schedule a couple of phone calls, to answer any questions you guys might have, or maybe webinars, probably the better way to do it so I can show you stuff if we need to. We're thinking we might want to include a couple more little things too. So we'll see how that all goes. You might actually get the email about the course before you listen to this podcast if everything goes okay. Take care, everybody. We'll be back this weekend. Bye-bye. Oh, and I should probably tell you, in case you're just a podcast listener and you're not on my email list. It's Craig peterson.com/subscribe. --- 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: Tesla Now Accepts Bitcoin and The Suez Canal Debacle
03/30/2021
AS HEARD ON - The Jim Polito Show - WTAG 580 AM: Tesla Now Accepts Bitcoin and The Suez Canal Debacle
Good morning, everybody. I was on this morning on WTAG with Jim Polito. We discussed not only that Elon Musk's Tesla Organization is now accepting Bitcoin for payment but an additional interesting twist to that. Then we talked about the Suez Canal and the problems with the Ever Given. Here we go with Jim. For more tech tips, news, and updates, visit - . --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Mining equipment. It's like those guys that you watch on the discovery channel, where they're mining for gold up in Alaska. The guys that make the money, they've got these massive machines moving all of this stuff and they're making lots of money. Well, there's specialized equipment as well for mining for Bitcoin. Good morning, Craig Peterson here. Of course, I was on with Mr. Jim Polito this morning. I had to talk about the Suez canal, this blockage. So we did, we got into that. Then also a little bit about Tesla and Bitcoin. What is Elon Musk doing? What what's he thinking? I had a couple of ideas and we talked about them with Jim. Here we go. Jim Polito: [00:00:44] You can buy now a Tesla with Bitcoin. There are organizations that will accept Bitcoin. Here's what's different here. Most of those organizations take the Bitcoin converted to regular currency and then that's it. Well, Elon Musk must be betting on Bitcoin. I don't know. I need a guy much smarter than me here, which doesn't take a lot of work. That is in no way to take anything away from our next guest, who is our good friend and tech talk guru. Craig Peterson. Good morning, Craig. Craig Peterson: [00:01:20] Hey, good morning, Mr. Jim. Yeah. What a different world. Jim Polito: [00:01:24] Yeah. You can buy a Tesla with Bitcoins, which is that crazy currency that we talk about frequently here. When he takes the Bitcoin in, unlike other businesses, he's not then converting it. Like when you go to Europe and you're converting your money into euros. He's not converting it. He's keeping the Bitcoin. Does that mean he thinks Bitcoin is viable? Craig Peterson: [00:01:50] Yeah, boy does he ever. He's been talking about it and promoting it for a while. He bought one and a half billion dollars, of course, that sends the price up. It isn't just ransomware now being used for Bitcoin. Everything's going crazy. Look at this musician Grimes. I don't know if you heard about this, but he sold the collection of digital work for 6.3 million. Jim Polito: [00:02:19] The digital artwork just makes me laugh. Somebody makes a piece of digital artwork, which, unlike the Mona Lisa, you can't go there and just pick it up and say, I'm going to bring it home, or I'm going to take a copy of it. You can't do that digital artwork as far as I'm concerned is worthless. Craig Peterson: [00:02:37] It's a perfect copy, right? It's not like the Mona Lisa a forgery. Jim Polito: [00:02:42] It's actually right. You're right. If you copy a piece of digital artwork, it's exactly the same. Craig Peterson: [00:02:49] It absolutely is. They filed at Tesla here. This is a regulatory filing with the securities and exchange commission about a month ago now saying that they would begin accepting Bitcoin as payment for Tesla cars. Now, I'm not sure who they're going after or what they are gonna use bitcoin for, maybe he sees a Bitcoin going up even further. We've certainly seen some major runs in it. You referred to it as a currency. I think that's an interesting word because of what is. What is the currency? We have dollars that we have right now that has the full faith and credit of the government just laughable in and of itself. But anyway, everybody takes it right from the pizza shop, that first took 10,000 Bitcoin for two pizzas. They're the first Bitcoin transaction ever. So figure out how much they were worth then far less than a penny. Now, Tesla saying, yeah, you can bring in one Bitcoin and I'll give you a full car. Jim Polito: [00:03:57] I don't know. I'm just not getting it, you know what, as they say, that I think the chance to get in on the ground floor was a long time ago. I'm just not getting in on the ground floor. I'll stick with all that stuff. Craig Peterson: [00:04:09] My son and I started doing mining, years ago, Bitcoin mining. It was just so expensive to do because we didn't have specialized mining equipment. It's like those guys that you watch on a discovery channel where they're mining for gold up in Alaska, the guys that make the money. They've got these massive machines moving all of this stuff and they're making lots of money. Well, if there's specialized equipment as well for mining for Bitcoin, and with the cost of electricity here in the Northeast, it's just not worth doing. If you go to eBay right now, You could do a search for Bitcoin mining equipment and you would find all kinds of used stuff for sale because the next generations out. And the only way they can stay effective is to get the next generation. So right now it is cheaper to mine a Bitcoin than to pay for the electricity. It's about 25 to $30,000 for one Bitcoin. If you're trying to mine it, it's going to vary. It's a little bit of a luck of the draw too, by the way, the Bitcoins they're in the $50,000 range. Okay, that makes some sense to do some mining. But again, you've still got to have this specialized equipment. That's going to cost you a lot of money and get busy. He's obviously betting on it going up. Yeah, he may be just saying, I'll convert it to a hard currency, when I hit the hundred thousand dollars a Bitcoin, he really hasn't said. Jim Polito: [00:05:37] There really are people who believe that it will too. Craig Peterson: [00:05:41] Oh yeah. Jim Polito: [00:05:42] Eric Bolling who used to be on Fox. He's a former investment person who then worked at the business channels. Then it gets a Fox. Then he had a sexual harassment allegation against him he's out. He does work for Newsmax now a few others. I listened to a podcast with him talking about it and he's betting on it. He's not a stupid guy, he's betting on it. Craig Peterson: [00:06:06] I wish I had money to bet on it. I just don't right. I'm trying to build a business and raise a family, support a wife, kids, chickens, by the way, the Fox got four or two foxes came by this morning I got four my chickens, but, we get it. Jim Polito: [00:06:22] We gotta talk about that after, but keep that thought in mind. Cause I gotta tell you a good story. Go ahead. Craig Peterson: [00:06:28] It's that time of year. We'll see what happens, Bitcoin. I just don't know. I've never had the trust in it. It takes trust to buy Bitcoin. The major drive driving force behind Bitcoin has been corporations buying Bitcoin so they can pay for a ransom when they get ransomware. They're buying Bitcoin in advance. That's part of their plan for disaster if they get hit with ransomware. Then the other thing that's really driven up Bitcoin over the years is people buying it to pay ransoms themselves. And that's a real big deal. That's something we're covering on the improving windows security course this week too. You got to keep yourself safe. How do you mitigate it? There just aren't that many places that accept it. Maybe Elon saying while we've got all of these total geeks that mine Bitcoin, now they'll trade it over. The fact that he bought a billion and a half drove the value of Bitcoin up. Is he playing the market? Is he gaming it by buying it? Driving it up, testing it, which will drive it up, right? The value just keeps going up. Who knows maybe that's even illegal. Jim Polito: [00:07:41] Well, he's been in trouble before with the SEC. Remember some of the statements he made. He should stop smoking pot, live on a podcast. He should maybe start with that. You have to give him some credit though for what he's done was SpaceX and other things. The very fact that he bought $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin, right after that purchase is closed. The price goes up because people seem to just see that Elon Musk bought Bitcoin maybe he's part of the whole thing and like old man, Joe Kennedy used to do. He knew when to get in the market and when to get out. Maybe Elon Musk got a little bit of that. I just think it's fascinating. Craig Peterson: [00:08:21] Hey, I gotta bring up those Suez canal thing here too, Jim. Oh no, go Jim Polito: [00:08:25] Go ahead. Go ahead. Craig Peterson: [00:08:26] I've got two kids in the maritime industry and you know that. It was three actually that have been. One of whom is a Master Mariner. She has unlimited oceans, unlimited tonnage command vessels for the US Navy and merchant vessels. And she's been through that very Suez canal before. She's told me some stories about it. I'm not sure that the pilots, now remember pilots when it comes to ships, are the specialized people, that know the harbors. Jim Polito: [00:08:59] Usually, they come out to the ship. Bring them out, they climb up the side, get in. They know the local waterways they take over for the Captain. Craig Peterson: [00:09:09] Those are the guys. You know what nepotism is, right? Jim Polito: [00:09:12] Oh yes, I do. We have quite a bit of that in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. We have a little bit of that going on. Craig Peterson: [00:09:19] I'm not sure these ships pilots over there by the descriptions I have heard. From the family members and others, I'm not sure those ship pilots are actually even qualified to get a Massachusetts voters license. Jim Polito: [00:09:35] No. Craig Peterson: [00:09:36] They are the least competent people I have ever heard of, nepotism runs rampant. If you actually want to get through the canal, you have to make sure when you go over there that your ship, you might be hauling oil, you might be hauling it doesn't matter what, but you better be hauling Marlboro Reds and M&M's because that's what powers the Suez Canal.. Jim Polito: [00:10:01] You know what, that's great. One of the busiest waterways in the world, what is it? How much of the trade of the world? 11% of the world's trade goes through and you're telling me that if you don't have the Marlboro Reds, forget about the Marlboro lights but if you don't have the Marlboro Reds and some M&M's, it's all over. Craig Peterson: [00:10:20] Forget about it. You're going to end up blocking that Canal. Jim Polito: [00:10:25] That's very, very interesting. There's a cool little app out there right now that allows you to put the ship anywhere that you want. Like, you can drop it on a map anywhere. You can drop it on your street on the map. Craig Peterson: [00:10:42] Boston public library curator. It's called when the Suez. Jim Polito: [00:10:48] I'm seeing quite a few online of people taking it and putting it in interesting places. Hey, you mentioned it and then maybe we should just now close with is that program that you're putting on. We always ask you at the end, how can folks get more information from Craig Peterson? Craig Peterson: [00:11:06] Absolutely. Now's the time to do this. This is an Improving Windows Security course. You probably also got an email if you're active on the email list. I don't want to bother people who aren't that interested. First of all, Big big problem right now with iOS Apple's operating system for its mobile devices, you should have already received and installed a patch from Apple, even an old Apple phone. Okay, good. Jim Polito: [00:11:38] Yeah, I saw Craig Peterson: [00:11:42] Android. That's why I don't like Android. Apple gets it out even for old, old phones, Number two, this Improving Windows Security course is starting this week. I hope to get the email out this afternoon with all of the details. It is going to help you tighten up your windows computer. If you're not on that email list, get on it now. Credit Peterson.com/subscribe, because I send out tips and tricks and training. We do free webinars, just all kinds of stuff. You'll only know if you go to Craig peterson.com/subscribe Jim Polito: [00:12:17] Craig that is great. Good. Good to hear from you. Thank you as usual for making the very complex simple, and we'll catch up with you next week. Craig Peterson: [00:12:28] Bye-bye Jim Polito: [00:12:28] Bye-Bye. Craig Peterson. --- 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 WGIR-AM 610: Twitter Hack Conviction and Vaccines and Scams surrounding them
03/29/2021
AS HEARD ON NH Today WGIR-AM 610: Twitter Hack Conviction and Vaccines and Scams surrounding them
Welcome, Craig Peterson here. This morning I was on with Chris Ryan on NH Today. I jumped right into a conversation with regards to vaccines. I might disagree a bit with Chris on this subject a little. Anyway, then we got into the Conviction of the teen Twitter hacker who hacked accounts of celebrities, Elon Musk, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and Kanye West for Bitcoin. He will be doing 3 years in Prison for this escapade. Here we go with Chris. These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit. - --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Good morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here on New Hampshire Today with Mr. Chris Ryan. We talked about a friend of mine who passed some years ago, in fact, quite a few years ago now, and a little bit about vaccines, cause he's talking a whole lot about it. I certainly disagree with him on some of the things he was saying this morning, but there are some interesting effects of that really have happened here over the last one. When did Jonas Salk come up with that first one? A hundred or so years ago? We chat a little bit about that, as well as that kid that hacked all of these blue check accounts on Twitter, including President Obama's, Kanye West, Joe Biden, and Elon Musk's accounts. Do you remember that? Then he was giving away free Bitcoin? Well, he just got sentenced. We'd talked a little bit about that as well. So here we go. Chris Ryan: [00:00:56] Craig Peterson, right now, host of tech talk on news radio 610 and 96.7 Saturdays at 11:30 AM. Craig Peterson: [00:01:04] Hey, I'm doing well. This brings back a memory of a friend of mine. His name was Gordon MacDonald and he died from complications of polio. I remember it ever so well, right around 1970. This whole thing now with the vaccinations. We have pretty much eliminated a lot of these diseases that were terminal back in the day. Chris Ryan: [00:01:24] Right. I think that whenever, even before COVID, I would hear anti-vaxxers talking about why people should not get vaccinations and the potential side effects and a wide range of conspiracy theories about why certain things are happening and trying to assign them to vaccines. You think about Franklin Delano Roosevelt who we talked about earlier in the show. You think about smallpox and other things that were eradicated were such a predominant part of American culture. Where that you did not think that your life was going to go on for a long period of time, based upon smallpox outbreaks, based upon polio and its prevalence. So. Vaccines have had such an incredibly positive effect on our culture as is the case with everything there are trade-offs. There is no perfect thing. I hate to break it to people, there are trade-offs. At times it's not exactly the way you want it to be, but where would we be as a country? Where would we be as a civilized society? You think about the AIDS vaccine and how it was distributed in Africa in the early two-thousands and what that has done there. There has been such incredible work that has been done by medicine, and we give so much credence to crackpots who want to come out and talk about various conspiracy theories on vaccines. There are negatives, there are side effects, there's no question about that. There is no perfect thing, but vaccines have had such an important part Craig Peterson: [00:02:54] Just because you're paranoid, Chris, doesn't mean that they're not coming after you. Chris Ryan: [00:02:58] True. Craig Peterson: [00:03:01] Oh my. Chris Ryan: [00:03:01] So let's talk a little bit about things in your realm here over the last few days. I want to start with this, We have seen various hackers have success as of late. One individual that hacks the Twitter accounts of Elon Musk, Barack Obama, for Bitcoin. That person has been given three years in prison for hacking into the accounts of Obama, Musk, Kanye West, as well as Joe Biden. What are your thoughts on that? Craig Peterson: [00:03:32] Yeah, you might remember this. What he did was, he was able to hack these accounts. He was at 17 years old at the time, so he was a minor and he entered a plea deal. He hacked these accounts, the so-called blue check brigade, right? He was able to post on those accounts and say, Hey, listen because I'm giving away lots of money here. If you send me a thousand dollars worth of Bitcoin, I'll send you back $3,000 worth of Bitcoin and people fell for it and he got more than a hundred thousand dollars worth of Bitcoin for this whole scam. But because he was a minor at the time, and he's entered into a plea deal, he is going to be getting three years in prison for this. It brings up a couple of really good points. One is we have to be careful if something's too good to be true it probably isn't, even if it might be a Nigerian Prince, right, which is how this whole mess started. So be careful of that. We're seeing it all of the time. We're seeing it with business email compromises, which is our cost and our businesses billions of dollars. We're seeing that now with ransomware and extortion. Where you have tripled in the last 12 months the number of ransoms we're paying out here in the United States. It's crazy. Stop. Read what it says right now and ask yourself. Does this seem legitimate? Chris Ryan: [00:05:02] Right. I think that in those circumstances, it's very different than when you get an email that says your cousin is being held in the UK, and we need money. Obviously, those have gone down a little bit with the lack of travel, but there's various scams that are out there. But when you see Kanye West or a celebrity, Elon Musk saying to do this, that's something that really is it would seem to make sense to somebody, right? That's something that they would definitely fall for. I think In these times, you always need to be cognizant. Going back to the vaccines again, do your due diligence. I'm not telling people to get the vaccine or not get the vaccine. I think it's a good idea and I'm going to do it, but you need to do your due diligence and to go through and become educated and to listen to people about the vaccine. Listen to people about what's taking place in this environment, regards to hacking, and make your own best decisions. Craig Peterson: [00:05:54] Yeah, absolutely. In this case, he was facing a 10-year sentence. A lot of people fell for this. He entered into that plea deal. Unfortunately, Chris, we're not seeing enough prosecutions of this because so much of, it's hard to prove. Hard to track down. When it comes to hacking these accounts that are very prominent, they showed up the next day at this kid's house and arrested him. He wasn't being very careful about it. We do have to be ultra-careful. Particularly, now we have hospitals that fell for these scams for personal protective equipment. Where it was being sold supposedly. They paid the bills, it never showed up. We're getting anxious about things. We're even seeing it now with vaccines. Just like this morning, Justin, how much did you pay to get that vaccine registration? Chris Ryan: [00:06:44] At least a hundred dollars Justin McIssac: [00:06:47] Yeah. $0. Craig Peterson: [00:06:50] That's a scam it's happening right now, too. So be careful everybody. Chris Ryan: [00:06:54] Craig, as always. Thank you so much. Craig Peterson: [00:06:57] Take care. Chris Ryan: [00:06:58] Craig Peterson, joining us here on Hampshire day. He hosts Tech Talk at 11:30 AM on Saturday. --- 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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Tech Talk with Craig Peterson Podcast: Intel, Apple, DDoS, BEC, Ransomware, Hackers, Third-Party Vendors and more
03/27/2021
Tech Talk with Craig Peterson Podcast: Intel, Apple, DDoS, BEC, Ransomware, Hackers, Third-Party Vendors and more
I know that I have been telling you about this course that I have been making for you -- Guess what it is done and this week, I will be making it available. It has taken a lot of work for both my wife, Karen and me but it is well worth it to get you this information on how you can Improve your Windows security. I walk you through all the basics of tightening up your security on Windows 10 and not only that but why you have to. his week was quite busy for me with meetings and presentations for my business. If you have not yet signed up for my email list do so today and you will be getting a large discount coupon for the course. This will be the only time that we offer this type of discount so be sure you are on my list before we release the course. Craig Welcome! Today we will talk about Intel and its war with Apple and what they did that they believe will give them an advantage but might just backfire big time. Then we will talk about DDoS attacks, BEC attacks, and Ransomware. Then we will discuss how hackers are trying to get into Apple by trying to attack their developer's computers. If you have been breached -- what did you learn you might be surprised. Then what can you do if the Feds buy all your location data from one of their security consultants? How much do you trust your security vendors? All that and even more, so be sure to Listen in. For more tech tips, news, and updates, visit - CraigPeterson.com. --- Tech Articles Craig Thinks You Should Read: --- Automated Machine-Generated Transcript: Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Hey, I did a webinar this week for the Massachusetts society for healthcare risk management. I thought there were some things that everybody needs to know, not just healthcare providers. Hi everybody. Craig Peterson here. Thanks for joining me today. There is so much to talk about. I have such fun doing it too, which is great. We will be discussing this in some more detail and the ransomware numbers are just scary. I was approached to give this webinar. You probably know if you've listened for the long time that I have done hundreds. If not thousands of webinars over the years. I have been doing them for our friends at the FBI InfraGard program. I did them many times, two, three, four a month for years with them all on cybersecurity. Plus, I do the free webinars for. People who are on my email list. I send out little audio grams every week as well, where I do a deeper dive, three minutes or so into a specific topic. It's really fun. I enjoy doing it. So I get approached all of the time, as I'm sure you can imagine doing these webinars for different organizations. I am always glad to do them. It might take me a little bit of time to schedule it into the schedule. You know how that goes, but I always end up doing them. This particular one was about risk mitigation because that's what these guys do, right? There's this society for healthcare risk management. How do identify the cyber threats? What are they preventing unauthorized access to PHI, which is your patient health information? Now, we all have personally identifiable information that's supposed to be protected and so is our healthcare information. So that's what we talked about, it was really fun to get into some detail, but there are a few things I wanted to bring up here with you guys. We're going to be including them this week. By the way, if you haven't noticed in my emails, I've been mentioning this Improving Windows Security course that is starting this next week. If you responded to one of my emails over the last few months where I said, Hey I'm going to be doing this course on Improving Windows Security. I would have probably responded to you saying, okay great. I'm working on it. We have been for months and because of has been months, what we're going to do for people who have asked for this already in responding to the newsletter that what I am going to do is give you guys coupons for this. So keep an eye on your email box. Everybody else. Okay. You're not going to get quite the deal. Actually, if you sign up today or tomorrow and get that newsletter should be going out a Sunday morning. Just respond and say Improving Windows Security so that you can get the full course, not just the free stuff that we're going to be giving. Man, you're going to love this anyway. It's just Craig peterson.com. If you want to sign up for that. I do these all of the time. One of the things that really stood out to me and I thought I would talk about actually, there's a few things is the security breaches in healthcare, because we all have some form of health care. If it's Obamacare, and guess what? Obama isn't your doctor. He's not seeing you, right? You've got a local doc. Sure. You go in, you talk to your doctor or they examine you. Maybe you have to go to the hospital, outpatient, whatever it might be. There are records of yours that are private, and there are people who want to get their hands on those records. Why is that? First of all this statistic just absolutely blew me away. A research company called black book market research, and surveyed about 3000 security professionals from healthcare provider organizations. 96% of those people who were surveyed believed that the bad guys are outpacing healthcare security, 96% of them. Isn't that just amazing? 56% are relying on medical devices using Microsoft windows seven. Seven hasn't been supported in quite some time. Eight isn't supported 8.1 has some support for it, but nowadays you pretty much have to be on Windows 10. If you want any support that is astounding. When you get right down to it. We also have the problem of medical internet of things, devices, M I O T think about, again, all of the devices a doctor uses. Now they might have an iPad that's relatively safe, but have you noticed there are Bluetooth thermometers now that they might use to check your temperature? Did you notice that even people who are in intensive care might be hooked up to an IV those things are connected via wifi and Bluetooth? The x-ray machines, the cat scans, everything now in the doctor's offices. Practically everything is electronic is hooked up to computers. We're helping a medical office right now doing a bit of a transition on their phone system so that they have integrated with their phone system. Now, automatic text reminders. If someone calls in or the office calls out, all of that is logged in the patient records, screen pops that come up and tell them, Hey okay is calling in and it shows all of the records before they even answer the phone. 56% of healthcare providers are using unsupported operating systems. That's just on their computers. Most organizations don't even know what is inside their machines. Cause you remember almost every machine nowadays has a computer on it. Then on top of it, they're using this 20-year-old antivirus software and insecure systems. They're really not vetting things, failure to access. It's just absolutely crazy. Now the bad guys are able to get in about 86% of the time. That's according to Verizon's 2020 data breach investigations report. That's just crazy. 86% of them are about money. The attackers usually take the easiest route to obtain all this information that they need. 43% of the breaches are due to the cloud. How many of our businesses are saying Oh, I'm going to use the cloud. I'm going to use salesforce.com. This is an example. I'm not trying to pick on salesforce.com. They've had their problems, but so has pretty much everybody else it's. We're gonna use salesforce.com for all of our client records and emails going out to et cetera, et cetera. That's just a word for someone else's computer, the cloud. It is a computer. It is still existing out there. You cannot, whether you're in healthcare or you're a regular business, you cannot just push off the responsibility for your data to a third-party cloud provider. Now in the medical business, they have these business process agreements, BPA partner agreements that say, okay, you Google, I'm going to be paying you extra for this special healthcare version. So they pay extra and they get that special healthcare version. And Google says we will keep your data safe. Oh, okay. That's well and good, but you have to pay for that version. 43% almost half of the breaches were due to people trying to use. What's called the cloud. 27% were attributed to ransomware. It is running rampant and we'll get into some of those stats here in a minute. This is the part that I would think everybody needs to hear and that is your patient health information worth 20 times more than credit cards are worth. Did you hear that? 20 times more, 2000% more than credit cards. So you might ask yourself why does that matter? What's the big deal with my patient information? If they have your credit card, they can use it a few times, hopefully, you'll notice it pretty quickly. You're using something like a credit monitoring service to notice, Hey, wait a minute. What's going on here. If they've got your social security number, they could potentially buy a house or a car in your name. You don't know that they bought a car in your name until the tow truck shows up asking for the car back. Because it's now being foreclosed on, but guess what? You don't have it. It's not yours. You have to spend 300 hours trying and straighten it all out and clear up your name? But when it comes to PHI this patient's health information, probably has your social security number. Remember when you fill out those forms when you go to the doctor's office, criminals can pull off stealing your identity that can go undetected for months, but it's even worse than that, frankly, because if they have a child's information, Oh, so again, we're talking about a birthday to name and address a social security number because you remember the government's forcing us to get social security numbers for all of our babies as they're born. Yeah. So they've got that social security number, which will never be used to track us. Will only ever be used for social security and can not be asked by anyone outside of the federal government and the social security administration. Another promise from the federal government was completely ignored. That child's personal information can now be used for at least 10 years, probably closer to 15 years by a bad guy. It can be sold to illegal aliens who now have a name social security number and maybe a fake birth date because they're really a little bit older than they appear to be on that birth certificate. That's why it's worth 20 times more. It's really something's going on. All right. You are listening to Craig Peterson. We're talking about our health care information. We're going to talk a little bit more about that. We all have healthcare records and they have some of our most personal information. That's what we're talking about today in follow-up to a webinar that I did last week for the healthcare industry. We're going to talk right now a little bit more about your privacy. Hey everybody. Thanks for tuning in, Craig Peterson here. Getting right down to the real hard stats here on our healthcare records, a lot of them have been stolen. We covered that, of course, in the last segment. If you miss that, you can catch that online on your favorite podcasting app. I'm pretty much everywhere, nowadays. It's just crazy to think about because, in reality, we have had millions of records stolen, 300 million healthcare records stolen to be exact since 2015, which is pretty bad. I'm looking at a chart right now that I showed to this healthcare industry group that showing that the hacking event has almost doubled over the last three years, year to year, every year. So in 2018, 164 major hacks, 2019, 312. That's a good double. 2020, 430, which isn't quite a double. So we are seeing a lot of data being stolen. Of course, stolen data means misused data, which is a very big problem. Now, in the healthcare industry, they've got a separate problem. That is these HIPAA rules. Now HIPAA has been in place for quite a while. It's supposed to have been provided portability of our records. Does anybody have any real luck with that? I know there are some I haven't. Portability, I don't even know where my health records have ended up. Frankly, cause my doctor ended up closing up shop and I just have no idea. But it's supposed to be portability and privacy. Well, the most common violations of these HIPAA regulations revolve around professional hackers. Then you've got business associate disclosure. Remember I mentioned that. The cloud is not an excuse for not protecting your data. You cannot hand that off to a third party. There's many more that I go into in the presentation. Of course, I talk about some of the ransomware that's been going around the fines they can get from some of these. Then here's the next thing I wanted to talk with you guys about. And that is the amount of ransomware out there. I'm going to have a little bit of a ransomware offering. Take a look in some training and stuff here. Take a look at your emails. If you get my newsletter, it'll probably, I'm going to try and get this in for tomorrow's newsletter. The one that comes out on Sunday, if you're not a subscriber right now, go to craig peterson.com/subscribe. You'll actually see it on the site @craigpeterson.com. If you scroll around, do a few things on the site, it should pop up automatically for you. I'm going to make a note to myself here about the ransomware stuff. So you guys can hop on and get more information about how to protect yourselves too. Now we're just talking about healthcare and of course, this is every business and every person out there. I talked about this Conti gang. I don't know if you've heard of them. C O N T I. Now, remember what I've said before about ransomware. It used to be that you'd get ransomware. Your computer would now have it's data encrypted, and then it would pop up this big red screen up that said you've got ransomware in order to get to all of your data back because what the ransomware did was encrypt it. You need to go to this website. You need to pay this amount of Bitcoin to this Bitcoin wallet and off it goes, right? That's the idea. According to the FBI, about half of the time, you'll get all your data back half the time. That's even if you pay the ransom. And now, too, that the. The State departments might come after you, and the FBI, if you pay a ransom because now you are supporting terrorist organizations, not just criminal enterprises very big deal. Now the other side of ransomware, and this is what just hit with a few different medical providers here. What I talked about was the Rehobeth McKinney Christian health center services, New Mexico, because now it's much more advanced instead of just getting on your computer, encrypting your files, demanding a ransom to get the decryption key. They even pre-install the decryptor for you. Isn't that handy? Yeah. What they are doing is they get onto a computer and then they start East-West spreading. Now we've seen that for years. I remember one of our clients, a car dealer, and this was five-seven years ago. They got some ransomware. Somebody clicked on something that they shouldn't have, and all of a sudden their machine gets ransomware. The machine, of course, is hooked up to the network and. It is also not just hooked up to the network, it is in fact, mounting drives from their file server. So his machine has access to all of these files. This guy was a manager over there at this car dealership. So he had access to all of the files. Think about that for a minute. What his machine did back then is it said, Oh great. Here's some network drives. It started encrypting the S drive and the H drive and the K drive. All of these different letters for these SMB mounted drives from the file server. We were in there beforehand and we installed our security stuff. When his machine got this brand new strain of ransomware, and of course he didn't want us looking at what was on his machine. So we couldn't install all of the antivirus software because then we would have access to it. We've got another client that's like that too, where the owner of the business doesn't want us installing software to really keep his machine clean. I don't know why people do that. It just, are they just trying to play their cards close to the chest? Is that what they're trying to do? Are they looking at something they shouldn't be looking at work or ever? Why do people do that? If you got hints, let me know. Cause I would love to know [email protected] Why do people do that? Anyhow, his machine got the ransomware. It tried to start spreading to the file server. Now, we had special hardware and software installed. So we saw that spread start. We immediately shut down. It was all automatic. It was just shut down. I shut down his network port, in fact, so his computer can go anywhere. His computer had the ransomware. We were able to just go ahead and restore from backup. The bad guys know that if all they're doing is encrypting your data, then who cares? You restore from backup. Now, hopefully, you're following a three-two-one backup scheme. Most places don't. Hopefully, you're testing it as well. We test every backup that we make for our customers every day. We usually about once a week, will, if it's a server or even a workstation, we will spin up the servers in a virtual environment and make sure that it can boot so that we know we have a good backup. I got to tell you guys, most of the time the backups are not working and it gets to be a real problem. What these guys have figured, including this Conti gang is we're not going to be able to get as much money out of them by just encrypting their discs. We need to do something else. So while they're trying to spread East-West inside, what they're doing is okay, so they got a hold of this manager's computer. They start scanning for other computers and scanning for vulnerabilities scanning for ways it can gain access. Unfortunately, the statistics show us that most of us have file share turned on our windows machines. That's one of the things I talk about in my Improving Windows Security course, what to do, how to do, how to turn that off because that is the second target of ransomware. Once it gets onto your machine. You've got to turn off those file-sharing services. So we'll tell you what Conti and these other guys do once they're there in, and they have found another machine. Maybe it has filesharing services. Maybe it's good old-fashioned vulnerability because nobody patched. Man, I can't believe how fast this computer is. We just did an upgrade on my iMac here in the studio. It is blindingly fast now. But we're talking about. Ransomware and what's the Conti gang and others doing, nowadays. Hello everybody. Craig Peterson here. Thanks for joining us today. Appreciate you spend a little bit of time and I enjoy helping to bring you guys up to speed on what is happening. There's just so much of it. You wouldn't believe what I have to filter out. The Conti gang have been very successful, but their money started to dry up fairly recently when people figured out if they had a decent backup, they could just go ahead and ignore the ransom demand. Instead of paying that ransom, just go ahead and restore from backup. So they had to do something different. What the Conti gang did, as well as pretty much everybody else in the ransomware business, is okay, what we're going to do now is we're going to find all of the other machines we can find on the network. Then we're even going to have real people get onto these computers remotely that they've compromised and have a poke about. See is there patient healthcare information? Are the bank account numbers on this machine? Are there plans...
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AS HEARD ON WGAN - Intel's New Ads are Stupid and Misleading (Again)
03/24/2021
AS HEARD ON WGAN - Intel's New Ads are Stupid and Misleading (Again)
Apparently, Intel has hired Justin Long. And if you don't know who Justin Long is if you think back way back to the early two-thousands, he was doing these ads, the I'm a Mac actor. Remember that guy?
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AS HEARD ON WTAG - Current State of Automobile Surveillance and Where Its Going
03/24/2021
AS HEARD ON WTAG - Current State of Automobile Surveillance and Where Its Going
It appears that there's a company who can they can track where your car is. And they want to sell this data to the government. What. This, by the way, this news comes as we hear that the Chinese don't want Tesla in China anymore because they think that Tesla is basically a CIA-backed company.
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2021-03-22-wgir-why is the biden administration changing tune about foreign hackers
03/24/2021
2021-03-22-wgir-why is the biden administration changing tune about foreign hackers
Good morning, everybody Craig Peterson here. And I was just talking with Mr. Chris, Ryan about some of the impact that we are beginning to feel with the remote hackers, right? Was this China was this Russia. And I thought it was interesting because Chris was obviously going online and. Doc going some of these different topics that we were talking about and 19 administration officials that were saying things that I don't think were true, frankly.
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Tech Talk with Craig Peterson Podcast: Backups versus Disaster Recovery versus Business Continuity, Apple wants Privacy - Google wants Your Info and more
03/20/2021
Tech Talk with Craig Peterson Podcast: Backups versus Disaster Recovery versus Business Continuity, Apple wants Privacy - Google wants Your Info and more
Sorry guys, this week was quite busy for me with meetings and presentations for my business. We will be back next week with a new so but for today this is a re-air of the February 20th Podcast. Check out the website for the latest articles I found for you to read. Craig Welcome! We lost a Radio Icon this week and he had a big impact on me, I have a short tribute to him but it was also another busy week on the technology front. We are going to get into the differences between Backups, Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity, often these get tossed around in discussions as one in the same - they are not. Then we will discuss Bitcoin and it metoric rise and why that happened. Next we'll discuss Apple and Google and why Google is trying to play hardball but may end up getting burned. Then we are headed to Space and NASA space travel and a discussion on Rocket Fuel for future missions to Mars and there is even more, so be sure to Listen in. For more tech tips, news, and updates, visit - CraigPeterson.com. --- Tech Articles Craig Thinks You Should Read: --- Automated Machine-Generated Transcript: Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] I've got to say the big story of the week is this breached water plant and how it really affects all of us. Not just because our water could be poisoned by a hacker, but it gives us a bit of a lesson on what we should be doing and what we did. Hi everybody. Craig Peterson here. There are many things that we did over this lockdown. Things we did. In fact, the lockdown itself to try and help stop not just the spread of the virus, but remember it was a two-week lockdown just so that we did not overwhelm our hospitals. Who could disagree with that, right? We all stayed home for two weeks that make sure that we're flattening the curve, that we're not going to have a lot of. People in hospitals. Unfortunately, other people who couldn't make it into the hospitals needed it. That two-week locked down to flatten the curve has turned into what? Now, almost a year later we are still seeing these lockdowns. These lockdowns have caused havoc. We've talked about many of them. Of course, you hear them all the time on the radio. Everything from suicides of our children. Through our parents dying in these homes and without the comfort of their family and without human touch for almost a year. It's just so, so, so sad to see. Now I'm not going to get into the political sides of this and what should we have done? What shouldn't have we'd had done? I've got my opinions on some of this. What I want to talk about is what we did with our jobs? What did we do with our businesses? I think we did some terrible things there, too. What I'm talking about is we need to stay home, but we have certain businesses that need to stay open. Now, frankly, every business needs to stay open. It's a business because it's fulfilling a need, right? It is so basic. It's hard to think that people don't understand this, but obviously, they don't. We shut down businesses. Businesses that will never, ever come back. People's lives destroyed. People whose entire savings, their entire retirement plan, everything was based on the business. That's where their money was. The people working there were counting on having that money to pay the rent, to pay the electric bills and other utilities. To pay for all of the things in life that we need to pay. It's one thing to have credit card bills that you can't pay because they're not a whole lot they can do about unsecured debt. They can certainly harass you. When it comes to things like your home or whatever it is, you're renting, whether you own it or not, how can you make those payments if you don't have money coming in. The money that the government is issued has just been a mere pittance. I get it. In some cases, people had just incredible amounts of money compared to what they were normally making with unemployment, with the federal subsidies, et cetera. That didn't last. PPP money, this payroll protection money, lasted for about six weeks for those businesses that could get it. Those that qualified. My business didn't qualify for PPP money. Not because it's too big, but because it's too small. Most of what happens in my business are done by my family members. I've got myself, I've got my wife, of course, you've probably seen Karen mentioned in some of my emails that go out. I've got my eldest son involved. He loves security. He's great at it. He's been working with me now for more than 10- 15 years on this. I've got one of my daughters working with this on me. So it's primarily a family business. We've got contractors who will do different things for us. We have a lot of suppliers and we have to pay those bills, but no payroll per se. You know what? That's a lot of businesses. The number of businesses that were in the same boat as I is huge. That's how things get started in this country. All of these companies could have started. The companies that had started had entered into lease agreements. That had started to provide services for their customers. Whether it be B2B like mine, business to business, or business to consumer they were all stifled. What have we done to ourselves? Really? What have we done? The virus itself is obviously pretty nasty and can be lethal in a lot of cases. It has been. Now we found out that people like governor Cuomo apparently just cooked the books. Cooked the books, something awful. We went home, we started working from home. Our businesses said, what can we do? We had people getting very, very busy trying to figure it out. There are a lot of little remote programs that you can use in one of those is Team Viewer. Now there's nothing particularly wrong with Team Viewer. I'm not fond of the idea of things like Team Viewer, remote desktop, and others, but sometimes it is the best solution for a particular problem. Team viewer in this case was used by a small government agency. Think about what would have happened. You had to shut down, you still had to do work. What did you do as a business? You probably got something like Team Viewer, one of these logins, remote login programs. Maybe you set up a remote desktop so people could get in remotely. Maybe you set up a VPN because that's going to solve all of your problems. Which of course it causes almost as many as it solves, but most people don't realize this. That's the case here. We're talking about a small town, 15,000 people, called Oldsmar. I don't think it's because they're a small town. I think this problem happened because they did what most of us did. We were not ready for a shutdown. As businesses, we weren't ready for a shutdown. In fact, the year before they did the shutdown, they had this massive pandemic planning session about eight months before. They all agreed that a shutdown was the wrong thing to do in the case of a worldwide pandemic. They also redefined pandemic. I think maybe getting the angle I'm coming from here. Right. They decided no, we're not going to do that. They did not plan for pandemics. In fact, they didn't plan for a lockdown. Obviously, you don't. Well, I don't know, maybe you do plan for a pandemic. If you're coming up with a virus you're going to release it, but they were not planning for a pandemic. They were not planning for the lockdown and neither were businesses. Most businesses, government agencies, and NGOs had no plans in place, even for disaster recovery or business continuity. You may or may not be aware of this, but there are different levels. You've got basic backups and you should be doing backups because hard disks fail. One of my customers' CEO thought that hard desks never fail. She was really upset when a disc crashed that we'd been warning her about because we keep an eye on things called smart stats on the disks. We said you've got this disc it's going to fail. You probably need to fix things because you're not in a raid array. You've fallen out of that already. Things didn't just get worse. You have a backup. You hope that Mac going to work. If you get ransomware and I got to tell you, nowadays, the answer's no. There's two sides to ransomware, but we've talked about that before. I'm not going to get into it right now. You've got the backup mainly in case the disk fails, or you accidentally delete a whole bunch of files and you want to get them back. The next step that you have is disaster recovery. You have a disaster like there's a massive snowstorm that caused a water main to break in the roof. All of your computer equipment is covered with water and none of it will work anymore. In a disaster recovery situation, you now take your backups and you get new machines and you load it all on, and hopefully, your backups are remote. They weren't damaged by the water. Unfortunately, most businesses, again, not thinking this through just hoping, crossing their fingers, that they're not going to be one of that 50% of businesses that is out of business because of a disaster. Actually is closer to 75%. It depends on whose numbers you're looking at. So they're hoping. No, no, I'm going to be part of your disaster. Disaster recovery. Is just think of that, of a snowstorm and the roof collapses of a fire and the computers have burned. Can you get your business back in business? Then there is business continuity. That's a whole other level of planning and business continuity is where you say, Hey, I need to make sure my business continues to conduct business. If you have a hundred, 200, 300 employees, You're much better off being able to let's say the computer room burns down as an example that or that roof caves in because of the snow and you've lost those computers. You're much better to be back in business in four hours or less. We've had business continuity solutions where we had equipment on site in a different part of the building. If there was a problem in one part of the building, we could failover to the other part. Now this is an awfully big building and we had fiber links between them, but they could be back in business in less than 10 minutes. It's just that quick. That is business continuity, right? If you are a public company or you are a division of a public company by law, you cannot be out of business for more than four hours. Now, that's just public companies. By the way, those same rules are in place for doctor's offices, for hospitals, any medical personnel you have to be able to get at the patient's records within four hours. How many of us are ready for that? Then along comes a shutdown, remote workers. We're going to get into this a little more detail. We're going to talk about these SCADA systems, supervisory control, and data acquisition. What does that mean? And why is this a problem for all of our infrastructure? How did this guy poison or at least try to a town of 15,000? You're listening to Craig Peterson. What happened to that town, a Florida city of about 15,000, Northwest of Tampa when hackers got into their water supply and hacked up the amount of lye by a factor of 100. Hello everybody. Craig Peterson here. This whole concept of having a backup versus some sort of disaster recovery plan versus business continuity is something most businesses really don't pay enough attention to. Now, we've got another problem which is really a business continuity problem. What do you do when your employees can't get into the business? When we've set up business continuity for businesses, in the past, what we've done is I mentioned earlier this data center where we duplicated part of it in another part of this massive building. If there was a problem with something, could just be some of the core switches go down or something, we could automatically failover and continue running within 10 minutes. That's one way to do it. But how about if the rest of the building went away? How about if your main servers okay, but the roof collapses or there's some sort of a fire? What happens if your employees can't come to work because there's a lockdown? There are so many reasons you need to have business continuity in place. We didn't have it right. Not we, as in me, but so many people, so many companies didn't have that. That's what happened in Oldsmar, Florida. They have a water plant. Of course, they have all of the normal things any city of 15,000 people would have. They had in their water treatment plant these devices that are called SCADA devices that are used to control valves. These valves are exactly what you think of a water plant. They're used to control the mixture of various chemicals to divert water around the plant. The source of the water, the type of filter switched over to a new filter so that the older filter can be replaced. In many cases, the main filtration is just done through sand and it has to backwash every once in a while. This is all controlled by computer, nowadays. They were running a Windows seven machine. No, I know you're saying, well, I've got Windows seven I'm okay. The problem is Windows seven is no longer supported by Microsoft unless you're paying them ungodly amounts of money. I'm talking about $50,000 a year per machine sort of money. It's just crazy amounts of money. Most companies don't have that, right? I don't know anybody outside the federal government that actually has that. There's probably some, but they will not release it to the general public. Sometimes they'll release a few little security patches because something was just so apparent that they had overlooked. But most of the time, no. Most of the time these security patches just aren't available for older versions of Windows. So they had a Windows machine that was controlling this network with all of these valves on it. They had that machine hooked up to something called Team Viewer. The idea behind Team Viewer is, Oh, this is really handy. I can put Team Viewer on our control machine. Then I can have my employees be at home and then use that control machine remotely over Team Viewer. That's what Team Viewer is designed for, isn't it? Well, as it turns out, they were using Team Viewer throughout the water district. That became a bit of a problem because they did not have proper firewalls to protect it. And they were all sharing the same password. The interesting advisory that came out about this particular problem from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, if you can believe it. This cybersecurity advisory for public water suppliers is talking about how water suppliers can guard against cyberattacks on water supplies. It goes through a lot of these basic things that I've talked about. They should listen to my show every once in a while, right? Or attended the briefings that I had put on for the FBI's InfraGard program. It would be pretty simple for them. The state of Florida came out with some guidelines, et cetera, after the fact. As did Massachusetts. They were running Windows seven. They were remotely accessing plant controls. The computer had no firewall installed. Well, that's what they're saying. In reality, Windows ships with a firewall installed, but that doesn't mean it's going to do any good. I talk a lot about that in some of my courses, but the computer was visible to the internet apparently. Okay. They all shared the same password. What do you want to bet it was a bad password and employees could remotely log into city systems using this Team Viewer application. It was really that simple. Now this actor's here apparently is more than one and they are unidentified. So we don't have a whole lot of information on it, but I did get a notice. It's called a pin, which is a notice from the FBI it's labeled green, which means I can share it with everybody. It's saying that they obtained unauthorized access to it. Now, here's the most important part. These cyber actors likely access the system by exploiting cybersecurity weaknesses, including poor password security and outdated Windows seven operating system to compromise the software used to remotely manage water treatment. The actor also likely uses the desktop sharing software Team Viewer to gain authorized access to the system. We've seen this, not only with Team Viewer, we have seen this with remote desktop and many other systems that people have been using to allow their workers to get in remotely. All of this because of the lockdown, people working at home. All of this should have been handled properly by having a business continuity plan in place. It's really that simple. Now the putting the plan together, isn't that simple, frankly, but we've got to think about what happens here. No. I also think about this particular hack and who did it. Well, it could have been the Russians, right? It could have been the Chinese or the North Koreans. We know Vietnam has gotten into the game lately. It could have been any of those guys. But do you know who the most likely people are to do this sort of thing? It's somebody who works for the company or in this case, very likely that it's a disgruntled employee. They all shared the same password. They use Team Viewer. I said, I'm not blaming Team Viewer here, but this is not good. This is really bad. This is not just something that could happen at a water plant where they're moving the amount of lye from a hundred parts per million to 11,000 parts per million. They're using it in drinking water to change the Alkalinity, the acidity of the water. I don't know, I don't know. We've got to do something about this. I'm going to have some training on this, what you should be doing for remote workers. If you're interested, let me know I'm going to plan some, but I'm not going to do it until I hear from you to know it's worth my time to put it all together. Email me M E at Craig Peterson. Let me know that you'd like to know about remote workers or maybe this whole business continuity idea. Again, email me [email protected] Let me know. Hey, you'll find a whole lot of stuff. If you go to Craig peterson.com and it's all good information that you need. Make sure you sign up for my newsletter right there. Craig peterson.com Hey, we can't go without talking about Bitcoin. It has surged surged surged. It may go up, it may go down. I'm not somebody who advises on investments, but we're going to talk about what it is and why people are mining it. Hello everybody. Craig Peterson here. Well, we have a really big thing to talk about when it comes to Bitcoin, but first I have to take a minute and honor a man who has inspired me in broadcasting for decades. A man who has changed the whole face of radio. AM radio was pretty much dead. Then he started his national show. Of course, I'm talking about Rush Limbaugh. Whether you agree with him politically, and I think most of you guys probably do. We all have our differences, or not, he is a man that deserves great respect. He changed the face of American politics. He literally single-handedly saved AM radio. He created this whole concept of a nationally syndicated talk radio show, and it has helped to educate millions of people. I started listening to him back in the late eighties, quite a while ago. I was just amazed with him and the way he did it. One of the things that inspired me about it is he took callers, but they weren't the guest, he was the guest. They were asking him questions. That is so topsy turvy from how, even today, most radio shows are. People would call him up and they would ask him questions and he'd be able to answer them. He also asked them some questions, obviously, in order to figure things out, he also was not afraid to take opposing calls. He would look for those and he would put those at the top of the queue. He would take those callers that disagreed with him before he took callers that agreed with him, his ditto heads, as they like to call themselves. When...
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AS HEARD ON - The Jim Polito Show - WTAG 580 AM: Amazon, Digital Rights, Libraries, and Apple Music
03/16/2021
AS HEARD ON - The Jim Polito Show - WTAG 580 AM: Amazon, Digital Rights, Libraries, and Apple Music
Good morning, everybody. I was on this morning on WTAG with Jim Polito. We discussed the new Amazon, ebooks, libraries, digital rights management and what some States are demanding from Amazon. Here we go with Jim. For more tech tips, news, and updates, visit - . --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] In Rhode Island have bills as well as New York that would require Amazon, as well as everybody else, to sell eBooks to libraries with quote reasonable terms endquote. Jim Polito: [00:00:13] Okay. Craig Peterson: [00:00:14] Hey everybody, Craig Peterson here. Just got off the phone with Mr. Jim Polito and we had some fun talking about libraries, Jeff Bezos and even George Orwell, got into the act here. Anyhow, here we go with Mr. Jim Polito. Jim Polito: [00:00:34] Hey, Amazon started off as a place to sell books. You know, online books and they basically destroyed the bookstore. I mean, we contributed to it. But now it seems that they're out to destroy libraries. Taking over the world, isn't enough for these folks. I don't know, that's the accusation. Well, let's see if we can confirm it. Let's bring in our good friend and tech talk guru of Craig peterson.com. The man that website is named after, Craig Peterson. Good morning, Craig. Craig Peterson: [00:01:13] Good morning, Jim. Jim Polito: [00:01:14] Oh, so here's the deal? We were just talking a little while ago about Jeff Bezos, started with his garage selling books out of there. Then mail order, then all of a sudden they sold everything. They basically changed retail. They made what we told online shopping would be like 25 years ago. People said, Oh no, you're going to be buying everything online. We said, sure we will. But we are, COVID helped that. Now there's talk that he's gonna close libraries and I went wait a minute. Is this a wild accusation? Craig Peterson: [00:01:48] Well, it is kind of wild, and certainly an accusation. Unfortunately it's also true. If you look at the libraries work over the years, Jim, you go in and you borrow a book. Well, where did that book come from, right? The library bought it. Libraries for a long time, have been paying more for a book than you would. You might go into the bookstore and you pay 20 bucks for the book, but the library is going to pay a lot more for that same book. 50, even a hundred dollars sometimes. So Jeff Bezos is doing right now. Is okay great. You've been paying for these books over price sometimes as much as a hundred dollars for one ebook and it can only be lent so many times, that ebook can. If you want to have five copies of that book out for people to read, you have to buy five licenses, that's what it's been. Jim Polito: [00:02:44] All right. So wait a minute. Let me just make sure, because make sure I understand this. So in the old days before we had, you know, you bought a book online and you read it on your nook or whatever. Hold on a second. So if I was buying a book for a library. I paid a higher rate because the library knew you were going to be loaning that book out, yada, yada, yada. Almost like the publisher said, Hey, we want a little bit more than the average person for this book. Is that true? Craig Peterson: [00:03:14] Absolutely. Jim Polito: [00:03:15] Okay. All right. So now I get this, you have intellectual property. You have a book that is virtual. I mean it's online. If you are a library and you want to let people be able to read that, download it and read it. You're going to have to pay a pretty penny to Jeff Bezos? Craig Peterson: [00:03:38] Yeah. If he will sell it to you. See that's the change that's happened more recently? Jeff Bezos has decided, well, Amazon, right? I'm not sure it was him personally, but they decided that it will not sell, at any price, downloadable versions of it's more than 10,000 eBooks it publishes. Think about an acquisition that Amazon made a few years ago, I have been an Audible subscriber for many, many years. Of course, Audible is the company that sells audio versions of books. Amazon bought Audible. Amazon has said, okay, you used to be able to go and borrow tapes at the library, and you'd listen as you're driving or whatever. You kept up on the latest business book or history or whatever he wanted. So Bezos also owns Audible , which is number one for audio books. They say, Hey, listen, not only, are, we not going to sell any of our eBooks to libraries, but we're not going to let them get any audio books either. Jim Polito: [00:04:43] Wow. Now that is pretty bad. Look from a business perspective, I understand. You're selling a product that now, why would someone buy it, if they could just join the library and download the book. There's gotta be somewhere in between. So libraries will be destroyed. I mean, libraries are great places for research and other things and talented librarians can help you out quite a bit. A talented librarian sometimes is a lot better than what Google will tell you. When you go into a search about a certain topic. Librarians are much better, and don't, usually have an agenda, like Google. You should buy this while you're researching that, you know what I mean? This could completely destroy libraries. Craig Peterson: [00:05:35] Of course, we're on in Rhode Island and right now. Lawmakers in Rhode Island have bills, as well as New York, that would require Amazon as well as everybody else to sell eBooks to libraries with reasonable terms and quotes. So we'll see, we'll see what happens, Maryland's already passed a law like that, but this is a real problem as you go forward. Now, remember, Amazon is the one you mentioned, the Kindle, or actually you mentioned the Nook Jim Polito: [00:06:06] That'sBarnes and noble, isn't it? Yeah. Craig Peterson: [00:06:08] Yeah, it is whoever they are. Yeah. Jim Polito: [00:06:12] Wait a minute. Hold on. Barnes and Nobles is on the phone. Danny DME. Don't take that call. Yeah. Craig Peterson: [00:06:21] Yeah. So whoever they are. Amazon has the number one ebook reader. Now, for those that have never done this, and ebook reader allows you to keep hundreds of books right there in this little almost like a display. They're fantastic. That's how I read 99% of my books. So they've got the number one ebook reader out there. And because of that, they kind of control the whole thing. But if you bought George Orwell's 1984, you might remember this was a few years back, Amazon decided you couldn't have that book anymore and removed it from everybody's ebook reader. All of the Kindles, they remove copies of 1984. Jim Polito: [00:07:05] What is the reasoning behind this, because I thought that 1984 was no longer under copyright, but I could be wrong. Craig Peterson: [00:07:10] Yeah, it is. The copyright holders told Amazon. That they didn't like the terms Amazon was putting the books under. So Amazon pulled them all back. That's another problem with eBooks, especially with digital rights management, they can take them away, that copy that you have in those Dr. Seuss books could disappear from your Kindle, because you don't own it. You see, if you buy a book and you read the book and you want to have a yard sale and sell the book for a buck or whatever it is, you can, because you own that book. If you get a book from Amazon on your Kindle, or any of these other places, you don't own that, in almost every case. You're just getting a right to read it and. They can pull it back. Jim Polito: [00:08:02] You know, it's interesting. My, my neighbor across the street, when he retired Dominic, Dominic, and his wife, Lucy, she's a school teacher. She's still working. He built one of those beautiful boxes that looks like a really big bird house with a glass door and it's for the neighborhood, put a book in, take a book, whatever. He can do that because people own the books. You own it. Craig Peterson: [00:08:25] Right. Jim Polito: [00:08:26] Good. Hey, whatever happened while we're on this topic with Apple and Apple music, when I downloaded a song for 99 cents and I thought I owned that song, I technically, did they change this? I technically didn't own it. Craig Peterson: [00:08:45] Yeah, you never have actually. That's the way they're doing it, nowadays. Apple said, Hey, listen, we're going to do this. And Amazon did too. It's going to be much cheaper for them to distribute it. But again, think back, you and I both remember albums, records, the black vinyl, you know, or that, of course the acetate and other things and we switched over to CDs. The compact disk. People don't know, those are thesedays either. Right? It was much, much cheaper for the record industry to produce a CD than it was to produce a record. Their costs went from a couple of bucks down to just a dime, but they charged more for the CD. What Amazon did. Yeah. More margin. Is, they said, Hey, listen guys, your distribution costs are going to be nil because all you're doing is copying digital books around. You're not going to have to have a warehouse. You're not going to have to ship these. You're not going to have trucks or anything else. We expect you to sell them for less. And the Amazon using its market power strong armed these publishing houses to lower their prices. Now the publishing houses are really pushing back and saying, no, you can'ttell me I can only sell it for $10 and make $9.99 cents. Whereas before I was only making $2, now I want more money and it's a shame, but that's, what always happens. Jim Polito: [00:10:11] And then your Don Quixote and you're going after windmills. Because you're going up against Amazon. This is one of the dangers of a big success, like Amazon. You know, what's sad is in the whole thing. 1984, isn't it ironic that George Orwell's book about big brother and this and that you can't get it on Amazon. When in fact the people who are using Amazon should know a little something about big brother, and it would be a good book for people to read right now. Craig Peterson: [00:10:46] You can get it. Yeah, it was just temporary. You can get it. You can get it. All right. Good. I'm glad his descendants have, and they've worked at it. Craig fascinating is usual with you. Folks. We always podcast segments. Which you can get on the station website, go to the Jim Polito show. On that page, you'll see Jim's podcasts on the right hand side. Just click there and this will be podcasted. Craig, if folks want to get more information from you, how do they do it? Well, just go online to Craig peterson.com and I also have my iHeart podcasts and tolisten to those things, just go to Craig peterson.com/iheart. That'll take you to the right spot. I was listening, in France, iHeart, so I can pick up my safe space. Jim Polito: [00:11:37] Nice. Craig as usual. Thank you. You always bring great stuff to the table. We'll talk with you next week. Craig Peterson: [00:11:43] Take care, Jim. Bye-bye. If you're in the healthcare industry, I am speaking for the big Massachusetts association this Friday. I am conducting a webinar for them on, of course, cybersecurity, particularly in the healthcare industry. If you are a member of an organization of some sort, and you'd like to have me on and do a webinar for you guys to let me know, I do make some time available for that and I may be able to help you out. Just email me M [email protected] I know of few of you guys are going to be there on Friday at 10:00 AM. I think it is as we go over healthcare industry stuff. Then I'm also going to be doing a few more webinars afterwards, delving into some of these topics a little bit deeper. All right, everybody take care. We'll be back tomorrow. Bye-bye. --- 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 WGIR-AM 610: Irresponsible Behavior of States with Regard to Websites
03/15/2021
AS HEARD ON NH Today WGIR-AM 610: Irresponsible Behavior of States with Regard to Websites
Welcome, Craig Peterson here. This morning I was on with Chris Ryan on NH Today. I jumped right into a conversation in regards to the irresponsible way that the States and Federal Government have been going about creating websites to schedule and distribute the Covid-19 vaccines. Here we go with Chris. These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit. - --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Instead of going out to the private sector and say, you know what, booking an appointment for a vaccine. That's a lot like booking an appointment or a ticket to go see a concert. Why don't we just use something that already exists. There's dozens of them, like Cvent and just modify that slightly. Have that company modify it. Well, you're familiar with the debacle that was and is. It's still there. It's just crazy. The problems with healthcare.gov. We got the Feds now rolling out their own websites. We've got States rolling out their own websites.. What can we expect from that? That's exactly what we talked about this morning, Chris Ryan and I on NH Today. Chris Ryan: [00:00:45] Craig Peterson joins us on the show, now from tech talk that you hear on news radio 610 and 96.7 Saturdays at 11:30 AM. Craig, how are you? Craig Peterson: [00:00:54] Hey, good morning, doing pretty well. You mentioned power, we lost it a couple of times over the last two days. Its no fun with all this wind. Chris Ryan: [00:01:03] Indeed. I could go into my pitch for the automatic standby generator from Generac, which you should get one of those. I'll refrain from going all in on it. Justin McIssac: [00:01:11] Nicely done. Chris Ryan: [00:01:12] But we do, we do recommend that, particularly in this given environment. I want to ask you about the prevalence of scams and the prevalence of identity thefts and things of that nature. How much of that has to do with our usage of phones and hackings and things of that nature? We heard last week, from the States aspect of securities, regulation and protection. We've talked a lot about this outside of just your appearances. Has there been a sizeable uptick as in regards to that area? Craig Peterson: [00:01:48] Yeah, there has been. What's interesting too, is it's been both directions. We've seen a huge uptick in finding some of these problems. Some of them have existed now for many months, maybe as much as a year or more. We only recently found out about, and this includes hacks from the Chinese and from the Russians, and of course that's nothing new, but the depth of these attacks has been brand new. It's just astounding how they have really come after every last one of us, particularly businesses. They've been very, very targeted. Government agencies have been hit hard. DOD, Department Of Defense contractors have been hit hard. You mentioned things like our smartphones that we're using all of the time now. Those are also starting to get hit. We've seen some responses. Samsung has said, Hey, we are going to support our phones now with security updates for three years or more. It looked like maybe we did something in return because these Russian government websites all went offline after we vowed, President Biden said, we're going to retaliate for some of these attacks. Chris Ryan: [00:03:08] That's really interesting. Whenever these things take place, whether there's an outage of a particular server or a website goes down, one of the first things that comes into my mind. Is this a glitch? Is this a problem? Is this an upgrade? Or they hit their their capacity. Or is this something a little more nefarious? Generally, is it just when a website goes down or a server is having some problems. Is it generally not nefarious or a lot of times is it well Craig Peterson: [00:03:36] It's a little bit of both. A lot of times it is. I've got to say that more recently, over the last year or so, we've been seeing something that we'd never seen in the Internet. That is that the internet was designed to be able to withstand atomic blast. It was very, very decentralized. The decentralized internet tended to be a very stable internet. What's been happening more recently is that there have been acquisitions going on. We've got more and more the internet concentrated in individual hands. Look at how Amazon is running about 60% of the internet traffic, nowadays. Some of it, it's generating, et cetera. We have seen, frankly, companies and Amazon is not one of them, but companies who are less and less able to understand what the consequences of their actions are. They're making changes to the internet and the networks. These big outages we've seen over the last year, almost all of them were due to, let's just call it incompetence on the part of small companies that have been buying large parts of control of the internet. That's going to be continuing for quite a while. So, it's not necessarily nefarious when something goes down. In fact recently, it's been a lot less nefarious than it used to be. It's just the normal course of things. More and more power concentrated in fewer and fewer companies that have less and less ability to do what they shouldn't be doing. Chris Ryan: [00:05:13] The Washington Post had a really good article this weekend about the rollout of the new vaccine website and the federal website. Intalking with Kathleen Sebelius, who was the Health and Human Services secretary during the Obamacare and healthcare.gov roll-out, which of course was a disaster. This website rollout is obviously significant. Every aspect of this is significant because Biden has called his shot. He has said, this is when things are going to take place. He has set a date. He has given that date. And, some may view it as being ambitious. Some may say we're already on that glide path, anyway. The aspect of pushing forward, a website of this nature, how do things go wrong? How could they go wrong? Particularly in light of what happened with healthcare.gov, which was delayed for weeks, as a result of various glitches, despite spending millions and millions and millions of dollars on it. Craig Peterson: [00:06:11] Yeah, my, I predicted that correctly, by the way. I had said it will take the about three years to get healthcare.gov to be working properly and that's exactly what it took. We had massive outages. The problem I see here with this Federal Government roll out, this new website that was announced. Americans, all being eligible for the vaccine by May first. It's all part of a strategy that has been around a while. The problem is that somehow businesses think that we're different. My business is entirely different from your business. Yet all businesses are 96-98% exactly the same. We have the same problems. The same concerns. Governments doing the same thing instead of going out to the private sector and saying, you know what? Booking an appointment for a vaccine that's a lot like booking an appointment for a ticket to go see a concert. Why don't we just use something that already exists. There's dozens of them, like Cvent. Just modify that slightly, have that company modify it. No, instead of that, we've got all of these people working for these government agencies, spending tens of millions of dollars of taxpayers' money to roll out something that is going to have major problems. We've seen that again and again, it's to me, Chris, just ridiculous what we're doing. We could have this thing rolled out in a week from start to finish and have it cost of maybe a couple of hundred grand total with all the modifications and have it working day one. Chris Ryan: [00:07:51] Yep. I mean this is the same thing that happened with healthcare.gov. If you had gone to, and that was in my view, a simpler website than this one is, you got to connect people with the location, the availability and all that the healthcare.gov in my view was a little bit easier. There was, not as much of a time constraint and there were best practices about those types of websites that already existed and could have been done at a fraction of the cost. It'll be fascinating to see how much this vaccine website plus, I mean the state of New Hampshire just rolled out their own website on this. Now you have duplicity as well, where you can go to your state website, you go to the federal website. Could you go to both and shop for a better date? Are they both drawing from the same, you would assume from the same locations, right? You go to the federal website, you go to the state website, you're going to get your vaccine still at the same spot, I assume. We've spent money, federal money on a state website, and now we're going to spend federal money on a federal website where they're both going to be doing the same thing. Craig Peterson: [00:08:53] Yeah. Yeah, this is a problem and frankly, the biggest problem they've got is the back end integration. I inferred from what you were saying, which is how do we tie it in with the local Rite Aid store? All of these different tie-ins that have to occur. It gets very, very, very complicated. Frankly, this is simpler than what they did with healthcare.gov, which had a lot more tie-ins to insurance companies in the backend. Leave it to the feds if you want something to get really messed up Chris Ryan: [00:09:23] As always, I appreciate you joining us here on New Hampshire today. Craig Peterson: [00:09:27] Take care. --- 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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Tech Talk with Craig Peterson Podcast: Supply chain hacks, Nation-state spying, Tesla, Microsoft Exchange Server Hack and More
03/13/2021
Tech Talk with Craig Peterson Podcast: Supply chain hacks, Nation-state spying, Tesla, Microsoft Exchange Server Hack and More
Welcome! It is now up to 100s of thousands of organizations that have been affected by this Microsoft Exchange Server Vulnerability and it was so large that you could drive a freight train through it. Oh yes -- Microsoft did issue a patch but that did not fix the problem which was the backdoor that the bad guys installed. Nation-states, especially China and Russia have been spying on us an it will take a lot of research to determine what information they were able to get their hands on and what damage they can do with that information. We have deep fakes in the news again and there is more so be sure to Listen in. For more tech tips, news, and updates, visit - CraigPeterson.com. --- Tech Articles Craig Thinks You Should Read: --- Automated Machine-Generated Transcript: Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] If you've been listening to me for a while, you may not believe this, but I've got a recommendation here on Android phones. Coming up we're going to talk about Google's new replacement for cookies, and a little bit about what Teslas' been up to. I don't like this. I have never been a fan of Android phones, and you know why I haven't been a fan? The biggest problem with Android phones is the lack of security updates. That really does concern me a lot. Google also has not been the best when it comes to the Playstore and making sure that everything on the store is actually safe. Here is some very promising news for people who like the Android platform or maybe dislike the Apple platform for one reason or another. Frankly, there's a lot of reasons there too. Samsung has always been the leader when it comes to keeping their number one phones updated in the past. I've always said, make sure you can get updates. Samsung with its Galaxy phones has been good for about two years. They provide you with the security updates you need with some patches. Even if Google comes out with a patch, most of the phones out there that are running Android, do not get the updates. Ever. Some of these phones are older, they don't bother supporting them. Some manufacturers drop support within months after you buy the phone. Samsung has been good for about two years. So my rule of thumb has always been, if you're going to buy Android, if you gotta do it. Stick with Samsung and stick with their number one model. It is now promising four years of security updates for more than 130 Galaxy phones. That's pretty big when you consider that frankly, Android phones have been the butt of many a joke over the years. Samsung is working pretty hard to make sure that they are really able to deliver for the Galaxy owners. Now, this is cool because Samsung just early, I think, this year it was that the Samsung promise that most new Galaxy phones would be getting about three generations of Android version updates. Now, that amounts to a few years, as a rule, the generations in the Android world are pretty much about a year. Google has been providing updates for its own phone that it has. They provided to these other companies, like Samsung, to then take it and modify it to fit what they want and then they provide it to you. So, three generations are good. Now, they have said four years of security updates. Now, that's a pretty impressive promise. What they're trying to do is compete with Apple that has historically provided about five years of support. There's a big difference, obviously between two years and five years, but there isn't as much of a difference between four years' worth of security updates, and the five, six, seven years that Apple has been doing depending on what kind of security updates. That's very impressive. Of course, Samsung just a year ago wasn't guaranteeing anything in terms of updates. Most new phone purchases were good for a year or two of updates, but only the Pixel, which is made by Google and Android. One base phones were on the record about how long you could be getting updates from the manufacturer. Now Samsung is doing one better than Google. Remember, Google is the guy that actually provides the Android operating system. Google's only guaranteed three years of version and security updates for Pixel phones and that's not very many phones. Frankly, Google Pixel is not been selling well. It's the standard that all of the Android manufacturers use in order to have a kind of proof of concept. So this is what it should look like. This just should be how it acts. I'm looking at this list here. This thing is huge of all of these phones from Samsung that is going to be supported, here. You've got the Galaxy foldable devices. The whole family of folds. The Galaxy S series and starts at the S 10 plus moving on to the S 20, S 25 G, S 20 plus blah, blah, blah. A bunch of different S 20 models and the S 21. That's pretty darn good. That's a lot of phones. Also, the Galaxy Note series, starting at the Note 10, all the way up to the current Note, 20 ultra-five GS the Galaxy AA series. Again, certainly, the 10 going up to eight 45, the Galaxy AMS, the up through the Galaxy X covers series and again tab series, which has been pretty popular for a lot of people. If you're thinking about picking up one of your Android phones here soon, maybe you should give a second thought to the Galaxy. Now, they're guaranteeing that they're going to provide these security updates for you for four years. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, a guarantee we'll see how long that lasts. The other problem is how quickly are they going to get it out? You'll see Apple devices, who just this week they had a security patch, they pushed it out and they expect to see 70, 80% of all of the phones with that security patch installed within a week. That's your Apple iPhones. Google comes out with a security patch. They push it out. It has to go to the vendors like Samsung and then the vendor like Samsung has to take that add the device drivers that need for all of these models. Think about that for a minute. That's a lot of device drivers. That's a lot of different models. I think it's going to take them a while to do that and then they'll get it to you. That security update that comes from Google, we've seen takes six months in the past before it gets on to your phone. If you're looking at. Security, if that's a real concern of yours and sure should be particularly after this disaster of a company called Microsoft and their windows products. Particularly now this Microsoft exchange server bug. I'm so upset with Microsoft, but you know what? We'll get into that a little bit later. The Samsung, the galaxies, the Google Androids are not designed for all of the safety and security that you really do need, frankly. When you think about the models were talking about 130 models that Samsung is going to be providing new updates for. Okay. When we look at Apple and the iPhone models let me see how many iPhone models are there out there. I'm going to Google that right now, even as we're talking. So 2007, that is when they first came up with them. Okay. So since the very first iPhone, according to the pho iPhone Wiki, there have been 29 models of the iPhone. 29. Two nine. How many did I say Samsung is going to be updating? 130. So who has an easier time of providing updates, security, updates, testing the updates, pushing the updates, having people install the updates, the company that in the last, how many years has been making iPhones yet since 2007? Okay. So all the way up to 2021, that's a lot of years. Versus the Android who has been making these Galaxy's for many years, but is only going to be providing updates back to the Galaxy S 10 from 2019. That covers the 130 models. Are you getting what I'm selling here? Are you buying it? Yeah, it's impossible. Really? For Samsung, even with all that, they're trying to do here. They're trying to help out. It's impossible for them to keep up with security-based unless they have this massive team. I don't expect that they do have a massive team that's going to be working in parallel. 130 teams, one for each phone. That just isn't happening. So again, if security is a concern, Android is not the way to go. If, for some reason you morally, ethically, religiously cannot use an iPhone and then have a solid look at Samsung because of this promise they came up with, here in the last two weeks, of four years of security updates for more than 130 phones. Finally, there is an Android phone that will have security updates at some point in time, versus what we've had over the years of really, you can only count on it for one or two years. It's just not worth it. Not a good thing. Hey, I am sending out on my newsletter, not just my show Notes, but I have also been sending out one or two other emails a week that have some very narrow training. What I've been doing is making audiograms for you guys. This is a video that is of me speaking, explaining something. On that video, you can see all of the words you can read along, which is great for people who are hearing impaired, or maybe you want to have that computer muted for whatever reason. It makes it easy. You can find me on YouTube, just go to Craig peterson.com/youtube, and you can catch those audiograms. You can also get them. If you are an active subscriber to my newsletter, active means you open it. You read it. I know you do. If I don't consider you active you just don't get this extra information. So, make sure you open those emails. A lot of us have been complaining about cookies and tracking for a long time. Google has finally heard us? I'm not sure about this. We're going to talk about third-party cookies, right now. Hi, everybody. Thanks for joining me, Craig Peterson here. Well, third-party cookies are where you go to a website, and that web browser kind of squeals on you, shall we say. What happens is Google, for instance, is trying to track you as you go online. As you go between websites. They're calling this kind of an advertising surveillance industry on the web. Frankly, this third-party cookie has really been an important part of this whole surveillance industry. What it does now is it allows a website to have a look at where you have been online. When I say it allows a website, it's really Google, that's doing the tracking. Obviously, you're going to a website, Google doesn't own every website out there. In fact, it barely owns any, when you look at the number of websites that are out on the internet. So Google has this whole concept of if you're visiting this site and you have visited this site and this other site, I know something about you. So it sells that information because it's seeing the pattern, right? That's the whole idea behind the advertising. Phasing out these tracking cookies and these other persistent third-party identifiers have been something people have been trying to get rid of for a very long time. The Electronic Frontier Foundation you'll find them [email protected] has been jumping up and down trying to get everybody to pull up their socks if you will. One of the first players to really jump into this was Apple. Apple has pretty much told the whole industry, you got to stop doing some of this tracking. Some of the tracking is okay. Again, how many times have I said, if I'm looking for a Ford F-150 then I don't mind seeing ads for the Ford F-150. Why would I want to see ads for a motor scooter when I'm looking for a pickup truck. Frankly, if I'm looking for an F-150, I expect to see ads maybe for a Chevy Silverado or a Dodge truck, does that make sense to you? I'm looking for something and that's when I'm interested in seeing it. Google is now jumping on this bandwagon because Apple has said we are going to be doing a couple of things. We are going to be forcing you, app developers, to tell everybody exactly what you are doing with their information, what you're tracking, who you're selling it to, what it's being used for. That's a very big deal. It's got the whole advertising industry very worried. Google is coming along saying, okay, Apple will do you a little bit of one better. Of course, the biggest complaint from Facebook who ironically has been buying newspaper ads, if you can believe that. Google has been destroying the newspaper industry and now it's going to newspapers to try and get people to stop Apple from destroying Facebook's industry by blocking some of the advertising tracking that Facebook has been doing. Now, what Google is doing is looking to replace these third-party cookies. How were they going to do that? They are already doing a few rather sneaky things. For instance, they fingerprint your browser. Your browser has a fingerprint because you have certain extensions on your browser that you've added. You have your computer, which has an operating system that has a certain version. It has a certain amount of memory. It has a certain amount of disc storage. A lot of the private information, personal information about your computer can be gleaned by a website. One of the things they've been doing this, you're blocking cookies. No problem. I can still figure out who you are and they don't necessarily know exactly who you are, but they have a very good idea. One of the proposals Google has come out with is called the federated learning of cohorts, which is very ambitious and could be the replacement, if you will, for these third-party cookies that could be the most harmful. What it is is a way to make your browser do the profiling. Itself. Historically they've been able to track your browser as you go around and then they have to pull all of that information together. They pull it together and they come up with a picture of you and who you are. Yeah. You're interested in buying a pickup truck, particularly an F150. This is an example. That picture gets detailed about you, but it's something that the advertisers have to put together. What this flock or federated learning of cohorts is doing is it's boiling down your recent browsing activity into a category. They're calling this a behavioral label, and then they're sharing it with websites and advertisers. The idea is basically your web browser itself is going to put you in one or more buckets and the websites that you're visiting and the advertisers that are advertising on those websites will be able to get that label that your browser has put on you. Yeah, you like that? So what EFF is saying is that this could exacerbate many of the worst non-privacy problems with behavioral ads, including discrimination and predatory targeting. You can guess what those things mean, right? They're calling this a privacy sandbox, right? It's always the opposite. If Congress is passing a bill, that is a COVID relief bill, you can bet that there's very little to do with COVID relief in the bill. Wait a minute, actually, that's true. There's only 9% of the money in this almost $2 trillion spending plan. 9%, that actually goes to COVID relief. Instant COVID relief bill. Same thing here with Google, right? This is the privacy sandbox and it's going to be better, Google says. In the world, we have today where data brokers and ad tech giants, track and profile everybody with complete impunity. Just like Equifax has. Just like Equifax lost our personal identifiable information, our social security numbers, or addresses or names or date of birth, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. We pay a small fine. Yet. We go on. Are they out of business? Have they lost business? In fact, they gained business because people have been paying Equifax to monitor their credit. Oh my gosh. That framing that Google is talking about is based on a false premise that you have to choose between tracking and new tracking. Does that sound familiar? Yeah. It's not an either-or. We really should be rejecting this whole new federated learning of cohorts proposal Google has come out with. You can bet that Apple is going to reject this outright because it's really rather terrible. If you care about your privacy on the other hand again, I look at it and say I want an F-150. I don't mind ads for pickup trucks, so what's wrong with that? Okay. There's two sides to this. I just don't like them calling me by name when I walked past a billboard. Stick around, we'll be right back. I'm a fan of much of what Elon Musk has done, what he's trying to do when it comes to technology, and being a proponent of technology. I'm not fond of Elon Musk taking over $3 billion from the taxpayers though. Hi, everybody. I appreciate you spending a couple of hours with me here on the weekend. There's so much to cover. Elon Musk it was $3 billion that he had received in government subsidies. Now we're looking at this, according to good jobs, first.org. We're looking at $4.9 billion dollars that Elon Musk has received basically from the taxpayer. It's really sad when you get right down to it. Now, Tesla got money from taxpayers he's paid some of it back. It's really the government trying to name a winner. There's a lot of competing technologies. There's even non-electric cars out there. How many of you even aware of this? That use, for instance, hydrogen instead of electricity. Now there's, of course, with any technology there's complications here and there. Hydrogen is absolutely amazing. It's an electric car. You fill it up with hydrogen and the only byproduct of the burning, if you will, the hydrogen, is water. In fact, it doesn't burn the hydrogen. It combines it with oxygen to make the water and produce electricity all at the same time. Very cool. There are some prototypes out already on the roads out in California and some other places around the world. When the government's giving out billions of dollars to electric cars, they're effectively naming a winner. Aren't they? Does that make sense? I don't think so. We've got to have a free market and this is not a way to have a free market. It's just like with solar, wind, some of these other technologies where the government is taking our tax dollars and is saying this particular technology, and even worse, look at Solyndra, look at some of these others just absolute debacles. Now, even worse they give money to a specific company within a certain industry. That is not a good thing. Government has a terrible record at picking winners. Even investors, you look at people who are angel investors and who are venture capitalists. They are lucky. If they make money in one of 10 of their investments. It is not a great way for them to make money. A professional investor does terribly. Imagine how poorly a politician does. The politician is going to be listening to the people knocking on their door, saying here's some money for next time you run for the house or Senate. Or locally, in local elections, it even happens. That is a very bad thing. It's been proven again, and again over particularly in the last about 140 years. Governments' terrible about picking winners. Yet they do it every day of the week. Tesla has gotten money, right? Some, of its tax benefits, some of it is actual cash. The bottom line, they've some great technology. Now what's happening is Tesla is asking Tesla fans to lobby the government on its behalf. Great article by Rachel Kraus over on Mashable about this week. I love it. She says a Tesla fan. Your mission. Should you choose to accept it is to go to bat politically for the company. Check this out online. You might want to too because Tesla has launched a new online portal called the Tesla engagement platform. CNBC spotted this about a week ago, and this is a hub where Tesla posts actions its users can take like contacting government officials when there is a potential law that would affect the company. In fact, it says in a blog post on this hub Tesla built. Engage Tesla is a new platform for both Tesla's public policy team and Tesla owners clubs. Its goal is to create a digital Homebase for all of our work and to make it easier for...
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AS HEARD ON: WGAN Mornings News with Matt Gagnon: Microsoft Exchange Server Hack and Russia and Chinese Spying Activities
03/10/2021
AS HEARD ON: WGAN Mornings News with Matt Gagnon: Microsoft Exchange Server Hack and Russia and Chinese Spying Activities
Good morning everybody! I was on WGAN this morning with Matt Gagnon. Matt asked right off the bat about one of my soapbox subjects, Microsoft! I told him I have had it with them and their reluctance to fix their software when they have the means to do so. Then we discussed Russia and China and their spying and hacking activities. Here we go with Matt. And more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com. --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] China and Russia spying on us. We knew this for a very long time. It's going to take years to unpack. We had the SolarWinds hack. Now we've got this Microsoft exchange server vulnerability. The most incredible drive a freight truck through it, vulnerability possible. I have had it. I think Matt Gagnon figured that out this morning when I was on the radio with him. So here we go with Matt Gagnon. Matt Gagnon: [00:00:28] It is 736 on the WGAN morning news, which is a perfect time on a Wednesday to talk to Craig Peterson, our tech guru. He joins us at this time every Wednesday. Also, you can hear him on this very station on Saturdays at one o'clock because he talks about these subjects and more in more depth and detail. Craig, how are you this morning? Craig Peterson: [00:00:46] I am doing great. My bees were flying yesterday. All of my hives overwintered, which is like a first for me. It is just, wow. This is so great. Matt Gagnon: [00:00:56] I'm sorry. I wasn't aware that you were a beekeeper. Craig Peterson: [00:00:58] Yeah, bees. I got chickens. I used to have horses, and we got cats and dogs. Craig Peterson, you also have technology-related equipment, gadgets galore and we're going to talk about some of that stuff right now. Matt Gagnon: [00:01:09] I want to kick things off maybe, if you will, Craig with me, by talking about the ongoing Microsoft exchange hack. What exactly is this? Craig Peterson: [00:01:19] This is an absolutely huge deal and it's not that difficult to understand. I am, bottom line, fed up with Microsoft. This is just the latest in a long string of major vulnerabilities. In this particular case, we're talking about probably right now, the numbers are over 100,000 businesses that have been hacked. It's just crazy. We know of about 30,000 give or take. Here's what the problem is. People in business need email. That's the life of a business. Many people made the mistake of trusting the Microsoft exchange server, which is something that you can get in-house. You run it on a little exchange server and aren't I great cause I got it set up. It's a little confusing. It also is offered in a hosted environment. Then Microsoft also has what used to be called office 365. That's now. Microsoft 365 also has email built-in. Okay. That's one of the core features. However, yet again, we had major vulnerabilities. Remember a mail server has to be exposed to the internet to allow it to receive mail and allow it to send email. It should really be one of the most secure machines you have and well protected. Many of us use bastion host. That's what I use for all of my clients. So that none of this nasty software or hackers get direct access to a complicated system, like Microsoft exchange server. They got into machines. They were able to, at that point, install a backdoor. Which allowed the hackers, and this is almost certainly China based on kind of the fingerprints involved, it allowed them to spread throughout organizations, including government agencies. Major government agencies, our school districts, local government, the retail, small business, you name it have been compromised. Microsoft, last week, came up with some patches that they released that kind of closed the door. The problem is the horses are already out of that barn. What happened is they've installed the back door and Microsoft didn't close it. Microsoft released patches for this major vulnerability, in the Microsoft exchange server, which you run again for your email and they did not fix the compromised machine. My advice to everybody, if you're a small business, if you're running an exchange server, you have to immediately patch it or have your service provider patch it. You should restore from backup from who knows how long ago, because there were backdoors installed. There's multiple types. This is a major mess up Matt, absolutely major. It's going to have consequences for years to come. 80% of Americans, now it's expected, about 80% of us have had all of our personal information stolen and in the hands of Russia and China. This is going to bring her closer to a hundred percent. Matt Gagnon: [00:04:39] Talking to Craig Peterson, our tech guru, who joins us on Wednesdays at this time to talk over the world of technology. I saw a news piece today, actually on China and Russia cooperating to build a moon base of some kind, which is perhaps a subject in and of itself that I could ask you about. That's actually not where I was going because China and Russia also in the news for their spying sprees, shall we call them. Where they're engaging in a whole bunch of different spying tactics. I'd love for you to break this down for us a little bit. It's a very interesting story. Craig Peterson: [00:05:09] It really is. We had this SolarWinds hack, and I've been talking about that for a couple of months now on this show. This SolarWinds is what's called a supply chain attack where SolarWind software is used by businesses to monitor their networks, to control systems that are within their networks to put this rather simply. SolarWinds issued a patch and it was an upgrade, right? It was the new features and some fixes and you got to install this. Apparently, over a year ago their software, SolarWind software had been compromised. SolarWinds then started distributing all of this Russian and Chinese malware to all of its customers. Again, including government agencies, businesses, et cetera. Now you have a supply chain risk. In other words, I'm using SolarWind software. I trust it, they signed it. I checked the signature and I got hacked bottom line. They have gotten into all kinds of systems, but SolarWinds said, Hey about a third of all of these tens of thousands of companies and agencies that have been hacked about a third of them don't use SolarWinds. It turns out now that they came in through Microsoft bugs. In this other third of the cases, almost certainly including this latest one we found out about last week. It is going to take years for us to try and figure this out, fix this problem. I am so upset. So upset with Microsoft. They are sitting on billions of dollars in cash, Matt, and they're not spending it to try and protect their customers. Small businesses, what are we supposed to do? It's nuts when our supply chain with our software providers giving us software that is hacked, already. We install it and now they are into all of our systems. All the Russians have to do is spray and pray. They just send it all out. We're just sitting there with our fingers crossed. It's not going to hit us. Oh, I trust Microsoft or I trust Apple, whatever it is. We have to hold these companies accountable. How about Equifax? They're still out there. They're still in business. They still have all of our information and they gave up about 150 million Americans plus Canadians plus some European data to the bad guys. They sit there and they say it's going to cost us ten to 20 million if we get hacked. To really fix this problem is going to cost us 30, 40, 50 million. We'll just sit here and won't spend the money. We have to stop this now. Matt Gagnon: [00:08:04] Craig Peterson, you hear his voice here every Wednesday at this time. You also hear it on Saturdays at one, o'clock talking about these issues and more. Craig, I appreciate it as always. We will talk to you again next week, sir. Craig Peterson: [00:08:15] Take care, Matt. Matt Gagnon: [00:08:16] All right. Craig Peterson: [00:08:16] Oh me. Oh my. Hey, Karen and I spent a bunch of time. In fact, the whole day, trying to get this membership site all up and running so we can put the courses in there for you. So you have the one place to go. So the free stuff that I'm going to be doing will be in there for you. Plus some of the paid courses we are getting close, I know I've been promising this forever, but I've got a business to run. I got eight kids, grandkids, right? My bees, as I mentioned, and chickens and all these other animals running around. So it's just taking me time. I have to apologize for that, but anyhow. I am very excited about what we're doing there because this is going to open up a whole new universe for us. All right. Everybody take care. We will talk again soon. Probably this weekend. --- 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: MyHeritage Deep Fake Animation App and Microsoft Exchange Server Hack
03/09/2021
AS HEARD ON - The Jim Polito Show - WTAG 580 AM: MyHeritage Deep Fake Animation App and Microsoft Exchange Server Hack
Good morning, everybody. I was on this morning on WTAG with Jim Polito. We discussed the new deep nostalgia app available from MyHeritage and some of the neat and also scary aspects of it. Then I got in a quick plug about the Microsoft Exchange Server hack that has affected 100,000 businesses. If you are using Microsoft Exchange Server, patch it and then wipe and restore your machine from backup because this hack leaves a back door in your system. Here we go with Jim. For more tech tips, news, and updates, visit - . --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Many of us have these pictures. I have pictures of family, of course, from the 1800s, and lots from then on. There are technologies now that are using a form of artificial intelligence. Right? Good morning, everybody. A very cool new, deep fake website that will take your old pictures and animate them. Yes. Those photos you've had for all of these years, you can now put in and it will turn them into a live living person video. It's amazing, but there's some risks. That's what I talked with Jim about this morning. Also, of course, I had to bring up this Microsoft hack. I have had it with Microsoft. So here we go with Mr. Jim Pollito. Jim Polito: [00:00:48] There is a warning using this could come back to haunt you. Joining us now, the man with all the answers, our tech talk guru friend, Craig Peterson. Good morning. Craig Peterson: [00:01:00] Hey, good morning, Mr. Jim. Man, I remember LaVale myself. It's a small world. Jim Polito: [00:01:07] You know, Roger LaVale. Craig Peterson: [00:01:10] Yes, the name is just crazy familiar. So I'm sure we've met. Well, maybe it's another one. Jim Polito: [00:01:16] Roger did work in high-tech weather systems, satellite communication systems, weather systems. Your paths may have crossed at one time. He traveled the world. He was a great man and a terrible loss. Thank you. I appreciate that. So tell me, people experiencing a loss because say they never met a grandparent. This was a great idea, right? You've warned us about how they can take my face though and make a video of me saying things that I would never say, and that's pretty bad. But this was a nice heartwarming application. No? Craig Peterson: [00:01:55] It really is. By the way, it's too late to worry about these things. I see the next election cycle being full of these fake videos. My heritage, you can go there. It's a very cool site. Kind of genealogy. There's so many people that are really interested in that. I have a son that is. We've traced our genealogy all the way back on both my mother and my father's side back to the seven-hundreds. Jim Polito: [00:02:22] Wow. Craig Peterson: [00:02:23] My mother's side, like a nine-hundreds or so. Once you hit a Royal line, it's just really easy. They really keep track. Jim Polito: [00:02:33] Royal Peterson. Listen, be careful, because Megan Markle and Harry will be saying terrible things about you. So be careful. Craig Peterson: [00:02:45] Well, did you ever seen that TV show Vikings? Jim Polito: [00:02:47] Yeah. Craig Peterson: [00:02:48] Yeah. Actually, some of those characters are my ancestors. The guy with the bad legs or whatever it is, right. I'm related to him. It's really weird. Now I have a daughter living in Norway, so it's a small world. Many of us have these pictures and I have pictures of family, of course, from the 1800s and lots from then on. There are technologies now that are using a form of artificial intelligence, that don't just take your photo, and I have software that does this. For instance, I use some software that uses artificial intelligence and the machine learning that's built into the Apple devices now in order to really clean up pictures, make them look absolutely amazing beautiful pictures from the thirties and forties. What my heritage is doing with their deep nostalgia is taking that to a much higher level and it makes some assumptions. If you've got a picture of someone that's maybe taken a little bit from the side or head-on it doesn't really matter. It looks at that picture and it mirrors it because in most cases, our faces are almost the same on both sides. Right. You draw a line down the middle of your face, Jim, the right side is probably pretty similar to the left. The top of your head is probably fairly easy to figure out what's there. What you can do with this deep nostalgia app here, which's available online, is upload a photo and it will have that person come to life. Their head will move around, their eyes blink. They will smile. It does all kinds of amazing things. It is, as you said, it's kind of cool to think about what my grandpa or grandma or whoever have looked like back in the day. A little video. Jim Polito: [00:04:39] So what's the problem with it. Craig Peterson: [00:04:44] Ahh. Well, we've had this problem for a while. Most of these deep fake apps that are available are from, you guessed it. There's this big country, like a billion-plus people. You have an idea, China. Jim Polito: [00:04:59] Oh, I know where you're going. Craig Peterson: [00:05:05] A lot of these are Chinese-based. They are taking our photos and doing basically whatever they want with them. We've seen this problem more and more, as people have paid more attention, and that is what rights do you have to that photo or video. Then once that photo has been modified, by an AI or something else, what rights do you have to that modified version? This is really easy to do. You can upload your picture, you hit the animate button, you set up an account. If you leave it on that website, they have access to it and the rights to it. We've seen many times that people there are doing malicious things with some of these pictures. I don't even want to go into that. Jim Polito: [00:05:55] So you basically cede ownership of that intellectual and physical property because it's a photo to them to be able to do this. Craig Peterson: [00:06:09] Yeah, absolutely. Here's the second problem that most people have, and that is they're not using password managers, which means they are reusing passwords. You go there, you can set it up using, for instance, in this particular case of MyHeritage. You can use your Google login, in order to log in. They have premium services. Most people are going to be reusing their passwords. They're reusing them across sites and that's been just an absolutely huge problem. Then you might've decided to submit even more personal data to my heritage than just the basic information you have to give to create an account. Yeah. You see where it's going, right? So it's never a bad idea to reduce your digital footprint. Adding this in. Giving up our photos may be good, may be bad. If you want to try it, it is kind of cool. They say that if you delete that little video off of their website they're not going to use it. Jim Polito: [00:07:11] Can we be sure of that? You know who we're dealing with, a year ago they were telling us, no, we don't have any problem over here with COVID. With any kind of weird pneumonia or more people die in by all means though, everything is A-okay. Well. It's not. Craig. I really appreciate that. I've got a longer final word coming up today. I thought that this was very, very important because you will click on it. You see other people's stuff and you're so thrilled and It's always good to hear from Craig Peterson about these things. Craig, in other ways to hear from Craig Peterson, His Highness, his Royal Highness HRH. We're going to have to put HRH in front. How do we hear from his Royal Highness Craig Peterson in the future? Hey, I sent out something real quick word of warning hundred thousand or more businesses have been hacked apparently by the Chinese because they're using Microsoft exchange server. Okay. Craig Peterson: [00:08:18] Government agencies have been hacked by this. Retail, education, our schools have been hacked. Hospitals have been hacked. Microsoft just released a patch for it, but it does not remove what it did, which is put a back door on your machine. They're taking everything from all of these businesses, government agencies. If you're using Microsoft exchange, patch it up now and then restore it from a backup because they may have compromised your machine. If you are someone who's been using Microsoft exchange, find options. I've had it with Microsoft. I have had it with them. This is the final straw. Forget it. Anyway, Craig peterson.com. You'll find out about this and so much more. There is so many little pieces of training. I have started giving them every week. Multiples. I got big stuff comin' up. Craig peterson.com. Jim Polito: [00:09:11] Craig, thank you so much as usual. What a great contribution you make to the show. We'll catch up with you next week or who knows maybe before. Craig Peterson: [00:09:22] Take care, Jim Jim Polito: [00:09:23] Thanks. Craig Peterson. Great guy.
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AS HEARD ON NH Today WGIR-AM 610: Understanding the Microsoft Exchange Hack
03/08/2021
AS HEARD ON NH Today WGIR-AM 610: Understanding the Microsoft Exchange Hack
Welcome, Craig Peterson here. This morning I was on with Chris Ryan on NH Today. I jumped right into a conversation that he and Justin were having about the Royal Family and because I am from Canada, I had a bit of a different perspective. Then we hopped up on one of my soapbox topics - Microsoft. Here we go with Chris. These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit. - --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Installing the patches will not get them out. It will not even remove the back door that they've installed on your server. If you can believe this right. Its incompetence is running rampant yet again. Hi everybody. Craig Peterson here. We started out by talking about the Royal family because Chris Ryan over on NH today has been talking a lot about that. What's going on with the Royal family? I have a little experience with that. Well, we talked about it. Then we got into a soapbox for Craig, which was Microsoft exchange server. I could not be more upset with Microsoft. I have not liked them for decades, now. They are incompetent, if you ask me, in so many ways. I'm sitting here pounding on the table. I don't know if you can hear it, but anyhow, We get right into it. I mean the down and dirty of it, because once again, we have had our data stolen this time by the Chinese. Chris Ryan: [00:01:07] The queen does not have any power, Justin. These are all ceremonial positions. She has to sign off on the laws. She just does it. She's supposed to sign it. Justin McIssac: [00:01:17] If she decided she felt like having some power. Chris Ryan: [00:01:20] You can't. The prime minister controls all of the key roles of government. Going to war. Things of that nature. All of her roles at this point are ceremonial. For over the last number hundreds of years the monarchy has diminished and power based upon their incompetence. Justin McIssac: [00:01:38] It's time to take the power back. Chris Ryan: [00:01:39] The power has been taken back. But maybe she shouldn't sign it. Maybe she shouldn't ceremonial signing things anymore. Is that what you're saying? Justin McIssac: [00:01:45] No, just declare war on somebody. Chris Ryan: [00:01:47] You can't do that. Justin McIssac: [00:01:47] No, I think she can. Chris Ryan: [00:01:48] She can't declare war. Justin McIssac: [00:01:49] As I understand that she can. Chris Ryan: [00:01:51] You don't understand it. Justin McIssac: [00:01:53] That may be the case, but as I understand it she declared war. Chris Ryan: [00:01:56] She can not declare war, she holds no real power in the British government, none zero. Justin McIssac: [00:02:02] You're just trying to minimize her. That's what you're doing. You're hitting on the Royals and I won't stand for it. Chris Ryan: [00:02:06] Right now in the program. Is Craig Peterson. Craig, how are you? Craig Peterson: [00:02:10] Hey, I'm doing well. You know, power in the Commonwealth. Chris Ryan: [00:02:14] You have as much power in the United Kingdom as the queen does. Craig Peterson: [00:02:19] The queen, she appoints the governor-general in all of the Commonwealth countries. The governor-general has the power in the Commonwealth countries like Canada, New Zealand, Australia, et cetera. The governor-general has the power to dissolve parliament effectively firing the prime minister. She has quite a bit of power outside of the UK itself. The governor-general is a post that's above all of the elected officials in every Commonwealth country. Chris Ryan: [00:02:52] Australia, Canada Yes, that is true. In the United Kingdom itself, she does not have the power to declare war, to change the laws that are signed, she is a ceremonial figurehead. However, she maintains that position and influence outside of. Craig Peterson: [00:03:06] Yeah, she does. She gets a stipend too from the government. Chris Ryan: [00:03:09] It's good to be The Queen Justin McIssac: [00:03:10] Sun never sets the British empire, Chris. Chris Ryan: [00:03:12] You wonder though, we are going to continue on this Craig since you've indulged me. Which may be the biggest mistake that you make today. The question though is as we start to hear more and more about things that are taking place. Whether it's with Prince Albert and I don't understand why that continues to get brushed under the carpet, while the circumstances with Harry and Megan received this type of attention. But appropriately so. Now we're hearing claims that there was racism, within the crown and there were questions about how dark the complexion of their child was going to be, to Harry. That was relayed to Megan. As an individual interested in this, do you see anything changing in regards to less ceremonial roles? The crown diminishing even more with the questions, around Charles, as well and his ability to lead? How do you see this affecting the crown as they seem to decrease in terms of what their actual power is but their influence increases? The intrigue in them increases on a continual basis. Craig Peterson: [00:04:14] Well, parliament's never particularly liked them because they don't like the budget money going to them. But I can tell you that throughout the Commonwealth and the UK, the Royal family is like the center of the conversation. I have an aunt who has passed now, Anna Hanna was her name and she lived for the Royal family. Everything about them. She knew all of the details. Chris Ryan: [00:04:38] Right? It's insane. Craig Peterson: [00:04:41] I think it's a little crazy, but we got the same thing here. People talk every day about these stupid artists that can't even sing. These actors and actresses can act. Follow everything they do. Look at the people that are famous for being famous. The Kardashians, what did they ever do? Well, they built some big empires that's for sure. It's the same type of mentality. Chris Ryan: [00:05:06] It's true, but I have a lot more respect for it. I have a lot more respect for any actor, musician, or influencer than I have for the crown. Basically, all that you did was be born into a circumstance. That is no reason for me to be interested in you other than the fact that you have a tremendous lineage. That is what upsets me more than anything else about those particular individuals. Now, certainly, there has been the benefit of nepotism for some folks in acting and sports and music and all that. Those folks have interest-based upon talent. Whether that's the talent of just drawing attention. Then, therefore, monetizing it, the Kardashians, as an example, there. I have a lot more respect for Kim Kardashian than for the queen of England. I'll just put that right out there. Well, let's transition here before we get into more trouble, right? We'll get you into trouble. Tens of thousands of US organizations hit in an ongoing Microsoft exchange hack. At least 30,000 compromised US organizations as a result of this hack. What took place? What concerns should average Americans have about that? Craig Peterson: [00:06:17] This is an extremely big deal. I did a video on this. Everybody who was on my email list, you should have gotten a little copy of this last week when it happened. If you are a business, Chris, you have to have email. That's kind of the lifeblood of a business is email. Many companies have made the mistake. I've called it a mistake for decades, of using Microsoft exchange server. Microsoft is a company that happens to sell software and usually, it's not particularly good software. I've got a little bit of an opinion on that. For years, I helped develop windows NT early on in Microsoft history. I've used it all. I've developed on it all. I'm talking about the operating systems here. Here's what happened recently. Businesses have been using Microsoft exchange server, as have government agencies, as have retail, our educational institutions. No one gets fired for buying Microsoft. That just drives me crazy cause they got some really bad stuff. The bottom line and I have a friend who loves the Microsoft stuff because he'll always have a job trying to fix it. That's beside the point. Right now, there was such a huge hole that freight trains are driven through. Anyone could easily gain control as the server over any sessions in any data. So last week, Microsoft issued an emergency patch for all of its exchange servers, that kinda sorta fixes the problem. The problem is they've gotten into, probably over a hundred thousand computers at this point, and they have put back doors into the computers. They're using the computers now to attack other computers, to grab all of your passwords, all of your history, all of your files and you have no idea. Because people are not doing the right stuff, which is blocking outbound connections from things like their exchange server. They're exposing it directly to the internet which you have to do, cause it is your main email gateway. This is just incredible. The federal government has jumped on this. Expect congressional investigations, which will solve nothing. By the way, if you install this patch, Chris, you may close the door. The problem is the horses are already out of the barn and you may already be infected. The odds are really good. If you're running an exchange server that you have been attacked, that they are inside your network. Installing the patches will not get them out and it will not even remove the back door that they've installed on your server. If you can believe this, right. Incompetence is running rampant, yet again, and we're losing all of our critical data. This is probably China, by the looks of it, and it just a scary, scary thing. Patch right now if you're a business, if you're a school, if you're a nonprofit, right. Patch. You've made the mistake of running a Microsoft exchange server, patch it and look at alternatives. Chris Ryan: [00:09:37] I think that there's always a cause for concern and diligence in regards to our information. Let's be honest, we're being a little bit more open with that than we have in past time periods. Evolution over, not just the last couple of decades, but over the last few years has been pretty significant. In how frequently we use our credit card information or personal information. You think about the explosion in delivery services and ordering things online with that each time you are putting your personal information there. What should it be people's concerns on that? Craig Peterson: [00:10:11] Well, things like credit cards, aren't too bad. If you have a visa or MasterCard check with your bank or the issuing company. What I do, if I have to give a credit card online is I have an individual unique credit card number for every website. That's absolutely a free service from all of these credit card companies. Every one of them has it. So check it out, find out more about it. You can install it on your browser. You probably want to use a secure browser. At any rate that's a whole other topic for discussion. You've got to give your information nowadays, especially with us being locked in for the last year. Use unique credit card numbers, and you can get those for free from your credit card company. It's just a little plugin for your web browser. Businesses, you've got to pull up your socks. Cannot let these people's personal information gets stolen. Remember this includes doctor's offices with your personal health information. Hospitals. It goes on and on. The C levels, Chris, I think are the biggest problem here in all of these companies. You give you a credit card number to a quote to secure server. It's not really a secure server. It's just that your data is encrypted, going to the server. Once that company has your data, is it being stolen? Is the CEO looking at this, like Equifax apparently did, from some of the articles I read and said, Oh, well, let's see, it's going to cost us, 10-20 million if we get hacked? It's gonna cost us 30-40 million to fix the problems. We're not going to bother fixing them. We're going to cross our fingers. We can no longer do that. Chris Ryan: [00:11:54] All right, Craig. Appreciate your time and look forward to talking again next week. Craig Peterson: [00:11:58] Take care. Chris Ryan: [00:11:58] All right. That is Craig Peterson with tech talk here on Newsradio 610 and 96.7, Saturdays at 11:30 AM. I am Chris Ryan. We shall return with more after this. Craig Peterson: [00:12:09] Woo mama. Keep your eyes on your email, because Improving Windows Security is about to launch. I think what I'm going to end up doing is we're going to do a couple of classes live and available for anybody for free before we get into the paid course. Keep an eye on your email. Also, I'm going to let you know people who've already signed up for the Improving Windows Security course, I'm going to give you a massive discount. You'll get a coupon for that. We'll be back Craig Peterson.com, of course. If you're not on the list better sign up soon because this course is starting. Take care, everybody. Bye-bye. --- 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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Tech Talk with Craig Peterson Podcast: Google Chromebook Outsells Apple - who is the loser?, Vulnerability in Programmable Logic Controllers affecting large Infrastructure providers, Clubhouse and More
03/06/2021
Tech Talk with Craig Peterson Podcast: Google Chromebook Outsells Apple - who is the loser?, Vulnerability in Programmable Logic Controllers affecting large Infrastructure providers, Clubhouse and More
Welcome! I am sure that most of you know about the problems Texas experienced with its energy infrastructure well there is more bad news for our nations' infrastructure and that comes from a vulnerability in the programmable logic controllers that many of these large infrastructure providers use to control the flow of product. (i.e., water, electricity, natural gas, etc.). Also this week Google Chromebooks outsold Apple but that is not the whole story. We also dug into processors and the importance of them and how it affects what you do daily. Then we discuss Clubhouse and why it may not be the best platform to get on and there is more so be sure to Listen in. For more tech tips, news, and updates, visit - CraigPeterson.com. --- Tech Articles Craig Thinks You Should Read: --- Automated Machine-Generated Transcript: Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Apple just got passed by Google's Chromebook. We'll tell you more about that. Clubhouse the app everybody seems to want, and it's invite-only. Sound familiar? That's happened before has got some serious privacy problems. Hi everybody. Craig Peterson here. Thanks for joining me today. There are a lot of things to talk about and I'm going to start with this article from ARS Technica, talking about programmable logic controllers. Now I can see you sitting there saying, what are you talking about, Craig? Who cares? Here's, what's going on. You heard about the solar winds hack? It's been something we've talked about pretty much every week here for the last Oh a month or so since it really happened. And we found out some more stuff about it this week, by the way, we know who the group is that actually did the hack very professional group. This means, of course, nation-state, but. They were going after different types of companies, that help the different types of companies, as well as government organizations. In other words, they were targeting MSPs managed services providers. And unfortunately, most of them failed because it's rare, very rare to find an MSP that actually takes care of security. And I'm not going to blame them. I'm not going to blame you for using one of these MSPs that got compromised. Because ultimately, security is a long tail thing. It is an industry in and of itself. It's hard to keep up. It's hard to keep moving forward. But I brought this up because I wanted to tie it into something we also talked about a bit for the last two weeks, and that is that water plant in Florida. This water plant in Florida had the amount of lye added to water, turned up 100 fold. Not 100%, a hundred times more lye in the water and somebody noticed and all well and good. Who did it? We don't really know, but here's the problem I want to talk about today. And that is the SCADAs systems, these PLCs, in other words, The computers that are controlling the valves in these various businesses and government agencies, the water plants, the electric plants, et cetera. You had valves. Those were these tubes. Remember that, and then transistors for a little while. Anyhow. This is something that's a very real problem because Rockwell automation you've heard of Rockwell before. I am sure of that because Rockwell has been a government contractor forever. They've done a whole lot of stuff in the military space and they do a ton also in the civilian space. Rockwell makes hardware that's used to control equipment in factories, a lot of equipment in a lot of factories, as well as all of these other places out there. And it is what's called generically a "programmable logic controller." They're selling them under this logix brand. You'll see them everywhere. They control everything you can think of out there. Some of them are very small. There might be a, like a toaster that you'd have on the countertop for instance, or something as big as one of those little pizza ovens you can put on the counter, but then they can be a whole lot bigger than that. But they help control equipment. And. Oh, the manufacturing and the processes on assembly lines and other manufacturing environments. You might remember what happened in Iran, where they had these PLCs, programmable logic controllers, that were part of this whole SCADAs system. It's all together. And in Iran, they were using them to control centrifuges and those centrifuges were being used to refine nuclear material eventually to make nuclear bombs. At least that's what we said. That's what the UN said, et cetera, et cetera. And then it makes sense, right? They have to refine the yellowcake. So that's what they were doing. And what did we do? Apparently, we got together with this country called Israel. It's over there in that same neck of the woods. And with them, we came up with some software to break into the computers at the Iran facility. Now, these computers were what we call air-gapped. They were not directly connected to the internet. So how did we hack it? We hacked the old-fashioned way. No, we didn't use a little honey bait. What happened with rep Swalwellout in California, who I don't understand how he's still sitting on the number one top secret committee in Congress, even though he spent years with this Chinese spy who obviously would have been feeding all of this information that he got back to China. I don't understand Nancy Pelosi. Sometimes this is just crazy. What's going on in Congress? It wasn't that? Okay. It wasn't a honey trap. It was a honey trap. I guess what they did is they developed this piece of malware, knew that they had to get it on to the machines that controlled the manufacturing process there in the plant that did the refining in order to make the nuclear bombs. How can you get it in if it's air-gapped, how can you get it in if those machines are not connected to the internet? But it doesn't matter if you break into the firewall because they're not behind the firewall. They're not on a network that is accessible from the outside. However, they were networked and they have to be networked inside the building so that you can have one computer that's monitoring the spin rates of all of these different centrifuges and just kind of keeping tabs on everything. So they went ahead and they put this little virus onto a thumb drive. And then, in fact, they made dozens of these thumb drives. They found out where the engineers who worked at the plant went for coffee, where they went for lunch and they scattered these around. And then a coffee spot at the lunch spot. And so now all of this stuff is scattered around these little thumb drives people, pick them up, Oh, a free thumb drive and they take them into the office. And this particular piece of malware was specifically crafted for this programmable logic controller. So if you plugged it into your computer as an accounting puter computer, it would say, Oh, wait a minute this is an accounting computer. I don't care. But these guys brought it back into their manufacturing facility and it did work there and it took over control of the machine that controlled all of these centrifuges. And fuges, it keeps saying fuses, centrifuges and it spun them out of control. And while it was spinning them out of control, it was showing a perfectly Greenlight status to the people who were trying to monitor it. They resist, it was a stroke of brilliant, but that is the type of system that we're concerned about. That's what we're talking about right now. These kinds of logic controllers that are used all over the place you can use them for almost anything you used on ships. They're used in government facilities. They're used everywhere. There was a vulnerability found and it was a, "I can't believe you did this" vulnerability. Now with solar winds, we found out it was a, I can't believe you did this vulnerability because apparently, solar winds had a password of solar winds one, two, three. Who wouldn't guess that perfectly good password? And man, we see these types of passwords all of the time. That's why I use a password manager. That's why you generate passwords or you come up with key phrases. Three or four words strung together with maybe a digit or something else in the middle somewhere and some upper lowercase characters. Right? That's how you generate a password. It's not supposed to be solar winds one, two, three. So that's problem. Number one, that's a big problem. This particular vulnerability has a severity score of 10 out of 10. Why? Why is this the worst level it could possibly be? Number one, it requires a very low skill level to be able to exploit it. Now that's interesting. Why is that? It turns out that these program, programmable logic controllers have a hard-coded key built into them. In other words, whoever programmed these things, and I'm looking at this list, there are a lot of them. Logix is the name of the company, the name of the product, and you'll see Logix in their names. And it is a whole bunch of compact Logix control, Logix drive, Logix a guard, Logix, guard on me. Now that wasn't supposed to provide cybersecurity support. All of those, okay. Then they have a hard-coded password. What that means is built right into the software is a back door with a password that can not be changed. Now, even if you bought one of those cheap firewalls from the big box retail store, you are going to be safer. Because at least it lets you change the password and you should be changing the password on your firewall. And in some cases, it also lets you change the username and you should change the username as well. But no. These Rockwell devices have a hard-coded password and Rockwell apparently is not going to issue a patch that directly addresses the problems that come from having a hard, coded key. So instead of that, they're saying, Oh, use these mitigation techniques. Isn't that what Iran did, isn't that? Why they had themselves? Nice little air gap network that was still breached? Oh, man. Oh, man. So it's a problem. It's a very big problem and they're just not paying much attention to it. Hey, stick around. We're going to talk about Chromebooks versus Mac and Windows right here. It looks like the Wintel monopoly continues to die on the vine because of what Apple's been doing, what Google has been doing. In fact, Google is really stepping up their game here, getting rid of Intel. Hi everybody. Craig Peterson here. Thanks for joining me. We know that Intel's been around for a long time. You probably remember Intel used to brag about it. There were ads where Intel would kick in a couple of bucks if all they'd said was Intel inside. In fact, they are still doing it on machines. You buy a machine it'll probably have a little sticker if it has an Intel processor saying Intel inside. Intel had a problem, they made components that people didn't buy. Well, they bought them, but they bought them as part of something else. They did not buy an Intel processor for the fact it's an Intel processor. Makes sense. Some of them did. I certainly looked at them. I bought AMD and some others instead,. Some of the power PC stuff from IBM, just absolutely incredible, as well as others. I have done a whole lot over the years when it comes to processors, you've heard already I helped develop operating systems and implement them and the internet protocol. I've got a lot of experience with processors, no doubt about it. A lot of machine coding and assembly work over the years. I wrote C, which is a programming language used largely for a high-speed stuff like operating systems. I did a lot of that. I look at this processor from Intel as a massive failure. Marketing-wise. In the industry, it's been really great, but when I get into it from the prospect, or from the side of being an architect, of operating systems, and an architect of user interfaces. I cannot believe Intel. It's just been terrible. Part of the problem with the Intel processors and their instruction sets. The way they do the memory access and the way they do all of their IO to other devices has to do with their legacy code. They've tried to remain compatible with all kinds of older processors over the years. I can understand that I can see why they might want to do that. They're afraid that people might leave them. They started out as a memory company and through. I was going to say no fault of their own, but no luck of their own or anything else. I don't know. Another company came to them and said, Hey, can you make a cheap processor? Remember IBM looking for a cheap processor to put into this PC right. A personal computer that they didn't think would sell very many, certainly wouldn't be a great business thing. They went and said, okay what are the cheap processors we can get and put into here? Intel, 8080. That's what we'll do. All of a sudden is born the XT and the PC XT and the PC AT came. Some of these others over the years on the 8286 and the other chipsets. Anyhow, I'm getting awfully geeky on ya. Started really falling behind. One of the ways they fell behind was in 64-bit design. In fact, Intel is AMD compatible. Now, if you can believe that. Talk about falling behind. I don't think it's the engineers, there's some brilliant people there. It's entirely business decisions that drove them to the point they're at. They continued to increase the price of the processors. They were getting a little faster, but they still had the corner on the market because people bought Wintel they bought Windows. If they're going to get Windows, they're going to get Intel. Make sense. There were some others over the years that competed including AMD, which is Intel-compatible for the most part. They really managed to keep people out of the marketplace so they could jack-up the cost. The price structure, just keep jacking up, jacking up, jacking up. Many companies got fed up with it, including some companies that had the ability to do something about it. One of those companies is Apple. I mentioned in my newsletter last week, I had an article talking about how Apple is now apparently about to make 6G chips. 6G at the next generation of wireless and Apple's getting rid of Qualcomm and gonna make in themselves. A company like Apple, when they want a million parts, they want them to arrive. They want them to be there on the day they ask for them and they want them to do what they asked for. Qualcomm has fallen down on that. They have not been able to meet Apple's demand. Intel has fallen flat on that. They have not been able to meet some of Apple's demands that have to do with the amount of energy they use the temperature they give off of course cause they want them on mobile devices. What did Apple do a decade ago? They said fine, forget about it. We're going to not use your Intel processors in our iPhone. They started using some other processors, some arm processors. Apple joined this community like an open-source manufacturing alliance that came up with a chip design that they could use as a basis. Apple took that and ran with it. Today it has run so far with it that Apple has an amazing chip. Now you can see these amazing chips in your newest I-phones and your newest iPad. That's what they have in them these new Apple processors, but Apple also now has their new M series processors, which are effectively the same things they've been using in the iPhone, iPad, but beefed up in order to handle the load you'd expect to have on a laptop or a desktop with a Mac mini. I'm just so impressed with these. I was playing with both of those. One of our clients wanted them. We had them ordered and shipped to our place. We put them on benches and we loaded them up and got them all running. We played with them a little bit just to see what they were like. Very impressive machines. They don't have Intel processors. Apple has switched processors a few times over the years, it went from the Intel or the Motorola over to the power PC then to the Intel, and now to its own chip design. It looks like completely new chipsets for the iPhone 13 hopefully, maybe the 14, hopefully, when that comes out. That'll probably be later this year. By the way, the 13 is just going to be an incremental update to the iPhone 12. They're saying is probably going to be like an iPhone 12S, really. Processors. Apple doesn't need to pay the Intel tax on these processors out there. I'm going to look right now, purchase price, Intel, a laptop CPU, just to get an idea. I'm on there right now and I see coming right up, here's an Intel core i9 $400. Just for the CPU and that's from B&H photo and B&H has a lot of this sort of thing. Most of these Intel CPUs that are on laptops cost over $400. They're branded as core this, that, or the other things. The real expense of one, just start getting into the Xeons. Those Xeon processors can be just through the roof. Here's one here right now an Intel Xeon platinum, 8180 $11,000 while actually, it's 10,995. If Apple can make its own processor, do you think they can do it for less than 400 bucks? Of course, they can, and that's going to save them a lot of money in making some of these devices. We're going to get into those devices, like the laptops. What do you need in a laptop? Why would you go with Windows, maybe one of these other operating systems, including Mac iOS? We'll talk about that. That's going to lead us into the conversation about Chrome. Why is Chrome OS becoming so popular? Why has it surpassed now market share of Apple and where did that market share come from? People have been buying PCs, but what's going on? Stick around, you're listening to Craig Peterson and you can find me online. Craig peterson.com. We're talking about chips. Yeah we're getting maybe slightly technical, but chips matter nowadays in a way that they haven't before and yet they matter even less. I'm going to explain that. Hello everybody. Craig Peterson here. I just said something that might've sounded confusing. Cause I said, CPU's matter more than ever. Yet they matter less than ever. Here's why. If you're looking at an Apple computer, you are looking at either an Intel processor, at least for the next couple of years or the Apple processor. If you're looking at a Windows machine for a little while Microsoft was really on a bit of a kick, trying to get Windows running on multiple platforms. In fact, it actually did. There were some amazing things they were able to do, but really if you're getting Windows, you are going to be on an Intel platform. How about your phone? Do you have a clue as to what kind of processors in your phone? Now, you guys are the best and brightest. So yeah, you, you might, okay. You might know the exact model number and CPU clock rate and everything else about your phone, but the vast majority of people have no idea and you don't need to know. You don't need to know because it is now like a utility. You don't really know how that electron is delivered to your house. Where that came from? How that was produced? You just turn on that light switch and hope it works, right? Unlike when there's big wind storms and your power goes out, that's what you're hoping for. That's what's happening now, you buy a phone, you don't care if there's Intel inside. The same thing's true with tablets. You buy a tablet, if it's an Apple tablet guaranteed it doesn't have an Intel CPU. If you buy a Surface tablet, you can get them with Intel or without Intel. A lot of times you can tell just based on the price of the tablet now. As we move forward, we're starting to see more and more devices powered by arm chips and others. You see the idea behind Unix, which is this operating system that's underneath all of them. Unix lives underneath MacOS. Unix lives underneath Android. It lives underneath pretty much every cell phone and every device programmable device that exists today has Unix underlayment, which is the main operating system. It's fantastic. The whole goal...
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AS HEARD ON: WGAN Mornings News with Matt Gagnon: Why You Should Consider A Zero Trust Security Model and Is there a Chromebook in your Future?
03/03/2021
AS HEARD ON: WGAN Mornings News with Matt Gagnon: Why You Should Consider A Zero Trust Security Model and Is there a Chromebook in your Future?
Good morning everybody! I was on WGAN this morning with Matt Gagnon. I went into a little detail about what a Zero Trust Security Model is and how it differs from a traditional network design and why you should be considering this type of system. Then we discussed the future of computing and why Chromebooks are so popular. Here we go with Matt. And more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com. --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Morning, Craig Peterson here. Hey, if you've ever wondered about Chromebooks and if you should get one, talked with Matt about that. Matt Gagnon, of course, I'm on every Wednesday morning with him. Also zero trust. Why is the national security agency pushing a whole new way of thinking? When we're talking about our computers. So here we go. Matt Gagnon: [00:00:26] Seven 36 WGAN morning news on a Wednesday morning. That means it's time to talk to Craig Peterson, our tech guru. You hear him on this very station on Saturdays at one o'clock to hear more depth of detail about these very stories we'll be talking to him about right now. Craig, how are you this morning, sir? Craig Peterson: [00:00:41] Hey, I am doing really quite well. I'm looking forward to spring. It's been actually a nice winter. Matt Gagnon: [00:00:48] What are you doing, man? You're tomorrow, there's going to be some sort of blizzard because you just said that you are now tempting fate. I already had to walk outside yesterday. I got gas in my car. Sadly, I had to, I had no choice. The wind hurt my face. Okay. That happened yesterday, Craig Peterson: [00:01:03] We were outside pouring diesel into our generator because there was no power and it was really cold. Matt Gagnon: [00:01:10] It really was. It was frozen. Terrible. I was actually reminded of my old college days. March in from the perimeter parking lot and the wind and the cold just beating me to death on my way in. It was not good yesterday. Craig Peterson: [00:01:24] I keep reminding people where that comes from. It comes from Russia. They blow it over the North pole in order to destroy our economy. Matt Gagnon: [00:01:31] Yes, they do. And there's so many things that those Russians do, those pesky Russians. Craig Peterson: [00:01:34] Canada gets caught in the cross hairs. It's just not fair to them, Matt Gagnon: [00:01:38] You might say, Craig, that I have zero trust in Russia. See where I'm going with this one. Could you tell me what a zero-trust security model is and why it perhaps should be something that people embrace? Craig Peterson: [00:01:50] This is a concept that's relatively new, at least to most people. The whole idea behind it is we have. To assume in this day and age that our systems have already been compromised. Not just that they might get compromised, but they have. So when we're setting up networks for businesses, we look at things in a much different way. It's no longer about the perimeter. Trying to keep people out. The NSA, the national security agency, used to call it no such agency. The NSA has come out with a warning to be bold and also a description of what to do. The idea is you've got things inside your network. You've got a printer, that's connected to the network. You've got laptops, desktops, a server. None of them should be able to talk to anything else on the network that it doesn't absolutely need to talk to. It's like the lowest privilege type thing. So for instance what I do on my office network is the printers are on a completely different network that is firewalled from the servers, which are firewalled from the desktop which are firewalled from the laptops. The printers can not get to anything else on the network unless first someone's trying to send them a print job. It's just an example of it. You don't want the laptops to be able to scan. We have a customer who just this week, he has a little SonicWall firewall and SonicWall's are okay, but he hasn't been updating it for three years. It hasn't been supported in years either. That little SonicWall firewall was then used to get into his network and start spreading. It got around the firewall because he was using it for a VPN controller. Then it started crawling all the way through this network and playing all kinds of havoc, internally. Again. If that firewall couldn't have gotten to a machine and then that machine starts probing everything else, it couldn't have spread. In other words, the zero-trust only allows machines to talk to each other that absolutely need to talk to each other and only using the protocols that they're supposed to. I've seen many times, which is the sales guy is tinkering around and is getting into the accounting data. Why are you doing that? They should not be allowed to, so that's the bottom line. This is a real big deal. We've got to start building our networks with the assumption that they have already been compromised. How are we going to control it? If it's compromised? Matt Gagnon: [00:04:34] Craig Peterson tech guru joins us at this time on Wednesdays going over to the world of technology. Another interesting story that I saw here this morning, Craig, was that Chromebooks apparently outsold Macs worldwide in 2020. That's something that surprised me a little bit here. I didn't realize that the market penetration, if you will, of the Chromebook, was that deep, but apparently, it is. What does this mean for the industry? Craig Peterson: [00:04:54] Yeah, it's interesting because you're talking about it surpassing the Mac and it sounds like maybe Chromebooks are leaning into Apple. In fact, these things are very lightweight computers. They're typically a tablet, maybe a laptop and they're running an operating system that comes from our friends at Google called Chrome OS. It is really designed for being online, although you can store files locally. Where it's been eating into is people that have been running Windows for years. Those Windows machines have been getting more and more expensive. Intel is just not keeping up with everything, particularly from the price standpoint. Putting a chip into Chromebook that is a non-Intel chip. It is way cheaper than Intel, we're talking to 10th or less of the price allows them to make these devices very inexpensive. You can go to a big-box retailer. You can get a little Chromebook device for 150 bucks at the low end. Now you've got a computer that can go online, get edit word documents, or spreadsheets, whatever you might want to do. Can talk to the grandkids or get on a business call, all right there from the Chromebook. It is hurting the Wintel monopoly, which is the Windows-Intel, a monopoly, if you will, that has been around for so long. It's a direction that Apple is following the Apple's computers will all be using non-Intel chips within the next two years, all of them. They already have computers out with these new chipsets. That's the bottom line, they really have gained some significant market share. People love them. I've got also mentioned here, not just regular people security researchers love the Chromebooks. They are very secure, but remember, we're talking about Google, their business is selling your information. They're not going to sell your files, but they're going to keep track of you. The other big driver of the Chromebook sales is schools because now we have so many kids at home going to school, the school says, Hey, you got to buy a $300 Chromebook for your kid for school. That's much easier to swallow than a thousand-dollar Mac or a $700 Windows laptop. --- 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: TikTok and Home Title Lock
03/02/2021
AS HEARD ON - The Jim Polito Show - WTAG 580 AM: TikTok and Home Title Lock
Good morning, everybody. I was on this morning on WTAG with Jim Polito. We discussed his newest foray into the social media platform, TikTok, and some of the problems with using TikTok. Then we got into a question from one of his callers about Home Title Lock. Here we go with Jim. For more tech tips, news, and updates, visit - . --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Good morning, Craig on with Mr. Jim Polito this morning. He made his first TikTok videos just this week. Then he gets an email for me talking about some of the privacy issues now. Still with TikTok. Yes, they were not sold. We did double-check. We also took a few minutes to talk about a home title lock because he had a caller asking some questions. So here we go with Mr. Jim Polito. Jim Polito: [00:00:28] I mentioned earlier that I published on TikTok for the first time. Look I'm not a kid. I'm on TikTok, the social media platform just because I wanted to register my name. I always like to get Jim Polito on every new social media one, so if I ever use it. I did it with Instagram a long time ago, when just the kids were on the gram and now I am a Jim Pollito on the gram at Jim Polito. So I published a couple of videos. Now it's not me dancing. Now. I'm having second thoughts because our good friend tech talk guru, Craig Peterson says there's some issues with TikTok again, even though it's not owned by the Chinese. He joins us now. Good morning, Craig. Craig Peterson: [00:01:13] Hey, I thought the Chinese owned everything everywhere. Jim Polito: [00:01:17] They do basically. You're absolutely right. They basically do own everything. But they don't own right. They don't own TikTok anymore. There was that big bidding war in the company. What's the name that, that nobody knew or that everybody thought was washed up? Craig Peterson: [00:01:34] Yeah. There was a whole bunch of people. You had Microsoft on in with Oracle. They thought, okay, that's what's going to happen. I actually don't think that they sold it. It all got stopped when the Biden administration went in. Jim Polito: [00:01:49] Listen, you would know better than it's still owned. Yeah. That they're trying to sell it to Oracle and Walmart, but it hasn't been sold yet. Oh, great. So the Chinese know what I'm doing. So I published two videos on TikTok, and actually, they were funny what? No, they're not dance videos. Nobody needs to see that. They're not dance videos. They're funny little videos that I made in Boston the weekend before last. They're they're cute. They're funny. They're about the founding fathers. If you want to see them, they're funny. I think they're funny, but anyway, what's going on with TikTok. Craig Peterson: [00:02:29] TikTok is a kind of newcomer. Of course, they've been around a while. There've been a lot of complaints about TikTok because it has been routing data to China, including location data. Remember, that's all part of the pictures and videos that we take. It's amazing when you get right down to it. For instance, the number one manufacturer of these little drones with cameras on them that fly around is also Chinese-based. Apparently has also been sending stuff back. So we're giving them a very good map of the United States everything everywhere it is, which is scary. We've got some consumer groups now complaining in the UK. We know under the Trump administration, they started looking into TikTok and found it lacking, if you will. There are complaints over there now about, okay, so people are making these videos. They're putting a lot of work in. Most videos, don't go viral. Most people don't have a real platform on it. Then some do go viral. If you look at the fine print of what TikTok has you click through, one of these groups. Yeah. Yeah. I agree with your terms, whatever the heck. They were, cause I didn't bother reading them. It says that you are giving TikTok an irrevocable right to use, distribute and reproduce the videos that you are publishing without any remuneration. So unlike YouTube, right? YouTube, if you're doing pretty well, they'll start paying you. Then if you look at TikTok, even though there's some old guys on TikTok, It's largely kids who are using it. When we're talking about kids, of course, we're talking about under 18. They haven't reached the age of majority. In the US, and also the European Union, there are special rules for those younger adults. They cannot publish some of these things without the parents getting involved and unfortunately, parents haven't been getting involved. TikTok has no real policies on it. I expect that they will really come under some serious scrutiny. Jim Polito: [00:04:44] We're talking with Craig Peterson, our tech talk guru. Here's the thing when a kid signs up for it, that's a contract, but if you sign a contract and you're under 18, it's generally not enforceable. Then the second part of this is the Europeans are saying, you're allowing these kids access to inappropriate material. You're not doing a good enough job policing yourselves like Danny and I was talking during the break. How a group he was part of, a relatively benign group on Facebook got, as he said, Zucked, as in Zuckerberg, got caught because they didn't like what was going on there, which maybe Facebook is policing a little too much. Whereas on the other end of the spectrum, TikTok is allowing kids access to this stuff that they shouldn't have access to. Craig Peterson: [00:05:37] Then, of course, the videos, in this case, they're being uploaded. TikTok has a policy that users must be 13 years of age or older in order to join. Okay. There seems to be very little if any enforcement of it and that's where we're really starting to get concerned. We're working to try and protect our kids and then things like this come along and it's concerning. Also, they don't have some of the defaults that other social media platforms have. So for instance, if the kid admits that they're 15 when they're signing up for TikTok, it does not automatically make that account private by default, which makes a whole lot of sense. There's a lot of things we did as kids and as adults that we don't want to have following us around for the rest of our lives. This is exactly what could be happening. Jim Polito: [00:06:31] Yeah. Not good. All right let's move on to something else. I want to ask you about this because a listener called about it. We have LifeLock and all these services that say they will monitor for you. You have explained to us, Hey, look, you can go to the three major credit reporting bureaus. Turn off your credit and only turn it on when you want to use it. That's one way to protect yourself. That's inexpensive and you don't have to pay one of these companies. The question was brought up about a title for your home for your property. Now there were those services out there saying, we'll protect your title because people can steal your title, go out and get a mortgage, a second mortgage on that property and then disappear. All of a sudden you're saying, wait a minute. I know I didn't take out that mortgage. But my understanding was that all those agencies do is try to prevent that from happening. Ultimately if your title is stolen, are you're not going to be responsible for that loan, correct? Craig Peterson: [00:07:33] You're going to have to do a little bit of fighting, but it's a rare occurrence that people's home titles are stolen. It certainly can happen. Frankly, it's a waste of money. They're probably a sponsor of the show. Jim Polito: [00:07:46] No, I've heard the ads. I think Bill O'Reilly, he does his own stuff now. He does an endorsement for them and I certainly don't want to tell somebody wants extra protection or whatever. As you said, you're going to be protected. All it's saving you from is some work. Craig Peterson: [00:08:02] You said that earlier, too, the caller as well, Jim. What it is it's insurance. Insurance does not stop the tree from falling on your house. Insurance, once you have it, of course, it can help repair the damage caused. That's what most of the LifeLock types are in the world. These home lock companies are doing is making it so if the event, it's very rare when it comes to title lock, if that event happens, they help cover you. There's another angle on this and that is most homeowners insurance policies have a rider on them that if your identity is stolen, then they start using your credit or if your home title is stolen, they will pay for all of the cleanups. That's just part of the normal home policy. So you might want to have a look at your home policy. Then one other thing is specifically when we're talking about home title lock, and that is the caller was saying, Hey, the County used to let us know, cause you remember what happens is you buy a home all the paperwork is filed with the County. What happens when someone steals your home title. Typically, they file something called a quick claim deed. They basically say I just bought the house and here's his signature or her signature right here in the document then they file it with County. What the counties can do when you have to contact them is most of them have a system where you can register for notification on activity. They may not be doing it automatically, anymore. Double-check with the County and they will then notify you. There's often a little charge it's not much. They'll notify you if there is any activity occurring on your title. So it makes sense. Our home is our biggest investment for many of us that's what we're hoping to use for retirement. Jim Polito: [00:09:56] Wow. Interesting. Very interesting. Now, as usual. Folks, Craig Peterson's here every week, but that doesn't mean that you can't interact with the tech talk guru during the week. How do people do that? Craig? Craig Peterson: [00:10:12] Oh, we get a lot of people just send an email to me, [email protected] I answer every one. It might take me a couple of days, but I answer every one of the emails. You should be on my email list. So you get the newsletters, the show notes, little bits of training that I do. Find out about courses that you need to know, and that you can find that my website @craigpeterson.com, craigpeterson.com Jim Polito: [00:10:36] There you go. Craig. Thanks so much for your time, buddy. We'll catch up with you next week. Craig Peterson: [00:10:42] Take care, Jim. Jim Polito: [00:10:42] You too. See a wealth of information there. --- 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 WGIR-AM 610: What Laptop Should You Buy
03/01/2021
AS HEARD ON NH Today WGIR-AM 610: What Laptop Should You Buy
Welcome, Craig Peterson here. This morning I was on with Chris Ryan on NH Today. He wanted to discuss what is the best technology to buy. We got into some details of the benefits and drawbacks of each. Here we go with Chris. These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit. - --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Hey, have you thought about whether you should get one of these Chromebooks, maybe Android tied into it, or a Mac or a Windows, computer laptop, or surface tablet or otherwise. That's exactly what I talked with Chris Ryan about this morning. So here we go with Chris. A little bit of insight on computers and the whole market behind it. Chris Ryan: [00:00:23] I am Chris Ryan. Appreciate you joining us for the show. Craig Peterson joins us right now in the program. He hosts tech talk on Newsradio 610 and 96.7. Craig Peterson: [00:00:32] Hey, good morning. Doing well. Chris Ryan: [00:00:34] Good. Thanks for joining us for the show. I want to talk to you today about decision-making in regards to what tech to use. Whether it's a cell phone, whether it's a Chromebook versus a Mac and this off of a story from geek wire.com, which indicates that Chromebooks outsold macs worldwide in 2020. So in your view, why did that take place? How do you go about if you're a consumer differentiating using a Chromebook versus using a Mac versus using another type of tablet? Craig Peterson: [00:01:09] Apple is moved to their own chips now really indicates what's going on in the marketplace. Many years ago, there were just a few different chips that were competing manufacturers. Motorola was winning this game. IBM had their chips for the mainframes. Then along came this little startup, known as Microsoft and helped Apple out. In fact, in the very beginning and moved on from there to really focus in on one hardware platform and that's the Intel platform. For years it was known as Wintel monopoly, meaning Windows and Intel. Those two were in lock step, went hand in hand. The default for people to buy was always Windows because that's what they knew. That's what they might've used at work. Although it might be a different version. So they just go ahead and use it at home. Now we have options. Intel has been falling by the wayside for years. Even 64 bit chips, Intel lost the whole lead on that. AMD advanced micro devices beat them. So when we're looking at it, as a consumer, now we have more choices. We can decide that we want a simpler machine, a more secure machine and get something like a Chrome or web based tablet. This is an operating system that is designed for mobile devices. We can get a chromo S based laptop, a desktop. There's even rumors that there's some more phones in the work. The Chrome OS will even run android and it's way cheaper because you don't have to use that expensive Intel chip, which is part of the reason Apple has decided to ditch Intel as well. Now we're going to the real benefit of Unix machines. Unix has been around since the early seventies. It's what I've used in data centers and all big businesses use in data centers. The real benefit to Unix, Chris, is it will run on anything. So now you can go out for $150, buy a half decent little tablet or laptop using Chrome OSwhich of course is coming from Google. Have that thing updated for you all the time, just automatically. It has all of the features on it you probably want, you can go online, obviously, you can edit document and it is cheap. Although, you can get more expensive ones. It's secure. Chrome OS is what many security researchers use. As you mentioned for the first time ever Chromebooks out sold Macs. That's a little misleading because it's not eating into Apple's market share. It's eating into Microsoft market share and along with that, of course, Intel. Chris Ryan: [00:04:05] I want to ask you about. Where Google kind of caught up to to Mac. Most individuals purchased what the optimal item was the Apple phone. It was the different Apple products. That was pretty much seen as being the market's view of things. Now, it seems that there's been a change and a lot of that has to do with, as you referenced, Google's technology and products and the alignment with Android and other types of phones. So at what point did Google get to the stage where they were on par with Mac, in your view, or perhaps surpassing it? Craig Peterson: [00:04:38] There's really two different things here. The on-par right now, as far as sales go is in the Chrome OS side. When we're talking about phones it's a different thing. These smartphones smart devices. There are many more mobile, sometimes more android based smartphones out there, then there are I iPhones. The main reason for that has to do with price. Google made the operating system, the Android operating system, available effectively for free for any developer that wanted to use it Chris Ryan: [00:05:13] The public perception is that the iPhone was the thing and kind of still is. Has that changed at all? Or is the technology with obviously the Chrome OS different? Has the technology with Google caught up to where Apple is in the view of the public, and in actuality, Craig Peterson: [00:05:28] In the view of the public, it's hard to. Say a lot of people you start using Windows, you say, you start using Android, you stick with it, et cetera. That's a little hard to tell, but I can tell you what Google thinks, obviously, Google's beta right now for the Android operating system is trying to copy more and more features from Apple's iOS, which is their operating system for their smartphones. Google thinks that Apple is still the market leader. They are still playing catch up. They are nowhere near, orders of magnitude, nowhere near Apple, when it comes to security. Android is far behind, still. Justin McIssac: [00:06:06] When it comes to actual Chromebooks versus Macbooks. Do you think a lot of this on the sales side, Craig, is driven by schools? For my school system in Rochester, if they're looking at $300 Chromebooks versus a $1,700 Macbook for their students, no contest. Craig Peterson: [00:06:19] Yeah, and that's absolutely true, Justin. The cost is something that a lot of people consider and it's a legitimate consideration. In the case of, should I get a cheap Windows machine or should I get a cheap Chromebook? The Chromebook is a much better option for most people. When you're talking about schools who have widely adopted the whole Chromebook and Chrome OS operating system. Schools, it's just a huge win. It's so much less expensive. It's much easier to tell Justin to buy a $300 Chromebook that the $1,800 Mac. Where the Mac comes in useful, let's run through those three platforms really quickly. The Mac comes in useful when you want something secure, easy to use that can run bigger applications. If you have an app, like you're trying to do video editing, maybe more photo editing, you might want to use a Mac. Windows is great, if the app that you need to use only runs on Windows. Or you only know Windows and you just don't want to bother learning an even simpler operating system. Then Chrome OOS is wonderful when you need primarily to go online. You're going to use a web browser. You need some simple applications. Maybe you want to edit some Word documents or Excel from time to time, nothing terribly fancy. That's where Chrome OS comes in. That's why it's been such a hit in schools, too. Chris Ryan: [00:07:44] Well, Craig has always I appreciate you joining us for the show and we shall chat again soon. Craig Peterson: [00:07:48] All right. Take care, Chris. Chris Ryan: [00:07:49] All right. That is Craig Peterson joining us here on New Hampshire today. You can hear him on Saturday and Sunday on news radio 610 and 96.7 with tech talk. Always good to talk with him about what's taking place in the tech marketplace. --- 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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Tech Talk with Craig Peterson Podcast: What really happened in TX, New MAC malware, Apples Electric Vehicles and More
02/27/2021
Tech Talk with Craig Peterson Podcast: What really happened in TX, New MAC malware, Apples Electric Vehicles and More
Welcome! It was also another busy week on the technology front and we are going to delve into what actually caused the energy problems in Texas. There is a new type of malware that is affecting Macs and it is has a different MO. Then we are going to discuss Apple and their ventures into automated electric cars and what we can expect. Why are states having issues making appointments for vaccines? In a word, it is bureaucratic incompetence. Then we have a new type of hack out there. It is called Buy-to-Infect and there is more so be sure to Listen in. For more tech tips, news, and updates, visit - CraigPeterson.com. --- Tech Articles Craig Thinks You Should Read: --- Automated Machine-Generated Transcript: Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] You probably know I've been doing cybersecurity now for 30 years in the online world. Yeah, that long. I'm afraid I have some confessions to make about our relationships here, cybersecurity people, and employees. Hi everybody. Craig Peterson here. I'm so glad to be here. I'm happy your here as well. There are so many ways to listen. I got pulled into this whole business of cybersecurity quite literally, kicking and screaming. I had been already involved in the development of the internet and internet protocols for a decade before. In fact, one of the contracts that I had was with a major manufacturer of computer systems. What I did there was design for Unix systems a way to check for malware, a way to manage them remotely. Yes indeed, I made one of the first RMM systems, as we call them nowadays. We also tied that RMM system, of course, into Windows and a few other operating systems. Unix was where I was working at the time. I am what they called an OG in the industry. My gosh, my first job with computer networks was back in 75. Believe it or not a long time ago. Back then, of course, it was mainframe to mainframe basically and some of the basic protocols, the RJE, and stuff. I know I've got a lot of older people who are listening who are saying, yeah, I remember that. It brings back memories. In fact, I got a note just this week from a listener who was saying his first computer was a Sinclair. Do you remember those things? Oh my gosh. It brought back so many memories for us older guys. But it was just such a cool little device with the keys and much different than I'd ever seen before. The XZ81. I just looked it up online so I can remember what the model number was. That was made by Timex. If you can believe that too. It's just. Wow. It had a Z 80 CPU, which of course was like an 8080, which was Intel's, big chip at the time, running at 3.25 megahertz. Yes, indeed. Very cool. I love that computer anyways. I digress. The whole industry at the time was non-existent, yeah. You had antivirus software. We started seeing that in the eighties and we had some terrible operating systems that many people were running like Windows, just absolutely horrific. Remember windows three-point 11 and XP and the millennial edition just some of the most terrible software ever. That's what happens when you have interns? A lot of the code, it came out in one of the lawsuits, for one of these versions of Windows. It was a different world and I had to figure out what was going on because I had some servers that were Unix servers. This was the early nineties and I was hosting email for companies and websites and doing some filtering and things with some kind of precursor to SpamAssassin. It was really something. I had some DECservers, Digital Equipment Corporation. Remember those guys and all of a sudden customers started calling me because the email wasn't working. It turned out it was working, but it was extremely slow and I had to figure out why. I telneted to my server. I got on, started poking around the servers. I had a computer room and the first floor of the building that I owned and I was up on the second floor. Off we go looking around trying to figure out what is going on. It was me actually. I said us, but it was really me. Cause I knew the most about this stuff. There were these processes that just continued to fork and I was trying to figure out why is it creating all these new processes. What's going on? What has happened here? Back then, The internet was a much different place. We trusted everybody. We had fun online. We would spam people who broke our almost unwritten rules of the internet about being kind to other people. What spam was, where the whole term comes from is you would send the script from Monty Python spam and eggs, spam and ham spam, spam, spam routine. You just send it to somebody that was breaking these unwritten rules, like trying to sell something on the internet. Absolutely verboten. What a change to today. I saw some of this stuff going on. I was trying to figure out what it was, but, we trusted everybody. So my mail server was Sendmail, at the time. We still maintain some instances of Sendmail for customers that need that. Nowadays. It's usually more something like postfix in the backend. You might have Zimbra or something out front, but postfix in the backend. We allowed anybody on the internet to get on to our mail server and fix some configuration problems. They didn't have full access to everything. Firewalls weren't then what they are today. In fact, one of our engineers just had to run out to a client who did something we told them not to do. They were using the Sonic wall firewall on their network as well as they had our stuff. So we had a really good Cisco firepower firewall sitting there, and then they have this SonicWall so that they're people, remotely could connect to the Sonic wall firewall, because it's good enough. SonicWall says it's compliant. The SonicWall firewall was being used to scan the network and load stuff. Does that sound familiar? Much to our chagrin. So he had to run out and take care of that today. It sounds like we might have to do a rip and replace over there restore from backups. You have no idea what these bad guys might've done. We've seen Chinese into these networks before, Chinese malware. It's been really bad. Boy, am I wandering all over the place? Back to this, we would allow people to get onto our network to fix things. If something was wrong, if we were misconfigured, they could help us and they could get on and do it because Sendmail configuration was not for the faint-hearted. In the days before Google, right? Eventually, we had Archie and Veronica, and Jughead. They did basic searches across FTP servers. That's my kicking and screaming story. I was trying to run a business where we hosted email for businesses, which we still do to this day, and where we had some, back then we didn't have websites. The web didn't come in into play until a couple of years later, but we did host FTP sites for businesses so that they could share files back and forth. That's what I wanted to do. That was my business. Later on, I ended up helping 80% of my clients find the other web hosts after, these $8 Gator hosting things. We just got a call on that this week. Somebody who'd been a client of ours 20 years ago, went with a guy that charges $5 a month for web hosting. They have personally identifiable information on that site if you can believe it. He was complaining because it wasn't working he was getting a C-panel error anytime he went to the site. We said, Hey, listen, this problem is the guy that you're hosting from. We did a little research and we checked the IP address and how many sites we're at that IP address. This guy that was charging them $5 a month had 150 different websites at that one IP address. Now that's not bad. He was hosting all of these 150 at a site, the charges, the eight to $10 a month for web hosting. He had all of these sites on top of a machine that was already split up hundreds of ways. It's just amazing what people do. Man alive. We got rid of 80% of those customers, the ones that wanted cheap, that's fine, get cheap, and see what happens to you. Some of them, we still maintain a good relationship with and so we help them out from time to time, right? What am I going to do? So somebody calls me, I gotta help them. That's precisely what we do now with this malware problem. What's going on here? We talked already about the Great Suspender and how Google has said, Hey, this now has malware in it, so we're removing it from your web browsers. That to me makes a ton of sense. Why not do that? This is another example of what happened with SolarWinds. This is an example of a supply chain infection. What happened with that? Somebody bought Great Suspender from the developer and then added in this basically malware to the Great Suspender. Just it's a terrible thing. Very surprising, but one of the biggest exploits that are being used by the bad guys right now is the security team's poor relationship with other employees within the organization. I promise we'll get to this a little bit more and explain the bottom line here. What's going on and it goes back to this customer that we just had to run out to. Why did they do what we told them not to do? Stick around. We're getting into the battle between cybersecurity senior officers in companies, owners, business owners, and the, even the employees. There has been such a battle going on. I saw two examples this week. Hi, everybody, it's a difficult world out there, but I find some comfort in listening to, of course, news radio. It keeps me up to date on what's going on. It helps me to really understand the world a lot better. I mentioned that one of my guys just had to run out to a client who did something we absolutely told them not to do. They had been using this company that was a break-fix shop, I guess is the way you would put it. They had a business that would respond to problems and they charge by the hour. I think right now their hourly rate is like 160 bucks or something. It is not cheap, but anyhow, That they would sell people equipment and then move on, right? Your problems aren't my problems. Just leave me alone, go away. It's a beautiful model because their employees at this break-fix shop don't have to understand much. They just have to know more than you do as a customer. There's one level of understanding that you have, and for someone to appear to be an expert, all they have to do is have slightly more understanding. That has bothered me so many times listened to the radio and they talk about somebody that's just this great expert, in reality, of course, they are not. But you don't know. That person talking about the expert doesn't know either because they just don't have enough knowledge. Of course, the person that's labeled the expert isn't going to say anything about it. They were doing what most companies do, which is okay. We know we need a firewall, so let's get a firewall. They went out and they talked to this company and they did their Google research because of course, Dr. Google is an expert on everything. Even with those differing opinions, you're going to go with the opinion that you like the best. That's what they did. They bought a Sonic wall firewall from this vendor, which was a break-fix shop. Now that's all well, and good. The sonic wall is not terrible stuff. They've got some amazing stuff as well. The problem is this device has been out of support for more than two years now. Even though they're not as advanced as some of the systems we can install, not that we always use the most advanced systems. It's not a bad, a little thing for a small business. We warned them that because they were using an out-of-date firewall that they could not get fixes for known vulnerabilities. Now that's a big deal too. Most people are not aware of the vulnerabilities that are on their machines. Do you go out every month and check the firmware versions on your firewall? You should be, even if you're a home user. Are you checking to make sure the firewall that the cable company provided you with is up to date, configured correctly? You've changed the password and the admin username, right? No? Most people haven't. He hadn't, right. He didn't know. We told them we did a little research and said here's your problem. That's part of his cyber health assessment. We told them what kind of firewall do you have? What's the version of software on it and we do that. We have a bunch of people that have asked for cyber health assessments. We've got them on a list because we're busy. So we have to schedule these and make them happen. So we said, do not plug that machine in. Of course, what do they do? They plugged it back in again. So now all of a sudden this morning, we get a wake-up call from our monitors that are running they're on their Cisco firepower firewall, where we have their extensive suite of additional software. This isn't just an off-shelf, Cisco firewall. It's telling us that the SonicWall or something through our, via the SonicWall. Is going through all this customer's network. It's actually attacking the Cisco firewall from inside the network. Absolutely amazing. Why does that happen? In this case, the business owner, and it is a very small business. It has about 5 million in revenue per year, I would guess. It's a small business by every stretch. The owner just doesn't want to spend the money he doesn't absolutely have to spend. He's not looking at this saying I could lose all my intellectual property. I could get sued by these people. I could lose my clients who find out that their data was released. Their orders were released. Everything was stolen. He looks at it and says, Oh wow. It's 200 bucks a month. Wait a minute guy, you have how many employees? You're worried about 200 bucks a month. I personally, I don't understand that. Why would you do that? Now, you're in a poor country. Okay. I get it right. That's a lot of money to spend, but not here in the United States. Doesn't make sense. A lot of this is really the reason I brought it up. It's showing how there is a disconnect between business owners, C-level people, and cybersecurity people. Basically, if you have less than 200 employees, you cannot afford to have your own cybersecurity team. It's impossible. It's way too expensive. Then the numbers start to change outsourced cybersecurity, which is what we do. We do this for this customer and. The in-house cybersecurity people, but we all have the same basic problem. The owner has a problem too, right? He has to weigh the costs of cybersecurity against the risks involved, which is what Equifax did. What so many of these big companies do, right? There's this, the norm Equifax said it's going to be way cheaper to just pay out $10 million in fines. When we get fined by the federal government for losing everyone in the country's personal financial information then it is to do this or we're not going to bother. Man, I'd love to see the smoking gun email on that, where they made that final decision, probably doesn't exist. They're smart enough to know that they would get sued and they have been sued because of this. We've got another problem right now because of people working from home. I mentioned, in fact, this week, you should have gotten an email from me on Thursday. That was a little audio thing that I put together. We call these things, audiograms, and it's a kind of a video that'll play. This particular one is about part of this problem. We've talked extensively about that water plant in Florida, that was hacked for lack of a better term. It might've been an insider thing. It might've been someone external, et cetera, et cetera. The reason it happened is that business, the water plant for a town of 15,000 people, which would be in a normal world, a small business. That small government operation was all of a sudden faced with lockdowns. What do we do? They didn't have a plan. They didn't have a business continuity plan, which is so important. I talked about it extensively last week as well. They had no way to manage this. So what did they do? They went out and bought team viewer licenses for everybody in the business. That put, well not the business, in this case, the agency, that put the agency at risk. That is putting our businesses at risk too, in such a big way. That's what the audiogram I emailed out on Thursday explaining this a bit. So stick around. We're going to continue this conversation. Of course, you're listening to Craig Peterson [email protected] We have people working from home. We didn't really plan for this. We're doing it because of the lockdown. Maybe, you found that it's actually better for your business, from whatever angle. What are the risks here of people taking computers home? Hello. Everybody Craig, Peterson here. So glad to be with you today. Glad you're taking a few minutes out of your day as well to listen in. Now I am very concerned about people using computers that they're taking home. I want to make a definition. Maybe there's a better way of saying this, computers that are used at home, home computers should never be used for work. I'm going to explain why. Computers that are at work probably should not be taken home. We saw the example of this, just this last couple of weeks. I was talking about this wonderful plugin that I've been using and recommending people use here for a very long time, called the Great Suspender. We've talked at length really about what happened there with the company being bought and then becoming evil, right? Just buying their way into 2 million people's computers. Sometimes these Chrome extensions that are installed on personal computers get automatically installed and synchronized to your work devices. In fact, that's the default. If you log into Chrome and you're using Google Chrome as your browser and you log into it on your home computer, and when you log into your same account over on your business computer. All of a sudden, now it's syncing. It's syncing things like passwords, which you should not be having Google store for you. You should definitely be using a good password manager and there are a few out there. If you're not familiar with them or don't know which one to use or how to use them. I have a great little special report on passwords and using password managers. I'd be glad to send it to you. Just email [email protected] and I'll send that on-off, right? I'm not making a dime off of that. I want to make you safer. I don't want to have happened to you what's happened to millions of Americans, including my best buddy who had his information stolen. I've been after him to use password managers. He never did it. I don't know why. Until his paycheck got stolen. Then he came over and I explained it and set it up with them and really helped him out. Maybe we should do a whole webinar showing you how to use these password managers, how to get them set up because it is a little bit tricky. It's certainly different than you're used to. Many people are using their browser Chrome in this example, to save passwords. When you go to a website, you'll automatically have the password there. Maybe you've got it set up so that it'll automatically log you in with all kinds of cool stuff. But there is a very big problem and that is that there is a huge risk with running these extensions, like the Great Suspender. The Great Suspender was approved by Google. It was in the Google store. You could download it from their app store. Absolutely free. In January of this year in 2021, we had someone out on Twitter, tweet that there was a problem with the security on the...
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AS HEARD ON: WGAN Mornings News with Matt Gagnon: Texas Energy - Asleep at the Switch and State Vaccine Scheduling Websites are a Nightmare
02/24/2021
AS HEARD ON: WGAN Mornings News with Matt Gagnon: Texas Energy - Asleep at the Switch and State Vaccine Scheduling Websites are a Nightmare
Good morning everybody! I was on WGAN this morning with Matt Gagnon. We really got into the power distribution issues in TX and it appears that the Energy department was really "asleep at the switch." Then we talked about the nightmare that these bureaucratic states are having with their vaccine scheduling websites. We discussed why they are having a problem and what they could have done, but didn't. Here we go with Matt. And more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com. --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Hi everybody. Craig Peterson here. I'm laughing because I just had to run over to another computer, shut off the speaker because here it was on the air with Mr. Matt Gagnon, and all of a sudden my computer, which was rebooting came up and decided it was going to play Johnny Cash Ring of fire. See if you can hear it in the background, it shouldn't be too loud. Cause I've got a decent microphone here, but man, did it distract me? Anyhow, we got into New York's vaccine website. What's going on there? This math that talks about wind energy shows what really happened down in the great state of Texas. A little bit about what's going on in Maine and of course, a little bit of ring of fire. So here we go with Mr. Matt Gagnon. Matt Gagnon: [00:00:46] It's WGAN morning news on a Wednesday, which means it's a good time to talk to Craig Peterson, our tech guru. You can hear him on this very station on Saturdays at one for his own show where he talks about a lot of these same topics, but why wait, he's here with us now, Craig, how are you this morning? Craig Peterson: [00:01:01] Hey, good morning back. Doing really well. Matt Gagnon: [00:01:03] Lots of stuff to get to with you here. One of the most topical topics, if you will, that we could deal with here, which is interesting to talk to you about. But something that we've talked about on the show quite often here in the last week, or so is about what's going on in Texas, right? With the energy failure. What's been going on with power outages and how cold has affected it and what I would consider a brewing controversy about, what's really. The ultimate culprit here, initially a lot of people were blaming sort of wind farms that had frozen and were unable to be producing any sort of electricity. Others have pointed the blame at natural gas facilities, also not being able to transfer a lot of electricity, et cetera, but you gave me an article that to read, which I thought was very interesting about the basic math behind all this showing how frankly wind energy actually is a pretty big culprit in this whole story. So just tell us a little bit more about what we've learned here. Craig Peterson: [00:01:54] Yeah, It's interesting when you get beyond kind of the emotions and the political arguments and get down to the real facts behind it all. Texas, of course, this is just a terrible thing. We had people die. Every year, in fact, of course, people end up dying from the cold and heat as well. Having the ability to heat our homes, our businesses, and cool them in the summer, particularly in Texas is really important. Texas focused on the summer where of course everything gets hot, they need a lot of electricity. They're four main ways of generating electricity. Natural gas, of course, they have a lot of that thanks to fracking, coal, wind, and nuclear. When we look at the numbers, the actual hard numbers of megawatt-hours produced in Texas. We see about a 20% drop across the board in the amount of electricity that they are generating by each of those four categories. That's not a good thing, right? Because you need more energy. In every case, the amount of energy produced dropped, because those systems were not set up to handle the cold. What's really interesting is you look at natural gas. For instance, it was about 44,000 megawatt-hours before this whole thing happened. That 44,000 number dropped down to 30,000 when we had, of course, the coldest part of the winter. Some of that was because control valves in some cases were not winterized. They weren't ready for the cold. There are other reasons as well. It dropped because, of course, now we have people demanding it to heat their homes. So there was less natural gas available for these power plants. Coal even dropped. It went from 10,000 megawatt-hours down to 8,000, but you pointed out something that's really dramatic and that is the wind power. We have all kinds of jets, but let's just use a small one as an example, a little Bombardier jet, they fly in and out of these smaller Maine airports all the time. How do they fly? Well, they fly because of the lift, right? The aerodynamic lift. If you get ice on those wings, all of a sudden you lose that lift, and the plane crashes. How are we not having planes crash all the time? It's that bladder on the leading edge of the wing. In the smaller planes, you use a bladder and that bladder expands, which now breaks up all of the ice it's on that wing and then contracts back down so that you maintain that aerodynamic shape. The same type of principle is in play when it comes to windmills, you basically have the wing of an aircraft in each one of those blades on the windmill. When that windmill gets coated with ice, it all of a sudden the blade does not grab the air anymore. So wind power generation in Texas dropped from about 8,000 megawatt-hours of production down to 650. Just dramatic. Even nuclear power dropped from about 5,000 megawatt-hours down to about 3,800. A lot of these were caused really by Texas, not paying attention to what would happen when it gets really cold. What most news outlets are not reporting, in fact, I haven't heard this on any news outlet, so you're hearing it first, probably right here. Is that Texas was minutes away from potentially being months away from recovering from this whole thing and back to the old normal. Matt Gagnon: [00:05:36] Yeah, I would say it to interrupt you there. I saw that same report and, it looks to me like a salacious headline but reading through the actual story, that's not an exaggeration. It was really a disaster waiting to happen. Craig Peterson: [00:05:47] It really was because again, natural gas doesn't like, oxygen. What happens when you're using a lot of the natural gas up? Well, the pressure drops. What happens for the pressure drops to a certain point where the pressure in the pipeline is about equal to that in the air? All of a sudden you get oxygen back into the lines and you get explosions. It's incredible, all the way across the board. Now, in Maine, we're not really heating all that much by electricity or natural gas. Nearly two-thirds of the households here in Maine use fuel oil as their primary energy source. Of course, most of that comes down from the great white North, say from Canada. That's the largest share of any state in the union, frankly. In 2019 80% of Maine's electrical need here was fulfilled from renewable energy sources, which includes, hydroelectric power, which provided the largest shared of about 31%. We've got some interesting things going on, including wind power generation, because Maine leads New England in wind power and ranks sixth in the nation. We built it to be able to handle these cold snaps. Matt Gagnon: [00:06:57] Speaking with Craig Peterson, our tech guru. He joins us at this time every Wednesday to go over the world of technology. Craig, also, another thing I've been talking an awful lot about on the show here is about the various problems in the state of New York and exactly what they've been doing wrong for quite a while, as it relates to COVID-19 stuff. Specifically Andrew Cuomo and all of his friends. You know, another story to talk about here, the vaccine website's not working in New York, again. Craig Peterson: [00:07:23] Yeah. It's incredible. The amount of difficulty, there's something called over-engineering. You've heard of that before. I'm sure, Matt. That's where you need to move a Boulder, so you get an engineer. The engineer comes out and designs a bulldozer when all you need was a fulcrum and level. Which would make life a whole lot easier for you. There's a lot of things to consider when you get right down to it. The bottom line is it is a major problem in New York. People are not able to get onto the website. Same problem in Massachusetts. They got the same thing going on. You could do all of this from these websites, just by hiring their commercial service like Cvent, or in this case, one guy for about 50 bucks built a website that would handle New York city's registration for COVID vaccines. Matt Gagnon: [00:08:11] It's incredible. Yeah. That kind of stuff that continues to be an issue and that New York always seems to lead the way and incompetence here. Craig Peterson, our tech guru joins us on Wednesdays to go over the world of technology. You can also hear him on Saturdays as well at one o'clock. Craig, appreciate it as always. And we'll talk to you again next week. Craig Peterson: [00:08:27] Hey, take care, Matt. Hey, everybody, take care. Have a great day. We'll be back this weekend. Of course. I'm having a little trouble with some of the software we're trying to use here to help. With you guys going through this Improve Windows Security course. I had set up an appointment with the vendor and they just bailed on me because the lady that I was going to be working with at her family just came down with the COVID-19. So she can't help. Lockdown affects us again, as well as apparently the virus. Anyhow, the course is all done. It's in the can. But we got to set it up in a way that you guys can get to it and can use it because we're covering 22 major topics here. I want you to be able to progress through it and understand it, use it, have all of the notes there, and everything. The only real way to do that, frankly, is with kind of a membership site. We're getting there, although we're not there yet. Man. What a year? I don't know about you. I was talking, actually, I was on the air. I was talking with somebody on the air, Oh, it was a television interview I did this week. I should post that up on the podcast. Anyhow, I was talking about the last year I said, my brain was saying this was last year. It was 2019 that was what I was talking about. Something that occurred in 2019. Here it is 2021. It was as though 2020 never happened. Maybe, I wiped it out of my brain. Which is a good thing. One of those years that you wish hadn't happened and apparently did end up happening. All right, everybody, take care. Thanks for being here. Love you. Appreciate you. Man, I love getting those notes from everybody. Me at craigpeterson.com. Take care. Bye-bye. --- 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: Texas Energy Problems -- Could Mass be in for Something Similar? and Apple Goes All In on 6G
02/23/2021
AS HEARD ON - The Jim Polito Show - WTAG 580 AM: Texas Energy Problems -- Could Mass be in for Something Similar? and Apple Goes All In on 6G
Good morning, everybody. I was on this morning on WTAG with Jim Polito. We discussed the power situation in Texas and then brought it home to Mass and talked about whether we could be in for anything similar. We also discussed Green Energy and Nuclear Energy. Then we got into 6G -- yes that is not a typo, Apple is developing their own chips and ditching Intel and Qualcomm to run on 6G. Here we go with Jim. For more tech tips, news, and updates, visit - . --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Good morning, Craig Peterson here. I've had a great day today. So far, anyway, and I was on with Mr. Polito this morning. We covered of course Texas stuff but from a Massachusetts angle. The electrical generation in Mass and what the numbers look like. It's actually quite a bit different in all of the new England States. It's amazing when I did the research on this. Apple. They're working on 6G. I explain how Apple is trying to divest itself of some of these vendors it had for years, that just aren't cutting it anymore. So here we go with Mr. Polito. Jim Polito: [00:00:36] It's time to bring in our good friend, the man who has the answers to all the questions. We may have our tech talk guru. Craig Peterson. Good morning, Craig. Craig Peterson: [00:00:48] Hey, good morning, sir. How are you doing? Jim Polito: [00:00:51] I'm good. Thank you. Actually, it's getting much nicer outside now. So, I'm feeling good. My friend Bob in Texas tells me it's going to be in the seventies today. We still need to talk about Texas. It was great last week having a conversation with you about them. Just about the failures and well the good old-fashioned green energy. Then I want to talk about 6G. Let's start with this, basically, energy failures contributed to the deadly situation in Texas, isn't that true? Craig Peterson: [00:01:31] Yeah, absolutely is. When we look at Texas and the Department of Energy and how much generation they have, they rely pretty heavily on wind power. In fact, Texas was generating, let's put it this way about 8,000 megawatts of electricity before the storm hit from wind power. Then the next day at the height of the storm, it went from 8,000-megawatt hours down to 650. It just completely wiped it out. What this is really indicative of is a general problem, that Texas seems to have, just like Massachusetts we're looking at our electrical generation and where does most of our power come from? Number one by far here is using the natural gas resources and burning that to make electricity. Well, that is also number one down in Texas. They had about 44-megawatt hours before the storm that dropdown to 30,000. So natural gas, coal, wind, and nuclear in Texas all dropped about 20% because of the storm. Man, did that cascade, but wind, it got wiped out. Jim Polito: [00:02:50] There you go when you need it the most, it's not there. I mean, we really need, we need Scotty from Star Trek to get the dilithium crystals to make us some, a power. I mean that's what we need. Then if Texas has another crisis, he can say I'm giving it all I got Captain. Not to make light of the fact that people actually died, but these types of things Chuck Schumer is saying, well, this is what happens when you don't pay attention to climate change. That's a nice thing to say to people who, you know, a state where people died. You get what you deserve. This is what happens or you don't want to join the feds. Unbelievable. Craig Peterson: [00:03:32] Well here in Mass, about one-fourth of Mass's total generation of electricity, comes from what are called renewable resources. The largest chunk of that in Mass is small-scale solar panels, less than a megawatt of generating capacity. So here, what we're talking about when we're talking about the renewable stuff, obviously wind is something they call renewable. Solar is something they call renewable, but you have to have sun. You have to have no snow on the solar panels. If you're going to do wind, you have to make sure that just like the leading edge of a wing on an airplane, you either have a bladder that expands and contracts to break the ice off or you have these things heated. There's a video going around from, I think it was 2017 of a helicopter in Texas with a spray unit hanging underneath it. Like we use here on our jets and it was hovering around these wonderful windmills spraying them trying to melt the ice off of them. If we're going to try and do this, you got to try and do it right. Again, let's talk green. The manufacturing of solar panels is anything, but green, the manufacturing of these lithium-ion batteries, even the nickel, the metal of batteries is anything but green. We talked before about how a Hummer, an H1 running diesel, and burning diesel for its entire lifetime is greener than a Toyota Prius because of all of the pollution that's caused by the Toyota Prius. The fact that your car, if you've got one of these electric cars, you know, God bless you, that those things are so cool. I would love to have one. But don't let it get stuck in your head that somehow it's green because it is not. It doesn't just have to do with the production of electricity. In Mass, we've totally gotten rid of these coal power plants. Our biggest nuclear plant down on the Cape has been shut down in May 2019. I was going to say last year because I'm not sure 2020 actually happened. Jim Polito: [00:05:48] Yeah. we skipped it. It's like the 13th floor in a hotel. Yeah. No, go ahead. Yeah, we've got to think about nuclear and we've got to think about all these other things. Craig Peterson: [00:05:57] Yes. Yes. You know what the biggest problem, if you ask me, with nuclear is that we are using standards at the nuclear regulatory commission that were established in the early fifties. They don't take into account these six-generation nuclear plants. Right now, extremely safe nuclear plants are on the drawing board and are being tested. That you could stick one right in your hometown. You have your own nuclear plant. The things buried underground. There's basically no moving parts other than, a couple. If it was to have a massive failure there'd be no leak of any nuclear material. That little plant, you can get them that'll produce one megawatt all the way on up from there. We can have them all over the place. We don't have the nuclear waste problem. It's using very low radioactive materials. In fact, it can take some of these radioactive materials from these old plants that we have from Pilgrim, et cetera and reuse them. The result would be something that even lower nuclear problems. So, uh, it's crazy. We're not thinking. Jim Polito: [00:07:07] Yeah, no that's because Bruce Springsteen in the no nukes concert back in the late seventies, you know, kind of solidified it all. You got to hate nuclear power yet when Kathy and I flew from Milan to Paris over the Alps. I looked down and saw two separate nuclear power plants, and France gets the majority of its electricity from nuclear power. By the way, they're not doing it really with the sixth generation nuclear power plants. Um, they still have older power plants and it works. We're talking with Craig Peterson our tech talk guru. Great guy. Craig, I think you made the point, I think they have a lot of thinking to do in a lot of these places. I want to talk about Apple already working on 6g. Now, first of all, I got a 5g phone over the holidays and 5g availability it's not as available as one would think and we're already talking about 6G. Craig Peterson: [00:08:05] Yeah. Yeah. 5G unless you're carriers T-Mobile, 5g is unavailable throughout most of the United States. Now we won't have time to get all the technical issues and I'll probably get into it a little bit this weekend as well on my show. Apple has decided they've had it with these third-party vendors. They've had it. I'm talking about the chip manufacturer. So for instance, when Apple came out with its iPhone and its iPad, it was using chips, and today chips completely designed by Apple. There's some licensed technology in there. No doubt. Apple is ditching Intel for all of its computers. It's already selling computers, if you buy a new Mac book air, or a Mac mini, or some of these others, very shortly including a small Mac book pro, it no longer has that Intel chip in it. Well, they want to get rid of Qualcomm chips that are in the phones because they don't meet their specs. If you're using 5g on your new iPhone 12. You'll notice your battery looks like it has a leak. It uses so much electricity just to do this 5g because of the way 5g works, but more particularly because of the way Qualcomm makes that little modem chip that's inside the phone. So Apple has said, okay, we're already making the main CPUs for the computers let's get busy let's make our own ship sets for cellular data. I'll let you in on a secret. Apple is really moving towards having these chips in every device they sell. So if you get an iPad, you get a laptop, et cetera, you're going to be connecting to the 6G probably some 5G's as well, initially to this new 6G network. Apple wants to be an absolute leader there. Let me tell you, they will be. They've done some amazing things and they're not stuck with the silicone they designed 10 years ago like Qualcomm is. They're starting from scratch and they can do it. Jim Polito: [00:10:09] Yeah. Well, that's interesting. Cause I'd like to see that and if Apple does it fine. I am on the Verizon network and I've just found that there's no big deal here with me other than it not being all that available. I don't notice any difference between the 5g and the 4g LTE, I just, I don't. Craig Peterson: [00:10:31] Well, many carriers are kind of spoofing it a little bit. They're calling a more advanced version of 4g, 5g. Ajit Pai who was the Trump administration guy over there at the FCC was starting to come down on these guys. The whole Biden switch up here has made it so that they're just letting it run wild right now. So, 5g isn't 5g isn't 5g and it's just not generally available, particularly not available on the Verizon network. Jim Polito: [00:11:01] Craig, this is great as usual. How do people get in touch with you? Well, if you go to Craig peterson.com, you're going to find all kinds of stuff right there. We have courses that we have started sending out little training every week. We got bigger pieces of training coming up to keep you up-to-date on security. Step-by-step what you should do. Right? I've got 50 different special reports that we're going to be sending out. You can only get it, if you go to Craig peterson.com. Slash subscribe, sign up there. I'll send you a few of them, right out of the shoot to get you started. Craig Peterson: [00:11:38] Then every week I'm going to be sending you more and we have deeper courses and deeper dives and webinars. I really want everybody to understand what you have to do to stay safe. Particularly our small businesses, our elderly, everybody out there. Jim Polito: [00:11:53] Again, Craig peterson.com. That's great, Craig. Thank you so much. As usual and thank you for the extra time last week you gave us. We look forward to talking with you again soon. Craig Peterson: [00:12:05] Take care, Jim. Thanks. For those that have been following here on what is happening with my Improving Windows Security course, you'll be happy to know it is finished and we're putting it all up. We're making a little membership site for y'all where I'm going to be putting all of these different things, make it easy for you to digest it. That's the whole idea, right? Little reminders and bookmarks, you can put into the video, text and screenshots, and everything. So it is almost there. Keep an eye out on your emails, take care of everybody. We'll be back on the Morrow. --- 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 WGIR-AM 610: It Wasn't Just Ice That Brought Texas Energy to A Standstill
02/22/2021
AS HEARD ON NH Today WGIR-AM 610: It Wasn't Just Ice That Brought Texas Energy to A Standstill
Welcome, Craig Peterson here. This morning I was on with Chris Ryan on NH Today. We talked about what is going on in Texas and Why? What did they do? What assumptions did they make? Where do they go from here? Here we go with Chris. These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit. - --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Justin McIssac: [00:00:00] Texas had a problem with this in 2011, just as the power company decided, it's going to cost too much to fix. With virtually no regulation, isn't that the issue, more than wind power itself, Craig Peterson: [00:00:10] Almost a total grid collapsed down in Texas. I get into that. All of the statistics, the real numbers. Let's prove what's right here when we're talking about some of these renewable energy resources. I get into it all with Mr. Chris, Ryan, here we go. Chris Ryan: [00:00:28] To be our new newscaster here on New Hampshire today. As we move to a little bit more serious topic, certainly for individuals involved down in Texas. I think this, obviously, when you see things happen in other States, you start to think about what could happen in my state. What could happen here in New Hampshire? The energy failure in regards to the grid in Texas is deeply concerning. What have you seen in regards to that and what do you attribute it to? Craig Peterson: [00:00:53] Chris, we talked a few weeks ago here about what could happen with even something like a massive solar flare. That it really could knock out our electric grid. This would be a major problem, because even as we're burning oil You still need electricity in order to get that heat flowing through your house, whether it's via water or by air. Obviously, what's happened in Texas is not terribly unique and it's a little different than the rest of the country. First of all, Texas has its own power grid. Texas has been very independent over the years. They are not connected to anyone out in the country. So they're making their own, they're using natural gas, coal, wind, and nuclear power. In fact, they've had a very, strong move towards wind power because normally speaking wind is a very big deal. I'm looking at the production numbers, for electricity here in megawatt-hours in Texas. Number one is natural gas, then coal, and then wind. The wind production went down from over 8,000 megawatt-hours down to 649. But so did everything else, Chris? Justin McIssac: [00:02:07] So, Craig, isn't this more of an issue of Texas, the Texas power company, didn't get its turbines ready for winterization. Rather than wind power is an issue of wind. Turbines running the North sea. They're running in Antarctica, Canada, other places. Texas had a problem with this in 2011. The power company decided that it's going to cost too much to fix. So with virtually no regulation, isn't that the issue more than wind power itself. Craig Peterson: [00:02:30] Yeah, it is. Everything went down. Natural gas went down from 43,000-megawatt hours down to 30. That's a pretty dramatic cut looking at it, lost almost a quarter of the natural gas. Nothing in Texas, including the wind power was ready for this type of cold weather. They had valves that were exposed to the elements out there. They just had an almost perfect storm and it's worse than I think many people realize. If the grid had gone offline and they were minutes away from losing the entire grid, it would have been months before everything could have been fixed. Let me explain all of that. Bottom line is you need to reboot your electric grid in much the same way you might reboot your network at the office. You need to have extremely large generators of some type that can provide that frequency, that clock in order to get all of the other parts of the grid online. Now there's other problems, too. You look at natural gas, which is again, number one in Texas for feeding homes and electrical generation with natural gas. If the supply starts to run out and dwindle, which it did because of frozen valves. Much the same problem that wind had. But because of frozen valves, the pressure continues to drop. Natural gas mixed with oxygen is very, very bad. The pressure drops to a certain point where all of a sudden there is more atmospheric pressure or almost an equal amount than there is in those pipelines. You're mixing air with gas. Now all of a sudden you have gas lines blowing up all over the place. In addition to having pipes freezing. Yeah, Justin, you're right. This is a failure of wind, but it's also a failure of everything else. Even the nuclear power went from over 5,000 megawatt-hours down to 3,800. They just were not prepared for this at all. By the skin of their teeth, they're going to manage to survive something where people could have been without power for months in a worst-case scenario. Chris Ryan: [00:04:50] This has been a big discussion in regards to renewable energy versus fossil fuels and which works. A lot of folks have pointed to the wind issue, here where you're right they all lost considerable amounts down, 20 to 25% in natural gas, coal, and nuclear. But winds lost obviously the most during the height of the storm. So, in your view, is it more about renewable versus traditional fossil fuel type of an argument, or is it an infrastructure piece where they were not prepared for wind to be able to be functional in this environment. Where wind has proven to be functional in other cold-weather areas? Craig Peterson: [00:05:31] Well, there's a, quite a few problems, frankly, with wind and the technology we're using. These windmills did not totally freeze up. The big problem was the same problem you have with icing on the wing of an airplane. These windmills are a lot like airplane wings. They rely on the surface sizes and shapes in order to be able to get the most effective bite, if you will, into that wind. So those surfaces got covered with ice. Was that a problem that could be solved? Oh, you bet. Look at our airplanes. Even the small ones they have on the leading edge of the wings, little bladders, and those bladders in icing conditions swell up. They blow up and they go down, up and down, up and down so that they keep all of the ice off. So, no question at all, this problem could have been solved before it even happened. Wind, I kind of like. I'm not a big wind fan. There is so many problems long-term. They're expensive to maintain. There are people who've had to move out of the areas with windmills, because of the low-frequency vibration. It was driving them crazy. Then there's the bird kill. There is a problem with everything, frankly, when you get right down to it from the natural gas on out. They could have done something about it. They are probably going to doing something about it. Right now, here in New Hampshire, we have a, I think, a better system, but we're thinking about what is our problem? The largest nuclear power reactor in New England provides us with 61% of our electrical grid generation power. Again, it is winterized. We have a lot of biomass for generating electricity here in New Hampshire. That's about 17% of New Hampshire's from renewable resources and we still have two of our three coal-fired plants operating here in New Hampshire. So, add all of that up we are a little better off. We're also set up for winter. We do have, by the way, electricity from wind here. In fact, 2016 was the first time that we had more electricity in New Hampshire from the wind than from coal. It's something that can be managed. They just didn't bother managing it. Now they're talking about connecting to the rest of the grid in the United States for a couple of different reasons. It's probably a smart thing to do. Just like here in New Hampshire, we don't have our own grid. We have a grid that covers new England, so we can feed electricity back and forth. Chris Ryan: [00:08:15] As always, I appreciate you joining us for the show. Craig Peterson: [00:08:17] Thank you. Chris Ryan: [00:08:18] All right. That is Craig Peterson. Joining us here on Hampshire today. I am Chris Ryan. You can hear tech talk with Craig on Saturdays and Sundays, Craig Peterson: [00:08:25] by the way. We're almost finished up with those cyber health assessment worksheets for everybody. I'm going to record a little bit of audio to kind of explain them. Anybody that asked for the cyber health assessment stuff of that will be coming your way in a couple of weeks. And as I've mentioned before, I think I'm expecting next week-ish, to be able to have out that Improving Windows Security course. All right. Everybody, take care. We'll be back tomorrow. --- 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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Tech Talk with Craig Peterson Podcast: Backups versus Disaster Recovery versus Business Continuity, Apple wants Privacy - Google wants Your Info and more
02/20/2021
Tech Talk with Craig Peterson Podcast: Backups versus Disaster Recovery versus Business Continuity, Apple wants Privacy - Google wants Your Info and more
Welcome! We lost a Radio Icon this week and he had a big impact on me, I have a short tribute to him but it was also another busy week on the technology front. We are going to get into the differences between Backups, Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity, often these get tossed around in discussions as one in the same - they are not. Then we will discuss Bitcoin and it metoric rise and why that happened. Next we'll discuss Apple and Google and why Google is trying to play hardball but may end up getting burned. Then we are headed to Space and NASA space travel and a discussion on Rocket Fuel for future missions to Mars and there is even more, so be sure to Listen in. For more tech tips, news, and updates, visit - CraigPeterson.com. --- Tech Articles Craig Thinks You Should Read: --- Automated Machine-Generated Transcript: Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] I've got to say the big story of the week is this breached water plant and how it really affects all of us. Not just because our water could be poisoned by a hacker, but it gives us a bit of a lesson on what we should be doing and what we did. Hi everybody. Craig Peterson here. There are many things that we did over this lockdown. Things we did. In fact, the lockdown itself to try and help stop not just the spread of the virus, but remember it was a two week lockdown just so that we did not overwhelm our hospitals. Who could disagree with that, right? We all stayed home for two weeks that makes sure that we're flattening the curve, that we're not going to have a lot of. People in hospitals. Unfortunately other people who couldn't make it into the hospitals that needed it. That two week locked down to flatten the curve has turned into what? Now, almost a year later we are still seeing these lockdowns. These lockdowns have caused havoc. We've talked about many of them. Of course, you hear them all the time on radio. Everything from suicides of our children. Through our parents dying in these homes and without the comfort of their family and without human touch for almost a year. It's just so, so, so sad to see. Now I'm not going to get into the political sides of this and what should we have done? What shouldn't have we'd had done. I've got my opinions on some of this. What I want to talk about is what we did with our jobs? What we did with our businesses? I think we did some terrible things there, too. What I'm talking about is we need to stay home, but we have certain businesses that need to stay open. Now, frankly, every business needs to stay open. It's a business because it's fulfilling a need, right? It is so basic. It's hard to think that people don't understand this, but obviously they don't. We shut down businesses. Businesses that will never, ever come back. People's lives destroyed. People whose entire savings, their entire retirement plan, everything was based on the business. That's where their money was. The people working there were counting on having that money to pay the rent, to pay the electric bills and other utilities. To pay for all of the things in life that we need to pay. It's one thing to have credit card bills that you can't pay, because they're not a whole lot they can do about unsecured debt. They can certainly harass you. When it comes to things like your home or whatever it is, you're renting, whether you own it or not, how can you make those payments if you don't have money coming in. The money that the government is issued has just been a mere pittance. I get it. In some cases, people had just incredible amounts of money compared to what they were normally making with unemployment, with the federal subsidies, et cetera. That didn't last. PPP money, this payroll protection money, lasted for about six weeks for those businesses that could get it. Those that qualified. My business didn't qualify for PPP money. Not because it's too big, but because it's too small. Most of what happens in my business is done by my family members. I've got myself, I've got my wife, of course, you've probably seen Karen mentioned in some of my emails that go out. I've got my eldest son involved. He loves security. He's great at it. He's been working with me now for more than 10- 15 years on this. I've got one of my daughters working with this on me. So it's primarily a family business. We've got contractors who will do different things for us. We have a lot of suppliers and we have to pay those bills, but no payroll per se. You know what? That's a lot of businesses. The number of businesses that were in the same boat as me is huge. That's how things get started in this country. All of these companies that could have started. The companies that had started that had entered into lease agreements. That had started to provide services for their customers. Whether it be B2B like mine, business to business or business to consumer they were all stifled. What have we done to ourselves? Really? What have we done? The virus itself is obviously pretty nasty and can be lethal in a lot of cases. It has been. Now we found out that people like governor Cuomo apparently just cooked the books. Cooked the books, something awful. We went home, we started working from home. Our businesses said, what can we do? We had people getting very, very busy trying to figure it out. There are a lot of little remote programs that you can use in one of those is Team Viewer. Now there's nothing particularly wrong with Team Viewer. I'm not fond of the idea of things like Team Viewer, remote desktop, and others, but sometimes it is the best solution for a particular problem. Team viewer in this case was used by a small government agency. Think about what would have happened. You had to shut down, you still had to do work. What did you do as a business? You probably got something like Team Viewer, one of these login, remote login programs. Maybe you set up remote desktop so people could get in remotely. Maybe you set up a VPN because that's going to solve all of your problems. Which of course it causes almost as many as it solves, but most people don't realize this. That's the case here. We're talking about a small town, 15,000 people, called Oldsmar. I don't think it's because they're a small town. I think this problem happened because they did what most of us did. We were not ready for a shutdown. As businesses, we wern't ready for shutdown. In fact, the year before they did the shutdown, they had this massive pandemic planning session about eight months before. They all agreed that a shut down was the wrong thing to do in the case of a worldwide pandemic. They also redefined pandemic. I think maybe getting the angle I'm coming from here. Right. They decided no, we're not going to do that. They did not plan for pandemic. In fact, they didn't plan for a lockdown. Obviously, you don't. Well, I don't know, maybe you do plan for a pandemic. If you're coming up with a virus you're going to release, but they were not planning for a pandemic. They were not planning for the lockdown and neither were businesses. Most businesses, government agencies and NGOs, had no plans in place, even for disaster recovery or business continuity. You may or may not be aware of this, but there's different levels. You've got basic backups and you should be doing backups because hard disks fail. One of my customers CEO thought that hard desks never fail. She was really upset when a disc crashed that we'd been warning her about, because we keep an eye on things called smart stats on the disks. We said you've got this disc it's going to fail. You probably need to fix things because you're not in a raid array. You've fallen out of that already. Things didn't just get worse. You have a backup. You hope that Mac going to work. If you get ransomware and I got to tell you, nowadays, the answer's no. There's two sides to ransomware, but we've talked about that before. I'm not going to get into it right now. You've got the backup mainly in case the disk fails, or you accidentally delete a whole bunch of files and you want to get them back. The next step that you have is disaster recovery. You have a disaster, like there's massive snow storm that caused a water main to break in the roof. All of your computer equipment is covered with water and none of it will work anymore. In a disaster recovery situation, you now take your backups and you get new machines and you load it all on and hopefully your backups are remote. They weren't damaged by the water. Unfortunately, most businesses, again, not thinking this through just hoping, crossing their fingers, that they're not going to be one of those 50% of businesses that is out of business because of a disaster. Actually is closer to 75%. It depends on whose numbers you're looking at. So they're hoping. No, no, I'm going to be part of your disaster. Disaster recovery. Is just think of that, of a snow storm and the roof collapses of a fire and the computers have burn. Can you get your business back in business? Then there is business continuity. That's a whole other level of planning and business continuity is where you say, Hey, I need to make sure my business continues to conduct business. If you have a hundred, 200, 300 employees, You're much better off being able to let's say the computer room burns down as an example that or that roof caves in because of the snow and you've lost those computers. You're much better to be back in business in four hours or less. We've had business continuity solutions where we had equipment on site in a different part of the building. If there was a problem in one part of the building, we could fail over to the other part. Now this is an awfully big building and we had fiber links between them, but they could be back in business in less than 10 minutes. It's just that quick. That is business continuity, right? If you are a public company or you are a division of a public company by law, you cannot be out of business for more than four hours. Now, that's just public companies. By the way, those same rules are in place for doctor's offices, for hospitals, any medical personnel you have to be able to get at the patient's records within four hours. How many of us are ready for that? Then along comes a shutdown, remote workers. We're going to get into this a little more detail. We're going to talk about these SCADA systems, supervisory control and data acquisition. What does that mean? And why is this a problem for all of our infrastructure. How did this guy poison or at least try to a town of 15,000. You're listening to Craig Peterson. What happened to that town, a Florida city of about 15,000, Northwest of Tampa when hackers got into their water supply and hacked up the amount of lye by a factor of 100. Hello everybody. Craig Peterson here. This whole concept of having a backup versus some sort of a disaster recovery plan versus business continuity is something most businesses really don't pay enough attention to. Now, we've got another problem which is really a business continuity problem. What do you do when your employees can't get into the business? When we've set up business continuity for businesses, in the past, what we've done is I mentioned earlier this data center where we duplicated part of it in another part of this massive building. If there was a problem with something, could just be some of the core switches go down or something, we could automatically fail over and continue running within 10 minutes. That's one way to do it. But how about if the rest of the building went away? How about if your main servers okay, but the roof collapses or there's some sort of a fire? What happens if your employees can't come into work because there's a lockdown? There are so many reasons you need to have business continuity in place. We didn't have it right. Not we, as in me, but so many people, so many companies didn't have that. That's what happened in Oldsmar, Florida. They have a water plant. Of course, they have all of the normal things any city of 15,000 people would have. They had in their water treatment plant these devices that are called SCADA devices that are used to control valves. These valves are exactly what you think in a water plant. They're used to control the mixture of various chemicals to divert water around the plant. The source of the water, the type of filter switched over to a new filter so that older filter can be replaced. In many cases, the main filtration is just done through sand and it has to backwash every once in a while. This is all controlled by computer, nowadays. They were running a Windows seven machine. No I know you're saying, well, I've got Windows seven I'm okay. The problem is Windows seven is no longer supported by Microsoft, unless you're paying them ungodly amounts of money. I'm talking about $50,000 a year per machine sort of money. It's just crazy amounts of money. Most companies don't have that, right? I don't know anybody outside the federal government that actually has that. There's probably some, but they will not release it to the general public. Sometimes they'll release a few little security patches because something was just so apparent that they had overlooked. But most of the time, no. Most of the time these security patches just aren't available for older versions of Windows. So they had a Windows machine that was controlling this network with all of these valves on it. They had that machine hooked up to something called Team Viewer. The idea behind Team Viewer is, Oh, this is really handy. I can put Team Viewer on our control machine. Then I can have my employees be at home and then use that control machine remotely over Team Viewer . That's what Team Viewer is designed for, isn't it? Well, as it turns out, they were using Team Viewer throughout the water district. That became a bit of a problem because they did not have proper firewalls to protect it. And they were all sharing the same password. Interesting advisory that came out about this particular problem from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, if you can believe it. This cybersecurity advisory for public water suppliers is talking about how water suppliers can guard against cyber attacks on water supplies. It goes through a lot of these basic things that I've talked about. They should listen to my show every once in a while, right? Or attended the briefings that I had put on for the FBI's InfraGuard program. It would be pretty simple for them. The state of Florida came out with some guidelines, et cetera, after the fact. As did Massachusetts. They were running Windows seven. They were remotely accessing plant controls. The computer had no firewall installed. Well, that's what they're saying. In reality, Windows ships with a firewall installed, but that doesn't mean it's going to do any good. I talk a lot about that in some of my courses, but the computer was visible to the internet apparently. Okay. They all shared the same password. What do you want to bet it was a bad password and employees could remotely log into city systems using this Team Viewer application. It was really that simple. Now this actor's here apparently is more than one and they are unidentified. So we don't have a whole lot of information on it, but I did get a notice. It's called a pin, which is a notice from the FBI it's labeled green, which means I can share it with everybody. It's saying that they obtained unauthorized access to it. Now, here's the most important part. These cyber actors likely access the system by exploiting cybersecurity weaknesses, including poor password security and outdated Windows seven operating system to compromise the software used to remotely manage water treatment. The actor also likely use the desktop sharing software Team Viewer to gain on authorized access to the system. We've seen this, not only with Team Viewer, we have seen this with remote desktop and many other systems that people have been using to allow their workers to get in remotely. All of this because of the lockdown, people working at home. All of this should have been handled properly by having a business continuity plan in place. It's really that simple. Now the putting the plan together, isn't that simple, frankly, but we've got to think about what happens here. No. I also think about this particular hack and who did it. Well, it could have been the Russians, right? It could have been the Chinese or the North Koreans. We know Vietnam has gotten into the game lately. It could have been any of those guys. But do you know who the most likely people are to do this sort of thing? It's somebody who works for the company or in this case, very likely that it's a disgruntled employee. They all shared the same password. They use Team Viewer. I said, I'm not blaming Team Viewer here, but this is not good. This is really bad. This is not just something that could happen at a water plant where they're moving the amount of lye from a hundred parts per million to 11,000 parts per million. They're using it in drinking water to change the Alkalinity, the acidity of the water. I don't know, I don't know. We've got to do something about this. I'm going to have some training on this, what you should be doing for remote workers. If you're interested, let me know I'm going to plan some, but I'm not going to do it until I hear from you to know it's worth my time to put it all together. Email me M E at Craig Peterson. Let me know that you'd like to know about remote workers or maybe this whole business continuity idea. Again, email me [email protected] Let me know. Hey, you'll find a whole lot of stuff. If you go to Craig peterson.com and it's all good information that you need. Make sure you sign up for my newsletter right there. Craig peterson.com Hey, we can't go without talking about Bitcoin. It has surged surged surged. It may go up, it may go down. I'm not somebody who advises on investments, but we're going to talk about what it is and why people are mining it. Hello everybody. Craig Peterson here. Well, we have a real big thing to talk about when it comes to Bitcoin, but first I have to take a minute and honor a man who has inspired me in broadcasting for decades. A man who has changed the whole face of radio. AM radio was pretty much dead. Then he started his national show. Of course, I'm talking about Rush Limbaugh. Whether you agree with him politically, and I think most of you guys probably do. We all have our differences, or not, he is a man that deserves great respect. He changed the face of American politics. He literally single handedly saved AM radio. He created this whole concept of a national syndicated talk radio show, and it has helped to educate millions of people. I started listening to him back in the late eighties, quite a while ago. I was just amazed with him and the way he did it. One of the things that inspired me about it is he took callers, but they weren't the guest, he was the guest. They were asking him questions. That is so topsy turvy from how, even today, most radio shows are. People would call him up and they would ask him questions and he'd be able to answer them. He also asked them some questions, obviously, in order to figure things out, he also was not afraid to take opposing calls. He would look for those and he would put those to the top of the queue. He would take those callers that disagreed with him before he took callers that agreed with him, his ditto heads, as they like to call themselves. When I heard this week that he had passed, I knew it was coming, but it hit me hard. It hit me really hard. He's not that much older than me. Although I remain in really good health, knock on wood here I am just flabbergasted. I don't have words for his passing. So it would not be right...
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AS HEARD ON - The Jim Polito Show - WTAG 580 AM: Charlie Baker's No Good Very Bad Day or Why Should Bureaucrats Not Design Websites
02/19/2021
AS HEARD ON - The Jim Polito Show - WTAG 580 AM: Charlie Baker's No Good Very Bad Day or Why Should Bureaucrats Not Design Websites
Welcome! Good morning, everybody. I was on WTAG this morning with Jim Polito. He wanted me on to discuss the problems that Massachusetts was having with the rollout of their Vaccine Scheduling website. Here we go with Jim. For more tech tips, news, and updates, visit - . --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. He had a special command appearance this morning to answer a major question that's been bothering people in Massachusetts. Their state just yesterday came out with a COVID vaccine registration site and a million people ages 65 and up became eligible that had not been eligible before. Of course, it did not work. They were getting errors like bad gateway error or this application crashed. It's just incredible. Incredible. Talk a little bit about what should have happened and the ways to really think about putting together something for your business. Should you, should the state be developing these systems from scratch? I give some alternatives here. You might know. I built one of the first large-scale websites in the world. The whole thing, including the data center for the silly thing, way back when. It was for Big yellow. I don't know if you remember that or not, which was the predecessor to Superpages. We were able to get it up and running in a matter of weeks from scratch, which was a database of every business in the entire region, multiple, multiple States. In fact, we ended up covering the entire United States before we even launched. We managed to get it finished at 2:00 AM. 9:00 AM they had a press conference down a New York City, and the site was released to the world and everything worked. It never crashed, which is absolutely amazing. In fact, we ended up after 18 months deciding maybe we should start rebooting some of these servers because they've been online yeah. For a year and a half. Of course, I was not running windows. Right. I have some credit here. I know what I'm talking about, kind of the bottom line. I think you might find this a little interesting if you're wondering about these government projects. Cause I also bring up Obamacare and what ended up happening with this $600 check that people were getting for being laid off over the whole lockdown thing. So here we go with Mr. Jim Pollito. Jim Polito: [00:02:27] Charlie. Baker's not having a great day. Didn't have a great day yesterday. The governor of Massachusetts because his computer system to register people to get the COVID vaccination crashed. It's been opened up to people 65 and older, and apparently, 1 million people to log on to set up appointments for the COVID-19 vaccine. It just crashed. It crashed. Joining us now to sort this all out is our good friend. Who's usually you're on Tuesday, but this is why he's such a great asset to the show tech talk guru Craig Peter song. Good morning, sir. Craig Peterson: [00:03:06] Hey, good morning, Jim. Hey, not only was the site unavailable but if you called2-1-1, the vaccine hotline, it also failed, they couldn't transfer through. So, the frustration level was just out of this world. Jim Polito: [00:03:22] It reminds me of the old days when you were calling and trying to get tickets to see the Rolling Stones when they went on sale and the systems would just crash to try to get through. I have advertisers who really attempt to crash their systems because I want to send them so many people for their system. That's a good thing. Like they say, Oh my God, all these callers from the Jim Pollito show were all of these people trying to log onto our website. What happens? Why does that happen? Craig Peterson: [00:03:53] In one-word incompetence. We remember the rollout of course, of the Obamacare website. I said, Hey, listen, this is going to take about three years for them to get right, after what is already online. It took about three years for them to get right. I have done some amazing things and seen some amazing things done when it comes to websites over the years. You just can't find competent people in some of these organizations, particularly some of the larger ones. It is easy enough in this day and age. In fact, it's very easy in less than a week you could put together a website that is effectively crash-proof that will automatically scale itself up. The question about why does it crash, has to do with the components that they're using and the way they're spreading the load. It's not as though all of a sudden yesterday a million more people were eligible for getting shots and they should've been concerned about this. There just weren't enough computing resources behind all of this is kind of the bottom line. Jim Polito: [00:05:01] It's like you got a bag that's rated for 10 pounds and you're trying to put 20 pounds in it. Craig Peterson: [00:05:07] Think about having a Toyota Prius and all of a sudden you want to get a hundred people into it. You should have known that since there were a hundred people that were going to line up, a Prius just wouldn't have done it. You needed a couple of buses. That's why it goes back to incompetence. Let's not even look all the way back through the Obamacare website. Let's look at what happened with unemployment, where people were getting these $600 checks, right? We have the exact same problem. All 50 States had it, but there's an even simpler solution besides designing this properly using sites like Amazon web services or Microsoft Azure, which both have systems to make sure that you can handle the load. It's something called queuing. They had something that many States adopted for their unemployment site. Very easy to add. I mean very easy to add. I looked into it because of problems I saw States having thought, well, maybe I could put a product together for them. I found Florida was using something and it took them all of about half an hour to put it in place. What this queuing system does is you go to the website and the queuing system says all the backend systems are pretty busy right now. So I'm just going to give you basically a line in number and when the backend systems are ready for you, then little it'll all be well and good. Now, I've got to give them a little bit of leeway here, Jim, because I'm not sure what's actually behind all of this. Are they actually trying to tie into all of these pharmacy's computer systems from that front-end website, ultimately, because there are so many pieces? Jim Polito: [00:06:59] No. Craig Peterson: [00:07:00] Okay. Jim Polito: [00:07:01] No, I don't think so. It's the super sites that they've set up, but I'm fairly sure that's how it is. Frankly, I have been suggesting, why don't we just put this in the hands of the people who've been doing it all along, and then it's their problem. Say to CVS, Walgreens, Stop and Shop, Wegmans, Price Chopper, all these places where you can get vaccines. Send them to them, pay them and say here. Craig Peterson: [00:07:32] Yeah, exactly. Why do you build a website in the first place to take appointments? There are dozens of calendaring and scheduling websites out there. You talk about these events, getting rolling stone tickets. Well, there's a website called that is designed to do exactly what the state is trying to do right now. The cost of this is like next to nothing to use it. I've used it before for events. We use it for the FBI InfraGard events. It's so simple. Yet, no, we've got a bureaucracy. We have people who are here on phony-baloney jobs, as Mel Brooks would say. They need to design it. No. All we're talking about is some basic calendaring functions. To your point, why set up these sites? Walmart has pharmacies, and so do most grocery stores, as you've just mentioned. Let them do it. Maybe have one of these things like the event or one of the other scheduling pieces of software or websites do the scheduling. Just let them do it. We don't need a whole new bureaucracy. They can't get it done. Jim Polito: [00:08:45] Yeah. See, here's the thing though that's different with Charlie Baker versus when Deval Patrick was governor in Massachusetts. As you alluded to the Obamacare exchanges and that site kept crashing, but not just from demand, it just wasn't designed well. It was a mess but different Deval Patrick just made excuses about it. Charlie Baker went out. I think Wednesday and said, yep, it's all ready to go. Which knowing what I know about Charlie Baker when he ran Harvard Pilgrim health care, he went to the person said, is this ready to go? Are you sure? Okay. He went out there. That's why, yesterday, he actually used the word I'm pissed, which I think is better for him to say and he will say I own it. I'm pissed. It's gotta be fixed. I would not, Charlie Bakers' a really nice guy. Some people say too nice. I wouldn't want to be the person who told him, it's ready to go. It's all set. Craig Peterson: [00:09:45] The other side of this is the testing involved because again, you can put these systems under load test and you should, and in the regular non-governmental space, we do put them under load tests and make sure they're going to work. Obviously, none of this happened. I can see why you're saying his hair is on fire and he's really upset, but so were all these other people. The design of the site was you went to the site, you filled out a PDF form online, and this form went on for pages and like you, so you're filling it all out, which I don't get either, right? Government paperwork and all of a sudden the site crashes. It does not keep any of the information that you just spent all your time filling out. Pages and pages form so that the design of it, even from that standpoint was ludicrous. What there is going to be a problem. The person's internet could go down, their computer could crash. Your website might not be able to handle the load. Then what are you going to do? Because now everybody has to start from scratch again. Jim Polito: [00:10:58] My goodness this is why you're the great resource. Hopefully, the state was listening and Rhode Island is listening to, and they'll call in and they'll say we got to get this Craig Peterson guy. Craig, by the way, while you're here, how would people get you through a system that would not crash? Craig Peterson: [00:11:16] Well, you can always just email me [email protected] and I have all of my podcasts and everything up at my website, which of course is also. craigpeterson.com. If you have any questions or anything [email protected] and I'm always happy to answer pretty much anything that comes my way. Jim Polito: [00:11:36] There you go. Craig. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. --- 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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