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This week is a replay of the show aired originally on 7 Mar 2020
Welcome!
We are going to hit a number of topics today from the world of Technology. I am quite disappointed with Mozilla, they are letting marketers and politicians define their technology. Listen in to find out why I feel that way. Compliance is an issue for many companies and I have some solutions that will help you and it includes a diet but probably not the kind you are thinking. Do you ever get nostalgic for "the good old days?" Well, I have something that might help, listen in to find out more. I will tell you happened to one of the Sharks from Shark Tank? How you can prevent it from happening to you and more.
For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com
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Automated Machine Generated Transcript:
Hello everybody, Craig Peterson here on WGAN and, of course, online at Craig Peterson, dot com and heard streaming all over the world on your favorite streaming site. I'm so glad to be here today and be able to talk with you a little bit about what are the top news stories this week? How can you keep safe that's kind of one of my themes because I freaked out when my company got attacked some years ago. You know, just a regular business guy trying to run a small business and man did hurt me bad back in the day. I'm just trying to get all of the information I've put together over the years and learn, and I continue to study this stuff and continue to look at what are the best ways to defend ourselves. I try and get all of that and put it together into neat packages for you. One of them, of course, is the radio show. I also get on with Facebook Lives. YouTube lives, and also do various types of pieces of training and tutorials and things out there. Where in fact, for the next course I have coming up, we're going to have implementation calls, where we are talking specifically about what to do when you do it. So you try and implement something, you have some issues. I'm going to get on the phone with you guys. So I think that's going to be great. And then the upcoming class here in a few weeks. And then, of course, the tutorials leading up to that class where I'll take your questions live, sometimes those little tutorial sessions on, you know what it's webinar technology. On these webinars, sometimes we go a couple of hours so I can answer all of your questions. That's what it's about here. All right, because I understand most people, not I know I'm this way too. I get contacted by somebody, and they're trying to sell me something that happened just over the weekend. Last weekend somebody knocked at the door, trying to sell windows, right. I think it was like Renewal by Andersen or something like that. And they were walking around knocking on doors. I see you know, immediately just knee jerk said, No, No thanks, my windows are fine. It got me to thinking about the whole situation in the security realm. Because that's what we do, right? What we've been doing for years decades, sometimes we have the antivirus software, every once in a while when we hear about a real big vulnerability, we go ahead and apply patches. You know, it's been the same old, same old, but we just can't do that anymore. And because really, we see huge, huge problems and businesses going out of business because of them. So that's what this is all about. So if you're a new listener, welcome. If you've been listening to me for a while, of course, Welcome, Welcome to you too. And I want to get this information out. So one of the best ways to make sure you have all of the latest information you need is to go online go to Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe, and that'll get you on my email list. Then once you're there, you will be able to keep up on up to date on things I do, try and get those out. I have a newsletter that's every Saturday morning. Then when I'm doing training, I'll send something that's a little out of the band if I'm doing a live or various other things. I thought because of the way it works with the emails I send out, if you want to unsubscribe, you will be guaranteed to never hear from me again. Maybe that's a great thing that is right for some people. But for other people, I came to realize that perhaps they didn't care about the training, they just wanted the newsletter, or perhaps they wanted the pieces of training but didn't want any emails. Some wanted on courses but not other courses, etc., etc. So I'm going to try and do something a little bit different right now, and there's a pretty nasty warning as a footnote. If you unsubscribe, I can't send you anything anymore. I won't send you anything even if you want a course, you'll not hear from me again, because you unsubscribed and marked as somebody that doesn't ever want to hear from me again. That's fine. I know we all have our lives, and maybe you think you're safe enough. Perhaps you're going to reach out to me when everything falls apart around you. At which point, I can't respond to you because I will have your email blocked. That is because I don't want to bother you. I want to comply with the can-spam app act. Although, you know, most people don't seem to care about that as well as the GDPR. Also, The New California regulations, the Massachusetts regulations, and new federal regulations that are going into effect. They all place requirements on when and where I'm not supposed to contact you. If you say No. Then No means no, right. I'm going to change things a little bit with these upcoming training and courses that I'm going to be doing. I'm going to make it so you can just unsubscribe from those, so you're not going to lose contact with me. I've had some people complain, and in the end, it becomes a bit of a pain to try and add them back in. We're going to try and make this a little bit easier for you guys, so keep an eye out for that. You already know right based on what I'm saying, as well as what I've done in the past that I won't spam you guys, I don't sell your name to other people your email address. Most of you I know are kind of the older generations, the younger guys they don't care we've already talked about that. They will sell their email address and name for a donut. But us older folk were a little bit more cautious about it. I think that's probably a good thing. We're less likely to get ripped off the senior population in some ways less likely to get ripped off, and other ways more likely get ripped off. It's interesting. Again, we tend to trust phone calls more. You know what I have, frankly, I don't answer my phone anymore. It just goes to voicemail. And I have somebody else look at it because there are so many scams coming in. But we tend to trust the phones more in the generation, you know, the men and women older than me, other baby boomers, they are a little bit more susceptible to those types of scams. So be careful with those types of scams as well just you know, be careful all the way around, frankly. And that brings us to our first story of the day today. And this is something I found that I thought was cool. So I thought I'd share it with you. It's a tech thing. I was just a few weeks ago talking on the radio. One of the radio shows I appear on as a guest. And we were talking about Betamax versus VHS. And I knew I knew that the radio host I was talking to there's no way he just loves tech. There's no way he did not have Betamax. And he did. He had hundreds, apparently of beta tapes in his closet. But this is all about that Era of the 1990s. I'm sure you guys had VCRs right back in the day. And of course, the winner of that war was VHS, and it wasn't because it was better technology, but we're not going to delve into that right now. And those VHS tapes, at this point, about 20,000 of them have been put into an online vault. Now, if you've never used the Wayback Machine, you have to check it out. You can find it online. At archive.org, that's the name of it. It is an Internet Archive, and it shows web pages going way back, you can look at my web page from back in the very, very, very early days of the Internet. When you know, love the not the Internet, but of when the whole web thing came about, which was 9293 is when it started to go. I didn't have a webpage back in 85. When I first registered my domain that's been around for a while. And then, of course, I was using other domains. Before that, I've used my ham radio call sign is my domain. And before that, but the Wayback Machine is this archive, you can browse the history of any major site, many miners sites that are out there. They have used it in court cases. It's used by me, just for kind of memories of things as the way they were. Now you can use it for something brand new. I didn't know that they had, and that is They've got something out there on the Wayback Machine that's called the VHS vault V-H-S just like the VHS tapes that we had or that ken didn't have because he had Betamax. Right now, I'm looking at says there are almost 21,000 results. So they've taken these VHS tapes that were submitted, and they have effectively ripped them. They've turned them into digital video, right. And some of these are just amazing, like a warm-up to Traci Lords. It's an exercise program. Of course, Traci Lords was involved in some adult films back in the day. Man, I love this mystery science theater. 3000 Timothy Leary is a guest on MTV with John Lennon, Les Miserables from 1935, rush to judgment. There are some many cool things The Lion King in full VHS tapes. Now some of this information is probably still copyrighted, but as a general rule, archive.org doesn't get nailed for copyright violations.
SpongeBob SquarePants Oh, this is the Fairy Fairy Godmother I think is what this cartoon was called and trying to remember my kids used to like it. Some bootleg tapes, everything, but you can find it online I think you would have a gas looking through these. I want you to go to archive.org as you're listening to the show, or maybe some other time during the week, you're sitting there watching some TV with your smartphone or your computer. Archive.org and look for the VHS vault. The actual URL is archive.org slash details slash VHS vault. You will see all kinds of fun stuff that's in there. They have many different collections
You can search this you can go in by year when They did it. They have Flemish dog collection. There's another one. There are collections I've used in some of the training videos I put together. There are collections of old black and white art, and pencil art, and engineering diagrams that are well, well auto copyright and you'll find all that [email protected] Check it out, I think you will have a gas checking it out. If you're like me, it's certainly brought back a lot of memories.
When we get back, we're going to be talking about something that you should be doing, whether you're a home user or business user. You know, the things that we have to be worried about are the things that can be stolen from us, right, in the online world. Okay, this is what we will be talking about. What can be taken from us, but also what can be used to kind of hold our feet to the fire in ransomware. So we're going to talk about how to reduce your risk with Craig Peterson here on WGAN Stick around. We'll be right back.
Hey everybody Craig Peterson back here on WGAN online, and of course, at Craig Peterson dot com. Yeah, you know it by now, right? Well, hopefully, you had a chance to [email protected], definitely check it out. It's called the Wayback Machine, at least that was its original name. And they may still have that domain, the Wayback machine.com. But now it's known as archive.org. It is a wonderful, wonderful trip down memory lane, at least for me. If, if you are a little bit older, you might remember the Internet back in the days fun looking at some of the original search pages at AltaVista. Man, I miss AltaVista. I used to like to use the Boolean algebra that you could do in AltaVista. By the way, if you are a geek like me when it comes to searching and you want to be able to dig into it. There's a tool I use, and I think that you'd like it also. It's not cheap, that's for sure, but not that expensive either, but it's called DEVONthink, D-E-V-O-N T-H-I-N-K. It allows you to set up searches using all kinds of Boolean constructs, which is very, very, very handy, at least as far as I'm concerned. You can set it up to do automatic search sets every day looking for different things. It's one of the tools I use to find the information that we talk about here on this show because so much of it just isn't generally speaking, available. It certainly isn't spoken about by the mainstream media, right? You know that right. That's why you listen to the show and why you follow me. I am on LinkedIn. I'm on Facebook. I'm on Twitter, YouTube, and my website as well. I appreciate all you guys who do follow and who comment. Now, if you're a business person, this is for you, but there are some things that you can do as an individual as well that are going to make a big difference for yourself and your safety online. Businesses are concerned about the GDPR, which we've talked about on the show before. That's the European privacy regulation. We're also very concerned right now with CCPA. I just had a company that makes optics. I use their optics here in the studio if you have ever seen me on a webinar or one of these videos or pop up training or anything. I'm in the studio, and my cameras here the lenses use the glass made by this company. I had no idea, but they reached out to us due to their operations in California. They have a sales operation there because, again, they're selling their optical glass for use in lenses, and all kinds of other devices. They reached out because they were concerned about what is happening, what could happen with these new California privacy regulations? Is it going to mess up their business? How is it going to mess up their business? How is it going to make things better or worse? I think they had some outstanding questions. So they called us in, and they paid us to do an audit of the systems they have. How are the systems working? What is it that we need to be worried about? You know, it's something that takes a few weeks and a couple of on-site visits in New York? New York State, which by the way, is going to have their own set of privacy regulations that are going to affect them pretty dramatically. But basically, what it came down to was if they were compliant with the European regulations, they were probably most of the way towards the California regulations. So they think that they're compliant. But when we got in and started having to look at it, it turned out No, no, no. They are not anywhere near compliant with either set of regulations. Even though their IT people told them they are because they have full-time programmers who are programming their systems. They thought, Oh, no, no, we're fine. We're fine. No, they weren't. So what do you do if your regular business? Enough moaning and groaning about the optical manufacturer, who has fantastic optics, which is why I use them. Let's talk about you. Let's talk about your business, your small business, your larger business, this is true, you should be paying attention if you are a medium or large business as well. One of the best things you can do, and it is hard to get through to a lot of CEOs and other business owners. But one of the best things you can do to reduce your risks is to reduce the data that you are maintaining. Right? If you want to reduce the chance of getting shot at, don't go out in the streets where they're shooting, right? If you want to reduce the risk of having your data stolen, then don't have the data out there for them to steal. If you don't want to get nailed by one of these new regulations, that says, hey, personally identifiable information has to be maintained in this way and that way. If someone asks you what data do you have on me? Do you realize now you only have one week to respond? You must provide that data to them. If you have any sort of a California Nexus or European Nexus, in other words, doing business in either one of those places. Now, it's down to I think five days it's not a week to respond, saying, Here's all of the data that we have about you. That's what you have to be able to do. We have to be able to do it right now. You also have to be able to tell them, here are all of the people within my organization as well our contractors that saw your data and had access to your data. That is a very, very big deal, frankly. The landscape is constantly changing your obligations for that data, and the data disclosure and the data-keeping keeps getting more strict. What's the right thing for you to do? Ultimately, well, it's to get rid of the damn data, right? It's a very, very solid first step in reducing your risk. Now I'm going to be publishing next week, a little guide that you can use yourself, right, you don't have to have me involved, or anything else is just for you, that you can use to do an inventory of all of the data that you have in your business. What we've done is we've gone through and looked at different parts of the businesses that we've worked with over the years and evaluated the kind of data they often have. You have to do that first, right? You must identify what your risks are. You must determine what data you have. I'll make that available for those people on my email list. It will be part of this ramp-up here, a precursor to the pieces of training that I will be doing. There will be different free pieces of training and tutorials in my ramp-up to my courses. You don't have to be in the course to participate in the free tutorials, okay? You don't have to buy anything from me. It is all free, no hype or anything else. Okay. I'm not trying to hard-sell anybody I want to help you. That is the first step -- doing this inventory the data you have, and it is one of the best things you can do. Put your company on a data diet. Now, you know, last week we had Barry Friedman on the show, talking about a sugar diet. Right. It's a lot like that, and it's getting rid of these addictive pieces of data that we keep on our clients on our prospects, everything else that's out there, right. Let's look at it as a lens. When you're looking at your data when you're doing an inventory of these data assets, ask yourself, do I need this? Will this provide what I need? Think about maybe like a food diet as Barry does with sugar? Do I need sugar? We know is sugar going to provide us the nutrients that we need? The answer to that is no. When it comes to sugar, right. We found that out from Barry last week. But we need to work to minimize sensitive data and ask ourselves, do we need this sensitive data to conduct business right now? And will we need this sensitive data to conduct business in the future? If the answer's no, securely dispose of that data. It is the only way to comply with these regulations that are already in place here in the US and Europe as well. All right, when we get back, we're going to talk about how did we get here? How did we? How did ransomware grow to be a multi-billion dollar industry? What did we do to get here? What should we do to try and get beyond all of this? You're listening to Craig Peterson on WGAN. And of course online at Craig Peterson. dot com, live on youtube, live on Facebook everywhere out there. Stick around. We'll be right back.
Hey, welcome back, everybody, Craig Peterson here on WGAN, and of course online at Craig Peterson dot com. In case you missed it. We've been busy today talking about the internet archives VHS vault. Again, that's archive.org. Check it out. It is kind of cool. We just talked about reducing risk using the cheapest mechanism possible. Data minimization will save you money and help you be compliant. Now I'm going to talk about ransomware. We've been warned recently about ransomware's rise. Many people thought it's kind of past. In some ways, it has. 2018 was kind of the banner year for the standard ransomware that out there, but it is back, and it is back with a vengeance. We talked about some of the statistics about a month ago and showed how it had gone up a bit almost doubled just between the third and fourth quarters last year, which is just absolutely dramatic. I had a course before, where we talked a little bit about backups. I've certainly talked about it here on the show before, and how backups help stop ransomware. Let's just spend a couple of minutes on that right now, although it's not 100% accurate anymore. It is essential to do for just a whole plethora of reasons. Backups are kind of the very first stage of what you need.
I read an article yesterday from a guy who is in some of the highest circles in the country. He had the phone numbers, the direct cell numbers of presidents and you name it, really just anybody who's anybody was on his phone. It was an Android phone. He had assumed that it was backed up into the cloud or something. His phone broke. He got a new phone and realized at that point that his phone had that never, ever, ever, been backed up. He lost the phone numbers from all of these people. Good luck getting them back, cell phone numbers, other contact information. Think of all the things that are on our phones nowadays. Losing your phone, having a hard disk crash on your laptop, or your desktop computer. Losing those can be devastating, no question about it. If you're a larger business and you think that you're doing backups, double-check them. I'd say three times quarters of the time, and I can't think of an exception to this, your backups will not work correctly for that business. I've never seen a case where all backups are working correctly, ever, ever going into a business. I know you, Craig, you're just crazy. It's silly. You're trying to build a business and scare people. No, I have never walked into a company and found their backups to be working correctly. We see things like, and I don't mean, they're not working in a way that is ideal or optimal for the business. Right? Certainly that on top of it. I mean, they weren't working.
We had one company that we went into, and they were dutifully doing backups, and the operations manager had five external hard disks. Every day he brought a hard drive in, he plugged it into the server and took it home at the end of the day. So we had Monday through Friday, hard disks that you brought back home with them. So they were off-site, which is, you know, great idea, by the way. The server itself had a RAID configuration on it and is called a raid five. It had three hard disks so that if a drive failed, they wouldn't lose all of their data. We went in because they wanted to do some upgrades. They hoped to move over to Apple infrastructure, where people could use iPads and iMacs on their desks to have a better working environment for everyone by moving away from windows. By the way, this is an excellent idea. They still had some Windows software that they had to run, so we helped them with that and got that all working running correctly. The backups you know, they were trying to do the right thing. But you know, you know what, there were a couple of problems one, their server had not written to any of those external disks for the last 18 months. They went a year and a half without ever having had a good backup. Think about that. What would happen to that business? What would happen to your company? After 18 months of no good backups and losing all your data?
Oh, and their server, an HP server, that cute little HP server had that RAID array, right a raid five where you can lose a disk and not lose data. Well, they had lost a drive. We were estimating based on the logs about a year before. There they were with no backups and no redundancy in their server disks on their server. That's an example right now, and I could go on and on. We had a company division of a Fortune 100 company that had paid for backups, and they had a dedicated data line. We put some next-generation firewalls in place that monitored the data and watched for data exfiltration to make sure that the plans and designs and social security numbers and bank accounts and everything were not being stolen or taken off off-site, right.
Guess what we found there? After six weeks of monitoring everything that's been going on because that's the first step right. Let's make sure we understand what the normal operations are. Didn't you tell us that you had an off-site backup of your mini computer going to another backup site? Oh, yeah, yeah, we do. It gets backed up in real-time. We're paying for the backups to go off-site. If something were to happen to our facility here, or to our computer, which is a big server, then they'd take over immediately we'd be off and running during those six weeks that we were in there we hadn't been involved with these operations.
Ultimately, we were in there for decades. Guess what we found? Yeah, exactly. None of the backups were occurring. They were paying for all of these things, right? They were paying for them. What we ended up doing is we came in, and we made sure that backups were happening. Unfortunately, they didn't have us do those backups. The company doing it for them was incompetent. And yet they decided to have them continue to do it. It doesn't make sense. We took over the rest of the backups. We had equipment on site, which we do at most of our clients. In case there's a problem, there are failovers that can occur. In this case, we'd have them back online in four hours, a requirement of publicly traded companies and their divisions. Again, they're just not doing anyways. Ramble. Ramble.
Wow, we've only got a couple of minutes left here in this segment. When it comes to backups, here's what you have to be careful of, and that is, make sure they are happening. Check the backups. Try and restore from your backups. Now, we're talking about ransomware. It is a seven and a half-billion-dollar industry. They are coming for you, and one of the best things you can do is have a backup. Still, there's another side to ransomware, nowadays, that backup won't help you with, and that is that they have your data, and they hold a ransom saying, if you don't pay us, we're going to release this onto the Internet. Then you're in real trouble. If you have personally identifiable information, or if you have your intellectual property out there, and it gets out to the Internet because you don't pay that ransom, you are in real trouble, plus if they encrypt your data, you'll need that backup.
All right, stick around. We will be right back. And we're going to be talking about our next topic for the day, which is how do you answer a non-technical executive, who asks, how secure are we? Your listening to Craig Peterson on WGAN and online at Craig Peterson dot com. Hey, have you ever been asked that question? Well, we'll tell you about how to answer it, coming right up.
Hey, welcome back, everybody, Craig Peterson here on WGAN and online, of course at Craig Peterson dot com. No surprise there.
Our next one is an interesting article and poses an interesting question. It is one that I'm sure you ask or have been asked, right? How secure are we? You are the Calvary, is the bottom line. You're the person who your family comes to, or the business owner comes to, the business asks whenever they have a tech question, right? You wouldn't be listening otherwise. It is how you get ahead. It is how you learn. You listen to me and others, read articles. You are the Calvary. How does the Calvary answer that question, when you're asked, How secure are we? You know, there's the obvious answer. Well, you know, we got this, and we got that. We have an Anti-virus, and we have a firewall. Those, frankly, are buzzwords that many of us use just to obfuscate the real answer to that question. I know that many times when we go into a business, and we secure it, we put together a proposal. Most of the time, our recommendations are not accepted. Most of the time, when we go into a business, and we say, here's what you need.
Here's what you need to do to stay secure, they say No, thank you, and prefer to run with blinders. Hopefully, they won't stumble in the middle of the night get or tossed by that horse, of just kind of ignoring it, right. Blinders or maybe you might want to call it ostrich-ing and to put their head in the sand or whatever, you want to call it, But most of the time, in reality, the businesses just don't do anything. Sometimes they do, right. That's how I stay in business. I stay in business because of the companies that want to remain secure. I stay in business because of the people that are the Calvary. They're like you who want to buy my courses to understand more to get step by step instructions know, not just the stories behind things, but the strategy in the exact tactics that they have to take. And that's you, I suspect, right? I think you're probably a lot like me in that way. That's how I like to learn, and that's how I teach as well. Well, this article is from our friends over Dark Reading. And the question is, uh, how secure are we? And how should we answer that? There's a great response by Kurtis Minder, the CEO, and Co-Founder of GroupSense. He says it depends. You've got to look at your executive team and qualify their level of understanding. Answering the question with the answer of well, we have antivirus, we have a firewall, and we have mail filters. You know, a lot of people nowadays say, "well, we're in the cloud," and there's nothing to worry about, which we already know, isn't true, right?
There's way more to worry about if you're in the cloud than if you have a local server. For those of you who are the kind of computer security people for your organization addressing this requires finding out where they are coming from who they are comparing. For instance, is it to what the Payment Card Industry PCI-DSS says we're supposed to do? Are we supposed to compare ourselves to the HIPAA-HiTech regulations? In other words, we have some medical data, which by the way, every company does, if you have any sort of a Health Insurance Program, right? Are we supposed to compare ourselves to the NIST 171 standard? There's, even more, there is the CMMC. There's, there's a lot of different criteria that are out there. You must understand the HOW before you answer this question. How secure we compared to similar companies in our industry? Or companies that are similar in size to us? No matter how you're going to answer that question, when the boss comes a-knockin or the kids or your wife comes a-knockin saying, How secure are we? No matter who it is you're talking to, I think the one thing you have to make sure of is that they understand that the whole security threat landscape is fluid. It's always changing, and your security programs need to be fluid as well. That's the reason I have consulting clients, right. That's the reason I have a membership program. The people who are the Calvary can follow and understand what it is they need to know. Now I want to hop over to this other guy here. His name is Matt Combs. And he is a global cybersecurity practice leader for an executive recruiter called Russell Reynolds Associates. It is absolutely a phenomenal interview on CIO.com. He's saying many companies were blissfully unaware t, especially those that don't have credit card information. How many times have I said that, right? It takes at least six months for the average company to figure out a breach occurred. Why did Matt say, especially those that don't have credit card information? It's because if they have credit card information, that information is likely to be sold on the open market very quickly. Once sold, the credit card companies are going to notice, right? Many companies have only learned that a breach occurred after the FBI came knocking on the door and told them they had a problem. Look at Home Depot. What happened? The FBI traced the dots. Home Depot, was compromised through their point of sale equipment. Can you believe that? people sitting in the parking lot of Home Depot hacked them? They didn't even know it until the FBI knocked on the door. That's a pretty big deal, on a pretty big company. I think they are the second-largest retailer in the country? When it comes to dollar-to-dollar value? Are you sold? Okay. If you don't have the credit card information, how would you even know that a breach happened? It goes ties back into the fluidity of security. It seems so obvious. Now when you look back at Home Depot and say, What were they thinking? I look at the target the TJX companies, and their hack they had security equipment, and that security equipment was quite good. It was alerting them, "whoa, wait a minute, guys, we've got a breach, okay." Did they take care of it? No, because they didn't know how to read the output, and they didn't have enough people to look at the logs, which is something else we keep telling you all. You have to watch the logs. You have to watch them closely. It's a full-time job. It's a highly skilled job, a highly trained job. It is not cheap, okay. I know a hotel company with 500 hotels in the United States, of course, you can look that up to find out who it is. They have a chief information security officer who is an information security group of one. Think about that 500 hotels, just the business itself, all of the data that they have, the liability that they have, and he doesn't have anyone working for him. Not even a support person. He has to beg, borrow, and steal help from it, and from the CIO, the Chief Information Officer. So when the executive asks you how secure are we, you have to say, Hey, listen, you know we can lock down the doors, we can lock down the windows, but the odds are if someone wants to breach us, they will be able to. However, make sure you are locking down the doors and locking down the windows. You got to close it all up. There was one other thing I think you should do when this non-tech executive asks you about how secure we are. That is, what's your nightmare, Mr. Executive? Which systems? Are you most concerned about being compromised? You should go back to the question I asked a little bit earlier, which is, what data do we have that maybe we shouldn't have? What data do we have that we are most concerned about losing? What are the Family Jewels in our organization? What is the data that if we were to lose it, we'd be in a lot of trouble, either because we could not conduct business anymore, or maybe we would get nailed by the regulators out there? Anyway, a lot of really, really good questions to ask because you're never 100% secure. All it takes is for one employee to click on the wrong link on an email. What I was just talking about will come up a little later on today. I talked about it this week on several radio stations. What happened with Barbara Cochran, an investor from Shark Tank. Stay tuned as we'll talk about it a little bit later on. All it takes and frankly, employee negligence such as accidental loss of data, accidental clicking on things. Employee negligence is still the main cause of data breaches. In a report from ShredIT now, of course, they're in the business of shredding documents of getting rid of these things. Shredding hard disk drives when you take them out of a computer. Remote workers and external vendors are also now a major cause of the increase in data breaches. That's one of the things we're going to be covering here in my course coming up in a couple of weeks, and that is the upstream-downstream risk. And the US military is totally into this now, because they had two or three major breaches last year that came through vendors. So hackers are no match for human error when it comes to sheer numbers. You also have the insider threats of people who are stealing from you. So they can get a better job, take it with them to another job. You have people who are upset with you and are just making an absolute mess of things on the way out the doors. So be very careful about that because it's huge data breaches cost an average of $3.6 million globally average that was in 2017. Some of those prices have gone up. The faster you respond to a breach, the more money that you'll save. They found that if you can respond to a breach within 30 days, on average, you'll save over a million dollars. Think of that. The odds are good that you will get breached. You will save, on average, a million dollars. Yet you're not funding the security people either by going to an external contractor, like me, to take care of it for you. Or you don't provide the resources to the internal people they need to do it. It is a huge, huge job. All right, top of the hour course, on the radio stations, we've got the news, traffic, weather, all that sort of stuff coming up. Then when we get back, we're going to talk about a new metric in security. The next-gen security metrics. Stick around, and you are listening to Craig Peterson on WGAN and online.
Hey everybody, welcome back. Craig Peterson here, on WGAN and, of course, online at Craig Peterson dot com. We have already covered a bunch today. I would refer you over to my website. If you'd like to find out a little bit more, of course, I'm also on the streaming services. You can find it there. We've covered the internet archive. They've got this cool, new VHS vault. We discussed ways to reduce your risk of data loss. It's all about identifying your data. and then minimizing your data, how we enabled ransomware to become a multi-billion dollar industry. And I also gave some good advice on backups and the fact that 100% of the businesses I've ever walked into have had a failed backup strategy and failed in a bunch of different ways. It is big for all of us who are out there who are members of the Calvary, who are trying to help our friends, our family with their computer issues, and the businesses for whom we work. Then we got to how to answer questions that we get that have to do with our level of security? How secure are we? How secure is the business? That's what we have covered so far today. I love our next topic. It's phenomenal. It's from Thread Post.com. But they're talking about different types of security metrics. Now, metrics, of course, our measurements, or the ways we measure things. We always have to measure progress to be able to know have we gotten to where we need to be, right. Progress can be difficult to measure. There are a lot of different types of measurements when it comes to our security. Say for Microsoft Windows, one of the big things is, are you ready every Patch Tuesday. Then a little bit more, as Microsoft sometimes comes with out-of-cycle patches. They got nailed a few years ago, through criticisms about them releasing new patches, like constantly, because they needed to release them. And so instead of fixing their problem, which would be almost impossible to do, and that is rewriting windows and making it much more secure design, they decided they would just go ahead and release patches once a month. And that way, of course, you're not getting them every day. So who's getting noticed that in fact, there are a whole lot of vulnerabilities and Windows. So that was another measurement that we had. Did you get your Patch Tuesday stuff done? That's been around a very long time? Well, we've got a new metric here, and it's called hardening. Now, I don't know about you guys, but my wife thinks that most people don't know what the name hardening is. So I'll explain it a little bit. Hardening is where we close holes in our networks and our Windows computers. That's really what our emphasis is going to be coming up here next week when we start our whole hardening series. By the time you finish this series and the courses, you'll be able to lock down any Windows or Mac computer yourself. You are going to be able to lock down your small business network, and you're going to stop worrying about being the victim of the bad guys. We're also going to train you on how to test everything yourself. That you can make sure that they can't get in, right. If not tested, how will you know it works. It's like I was talking about with backups. How do you know they are working? How do you know it's effective? How effective is it? So we're going to teach all of that, and I think that's just going to be amazing for you guys, man. We're looking to do something you guys are going to love. Hardening in the case of our computers includes our computers, browsers, firewalls, and routers. In other words, there, we're using all of the options, all of the available software to make sure that bad guys are not easily going to get in is our Windows Firewall harden on our computers? Did you even know you had a firewall on a Windows computer? Well, it's almost useless. Because Windows has a firewall, it is turned on by default, but they have all kinds of services turned on and available to be used. All of these things are kind of crazy. When we get down to it, there are things we can do. That's what we're going to be covering starting in about a week with some of these tutorials. And with our great course that we have coming up. Now, let's talk about what's holding us back and what mean time to harden means. We're looking at vulnerabilities, when we're talking about a zero-day-attack, it is one that no one has seen before and where there is not a patch or workaround for it. It's really kind of a nasty thing. When it comes to hardening, you want to make sure that you have as few services as possible on your computer, firewall, and browser. That again makes your attack surface smaller. But when we're talking about those types of zero-day attacks, it typically takes an organization 15 times longer to close a vulnerability than it does for the attackers to weaponize that vulnerability and exploit it. So basically, we're talking about one week for the bad guys to take a vulnerability one of those zero-day things. It takes one week to weaponize it, and it takes us about 102 days to patch it. Let that sink in for just a minute here. Once vulnerabilities get disclosed, It's a time-race here to either secure this hole before the bad guys to exploit it. Now we saw that with the Equifax breach where here's a major, major breach against a major company out there, and only happened because they hadn't applied the patches that they needed to apply. It's just really that simple. Microsoft has a patch let's give an example right now, BlueKeep. BlueKeep is a way to break into Microsoft machines. Microsoft released patches for BlueKeep in the May 2019 Patch Tuesday security fixes. Microsoft released it in May, and as of December 2019, seven months later, there were still over 700,000 machines at risk. Let me see here now May to June July, August, September, October, November, December. That, to me, sounds like seven months. That's huge. Sophos has some security software. In their recent report about WannaCry, which is ransomware. The patch against the exploit WannaCry was using has not been installed on a countless number of machines. Still despite being released more than two years ago. It's crazy, isn't it? Do you guys agree with me? Am I just being kind an alarmist? Now the average time to weaponize this is seven days. Many weaponization comes in less than seven days. Like the infamous ApacheStruts vulnerability. You have effectively 72 hours to harden new systems. Now the numbers are even worse. When we're talking about incident response. There's a new rule out from a company called CrowdStrike. You might have heard of them before, they've been in the news for some political stuff as well. But they are a security company. They do a lot of investigations after the fact and try to figure out what happened and try and clean things up. CrowdStrike has a new rule. It's called the 1-10-60 rule. And it's based on what they call breakout time. So here's what that is.
Most nation-state actors, in other words, the more advanced hackers out there, move laterally from an initial attack within two hours on average. In other words, if there is a country that's coming after you say, for instance, China. Most say now it isn't like China is going to go after me. I'm not Military and not a military contractor. China comes after you to steal your intellectual property. Once they have gotten inside of your network, they will move around inside your system. What this means is it gives defenders of a network one minute to detect a breach, 10 minutes to understand what has happened and that it was a breach and one hour to contain that breach from the initial incursion. That is huge. Now, this is part of this meantime to hardening and goal response that we're trying to achieve. If you're a regular business, and it's six months before you even notice that a hack occurred, if you ever even notice, which is par for the course, and one that we see that quite frequently. We will come in and look for signs of hacking. Many times, companies don't want to know. They just want to know if there are any openings that they should be closing right now. Why? If you see a hack occurred, there are specific legal responsibilities that you have. Companies say, Listen, don't tell me, I don't want to know. Without monitoring and watching what our organizations are doing, if we're not at the very least, patching and hardening, we're in real trouble. Now, I know you guys know how to patch it's not that difficult to do. We're not going to spend a lot of time on that in the upcoming tutorials or courses, but we are going to spend a lot of time in the course on Hardening because it is one of your best defenses. It's kind of like having a package on the front porch that was just delivered by Amazon people, right? If there is no package on the porch, the porch pirates are not going to show up and to steal the box. It's the same type of thing here. If you do not have services available on your machines inside your network, there is no way for the bad guys to move laterally. There's no way for them to get in remotely. That is our goal in our hardening courses, how to harden your Windows machine. That's coming up in about a week, week and a half. So make sure you are on my email list. You get all of that free training. You can find out about the courses as well that we are putting together for this. All of that at Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe. You're listening to me here on WGAN. You can always send questions to me -- me at Craig Peterson dot com.
Hey, welcome back, everybody, Craig Peterson online at Craig Peterson dot com and right here on WGAN. I am also putting these up on Facebook and making them available on YouTube. For those that are interested.
I want to talk a little bit right now about Clearview AI. You know, again, I've said so many times that we've got to be careful with our data online. Clearview AI is this company that we talked about a few weeks ago, that has been scraping all of the information it could get online, mainly related to photographs. All of the pictures that you posted on Facebook or that you put up on any photo sharing sites, all of that stuff, Clearview scraped. Now, they have this app that allows you to take a picture, and then it will do facial recognition to find all of the places online that that picture appears. And it has been used by looks like more than 2200 different organizations, many of them police department to track people down. So if you have a picture, even if it's not a great picture, that picture can then be put into the clear view AI app. And it'll show you here you go, here's where we found this guy or gal online. And even if you didn't take the picture, and you are in a photograph, it is going to show up in clear view is going to find it. Now, Clearview AI grabbed all of these photographs online without asking permission of anyone. I don't think they asked your permission, did they? They didn't get my permission. They scraped them from Twitter, who they didn't ask permission. They scraped them from Facebook. They scraped them from all over the internet. They ended up with billions of photographs. They logged it all along with where they found them online. That way, if the police department is looking for this person, they have a photo of them. They can put it into the Clearview AI app and can authenticate where online it was found. And then the police department just goes there and says, Oh, well, that's a Mary Jane's homepage. Here's more about Mary Jane, where she lives and everything else and now off they go to get Mary Jane. Now remember, of course, first off, these things are not 100% accurate. They could be false. There are false positives, although in many cases, they have been very successful at identifying people, and they have helped to solve some crimes, which is I guess a good thing, right. I think that's what you might want to say, okay. In a notification that The Daily Beast reviewed, Clearview AI told them that there had been an intruder that gained unauthorized access to its list of customers, and they got access to many accounts they've set up and the searches they have run.
Now, this disclosure also claimed that there was no breach of Clearview AI servers and that there was no compromise of Clearview AI systems or networks. That puzzles me makes me wonder, well, maybe they were using a cloud service, and they had it stored up there, and that's how it got stolen. It's hard to say. Clearview AI went on to say that it patched the unspecified hole that let the intruder in and that whoever was didn't manage to get their hands on their customer's search histories. Now there's a release from a Clearview AI attorney, and his statement said that security is Clearview AI top priority, which is total crap, right? They did everything they could to breach ethics and security of the user agreements from all of these websites from which they scraped our information. Unfortunately, data breaches their attorney says are part of life in the 21st century. Our servers were never accessed. We patched the flaw and continue to work to strengthen our security. All of this is in a report on naked security dot com. Now, this, frankly, is very concerning to me from several different standpoints, right. First of all, Clearview AI had this massive database of facial images that they had sold to hundreds of law enforcement agencies.
In many cases, it wasn't like the overall agency. It was just a police officer themself that subscribed. It may be a detective, etc. The New York Times ran a front-page article in January, saying that Clearview AI may end privacy as we know it and man, is that ever true. They have been quietly selling access to these facial images and facial recognition software to over 600 law enforcement agencies. Now with this data breach, it looks like it's more than 2200. Although we have not seen the list posted online yet, we may end up seeing the posted online. It depends on who did this and if it was a nation-state, which is entirely possible. They are trying to find out a little bit more about us or whether it was somebody else.
It reminds me of a lot about the founding of Facebook and why I've been against Facebook over the years, right? Facebook had a very unethical at its start. They stole all the photos of women going to Harvard University and then had people be able to go to their little website and rate the women, right? Rate them? Yeah, on their looks using all stolen photos. That's the allegation behind it all. It certainly seems to be true. Microsoft, that's another reason I just, I don't use the word hate very often believe me, but I do hate Microsoft and the way they started. They unethically sued people and play games with trying to buy them by lying about the rights that they had. Bill Gates outright lying to IBM and others, back in the early days. I have a good friend of mine who says Craig if you didn't have any ethics, you would be one of the wealthiest people in the country. Your ethics kept you from doing them, yet you bent over backward to help people. Companies, like these need to go out of business and need to go out of business fast, it's crazy. We've got the Biometric Information Privacy Act that Clearview AI has violated.
ClearView AI has also been told by Twitter, Facebook, Google, and YouTube to stop scraping. Those companies have ordered it to stop that. It is against the policies. The Times noted that there's a strong use case for ClearView AI technology finding the victims of child abuse. News. It makes a lot of sense. One, retired Chief of Police said that running images of 21 victims of the same offender returned nine or 14 miners identifications, the youngest of whom was 13. So where do we draw the law watch line, I should say, what should we be doing here? It goes back to the whole fruit of the poisoned tree principle that exists in the law. That you've seen on TV and in movies many times, any evidence illegally obtained can't be used nor anything that comes of that evidence. It is why some Federal investigators play games with where did you get this evidence? Russia? Did it come from Christopher Steele? Should we have something similar In this case, and I think that we should if they stole information from these companies, which they did. It's, frankly, intellectual property theft at the very least. That means it is of no use in any sort of a police case that started an investigation and any legal matters that follow. That's my opinion. I don't know what yours is. I'd love to hear from you email Me at Craig Peterson dot com. Thank God they were able to find some of these victims of child abuse. But at the same time here, we should have some rights to privacy. It may already be too late. I guess we'll know. Soon enough.
Hey, when we get back, we're going to talk about Barbara Cochran. She's the star of Shark Tank, and she just lost 400 grand in a scam will tell you all about it. You are listening to Craig Peterson and WGAN. And make sure you sign up online at Craig Peterson dot com.
Hi, everybody. Yeah, that means we're back. Craig Peterson here on WGAN.
We're going to talk right now about a TV show that I have enjoyed watching over the years. There are a few shows that I watch pretty regularly. Of course, there are some sci-fi shows we won't talk about those right now. But a couple of them are The Profit I enjoy that show. I like the guy who is the main character on that show, and his name is Marcus Lemonis. He owns a considerable interest in Camping World, as well as GoodSam Club, and he invests in small businesses. I disagree with him almost 100% on politics, but he does try and help people out which I think is fantastic and, and he goes into these businesses that are struggling, that are trying to figure out how do we move to the next step or how do we even survive? Then he helps him out, and he frequently invests in them. When he invests, he takes a good chunk, usually enough so that he has a controlling interest in other words 51% sort of a thing. Then he's often running, and he helps build them into real successful companies. Now, I guess it goes back to the question of, would you rather have a small slice of a massive pie as an owner, or would you rather have 100% of a tiny pie, that may end up collapsing in on itself at some point in time. That's kind of the decision these people have to face as they are talking with him and trying to figure it out. So I like that show. He had a good episode, recently that I found very, very fascinating. Check that one out, The Profit. Another one that I've enjoyed over the years is Shark Tank. Now Shark Tank is if you haven't seen it, it is a show, and there are a number of them. It's called Dragon's Den overseas. There's one in the UK. There's a shark tank in Canada, and there's a shark tank in Australia, all called slightly different things. The idea behind Shark Tank is you go in there you make a pitch to these investors, and the investors decide if they're going to throw some money at you. They will make a deal saying okay, I'll give you 20% for 20% of your company, I'll give you this much money, or you know, I'll bring in people to help out, but I want controlling interest or whatever it is. Well, one of the business moguls on there that part of this whole judging team on Shark Tank just last week lost nearly $400,000. It was disclosed that the 400 grande loss came through an email scammer. Now, if she had been listening to this show, she would have known about it. She would have known what's happening. She has enough money that she kind of brushed it off. Oh well, she thinks that she'll never get the money back. And you know what? She's probably right. We've seen that happen many times, even with the FBI getting involved most of the time that money never, ever comes back to you. According to media reports, a scammer who was posing as Barbara Cochran's executive assistant forwarded to her bookkeeper an invoice requesting that payment. I'm looking at the email right now. Barbara released it, which is great as that way people can see what happened. It's an email it's from, Jake somebody. Sent on Friday, February 21, and addressed to Emily carbon copy Michelle. The subject was forward Invoice 873, and it's got the name of a German company. It begins, Hello Emily. Please see the attached invoice below for payment. We are ready to proceed, and we are shipping next week. Please ensure the invoice is paid on time, shipping charges are additional. It appears like a little real invoice. It's got the due date on it, which was due on the 27th, and the amount was $388,700 and 11 cents. And it looks as I said kind of like a standard invoice. Dear customer. Please see the attached invoice. Wire transfers should be directed to FFH concept GMbH address in Berlin, Germany. Bank details include the bank name, the account name, bank address As the IBN number, the swift number, thank you for your business, we appreciate it very much.
The truth was, this email did not originate from Barbara Cochran's executive assistant. Instead, what happened here is that the scammers and created an email address that looked the same as her executive assistant. It had one letter different in it. At first glance, it seems legitimate, yeah, this is from the Executive Assistant. You and I look at 400,000 and say, Whoa, wait a minute now. I don't even have that much. In this case, Barbara Cochran, this was pretty normal for her. There's not only this amount because she is involved in so many real estate deals. That's how she made her money was in real estate. She gets these invoices from these companies all over the world. It did not look that strange. All the bad guys, in this case, had to do was a little bit of research. They found out what the executive assistant's name, they found out what the email address was. The bookkeeper did not spot this little spelling error, if you will, in the email address. When she asked questions about the purpose of the payment, all communication went straight to the scammer's and not to the assistant. What did she do? She hit reply, and the response went straight to the scammers, and the scammers gave him what looked to be or gave her what appeared to be a reasonable answer, right. On Tuesday last week, seemingly satisfied by the answers she'd received by the scammers posing as Barbara Cochran's executive assistant. The bookkeeper transferred almost $400,000 into the bank account contract controlled by the scammers. It was only one the bookkeeper manually CC'd Cochran's assistant directly with confirmation that the invoice had was paid. It became clear what happened. So, again, that tells you don't respond to emails, right? Look it up, use a contact list, use your autocomplete to try and reach out to somebody to verify it. I always go one more step further, and that is to get on the phone and confirm the transaction. Now in speaking to people magazine, Barbara Corcoran again apparently was pretty okay about the theft. She says quote, I lost the 400,000 as a result of a fake email sent to my company. It was an invoice supposedly sent by my assistant to my bookkeeper, approving the payment for real estate renovation. There was no reason to be suspicious. I invest in quite a bit of real estate. I disagree with that there was reason to be suspicious.
Anyhow, I was upset at first, but then remember, it's only money good for her. Frankly, she posted on Twitter about it. Lesson learned. Be careful when you wire money. She retweeted something from TMZ about her getting hooked in this scam. I'm glad she has a positive attitude about it. It's very unlikely, as I said earlier, that she'll ever recover a dime from these fraudsters because of the way the money was wired. Ninety seconds later is all it takes for the cash to be gone and out of reach. And they probably went ahead and transferred it from German banks to other banks, and it continues to move the money around. It's kind of like what happened in Eastern Europe and Ukraine, with a billion dollars in aid that we sent that ended up bouncing around between multiple companies in multiple countries to hide whose pocket it ended up. It's just kind of crazy. It can happen to anyone, and it can happen to any of us. Every last one of us, business person or otherwise, needs to be on guard. Don't reply to emails. Always make sure you enter in the email address if it's anything that might be of concern. Remember that banks and other places are unlikely, including the IRS tax time, to be sending you emails about some of this stuff. Just double-check and phone them, look them up online, and phone that number. Ask a question from their help people over on their website.
Well, we've got one last segment here, and we're going to be talking about new security features from Firefox that means insecurity to you. This is Craig Peterson on WGAN, and you know, I like Firefox, right?
Hey, welcome back, everybody, Craig Peterson, here on WGAN and online Craig Peterson dot com. Well, that's Peterson with an -On dot com.
Hey, thanks for joining us today we've had a great day, we've talked about where you find a little bit of nostalgia online over at the Internet Archive. We talked about reducing the risk through data minimization. I described how ransomware became a multi-billion dollar industry. We talked about the changes that have recently happened with ransomware that will require you to make a change in what you're doing to stop becoming a victim. Then we got into how should you answer a non-technology related executive who asks you, how secure are we? How do you answer that question to your family as well? Because we are all the Calvary, right? We're the people that our friends, family, our people from church, the business people, they all come to us. So I wanted to make sure we covered that the next generation here of security metrics, how long does it take to harden your systems, and we've got a course coming up on that here in a couple of weeks and a bunch of tutorials to help you out. The company that we talked about clear view AI, very, very bad guys, frankly, very unethical. They just lost their entire database of Facebook buying clients to hackers. And then they brushed it off like it's no big thing.
Hey, you know, everybody gets hacked nowadays. Man is talking about a company with no ethics at all. We talked about them, and then, of course, most recently, we just talked about business email compromise. We gave you a specific example here of Barbara Corcoran. She is one of the business moguls over on Shark Tank. How she lost almost $400,000 in a scam, and what you can do to help protect yourself. And we gave away some actual clues here precisely what the bad guys are doing to try and get that information or get us to to to do that, right? What kind of information are they gathering about us?
Well, I want to talk about Firefox here for a few minutes, all web browser thing. And this has to do with security. And this is an article over on we live security.com that made me think about what is going on with Firefox and Mozilla. Now, if you've been on any of my training courses, you know, the browser you absolutely should never use ever, ever, ever unless there is a gun to your head, and then it's okay. Is Internet Explorer is just one of the worst browsers ever? You know, it's just terrible. It's right up there with the original browser, the NCSA Mosaic, but at least it was changing the industry. Internet Explorer was just a huge security hole. I mean crazy. The things that allowed programmers to do, and it was such an avenue for hacking. You know that right, don't ever use Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Then they came out with the Edge browser, and they had problems with that, so now they've scrapped the Edge browser for the Edge browser. Yes, I said that. Microsoft, you know how it goes with them, right I used to get so upset, and I just let it go. You know, they call the database server SQL Server as though they invented sequel. IBM created that decades ago, but no, no, they took the copyright for it. Okay.
Man, now they've got their new power shell as though it's a new concept. Are you kidding me? We have been using shells in the computer business since forever, since the 60's certainly, in the Unix world. Anyhow, on and on and on and on. So they threw out their Edge browser. And they started to use Mike or not Microsoft, Microsoft started to use Google's Chrome browser, chromium as the base for the New Edge browser. And there are still some problems with it. We're having some issues with the Edge browser and a couple of our customer's sites, mainly dealing with updates and getting it to update correctly. I don't know if any of you guys are having that problem. It's interesting because the machines that have regular windows ten on them that were factory installed Windows 10 and then cleaned up afterward. Those are the ones that are having trouble updating the Edge browser. And the machines that are using an image that we built from scratch, which is what we usually like to do for our customers is working just fine. If you're having issues with the Edge browser, let me know, I'd love to know.
Next, down near the bottom of the list is Google's Chrome. Now, Chrome is pretty secure, generally speaking. There are a few extensions that you want to use with any browser, including Chrome. We'll be covering them starting next week guaranteed, so keep an eye on your email box. These will be free tutorials. I'm not selling you, blah, blah, right? These extensions are ones you're going to want to use. The biggest problem I have with Chrome is Google collecting all of the information in the world and selling it to the highest bidder. Okay, that's the biggest problem I have with Chrome. And then I use either Firefox or opera. Those are my two go-to browsers for the most part. Firefox has been very, very good, and if you're a Facebook user, Firefox has some fantastic features. Firefox does fencing on Facebook so that Facebook cannot look at the other tabs that you have on your machine. It cannot look at the cookies your computer has that are set by other sites. It puts a fence up around Facebook's website, which is fantastic, right? Good for you and Firefox, probably the best browser out there when it comes to using this type of fencing technology for fire for our friends over at Facebook. Opera is known to be very fast, which is kind of their claim to fame. They also adopted Google's chromium base, but they've done a lot of good stuff on top of it. Those are the two I've been recommending and talked about them frequently, basically for a few years now. Those are the two you want to use. Well, Firefox is now turning on something called DNS over HTTPs. It's turning it on by default for US users. I want the Calvary to be aware of this. The Calvary is you guys. It's everybody that people come running to when there's a problem. Okay? So I want you guys to be aware of this. Why? It breaks security systems. Now, you might stop and say, Well, wait a minute. My wife said, What do you mean, Craig, this is contradictory. You're usually saying the opposite.
HTTPS is, you know, is the Secure Sockets version of web browsing online and is based on TLS. It's SSL, right? All of these things. It is security, and the thinking behind this short name is DoH, which is DNS over HTTPS. The reasoning behind this is when you are at home, and you are going to a website, you have to turn the name into an IP address because you can remember the IP address. You're going to ask your internet service provider, what's the IP address for this? Or maybe you're going to ask a third-party for the conversion of the name to an IP address. When you ask for it, it gets sent in the clear, and it is possible to deflect it.
Some ISPs do intercept now, but it isn't necessarily nefarious. Some manipulate it to insert a little crap into it. Some of them play those types of games, which I disagree with, but it's not necessarily nefarious. So the idea is if they use encryption to make that DNS request to a DNS server, then that problem goes away. No one in the middle can sit there and watch your DNS requests to know where you're going online. They can't muck with them either, right? That's the other side of this idea. So here's what you guys in the Calvary need to know. That is, if it is encrypting DNS by default, which Firefox is starting to do, it means that we can not any longer use third-party DNS services without making some configuration changes on our user's computers. Whether it's a family, whether it's a business, whatever it might be. So coming up here, in a couple of weeks, I'm going to be having a webinar on how to use particular DNS services to stop the spread of ransomware hackers and everything else, right, I'm going to walk you through what the strategy is, what are the tactics are behind it. What are you going to do? How are you going to do that? Why you should do it. This type of thing that Firefox is going to do is a double-edged sword. There is no privacy added by DNS over HTTPS. Okay, absolutely none. It's a lie that the marketers and proponents are trying to tell to cover up the real motives. The DNS over TLS offers the same privacy. They both rely on TLS here, right? But it can have amazingly negative implications for security. How do you now identify malware communicating because it can masquerade as regular HTTPS traffic on the networks? There are multiple ways to deal with the changes. I'll be adding this into my course coming up as this is going to be a bit of a big deal. When we're talking about these DNS services that you can use the free ones and the paid ones, and I'm going to show you how to use them to improve your security dramatically. The free ones are great for a small office, home office, or for families. I'll tell you how to do all of that. I'm a little concerned and more than a bit disappointed by our friends over at Mozilla for doing this. I have mixed feelings again, but because you're the Calvary. I thought you needed to know, and so I am telling you right now, so that's a wrap up for today's show.
I want to encourage everyone if you do not get my Saturday morning newsletter, that you sign up for it right away. I have links to these articles and other articles that you need to handle. Also, some of the security patches as they come out, the most critical patches. I tell you about them and give you links to install them. It is free, and you can get that by just going to Craig Peterson dot com, slash subscribe. You'll also find out about the tutorials I have coming up and some of the training that we have, our implementation calls and guides. We have playbooks, we've got so much cool stuff to help you guys out. It is part of my give back. For many of you, it will be the turning point in your security, in business, and at home. Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe listening on WGAN and online.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
---
More stories and tech updates at:
www.craigpeterson.com
Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating:
www.craigpeterson.com/itunes
Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:
www.twitter.com/craigpeterson
For questions, call or text:
855-385-5553
Good morning everybody!
I was on with Ken and Matt and we had a good discussion about how Remote Diagnostics, Remote Work and Coronaviruses, and AI and how this is changing our world.ย ย
These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com
---
Automated Machine Generated Transcript:
Matt
We're back again, and it is 7:38 on the WGAN Morning News with Ken and Matt. We are now talking to Craig Peterson is our tech guru. And he joins us now.
Ken
Mr. Craig, your timing couldn't be better because I got a new MacBook because my keys kept falling off the butterfly keyboard, which sucked him. I don't know why Apple did it. So I installed on I migrate everything over. And now, when I put on Chrome, and I tried to Google, I get this thing called Rona that comes on air express or something. And I clicked on it to see what it was and at someplace in Tel Aviv, that that says Nitsa. And so what's fascinating to me, by the way, Craig, I'm sure you can't do tech support from the phone right now. But uh, he got a brand new computer and did nothing. I didn't know it was already there. And on my last laptop. I mean, I thought it I identified it as like malware, right. His previous laptop, I sort of found a way around it or whatever, but like he just doesn't do anything and it's there also.
Craig
Yeah, but it must have happened when you migrated from your old one, hidden deep somewhere, and got installed during migration.
Ken
Yeah. Oh, that's why you pulled it from the old computer. I thought it was off my old computer. No, it wasn't I hit it. When I did that screen, I hit it so well, should I email Google? Should I email Chrome? Or I throw the computer against the wall? That is another option. I mean, what's this guy? If I email this guy in Tel Aviv, and said, what's this?
Craig
Yeah, don't do that. Don't do that. For the love of God. Don't do that.
Matt
They did a scan. They didn't find it. I've done so, give me suggestions.
Craig
Well, it sounds like you got a good tech support guy there locally to figure it out. But it looks like this is coming from Google, isn't it? He's got Chrome. It comes up from Chrome. I didn't know you didn't Google.
Ken
When I hit a web Chrome, it comes up instead of saying, "Google," it says, "Search." And then it's a smart search. It has this air Express, Facebook, Twitter, and it's just a standard launch page, but it has this Ollie Express thing next to it.
Craig
It's malware. Yeah, something new, but they got installed a while ago, a month ago and migrated. Well, that sort of thing takes a little bit to fix, and I definitely can do it. I bring it down virtually.
Ken
I wonder if I find the mouse if my guy can do it.
Craig
Yeah, usually the migration, it's not a big problem. And it's, there's a lot of these types of things go around. Well, of course, the biggest one is when people install these toolbars on their browsers. There's nothing but spyware in there. It doesn't sound like that. Matt would notice the difference. The toolbar Yeah,
Matt
The toolbar Yeah. No, I actually, that's the first thought I had too. I tried to get rid of it. I went to see if it was an extension. It was an extension.
Yeah, I think I put Malwarebytes on his computer too. It's got Malwarebytes, and I ran it, and it found nothing. So this is probably not nasty, it's just annoying.
Craig
Yes.
Matt
It's trying to sell him something.
Craig
Yeah. Well, hey guys, I've got to bring something up here that I did almost a week ago now. There are millions of people who are working from home currently. Remote workers, many people even trying to figure out how to start a little business at home. I almost didn't wake up for this morning. Because I've been putting on these webinars, there are nine different webinars on topics related to security, not installing these nasty browser extensions. I did two webinars yesterday. These webinars are free. We talked about a browser extension you can put onto Chrome and other browsers, that is going to save your laptop battery, it's going to speed things up. It's just going to do a whole bunch of great stuff for you. I wanted to bring up today that I again, a bunch of people signed up. My next one is on Thursday. I'm going to do two on Thursday, two on Friday, one on Sunday. And then every day next week, I'm going to be doing two of them. And we're covering all kinds of topics, including some extensions that do stop malware on your browsers. We're going to go into VPN, when can you use them? When should you use them that Norton VPN isn't going to help you at all when it's time to get into the office, using a VPN versus remote desktop software. We're going to be covering your firewalls, and What kind of a firewall should you have? The attacks prevalent right now for home users? For a network router slash firewall? How should you be trading at a Wi-Fi? What do you need to know about Wi-Fi? All of this stuff and all free. And unlike that nastiness that you've got to your machine can I'm not sitting there trying to sell you anything. These are free, and we're talking about 10 hours plus worth of some training here. I'm working from home and doing it securely. And what I'd like to do is ask people to take a couple of minutes right now, because whether you are a retiree, or you are running a 500 person company, this information is something you need to have. And we've had a great response. I love the feedback people have been giving. So that's kind of given me a little bit more energy to do this. But if you are interested, You need to be on my email list because that's where I put the announcements out. I am not one of these marketers and new million pieces of emails a day. But if you go to Craig Peterson comm slash subscribe. It is so important right now because I'm getting notifications every day almost from the FBI, about new scans that the bad guys are running against people who are working from home. It is nuts. So these are not just me lecturing, these are two, and as they are LIVE. I'm answering all your questions, live. I'm showing you how to do things. And it's I hate to say this sounds a little self-serving, but it is thousands of dollars worth of training that I'm doing for free This is to help people out. Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe to attend You're going to need you can have a computer you can use your tablet you can use your phone, your smartphone that is and make sure you've got a piece of paper and a pencil ready and handy to do stuff. And anyone who attends gets replays. I have specialized training and special thank you things are people that participate because I know it's a lot of work for you too, but, but I want to get this out right now. It is just it's so important. I don't want you to get nailed or badly by these bad guys.
Matt
we're talking to Craig Peterson, he's our tech guru, and he joins us at this time every Wednesday to go over what's happening in the world of technology. No topic gets discussed without Coronavirus as part of it. Ladies and gentlemen, and so that is no exception for you, Craig, companies are trying to respond to this whole thing, and it's making them turn to what appears to be artificial intelligence. Are we creating Skynet here, in response to the Coronavirus? Should I be worried about this?
Unknown Speaker 8:08
I heard that Prince Charles tested positive for Coronavirus this morning. Testing positive looks like the world might be coming to an end. Who knows, right? Yeah, here's the trick. We have a lot of companies who don't have all of the workers, and there was just a new story here at the bottom of the hour talking about the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard and some of the ironworkers trying to say, Hey, listen, we this is kind of dangerous for us. Workers are just not showing up, or they're being told not to show up. It depends on the company. The big tech companies are trying to use this artificial intelligence now. I don't like the definition that pins these days are using When it comes to artificial intelligence, that word has changed. We used to think of AI and man you too as kind of a Skynet thing. Right? Right? It the computers making decisions, it's learning, it's advancing that smarter than we are, etc., etc. We don't have that yet. It hasn't happened. And there's a lot of warnings about what might happen if that were to happen. But we don't have it. It's not artificial intelligence, and it's barely even machine learning. What it is, is pattern matching. Companies like Facebook, and many others out there right now YouTube, where you're putting content on the site, and people want to make sure that you're not racist, like saying things like President Trump is excellent, which would be horrific. If someone were to say that on Facebook, for instance, tongue firmly planted in cheek there
Unknown Speaker 10:02
Who is going to censor the internet now? While they're turning more heavily to computers, machine language programming is looking for patterns, and those particular patterns are what they're calling AI. It is not artificial intelligence. There's throwing that term around again. So Skynet is not a threat. But if you are trying to start a new ad campaign on Facebook, for instance, all ads are reviewed by Facebook. It is going to take longer to get it approved, and there's going to be many more false positives. That is because AI, as they call it, is a little bit more of a curmudgeon than the people who review some of these ads and articles and posts and everything else. So yeah, it this is going to force some movement forward on this AI type front, but the singularity I think, man it is still many, many years away.
Matt
It is still coming, though. It is today.
Ken
You just wish to be here fast. Well, we're talking to Craig Peterson, our tech guru joins us every Wednesday at 738. before we let you go, Coronaviruses are the story of the year, or the websites and have that the talk about screening is well you can't go to a website to get screened, but there is useful information on testing.
Craig
Yeah, it didn't come out, believe it or not, you can go to google.com slash Covid-19 and find information there. The symptoms are listed there. Of course, they're all over the place. The CDC has, among many others, but one of Google's companies that the company they own did launch just a few days after President Trump announced is called Verily, this primary site allows people to go on and answer a few questions. It comes up with a diagnosis of, yeah, you probably got it, which you could have got that same diagnosis from your cousin. It is very, very simple. They're adding in now where you can go to get tested because, of course, as you guys already know, they don't want you just showing up in the emergency room of a hospital, with potentially Coronavirus where you can spread it. We already know hospitals are the worst place to go if you're sick, because you can catch diseases there, you just can't get anywhere else. They don't want to add Covid-19 to that list. So you can check it out. google.com slash subscribe if you want a little more information.
Unknown Speaker 12:48
All right. Greg Peterson, our tech guru. He joins us now as he always does on Wednesdays to go over the world of technology. We're going to leave it there, Craig. So we appreciate you joining us as always, and we will talk to you next week.
Unknown Speaker 13:00
All right, I'll be on Saturday, of course, at 1 pm cover some more of these topics everyone needs to know. And then again that URL to sign up as Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe in here guys. Thanks a lot, Greg.
Unknown Speaker 13:15
Great. Let's go to the break room, ladies and gentlemen. Go to Eric. He's got all the top stories of the day.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
---
More stories and tech updates at:
www.craigpeterson.com
Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating:
www.craigpeterson.com/itunes
Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:
www.twitter.com/craigpeterson
For questions, call or text:
855-385-5553
Good morning everybody!
I was on with Ken and Matt and we had a good discussion about how Remote Diagnostics, Remote Work and Coronaviruses, and AI and how this is changing our world.ย ย
These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com
---
Automated Machine Generated Transcript:
Matt
We're back again, and it is 7:38 on the WGAN Morning News with Ken and Matt. We are now talking to Craig Peterson is our tech guru. And he joins us now.
Ken
Mr. Craig, your timing couldn't be better because I got a new MacBook because my keys kept falling off the butterfly keyboard, which sucked him. I don't know why Apple did it. So I installed on I migrate everything over. And now, when I put on Chrome, and I tried to Google, I get this thing called Rona that comes on air express or something. And I clicked on it to see what it was and at someplace in Tel Aviv, that that says Nitsa. And so what's fascinating to me, by the way, Craig, I'm sure you can't do tech support from the phone right now. But uh, he got a brand new computer and did nothing. I didn't know it was already there. And on my last laptop. I mean, I thought it I identified it as like malware, right. His previous laptop, I sort of found a way around it or whatever, but like he just doesn't do anything and it's there also.
Craig
Yeah, but it must have happened when you migrated from your old one, hidden deep somewhere, and got installed during migration.
Ken
Yeah. Oh, that's why you pulled it from the old computer. I thought it was off my old computer. No, it wasn't I hit it. When I did that screen, I hit it so well, should I email Google? Should I email Chrome? Or I throw the computer against the wall? That is another option. I mean, what's this guy? If I email this guy in Tel Aviv, and said, what's this?
Craig
Yeah, don't do that. Don't do that. For the love of God. Don't do that.
Matt
They did a scan. They didn't find it. I've done so, give me suggestions.
Craig
Well, it sounds like you got a good tech support guy there locally to figure it out. But it looks like this is coming from Google, isn't it? He's got Chrome. It comes up from Chrome. I didn't know you didn't Google.
Ken
When I hit a web Chrome, it comes up instead of saying, "Google," it says, "Search." And then it's a smart search. It has this air Express, Facebook, Twitter, and it's just a standard launch page, but it has this Ollie Express thing next to it.
Craig
It's malware. Yeah, something new, but they got installed a while ago, a month ago and migrated. Well, that sort of thing takes a little bit to fix, and I definitely can do it. I bring it down virtually.
Ken
I wonder if I find the mouse if my guy can do it.
Craig
Yeah, usually the migration, it's not a big problem. And it's, there's a lot of these types of things go around. Well, of course, the biggest one is when people install these toolbars on their browsers. There's nothing but spyware in there. It doesn't sound like that. Matt would notice the difference. The toolbar Yeah,
Matt
The toolbar Yeah. No, I actually, that's the first thought I had too. I tried to get rid of it. I went to see if it was an extension. It was an extension.
Yeah, I think I put Malwarebytes on his computer too. It's got Malwarebytes, and I ran it, and it found nothing. So this is probably not nasty, it's just annoying.
Craig
Yes.
Matt
It's trying to sell him something.
Craig
Yeah. Well, hey guys, I've got to bring something up here that I did almost a week ago now. There are millions of people who are working from home currently. Remote workers, many people even trying to figure out how to start a little business at home. I almost didn't wake up for this morning. Because I've been putting on these webinars, there are nine different webinars on topics related to security, not installing these nasty browser extensions. I did two webinars yesterday. These webinars are free. We talked about a browser extension you can put onto Chrome and other browsers, that is going to save your laptop battery, it's going to speed things up. It's just going to do a whole bunch of great stuff for you. I wanted to bring up today that I again, a bunch of people signed up. My next one is on Thursday. I'm going to do two on Thursday, two on Friday, one on Sunday. And then every day next week, I'm going to be doing two of them. And we're covering all kinds of topics, including some extensions that do stop malware on your browsers. We're going to go into VPN, when can you use them? When should you use them that Norton VPN isn't going to help you at all when it's time to get into the office, using a VPN versus remote desktop software. We're going to be covering your firewalls, and What kind of a firewall should you have? The attacks prevalent right now for home users? For a network router slash firewall? How should you be trading at a Wi-Fi? What do you need to know about Wi-Fi? All of this stuff and all free. And unlike that nastiness that you've got to your machine can I'm not sitting there trying to sell you anything. These are free, and we're talking about 10 hours plus worth of some training here. I'm working from home and doing it securely. And what I'd like to do is ask people to take a couple of minutes right now, because whether you are a retiree, or you are running a 500 person company, this information is something you need to have. And we've had a great response. I love the feedback people have been giving. So that's kind of given me a little bit more energy to do this. But if you are interested, You need to be on my email list because that's where I put the announcements out. I am not one of these marketers and new million pieces of emails a day. But if you go to Craig Peterson comm slash subscribe. It is so important right now because I'm getting notifications every day almost from the FBI, about new scans that the bad guys are running against people who are working from home. It is nuts. So these are not just me lecturing, these are two, and as they are LIVE. I'm answering all your questions, live. I'm showing you how to do things. And it's I hate to say this sounds a little self-serving, but it is thousands of dollars worth of training that I'm doing for free This is to help people out. Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe to attend You're going to need you can have a computer you can use your tablet you can use your phone, your smartphone that is and make sure you've got a piece of paper and a pencil ready and handy to do stuff. And anyone who attends gets replays. I have specialized training and special thank you things are people that participate because I know it's a lot of work for you too, but, but I want to get this out right now. It is just it's so important. I don't want you to get nailed or badly by these bad guys.
Matt
we're talking to Craig Peterson, he's our tech guru, and he joins us at this time every Wednesday to go over what's happening in the world of technology. No topic gets discussed without Coronavirus as part of it. Ladies and gentlemen, and so that is no exception for you, Craig, companies are trying to respond to this whole thing, and it's making them turn to what appears to be artificial intelligence. Are we creating Skynet here, in response to the Coronavirus? Should I be worried about this?
Unknown Speaker 8:08
I heard that Prince Charles tested positive for Coronavirus this morning. Testing positive looks like the world might be coming to an end. Who knows, right? Yeah, here's the trick. We have a lot of companies who don't have all of the workers, and there was just a new story here at the bottom of the hour talking about the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard and some of the ironworkers trying to say, Hey, listen, we this is kind of dangerous for us. Workers are just not showing up, or they're being told not to show up. It depends on the company. The big tech companies are trying to use this artificial intelligence now. I don't like the definition that pins these days are using When it comes to artificial intelligence, that word has changed. We used to think of AI and man you too as kind of a Skynet thing. Right? Right? It the computers making decisions, it's learning, it's advancing that smarter than we are, etc., etc. We don't have that yet. It hasn't happened. And there's a lot of warnings about what might happen if that were to happen. But we don't have it. It's not artificial intelligence, and it's barely even machine learning. What it is, is pattern matching. Companies like Facebook, and many others out there right now YouTube, where you're putting content on the site, and people want to make sure that you're not racist, like saying things like President Trump is excellent, which would be horrific. If someone were to say that on Facebook, for instance, tongue firmly planted in cheek there
Unknown Speaker 10:02
Who is going to censor the internet now? While they're turning more heavily to computers, machine language programming is looking for patterns, and those particular patterns are what they're calling AI. It is not artificial intelligence. There's throwing that term around again. So Skynet is not a threat. But if you are trying to start a new ad campaign on Facebook, for instance, all ads are reviewed by Facebook. It is going to take longer to get it approved, and there's going to be many more false positives. That is because AI, as they call it, is a little bit more of a curmudgeon than the people who review some of these ads and articles and posts and everything else. So yeah, it this is going to force some movement forward on this AI type front, but the singularity I think, man it is still many, many years away.
Matt
It is still coming, though. It is today.
Ken
You just wish to be here fast. Well, we're talking to Craig Peterson, our tech guru joins us every Wednesday at 738. before we let you go, Coronaviruses are the story of the year, or the websites and have that the talk about screening is well you can't go to a website to get screened, but there is useful information on testing.
Craig
Yeah, it didn't come out, believe it or not, you can go to google.com slash Covid-19 and find information there. The symptoms are listed there. Of course, they're all over the place. The CDC has, among many others, but one of Google's companies that the company they own did launch just a few days after President Trump announced is called Verily, this primary site allows people to go on and answer a few questions. It comes up with a diagnosis of, yeah, you probably got it, which you could have got that same diagnosis from your cousin. It is very, very simple. They're adding in now where you can go to get tested because, of course, as you guys already know, they don't want you just showing up in the emergency room of a hospital, with potentially Coronavirus where you can spread it. We already know hospitals are the worst place to go if you're sick, because you can catch diseases there, you just can't get anywhere else. They don't want to add Covid-19 to that list. So you can check it out. google.com slash subscribe if you want a little more information.
Unknown Speaker 12:48
All right. Greg Peterson, our tech guru. He joins us now as he always does on Wednesdays to go over the world of technology. We're going to leave it there, Craig. So we appreciate you joining us as always, and we will talk to you next week.
Unknown Speaker 13:00
All right, I'll be on Saturday, of course, at 1 pm cover some more of these topics everyone needs to know. And then again that URL to sign up as Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe in here guys. Thanks a lot, Greg.
Unknown Speaker 13:15
Great. Let's go to the break room, ladies and gentlemen. Go to Eric. He's got all the top stories of the day.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
---
More stories and tech updates at:
www.craigpeterson.com
Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating:
www.craigpeterson.com/itunes
Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:
www.twitter.com/craigpeterson
For questions, call or text:
855-385-5553
Good morning everybody!
I was on with Ken and Matt and we had a good discussion about how Remote Diagnostics, Remote Work and Coronaviruses, and AI and how this is changing our world.
These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com
---
Automated Machine Generated Transcript:
Matt We're back again, and it is 7:38 on the WGAN Morning News with Ken and Matt. We are now talking to Craig Peterson is our tech guru. And he joins us now.
Ken Mr. Craig, your timing couldn't be better because I got a new MacBook because my keys kept falling off the butterfly keyboard, which sucked him. I don't know why Apple did it. So I installed on I migrate everything over. And now, when I put on Chrome, and I tried to Google, I get this thing called Rona that comes on air express or something. And I clicked on it to see what it was and at someplace in Tel Aviv, that that says Nitsa. And so what's fascinating to me, by the way, Craig, I'm sure you can't do tech support from the phone right now. But uh, he got a brand new computer and did nothing. I didn't know it was already there. And on my last laptop. I mean, I thought it I identified it as like malware, right. His previous laptop, I sort of found a way around it or whatever, but like he just doesn't do anything and it's there also.
Craig Yeah, but it must have happened when you migrated from your old one, hidden deep somewhere, and got installed during migration.
Ken Yeah. Oh, that's why you pulled it from the old computer. I thought it was off my old computer. No, it wasn't I hit it. When I did that screen, I hit it so well, should I email Google? Should I email Chrome? Or I throw the computer against the wall? That is another option. I mean, what's this guy? If I email this guy in Tel Aviv, and said, what's this?
Craig Yeah, don't do that. Don't do that. For the love of God. Don't do that.
Matt They did a scan. They didn't find it. I've done so, give me suggestions.
Craig Well, it sounds like you got a good tech support guy there locally to figure it out. But it looks like this is coming from Google, isn't it? He's got Chrome. It comes up from Chrome. I didn't know you didn't Google.
Ken When I hit a web Chrome, it comes up instead of saying, "Google," it says, "Search." And then it's a smart search. It has this air Express, Facebook, Twitter, and it's just a standard launch page, but it has this Ollie Express thing next to it.
Craig It's malware. Yeah, something new, but they got installed a while ago, a month ago and migrated. Well, that sort of thing takes a little bit to fix, and I definitely can do it. I bring it down virtually.
Ken I wonder if I find the mouse if my guy can do it.
Craig Yeah, usually the migration, it's not a big problem. And it's, there's a lot of these types of things go around. Well, of course, the biggest one is when people install these toolbars on their browsers. There's nothing but spyware in there. It doesn't sound like that. Matt would notice the difference. The toolbar Yeah,
Matt The toolbar Yeah. No, I actually, that's the first thought I had too. I tried to get rid of it. I went to see if it was an extension. It was an extension. Yeah, I think I put Malwarebytes on his computer too. It's got Malwarebytes, and I ran it, and it found nothing. So this is probably not nasty, it's just annoying.
Craig Yes.
Matt It's trying to sell him something.
Craig Yeah. Well, hey guys, I've got to bring something up here that I did almost a week ago now. There are millions of people who are working from home currently. Remote workers, many people even trying to figure out how to start a little business at home. I almost didn't wake up for this morning. Because I've been putting on these webinars, there are nine different webinars on topics related to security, not installing these nasty browser extensions. I did two webinars yesterday. These webinars are free. We talked about a browser extension you can put onto Chrome and other browsers, that is going to save your laptop battery, it's going to speed things up. It's just going to do a whole bunch of great stuff for you. I wanted to bring up today that I again, a bunch of people signed up. My next one is on Thursday. I'm going to do two on Thursday, two on Friday, one on Sunday. And then every day next week, I'm going to be doing two of them. And we're covering all kinds of topics, including some extensions that do stop malware on your browsers. We're going to go into VPN, when can you use them? When should you use them that Norton VPN isn't going to help you at all when it's time to get into the office, using a VPN versus remote desktop software. We're going to be covering your firewalls, and What kind of a firewall should you have? The attacks prevalent right now for home users? For a network router slash firewall? How should you be trading at a Wi-Fi? What do you need to know about Wi-Fi? All of this stuff and all free. And unlike that nastiness that you've got to your machine can I'm not sitting there trying to sell you anything. These are free, and we're talking about 10 hours plus worth of some training here. I'm working from home and doing it securely. And what I'd like to do is ask people to take a couple of minutes right now, because whether you are a retiree, or you are running a 500 person company, this information is something you need to have. And we've had a great response. I love the feedback people have been giving. So that's kind of given me a little bit more energy to do this. But if you are interested, You need to be on my email list because that's where I put the announcements out. I am not one of these marketers and new million pieces of emails a day. But if you go to Craig Peterson comm slash subscribe. It is so important right now because I'm getting notifications every day almost from the FBI, about new scans that the bad guys are running against people who are working from home. It is nuts. So these are not just me lecturing, these are two, and as they are LIVE. I'm answering all your questions, live. I'm showing you how to do things. And it's I hate to say this sounds a little self-serving, but it is thousands of dollars worth of training that I'm doing for free This is to help people out. Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe to attend You're going to need you can have a computer you can use your tablet you can use your phone, your smartphone that is and make sure you've got a piece of paper and a pencil ready and handy to do stuff. And anyone who attends gets replays. I have specialized training and special thank you things are people that participate because I know it's a lot of work for you too, but, but I want to get this out right now. It is just it's so important. I don't want you to get nailed or badly by these bad guys.
Matt we're talking to Craig Peterson, he's our tech guru, and he joins us at this time every Wednesday to go over what's happening in the world of technology. No topic gets discussed without Coronavirus as part of it. Ladies and gentlemen, and so that is no exception for you, Craig, companies are trying to respond to this whole thing, and it's making them turn to what appears to be artificial intelligence. Are we creating Skynet here, in response to the Coronavirus? Should I be worried about this?
Unknown Speaker 8:08 I heard that Prince Charles tested positive for Coronavirus this morning. Testing positive looks like the world might be coming to an end. Who knows, right? Yeah, here's the trick. We have a lot of companies who don't have all of the workers, and there was just a new story here at the bottom of the hour talking about the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard and some of the ironworkers trying to say, Hey, listen, we this is kind of dangerous for us. Workers are just not showing up, or they're being told not to show up. It depends on the company. The big tech companies are trying to use this artificial intelligence now. I don't like the definition that pins these days are using When it comes to artificial intelligence, that word has changed. We used to think of AI and man you too as kind of a Skynet thing. Right? Right? It the computers making decisions, it's learning, it's advancing that smarter than we are, etc., etc. We don't have that yet. It hasn't happened. And there's a lot of warnings about what might happen if that were to happen. But we don't have it. It's not artificial intelligence, and it's barely even machine learning. What it is, is pattern matching. Companies like Facebook, and many others out there right now YouTube, where you're putting content on the site, and people want to make sure that you're not racist, like saying things like President Trump is excellent, which would be horrific. If someone were to say that on Facebook, for instance, tongue firmly planted in cheek there
Unknown Speaker 10:02 Who is going to censor the internet now? While they're turning more heavily to computers, machine language programming is looking for patterns, and those particular patterns are what they're calling AI. It is not artificial intelligence. There's throwing that term around again. So Skynet is not a threat. But if you are trying to start a new ad campaign on Facebook, for instance, all ads are reviewed by Facebook. It is going to take longer to get it approved, and there's going to be many more false positives. That is because AI, as they call it, is a little bit more of a curmudgeon than the people who review some of these ads and articles and posts and everything else. So yeah, it this is going to force some movement forward on this AI type front, but the singularity I think, man it is still many, many years away.
Matt It is still coming, though. It is today.
Ken You just wish to be here fast. Well, we're talking to Craig Peterson, our tech guru joins us every Wednesday at 738. before we let you go, Coronaviruses are the story of the year, or the websites and have that the talk about screening is well you can't go to a website to get screened, but there is useful information on testing.
Craig Yeah, it didn't come out, believe it or not, you can go to google.com slash Covid-19 and find information there. The symptoms are listed there. Of course, they're all over the place. The CDC has, among many others, but one of Google's companies that the company they own did launch just a few days after President Trump announced is called Verily, this primary site allows people to go on and answer a few questions. It comes up with a diagnosis of, yeah, you probably got it, which you could have got that same diagnosis from your cousin. It is very, very simple. They're adding in now where you can go to get tested because, of course, as you guys already know, they don't want you just showing up in the emergency room of a hospital, with potentially Coronavirus where you can spread it. We already know hospitals are the worst place to go if you're sick, because you can catch diseases there, you just can't get anywhere else. They don't want to add Covid-19 to that list. So you can check it out. google.com slash subscribe if you want a little more information.
Unknown Speaker 12:48 All right. Greg Peterson, our tech guru. He joins us now as he always does on Wednesdays to go over the world of technology. We're going to leave it there, Craig. So we appreciate you joining us as always, and we will talk to you next week.
Unknown Speaker 13:00 All right, I'll be on Saturday, of course, at 1 pm cover some more of these topics everyone needs to know. And then again that URL to sign up as Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe in here guys. Thanks a lot, Greg.
Unknown Speaker 13:15 Great. Let's go to the break room, ladies and gentlemen. Go to Eric. He's got all the top stories of the day.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
---
More stories and tech updates at:
www.craigpeterson.com
Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating:
www.craigpeterson.com/itunes
Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:
www.twitter.com/craigpeterson
For questions, call or text:
855-385-5553
Welcome!ย
Hey everyone.ย I hope you are all doing well during this period of social distancing we are experiencing due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
If you are new to doing remote work or working from home then you are going to want to attend the series of webinars on tools, techniques, and tactics you can use to make this easier for you.ย These are all offered at no charge. Later next week, I will be offering a live training course on securing your computers, networks, and browsers. This will be deeply discounted. No pressure, but if you are interested, I would appreciate your business.
I was on with Jim Polito who was sitting in his kitchen under self-quarantine because he recently traveled overseas. We discussed some Top Tips for Remote Working and Working From Home. So, here we go with Jim Polito.
For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com
---ย
Automated Machine Generated Transcript:
Craig
There is a special plug-in that goes into your browsers, which helps to improve the whole browser experience. You use less memory, you will use less battery if you're on a laptop, and maybe you're out a little bit. That's the kind of the scope of what we're doing. We're getting into security as well. I'm going to teach you the tools, techniques, and tactics that I use, Jim.
Craig
This morning I was on with Jim Polito course, Craig Peterson here. And I spent a little time talking about the webinars, and what I have learned from more than 20 years of working from home and with my family. I will tell you the things that work for all of us. So listen in here we go.
Jim
He is the man, and this is the guy you want to turn to in times like these. I'm talking about our tech talk guru, Craig Peterson. Good morning, Craig.
Craig
Good Morning. I guess I am the man of the hour. I can't believe how many people have work from home questions.
Jim
Listen, let's start by just letting everybody know at the end of this segment, you can get all of this information plus more. You can get on his list, which is an excellent thing, especially now. Because you will send great information along to people, and you won't try to sell them anything or anything else. It's just that's how it is. But that we'll talk about at the end, but you've got some webinars going on. Before we get to our topics at hand, you have a pretty significant announcement.
Craig
Yeah, this is a very, very big thing. I think for so many people. We have, as you might know, I've been doing webinars for the FBI is infragard program. That's where The FBI works with critical infrastructure and critical businesses in several areas. Now, I guess based on what you were saying this morning. I've been doing these for quite a while. And the whole idea is to help businesses understand what they need to do. And we get some information from the FBI. They'll tell us stuff that they'll tell anybody, and then they keep everything that keeps us up at night, close to their chest. Yeah. Here's what I'm going to do. I have been doing webinars now for quite a few years, and we have some brand new ones. I have nine different remote work or work from home type of webinars coming up over the next two weeks. We're going delve into a different topic each day. I'm going to make them available to people who sign up. That is important as these are going to be LIVE. I will stay on and answer everybody's questions. The ones that I've done so far, they have been averaging about an hour and a half long. We're going to have one at 4 pm. Today, one at 9 pm tonight, and we're going to be talking about how to a special plug-in for your browsers, that helps to improve the whole browser experience. It will help you use less memory, you use less battery if you're on a laptop, and you step out for a little bit. That's the scope of what we're doing, and we will be getting into security as well. I'm going to teach you the tools, techniques, and tactics that I use, Jim. The way people sign up is they can just go to my website, Craig Peterson dot com slash Jim. There's a special sign-up there. Craig Peterson dot com slash Jim. It is just teaching and is free for everybody. Even though maybe you're a little bit older, you're not working anymore. Although aimed at remote workers, both for the business owner and the people working from home. If you're a little bit older, you're not working anymore, and you are still going to get a lot of benefit out of these webinars because you're going to learn a lot more about security. I'm going to give you all these free tools I use. We'll talk a little bit about some of the paid tools that we use, but it's all about remote working in this day and age.
Jim
That's great. You know what I'll do, we always podcast this segment. And what I'll do is I'll put up a link in that podcast posting at WTAG dot com on the Jim Polito Show page. When I broadcast this later this morning, I'll put that link up so people can get it now. I used some of the information you sent me. I mean, all of it was fascinating. However, I want to zero in on one thing. The big gamble that tech companies are making right now.
As you know, they say necessity is the mother of invention. These companies must now take a more in-depth look at artificial intelligence. Not that companies aren't already using it, including our artificial intelligence right here at iHeart. But artificial intelligence in terms of these big tech companies, and it's kind of a gamble right now, why don't you explain that?
Craig
Yeah, it is because their people, you know, they aren't able to go into work. We've been using it in the tech industry for quite a while. We have used it to work with foreign workers as well. That has been wonderful for them because it helps to move them up to the food ladder if you will by increasing their pay. You know, it used to be that we would always outsource to India and it was very cheap. Then India's wages now are almost on par depending on what type of work it is with US workers. Currently, India is outsourcing to China. It's great. It's been lifting all the boats in that ocean everybody has been doing a little bit better. But we're at the point now where we need to have some more advanced technology. We're talking about hundreds of hours worth of videos being uploaded to YouTube every minute. There is no way that you could hire enough people to review all of those as an example. So what we see now is an acceleration via this artificial intelligence type mechanism reviewing videos. We see our posts on Facebook, for instance, and you're having problems getting your advertising approved. BTW that is another reason to use iHeart to get your messages out, which I heard is also using AI to accept these ads. So, overall, this is the trend, it's going to be here it started before the whole Covid-19 virus thing. However, with many people quarantining, you can't find a laptop to buy anywhere in the known universe, because they are all gone. Many of these businesses now no longer have the workers that they used to have even. So they've turned more to artificial intelligence. That means that there are all kinds of false negatives about some of the stuff you're posting. Which means things you're posting may get blocked more often than usual. Things you post, videos you upload might not get approved. And this is an overall trend. You know, they call it artificial intelligence, Jim. But the way I've been looking at it is not even machine learning. It's just some heavy programming that looks for patterns looking for keywords that have been getting a little bit smarter as time goes on.
It's not like, like in science fiction movies, where artificial intelligence becomes self-aware. It is. I mean, frankly, what Tommy be our meteorologist does with the models is a form of artificial intelligence because the models continue to learn. They adapt and regurgitate what they learn. They're not self-aware. They're not reasoning they're doing what we have programmed them to do.
They're looking for pattern matches. That is what they're looking for, and you know what, with this coronavirus pandemic, the whole artificial intelligence pattern matching thing has been a huge win. We're able to run simulations. Not just against known drugs that a drug company might want to try but against basically every material and combination of materials and minerals and bacterium, etc., etc. Even those that we could even think of using. We can run the simulations inside these artificial bits of intelligence that have learned a little bit about these patterns. We see these types of vaccines and medications delivered in just an incredible time. Things that would take years are now taking hours literally, and we are moving towards the point very, very soon. We already have some of this where we will have drugs ready. These vaccines you name it made specifically for us. So there will be a Jim Polito pill the Jim Polito can take that will deal with all of the issues he has. That's all thanks to this artificial intelligence, this machine learning that's going on right now.
Jim
I don't think people want to take the Jim Polito pill, to be honest with you. I understand the metaphor there, Craig, but I just you know, nobody wants to be a middle-aged chubby and loudmouth and be stupid when it comes to tech, right. We're talking with Craig Peterson, our tech talk guru. Artificial intelligence is a big tech gamble right now. His webinars, which you can sign up for from him, and at the end of his segment, and we're going to tell you how you can get all of this information from him.
Jim
Craig, if I could just shift back, again, to working from home. I know you're going to discuss this in the webinars, and in the short time we have left, could you give me kind of just a brief bit of some of the things that you've learned over the 22 years of working from home, not because you had to, but because it worked for you?
Craig
Yeah, it did. There are some basics that I have found work well for both my wife and I. Now I even have kids that work from home, too. In 22 years of working from home, the number one thing that I've learned is you have to have not just a separate space, but multiple separate areas. Most of us have various job functions that we're performing, and you need to have a different place for each job function, especially if you're kind of an entrepreneur or you're trying to start a home business. Now, this doesn't mean you have to have different rooms, don't get me wrong, but don't sit in that chair you use to watch TV. Or if you only have one chair, turn it around, and, you know, face a different window have different environments. That's number one. Number two is one that I found very, very helpful, and that is to use the Pomodoro Technique. We mentioned that last week, and that is to take 20 minutes and then a 10-minute break. So that you're very, very focused on it. You have to get up and walk around. I sit on a big balance ball, and I have a desk that goes up and down. I can be standing, and I can be sitting in a chair like I am right now. Or I can be on one of these balance balls. Because if you don't, and may not think of it but you have To get up, you have to keep moving. And then the third most important thing, again, not technology-wise, is that your family has to respect your workspace. Think of different ways you could do it. Most people, it's advised to dress up as you would usually for work. And if your family sees you in work clothes, they're supposed to leave you alone. But you know, the workaround I have on that that has worked exceptionally well for me, is when it's that break time when I've done my 20 minutes of hard work. Then a 10-minute break, I walk into the rest of the house, go to the kitchen, walk around, get a cup of water, and talk to the family. That way, they don't have to interrupt me when I'm working hard. And then the technology side, make sure you are safe, and I mean safe and so Friday, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. I'm going to be talking specifically about some important security things you have to be doing in the webinars. And I've got right I'm doing two today to Thursday to on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, all the way through next week because I want to help everybody because these tech issues on security just get so complicated so fast. Still, those are my tips right there, and they have gotten me a long way.
Jim
I'll tell you, you know, the first day I did the show on the pajamas, but on the second day, I only thought about it. Now I'm up and dressed. You know, the thing is, I wear pretty much the same clothes to go to work that I do on the weekend. But no, I got up showered did the same thing that I would do. You know other than getting in the car and driving, everything I did was the same. I like you, take breaks during the commercials in our show when I don't have work to do. When I'm back in the studio, I walk around the building, you know I get out of the studio, and it refreshes my brain and resets it. Here it's perfect because I can get up from the table and the little broadcast area I have here. I can talk to Kathy, pet the dog, whatever, you know, that kind of stuff. It does help, but then I go back into the mode, and I'm in my little you know area here. It works. Look, it is time to get folks the immediate information. When I podcast, this will have a link, but you can give the link now to if you want. So, one thing to get on Craig's email list, you text My name Jim, J-I-M to this number.
Craig
Here 855-385-5563. So let's just Jim 2855385 5553
Jim
All right, standard data and tax rates apply. Then, Craig, I'm going to put this with the podcast the address for the to be able to find out about the webinars you're doing for working at home. All right, there you go. It's Craig Peterson, of course. Craig Peterson dot com slash, Jim.
Craig
That's the only place you'll find it right now you guys are getting a heads up. You're going to be some of the first ones to be able to get in and ask questions. I am not advertising it generally right now. It's because I want to start small and help people as much as I can. Craig Peterson dot com slash Jim.
Jim
Craig, you're the best. We appreciate it. Especially in these times, folks you want to get on Craig's list. I don't mean the website. I mean, Craig Peterson, and if you can, attend some of those webinars. Craig, I will talk to you next week. Stay safe.
Craig
All right. Thanks. Take care. Bye-bye.
Jim
All right, and I will podcast that this morning. A final word when we return. You're listening to the Jim Polito show from my kitchen with pops. It is your safe space. The Jim Polito show, where we serve hot drinks.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
---ย
More stories and tech updates at:
www.craigpeterson.com
Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating:
www.craigpeterson.com/itunes
Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:
www.twitter.com/craigpeterson
For questions, call or text:
855-385-5553
Welcome!ย
Hey everyone.ย I hope you are all doing well during this period of social distancing we are experiencing due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
If you are new to doing remote work or working from home then you are going to want to attend the series of webinars on tools, techniques, and tactics you can use to make this easier for you.ย These are all offered at no charge. Later next week, I will be offering a live training course on securing your computers, networks, and browsers. This will be deeply discounted. No pressure, but if you are interested, I would appreciate your business.
I was on with Jim Polito who was sitting in his kitchen under self-quarantine because he recently traveled overseas. We discussed some Top Tips for Remote Working and Working From Home. So, here we go with Jim Polito.
For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com
---ย
Automated Machine Generated Transcript:
Craig
There is a special plug-in that goes into your browsers, which helps to improve the whole browser experience. You use less memory, you will use less battery if you're on a laptop, and maybe you're out a little bit. That's the kind of the scope of what we're doing. We're getting into security as well. I'm going to teach you the tools, techniques, and tactics that I use, Jim.
Craig
This morning I was on with Jim Polito course, Craig Peterson here. And I spent a little time talking about the webinars, and what I have learned from more than 20 years of working from home and with my family. I will tell you the things that work for all of us. So listen in here we go.
Jim
He is the man, and this is the guy you want to turn to in times like these. I'm talking about our tech talk guru, Craig Peterson. Good morning, Craig.
Craig
Good Morning. I guess I am the man of the hour. I can't believe how many people have work from home questions.
Jim
Listen, let's start by just letting everybody know at the end of this segment, you can get all of this information plus more. You can get on his list, which is an excellent thing, especially now. Because you will send great information along to people, and you won't try to sell them anything or anything else. It's just that's how it is. But that we'll talk about at the end, but you've got some webinars going on. Before we get to our topics at hand, you have a pretty significant announcement.
Craig
Yeah, this is a very, very big thing. I think for so many people. We have, as you might know, I've been doing webinars for the FBI is infragard program. That's where The FBI works with critical infrastructure and critical businesses in several areas. Now, I guess based on what you were saying this morning. I've been doing these for quite a while. And the whole idea is to help businesses understand what they need to do. And we get some information from the FBI. They'll tell us stuff that they'll tell anybody, and then they keep everything that keeps us up at night, close to their chest. Yeah. Here's what I'm going to do. I have been doing webinars now for quite a few years, and we have some brand new ones. I have nine different remote work or work from home type of webinars coming up over the next two weeks. We're going delve into a different topic each day. I'm going to make them available to people who sign up. That is important as these are going to be LIVE. I will stay on and answer everybody's questions. The ones that I've done so far, they have been averaging about an hour and a half long. We're going to have one at 4 pm. Today, one at 9 pm tonight, and we're going to be talking about how to a special plug-in for your browsers, that helps to improve the whole browser experience. It will help you use less memory, you use less battery if you're on a laptop, and you step out for a little bit. That's the scope of what we're doing, and we will be getting into security as well. I'm going to teach you the tools, techniques, and tactics that I use, Jim. The way people sign up is they can just go to my website, Craig Peterson dot com slash Jim. There's a special sign-up there. Craig Peterson dot com slash Jim. It is just teaching and is free for everybody. Even though maybe you're a little bit older, you're not working anymore. Although aimed at remote workers, both for the business owner and the people working from home. If you're a little bit older, you're not working anymore, and you are still going to get a lot of benefit out of these webinars because you're going to learn a lot more about security. I'm going to give you all these free tools I use. We'll talk a little bit about some of the paid tools that we use, but it's all about remote working in this day and age.
Jim
That's great. You know what I'll do, we always podcast this segment. And what I'll do is I'll put up a link in that podcast posting at WTAG dot com on the Jim Polito Show page. When I broadcast this later this morning, I'll put that link up so people can get it now. I used some of the information you sent me. I mean, all of it was fascinating. However, I want to zero in on one thing. The big gamble that tech companies are making right now.
As you know, they say necessity is the mother of invention. These companies must now take a more in-depth look at artificial intelligence. Not that companies aren't already using it, including our artificial intelligence right here at iHeart. But artificial intelligence in terms of these big tech companies, and it's kind of a gamble right now, why don't you explain that?
Craig
Yeah, it is because their people, you know, they aren't able to go into work. We've been using it in the tech industry for quite a while. We have used it to work with foreign workers as well. That has been wonderful for them because it helps to move them up to the food ladder if you will by increasing their pay. You know, it used to be that we would always outsource to India and it was very cheap. Then India's wages now are almost on par depending on what type of work it is with US workers. Currently, India is outsourcing to China. It's great. It's been lifting all the boats in that ocean everybody has been doing a little bit better. But we're at the point now where we need to have some more advanced technology. We're talking about hundreds of hours worth of videos being uploaded to YouTube every minute. There is no way that you could hire enough people to review all of those as an example. So what we see now is an acceleration via this artificial intelligence type mechanism reviewing videos. We see our posts on Facebook, for instance, and you're having problems getting your advertising approved. BTW that is another reason to use iHeart to get your messages out, which I heard is also using AI to accept these ads. So, overall, this is the trend, it's going to be here it started before the whole Covid-19 virus thing. However, with many people quarantining, you can't find a laptop to buy anywhere in the known universe, because they are all gone. Many of these businesses now no longer have the workers that they used to have even. So they've turned more to artificial intelligence. That means that there are all kinds of false negatives about some of the stuff you're posting. Which means things you're posting may get blocked more often than usual. Things you post, videos you upload might not get approved. And this is an overall trend. You know, they call it artificial intelligence, Jim. But the way I've been looking at it is not even machine learning. It's just some heavy programming that looks for patterns looking for keywords that have been getting a little bit smarter as time goes on.
It's not like, like in science fiction movies, where artificial intelligence becomes self-aware. It is. I mean, frankly, what Tommy be our meteorologist does with the models is a form of artificial intelligence because the models continue to learn. They adapt and regurgitate what they learn. They're not self-aware. They're not reasoning they're doing what we have programmed them to do.
They're looking for pattern matches. That is what they're looking for, and you know what, with this coronavirus pandemic, the whole artificial intelligence pattern matching thing has been a huge win. We're able to run simulations. Not just against known drugs that a drug company might want to try but against basically every material and combination of materials and minerals and bacterium, etc., etc. Even those that we could even think of using. We can run the simulations inside these artificial bits of intelligence that have learned a little bit about these patterns. We see these types of vaccines and medications delivered in just an incredible time. Things that would take years are now taking hours literally, and we are moving towards the point very, very soon. We already have some of this where we will have drugs ready. These vaccines you name it made specifically for us. So there will be a Jim Polito pill the Jim Polito can take that will deal with all of the issues he has. That's all thanks to this artificial intelligence, this machine learning that's going on right now.
Jim
I don't think people want to take the Jim Polito pill, to be honest with you. I understand the metaphor there, Craig, but I just you know, nobody wants to be a middle-aged chubby and loudmouth and be stupid when it comes to tech, right. We're talking with Craig Peterson, our tech talk guru. Artificial intelligence is a big tech gamble right now. His webinars, which you can sign up for from him, and at the end of his segment, and we're going to tell you how you can get all of this information from him.
Jim
Craig, if I could just shift back, again, to working from home. I know you're going to discuss this in the webinars, and in the short time we have left, could you give me kind of just a brief bit of some of the things that you've learned over the 22 years of working from home, not because you had to, but because it worked for you?
Craig
Yeah, it did. There are some basics that I have found work well for both my wife and I. Now I even have kids that work from home, too. In 22 years of working from home, the number one thing that I've learned is you have to have not just a separate space, but multiple separate areas. Most of us have various job functions that we're performing, and you need to have a different place for each job function, especially if you're kind of an entrepreneur or you're trying to start a home business. Now, this doesn't mean you have to have different rooms, don't get me wrong, but don't sit in that chair you use to watch TV. Or if you only have one chair, turn it around, and, you know, face a different window have different environments. That's number one. Number two is one that I found very, very helpful, and that is to use the Pomodoro Technique. We mentioned that last week, and that is to take 20 minutes and then a 10-minute break. So that you're very, very focused on it. You have to get up and walk around. I sit on a big balance ball, and I have a desk that goes up and down. I can be standing, and I can be sitting in a chair like I am right now. Or I can be on one of these balance balls. Because if you don't, and may not think of it but you have To get up, you have to keep moving. And then the third most important thing, again, not technology-wise, is that your family has to respect your workspace. Think of different ways you could do it. Most people, it's advised to dress up as you would usually for work. And if your family sees you in work clothes, they're supposed to leave you alone. But you know, the workaround I have on that that has worked exceptionally well for me, is when it's that break time when I've done my 20 minutes of hard work. Then a 10-minute break, I walk into the rest of the house, go to the kitchen, walk around, get a cup of water, and talk to the family. That way, they don't have to interrupt me when I'm working hard. And then the technology side, make sure you are safe, and I mean safe and so Friday, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. I'm going to be talking specifically about some important security things you have to be doing in the webinars. And I've got right I'm doing two today to Thursday to on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, all the way through next week because I want to help everybody because these tech issues on security just get so complicated so fast. Still, those are my tips right there, and they have gotten me a long way.
Jim
I'll tell you, you know, the first day I did the show on the pajamas, but on the second day, I only thought about it. Now I'm up and dressed. You know, the thing is, I wear pretty much the same clothes to go to work that I do on the weekend. But no, I got up showered did the same thing that I would do. You know other than getting in the car and driving, everything I did was the same. I like you, take breaks during the commercials in our show when I don't have work to do. When I'm back in the studio, I walk around the building, you know I get out of the studio, and it refreshes my brain and resets it. Here it's perfect because I can get up from the table and the little broadcast area I have here. I can talk to Kathy, pet the dog, whatever, you know, that kind of stuff. It does help, but then I go back into the mode, and I'm in my little you know area here. It works. Look, it is time to get folks the immediate information. When I podcast, this will have a link, but you can give the link now to if you want. So, one thing to get on Craig's email list, you text My name Jim, J-I-M to this number.
Craig
Here 855-385-5563. So let's just Jim 2855385 5553
Jim
All right, standard data and tax rates apply. Then, Craig, I'm going to put this with the podcast the address for the to be able to find out about the webinars you're doing for working at home. All right, there you go. It's Craig Peterson, of course. Craig Peterson dot com slash, Jim.
Craig
That's the only place you'll find it right now you guys are getting a heads up. You're going to be some of the first ones to be able to get in and ask questions. I am not advertising it generally right now. It's because I want to start small and help people as much as I can. Craig Peterson dot com slash Jim.
Jim
Craig, you're the best. We appreciate it. Especially in these times, folks you want to get on Craig's list. I don't mean the website. I mean, Craig Peterson, and if you can, attend some of those webinars. Craig, I will talk to you next week. Stay safe.
Craig
All right. Thanks. Take care. Bye-bye.
Jim
All right, and I will podcast that this morning. A final word when we return. You're listening to the Jim Polito show from my kitchen with pops. It is your safe space. The Jim Polito show, where we serve hot drinks.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
---ย
More stories and tech updates at:
www.craigpeterson.com
Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating:
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Welcome!
Hey everyone. I hope you are all doing well during this period of social distancing we are experiencing due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
If you are new to doing remote work or working from home then you are going to want to attend the series of webinars on tools, techniques, and tactics you can use to make this easier for you. These are all offered at no charge. Later next week, I will be offering a live training course on securing your computers, networks, and browsers. This will be deeply discounted. No pressure, but if you are interested, I would appreciate your business.
I was on with Jim Polito who was sitting in his kitchen under self-quarantine because he recently traveled overseas. We discussed some Top Tips for Remote Working and Working From Home. So, here we go with Jim Polito.
For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com
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Automated Machine Generated Transcript:
Craig There is a special plug-in that goes into your browsers, which helps to improve the whole browser experience. You use less memory, you will use less battery if you're on a laptop, and maybe you're out a little bit. That's the kind of the scope of what we're doing. We're getting into security as well. I'm going to teach you the tools, techniques, and tactics that I use, Jim.
Craig This morning I was on with Jim Polito course, Craig Peterson here. And I spent a little time talking about the webinars, and what I have learned from more than 20 years of working from home and with my family. I will tell you the things that work for all of us. So listen in here we go.
Jim He is the man, and this is the guy you want to turn to in times like these. I'm talking about our tech talk guru, Craig Peterson. Good morning, Craig.
Craig Good Morning. I guess I am the man of the hour. I can't believe how many people have work from home questions.
Jim Listen, let's start by just letting everybody know at the end of this segment, you can get all of this information plus more. You can get on his list, which is an excellent thing, especially now. Because you will send great information along to people, and you won't try to sell them anything or anything else. It's just that's how it is. But that we'll talk about at the end, but you've got some webinars going on. Before we get to our topics at hand, you have a pretty significant announcement.
Craig Yeah, this is a very, very big thing. I think for so many people. We have, as you might know, I've been doing webinars for the FBI is infragard program. That's where The FBI works with critical infrastructure and critical businesses in several areas. Now, I guess based on what you were saying this morning. I've been doing these for quite a while. And the whole idea is to help businesses understand what they need to do. And we get some information from the FBI. They'll tell us stuff that they'll tell anybody, and then they keep everything that keeps us up at night, close to their chest. Yeah. Here's what I'm going to do. I have been doing webinars now for quite a few years, and we have some brand new ones. I have nine different remote work or work from home type of webinars coming up over the next two weeks. We're going delve into a different topic each day. I'm going to make them available to people who sign up. That is important as these are going to be LIVE. I will stay on and answer everybody's questions. The ones that I've done so far, they have been averaging about an hour and a half long. We're going to have one at 4 pm. Today, one at 9 pm tonight, and we're going to be talking about how to a special plug-in for your browsers, that helps to improve the whole browser experience. It will help you use less memory, you use less battery if you're on a laptop, and you step out for a little bit. That's the scope of what we're doing, and we will be getting into security as well. I'm going to teach you the tools, techniques, and tactics that I use, Jim. The way people sign up is they can just go to my website, Craig Peterson dot com slash Jim. There's a special sign-up there. Craig Peterson dot com slash Jim. It is just teaching and is free for everybody. Even though maybe you're a little bit older, you're not working anymore. Although aimed at remote workers, both for the business owner and the people working from home. If you're a little bit older, you're not working anymore, and you are still going to get a lot of benefit out of these webinars because you're going to learn a lot more about security. I'm going to give you all these free tools I use. We'll talk a little bit about some of the paid tools that we use, but it's all about remote working in this day and age.
Jim That's great. You know what I'll do, we always podcast this segment. And what I'll do is I'll put up a link in that podcast posting at WTAG dot com on the Jim Polito Show page. When I broadcast this later this morning, I'll put that link up so people can get it now. I used some of the information you sent me. I mean, all of it was fascinating. However, I want to zero in on one thing. The big gamble that tech companies are making right now.
As you know, they say necessity is the mother of invention. These companies must now take a more in-depth look at artificial intelligence. Not that companies aren't already using it, including our artificial intelligence right here at iHeart. But artificial intelligence in terms of these big tech companies, and it's kind of a gamble right now, why don't you explain that?
Craig Yeah, it is because their people, you know, they aren't able to go into work. We've been using it in the tech industry for quite a while. We have used it to work with foreign workers as well. That has been wonderful for them because it helps to move them up to the food ladder if you will by increasing their pay. You know, it used to be that we would always outsource to India and it was very cheap. Then India's wages now are almost on par depending on what type of work it is with US workers. Currently, India is outsourcing to China. It's great. It's been lifting all the boats in that ocean everybody has been doing a little bit better. But we're at the point now where we need to have some more advanced technology. We're talking about hundreds of hours worth of videos being uploaded to YouTube every minute. There is no way that you could hire enough people to review all of those as an example. So what we see now is an acceleration via this artificial intelligence type mechanism reviewing videos. We see our posts on Facebook, for instance, and you're having problems getting your advertising approved. BTW that is another reason to use iHeart to get your messages out, which I heard is also using AI to accept these ads. So, overall, this is the trend, it's going to be here it started before the whole Covid-19 virus thing. However, with many people quarantining, you can't find a laptop to buy anywhere in the known universe, because they are all gone. Many of these businesses now no longer have the workers that they used to have even. So they've turned more to artificial intelligence. That means that there are all kinds of false negatives about some of the stuff you're posting. Which means things you're posting may get blocked more often than usual. Things you post, videos you upload might not get approved. And this is an overall trend. You know, they call it artificial intelligence, Jim. But the way I've been looking at it is not even machine learning. It's just some heavy programming that looks for patterns looking for keywords that have been getting a little bit smarter as time goes on.
It's not like, like in science fiction movies, where artificial intelligence becomes self-aware. It is. I mean, frankly, what Tommy be our meteorologist does with the models is a form of artificial intelligence because the models continue to learn. They adapt and regurgitate what they learn. They're not self-aware. They're not reasoning they're doing what we have programmed them to do.
They're looking for pattern matches. That is what they're looking for, and you know what, with this coronavirus pandemic, the whole artificial intelligence pattern matching thing has been a huge win. We're able to run simulations. Not just against known drugs that a drug company might want to try but against basically every material and combination of materials and minerals and bacterium, etc., etc. Even those that we could even think of using. We can run the simulations inside these artificial bits of intelligence that have learned a little bit about these patterns. We see these types of vaccines and medications delivered in just an incredible time. Things that would take years are now taking hours literally, and we are moving towards the point very, very soon. We already have some of this where we will have drugs ready. These vaccines you name it made specifically for us. So there will be a Jim Polito pill the Jim Polito can take that will deal with all of the issues he has. That's all thanks to this artificial intelligence, this machine learning that's going on right now.
Jim I don't think people want to take the Jim Polito pill, to be honest with you. I understand the metaphor there, Craig, but I just you know, nobody wants to be a middle-aged chubby and loudmouth and be stupid when it comes to tech, right. We're talking with Craig Peterson, our tech talk guru. Artificial intelligence is a big tech gamble right now. His webinars, which you can sign up for from him, and at the end of his segment, and we're going to tell you how you can get all of this information from him.
Jim Craig, if I could just shift back, again, to working from home. I know you're going to discuss this in the webinars, and in the short time we have left, could you give me kind of just a brief bit of some of the things that you've learned over the 22 years of working from home, not because you had to, but because it worked for you?
Craig Yeah, it did. There are some basics that I have found work well for both my wife and I. Now I even have kids that work from home, too. In 22 years of working from home, the number one thing that I've learned is you have to have not just a separate space, but multiple separate areas. Most of us have various job functions that we're performing, and you need to have a different place for each job function, especially if you're kind of an entrepreneur or you're trying to start a home business. Now, this doesn't mean you have to have different rooms, don't get me wrong, but don't sit in that chair you use to watch TV. Or if you only have one chair, turn it around, and, you know, face a different window have different environments. That's number one. Number two is one that I found very, very helpful, and that is to use the Pomodoro Technique. We mentioned that last week, and that is to take 20 minutes and then a 10-minute break. So that you're very, very focused on it. You have to get up and walk around. I sit on a big balance ball, and I have a desk that goes up and down. I can be standing, and I can be sitting in a chair like I am right now. Or I can be on one of these balance balls. Because if you don't, and may not think of it but you have To get up, you have to keep moving. And then the third most important thing, again, not technology-wise, is that your family has to respect your workspace. Think of different ways you could do it. Most people, it's advised to dress up as you would usually for work. And if your family sees you in work clothes, they're supposed to leave you alone. But you know, the workaround I have on that that has worked exceptionally well for me, is when it's that break time when I've done my 20 minutes of hard work. Then a 10-minute break, I walk into the rest of the house, go to the kitchen, walk around, get a cup of water, and talk to the family. That way, they don't have to interrupt me when I'm working hard. And then the technology side, make sure you are safe, and I mean safe and so Friday, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. I'm going to be talking specifically about some important security things you have to be doing in the webinars. And I've got right I'm doing two today to Thursday to on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, all the way through next week because I want to help everybody because these tech issues on security just get so complicated so fast. Still, those are my tips right there, and they have gotten me a long way.
Jim I'll tell you, you know, the first day I did the show on the pajamas, but on the second day, I only thought about it. Now I'm up and dressed. You know, the thing is, I wear pretty much the same clothes to go to work that I do on the weekend. But no, I got up showered did the same thing that I would do. You know other than getting in the car and driving, everything I did was the same. I like you, take breaks during the commercials in our show when I don't have work to do. When I'm back in the studio, I walk around the building, you know I get out of the studio, and it refreshes my brain and resets it. Here it's perfect because I can get up from the table and the little broadcast area I have here. I can talk to Kathy, pet the dog, whatever, you know, that kind of stuff. It does help, but then I go back into the mode, and I'm in my little you know area here. It works. Look, it is time to get folks the immediate information. When I podcast, this will have a link, but you can give the link now to if you want. So, one thing to get on Craig's email list, you text My name Jim, J-I-M to this number.
Craig Here 855-385-5563. So let's just Jim 2855385 5553
Jim All right, standard data and tax rates apply. Then, Craig, I'm going to put this with the podcast the address for the to be able to find out about the webinars you're doing for working at home. All right, there you go. It's Craig Peterson, of course. Craig Peterson dot com slash, Jim.
Craig That's the only place you'll find it right now you guys are getting a heads up. You're going to be some of the first ones to be able to get in and ask questions. I am not advertising it generally right now. It's because I want to start small and help people as much as I can. Craig Peterson dot com slash Jim.
Jim Craig, you're the best. We appreciate it. Especially in these times, folks you want to get on Craig's list. I don't mean the website. I mean, Craig Peterson, and if you can, attend some of those webinars. Craig, I will talk to you next week. Stay safe.
Craig All right. Thanks. Take care. Bye-bye.
Jim All right, and I will podcast that this morning. A final word when we return. You're listening to the Jim Polito show from my kitchen with pops. It is your safe space. The Jim Polito show, where we serve hot drinks.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
---
More stories and tech updates at:
www.craigpeterson.com
Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating:
www.craigpeterson.com/itunes
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www.twitter.com/craigpeterson
For questions, call or text:
855-385-5553
Welcome! ย
Today's show will cover all the different aspects of remote work.ย During the Coronavirus Pandemic, social distancing, and self and mandated quarantines there is a lot of technology to talk about.ย If you are not on my email list, sign up at Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe. It is a busy show -- so stay tuned.
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Automated Machine Generated Transcript:
Hey, hello, and welcome everybody to the show. Of course, we put this out on as a podcast as well and all of your favorite podcasting sites, and we're heard right here on WGAN every Saturday from one until 3 pm. Of course, I'm on with Ken and Matt for their morning drive show, which is every Wednesday at 738. Well, their morning drive shows every day. As you might expect, we have a lot of coronavirus related stuff today. But this is not going to be so much on the medical side. It is going to be more on the - How do you work from home? How do you make your business a success, when you have many of your workers who are out for whatever reason. We'll be talking about the technologies of working from home, as well as what the FCC is doing to help make our lives a little bit easier in this set Coronavirus match. You might have seen and how viruses in and of themselves are kind of a big problem. If he were to ask me, we're going to talk about this massive Atlanta based money laundering operation that the FBI brought down. A colossal business email compromised bust that also brought down dozens of different bad guys. What they did and how they're trying to take advantage of the coronavirus to steal even more money from you. Some free upgrades that have come from Comcast and T Mobile. We probably we'll talk a little bit about what WebEx is doing for us as well when it comes to free conferencing systems and team systems for 90 days or more. We will discuss how the more secure businesses out there are making it very difficult, in fact, almost impossible, in some cases, absolutely impossible to work from home and some advice from my wife and me. I've been working at home for more than 20 years, what have we learned over those years, and what have other people been saying that I thought might make a reasonable discussion. Now you'll find all of this, of course, on my website at Craig Peterson dot com, we try and post all of these articles up for everybody to be able to see. And we'll also be talking about this a little bit more in some of our webinars. You might have attended my webinars this week. Last Sunday, I had a great webinar well attended. We covered a lot of ground frankly, about the whole work from home thing and VPNs and some of the technology you should and should not be using. We're probably this week going to start up this coming week and have some specialized ones as well. We're going to be talking about VPNs, the hardware and software you need, and the routers in your home office. Some of the plugins you should be using and what you can do about DNS. So that'll all be coming up this week. There's only one way to find out about this and to get registered. These are free and are essential for you as a worker, as a business owner, or as a manager. All of those people you're going to benefit a lot by checking in with me on these webinars. So how do you get on? Easy just go to Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe. I am not one of these spammers. I'm not one of these internet marketers. I haven't been in the online space now for many, many decades. And it's kind of scary to think about blizzards four-plus decades actually in the whole networking space, and the computer security space for this as well. So I guess you could say I've seen it all, at least most of it. And so I've been taking questions from everybody. What do you want? What don't you want to see? If you do sign up for the list, by the way, I've got three little surprises that will come your way some great gifts of information that are available for you just for the clicking and signing up. Again Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe, keep an eye on your mail mailbox because I will be letting you know about these other webinars that are coming up this next week.
You know, being the tech guy that I am. Sometimes, I think it's kind of like the cobblers kids without any shoes or repaired shoes. In my case, it was ill-repaired technology and of course, when you needed it, you know just isn't there for you. This week, the problem I've been having has been with my email. If you responded to me, I have to apologize because my email system has not been working correctly. You already know I have thousands of people on my email lists, and I've been trying to keep everybody up to date on Saturday mornings, you get my special emails about what the news is this week. Then pretty much once a month, more or less a week after Microsoft's Patch Tuesday, I tell you what the most critical patches are to install and apply and give you all that information. If you haven't caught that one yet, its because we haven't sent it out, however, we have the very first of that edition all set and ready to go, and we'll probably be sending that out pretty darn soon. And what we're trying to do is save you a lot of time, Microsoft had over 100 critical patches this week, and there's no way that a regular company can keep up with all of these patches. So what do you do? That's what these exclusive newsletters are for, telling you here are the most critical ones, the ones that are in the wild right now. Bad guys are using them. That's easy for them to use to get into your system. So How can you protect yourself? All of that stuff in that newsletter? So I think it's going to be handy. It's one of the things we've heard the most complaints about from people is just what patches Do I need to apply because you can't possibly patch them all. I also had a great discussion this week that I want to bring up while we're talking about patches. And this is for the listener, in fact, in Maine, and a business owner, small business owner, and he is using Android devices sticking with the Google devices. Google makes a phone called a pixel. It's not necessarily the best of the Android devices out there in many measures. But the good news about it is the Google does release updates for it, and those updates can cover all of the critical patches that you need. But the point I made to him, and I want to make sure it is clear for everybody who's listening is that most of the vendors In the Android world do not support vices devices for more than two years. So you only get two years' worth of patch support. And that includes Samsung. And it frankly, if I were buying an Android device, I would probably buy the Samsung Galaxy more or less top of the line, because I know they'll be supporting that for two years. So first of all, check when the device came out. So if you're buying a new Samsung Galaxy phone, and it came out eight months ago, remember, that's eight months off of the two years' worth of support. So you're going to get what a year and four months' worth of support, hopefully, out of Samsung, and then after that, the problem is you're not going to be able to get patches anymore, and that means your security is going to go right down the drain. Keep that in mind. So our basic rule of thumb when it comes to Android devices, if you're going to buy them, you need to buy a new phone every year to make sure That you're able to get the updates. If you are using an Apple phone, you're good to go for five years, five years. So again, the same trick applies. When did Apple released that phone, and you're getting going to get support for five years from when it was released. So with the Apple phones, we advise every four years or just keep an ear to the ground.
Apple's good about not only giving you the updates, and automatically installing them, but also having them not break your phones as well as letting you know when the end of life is for each device. We recently saw the end of life for the iPhone six. The six S is going to be coming up later on this year. So you know, if you have a success, you're probably going to have to replace it. Then the sevens will probably be good until next year. They just last, right, and Apple supports them and keeps all of these security patches up-to-date, which is super duper exciting. For us, particularly in this day and age, one of the things I mentioned this week on one of these webinars was, hey guys huge deal here.
Because what we're finding is that we're at war and you may not realize it, they're certainly not talking about it on TV. And I'm not talking about coronavirus. I'm talking about war with real live enemies. Just like in the old days, we've got Iran we've got China, and we've got Russia all attacking us actively attacking us. But this is a war in cyberspace. We're not attacking them anywhere like they're attacking us. And it isn't just bad guys living in those countries. We're talking about a war that has been declared by and is officially being run by their government. Now we have retaliated for some of these cyber strikes. Still, it is a real war, and we can expect more of it. We can expect it to increase here with the coronavirus spread because we're all kind of distracted, aren't we? From soup to nuts, the military is distracted. So we have to make sure that we are covering ourselves with security, and that's part of what I will cover in these webinars coming up.
I begin with the basics of remote work, including what to look out for and what you need to know. In these webinars, I always answer all the questions everybody has so that you can get the right answers. And I am just you know, it's content-rich, where we're, we're answering your questions, we're giving you all the information we can, and I'm going to be selling here probably in the next week or two, a more advanced course. That does a deep dive step by step all of the tactics and things you need to do and how to do it to lock down your Windows computers, lock down your network, your Wi-Fi, etc. I've heard from so many people that it's confusing going online, searching Google trying to find the information, and no one has it appropriately organized because everybody has their little bit. So we're going to be doing a full paid course on that one. It is for anybody who has to maintain computers, primarily for businesses, where you have to keep these things secure. It will help you make sure the security is going to work for you. Okay, so to subscribe, make sure you get on those lists by going to Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe. And when we get back, we're going to be talking about working from home some of the things to consider from the tech side. You're listening to Craig Peterson on WGAN.
Hi, everybody, Craig Peterson back here. I was feeling kind of punky this weekend. If anybody else kind of felt that way. I don't think it was the coronavirus or Covid-19. I have been, maybe about a week feeling run down. I was kind of moving slowly, and it was not much fun, but I'm feeling so much better right now. That's why I didn't have as many of these webinars last week that I wanted to have. I was going to try and do like one a day, but I ended up with more like one last week. Next week is going to be bigger better. I am feeling well. We're going to talk a lot more. Now that you guys have had a little experience working at home and answer even more questions than we could have answered before now that you kind of know what you don't know right a little bit. Get you safe, get your safe at home and get you're using the right tools. We have even put together a little survey to help you check your preparedness to work remotely. We're going to be releasing information about some of the tools and hopefully help you find some tools that are going to help you at home help you with everything from efficiency, through security at with your work at home setups. And we're we set up a Facebook group, and I'm not sure if we're going to use it right away. You know, when I surveyed you guys a couple of weeks ago, there was only I think there's only like one or 2% of people that wanted to do these lives on Facebook. zero percent, by the way, that wanted to do them on YouTube. And the vast majority of people wanted to do regular webinars, so we did it on zoom. I may use WebEx as well depends how many people sign up because my zoom only supports 100 people, my WebEx, which is what I've used for Some of my bigger training supports up to 10,000 people. So we'll you know, we'll see. But you have to sign up. Just go to Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe. And that will also be sending you a few really kind of cool cheat sheets and things that I think you could use. And so all of this is free, absolutely free. And then you will find out about the webinars that I'm doing this week as we do some deep dive webinars as well this week, so it should be a great week, coming up this week. All right, so let's get right down to it. Now. Our first topic really for this week. Well, maybe our next one, right. But this is from the verge. And Kim Lyons wrote this, and it's about how to work from home. And I when I did my surveys of you guys who are on my email list this last week, actually we can half ago, I found that the majority of you who went to the webinar that I held Last Sunday, said that you had never really worked from home before, that this was the very first time. So congratulations to you, I suspect you're like most of these people. We were able to answer all of their questions in the webinar. That's what they're for is to get the information out and answer your questions. It can be kind of fun, and it is kind of different. Many people are just sitting at home in their pajamas and till noon. Now it's time to get back to work because we're looking at an extended period. If you're in the 80-year-old range, even above 70, many of us are still working right. Above 70 years old, you are in the kind of that critical age range where the recommendations are that for the next three months, you need to limit going outside and meeting with people heavily. If you are above 60 or above now, they are warning us that again, and you need to be very, very careful. Although most of these deaths are people who are 80 and older, anybody with the compromised system must be careful, and down till about 25 years of age. So if you are one of these say diabetics or you have emphysema, COPD, or many underlying illnesses, you've got to be very, very careful. So for you, this might be an extended period, we might be tar talking, you know what to see here, March to April, May, mid-June, July, maybe even August that you're going to want to be working from home. So there are a few ways that you can be productive at home, and you know, again, we go into a lot of detail in the webinars. It is just a quick radio hit right today. So, Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe to make sure You're signed up. If you're planning to work from home for an extended period, here are some things that you might want to consider. Remember, too, that the best ways to work at home are going to vary from person to person. What you have to do is figure out what helps you to stay focused and to separate your work life from your home life. And this is something that frankly, I have had a hard time doing. Because you already know I give away a lot of time. And I'm doing that right now too. You'll probably see another email from me this week, where we're volleying to volunteering to spend 15 minutes half an hour with you on the phone to help you with whatever setup you have. And we can even do remote tech support for you. Anything that you need help with, and we're just volunteering this for free for people. Again, you can just email me at Craig Peterson dot com. If you want some more information if you're having trouble if you're trying to make this work me at Craig Peterson dot com, and you're just having trouble with that. But the problem I've had over the last couple of decades of working at home is that separating my work life from my home life. I get up in the morning, and one of the first things I do is I pull out that laptop, and I start checking my email, I'm checking my client's systems, I'm checking our systems, I'm checking on the VPN that clients are using. I'm checking the firewall logs to from our clients as well as for us. Just see if anyone has been trying to hack in. Then we have a look at the alerts that have come up from those firewalls, and other you know, emergencies that might be pending, and solve all of those. Then I get up, and I do my running and some weightlifting down in the basement. I have this great treadmill that one of my daughters had bought for herself. It is a Livestrong brand, from back when Lance Armstrong wasn't a bad word and is a great treadmill. Then I go up, and I shower, and I get back to work. I work all day and then when the evening comes, and we might turn on a TV show while I am, What? Yes, while I'm working on my laptop, and taking care of things for people. That's what I do. Right? I love helping people. I remember when I was about 20 years old, maybe it was 19. And one of my coaches told me, he said he sat us all down. He said I want you to write your obituary right now. You're 20 years old, give or take, write your obituary. What Would you like your headstone to say, try and get it that short? Just a headstone? So we're not talking about multiple paragraphs, you're just talking about multiple words, frankly, what would you like it to say? And I thought about that seriously thought about it. You know what, it has been the mantra for my life here for another 40 years after that, and that is he helped others. That's what I wanted on my headstone. And that's what I've done, right? My wife and I, we've raised together our eight kids, we homeschooled them, all the way up to college. They've gone on to have just extraordinary lives. I still have two of them working with me, which is a real blessing. It's been wonderful. So I haven't solved this problem of separating my home life from my business life because, for me, they've been one-in-the-same. There might be something I need to do with my family during the day. And so I will do it. Because that's the most important thing to me, there might be something that comes up for a client, and I might have to work at it even overnight all night long to get them to the point where they have a smooth operation the very next day at work. That's what I'll do. That's what my family will do. That's what we do for our customers and friends and have forever. And I don't know if that's a bad thing or not, you know if you're going to be doing that if you don't want to do that, but you have to make the decision. Where are you going to draw the line? Okay, we're going to continue this discussion when we get back after the break. We're going to talk about some other things you should be looking at when we talk when we're thinking about the physical side of working from home. You're listening to Craig Peterson right here on WGAN, and on the podcast and streaming pretty much everywhere. Stick around. We'll be right back.
Hello, everybody, welcome back, Craig Peterson here, on WGAN, and of course, online streaming sites everywhere. Just look for me, Craig Peterson, on your favorite streaming app. I listen to podcasts all the time and use them. You know, I mentioned in the last segment that I spent some time in the morning every day on the treadmill, trying to keep my heart rate up into that right range and double-check with your doctor if you have a question about what that range is. It used to be kind of your maximum heart rate was 200 minus your age. I'm not sure what it is. Now, I've heard people say it was like 220 or whatever. But double-check, double-check, double-check. You don't want to stress your heart. I've been amazed at how well I have done for me. I've been doing this daily running, walking, jogging, kind of a combination in terms you know, again, intermittent. You know, go fast, going slow well relatively slow. I started this before Christmas last year. So I've been doing it now for three months. A solid three months, and it has made a fantastic difference. I'm surprised how quickly my heart rate drops now after I've been exercising and how not out of breath I am. Currently, my heart rate is in a healthy heart range. It's been just phenomenal for me. Some people are saying that it does help. I think it's Dr. Fung who says to get your core body temperature up because when it comes to some of these viruses, and it is harder for them to live in heat. There is nothing like a little hard exercise to make that happen. Get that old cardio going. Alright, so back to what we should be doing on the physical side when it comes to working from home. I have a separate workspace, and I'm blessed to have it. We built this house, 25-30 years ago, now. When we designed the house, we created an office off of the back. It reminds me I'm thinking back of that I had two T-1 data lines in here, which was like crazy fast, who could use so much data? It cost about $5,000 a month. Can you believe that back in that day and age, it was rather expensive? Now we've got three and a half gigabits worth of data up and down here. Because, as you know, I run all types of pieces of training and everything right out of here. It has been phenomenal. It's so much cheaper. It's like a 10th of the price of what it used to be for those two T-1 lines, and I have way way more bandwidth, and it is a lot faster, a lot cheaper. I do have that physically separate workspace, but it isn't necessary. You don't need a dedicated office. And I remember thinking that I did and I went out, and I said, you know, I'm not going to rent space for my company per se, like go out and rent this office and have room for Secretary and other people or whatever. And I went to one of these rental things where you can get space as you need it. I went to Regis, so I went to, and we got an office, and we used it rarely, right because it was home. Why not work at home because this is remote work, right? I was remotely working doing stuff for clients. I found it was such a pain to go there, and then you have the office space to maintain, but again, I have a physical office off the back of the house, which is great. What you might need to do is to find a room with a door that closes. In many cases where you have a much smaller living space, that could be impossible, right? What doors do you have? You have closets, and you have the bathroom, maybe you have a bedroom door, maybe you have, you know, the living space and the bedroom space all in one. And, heck, I've lived in those spaces before myself. Here's what you should do. You need to have a space that's dedicated for you to work, and that can just be a corner of the room. That can be a chair that you the chair that you have that you turn around to a specific angle. A small desk set up in a corner, a table a folding table that you pull out a laptop, But that you put on the end of the kitchen table, anything like that, so that you have a space that you go to that is prepared for you to work. And the idea behind this is a fascinating psychological principle that when you have a physical area that you go to that is set up for doing a certain type of work, and your body will go into that mode. It's kind of like when you go to bed at night, and you should not be doing what I do. I don't do this at night, I do in the morning, but sitting there with your laptop or sitting there with your cell phone and doing stuff on it. Your bedroom is for sleeping and maybe one or two other activities. That is so that your brain gets trained that when you go into your bedroom, and you lay on your bed, it says, Oh, it's time to go to sleep. And you then go to sleep. It's the same sort of thing. You're Going with you've got that laptop at the same end of the kitchen table, your brain says, Oh, I'm going to work now. You don't want to use a place like your bedroom or the couch, Chesterfield. sofa, whatever you call it. It should be a place that is not used for relaxation but used only for work. Now, the other trick is to train other members of your household to understand that when you are in this space, I am working. You should not bother me. You shouldn't be coming to me with questions, etc. and let them know that hey, you are going to be around during coffee breaks if you will. And you'll be glad to take their questions, and you'll be glad to do the "honey-do's" then, you know those little things that your husband or your wife wants you to do. It's going to take a little bit of trial and error to figure out what's going to work For you, but it is going to be important.
Some people find that one of the hardest parts of working from home is the part that I explained to the very beginning of this discussion, and that is that you can end up working 24 seven. In reality, the best way to do it is to start work around the same time every day ended around the same time, take your breaks, including meals about the same time, every day. Again, don't eat in the work areas, don't sleep in them, don't lounge in them. But, you know, I don't intend to eat at my desk, and I do that less lately now that I've been thinking more about it and thinking critically about it. I try and go to the kitchen to eat, and that does make a difference. You also need to be careful about kind of stir crazy. So you should get up every once in a while, walk outside if you can, I use something called the Pomodoro Technique. I use a timer in which I use a timer that says, okay, you're doing 20 minutes' worth of work right now. So what are you going to do? What's your goal? What are you going to accomplish in this 20 minutes, you set that little timer.
I use software for it. But in retrospect, one of those little kitchen timers, you know, the little tomato things where you, you twist the top, and now you've got your 20-minute timer going would be more than enough. That might be kind of nice because it sits there going tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, reminding you that you have work to do right. Now the other side of this is feeling a little isolated at times. We'll talk about some of the applications that you might want to use to collaborate and work together. Also, other rules that I think are important for us as we work from home. It's a little different if you're trying to start an at-home business, I think most of these rules still apply. Still, it's a little bit different than working from home for an employer who expects specific results at certain times and expects certain types of unification. So we'll talk a bit about that when we get back as well. You're listening to Craig Peterson. Make sure that you go to Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe right now. Craig Peterson, that's S-O-N slash subscribe and get on some of these webinars I'm holding this week, and we'll be right back on WGAN.
Hi guys, welcome back. Craig Peterson here on WGAN. You know you can get me as well every Wednesday morning on with Ken and Matt at about 738. Last week I got bumped by the governor, but you know what the heck? It's an excellent way to get my segment bumped, I guess. Usually, every Wednesday at 7:38 am with Ken and Matt, and of course, online, you can catch me on pretty much every streaming platform out there. And make sure you join me for these webinars we're having over the next couple of weeks I'm going to be going into more detail answering every question you guys have on working from home, the technology to do it, the ways to do it securely.
We're opening up our calendar for people who need some help with their businesses. How to get this working securely, using the existing equipment we have, and maybe some free software to get my people who are working at home, working efficiently and effectively, so I'm going to be doing some webinars on that as well. Let's finish up the topic of workspaces when you're working from home. One of the essential things to also consider is, if you do have enough room while you're working from home to have more than one space, then you can do something quite useful, very efficient, and that is you use different areas for different work tasks. So, for instance, in my case, I am running the business paying bills, depositing checks, doing all that sort of thing. So I have one space where I do that. I have another area where I'm at right now that I use when I'm doing my radio show, television interviews, running webinars, that's another space. I have yet another area when I'm reading or trying to do some studying. I have a space for meditation. All I'm doing is moving around in one room. That's all you need to do to program your brain. When I am in this position, when I'm sitting in this chair facing this direction, I'm doing this. Then with the Pomodoro Technique, where you're spending 20-minutes doing something and then taking a 10-minute break, I always get up, I walk out of the area entirely. I might talk to the family, get myself a glass of water or a cup of coffee, whatever it might be, and do a little socializing and help with whatever needs doing. Then I go back to my space. I get back to work. It's a unique way of working. If you do have people around that can help you with feeling a sense of social connection. But if you're working remotely, you can feel isolated at times. As part of your routine, you're going to want to try and interact with your co-workers regularly. It's kind of like the old water bottle, where you all kind of meet around there and chat and talk and what did you do last weekend? You know, don't feel bad about talking that way. We all need that even if you're an introvert. We need to have relationships with other people. We need to talk to other people. What we do in the office is we use one of these team apps. Now the one we use is the only one that's secure for doing all of this. That is Cisco WebEx, and they have different levels. We use the most secure level. Now, if you are a doctor, I've got to point out right now that there are some temporary rules in place that's part of this whole Covid-19 or Wuhan virus thing that allows you to use things like Slack and Skype, neither of which are secure. Keep that in mind. Those rules will change again, and HIPAA regulations will not allow you to use them. We use WebEx. You can get it for free right now for 90 days. It is phenomenal. It isn't just for meetings, and you know where you've got the camera on your laptop or your computer, and you are having a remote meeting, and you can see everyone, which is wonderful. But it is also for the team collaboration-side of things, where you can have rooms where you can all chat with each other. Now, one of the other advantages of using Cisco WebEx is over everything else is that it provides any level of security that allows people who are outside of your organization as part of a team. So we haven't set up, so some of our vendors are in certain team rooms, and we can talk to them our customers are in individual team rooms so we can talk to them. Now, we have the whole thing fully integrated with our phone system as well. If people call, it drops the transcription of that voice message they might have left into a room for so we can see it all in Cisco teams. If you want, you can go and set it up yourself. But, if you need a little help, or here's the other side. If you purchase it through us, we can set you up with a more advanced demo than you can get on the website. So again, you can just email me at Craig Peterson dot com if you are interested. I'd appreciate it. You know, we don't make any money off of it from the demo. Hopefully, you're going to continue to use it, and we make a couple of bucks a month from it. We can provide you a little bit of support and a little bit of training. It's a good thing, just email me at Craig Peterson dot com, and we can help you with that. We also integrate things like WebEx into large phone systems. It's actually what the military uses, and what the White House uses. They have some very, very secure systems as well, depending on what you need. Keep in mind all of the CMMC regulations that are going into effect in June. If you have to have it for compliance, CMMC, HIPAA, high tech, etc. It is the system for you. You can get the necessary set up for free by going to WebEx dot com. However, if you want a little bit more, I'd appreciate it. If you'd come through my company, Mainstream. Do me a favor and just reach out to me. That's me at Craig Peterson dot com. My team and I can help you out there with getting it all set up and Mgetting you in the place you need to be. So there you go chat over these messaging apps, hold meetings with them. The one you might want to look at, as I said, WebEx is the only one integrated and completely secure at the levels we can provide to you. You cannot get it on their general website. You have to get it from a Cisco partner like my company. Slack is great, and I have used it a lot in the past, but it is just not secure. It is not even close to providing the features that WebEx provides. You might look at Zoom, although it is terrifically insecure, but not as vulnerable as Skype is. But Zoom is quite bad. They made some major design decisions that opened up security holes you can drive a Mack truck through. It is just crazy. I do use Zoom but never for applications where security is an issue. If you've been on some of my webinars, some get hosted on zoom. Mainly because a lot of people use it and are familiar with how it works. I'm not so worried about security on Zoom for my webinars.The problem with the Zoom from a security standpoint is Zoom has a back door. They punched out of the network to allow them to control some of the aspects of your zoom conferences. That why we don't use or allow its use in any of our clients that have CMMC or high tech restrictions. That is a big No-No. They recently got slapped by the regulators. Check these things out. If you are using Microsoft Office, three 365, they have some collaboration tools too. I'm going to talk more about the collaboration tools and my webinars again this week, and we covered some last week. I have not made replays available of these webinars because I want you to attend them live if you can. I think coming up, and I will make replays available. So if you register, I will let you watch a replay. But I want you guys on these webinars. I know 70% of people say they will never attend a webinar and never sign up for a webinar. These are not high-pressure pitch event events. They are where I'm trying to help you out trying to get you going and trying to answer your questions. Okay. So make sure you do sign up. Now the last rule and the rule that I violate most often is trying to end work at the same time every day. So obviously there's going to be times when there are deadlines or project needs after hours, attention. There are times where I mentioned that I would work 24 hours, I've gone three days straight to try and solve a problem which we didn't cause, but the client needed to have solved. We stepped in and worked with other vendors, and we got the problem solved. In most situations after 10 pm work, email can wait until the following day for a response. Remember when we're at the end these work at home environments, that some people are going to start work at 6 am, some at nine, some at noon, and complete their jobs 8 to 10 hours later. They might be on a schedule where an 8 pm email goes out from them. We all project right, and they're going to project, and they're going to kind of expect you to be working the same hours they're working, although that's not necessarily the case. Even though they may sound a little anxious, get them used to the fact You're working from eight till five. And that's it. I'll get back to you tomorrow. Don't even respond to the email that comes in at 10 pm. I think that's important for a lot of people's sanity. For me, I just enjoy this so much. If I did not get paid to do it, I'd still do it. As you know, I do a lot of it and don't get paid for it. I guess that is a testament to the bottom line. Wow, the hour is up, I can't believe it. We're going to the top of the next hour. When we get back, we're going to talk about what you need to think about from your ISP, your internet service provider. That's how you get your internet. So what are some of the considerations here? What has the FCC done this week? What are some of the major providers doing as well? To make our lives and work from home a little bit easier, and don't forget, you know, I'm going to repeat this, sign up, sign up now so you can get all of this information. You can find out about my webinars that we're going to be doing some of the classes all of the free stuff, I want to help you out. Craig peterson.com slash subscribe. That's why I've been on the air now for about 25 years, just trying to help people understand what's going on in the security realm, the technology realm, and we need to understand it right now. So stick around. We're going to talk about that ISP and what that means to you. What are the things you need to consider and subscribe to Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe, and you're listening to me on WGAN and, of course, and online at Craig Peterson dot com.
Hey guys, welcome back. Craig Peterson here, of course on WGAN online at Craig Peterson calm. We had millions of people this week, working from home for the first time connecting to their offices trying to get things done trying to do a little collaboration and getting themselves in a little trouble as well. We have seen a significant increase in security problems because of people working at home. But I guess that shouldn't be a huge surprise to anybody that listens here. I have already done some webinars about working from home. I explained the pros and cons of working from home, and some of the technology required to be secure at home. And we're going to be doing more of those free webinars this coming week. We're going to start getting a little more long tail, if you will, drilling down deeper into some topics like VPNs, what are the best ones to use? When do they work? Well, when don't they work? We're going to be talking about your firewalls at the house and the office, and should you be linking them together? How can you split your network? When should you? Why should you, we're going to be covering in a lot more detail some of the questions that we've had popped up and people have been asking us. Then, of course, as always, we will take all of your questions. If you don't want to attend a webinar, if you have made the oath of never attend webinars, then you can always email me just me at Craig Peterson dor com or respond to one of the emails I send out about these webinars. If there are enough people interested, maybe what we should do is take it and get a webinar transcribed for you, maybe some screenshots. Perhaps you can even suggest what might work for you if you don't want to attend a webinar. But they have been very well attended. I've been quite pleased with that. That's after only making one announcement this last week. There was one email that went out is a little bit more than a week ago. I've been working with those people that responded. There are a lot of people I know that want to know more. So make sure you pass it along as well. If you have friends or family or other co-workers that have questions or if your boss has questions. If they're not letting you work from home and you want to work from home, make sure your boss gets on one of these webinars as well. And you can sign up to find out more about them. Just go to Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe, and we will be sending you all have that information. As part of signing up, you'll get some different cheat sheets. I think I have included three different cheat sheets. Some of them are multi-page, to help you with your online security, which is, of course, very, very important. We see an uptick in business, email compromises, and other things that are out there. We'll tell you a bit about that in the next segment. We will discuss what is going on with the whole Coronavirus and its ties into security problems. Well, we have had our president deregulating like crazy now for a week or two. Some people would say that our president is stupid. I think it's a brilliant thing to get rid of some of this regulation. You know, we don't live in a socialist country. However, we have many of the problems present in socialist countries. It can take years to get anything through these vast bureaucracies. Bureaucracy has a mind of their own, whether it's socialist, or in our case, a more of a free-market society. Cutting through the red tape meant this last week that they made some changes at the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission. Our FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, has done some amazing things so far with making it just so much more streamlined than smooth out items for customers. He got rid of some of the crazy stuff that was in the works previously, which would have increased at the internet expense for everybody. There are so many crazy things going on in increased regulation. The FCC has been putting pressure on internet service providers. These are the companies you're familiar Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon, all of your phone carriers. With everybody using smartphones now that we have people who are working from home. So one of my daughters, for instance, works in a call center. And what they have done is sent home their call center people with laptops, that they then connect up to the internet. And in this case, it was a hard-wired internet that you needed to have because she's in the financial services arena. And of course, right, it's my house. So, of course, we have Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, in fact, gigabit for her out to the internet, no problem. And so she hooked up, and she's able to get onto the systems at work, but the way it works With her for the call center and this is very common for call center people working at home or out of the office is the call center software placed a phone call to her cell phone. So now her T Mobile cell phone is going to be racking up thousands of minutes. That could be a problem.
So the FCC has been putting pressure on internet service providers and these phone companies etc. to do a couple of things. All of the major ISPs are committed and have pledged to waive late fees and keep customers connected when they miss payments due to this coronavirus pandemic. Now, of course, I get a little bit concerned about what happens if you miss payments for two months or three months? Because you just don't have the income, right? You lost your job. Maybe you were getting paid hourly piecemeal work whatever You don't have a regular paycheck, so you're not getting unemployment. Now you've got three months' worth of bills. The coronavirus is declared, you know, over or was victorious. So whatever the endpoint is on this thing, which is always a problem, right? It's like we go to war. And so how do we, how do we know that we've succeeded in that, but anyways, it comes, and now you have a three months payment to make, or they're going to catch off. So hopefully, that's not going to happen. They call this the keep Americans connected pledge. And we'll see, the FCC has not been able to convince these internet service providers to waive their data caps during the pandemic, but some of them may end up doing that. Home internet mobile providers that sign this pledge include all tests at TNT CenturyLink charter, Comcast Cox, frontier media comm sprint, T Mobile track phone US Cellular, Verizon, Windstream, and dozens of other small ones. Here's the pledge itself. Number one, not terminate service to any residential or Small business customers' because of their inability to pay their bills due to disruptions caused by the Coronavirus pandemic. Number two waive any late fees that any residential or small business customers incur because of their economic circumstances related to the Coronavirus pandemic, you know, how are you going to prove this stuff to these guys? Number three, open its Wi-Fi hotspots to any American who needs them. So that is actually that third one is kind of handy. Because I know a lot of people have over the years jumped onto their neighbor's Wi-Fi service unbeknownst to their neighbor, right? They were over at their house one time and got the password and continued to use it. Well, for instance, with Comcast, if you see an Xfinity Wi-Fi anywhere, and they are pretty much everywhere you see an Xfinity Wi-Fi, you can now hop on and use it for free. Which is when frankly pretty good for people. The FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said I don't want any American consumers experiencing hardships because of the pandemic to lose connectivity. It's a good thing that they're stepping up, and it's going to help maintain this social distancing. He also called these broadband providers to relax or data cap policies. But we'll see if they do the pledge doesn't require that. at&t said that it's waiving home internet data caps. So that's a good thing. And see overcharges are for raising profit, so they're not going to do that Comcast had not promised as of this last week anyway when I did some research on it. He's also asking telephone carriers to waive long-distance and overage fees. And even that ISP says surf schools and libraries should work with them on remote learning opportunities. So this is all excellent stuff, right? Up and restriction. So some of these companies have automatically Comcast doubled the amount of bandwidth available to some customers, other customers increased the bandwidth by 50%, which is good. That's going to help from working from home. Remember, and you've got upstream and downstream bandwidth. If you're working from home, that upstream might be the killer for you. So we'll see what happens here. The FCC has done some things that pushed them in the right direction. You know there are both pros and cons to all of this, as there always is. Now, we have coming up this week, several webinars, free webinars, I'm going to be doing deep dives, these are live. I'm answering all of your questions in real-time. You are going to want to attend these, believe me, whether you're a home user business user, whether you're working from home,
or not lots of great information. I'm taking my decade's worth of experience and putting it out there for you. I'm going to have some of my team members on these as well to answer questions that maybe go a little more detailed or, you know, are out of my bailiwick. But all of that can only be found one way, and that's if you're on my email list. I do not hound you. I do not annoy you. But you have to sign up Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe. That's Craig Peterson with an o dot com slash subscribe. Stick around.
Welcome back, everybody. Craig Peterson here. Hey, if you missed that URL to sign up and get all those free cheat sheets and to find out about our exclusive webinars during the coming week. Make sure you subscribe that URL is Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe, Craig just like a town C-R-A-I-G and Peterson P-E-T-E-R-S-O-N dot com slash subscribe, all lowercase. You can get on to my email list. You'll also be getting my weekly newsletter that includes the recap of the top tech stories of the week. We have a new newsletter that we've put together, and I'm going to start publishing that explicitly goes through what the most critical patches are that you need to apply. So that comes out monthly. It's kind of coordinated with Microsoft's Patch Tuesday, comes out about a week later is what our plan is. And that gives us a chance to analyze the patches like this last month, and they had more than 100 high severity patches they wanted to have you apply. If you want to know what are the ones I have to worry about, although this is for you, so you'll get that as well. And you will have the opportunity to sign up for all of these free webinars, learn about different pieces of training, webinars, pop-ups that we have kind of everything all rolled into one. So make sure you check that out and sign up Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe. So let's get into our next article about the Coronavirus maps. I got one of these weeks ago, and it was an email sent out to the media. Come check this out. We've put together this new map. And at the time, I didn't think twice about it. I do have multiple layers of security on this network and multiple-layers of protection on my Mac as well. I clicked on it, right, duh. And I was taken to a site that did have a map. I was lucky because I did have the advanced malware protection, the AMP stack from Cisco on my Mac, and it was all appropriately caught by the firepower firewall.
I think it is what found it at the network edge. It saw it and what it was doing and stopped it immediately. Even this spread of coronavirus you want to call it Covid-19, which is similar to the SARS. Coronavirus, also known as Wuhan virus, which is where it started. We've got, you know Lyme disease because it began in Lyme, Connecticut, SARS, you know, all of these diseases because of the rivers, they were first found out and stuff, but whatever, this Cova 19, we'll just call it that, which is the disease. But the bad guys are using this as an opportunity to spread malware and to launch cyber attacks. They were fast about doing that.
There's a threat analysis report that was released by this company called reason cybersecurity. They had a good look at this to get an idea of what's going on. They found a file called Coronavirus map.com.xe. Yeah, how's that for common right.com.xe, which is where they will try and get you to download it thinking it's an executable. That could be helpful, helpful for you. But in fact, it's not. But there are a lot of people who have downloaded it. I'm looking right now at a table showing where downloads are occurring. What's going on? How many engines detect it. And here's an example of how useless antivirus software is nowadays. As of now, now, this is about two weeks that this particular piece of malware has been in the wild, about two weeks 58 out of the 72 engines that they tested over virus total, only 58 of these antivirus engines even detect it as being a problem. Ours identified it about two weeks ago. So you know, again, more reason not to trust antivirus software in many ways. That's not what we're talking about right now.
What we're doing now is this is a new threat, and they're using an old malware trick. And this is kind of part of the whole business email compromise stuff that we've heard about over the last couple of years. I've talked about it. The FBI has published statistics, and we're talking about many billions of dollars victims have had stolen. A very, very big deal. We've got local state officials, federal officials, who have been trying to track it down. The US Attorney's in the Northern District of Georgia, came out saying that dozens are getting charged in this Atlanta based money laundering operation. It funneled $30 million in proceeds from computer fraud schemes, romance scams, and retirement account fraud. It is all stuff that we've talked about before on this show. This announcement was last Friday. Friday the 13th was a bad day for those guys. It says that federal agents have arrested 24 individuals for their involvement in a large scale fraud and money laundering operation that targeted citizens, corporations, and financial institutions throughout the United States. Business email compromise schemes, romance fraud scams, and retirement account scams, among other frauds, duped numerous victims into losing more than $30 million in the course this release goes on for quite a ways. But the bottom line is this new Cova 19 scam where they are saying, Hey, here's a map. You can download it well that one's giving you a virus when you go ahead and try and do that. Of course, their more advanced malware platforms are not going to Luck that through. The next one is business email compromise schemes. And this is where they try and trick businesses into thinking that they owe money to somebody, they need to wire money to somebody, they haven't paid a vendor, etc., etc. It's a standard scheme, and it's up right now. The romance fraud scams, I suspect those are going to be pretty successful right now as people are self-isolating and maybe are feeling though a little bit isolated. And the romance fraud scams are things like, you know, getting somebody to kind of fall in love with you appreciate you. And then you go ahead and say, you know, I've got this bill hospital bill, it's 2000 3000. It's $5,000. And in some cases, it's my nephew, my knees, my wife or ex-wife or whatever. Right. And they have already scammed you into feeling for them, and then they get you to send them money.
In some cases, it's Hey, I want to meet in person. And it's going to cost you know, 20 $500 for me to fly over there. And people are wiring them the money. So there's your romance fraud, scam, retirement accounts scams. Oh, man. It's, especially in these cases, with a down market right now. It's, hey, you know, we've got a certified investment plan, and we are still even in these downtime showing the return of 5% or more, you know, they don't want to make it sound like it's too good. And get people to wire the money into their accounts. Think of Bernie Madoff and what he did many other frauds, and they're trying to dupe the victim. So we have to be very careful when we're out there. Watch for online fake dating profiles, third party administrators for retirement investment. So these, see these are the people that have a whole list of them.
Just a glance is showing they're about 30 years old in general. That's a shame. There are a lot of foreign-sounding names. All of the people are in Georgia, except for a couple in Texas. Somebody in Nigeria has an A in Missouri. Alright, when we get back, we're going to talk about the next topic here Comcast and T Mobile. Some other things when it comes to working from home. Make sure you get on to my email list so that you can get notified about this week's webinars and other topics at Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe. You are listening to WGAN. We'll be right back.
Hey, welcome back, everybody, Craig Peterson, here. Glad you guys could be with me today we've only got about a half an hour left in today's show with a few more topics to cover. But this has been a big week for people all over the world. For the very first time, many are working from home. That this includes, of course, people right here, people across the United States, Canada, Mexico, even France. Although the demonstrators are wandering the streets over there trying to spread the disease, well, they are French. Now and shout out to all of our people who listen from France. We do have people listening in France, so they know what I'm talking about. I have been putting together some detailed deep-dive webinars for this coming week, where I'm going to be answering all of your questions. I might do one or two Facebook Lives. We'll see how it all goes. I'm not a big Facebook Live fan myself, but you know many people are. So maybe you would like to get involved if you would. Again, these are all free, and I am trying to help you guys out. Believe me. You can sign up for my email list, which is Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe. You'll find out about these, and you'll get my regular email every week that comes out the newsletter with the top stories of the week all of the stories we discuss here on the air and elsewhere. We also have a new newsletter that we have the first one in the can we probably will send it out this week. It is about security and what the top patches are this month that you need to worry about a little bit of a deep dive there. We give you all kinds of links to the sites to find out exactly what to install, how to install it, what to do with it. All kinds of stuff that you won't get anywhere else, and you're going to get it for free. Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe where you need to sign up. Make sure you go there and go there right now so that you don't forget Craig Peterson dot com slash, subscribe, believe me, I'm not going to be pestering you. I'm telling you all kinds of great stuff. Hardly anybody ends up unsubscribing. It is very, very rare. I have one of the highest open rates in the entire industry near as I can tell in talking with other people, and that's because people appreciate it. You know, I appreciate you guys too. I have been talking a little bit about tools on some of these webinars. I did a deep dive, and I'm going to do a deeper dive this coming week about the tools you can use when you're working from home. If you're a business owner or an IT person, you will hear about the types of tools that are going to help your teams. One of the things that I just wanted to bring up here now is that Comcast and T-Mobile have both said they are going to upgrade everyone to unlimited data for the next 60 days. They are going to suspend the enforcement of the data cap and overage fees during the Coronavirus pandemic. I think that's good. The statement says while the vast majority of our customers do not come close to using one terabyte of data in a month, we are pausing our data plans for 60 days giving all customers unlimited data for no additional charge. Normally Comcast charges an extra $50 per month for unlimited data or $10 for each additional block of 50G after you exceed one terabyte. They're also making their Xfinity Wi-Fi hotspots free for anyone to use. I mentioned that earlier in the show. So if you are somewhere and you need the internet, and you see a Wi-Fi network called Xfinity, you can hop on and use it. Now from a security standpoint, there are considerations, and we go into those in more depth in the webinars coming up this week. And I have a whole course that gets into a lot of depth on that. But it's great Xfinity just look for that Wi-Fi hotspot on your phone, no matter where you are. They have millions of them all over the country. Anyone that has Comcast, for the internet is going to be providing unbeknownst to them, and affinity Wi-Fi hotspot, okay? Now, normally they are free to Comcast customers, and everybody else needs to buy a pass to use them. They're going to be free for 60 days. They are the largest home internet provider in the nation. And I know there's not a whole lot of them in some of our communities, but they are very, very big at&t, which is the second biggest home internet provider that enforces data caps announced that it would waive the caps as well. So that's great news, frankly, unlimited smartphone data for the next 60 days. Excluding roaming, By the way, so don't think you can get roaming for free, and that applies to any T-Mobile plan Metro by T-Mobile prepaid pant plan as well. It's also giving all of its T-Mobile customers an additional 20 Giga mobile hotspot tethering service for the next 60 days. Sprint, which is being acquired right now by T-Mobile, is taking No coal steps. So there you go. There are your main guys now really, it's just it's down to Comcast is providing smartphone service, not using all their towers though, and T-Mobile, AT&T, and Sprint are all doing it. Now to help low-income Americans, T-Mobile is working with Lifeline. And it's going to provide customers and extra free data up to five gigabytes and gigabytes I should say, per month over the next two months. Lifeline, by the way, is a federal program. It gives discounted service to people with low incomes, and many Lifeline providers resell T-Mobile service instead of having networks of their own. By the way, T-Mobile also has a 55 and older plan for those of us who are in that age group, and they have discounts for that group as well. So there you go. There is a lot to cover. center there, and thanks to Comcast, at&t, T-Mobile, and the dozens of other ISVs that are going to be providing us with more service for free during these tougher times. Now, one of the things I talk a lot about when we're talking about security is linking networks and having people working from home or remote offices and the use of VPNs, and other security problems, right? Well, here's a real eye-opener. There are many businesses considered part of our critical infrastructure. The businesses that are under FINRA regulations these businesses are in the financial businesses, particularly banks, manufacturers. Anyone who's making anything for the military or DFARS contractors, but the bottom line is, the more sensitive the systems are, the less you want those systems to connected to the internet in any way. And in those cases where you've got the critical infrastructure intelligence agencies anywhere, you have higher security networks, working at home is not an option at all. Well, there are some ways around this problem. And I don't mean around it as in trying to skirt the security issues, but around it in a very secure way. And it depends on how you're working and what you're doing and really how critical and sensitive the data is. You know, the old orange book standards were there for a reason, and people can read some of the older CRTs and things remotely. These new LCDs and LED displays we have are harder to read remotely, but in those cases, forget about printing. Never going to be able to work from home right if, if the information is only available in a SCIF, forget about it, you're not going to be able to work from home, or getting kind of technology there with those TLS and SSL. But anyway, we have to be careful if we are in a business that has this type of sensitive information. So we'll talk about that when we get back. And then we have one more topic for today, and we're going to cover another angle of working at home and what does that mean to you and me, so stick around. We're going to be back. You're listening to Craig Peterson. On w GAN online. Craig Peterson dot com. And make sure you sign up on my email list right now. You have to subscribe by going to Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe, and you'll find out about all of our free resources for working at home. Stick around. We'll be right back.
Hey guys, welcome back. Craig Peterson here. We've been talking a lot about working from home. And if you missed any of today's show and you are working from home or your business, who has people who are working from home or considering having people working from home, you're going to want to catch the replays of today's show. And you can usually find those right by going to Craig Peters on.com slash iTunes. You can also find it and almost anywhere in any podcast platform out there. Just search for Craig Peterson, and you'll find today's whole show they're available as a podcast. We covered a ton of topics there, and we're talking right now about those companies that are kind of high stakes security. Intelligence agencies, critical infrastructure, anybody who's developing things for the DOD contractors, subcontractors, sub-subcontractors, and we've got this whole CMC thing going on. And I'm talking with people who have attended these briefings on it and just don't understand what they need to do and how to do it. And they just won't do it because I can't believe they're required to have all this security is crazy. But here's the bottom line. Last week, the US government cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency issued an advisory to critical infrastructure companies to prepare for remote work scenarios as this whole Covid-19 spreads. They told people that they have to check that their VPN networks are up-to-date, that the companies have implemented multi-factor authentication, that they have tested out the remote access scenario. Of course, there's a lot more to it than just that. Cybersecurity consultants, like me, who work with those high stake clients know that remote work and security don't mix unless you understand what you are doing. In this Ars Technica article here, they discuss electric utilities, oil, and gas firms, manufacturing companies, and say that it's not always so simple for many of their most critical customers and even more so for intelligence agencies. It should be a wake-up call. If you are a company that has to meet any of these higher security standards. Most notably, if you have to meet the DFARS standards. The ITAR standards, the new CMMC standards, which are all of the military standards. The NIST 171 standards say you can not have people working at home. Okay, so here is a statement from a team lead over the Department of Energy and should be a fairly good wake up call. You need to figure out a way that if individuals cannot physically access the control system for a service that cannot stop, like electricity, water, wastewater, similar services, you ensure continuous operation. Even in the face in an environment where you might be risking your employee's lives if they continue to commute into the office. So think about that amazing statement here. For many industrial networks, the highest standard of security is an air gap, and this is what we do with our manufacturing clients. It means a physical disconnect between the inner sanctum of software connected to the physical environment and the less sensitive internet-connected IT systems. So there are very few private sector firms that are using air gaps. In other words, there is no physical connection. There is the obvious exception for highly regulated nuclear power utilities who have implemented actual air gaps and my clients for whom we have put air gaps in place in 100% of the cases where it's been possible. But again, my clients want to have their networks secure because they don't want stuff stolen. They don't want to get sued by releasing personal identifiable, identifiable information, and they don't want to shut down the manufacturing line, which is quite severe. All of these restrictions we're talking about can create these massive chokepoints for hackers and also for remote workers. Think about that. There are things, like jump boxes, we've used before, depending on the software used. If you can put those in place, then we've got administrators bumping each other off as they try and work and log in. Because these jump boxes, these, you might call them gateways. You SSH into that box, and then SSH into a different part of the network. So you have to kind of jump around. Some of them only allow one of the administrators to be on at a time. So think about that. If you fit into any of those, you have a bigger issue, and I'd be glad to talk to you guys. I mean, talk to you and help you with what you have. I have set aside some 15-minute time blocks. I'm going to send out an email again this week to let people sign-up, if your business is having problems, reach out to me, right? I'm a resource here. Don't let my 40 plus years of experience with this go to waste. I want to help, and I can help. You don't have to be a client, okay? And I will dedicate up 15 minutes or half an hour to help you out to get you going. Okay, because this is that important. I know what it's like to own a business. I've owned a business for many decades. And I know I get very frustrated when I feel like I'm kind of all left alone. Okay, that's off my chest. You can do that just by emailing me at Craig Peterson, it is me at Craig Peterson calm, or you can go to my company's website as well, mainstream dot net and there is a contact form on there where you can leave a message, and I'll get back to you or another member of my team will. Let's get back to a great article, by the Ars Technica staff, on working at home. They've done it for 22 years Ars Technica has. And as you know, I've been doing it for more than a couple of decades as well. But let's kind of run through what their suggestions are here to kind of finish up the show. One work-from-home suggestion from them was about snacks, supplies, a pet, and dolls. Now, you know, I don't recognize our I don't recommend snacks because I practice intermittent fasting, right? A pet. We have a pet. We have a Great Dane and have lots of supplies, and I don't have any dolls. But anyway, you should consider upgrading to a more ergonomic workstation. It is particularly true if you're working from home for a long time. For instance, I have these tables from SIS. SIS is a company that makes office furniture, and what these are about six foot long, and maybe two or three feet deep. And they raise and lower a few feet. I can sit in a chair, I can sit on a ball here, kind of a big exercise ball or I can stand up, I can move around. It is phenomenal. And I have these and most of my workstations. They're just phenomenal. I love these things. Before these, I had one that I just attached to a regular table, and I could raise and lower my keyboard, mouse, and screen, and that was just wonderful as well. So remember that it is convenient. Let's see other suggestions from Ars Technica. They said they've done this since 98. Okay, so this is from Jade Timor senior science editor your office needs to have View he says, trees, birds open sky just something you find appealing so that when you raise your head from your screen to clear your mind, there's something there that you want to see. I do have a couple of windows here in my working area, and I can kind of see the sky. So it's not too bad but I again I get up move around. The author goes on to say to have an exercise and activity routine. Many studies have shown that getting up and moving a bit is incredibly positive for your health. That's what I do. I don't get completely sedentary. Senior tech policy reporter Timothy Lee says have a physically separate workspace. I talked a lot about that earlier in the show. Again, you can find the show at Craig Peterson dot com slash iTunes and subscribe there as well. So, he says to put it as far as possible from the kitchen, laundry room, TV, and other sources of domestic distraction. Senior technology editor Lee Hutchinson, he says it's not slacking. In my experience, what helps me more than anything is to have co-workers who are also virtual. At a past job, I held for a year or so where I was the only remote teammate in a large Bellevue Washington based admin team. I was secluded from my team at home and missed everybody. He goes on to say that they use slack now. I don't particularly like slack. It is not secure. It does not meet any of the security standards. The only thing that does is the high-level version of WebEx teams, which is what I use. Our clients that need security and have their security requirements are passed down by law. We have to be as secure as they are, or at least his as they're supposed to be. So that's what we use, we use the WebEx teams. If you'd like this 90-day free trial, we can set you up we can get it going, and we can give you a higher level better version of it then you can get right now at the WebEx dot com website. However, if you don't want to bother me, I understand you can get it yourself, but please do me a favor and just email me. me at Craig Peterson dot com and ask me any questions, including about this, and we can get you set up with this trial. Jennifer Ouellette, senior writer and she is saying that it makes a huge difference having everybody working remotely Now remember, Ars Technica, they publish they do writing little different than a manufacturer. But she had online communities. That's what she likes. Groups of friends who are science writers, and she's always loved it. It's got a picture of her cat here to kind of a cute cat. But anyway, there's a whole bunch of others that I have up on my website as well at Craig Peterson dot com. You'll see those in the blogs off of the homepage. And again, make sure you sign up. I'm going to be having some deep-dive webinars this week, answering all of your questions we'll be talking about VPN, some of the tools you can use, basically about everything. But you have to subscribe, Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe, do it right now. Go to your computer, type in this URL, Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe. You'll find out about all these webinars and much much more. Have a great week, and we'll talk to you Wednesday at 738 with Ken and Matt.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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Automated Machine Generated Transcript:
Hey, hello, and welcome everybody to the show. Of course, we put this out on as a podcast as well and all of your favorite podcasting sites, and we're heard right here on WGAN every Saturday from one until 3 pm. Of course, I'm on with Ken and Matt for their morning drive show, which is every Wednesday at 738. Well, their morning drive shows every day. As you might expect, we have a lot of coronavirus related stuff today. But this is not going to be so much on the medical side. It is going to be more on the - How do you work from home? How do you make your business a success, when you have many of your workers who are out for whatever reason. We'll be talking about the technologies of working from home, as well as what the FCC is doing to help make our lives a little bit easier in this set Coronavirus match. You might have seen and how viruses in and of themselves are kind of a big problem. If he were to ask me, we're going to talk about this massive Atlanta based money laundering operation that the FBI brought down. A colossal business email compromised bust that also brought down dozens of different bad guys. What they did and how they're trying to take advantage of the coronavirus to steal even more money from you. Some free upgrades that have come from Comcast and T Mobile. We probably we'll talk a little bit about what WebEx is doing for us as well when it comes to free conferencing systems and team systems for 90 days or more. We will discuss how the more secure businesses out there are making it very difficult, in fact, almost impossible, in some cases, absolutely impossible to work from home and some advice from my wife and me. I've been working at home for more than 20 years, what have we learned over those years, and what have other people been saying that I thought might make a reasonable discussion. Now you'll find all of this, of course, on my website at Craig Peterson dot com, we try and post all of these articles up for everybody to be able to see. And we'll also be talking about this a little bit more in some of our webinars. You might have attended my webinars this week. Last Sunday, I had a great webinar well attended. We covered a lot of ground frankly, about the whole work from home thing and VPNs and some of the technology you should and should not be using. We're probably this week going to start up this coming week and have some specialized ones as well. We're going to be talking about VPNs, the hardware and software you need, and the routers in your home office. Some of the plugins you should be using and what you can do about DNS. So that'll all be coming up this week. There's only one way to find out about this and to get registered. These are free and are essential for you as a worker, as a business owner, or as a manager. All of those people you're going to benefit a lot by checking in with me on these webinars. So how do you get on? Easy just go to Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe. I am not one of these spammers. I'm not one of these internet marketers. I haven't been in the online space now for many, many decades. And it's kind of scary to think about blizzards four-plus decades actually in the whole networking space, and the computer security space for this as well. So I guess you could say I've seen it all, at least most of it. And so I've been taking questions from everybody. What do you want? What don't you want to see? If you do sign up for the list, by the way, I've got three little surprises that will come your way some great gifts of information that are available for you just for the clicking and signing up. Again Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe, keep an eye on your mail mailbox because I will be letting you know about these other webinars that are coming up this next week.
You know, being the tech guy that I am. Sometimes, I think it's kind of like the cobblers kids without any shoes or repaired shoes. In my case, it was ill-repaired technology and of course, when you needed it, you know just isn't there for you. This week, the problem I've been having has been with my email. If you responded to me, I have to apologize because my email system has not been working correctly. You already know I have thousands of people on my email lists, and I've been trying to keep everybody up to date on Saturday mornings, you get my special emails about what the news is this week. Then pretty much once a month, more or less a week after Microsoft's Patch Tuesday, I tell you what the most critical patches are to install and apply and give you all that information. If you haven't caught that one yet, its because we haven't sent it out, however, we have the very first of that edition all set and ready to go, and we'll probably be sending that out pretty darn soon. And what we're trying to do is save you a lot of time, Microsoft had over 100 critical patches this week, and there's no way that a regular company can keep up with all of these patches. So what do you do? That's what these exclusive newsletters are for, telling you here are the most critical ones, the ones that are in the wild right now. Bad guys are using them. That's easy for them to use to get into your system. So How can you protect yourself? All of that stuff in that newsletter? So I think it's going to be handy. It's one of the things we've heard the most complaints about from people is just what patches Do I need to apply because you can't possibly patch them all. I also had a great discussion this week that I want to bring up while we're talking about patches. And this is for the listener, in fact, in Maine, and a business owner, small business owner, and he is using Android devices sticking with the Google devices. Google makes a phone called a pixel. It's not necessarily the best of the Android devices out there in many measures. But the good news about it is the Google does release updates for it, and those updates can cover all of the critical patches that you need. But the point I made to him, and I want to make sure it is clear for everybody who's listening is that most of the vendors In the Android world do not support vices devices for more than two years. So you only get two years' worth of patch support. And that includes Samsung. And it frankly, if I were buying an Android device, I would probably buy the Samsung Galaxy more or less top of the line, because I know they'll be supporting that for two years. So first of all, check when the device came out. So if you're buying a new Samsung Galaxy phone, and it came out eight months ago, remember, that's eight months off of the two years' worth of support. So you're going to get what a year and four months' worth of support, hopefully, out of Samsung, and then after that, the problem is you're not going to be able to get patches anymore, and that means your security is going to go right down the drain. Keep that in mind. So our basic rule of thumb when it comes to Android devices, if you're going to buy them, you need to buy a new phone every year to make sure That you're able to get the updates. If you are using an Apple phone, you're good to go for five years, five years. So again, the same trick applies. When did Apple released that phone, and you're getting going to get support for five years from when it was released. So with the Apple phones, we advise every four years or just keep an ear to the ground.
Apple's good about not only giving you the updates, and automatically installing them, but also having them not break your phones as well as letting you know when the end of life is for each device. We recently saw the end of life for the iPhone six. The six S is going to be coming up later on this year. So you know, if you have a success, you're probably going to have to replace it. Then the sevens will probably be good until next year. They just last, right, and Apple supports them and keeps all of these security patches up-to-date, which is super duper exciting. For us, particularly in this day and age, one of the things I mentioned this week on one of these webinars was, hey guys huge deal here.
Because what we're finding is that we're at war and you may not realize it, they're certainly not talking about it on TV. And I'm not talking about coronavirus. I'm talking about war with real live enemies. Just like in the old days, we've got Iran we've got China, and we've got Russia all attacking us actively attacking us. But this is a war in cyberspace. We're not attacking them anywhere like they're attacking us. And it isn't just bad guys living in those countries. We're talking about a war that has been declared by and is officially being run by their government. Now we have retaliated for some of these cyber strikes. Still, it is a real war, and we can expect more of it. We can expect it to increase here with the coronavirus spread because we're all kind of distracted, aren't we? From soup to nuts, the military is distracted. So we have to make sure that we are covering ourselves with security, and that's part of what I will cover in these webinars coming up.
I begin with the basics of remote work, including what to look out for and what you need to know. In these webinars, I always answer all the questions everybody has so that you can get the right answers. And I am just you know, it's content-rich, where we're, we're answering your questions, we're giving you all the information we can, and I'm going to be selling here probably in the next week or two, a more advanced course. That does a deep dive step by step all of the tactics and things you need to do and how to do it to lock down your Windows computers, lock down your network, your Wi-Fi, etc. I've heard from so many people that it's confusing going online, searching Google trying to find the information, and no one has it appropriately organized because everybody has their little bit. So we're going to be doing a full paid course on that one. It is for anybody who has to maintain computers, primarily for businesses, where you have to keep these things secure. It will help you make sure the security is going to work for you. Okay, so to subscribe, make sure you get on those lists by going to Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe. And when we get back, we're going to be talking about working from home some of the things to consider from the tech side. You're listening to Craig Peterson on WGAN.
Hi, everybody, Craig Peterson back here. I was feeling kind of punky this weekend. If anybody else kind of felt that way. I don't think it was the coronavirus or Covid-19. I have been, maybe about a week feeling run down. I was kind of moving slowly, and it was not much fun, but I'm feeling so much better right now. That's why I didn't have as many of these webinars last week that I wanted to have. I was going to try and do like one a day, but I ended up with more like one last week. Next week is going to be bigger better. I am feeling well. We're going to talk a lot more. Now that you guys have had a little experience working at home and answer even more questions than we could have answered before now that you kind of know what you don't know right a little bit. Get you safe, get your safe at home and get you're using the right tools. We have even put together a little survey to help you check your preparedness to work remotely. We're going to be releasing information about some of the tools and hopefully help you find some tools that are going to help you at home help you with everything from efficiency, through security at with your work at home setups. And we're we set up a Facebook group, and I'm not sure if we're going to use it right away. You know, when I surveyed you guys a couple of weeks ago, there was only I think there's only like one or 2% of people that wanted to do these lives on Facebook. zero percent, by the way, that wanted to do them on YouTube. And the vast majority of people wanted to do regular webinars, so we did it on zoom. I may use WebEx as well depends how many people sign up because my zoom only supports 100 people, my WebEx, which is what I've used for Some of my bigger training supports up to 10,000 people. So we'll you know, we'll see. But you have to sign up. Just go to Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe. And that will also be sending you a few really kind of cool cheat sheets and things that I think you could use. And so all of this is free, absolutely free. And then you will find out about the webinars that I'm doing this week as we do some deep dive webinars as well this week, so it should be a great week, coming up this week. All right, so let's get right down to it. Now. Our first topic really for this week. Well, maybe our next one, right. But this is from the verge. And Kim Lyons wrote this, and it's about how to work from home. And I when I did my surveys of you guys who are on my email list this last week, actually we can half ago, I found that the majority of you who went to the webinar that I held Last Sunday, said that you had never really worked from home before, that this was the very first time. So congratulations to you, I suspect you're like most of these people. We were able to answer all of their questions in the webinar. That's what they're for is to get the information out and answer your questions. It can be kind of fun, and it is kind of different. Many people are just sitting at home in their pajamas and till noon. Now it's time to get back to work because we're looking at an extended period. If you're in the 80-year-old range, even above 70, many of us are still working right. Above 70 years old, you are in the kind of that critical age range where the recommendations are that for the next three months, you need to limit going outside and meeting with people heavily. If you are above 60 or above now, they are warning us that again, and you need to be very, very careful. Although most of these deaths are people who are 80 and older, anybody with the compromised system must be careful, and down till about 25 years of age. So if you are one of these say diabetics or you have emphysema, COPD, or many underlying illnesses, you've got to be very, very careful. So for you, this might be an extended period, we might be tar talking, you know what to see here, March to April, May, mid-June, July, maybe even August that you're going to want to be working from home. So there are a few ways that you can be productive at home, and you know, again, we go into a lot of detail in the webinars. It is just a quick radio hit right today. So, Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe to make sure You're signed up. If you're planning to work from home for an extended period, here are some things that you might want to consider. Remember, too, that the best ways to work at home are going to vary from person to person. What you have to do is figure out what helps you to stay focused and to separate your work life from your home life. And this is something that frankly, I have had a hard time doing. Because you already know I give away a lot of time. And I'm doing that right now too. You'll probably see another email from me this week, where we're volleying to volunteering to spend 15 minutes half an hour with you on the phone to help you with whatever setup you have. And we can even do remote tech support for you. Anything that you need help with, and we're just volunteering this for free for people. Again, you can just email me at Craig Peterson dot com. If you want some more information if you're having trouble if you're trying to make this work me at Craig Peterson dot com, and you're just having trouble with that. But the problem I've had over the last couple of decades of working at home is that separating my work life from my home life. I get up in the morning, and one of the first things I do is I pull out that laptop, and I start checking my email, I'm checking my client's systems, I'm checking our systems, I'm checking on the VPN that clients are using. I'm checking the firewall logs to from our clients as well as for us. Just see if anyone has been trying to hack in. Then we have a look at the alerts that have come up from those firewalls, and other you know, emergencies that might be pending, and solve all of those. Then I get up, and I do my running and some weightlifting down in the basement. I have this great treadmill that one of my daughters had bought for herself. It is a Livestrong brand, from back when Lance Armstrong wasn't a bad word and is a great treadmill. Then I go up, and I shower, and I get back to work. I work all day and then when the evening comes, and we might turn on a TV show while I am, What? Yes, while I'm working on my laptop, and taking care of things for people. That's what I do. Right? I love helping people. I remember when I was about 20 years old, maybe it was 19. And one of my coaches told me, he said he sat us all down. He said I want you to write your obituary right now. You're 20 years old, give or take, write your obituary. What Would you like your headstone to say, try and get it that short? Just a headstone? So we're not talking about multiple paragraphs, you're just talking about multiple words, frankly, what would you like it to say? And I thought about that seriously thought about it. You know what, it has been the mantra for my life here for another 40 years after that, and that is he helped others. That's what I wanted on my headstone. And that's what I've done, right? My wife and I, we've raised together our eight kids, we homeschooled them, all the way up to college. They've gone on to have just extraordinary lives. I still have two of them working with me, which is a real blessing. It's been wonderful. So I haven't solved this problem of separating my home life from my business life because, for me, they've been one-in-the-same. There might be something I need to do with my family during the day. And so I will do it. Because that's the most important thing to me, there might be something that comes up for a client, and I might have to work at it even overnight all night long to get them to the point where they have a smooth operation the very next day at work. That's what I'll do. That's what my family will do. That's what we do for our customers and friends and have forever. And I don't know if that's a bad thing or not, you know if you're going to be doing that if you don't want to do that, but you have to make the decision. Where are you going to draw the line? Okay, we're going to continue this discussion when we get back after the break. We're going to talk about some other things you should be looking at when we talk when we're thinking about the physical side of working from home. You're listening to Craig Peterson right here on WGAN, and on the podcast and streaming pretty much everywhere. Stick around. We'll be right back.
Hello, everybody, welcome back, Craig Peterson here, on WGAN, and of course, online streaming sites everywhere. Just look for me, Craig Peterson, on your favorite streaming app. I listen to podcasts all the time and use them. You know, I mentioned in the last segment that I spent some time in the morning every day on the treadmill, trying to keep my heart rate up into that right range and double-check with your doctor if you have a question about what that range is. It used to be kind of your maximum heart rate was 200 minus your age. I'm not sure what it is. Now, I've heard people say it was like 220 or whatever. But double-check, double-check, double-check. You don't want to stress your heart. I've been amazed at how well I have done for me. I've been doing this daily running, walking, jogging, kind of a combination in terms you know, again, intermittent. You know, go fast, going slow well relatively slow. I started this before Christmas last year. So I've been doing it now for three months. A solid three months, and it has made a fantastic difference. I'm surprised how quickly my heart rate drops now after I've been exercising and how not out of breath I am. Currently, my heart rate is in a healthy heart range. It's been just phenomenal for me. Some people are saying that it does help. I think it's Dr. Fung who says to get your core body temperature up because when it comes to some of these viruses, and it is harder for them to live in heat. There is nothing like a little hard exercise to make that happen. Get that old cardio going. Alright, so back to what we should be doing on the physical side when it comes to working from home. I have a separate workspace, and I'm blessed to have it. We built this house, 25-30 years ago, now. When we designed the house, we created an office off of the back. It reminds me I'm thinking back of that I had two T-1 data lines in here, which was like crazy fast, who could use so much data? It cost about $5,000 a month. Can you believe that back in that day and age, it was rather expensive? Now we've got three and a half gigabits worth of data up and down here. Because, as you know, I run all types of pieces of training and everything right out of here. It has been phenomenal. It's so much cheaper. It's like a 10th of the price of what it used to be for those two T-1 lines, and I have way way more bandwidth, and it is a lot faster, a lot cheaper. I do have that physically separate workspace, but it isn't necessary. You don't need a dedicated office. And I remember thinking that I did and I went out, and I said, you know, I'm not going to rent space for my company per se, like go out and rent this office and have room for Secretary and other people or whatever. And I went to one of these rental things where you can get space as you need it. I went to Regis, so I went to, and we got an office, and we used it rarely, right because it was home. Why not work at home because this is remote work, right? I was remotely working doing stuff for clients. I found it was such a pain to go there, and then you have the office space to maintain, but again, I have a physical office off the back of the house, which is great. What you might need to do is to find a room with a door that closes. In many cases where you have a much smaller living space, that could be impossible, right? What doors do you have? You have closets, and you have the bathroom, maybe you have a bedroom door, maybe you have, you know, the living space and the bedroom space all in one. And, heck, I've lived in those spaces before myself. Here's what you should do. You need to have a space that's dedicated for you to work, and that can just be a corner of the room. That can be a chair that you the chair that you have that you turn around to a specific angle. A small desk set up in a corner, a table a folding table that you pull out a laptop, But that you put on the end of the kitchen table, anything like that, so that you have a space that you go to that is prepared for you to work. And the idea behind this is a fascinating psychological principle that when you have a physical area that you go to that is set up for doing a certain type of work, and your body will go into that mode. It's kind of like when you go to bed at night, and you should not be doing what I do. I don't do this at night, I do in the morning, but sitting there with your laptop or sitting there with your cell phone and doing stuff on it. Your bedroom is for sleeping and maybe one or two other activities. That is so that your brain gets trained that when you go into your bedroom, and you lay on your bed, it says, Oh, it's time to go to sleep. And you then go to sleep. It's the same sort of thing. You're Going with you've got that laptop at the same end of the kitchen table, your brain says, Oh, I'm going to work now. You don't want to use a place like your bedroom or the couch, Chesterfield. sofa, whatever you call it. It should be a place that is not used for relaxation but used only for work. Now, the other trick is to train other members of your household to understand that when you are in this space, I am working. You should not bother me. You shouldn't be coming to me with questions, etc. and let them know that hey, you are going to be around during coffee breaks if you will. And you'll be glad to take their questions, and you'll be glad to do the "honey-do's" then, you know those little things that your husband or your wife wants you to do. It's going to take a little bit of trial and error to figure out what's going to work For you, but it is going to be important.
Some people find that one of the hardest parts of working from home is the part that I explained to the very beginning of this discussion, and that is that you can end up working 24 seven. In reality, the best way to do it is to start work around the same time every day ended around the same time, take your breaks, including meals about the same time, every day. Again, don't eat in the work areas, don't sleep in them, don't lounge in them. But, you know, I don't intend to eat at my desk, and I do that less lately now that I've been thinking more about it and thinking critically about it. I try and go to the kitchen to eat, and that does make a difference. You also need to be careful about kind of stir crazy. So you should get up every once in a while, walk outside if you can, I use something called the Pomodoro Technique. I use a timer in which I use a timer that says, okay, you're doing 20 minutes' worth of work right now. So what are you going to do? What's your goal? What are you going to accomplish in this 20 minutes, you set that little timer.
I use software for it. But in retrospect, one of those little kitchen timers, you know, the little tomato things where you, you twist the top, and now you've got your 20-minute timer going would be more than enough. That might be kind of nice because it sits there going tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, reminding you that you have work to do right. Now the other side of this is feeling a little isolated at times. We'll talk about some of the applications that you might want to use to collaborate and work together. Also, other rules that I think are important for us as we work from home. It's a little different if you're trying to start an at-home business, I think most of these rules still apply. Still, it's a little bit different than working from home for an employer who expects specific results at certain times and expects certain types of unification. So we'll talk a bit about that when we get back as well. You're listening to Craig Peterson. Make sure that you go to Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe right now. Craig Peterson, that's S-O-N slash subscribe and get on some of these webinars I'm holding this week, and we'll be right back on WGAN.
Hi guys, welcome back. Craig Peterson here on WGAN. You know you can get me as well every Wednesday morning on with Ken and Matt at about 738. Last week I got bumped by the governor, but you know what the heck? It's an excellent way to get my segment bumped, I guess. Usually, every Wednesday at 7:38 am with Ken and Matt, and of course, online, you can catch me on pretty much every streaming platform out there. And make sure you join me for these webinars we're having over the next couple of weeks I'm going to be going into more detail answering every question you guys have on working from home, the technology to do it, the ways to do it securely.
We're opening up our calendar for people who need some help with their businesses. How to get this working securely, using the existing equipment we have, and maybe some free software to get my people who are working at home, working efficiently and effectively, so I'm going to be doing some webinars on that as well. Let's finish up the topic of workspaces when you're working from home. One of the essential things to also consider is, if you do have enough room while you're working from home to have more than one space, then you can do something quite useful, very efficient, and that is you use different areas for different work tasks. So, for instance, in my case, I am running the business paying bills, depositing checks, doing all that sort of thing. So I have one space where I do that. I have another area where I'm at right now that I use when I'm doing my radio show, television interviews, running webinars, that's another space. I have yet another area when I'm reading or trying to do some studying. I have a space for meditation. All I'm doing is moving around in one room. That's all you need to do to program your brain. When I am in this position, when I'm sitting in this chair facing this direction, I'm doing this. Then with the Pomodoro Technique, where you're spending 20-minutes doing something and then taking a 10-minute break, I always get up, I walk out of the area entirely. I might talk to the family, get myself a glass of water or a cup of coffee, whatever it might be, and do a little socializing and help with whatever needs doing. Then I go back to my space. I get back to work. It's a unique way of working. If you do have people around that can help you with feeling a sense of social connection. But if you're working remotely, you can feel isolated at times. As part of your routine, you're going to want to try and interact with your co-workers regularly. It's kind of like the old water bottle, where you all kind of meet around there and chat and talk and what did you do last weekend? You know, don't feel bad about talking that way. We all need that even if you're an introvert. We need to have relationships with other people. We need to talk to other people. What we do in the office is we use one of these team apps. Now the one we use is the only one that's secure for doing all of this. That is Cisco WebEx, and they have different levels. We use the most secure level. Now, if you are a doctor, I've got to point out right now that there are some temporary rules in place that's part of this whole Covid-19 or Wuhan virus thing that allows you to use things like Slack and Skype, neither of which are secure. Keep that in mind. Those rules will change again, and HIPAA regulations will not allow you to use them. We use WebEx. You can get it for free right now for 90 days. It is phenomenal. It isn't just for meetings, and you know where you've got the camera on your laptop or your computer, and you are having a remote meeting, and you can see everyone, which is wonderful. But it is also for the team collaboration-side of things, where you can have rooms where you can all chat with each other. Now, one of the other advantages of using Cisco WebEx is over everything else is that it provides any level of security that allows people who are outside of your organization as part of a team. So we haven't set up, so some of our vendors are in certain team rooms, and we can talk to them our customers are in individual team rooms so we can talk to them. Now, we have the whole thing fully integrated with our phone system as well. If people call, it drops the transcription of that voice message they might have left into a room for so we can see it all in Cisco teams. If you want, you can go and set it up yourself. But, if you need a little help, or here's the other side. If you purchase it through us, we can set you up with a more advanced demo than you can get on the website. So again, you can just email me at Craig Peterson dot com if you are interested. I'd appreciate it. You know, we don't make any money off of it from the demo. Hopefully, you're going to continue to use it, and we make a couple of bucks a month from it. We can provide you a little bit of support and a little bit of training. It's a good thing, just email me at Craig Peterson dot com, and we can help you with that. We also integrate things like WebEx into large phone systems. It's actually what the military uses, and what the White House uses. They have some very, very secure systems as well, depending on what you need. Keep in mind all of the CMMC regulations that are going into effect in June. If you have to have it for compliance, CMMC, HIPAA, high tech, etc. It is the system for you. You can get the necessary set up for free by going to WebEx dot com. However, if you want a little bit more, I'd appreciate it. If you'd come through my company, Mainstream. Do me a favor and just reach out to me. That's me at Craig Peterson dot com. My team and I can help you out there with getting it all set up and Mgetting you in the place you need to be. So there you go chat over these messaging apps, hold meetings with them. The one you might want to look at, as I said, WebEx is the only one integrated and completely secure at the levels we can provide to you. You cannot get it on their general website. You have to get it from a Cisco partner like my company. Slack is great, and I have used it a lot in the past, but it is just not secure. It is not even close to providing the features that WebEx provides. You might look at Zoom, although it is terrifically insecure, but not as vulnerable as Skype is. But Zoom is quite bad. They made some major design decisions that opened up security holes you can drive a Mack truck through. It is just crazy. I do use Zoom but never for applications where security is an issue. If you've been on some of my webinars, some get hosted on zoom. Mainly because a lot of people use it and are familiar with how it works. I'm not so worried about security on Zoom for my webinars.The problem with the Zoom from a security standpoint is Zoom has a back door. They punched out of the network to allow them to control some of the aspects of your zoom conferences. That why we don't use or allow its use in any of our clients that have CMMC or high tech restrictions. That is a big No-No. They recently got slapped by the regulators. Check these things out. If you are using Microsoft Office, three 365, they have some collaboration tools too. I'm going to talk more about the collaboration tools and my webinars again this week, and we covered some last week. I have not made replays available of these webinars because I want you to attend them live if you can. I think coming up, and I will make replays available. So if you register, I will let you watch a replay. But I want you guys on these webinars. I know 70% of people say they will never attend a webinar and never sign up for a webinar. These are not high-pressure pitch event events. They are where I'm trying to help you out trying to get you going and trying to answer your questions. Okay. So make sure you do sign up. Now the last rule and the rule that I violate most often is trying to end work at the same time every day. So obviously there's going to be times when there are deadlines or project needs after hours, attention. There are times where I mentioned that I would work 24 hours, I've gone three days straight to try and solve a problem which we didn't cause, but the client needed to have solved. We stepped in and worked with other vendors, and we got the problem solved. In most situations after 10 pm work, email can wait until the following day for a response. Remember when we're at the end these work at home environments, that some people are going to start work at 6 am, some at nine, some at noon, and complete their jobs 8 to 10 hours later. They might be on a schedule where an 8 pm email goes out from them. We all project right, and they're going to project, and they're going to kind of expect you to be working the same hours they're working, although that's not necessarily the case. Even though they may sound a little anxious, get them used to the fact You're working from eight till five. And that's it. I'll get back to you tomorrow. Don't even respond to the email that comes in at 10 pm. I think that's important for a lot of people's sanity. For me, I just enjoy this so much. If I did not get paid to do it, I'd still do it. As you know, I do a lot of it and don't get paid for it. I guess that is a testament to the bottom line. Wow, the hour is up, I can't believe it. We're going to the top of the next hour. When we get back, we're going to talk about what you need to think about from your ISP, your internet service provider. That's how you get your internet. So what are some of the considerations here? What has the FCC done this week? What are some of the major providers doing as well? To make our lives and work from home a little bit easier, and don't forget, you know, I'm going to repeat this, sign up, sign up now so you can get all of this information. You can find out about my webinars that we're going to be doing some of the classes all of the free stuff, I want to help you out. Craig peterson.com slash subscribe. That's why I've been on the air now for about 25 years, just trying to help people understand what's going on in the security realm, the technology realm, and we need to understand it right now. So stick around. We're going to talk about that ISP and what that means to you. What are the things you need to consider and subscribe to Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe, and you're listening to me on WGAN and, of course, and online at Craig Peterson dot com.
Hey guys, welcome back. Craig Peterson here, of course on WGAN online at Craig Peterson calm. We had millions of people this week, working from home for the first time connecting to their offices trying to get things done trying to do a little collaboration and getting themselves in a little trouble as well. We have seen a significant increase in security problems because of people working at home. But I guess that shouldn't be a huge surprise to anybody that listens here. I have already done some webinars about working from home. I explained the pros and cons of working from home, and some of the technology required to be secure at home. And we're going to be doing more of those free webinars this coming week. We're going to start getting a little more long tail, if you will, drilling down deeper into some topics like VPNs, what are the best ones to use? When do they work? Well, when don't they work? We're going to be talking about your firewalls at the house and the office, and should you be linking them together? How can you split your network? When should you? Why should you, we're going to be covering in a lot more detail some of the questions that we've had popped up and people have been asking us. Then, of course, as always, we will take all of your questions. If you don't want to attend a webinar, if you have made the oath of never attend webinars, then you can always email me just me at Craig Peterson dor com or respond to one of the emails I send out about these webinars. If there are enough people interested, maybe what we should do is take it and get a webinar transcribed for you, maybe some screenshots. Perhaps you can even suggest what might work for you if you don't want to attend a webinar. But they have been very well attended. I've been quite pleased with that. That's after only making one announcement this last week. There was one email that went out is a little bit more than a week ago. I've been working with those people that responded. There are a lot of people I know that want to know more. So make sure you pass it along as well. If you have friends or family or other co-workers that have questions or if your boss has questions. If they're not letting you work from home and you want to work from home, make sure your boss gets on one of these webinars as well. And you can sign up to find out more about them. Just go to Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe, and we will be sending you all have that information. As part of signing up, you'll get some different cheat sheets. I think I have included three different cheat sheets. Some of them are multi-page, to help you with your online security, which is, of course, very, very important. We see an uptick in business, email compromises, and other things that are out there. We'll tell you a bit about that in the next segment. We will discuss what is going on with the whole Coronavirus and its ties into security problems. Well, we have had our president deregulating like crazy now for a week or two. Some people would say that our president is stupid. I think it's a brilliant thing to get rid of some of this regulation. You know, we don't live in a socialist country. However, we have many of the problems present in socialist countries. It can take years to get anything through these vast bureaucracies. Bureaucracy has a mind of their own, whether it's socialist, or in our case, a more of a free-market society. Cutting through the red tape meant this last week that they made some changes at the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission. Our FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, has done some amazing things so far with making it just so much more streamlined than smooth out items for customers. He got rid of some of the crazy stuff that was in the works previously, which would have increased at the internet expense for everybody. There are so many crazy things going on in increased regulation. The FCC has been putting pressure on internet service providers. These are the companies you're familiar Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon, all of your phone carriers. With everybody using smartphones now that we have people who are working from home. So one of my daughters, for instance, works in a call center. And what they have done is sent home their call center people with laptops, that they then connect up to the internet. And in this case, it was a hard-wired internet that you needed to have because she's in the financial services arena. And of course, right, it's my house. So, of course, we have Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, in fact, gigabit for her out to the internet, no problem. And so she hooked up, and she's able to get onto the systems at work, but the way it works With her for the call center and this is very common for call center people working at home or out of the office is the call center software placed a phone call to her cell phone. So now her T Mobile cell phone is going to be racking up thousands of minutes. That could be a problem.
So the FCC has been putting pressure on internet service providers and these phone companies etc. to do a couple of things. All of the major ISPs are committed and have pledged to waive late fees and keep customers connected when they miss payments due to this coronavirus pandemic. Now, of course, I get a little bit concerned about what happens if you miss payments for two months or three months? Because you just don't have the income, right? You lost your job. Maybe you were getting paid hourly piecemeal work whatever You don't have a regular paycheck, so you're not getting unemployment. Now you've got three months' worth of bills. The coronavirus is declared, you know, over or was victorious. So whatever the endpoint is on this thing, which is always a problem, right? It's like we go to war. And so how do we, how do we know that we've succeeded in that, but anyways, it comes, and now you have a three months payment to make, or they're going to catch off. So hopefully, that's not going to happen. They call this the keep Americans connected pledge. And we'll see, the FCC has not been able to convince these internet service providers to waive their data caps during the pandemic, but some of them may end up doing that. Home internet mobile providers that sign this pledge include all tests at TNT CenturyLink charter, Comcast Cox, frontier media comm sprint, T Mobile track phone US Cellular, Verizon, Windstream, and dozens of other small ones. Here's the pledge itself. Number one, not terminate service to any residential or Small business customers' because of their inability to pay their bills due to disruptions caused by the Coronavirus pandemic. Number two waive any late fees that any residential or small business customers incur because of their economic circumstances related to the Coronavirus pandemic, you know, how are you going to prove this stuff to these guys? Number three, open its Wi-Fi hotspots to any American who needs them. So that is actually that third one is kind of handy. Because I know a lot of people have over the years jumped onto their neighbor's Wi-Fi service unbeknownst to their neighbor, right? They were over at their house one time and got the password and continued to use it. Well, for instance, with Comcast, if you see an Xfinity Wi-Fi anywhere, and they are pretty much everywhere you see an Xfinity Wi-Fi, you can now hop on and use it for free. Which is when frankly pretty good for people. The FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said I don't want any American consumers experiencing hardships because of the pandemic to lose connectivity. It's a good thing that they're stepping up, and it's going to help maintain this social distancing. He also called these broadband providers to relax or data cap policies. But we'll see if they do the pledge doesn't require that. at&t said that it's waiving home internet data caps. So that's a good thing. And see overcharges are for raising profit, so they're not going to do that Comcast had not promised as of this last week anyway when I did some research on it. He's also asking telephone carriers to waive long-distance and overage fees. And even that ISP says surf schools and libraries should work with them on remote learning opportunities. So this is all excellent stuff, right? Up and restriction. So some of these companies have automatically Comcast doubled the amount of bandwidth available to some customers, other customers increased the bandwidth by 50%, which is good. That's going to help from working from home. Remember, and you've got upstream and downstream bandwidth. If you're working from home, that upstream might be the killer for you. So we'll see what happens here. The FCC has done some things that pushed them in the right direction. You know there are both pros and cons to all of this, as there always is. Now, we have coming up this week, several webinars, free webinars, I'm going to be doing deep dives, these are live. I'm answering all of your questions in real-time. You are going to want to attend these, believe me, whether you're a home user business user, whether you're working from home,
or not lots of great information. I'm taking my decade's worth of experience and putting it out there for you. I'm going to have some of my team members on these as well to answer questions that maybe go a little more detailed or, you know, are out of my bailiwick. But all of that can only be found one way, and that's if you're on my email list. I do not hound you. I do not annoy you. But you have to sign up Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe. That's Craig Peterson with an o dot com slash subscribe. Stick around.
Welcome back, everybody. Craig Peterson here. Hey, if you missed that URL to sign up and get all those free cheat sheets and to find out about our exclusive webinars during the coming week. Make sure you subscribe that URL is Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe, Craig just like a town C-R-A-I-G and Peterson P-E-T-E-R-S-O-N dot com slash subscribe, all lowercase. You can get on to my email list. You'll also be getting my weekly newsletter that includes the recap of the top tech stories of the week. We have a new newsletter that we've put together, and I'm going to start publishing that explicitly goes through what the most critical patches are that you need to apply. So that comes out monthly. It's kind of coordinated with Microsoft's Patch Tuesday, comes out about a week later is what our plan is. And that gives us a chance to analyze the patches like this last month, and they had more than 100 high severity patches they wanted to have you apply. If you want to know what are the ones I have to worry about, although this is for you, so you'll get that as well. And you will have the opportunity to sign up for all of these free webinars, learn about different pieces of training, webinars, pop-ups that we have kind of everything all rolled into one. So make sure you check that out and sign up Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe. So let's get into our next article about the Coronavirus maps. I got one of these weeks ago, and it was an email sent out to the media. Come check this out. We've put together this new map. And at the time, I didn't think twice about it. I do have multiple layers of security on this network and multiple-layers of protection on my Mac as well. I clicked on it, right, duh. And I was taken to a site that did have a map. I was lucky because I did have the advanced malware protection, the AMP stack from Cisco on my Mac, and it was all appropriately caught by the firepower firewall.
I think it is what found it at the network edge. It saw it and what it was doing and stopped it immediately. Even this spread of coronavirus you want to call it Covid-19, which is similar to the SARS. Coronavirus, also known as Wuhan virus, which is where it started. We've got, you know Lyme disease because it began in Lyme, Connecticut, SARS, you know, all of these diseases because of the rivers, they were first found out and stuff, but whatever, this Cova 19, we'll just call it that, which is the disease. But the bad guys are using this as an opportunity to spread malware and to launch cyber attacks. They were fast about doing that.
There's a threat analysis report that was released by this company called reason cybersecurity. They had a good look at this to get an idea of what's going on. They found a file called Coronavirus map.com.xe. Yeah, how's that for common right.com.xe, which is where they will try and get you to download it thinking it's an executable. That could be helpful, helpful for you. But in fact, it's not. But there are a lot of people who have downloaded it. I'm looking right now at a table showing where downloads are occurring. What's going on? How many engines detect it. And here's an example of how useless antivirus software is nowadays. As of now, now, this is about two weeks that this particular piece of malware has been in the wild, about two weeks 58 out of the 72 engines that they tested over virus total, only 58 of these antivirus engines even detect it as being a problem. Ours identified it about two weeks ago. So you know, again, more reason not to trust antivirus software in many ways. That's not what we're talking about right now.
What we're doing now is this is a new threat, and they're using an old malware trick. And this is kind of part of the whole business email compromise stuff that we've heard about over the last couple of years. I've talked about it. The FBI has published statistics, and we're talking about many billions of dollars victims have had stolen. A very, very big deal. We've got local state officials, federal officials, who have been trying to track it down. The US Attorney's in the Northern District of Georgia, came out saying that dozens are getting charged in this Atlanta based money laundering operation. It funneled $30 million in proceeds from computer fraud schemes, romance scams, and retirement account fraud. It is all stuff that we've talked about before on this show. This announcement was last Friday. Friday the 13th was a bad day for those guys. It says that federal agents have arrested 24 individuals for their involvement in a large scale fraud and money laundering operation that targeted citizens, corporations, and financial institutions throughout the United States. Business email compromise schemes, romance fraud scams, and retirement account scams, among other frauds, duped numerous victims into losing more than $30 million in the course this release goes on for quite a ways. But the bottom line is this new Cova 19 scam where they are saying, Hey, here's a map. You can download it well that one's giving you a virus when you go ahead and try and do that. Of course, their more advanced malware platforms are not going to Luck that through. The next one is business email compromise schemes. And this is where they try and trick businesses into thinking that they owe money to somebody, they need to wire money to somebody, they haven't paid a vendor, etc., etc. It's a standard scheme, and it's up right now. The romance fraud scams, I suspect those are going to be pretty successful right now as people are self-isolating and maybe are feeling though a little bit isolated. And the romance fraud scams are things like, you know, getting somebody to kind of fall in love with you appreciate you. And then you go ahead and say, you know, I've got this bill hospital bill, it's 2000 3000. It's $5,000. And in some cases, it's my nephew, my knees, my wife or ex-wife or whatever. Right. And they have already scammed you into feeling for them, and then they get you to send them money.
In some cases, it's Hey, I want to meet in person. And it's going to cost you know, 20 $500 for me to fly over there. And people are wiring them the money. So there's your romance fraud, scam, retirement accounts scams. Oh, man. It's, especially in these cases, with a down market right now. It's, hey, you know, we've got a certified investment plan, and we are still even in these downtime showing the return of 5% or more, you know, they don't want to make it sound like it's too good. And get people to wire the money into their accounts. Think of Bernie Madoff and what he did many other frauds, and they're trying to dupe the victim. So we have to be very careful when we're out there. Watch for online fake dating profiles, third party administrators for retirement investment. So these, see these are the people that have a whole list of them.
Just a glance is showing they're about 30 years old in general. That's a shame. There are a lot of foreign-sounding names. All of the people are in Georgia, except for a couple in Texas. Somebody in Nigeria has an A in Missouri. Alright, when we get back, we're going to talk about the next topic here Comcast and T Mobile. Some other things when it comes to working from home. Make sure you get on to my email list so that you can get notified about this week's webinars and other topics at Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe. You are listening to WGAN. We'll be right back.
Hey, welcome back, everybody, Craig Peterson, here. Glad you guys could be with me today we've only got about a half an hour left in today's show with a few more topics to cover. But this has been a big week for people all over the world. For the very first time, many are working from home. That this includes, of course, people right here, people across the United States, Canada, Mexico, even France. Although the demonstrators are wandering the streets over there trying to spread the disease, well, they are French. Now and shout out to all of our people who listen from France. We do have people listening in France, so they know what I'm talking about. I have been putting together some detailed deep-dive webinars for this coming week, where I'm going to be answering all of your questions. I might do one or two Facebook Lives. We'll see how it all goes. I'm not a big Facebook Live fan myself, but you know many people are. So maybe you would like to get involved if you would. Again, these are all free, and I am trying to help you guys out. Believe me. You can sign up for my email list, which is Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe. You'll find out about these, and you'll get my regular email every week that comes out the newsletter with the top stories of the week all of the stories we discuss here on the air and elsewhere. We also have a new newsletter that we have the first one in the can we probably will send it out this week. It is about security and what the top patches are this month that you need to worry about a little bit of a deep dive there. We give you all kinds of links to the sites to find out exactly what to install, how to install it, what to do with it. All kinds of stuff that you won't get anywhere else, and you're going to get it for free. Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe where you need to sign up. Make sure you go there and go there right now so that you don't forget Craig Peterson dot com slash, subscribe, believe me, I'm not going to be pestering you. I'm telling you all kinds of great stuff. Hardly anybody ends up unsubscribing. It is very, very rare. I have one of the highest open rates in the entire industry near as I can tell in talking with other people, and that's because people appreciate it. You know, I appreciate you guys too. I have been talking a little bit about tools on some of these webinars. I did a deep dive, and I'm going to do a deeper dive this coming week about the tools you can use when you're working from home. If you're a business owner or an IT person, you will hear about the types of tools that are going to help your teams. One of the things that I just wanted to bring up here now is that Comcast and T-Mobile have both said they are going to upgrade everyone to unlimited data for the next 60 days. They are going to suspend the enforcement of the data cap and overage fees during the Coronavirus pandemic. I think that's good. The statement says while the vast majority of our customers do not come close to using one terabyte of data in a month, we are pausing our data plans for 60 days giving all customers unlimited data for no additional charge. Normally Comcast charges an extra $50 per month for unlimited data or $10 for each additional block of 50G after you exceed one terabyte. They're also making their Xfinity Wi-Fi hotspots free for anyone to use. I mentioned that earlier in the show. So if you are somewhere and you need the internet, and you see a Wi-Fi network called Xfinity, you can hop on and use it. Now from a security standpoint, there are considerations, and we go into those in more depth in the webinars coming up this week. And I have a whole course that gets into a lot of depth on that. But it's great Xfinity just look for that Wi-Fi hotspot on your phone, no matter where you are. They have millions of them all over the country. Anyone that has Comcast, for the internet is going to be providing unbeknownst to them, and affinity Wi-Fi hotspot, okay? Now, normally they are free to Comcast customers, and everybody else needs to buy a pass to use them. They're going to be free for 60 days. They are the largest home internet provider in the nation. And I know there's not a whole lot of them in some of our communities, but they are very, very big at&t, which is the second biggest home internet provider that enforces data caps announced that it would waive the caps as well. So that's great news, frankly, unlimited smartphone data for the next 60 days. Excluding roaming, By the way, so don't think you can get roaming for free, and that applies to any T-Mobile plan Metro by T-Mobile prepaid pant plan as well. It's also giving all of its T-Mobile customers an additional 20 Giga mobile hotspot tethering service for the next 60 days. Sprint, which is being acquired right now by T-Mobile, is taking No coal steps. So there you go. There are your main guys now really, it's just it's down to Comcast is providing smartphone service, not using all their towers though, and T-Mobile, AT&T, and Sprint are all doing it. Now to help low-income Americans, T-Mobile is working with Lifeline. And it's going to provide customers and extra free data up to five gigabytes and gigabytes I should say, per month over the next two months. Lifeline, by the way, is a federal program. It gives discounted service to people with low incomes, and many Lifeline providers resell T-Mobile service instead of having networks of their own. By the way, T-Mobile also has a 55 and older plan for those of us who are in that age group, and they have discounts for that group as well. So there you go. There is a lot to cover. center there, and thanks to Comcast, at&t, T-Mobile, and the dozens of other ISVs that are going to be providing us with more service for free during these tougher times. Now, one of the things I talk a lot about when we're talking about security is linking networks and having people working from home or remote offices and the use of VPNs, and other security problems, right? Well, here's a real eye-opener. There are many businesses considered part of our critical infrastructure. The businesses that are under FINRA regulations these businesses are in the financial businesses, particularly banks, manufacturers. Anyone who's making anything for the military or DFARS contractors, but the bottom line is, the more sensitive the systems are, the less you want those systems to connected to the internet in any way. And in those cases where you've got the critical infrastructure intelligence agencies anywhere, you have higher security networks, working at home is not an option at all. Well, there are some ways around this problem. And I don't mean around it as in trying to skirt the security issues, but around it in a very secure way. And it depends on how you're working and what you're doing and really how critical and sensitive the data is. You know, the old orange book standards were there for a reason, and people can read some of the older CRTs and things remotely. These new LCDs and LED displays we have are harder to read remotely, but in those cases, forget about printing. Never going to be able to work from home right if, if the information is only available in a SCIF, forget about it, you're not going to be able to work from home, or getting kind of technology there with those TLS and SSL. But anyway, we have to be careful if we are in a business that has this type of sensitive information. So we'll talk about that when we get back. And then we have one more topic for today, and we're going to cover another angle of working at home and what does that mean to you and me, so stick around. We're going to be back. You're listening to Craig Peterson. On w GAN online. Craig Peterson dot com. And make sure you sign up on my email list right now. You have to subscribe by going to Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe, and you'll find out about all of our free resources for working at home. Stick around. We'll be right back.
Hey guys, welcome back. Craig Peterson here. We've been talking a lot about working from home. And if you missed any of today's show and you are working from home or your business, who has people who are working from home or considering having people working from home, you're going to want to catch the replays of today's show. And you can usually find those right by going to Craig Peters on.com slash iTunes. You can also find it and almost anywhere in any podcast platform out there. Just search for Craig Peterson, and you'll find today's whole show they're available as a podcast. We covered a ton of topics there, and we're talking right now about those companies that are kind of high stakes security. Intelligence agencies, critical infrastructure, anybody who's developing things for the DOD contractors, subcontractors, sub-subcontractors, and we've got this whole CMC thing going on. And I'm talking with people who have attended these briefings on it and just don't understand what they need to do and how to do it. And they just won't do it because I can't believe they're required to have all this security is crazy. But here's the bottom line. Last week, the US government cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency issued an advisory to critical infrastructure companies to prepare for remote work scenarios as this whole Covid-19 spreads. They told people that they have to check that their VPN networks are up-to-date, that the companies have implemented multi-factor authentication, that they have tested out the remote access scenario. Of course, there's a lot more to it than just that. Cybersecurity consultants, like me, who work with those high stake clients know that remote work and security don't mix unless you understand what you are doing. In this Ars Technica article here, they discuss electric utilities, oil, and gas firms, manufacturing companies, and say that it's not always so simple for many of their most critical customers and even more so for intelligence agencies. It should be a wake-up call. If you are a company that has to meet any of these higher security standards. Most notably, if you have to meet the DFARS standards. The ITAR standards, the new CMMC standards, which are all of the military standards. The NIST 171 standards say you can not have people working at home. Okay, so here is a statement from a team lead over the Department of Energy and should be a fairly good wake up call. You need to figure out a way that if individuals cannot physically access the control system for a service that cannot stop, like electricity, water, wastewater, similar services, you ensure continuous operation. Even in the face in an environment where you might be risking your employee's lives if they continue to commute into the office. So think about that amazing statement here. For many industrial networks, the highest standard of security is an air gap, and this is what we do with our manufacturing clients. It means a physical disconnect between the inner sanctum of software connected to the physical environment and the less sensitive internet-connected IT systems. So there are very few private sector firms that are using air gaps. In other words, there is no physical connection. There is the obvious exception for highly regulated nuclear power utilities who have implemented actual air gaps and my clients for whom we have put air gaps in place in 100% of the cases where it's been possible. But again, my clients want to have their networks secure because they don't want stuff stolen. They don't want to get sued by releasing personal identifiable, identifiable information, and they don't want to shut down the manufacturing line, which is quite severe. All of these restrictions we're talking about can create these massive chokepoints for hackers and also for remote workers. Think about that. There are things, like jump boxes, we've used before, depending on the software used. If you can put those in place, then we've got administrators bumping each other off as they try and work and log in. Because these jump boxes, these, you might call them gateways. You SSH into that box, and then SSH into a different part of the network. So you have to kind of jump around. Some of them only allow one of the administrators to be on at a time. So think about that. If you fit into any of those, you have a bigger issue, and I'd be glad to talk to you guys. I mean, talk to you and help you with what you have. I have set aside some 15-minute time blocks. I'm going to send out an email again this week to let people sign-up, if your business is having problems, reach out to me, right? I'm a resource here. Don't let my 40 plus years of experience with this go to waste. I want to help, and I can help. You don't have to be a client, okay? And I will dedicate up 15 minutes or half an hour to help you out to get you going. Okay, because this is that important. I know what it's like to own a business. I've owned a business for many decades. And I know I get very frustrated when I feel like I'm kind of all left alone. Okay, that's off my chest. You can do that just by emailing me at Craig Peterson, it is me at Craig Peterson calm, or you can go to my company's website as well, mainstream dot net and there is a contact form on there where you can leave a message, and I'll get back to you or another member of my team will. Let's get back to a great article, by the Ars Technica staff, on working at home. They've done it for 22 years Ars Technica has. And as you know, I've been doing it for more than a couple of decades as well. But let's kind of run through what their suggestions are here to kind of finish up the show. One work-from-home suggestion from them was about snacks, supplies, a pet, and dolls. Now, you know, I don't recognize our I don't recommend snacks because I practice intermittent fasting, right? A pet. We have a pet. We have a Great Dane and have lots of supplies, and I don't have any dolls. But anyway, you should consider upgrading to a more ergonomic workstation. It is particularly true if you're working from home for a long time. For instance, I have these tables from SIS. SIS is a company that makes office furniture, and what these are about six foot long, and maybe two or three feet deep. And they raise and lower a few feet. I can sit in a chair, I can sit on a ball here, kind of a big exercise ball or I can stand up, I can move around. It is phenomenal. And I have these and most of my workstations. They're just phenomenal. I love these things. Before these, I had one that I just attached to a regular table, and I could raise and lower my keyboard, mouse, and screen, and that was just wonderful as well. So remember that it is convenient. Let's see other suggestions from Ars Technica. They said they've done this since 98. Okay, so this is from Jade Timor senior science editor your office needs to have View he says, trees, birds open sky just something you find appealing so that when you raise your head from your screen to clear your mind, there's something there that you want to see. I do have a couple of windows here in my working area, and I can kind of see the sky. So it's not too bad but I again I get up move around. The author goes on to say to have an exercise and activity routine. Many studies have shown that getting up and moving a bit is incredibly positive for your health. That's what I do. I don't get completely sedentary. Senior tech policy reporter Timothy Lee says have a physically separate workspace. I talked a lot about that earlier in the show. Again, you can find the show at Craig Peterson dot com slash iTunes and subscribe there as well. So, he says to put it as far as possible from the kitchen, laundry room, TV, and other sources of domestic distraction. Senior technology editor Lee Hutchinson, he says it's not slacking. In my experience, what helps me more than anything is to have co-workers who are also virtual. At a past job, I held for a year or so where I was the only remote teammate in a large Bellevue Washington based admin team. I was secluded from my team at home and missed everybody. He goes on to say that they use slack now. I don't particularly like slack. It is not secure. It does not meet any of the security standards. The only thing that does is the high-level version of WebEx teams, which is what I use. Our clients that need security and have their security requirements are passed down by law. We have to be as secure as they are, or at least his as they're supposed to be. So that's what we use, we use the WebEx teams. If you'd like this 90-day free trial, we can set you up we can get it going, and we can give you a higher level better version of it then you can get right now at the WebEx dot com website. However, if you don't want to bother me, I understand you can get it yourself, but please do me a favor and just email me. me at Craig Peterson dot com and ask me any questions, including about this, and we can get you set up with this trial. Jennifer Ouellette, senior writer and she is saying that it makes a huge difference having everybody working remotely Now remember, Ars Technica, they publish they do writing little different than a manufacturer. But she had online communities. That's what she likes. Groups of friends who are science writers, and she's always loved it. It's got a picture of her cat here to kind of a cute cat. But anyway, there's a whole bunch of others that I have up on my website as well at Craig Peterson dot com. You'll see those in the blogs off of the homepage. And again, make sure you sign up. I'm going to be having some deep-dive webinars this week, answering all of your questions we'll be talking about VPN, some of the tools you can use, basically about everything. But you have to subscribe, Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe, do it right now. Go to your computer, type in this URL, Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe. You'll find out about all these webinars and much much more. Have a great week, and we'll talk to you Wednesday at 738 with Ken and Matt.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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Today's show will cover all the different aspects of remote work. During the Coronavirus Pandemic, social distancing, and self and mandated quarantines there is a lot of technology to talk about. If you are not on my email list, sign up at Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe. It is a busy show -- so stay tuned.
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Automated Machine Generated Transcript:
Hey, hello, and welcome everybody to the show. Of course, we put this out on as a podcast as well and all of your favorite podcasting sites, and we're heard right here on WGAN every Saturday from one until 3 pm. Of course, I'm on with Ken and Matt for their morning drive show, which is every Wednesday at 738. Well, their morning drive shows every day. As you might expect, we have a lot of coronavirus related stuff today. But this is not going to be so much on the medical side. It is going to be more on the - How do you work from home? How do you make your business a success, when you have many of your workers who are out for whatever reason. We'll be talking about the technologies of working from home, as well as what the FCC is doing to help make our lives a little bit easier in this set Coronavirus match. You might have seen and how viruses in and of themselves are kind of a big problem. If he were to ask me, we're going to talk about this massive Atlanta based money laundering operation that the FBI brought down. A colossal business email compromised bust that also brought down dozens of different bad guys. What they did and how they're trying to take advantage of the coronavirus to steal even more money from you. Some free upgrades that have come from Comcast and T Mobile. We probably we'll talk a little bit about what WebEx is doing for us as well when it comes to free conferencing systems and team systems for 90 days or more. We will discuss how the more secure businesses out there are making it very difficult, in fact, almost impossible, in some cases, absolutely impossible to work from home and some advice from my wife and me. I've been working at home for more than 20 years, what have we learned over those years, and what have other people been saying that I thought might make a reasonable discussion. Now you'll find all of this, of course, on my website at Craig Peterson dot com, we try and post all of these articles up for everybody to be able to see. And we'll also be talking about this a little bit more in some of our webinars. You might have attended my webinars this week. Last Sunday, I had a great webinar well attended. We covered a lot of ground frankly, about the whole work from home thing and VPNs and some of the technology you should and should not be using. We're probably this week going to start up this coming week and have some specialized ones as well. We're going to be talking about VPNs, the hardware and software you need, and the routers in your home office. Some of the plugins you should be using and what you can do about DNS. So that'll all be coming up this week. There's only one way to find out about this and to get registered. These are free and are essential for you as a worker, as a business owner, or as a manager. All of those people you're going to benefit a lot by checking in with me on these webinars. So how do you get on? Easy just go to Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe. I am not one of these spammers. I'm not one of these internet marketers. I haven't been in the online space now for many, many decades. And it's kind of scary to think about blizzards four-plus decades actually in the whole networking space, and the computer security space for this as well. So I guess you could say I've seen it all, at least most of it. And so I've been taking questions from everybody. What do you want? What don't you want to see? If you do sign up for the list, by the way, I've got three little surprises that will come your way some great gifts of information that are available for you just for the clicking and signing up. Again Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe, keep an eye on your mail mailbox because I will be letting you know about these other webinars that are coming up this next week.
You know, being the tech guy that I am. Sometimes, I think it's kind of like the cobblers kids without any shoes or repaired shoes. In my case, it was ill-repaired technology and of course, when you needed it, you know just isn't there for you. This week, the problem I've been having has been with my email. If you responded to me, I have to apologize because my email system has not been working correctly. You already know I have thousands of people on my email lists, and I've been trying to keep everybody up to date on Saturday mornings, you get my special emails about what the news is this week. Then pretty much once a month, more or less a week after Microsoft's Patch Tuesday, I tell you what the most critical patches are to install and apply and give you all that information. If you haven't caught that one yet, its because we haven't sent it out, however, we have the very first of that edition all set and ready to go, and we'll probably be sending that out pretty darn soon. And what we're trying to do is save you a lot of time, Microsoft had over 100 critical patches this week, and there's no way that a regular company can keep up with all of these patches. So what do you do? That's what these exclusive newsletters are for, telling you here are the most critical ones, the ones that are in the wild right now. Bad guys are using them. That's easy for them to use to get into your system. So How can you protect yourself? All of that stuff in that newsletter? So I think it's going to be handy. It's one of the things we've heard the most complaints about from people is just what patches Do I need to apply because you can't possibly patch them all. I also had a great discussion this week that I want to bring up while we're talking about patches. And this is for the listener, in fact, in Maine, and a business owner, small business owner, and he is using Android devices sticking with the Google devices. Google makes a phone called a pixel. It's not necessarily the best of the Android devices out there in many measures. But the good news about it is the Google does release updates for it, and those updates can cover all of the critical patches that you need. But the point I made to him, and I want to make sure it is clear for everybody who's listening is that most of the vendors In the Android world do not support vices devices for more than two years. So you only get two years' worth of patch support. And that includes Samsung. And it frankly, if I were buying an Android device, I would probably buy the Samsung Galaxy more or less top of the line, because I know they'll be supporting that for two years. So first of all, check when the device came out. So if you're buying a new Samsung Galaxy phone, and it came out eight months ago, remember, that's eight months off of the two years' worth of support. So you're going to get what a year and four months' worth of support, hopefully, out of Samsung, and then after that, the problem is you're not going to be able to get patches anymore, and that means your security is going to go right down the drain. Keep that in mind. So our basic rule of thumb when it comes to Android devices, if you're going to buy them, you need to buy a new phone every year to make sure That you're able to get the updates. If you are using an Apple phone, you're good to go for five years, five years. So again, the same trick applies. When did Apple released that phone, and you're getting going to get support for five years from when it was released. So with the Apple phones, we advise every four years or just keep an ear to the ground.
Apple's good about not only giving you the updates, and automatically installing them, but also having them not break your phones as well as letting you know when the end of life is for each device. We recently saw the end of life for the iPhone six. The six S is going to be coming up later on this year. So you know, if you have a success, you're probably going to have to replace it. Then the sevens will probably be good until next year. They just last, right, and Apple supports them and keeps all of these security patches up-to-date, which is super duper exciting. For us, particularly in this day and age, one of the things I mentioned this week on one of these webinars was, hey guys huge deal here. Because what we're finding is that we're at war and you may not realize it, they're certainly not talking about it on TV. And I'm not talking about coronavirus. I'm talking about war with real live enemies. Just like in the old days, we've got Iran we've got China, and we've got Russia all attacking us actively attacking us. But this is a war in cyberspace. We're not attacking them anywhere like they're attacking us. And it isn't just bad guys living in those countries. We're talking about a war that has been declared by and is officially being run by their government. Now we have retaliated for some of these cyber strikes. Still, it is a real war, and we can expect more of it. We can expect it to increase here with the coronavirus spread because we're all kind of distracted, aren't we? From soup to nuts, the military is distracted. So we have to make sure that we are covering ourselves with security, and that's part of what I will cover in these webinars coming up. I begin with the basics of remote work, including what to look out for and what you need to know. In these webinars, I always answer all the questions everybody has so that you can get the right answers. And I am just you know, it's content-rich, where we're, we're answering your questions, we're giving you all the information we can, and I'm going to be selling here probably in the next week or two, a more advanced course. That does a deep dive step by step all of the tactics and things you need to do and how to do it to lock down your Windows computers, lock down your network, your Wi-Fi, etc. I've heard from so many people that it's confusing going online, searching Google trying to find the information, and no one has it appropriately organized because everybody has their little bit. So we're going to be doing a full paid course on that one. It is for anybody who has to maintain computers, primarily for businesses, where you have to keep these things secure. It will help you make sure the security is going to work for you. Okay, so to subscribe, make sure you get on those lists by going to Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe. And when we get back, we're going to be talking about working from home some of the things to consider from the tech side. You're listening to Craig Peterson on WGAN.
Hi, everybody, Craig Peterson back here. I was feeling kind of punky this weekend. If anybody else kind of felt that way. I don't think it was the coronavirus or Covid-19. I have been, maybe about a week feeling run down. I was kind of moving slowly, and it was not much fun, but I'm feeling so much better right now. That's why I didn't have as many of these webinars last week that I wanted to have. I was going to try and do like one a day, but I ended up with more like one last week. Next week is going to be bigger better. I am feeling well. We're going to talk a lot more. Now that you guys have had a little experience working at home and answer even more questions than we could have answered before now that you kind of know what you don't know right a little bit. Get you safe, get your safe at home and get you're using the right tools. We have even put together a little survey to help you check your preparedness to work remotely. We're going to be releasing information about some of the tools and hopefully help you find some tools that are going to help you at home help you with everything from efficiency, through security at with your work at home setups. And we're we set up a Facebook group, and I'm not sure if we're going to use it right away. You know, when I surveyed you guys a couple of weeks ago, there was only I think there's only like one or 2% of people that wanted to do these lives on Facebook. zero percent, by the way, that wanted to do them on YouTube. And the vast majority of people wanted to do regular webinars, so we did it on zoom. I may use WebEx as well depends how many people sign up because my zoom only supports 100 people, my WebEx, which is what I've used for Some of my bigger training supports up to 10,000 people. So we'll you know, we'll see. But you have to sign up. Just go to Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe. And that will also be sending you a few really kind of cool cheat sheets and things that I think you could use. And so all of this is free, absolutely free. And then you will find out about the webinars that I'm doing this week as we do some deep dive webinars as well this week, so it should be a great week, coming up this week. All right, so let's get right down to it. Now. Our first topic really for this week. Well, maybe our next one, right. But this is from the verge. And Kim Lyons wrote this, and it's about how to work from home. And I when I did my surveys of you guys who are on my email list this last week, actually we can half ago, I found that the majority of you who went to the webinar that I held Last Sunday, said that you had never really worked from home before, that this was the very first time. So congratulations to you, I suspect you're like most of these people. We were able to answer all of their questions in the webinar. That's what they're for is to get the information out and answer your questions. It can be kind of fun, and it is kind of different. Many people are just sitting at home in their pajamas and till noon. Now it's time to get back to work because we're looking at an extended period. If you're in the 80-year-old range, even above 70, many of us are still working right. Above 70 years old, you are in the kind of that critical age range where the recommendations are that for the next three months, you need to limit going outside and meeting with people heavily. If you are above 60 or above now, they are warning us that again, and you need to be very, very careful. Although most of these deaths are people who are 80 and older, anybody with the compromised system must be careful, and down till about 25 years of age. So if you are one of these say diabetics or you have emphysema, COPD, or many underlying illnesses, you've got to be very, very careful. So for you, this might be an extended period, we might be tar talking, you know what to see here, March to April, May, mid-June, July, maybe even August that you're going to want to be working from home. So there are a few ways that you can be productive at home, and you know, again, we go into a lot of detail in the webinars. It is just a quick radio hit right today. So, Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe to make sure You're signed up. If you're planning to work from home for an extended period, here are some things that you might want to consider. Remember, too, that the best ways to work at home are going to vary from person to person. What you have to do is figure out what helps you to stay focused and to separate your work life from your home life. And this is something that frankly, I have had a hard time doing. Because you already know I give away a lot of time. And I'm doing that right now too. You'll probably see another email from me this week, where we're volleying to volunteering to spend 15 minutes half an hour with you on the phone to help you with whatever setup you have. And we can even do remote tech support for you. Anything that you need help with, and we're just volunteering this for free for people. Again, you can just email me at Craig Peterson dot com. If you want some more information if you're having trouble if you're trying to make this work me at Craig Peterson dot com, and you're just having trouble with that. But the problem I've had over the last couple of decades of working at home is that separating my work life from my home life. I get up in the morning, and one of the first things I do is I pull out that laptop, and I start checking my email, I'm checking my client's systems, I'm checking our systems, I'm checking on the VPN that clients are using. I'm checking the firewall logs to from our clients as well as for us. Just see if anyone has been trying to hack in. Then we have a look at the alerts that have come up from those firewalls, and other you know, emergencies that might be pending, and solve all of those. Then I get up, and I do my running and some weightlifting down in the basement. I have this great treadmill that one of my daughters had bought for herself. It is a Livestrong brand, from back when Lance Armstrong wasn't a bad word and is a great treadmill. Then I go up, and I shower, and I get back to work. I work all day and then when the evening comes, and we might turn on a TV show while I am, What? Yes, while I'm working on my laptop, and taking care of things for people. That's what I do. Right? I love helping people. I remember when I was about 20 years old, maybe it was 19. And one of my coaches told me, he said he sat us all down. He said I want you to write your obituary right now. You're 20 years old, give or take, write your obituary. What Would you like your headstone to say, try and get it that short? Just a headstone? So we're not talking about multiple paragraphs, you're just talking about multiple words, frankly, what would you like it to say? And I thought about that seriously thought about it. You know what, it has been the mantra for my life here for another 40 years after that, and that is he helped others. That's what I wanted on my headstone. And that's what I've done, right? My wife and I, we've raised together our eight kids, we homeschooled them, all the way up to college. They've gone on to have just extraordinary lives. I still have two of them working with me, which is a real blessing. It's been wonderful. So I haven't solved this problem of separating my home life from my business life because, for me, they've been one-in-the-same. There might be something I need to do with my family during the day. And so I will do it. Because that's the most important thing to me, there might be something that comes up for a client, and I might have to work at it even overnight all night long to get them to the point where they have a smooth operation the very next day at work. That's what I'll do. That's what my family will do. That's what we do for our customers and friends and have forever. And I don't know if that's a bad thing or not, you know if you're going to be doing that if you don't want to do that, but you have to make the decision. Where are you going to draw the line? Okay, we're going to continue this discussion when we get back after the break. We're going to talk about some other things you should be looking at when we talk when we're thinking about the physical side of working from home. You're listening to Craig Peterson right here on WGAN, and on the podcast and streaming pretty much everywhere. Stick around. We'll be right back.
Hello, everybody, welcome back, Craig Peterson here, on WGAN, and of course, online streaming sites everywhere. Just look for me, Craig Peterson, on your favorite streaming app. I listen to podcasts all the time and use them. You know, I mentioned in the last segment that I spent some time in the morning every day on the treadmill, trying to keep my heart rate up into that right range and double-check with your doctor if you have a question about what that range is. It used to be kind of your maximum heart rate was 200 minus your age. I'm not sure what it is. Now, I've heard people say it was like 220 or whatever. But double-check, double-check, double-check. You don't want to stress your heart. I've been amazed at how well I have done for me. I've been doing this daily running, walking, jogging, kind of a combination in terms you know, again, intermittent. You know, go fast, going slow well relatively slow. I started this before Christmas last year. So I've been doing it now for three months. A solid three months, and it has made a fantastic difference. I'm surprised how quickly my heart rate drops now after I've been exercising and how not out of breath I am. Currently, my heart rate is in a healthy heart range. It's been just phenomenal for me. Some people are saying that it does help. I think it's Dr. Fung who says to get your core body temperature up because when it comes to some of these viruses, and it is harder for them to live in heat. There is nothing like a little hard exercise to make that happen. Get that old cardio going. Alright, so back to what we should be doing on the physical side when it comes to working from home. I have a separate workspace, and I'm blessed to have it. We built this house, 25-30 years ago, now. When we designed the house, we created an office off of the back. It reminds me I'm thinking back of that I had two T-1 data lines in here, which was like crazy fast, who could use so much data? It cost about $5,000 a month. Can you believe that back in that day and age, it was rather expensive? Now we've got three and a half gigabits worth of data up and down here. Because, as you know, I run all types of pieces of training and everything right out of here. It has been phenomenal. It's so much cheaper. It's like a 10th of the price of what it used to be for those two T-1 lines, and I have way way more bandwidth, and it is a lot faster, a lot cheaper. I do have that physically separate workspace, but it isn't necessary. You don't need a dedicated office. And I remember thinking that I did and I went out, and I said, you know, I'm not going to rent space for my company per se, like go out and rent this office and have room for Secretary and other people or whatever. And I went to one of these rental things where you can get space as you need it. I went to Regis, so I went to, and we got an office, and we used it rarely, right because it was home. Why not work at home because this is remote work, right? I was remotely working doing stuff for clients. I found it was such a pain to go there, and then you have the office space to maintain, but again, I have a physical office off the back of the house, which is great. What you might need to do is to find a room with a door that closes. In many cases where you have a much smaller living space, that could be impossible, right? What doors do you have? You have closets, and you have the bathroom, maybe you have a bedroom door, maybe you have, you know, the living space and the bedroom space all in one. And, heck, I've lived in those spaces before myself. Here's what you should do. You need to have a space that's dedicated for you to work, and that can just be a corner of the room. That can be a chair that you the chair that you have that you turn around to a specific angle. A small desk set up in a corner, a table a folding table that you pull out a laptop, But that you put on the end of the kitchen table, anything like that, so that you have a space that you go to that is prepared for you to work. And the idea behind this is a fascinating psychological principle that when you have a physical area that you go to that is set up for doing a certain type of work, and your body will go into that mode. It's kind of like when you go to bed at night, and you should not be doing what I do. I don't do this at night, I do in the morning, but sitting there with your laptop or sitting there with your cell phone and doing stuff on it. Your bedroom is for sleeping and maybe one or two other activities. That is so that your brain gets trained that when you go into your bedroom, and you lay on your bed, it says, Oh, it's time to go to sleep. And you then go to sleep. It's the same sort of thing. You're Going with you've got that laptop at the same end of the kitchen table, your brain says, Oh, I'm going to work now. You don't want to use a place like your bedroom or the couch, Chesterfield. sofa, whatever you call it. It should be a place that is not used for relaxation but used only for work. Now, the other trick is to train other members of your household to understand that when you are in this space, I am working. You should not bother me. You shouldn't be coming to me with questions, etc. and let them know that hey, you are going to be around during coffee breaks if you will. And you'll be glad to take their questions, and you'll be glad to do the "honey-do's" then, you know those little things that your husband or your wife wants you to do. It's going to take a little bit of trial and error to figure out what's going to work For you, but it is going to be important.
Some people find that one of the hardest parts of working from home is the part that I explained to the very beginning of this discussion, and that is that you can end up working 24 seven. In reality, the best way to do it is to start work around the same time every day ended around the same time, take your breaks, including meals about the same time, every day. Again, don't eat in the work areas, don't sleep in them, don't lounge in them. But, you know, I don't intend to eat at my desk, and I do that less lately now that I've been thinking more about it and thinking critically about it. I try and go to the kitchen to eat, and that does make a difference. You also need to be careful about kind of stir crazy. So you should get up every once in a while, walk outside if you can, I use something called the Pomodoro Technique. I use a timer in which I use a timer that says, okay, you're doing 20 minutes' worth of work right now. So what are you going to do? What's your goal? What are you going to accomplish in this 20 minutes, you set that little timer. I use software for it. But in retrospect, one of those little kitchen timers, you know, the little tomato things where you, you twist the top, and now you've got your 20-minute timer going would be more than enough. That might be kind of nice because it sits there going tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, reminding you that you have work to do right. Now the other side of this is feeling a little isolated at times. We'll talk about some of the applications that you might want to use to collaborate and work together. Also, other rules that I think are important for us as we work from home. It's a little different if you're trying to start an at-home business, I think most of these rules still apply. Still, it's a little bit different than working from home for an employer who expects specific results at certain times and expects certain types of unification. So we'll talk a bit about that when we get back as well. You're listening to Craig Peterson. Make sure that you go to Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe right now. Craig Peterson, that's S-O-N slash subscribe and get on some of these webinars I'm holding this week, and we'll be right back on WGAN.
Hi guys, welcome back. Craig Peterson here on WGAN. You know you can get me as well every Wednesday morning on with Ken and Matt at about 738. Last week I got bumped by the governor, but you know what the heck? It's an excellent way to get my segment bumped, I guess. Usually, every Wednesday at 7:38 am with Ken and Matt, and of course, online, you can catch me on pretty much every streaming platform out there. And make sure you join me for these webinars we're having over the next couple of weeks I'm going to be going into more detail answering every question you guys have on working from home, the technology to do it, the ways to do it securely. We're opening up our calendar for people who need some help with their businesses. How to get this working securely, using the existing equipment we have, and maybe some free software to get my people who are working at home, working efficiently and effectively, so I'm going to be doing some webinars on that as well. Let's finish up the topic of workspaces when you're working from home. One of the essential things to also consider is, if you do have enough room while you're working from home to have more than one space, then you can do something quite useful, very efficient, and that is you use different areas for different work tasks. So, for instance, in my case, I am running the business paying bills, depositing checks, doing all that sort of thing. So I have one space where I do that. I have another area where I'm at right now that I use when I'm doing my radio show, television interviews, running webinars, that's another space. I have yet another area when I'm reading or trying to do some studying. I have a space for meditation. All I'm doing is moving around in one room. That's all you need to do to program your brain. When I am in this position, when I'm sitting in this chair facing this direction, I'm doing this. Then with the Pomodoro Technique, where you're spending 20-minutes doing something and then taking a 10-minute break, I always get up, I walk out of the area entirely. I might talk to the family, get myself a glass of water or a cup of coffee, whatever it might be, and do a little socializing and help with whatever needs doing. Then I go back to my space. I get back to work. It's a unique way of working. If you do have people around that can help you with feeling a sense of social connection. But if you're working remotely, you can feel isolated at times. As part of your routine, you're going to want to try and interact with your co-workers regularly. It's kind of like the old water bottle, where you all kind of meet around there and chat and talk and what did you do last weekend? You know, don't feel bad about talking that way. We all need that even if you're an introvert. We need to have relationships with other people. We need to talk to other people. What we do in the office is we use one of these team apps. Now the one we use is the only one that's secure for doing all of this. That is Cisco WebEx, and they have different levels. We use the most secure level. Now, if you are a doctor, I've got to point out right now that there are some temporary rules in place that's part of this whole Covid-19 or Wuhan virus thing that allows you to use things like Slack and Skype, neither of which are secure. Keep that in mind. Those rules will change again, and HIPAA regulations will not allow you to use them. We use WebEx. You can get it for free right now for 90 days. It is phenomenal. It isn't just for meetings, and you know where you've got the camera on your laptop or your computer, and you are having a remote meeting, and you can see everyone, which is wonderful. But it is also for the team collaboration-side of things, where you can have rooms where you can all chat with each other. Now, one of the other advantages of using Cisco WebEx is over everything else is that it provides any level of security that allows people who are outside of your organization as part of a team. So we haven't set up, so some of our vendors are in certain team rooms, and we can talk to them our customers are in individual team rooms so we can talk to them. Now, we have the whole thing fully integrated with our phone system as well. If people call, it drops the transcription of that voice message they might have left into a room for so we can see it all in Cisco teams. If you want, you can go and set it up yourself. But, if you need a little help, or here's the other side. If you purchase it through us, we can set you up with a more advanced demo than you can get on the website. So again, you can just email me at Craig Peterson dot com if you are interested. I'd appreciate it. You know, we don't make any money off of it from the demo. Hopefully, you're going to continue to use it, and we make a couple of bucks a month from it. We can provide you a little bit of support and a little bit of training. It's a good thing, just email me at Craig Peterson dot com, and we can help you with that. We also integrate things like WebEx into large phone systems. It's actually what the military uses, and what the White House uses. They have some very, very secure systems as well, depending on what you need. Keep in mind all of the CMMC regulations that are going into effect in June. If you have to have it for compliance, CMMC, HIPAA, high tech, etc. It is the system for you. You can get the necessary set up for free by going to WebEx dot com. However, if you want a little bit more, I'd appreciate it. If you'd come through my company, Mainstream. Do me a favor and just reach out to me. That's me at Craig Peterson dot com. My team and I can help you out there with getting it all set up and Mgetting you in the place you need to be. So there you go chat over these messaging apps, hold meetings with them. The one you might want to look at, as I said, WebEx is the only one integrated and completely secure at the levels we can provide to you. You cannot get it on their general website. You have to get it from a Cisco partner like my company. Slack is great, and I have used it a lot in the past, but it is just not secure. It is not even close to providing the features that WebEx provides. You might look at Zoom, although it is terrifically insecure, but not as vulnerable as Skype is. But Zoom is quite bad. They made some major design decisions that opened up security holes you can drive a Mack truck through. It is just crazy. I do use Zoom but never for applications where security is an issue. If you've been on some of my webinars, some get hosted on zoom. Mainly because a lot of people use it and are familiar with how it works. I'm not so worried about security on Zoom for my webinars.The problem with the Zoom from a security standpoint is Zoom has a back door. They punched out of the network to allow them to control some of the aspects of your zoom conferences. That why we don't use or allow its use in any of our clients that have CMMC or high tech restrictions. That is a big No-No. They recently got slapped by the regulators. Check these things out. If you are using Microsoft Office, three 365, they have some collaboration tools too. I'm going to talk more about the collaboration tools and my webinars again this week, and we covered some last week. I have not made replays available of these webinars because I want you to attend them live if you can. I think coming up, and I will make replays available. So if you register, I will let you watch a replay. But I want you guys on these webinars. I know 70% of people say they will never attend a webinar and never sign up for a webinar. These are not high-pressure pitch event events. They are where I'm trying to help you out trying to get you going and trying to answer your questions. Okay. So make sure you do sign up. Now the last rule and the rule that I violate most often is trying to end work at the same time every day. So obviously there's going to be times when there are deadlines or project needs after hours, attention. There are times where I mentioned that I would work 24 hours, I've gone three days straight to try and solve a problem which we didn't cause, but the client needed to have solved. We stepped in and worked with other vendors, and we got the problem solved. In most situations after 10 pm work, email can wait until the following day for a response. Remember when we're at the end these work at home environments, that some people are going to start work at 6 am, some at nine, some at noon, and complete their jobs 8 to 10 hours later. They might be on a schedule where an 8 pm email goes out from them. We all project right, and they're going to project, and they're going to kind of expect you to be working the same hours they're working, although that's not necessarily the case. Even though they may sound a little anxious, get them used to the fact You're working from eight till five. And that's it. I'll get back to you tomorrow. Don't even respond to the email that comes in at 10 pm. I think that's important for a lot of people's sanity. For me, I just enjoy this so much. If I did not get paid to do it, I'd still do it. As you know, I do a lot of it and don't get paid for it. I guess that is a testament to the bottom line. Wow, the hour is up, I can't believe it. We're going to the top of the next hour. When we get back, we're going to talk about what you need to think about from your ISP, your internet service provider. That's how you get your internet. So what are some of the considerations here? What has the FCC done this week? What are some of the major providers doing as well? To make our lives and work from home a little bit easier, and don't forget, you know, I'm going to repeat this, sign up, sign up now so you can get all of this information. You can find out about my webinars that we're going to be doing some of the classes all of the free stuff, I want to help you out. Craig peterson.com slash subscribe. That's why I've been on the air now for about 25 years, just trying to help people understand what's going on in the security realm, the technology realm, and we need to understand it right now. So stick around. We're going to talk about that ISP and what that means to you. What are the things you need to consider and subscribe to Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe, and you're listening to me on WGAN and, of course, and online at Craig Peterson dot com.
Hey guys, welcome back. Craig Peterson here, of course on WGAN online at Craig Peterson calm. We had millions of people this week, working from home for the first time connecting to their offices trying to get things done trying to do a little collaboration and getting themselves in a little trouble as well. We have seen a significant increase in security problems because of people working at home. But I guess that shouldn't be a huge surprise to anybody that listens here. I have already done some webinars about working from home. I explained the pros and cons of working from home, and some of the technology required to be secure at home. And we're going to be doing more of those free webinars this coming week. We're going to start getting a little more long tail, if you will, drilling down deeper into some topics like VPNs, what are the best ones to use? When do they work? Well, when don't they work? We're going to be talking about your firewalls at the house and the office, and should you be linking them together? How can you split your network? When should you? Why should you, we're going to be covering in a lot more detail some of the questions that we've had popped up and people have been asking us. Then, of course, as always, we will take all of your questions. If you don't want to attend a webinar, if you have made the oath of never attend webinars, then you can always email me just me at Craig Peterson dor com or respond to one of the emails I send out about these webinars. If there are enough people interested, maybe what we should do is take it and get a webinar transcribed for you, maybe some screenshots. Perhaps you can even suggest what might work for you if you don't want to attend a webinar. But they have been very well attended. I've been quite pleased with that. That's after only making one announcement this last week. There was one email that went out is a little bit more than a week ago. I've been working with those people that responded. There are a lot of people I know that want to know more. So make sure you pass it along as well. If you have friends or family or other co-workers that have questions or if your boss has questions. If they're not letting you work from home and you want to work from home, make sure your boss gets on one of these webinars as well. And you can sign up to find out more about them. Just go to Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe, and we will be sending you all have that information. As part of signing up, you'll get some different cheat sheets. I think I have included three different cheat sheets. Some of them are multi-page, to help you with your online security, which is, of course, very, very important. We see an uptick in business, email compromises, and other things that are out there. We'll tell you a bit about that in the next segment. We will discuss what is going on with the whole Coronavirus and its ties into security problems. Well, we have had our president deregulating like crazy now for a week or two. Some people would say that our president is stupid. I think it's a brilliant thing to get rid of some of this regulation. You know, we don't live in a socialist country. However, we have many of the problems present in socialist countries. It can take years to get anything through these vast bureaucracies. Bureaucracy has a mind of their own, whether it's socialist, or in our case, a more of a free-market society. Cutting through the red tape meant this last week that they made some changes at the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission. Our FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, has done some amazing things so far with making it just so much more streamlined than smooth out items for customers. He got rid of some of the crazy stuff that was in the works previously, which would have increased at the internet expense for everybody. There are so many crazy things going on in increased regulation. The FCC has been putting pressure on internet service providers. These are the companies you're familiar Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon, all of your phone carriers. With everybody using smartphones now that we have people who are working from home. So one of my daughters, for instance, works in a call center. And what they have done is sent home their call center people with laptops, that they then connect up to the internet. And in this case, it was a hard-wired internet that you needed to have because she's in the financial services arena. And of course, right, it's my house. So, of course, we have Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, in fact, gigabit for her out to the internet, no problem. And so she hooked up, and she's able to get onto the systems at work, but the way it works With her for the call center and this is very common for call center people working at home or out of the office is the call center software placed a phone call to her cell phone. So now her T Mobile cell phone is going to be racking up thousands of minutes. That could be a problem.
So the FCC has been putting pressure on internet service providers and these phone companies etc. to do a couple of things. All of the major ISPs are committed and have pledged to waive late fees and keep customers connected when they miss payments due to this coronavirus pandemic. Now, of course, I get a little bit concerned about what happens if you miss payments for two months or three months? Because you just don't have the income, right? You lost your job. Maybe you were getting paid hourly piecemeal work whatever You don't have a regular paycheck, so you're not getting unemployment. Now you've got three months' worth of bills. The coronavirus is declared, you know, over or was victorious. So whatever the endpoint is on this thing, which is always a problem, right? It's like we go to war. And so how do we, how do we know that we've succeeded in that, but anyways, it comes, and now you have a three months payment to make, or they're going to catch off. So hopefully, that's not going to happen. They call this the keep Americans connected pledge. And we'll see, the FCC has not been able to convince these internet service providers to waive their data caps during the pandemic, but some of them may end up doing that. Home internet mobile providers that sign this pledge include all tests at TNT CenturyLink charter, Comcast Cox, frontier media comm sprint, T Mobile track phone US Cellular, Verizon, Windstream, and dozens of other small ones. Here's the pledge itself. Number one, not terminate service to any residential or Small business customers' because of their inability to pay their bills due to disruptions caused by the Coronavirus pandemic. Number two waive any late fees that any residential or small business customers incur because of their economic circumstances related to the Coronavirus pandemic, you know, how are you going to prove this stuff to these guys? Number three, open its Wi-Fi hotspots to any American who needs them. So that is actually that third one is kind of handy. Because I know a lot of people have over the years jumped onto their neighbor's Wi-Fi service unbeknownst to their neighbor, right? They were over at their house one time and got the password and continued to use it. Well, for instance, with Comcast, if you see an Xfinity Wi-Fi anywhere, and they are pretty much everywhere you see an Xfinity Wi-Fi, you can now hop on and use it for free. Which is when frankly pretty good for people. The FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said I don't want any American consumers experiencing hardships because of the pandemic to lose connectivity. It's a good thing that they're stepping up, and it's going to help maintain this social distancing. He also called these broadband providers to relax or data cap policies. But we'll see if they do the pledge doesn't require that. at&t said that it's waiving home internet data caps. So that's a good thing. And see overcharges are for raising profit, so they're not going to do that Comcast had not promised as of this last week anyway when I did some research on it. He's also asking telephone carriers to waive long-distance and overage fees. And even that ISP says surf schools and libraries should work with them on remote learning opportunities. So this is all excellent stuff, right? Up and restriction. So some of these companies have automatically Comcast doubled the amount of bandwidth available to some customers, other customers increased the bandwidth by 50%, which is good. That's going to help from working from home. Remember, and you've got upstream and downstream bandwidth. If you're working from home, that upstream might be the killer for you. So we'll see what happens here. The FCC has done some things that pushed them in the right direction. You know there are both pros and cons to all of this, as there always is. Now, we have coming up this week, several webinars, free webinars, I'm going to be doing deep dives, these are live. I'm answering all of your questions in real-time. You are going to want to attend these, believe me, whether you're a home user business user, whether you're working from home,
or not lots of great information. I'm taking my decade's worth of experience and putting it out there for you. I'm going to have some of my team members on these as well to answer questions that maybe go a little more detailed or, you know, are out of my bailiwick. But all of that can only be found one way, and that's if you're on my email list. I do not hound you. I do not annoy you. But you have to sign up Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe. That's Craig Peterson with an o dot com slash subscribe. Stick around.
Welcome back, everybody. Craig Peterson here. Hey, if you missed that URL to sign up and get all those free cheat sheets and to find out about our exclusive webinars during the coming week. Make sure you subscribe that URL is Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe, Craig just like a town C-R-A-I-G and Peterson P-E-T-E-R-S-O-N dot com slash subscribe, all lowercase. You can get on to my email list. You'll also be getting my weekly newsletter that includes the recap of the top tech stories of the week. We have a new newsletter that we've put together, and I'm going to start publishing that explicitly goes through what the most critical patches are that you need to apply. So that comes out monthly. It's kind of coordinated with Microsoft's Patch Tuesday, comes out about a week later is what our plan is. And that gives us a chance to analyze the patches like this last month, and they had more than 100 high severity patches they wanted to have you apply. If you want to know what are the ones I have to worry about, although this is for you, so you'll get that as well. And you will have the opportunity to sign up for all of these free webinars, learn about different pieces of training, webinars, pop-ups that we have kind of everything all rolled into one. So make sure you check that out and sign up Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe. So let's get into our next article about the Coronavirus maps. I got one of these weeks ago, and it was an email sent out to the media. Come check this out. We've put together this new map. And at the time, I didn't think twice about it. I do have multiple layers of security on this network and multiple-layers of protection on my Mac as well. I clicked on it, right, duh. And I was taken to a site that did have a map. I was lucky because I did have the advanced malware protection, the AMP stack from Cisco on my Mac, and it was all appropriately caught by the firepower firewall. I think it is what found it at the network edge. It saw it and what it was doing and stopped it immediately. Even this spread of coronavirus you want to call it Covid-19, which is similar to the SARS. Coronavirus, also known as Wuhan virus, which is where it started. We've got, you know Lyme disease because it began in Lyme, Connecticut, SARS, you know, all of these diseases because of the rivers, they were first found out and stuff, but whatever, this Cova 19, we'll just call it that, which is the disease. But the bad guys are using this as an opportunity to spread malware and to launch cyber attacks. They were fast about doing that.
There's a threat analysis report that was released by this company called reason cybersecurity. They had a good look at this to get an idea of what's going on. They found a file called Coronavirus map.com.xe. Yeah, how's that for common right.com.xe, which is where they will try and get you to download it thinking it's an executable. That could be helpful, helpful for you. But in fact, it's not. But there are a lot of people who have downloaded it. I'm looking right now at a table showing where downloads are occurring. What's going on? How many engines detect it. And here's an example of how useless antivirus software is nowadays. As of now, now, this is about two weeks that this particular piece of malware has been in the wild, about two weeks 58 out of the 72 engines that they tested over virus total, only 58 of these antivirus engines even detect it as being a problem. Ours identified it about two weeks ago. So you know, again, more reason not to trust antivirus software in many ways. That's not what we're talking about right now.
What we're doing now is this is a new threat, and they're using an old malware trick. And this is kind of part of the whole business email compromise stuff that we've heard about over the last couple of years. I've talked about it. The FBI has published statistics, and we're talking about many billions of dollars victims have had stolen. A very, very big deal. We've got local state officials, federal officials, who have been trying to track it down. The US Attorney's in the Northern District of Georgia, came out saying that dozens are getting charged in this Atlanta based money laundering operation. It funneled $30 million in proceeds from computer fraud schemes, romance scams, and retirement account fraud. It is all stuff that we've talked about before on this show. This announcement was last Friday. Friday the 13th was a bad day for those guys. It says that federal agents have arrested 24 individuals for their involvement in a large scale fraud and money laundering operation that targeted citizens, corporations, and financial institutions throughout the United States. Business email compromise schemes, romance fraud scams, and retirement account scams, among other frauds, duped numerous victims into losing more than $30 million in the course this release goes on for quite a ways. But the bottom line is this new Cova 19 scam where they are saying, Hey, here's a map. You can download it well that one's giving you a virus when you go ahead and try and do that. Of course, their more advanced malware platforms are not going to Luck that through. The next one is business email compromise schemes. And this is where they try and trick businesses into thinking that they owe money to somebody, they need to wire money to somebody, they haven't paid a vendor, etc., etc. It's a standard scheme, and it's up right now. The romance fraud scams, I suspect those are going to be pretty successful right now as people are self-isolating and maybe are feeling though a little bit isolated. And the romance fraud scams are things like, you know, getting somebody to kind of fall in love with you appreciate you. And then you go ahead and say, you know, I've got this bill hospital bill, it's 2000 3000. It's $5,000. And in some cases, it's my nephew, my knees, my wife or ex-wife or whatever. Right. And they have already scammed you into feeling for them, and then they get you to send them money. In some cases, it's Hey, I want to meet in person. And it's going to cost you know, 20 $500 for me to fly over there. And people are wiring them the money. So there's your romance fraud, scam, retirement accounts scams. Oh, man. It's, especially in these cases, with a down market right now. It's, hey, you know, we've got a certified investment plan, and we are still even in these downtime showing the return of 5% or more, you know, they don't want to make it sound like it's too good. And get people to wire the money into their accounts. Think of Bernie Madoff and what he did many other frauds, and they're trying to dupe the victim. So we have to be very careful when we're out there. Watch for online fake dating profiles, third party administrators for retirement investment. So these, see these are the people that have a whole list of them. Just a glance is showing they're about 30 years old in general. That's a shame. There are a lot of foreign-sounding names. All of the people are in Georgia, except for a couple in Texas. Somebody in Nigeria has an A in Missouri. Alright, when we get back, we're going to talk about the next topic here Comcast and T Mobile. Some other things when it comes to working from home. Make sure you get on to my email list so that you can get notified about this week's webinars and other topics at Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe. You are listening to WGAN. We'll be right back.
Hey, welcome back, everybody, Craig Peterson, here. Glad you guys could be with me today we've only got about a half an hour left in today's show with a few more topics to cover. But this has been a big week for people all over the world. For the very first time, many are working from home. That this includes, of course, people right here, people across the United States, Canada, Mexico, even France. Although the demonstrators are wandering the streets over there trying to spread the disease, well, they are French. Now and shout out to all of our people who listen from France. We do have people listening in France, so they know what I'm talking about. I have been putting together some detailed deep-dive webinars for this coming week, where I'm going to be answering all of your questions. I might do one or two Facebook Lives. We'll see how it all goes. I'm not a big Facebook Live fan myself, but you know many people are. So maybe you would like to get involved if you would. Again, these are all free, and I am trying to help you guys out. Believe me. You can sign up for my email list, which is Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe. You'll find out about these, and you'll get my regular email every week that comes out the newsletter with the top stories of the week all of the stories we discuss here on the air and elsewhere. We also have a new newsletter that we have the first one in the can we probably will send it out this week. It is about security and what the top patches are this month that you need to worry about a little bit of a deep dive there. We give you all kinds of links to the sites to find out exactly what to install, how to install it, what to do with it. All kinds of stuff that you won't get anywhere else, and you're going to get it for free. Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe where you need to sign up. Make sure you go there and go there right now so that you don't forget Craig Peterson dot com slash, subscribe, believe me, I'm not going to be pestering you. I'm telling you all kinds of great stuff. Hardly anybody ends up unsubscribing. It is very, very rare. I have one of the highest open rates in the entire industry near as I can tell in talking with other people, and that's because people appreciate it. You know, I appreciate you guys too. I have been talking a little bit about tools on some of these webinars. I did a deep dive, and I'm going to do a deeper dive this coming week about the tools you can use when you're working from home. If you're a business owner or an IT person, you will hear about the types of tools that are going to help your teams. One of the things that I just wanted to bring up here now is that Comcast and T-Mobile have both said they are going to upgrade everyone to unlimited data for the next 60 days. They are going to suspend the enforcement of the data cap and overage fees during the Coronavirus pandemic. I think that's good. The statement says while the vast majority of our customers do not come close to using one terabyte of data in a month, we are pausing our data plans for 60 days giving all customers unlimited data for no additional charge. Normally Comcast charges an extra $50 per month for unlimited data or $10 for each additional block of 50G after you exceed one terabyte. They're also making their Xfinity Wi-Fi hotspots free for anyone to use. I mentioned that earlier in the show. So if you are somewhere and you need the internet, and you see a Wi-Fi network called Xfinity, you can hop on and use it. Now from a security standpoint, there are considerations, and we go into those in more depth in the webinars coming up this week. And I have a whole course that gets into a lot of depth on that. But it's great Xfinity just look for that Wi-Fi hotspot on your phone, no matter where you are. They have millions of them all over the country. Anyone that has Comcast, for the internet is going to be providing unbeknownst to them, and affinity Wi-Fi hotspot, okay? Now, normally they are free to Comcast customers, and everybody else needs to buy a pass to use them. They're going to be free for 60 days. They are the largest home internet provider in the nation. And I know there's not a whole lot of them in some of our communities, but they are very, very big at&t, which is the second biggest home internet provider that enforces data caps announced that it would waive the caps as well. So that's great news, frankly, unlimited smartphone data for the next 60 days. Excluding roaming, By the way, so don't think you can get roaming for free, and that applies to any T-Mobile plan Metro by T-Mobile prepaid pant plan as well. It's also giving all of its T-Mobile customers an additional 20 Giga mobile hotspot tethering service for the next 60 days. Sprint, which is being acquired right now by T-Mobile, is taking No coal steps. So there you go. There are your main guys now really, it's just it's down to Comcast is providing smartphone service, not using all their towers though, and T-Mobile, AT&T, and Sprint are all doing it. Now to help low-income Americans, T-Mobile is working with Lifeline. And it's going to provide customers and extra free data up to five gigabytes and gigabytes I should say, per month over the next two months. Lifeline, by the way, is a federal program. It gives discounted service to people with low incomes, and many Lifeline providers resell T-Mobile service instead of having networks of their own. By the way, T-Mobile also has a 55 and older plan for those of us who are in that age group, and they have discounts for that group as well. So there you go. There is a lot to cover. center there, and thanks to Comcast, at&t, T-Mobile, and the dozens of other ISVs that are going to be providing us with more service for free during these tougher times. Now, one of the things I talk a lot about when we're talking about security is linking networks and having people working from home or remote offices and the use of VPNs, and other security problems, right? Well, here's a real eye-opener. There are many businesses considered part of our critical infrastructure. The businesses that are under FINRA regulations these businesses are in the financial businesses, particularly banks, manufacturers. Anyone who's making anything for the military or DFARS contractors, but the bottom line is, the more sensitive the systems are, the less you want those systems to connected to the internet in any way. And in those cases where you've got the critical infrastructure intelligence agencies anywhere, you have higher security networks, working at home is not an option at all. Well, there are some ways around this problem. And I don't mean around it as in trying to skirt the security issues, but around it in a very secure way. And it depends on how you're working and what you're doing and really how critical and sensitive the data is. You know, the old orange book standards were there for a reason, and people can read some of the older CRTs and things remotely. These new LCDs and LED displays we have are harder to read remotely, but in those cases, forget about printing. Never going to be able to work from home right if, if the information is only available in a SCIF, forget about it, you're not going to be able to work from home, or getting kind of technology there with those TLS and SSL. But anyway, we have to be careful if we are in a business that has this type of sensitive information. So we'll talk about that when we get back. And then we have one more topic for today, and we're going to cover another angle of working at home and what does that mean to you and me, so stick around. We're going to be back. You're listening to Craig Peterson. On w GAN online. Craig Peterson dot com. And make sure you sign up on my email list right now. You have to subscribe by going to Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe, and you'll find out about all of our free resources for working at home. Stick around. We'll be right back.
Hey guys, welcome back. Craig Peterson here. We've been talking a lot about working from home. And if you missed any of today's show and you are working from home or your business, who has people who are working from home or considering having people working from home, you're going to want to catch the replays of today's show. And you can usually find those right by going to Craig Peters on.com slash iTunes. You can also find it and almost anywhere in any podcast platform out there. Just search for Craig Peterson, and you'll find today's whole show they're available as a podcast. We covered a ton of topics there, and we're talking right now about those companies that are kind of high stakes security. Intelligence agencies, critical infrastructure, anybody who's developing things for the DOD contractors, subcontractors, sub-subcontractors, and we've got this whole CMC thing going on. And I'm talking with people who have attended these briefings on it and just don't understand what they need to do and how to do it. And they just won't do it because I can't believe they're required to have all this security is crazy. But here's the bottom line. Last week, the US government cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency issued an advisory to critical infrastructure companies to prepare for remote work scenarios as this whole Covid-19 spreads. They told people that they have to check that their VPN networks are up-to-date, that the companies have implemented multi-factor authentication, that they have tested out the remote access scenario. Of course, there's a lot more to it than just that. Cybersecurity consultants, like me, who work with those high stake clients know that remote work and security don't mix unless you understand what you are doing. In this Ars Technica article here, they discuss electric utilities, oil, and gas firms, manufacturing companies, and say that it's not always so simple for many of their most critical customers and even more so for intelligence agencies. It should be a wake-up call. If you are a company that has to meet any of these higher security standards. Most notably, if you have to meet the DFARS standards. The ITAR standards, the new CMMC standards, which are all of the military standards. The NIST 171 standards say you can not have people working at home. Okay, so here is a statement from a team lead over the Department of Energy and should be a fairly good wake up call. You need to figure out a way that if individuals cannot physically access the control system for a service that cannot stop, like electricity, water, wastewater, similar services, you ensure continuous operation. Even in the face in an environment where you might be risking your employee's lives if they continue to commute into the office. So think about that amazing statement here. For many industrial networks, the highest standard of security is an air gap, and this is what we do with our manufacturing clients. It means a physical disconnect between the inner sanctum of software connected to the physical environment and the less sensitive internet-connected IT systems. So there are very few private sector firms that are using air gaps. In other words, there is no physical connection. There is the obvious exception for highly regulated nuclear power utilities who have implemented actual air gaps and my clients for whom we have put air gaps in place in 100% of the cases where it's been possible. But again, my clients want to have their networks secure because they don't want stuff stolen. They don't want to get sued by releasing personal identifiable, identifiable information, and they don't want to shut down the manufacturing line, which is quite severe. All of these restrictions we're talking about can create these massive chokepoints for hackers and also for remote workers. Think about that. There are things, like jump boxes, we've used before, depending on the software used. If you can put those in place, then we've got administrators bumping each other off as they try and work and log in. Because these jump boxes, these, you might call them gateways. You SSH into that box, and then SSH into a different part of the network. So you have to kind of jump around. Some of them only allow one of the administrators to be on at a time. So think about that. If you fit into any of those, you have a bigger issue, and I'd be glad to talk to you guys. I mean, talk to you and help you with what you have. I have set aside some 15-minute time blocks. I'm going to send out an email again this week to let people sign-up, if your business is having problems, reach out to me, right? I'm a resource here. Don't let my 40 plus years of experience with this go to waste. I want to help, and I can help. You don't have to be a client, okay? And I will dedicate up 15 minutes or half an hour to help you out to get you going. Okay, because this is that important. I know what it's like to own a business. I've owned a business for many decades. And I know I get very frustrated when I feel like I'm kind of all left alone. Okay, that's off my chest. You can do that just by emailing me at Craig Peterson, it is me at Craig Peterson calm, or you can go to my company's website as well, mainstream dot net and there is a contact form on there where you can leave a message, and I'll get back to you or another member of my team will. Let's get back to a great article, by the Ars Technica staff, on working at home. They've done it for 22 years Ars Technica has. And as you know, I've been doing it for more than a couple of decades as well. But let's kind of run through what their suggestions are here to kind of finish up the show. One work-from-home suggestion from them was about snacks, supplies, a pet, and dolls. Now, you know, I don't recognize our I don't recommend snacks because I practice intermittent fasting, right? A pet. We have a pet. We have a Great Dane and have lots of supplies, and I don't have any dolls. But anyway, you should consider upgrading to a more ergonomic workstation. It is particularly true if you're working from home for a long time. For instance, I have these tables from SIS. SIS is a company that makes office furniture, and what these are about six foot long, and maybe two or three feet deep. And they raise and lower a few feet. I can sit in a chair, I can sit on a ball here, kind of a big exercise ball or I can stand up, I can move around. It is phenomenal. And I have these and most of my workstations. They're just phenomenal. I love these things. Before these, I had one that I just attached to a regular table, and I could raise and lower my keyboard, mouse, and screen, and that was just wonderful as well. So remember that it is convenient. Let's see other suggestions from Ars Technica. They said they've done this since 98. Okay, so this is from Jade Timor senior science editor your office needs to have View he says, trees, birds open sky just something you find appealing so that when you raise your head from your screen to clear your mind, there's something there that you want to see. I do have a couple of windows here in my working area, and I can kind of see the sky. So it's not too bad but I again I get up move around. The author goes on to say to have an exercise and activity routine. Many studies have shown that getting up and moving a bit is incredibly positive for your health. That's what I do. I don't get completely sedentary. Senior tech policy reporter Timothy Lee says have a physically separate workspace. I talked a lot about that earlier in the show. Again, you can find the show at Craig Peterson dot com slash iTunes and subscribe there as well. So, he says to put it as far as possible from the kitchen, laundry room, TV, and other sources of domestic distraction. Senior technology editor Lee Hutchinson, he says it's not slacking. In my experience, what helps me more than anything is to have co-workers who are also virtual. At a past job, I held for a year or so where I was the only remote teammate in a large Bellevue Washington based admin team. I was secluded from my team at home and missed everybody. He goes on to say that they use slack now. I don't particularly like slack. It is not secure. It does not meet any of the security standards. The only thing that does is the high-level version of WebEx teams, which is what I use. Our clients that need security and have their security requirements are passed down by law. We have to be as secure as they are, or at least his as they're supposed to be. So that's what we use, we use the WebEx teams. If you'd like this 90-day free trial, we can set you up we can get it going, and we can give you a higher level better version of it then you can get right now at the WebEx dot com website. However, if you don't want to bother me, I understand you can get it yourself, but please do me a favor and just email me. me at Craig Peterson dot com and ask me any questions, including about this, and we can get you set up with this trial. Jennifer Ouellette, senior writer and she is saying that it makes a huge difference having everybody working remotely Now remember, Ars Technica, they publish they do writing little different than a manufacturer. But she had online communities. That's what she likes. Groups of friends who are science writers, and she's always loved it. It's got a picture of her cat here to kind of a cute cat. But anyway, there's a whole bunch of others that I have up on my website as well at Craig Peterson dot com. You'll see those in the blogs off of the homepage. And again, make sure you sign up. I'm going to be having some deep-dive webinars this week, answering all of your questions we'll be talking about VPN, some of the tools you can use, basically about everything. But you have to subscribe, Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe, do it right now. Go to your computer, type in this URL, Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe. You'll find out about all these webinars and much much more. Have a great week, and we'll talk to you Wednesday at 738 with Ken and Matt.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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