Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity

Welcome!  

Today there is a ton of stuff going on in the world of Technology and we are going to hit a number of topics from how Colleges are using Social Credit Scores to change college students behavior, Social Media Influencers and why we need to pay attention to them, How the internet is changing, The insecurity of location tracking and why you may want to turn it off, Russian Hacking of Elections -- not really and even more.  It is a busy show -- so stay tuned.

For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com

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Machine Automated Transcript:

Hello, everybody, Craig Peterson here. Thanks for joining me spend a little bit of time with me most of the people listening on Saturdays, I have been, of course, on WGIR and a whole bunch of other radio stations now for many years, it turns out it's like 25 years, long time. So thanks for joining me today. We're also, of course, over on YouTube and Facebook, and online at Craig Peterson dot com is where you'll find me. You can go to Craig Peterson slash YouTube to see me there, and at Craig Peterson slash Facebook as well over on my site. Well, today we've got a lot of fun stuff. We are going to start by talking about the old dead internet and what does that may mean to you. You can see the headline behind me on the screen if you're watching us on video. We're also going to get into the Russian hacking of our elections. Was that real? How close did those guys get to us when it comes to the hacking. So we'll be talking about that. We've got a beginner's guide, we'll be talking about, and it is something I've been doing along with my wife for a few years now, Intermittent fasting. It is unbelievable the difference that can make. It's the diet that isn't a diet, and it is just so easy, at least for us. And we've tried everything. We're going to talk about the 27 plus apps you should probably delete from your smartphone here in early 2020. What is going on at our American universities? Did you know they are using social credit now to track students, we'll be talking about that? Don't scoff at influencers. Here is kind of a cool article from Kevin Roose. What are the Chinese farmers complaining about and why. Frankly, criminals are using drones. Then we'll talk about the New York Times and how they were able to track President Donald Trump, and what happened with him. What was that all about? So, we'll be getting to all of those articles and, of course, a whole lot more as we do every week. So thanks for joining me, everybody. So I am kind of running the entire show here today. It's funny when I look at some of these podcasts and videos and things that people are using, and how many multiple people are helping to run everything. In my case, it's not a lot of people; it's my wife and me. She helps prepare a lot of the stuff you see online, but she's not the one who is sitting here that is all me. So, if you're watching, it may be a little bit rough, so I apologize for that. So, let's get going here with our first article. We are doing a tiny screen in screen thing here. You can see me, and that article as well. If you're watching, let me know by the way me and Craig Peterson dot com. Let me know what it is you think about what I'm doing? Does it make sense to put the whole hour and a half in one video in one podcast? That is what I've been doing for a while now, my podcasts, but this is new for video. Should I break them all up as well? I'm starting to do some of the training videos and things beginning soon. Let's get to this article about the old internet you see here on my screen. I've got pictures of a bunch of the early internet properties Myspace and course you're familiar with Twitter, right? Well, some of these places have died. Snapchat, TikTok, Vine. We're all using them today. Will they be around in years to come? That little f logo that you see there? Friendster? Have you been using Friendster lately, if you uploaded videos, what happened to those MySpace, Flicker? Flicker is still around, but they kind of got shot in the head when they were purchased by our friends over at AOL slash Yahoo. Verizon bought that. Webshots, Photobucket. How about blogs? I certainly have a blog. I have over 3000 articles up on my blog at Craig Peterson, dot com.

WordPress. wordpress.com. If you have a blog over there, Zynga, Tumblr, they lost all their adult content, AOL Instant Messenger. We signed up for all of these in the 2000s. Now it's 2020. What's happened to all of our data? What happened to all of the videos that we hit upload. All of our pictures? Some of them just went, poof, they were just totally gone. Today social media is on a roll and just keeps growing. But are we going to be able to get our data in the future? I think it's an excellent question. And it was one posed by Katie Notopoulos over on BuzzFeed news because she's lost a lot of her pictures. I lost a lot of my photos. I had put together a website using one of these pieces of website software that lets you go in and create your photo album. I had this beautiful vision, right, and I was going to have all my photos there, the kids were going to upload their photos for generations, you know, the grandkids and great-grandkids. And I was going to be able to go there. We make a beautiful calendar every year and have it printed and put that calendar up on everybody's refrigerator, right? Of course, it didn't happen as the software crashed, and the backup did not work, and I lost all of these photos, hundreds of them. And it was just such a disappointment. But what's going to happen to you when Facebook disappears in just a few years. It is not going to be around forever, right. Facebook today is not going to be what Facebook is five years from now. We already see with California is new privacy law, how it is affecting Facebook, and how it keeps your data. Where it puts the data. We've seen the privacy laws changing other sites as well. So, what are you going to do? Right? What are you going to do? How about those texts and emails? They say anything you put up on the internet is up forever. Now we're finding out that's not true. It's just this stuff. We don't want to be out there. That kind of gets kept up forever. Friendster, we want that. Friendster has been around early since early 2002. At least it was. It was a social network that was pretty popular for a while, and then it fell out of favor. It even got mentioned in some movies. I remember one Seth Green was talking about Friendster, back then back in the days, but it turned into a gaming company and wiped out all of the profiles. Then there was my space, and it didn't go away as quickly as Friendster did, it had a more painful death. But by 2013, it was completely music focused. What sites are music-focused anymore. He might have, you know, a couple, but really, you're going to Amazon or Apple or Spotify. Pandora. One of those right to get your music by the way, when it comes to music sites, I would recommend you stay away from Spotify. Okay. Then just last year 2019, there was a server migration that messed up and all of their pre-2015 profile content. There were hundreds of thousands of photos that were lost. They're gone forever. Flicker. Now flicker was being used by a lot of people, and I remember stories of people who had uploaded photos to flicker. were driving down a highway, and saw one of their photos on a billboard for an advertisement. Not a flicker advertisement but one for a third party company. And they were pretty upset. Then they read the terms flicker had. And any of these photos you uploaded could be used by flicker could be sold by flicker. Well, in late 2018, flicker was sold off by this AOL Yahoo conglomerate that was bought by Verizon. It was bought by Smugmug, which is a photo hosting printing site, mainly used by professional photographers. They only gave you a few months to download your photos if you didn't download them, or upgrade to a paid Smugmug account you were completely out of luck, which kind of is a bad thing, right? You lost all your photos except for the most recent 1000 photos. And how many of us only have 1000 photos in this day and age. It'll cost you almost nothing to take a picture. It's not like the days when we were using our Nikon camera. With 35 millimeter film, and he had to decide if I was going to use Fujifilm or Kodak film. Should I use a professional-grade, black and white, you know none of that anymore, right? So, we have hundreds of thousands, so they were all lost. Webshots founded in the mid-90s hit its stride in the mid-double OOts when digital cameras became affordable, CNET bought it. Then American Greetings bought it and then it got sold back to the original owner or owners, who in 2014, relaunched it as Smile by Webshots, became a site for desktop wallpapers. You only had two months' notice to download your photos, migrate them to a new paid account or guess what? They all got deleted permanently. Photobucket. They announced that they were hotlinking in 2017, would only be allowed for paid accounts costing 400 bucks a year. Hotlinks, of course, feel very archaic now. That's where you have a direct link to a photo as opposed to your album. But man, completely gone. The whole internet got pockmark. I love that word, by these missing photos, and we still see those today online. Blogs exist. But you know, the scrappy new medium to get your story out is a lot less useful. 2013 I can't believe it was that long ago GoogleReader went away. I used to use Google Reader from my blogroll. That's how it kept track of articles. So much harder to do nowadays, RSS is gone. Man, I loved RSS, and Google's RSS readers are gone.

Pro tier blogs like Gawker video, all gone. Right Gawker writer, Alex Pyrene best described the changing economics of the media business. Plus freakishly bad luck as the death of the rude press. Isn't that true? Remember Gawker and the big lawsuit wrestlers pulled Minnesota into it big, big, mess, okay. Anyhow, remember all of these, and the many more that went the way of the world. Think about what you're using today. Will your data be around in the future? Think about the free sites you're using right now? Like free sites like what? Well, Facebook, among others? Is your data going to be around in the future? You know, very, very good questions we all have to ask ourselves. So keep a backup yourself on a medium that you control. And that you can read in another five or ten years. Your listening to Craig Peterson right here on WGAN and online at Craig Peterson dot com and Craig Peterson.com slash YouTube. You can see me, Oh no. We'll be right back.

 Hello, everybody, Welcome back. Craig Peterson here on WGAN and online at Craig Peterson dot com. If you want to join me, you can see the whole show as I recorded it at Craig Peterson slash YouTube. Well, now we're going to talk about Russian hacking. Right? Hasn't that been kind of all the rage over the last, what, two or three years? The Mueller report, and what did the Russians do? How could they have done that to us? Should we be worried about it more worried than we are have been? All frankly, outstanding questions. We need to know because we've got another election coming up soon. 2020 is an election year. We've got less than a month, from today, until we cast the first votes in the first in the nation primary. That is if you're in New Hampshire, which is the first primary. There is a caucus in IOWA, then the New Hampshire primary, and then I think it's Nevada followed by one of the Carolinas, and this just it accelerates from there, right? You got the Super Tuesday, which has got moved up and everything else. But how safe are our elections? I think it's a v good question. What did the Russians do? What did they know? How did they hack it? And can we do something about this in the future? Now we've got all kinds of voting machines. If you've been listening to me for a while, you know, I like the manual ones. Those have a sheet of paper, right, with all of the candidates with a circle you fill in. They give you a felt pen, a flare pen, right, a little felt pen to fill in to vote for the person. And that's as simple as it gets, isn't it? And then you put it in a machine, and the machine reads it the machine is pre-programmed to know that, that this circle filled in here means a vote for this person or these people or for that particular thing that's on the ballot, whatever it might be, right? The reason I like those is it gives us the best of both worlds. We have the world of, oh, wow, isn't this simple. I can go ahead and vote. Today wonderful times had by all, and you can vote quickly. The votes get tabulated, and we know by the end of the day, the results. But what if there's a problem? A contested vote. Well, with a paper ballot, again, that ballot can be sat in front of people who are ballot commissioners or whatever title your county or your state gives them. They look at those each ballot one by one and to see who was selected. They can take them and put them into literal stacks. These are the people who voted for this person, these voted for another person. And then they count them up. And now they've got the winners. And you can have a Republican, a Democrat and independent, whoever. Often police officers looking at these and counting them. But so many places have gone to these electronic voting machines. And the electronic voting machines are a nightmare and a half because of these electronic voting machines. Now, you're looking at the ballot trying to figure out okay, who voted for who. It gives you a screen, but you don't have a ballot. At best, some of these machines have a little paper audit tape that comes out, and they can go through and think of what you get from the receipts from buying something at the store. Right? So I've got one, let me pull one out here for you. Okay, so this is a receipt like you'd get at the store, right? This one particular one is from Walmart. And you know so there you go you can see what I bought at Walmart. Well, simple enough, but you've got sheets of these things that are affected by heat. They may get torn and, in my case, been sitting there my pocket right as I'm trying to keep track of them for the accountant, right. So I can do my taxes at the end of the year or the end of the quarter for businesses, so I'm just trying to keep track of all of it well how if the machine is just a tablet, how you are going to keep track of it. How are you going to know what the actual vote cast? People reported hitting a button for a zone on the part of the screen to vote for Candidate A, yet it registered their vote for a different candidate. At least they think it registered for someone else or might have registered properly, and it might be the right vote. For the right person who they wanted, but in reality, they don't know because it looked like it was registering the vote for the other guy. And now, after the end of the day, how are they getting audited? So with the paper ballots, you can go in, and you can look at them. And you can do a spot check. You can say, okay, is this make sure this machine was doing it? Right? Let's make sure we didn't mess up stuff when we sent it out to people. Well, when we're talking about this here with this whole Russian involvement with our election, we're not talking about these machines, although potentially could happen. What we're talking about as a couple of other things, first of all, meddling with our election where they're buying ads on Facebook, or they're buying ads somewhere out, and people get upset, you know, frankly, for a good reason. Because now it's a Russian ad saying vote for Hillary or Russian ad saying vote for Donald Both of which happened in the last election cycle model. Most of them happened to after the election, which is just totally bizarre for me. Anyhow, there was a technology company that got hacked in Florida according to some government reports. Now, here's what happened. They used a phishing attack against this company to gain access to their computer systems, and then get passwords and then get inside the machines. Now, that's where the problem comes up. Because it's not necessarily even the voting machines like what I'm showing on the screen here. What can happen, frankly, is that the voting machines' information gets sent ultimately to the state, right? Ultimately the whoever's in charge of you know, various new Hampshire, we have Bill Gardner and his Office of the Secretary of State's office, but it varies from state to state. So ultimately, these tallies go to our friends at the Secretary of State's office. And then they're posted on the website. And then what happens in the national elections is they go to the various individual Secretaries of State, and they say, who did your people vote for, and they add them all up. So the Russians could hack the Secretary of State's office, the Russians could hack the voting machines. And the Russians could influence us by buying a head-on Facebook or these other social media platforms on Google to try and get us to vote differently. Well, this is from Politico, which is, you know, political was a very left-wing leaning website out there. It's kind of a political organization that masquerades as news, But this is a pretty good article here. So they're saying that people were going to vote in North Carolina. In North Carolina, there had been a court ruling that said that people did not need to prove who they were, were to vote. You know, they have to prove who they are for everything else like to buy a glass of Beer to prove your age, right. Some places even you're 60 years old, they want to card you, and you say, Are you kidding me? No way. I'm going to do that. So in Jerome County, they were using laptops, and those laptops had the voter records on them. And those voter records were used to determine if they had already come and voted. Or if they had shown ID. Well, they had all kinds of problems with these. When they started digging in, they found that a company called VR systems had allegedly been targeted by Russian hackers using a phishing campaign three months before the election. and phishing is what Russians and others are using, not just to influence our elections, like what we see here. But to get into our bank accounts, our business account, it's just absolutely crazy. So this article goes on and going back to 2016. And what had happened, you might find it very interesting. But the bad news is things just haven't changed much. So expect similar problems with our 2020 election pay coming back,

I'm going to tell you about something my wife and I did to lose one hundred pounds between the two of us, okay, I'm not selling anything. It is amazing, and I don't even consider this a diet. So we'll get to that when we get back. I got a couple of great articles on that that I think you will like, so stick around. We'll be right back.

 Hello everybody Craig Peterson, here. Thanks for joining me here on WGAN and online Craig Peterson dot com slash YouTube. You can watch me there. I record this live, but, of course, it's on YouTube so you can watch it anytime, right? And we're putting the whole show out there so if there's something you missed, have a look there. I think you might find it interesting, at least I hope you do. I have a lot of fun putting together it's a lot of work, and I love to hear from you too. So Craig Peterson dot com. 

 Hey, man, have I got something for you? It is something that my wife and I have learned a lot about over the years. That's dieting, right? Diet exercise. I have done almost every diet. I've tried them all, and they've all worked to a degree or another. The Atkins diet was huge, and man, I had gotten up to almost 280 pounds. And I went on Atkins and got all the way down to I think it was like 192 at my lowest, so I lost 90 pounds, which is a lot. And then slowly but surely I put it back on. By the way, when I got up to 280, I was a vegetarian. You know, vegetarian, oh, you're fine. You can eat as much as you want whatever you want, as long as it's vegetarian, right? And that's what I did. And I put on a lot of weight. Then I had to take it off. Then over the years, I put weight back on, I got up to about 245, and I said, Oh my gosh, it's happening again. So, this was about three years ago now, and well, little over two years. And I started to do some more research on this thinking, Okay, it's been 20 years since I did the Atkins diet, things have had to change over that 20 years, right? It has got to be different than it was back then. So I started looking into it again, and I found an article about a Nobel Prize in Medicine given to a Japanese researcher, Yoshinori Ohsumi, about three years ago now a guess who had figured out this process called autophagy. I've heard it pronounced a few different ways. I'm probably pronouncing it the wrong way. However, that is how it is spelled right. That's how I found it was in the written word. So this process what he discovered and the reason he got the Nobel Prize in Medicine was he saw how cells repair themselves, which is a very, very big deal, right? That's the goal. We want to be healthy. We don't want cancers, Parkinson's, or any other of these diseases that are associated with old age. And we certainly want to keep our weight down. And he did a lot of research into this. I read it, of course, he won the Nobel Prize on it. And then I started branching out from there, as I often do, and I found this doctor up in Toronto, University of Toronto, and he was he's a practicing doctor who takes care of patients with kidney problems. Well, who are the patients that have the most kidney problems? Well, it's people with diabetes. And so I looked at it and thought, Man, this is kind of interesting. He had also found out about this whole autophagy thing. And he was tired of having his patients die, because ultimately, type two diabetics, particularly, you're going to die of a complication associated with your diabetes. So his patients just died. Right? And he did everything he could to help them and the founder, you know, what would, what's the treatment while if you have diabetes, it's because the insulin can't get into the cells to open them up to accept the sugars, right? So what do we do? Well, we give them more insulin. So what Dr. Jason Fung found out in putting two and two together was that insulin is, in fact, the problem. According to the research on autophagy, there's only one time that your body repairs itself, and that is when you are not eating. So think about when you've been sick in the past, what do people tell you to do? What does the doctor tell you to do? They say, well, go to bed, right? Get some rest, get some sleep. What are you not doing when you're sleeping? You are not eating. So he kind of put all this together and came up with this whole concept a little bit further, because it's not as though fasting is something new, but about fasting. What got me going on it more was that I had read a book about Blue Zones, these areas of the world where people tend to be healthier and live longer. When I read that book, and this is long before I found out about autophagy, or fasting, I figured out something that became very obvious to me. That was that every one of these areas where people live longer and healthier lives was a religious community. Shinto people were in Okinawa, Japan. They were Greek Orthodox in Ikaria Greece, a small Greek island in the Agean sea, where we got the whole concept of the Mediterranean diet. You have Seventh Day Adventist in Loma Linda in Southern California. All of these people are part of the Blue Zones. Add up also add to that the Mormons who are known to be healthier than average. And all of a sudden, I realized, wait a minute now these are all religious people, what do they do? Delving into it more, I found that the most religious Greek Orthodox are fasting over 180 days a year. Now fasting and the definition of it varies. It certainly differs religiously. In the case of the Greek Orthodox, it was a calorie-restricted diet. They could only do certain things, particular wine, certain cheeses, and to Through where I do this every once in a while where I don't eat anything. All I have is water and clear liquids in that set. So there are some real advantages to this diet because you're not eating your body has the opportunity to repair itself and get back to that kind of homeostatic state. Then I started thinking wait a minute, and what happened in the 70s. If you look at the curve of where we started having all of these obesity problems and health problems, it is back in the late 70s. When they introduced this whole food pyramid. We need to eat more carbs. This whole thing about six meals a day you eat your three meals, you have your snacks. Then I thought about the kids. Right they get up and have breakfast, a mid-morning snack, then lunch, an afternoon snack before soccer, then dinner, and maybe even have a snack before they go to bed. We're continually stimulating our bodies to produce insulin, which is causing significant problems in our bodies. I read what Dr. Fung had written, and I read at least a half a dozen other books and then thinking about the Blue Zone thing thinking about what the whole Nobel Prize in Medicine had been about with autophagy put them in a pot and stirred them up, which is what Dr. Fung did as well. And Dr. Fung was able to put his patients these people with type two diabetes on and their intermittent fasting schedule. Now, remember, I'm not a doctor. I was in emergency medicine for a while in the EMS. So I know a little bit about it. So I might sound like I know more than I do. But I can tell you that this works. It's worked for me, my wife, and every member of my family because we've all tried it to varying degrees. So I want to get into this little bit more because over the holidays, there was an article that came out talking about intermittent fasting. I found it fascinating, absolutely fascinating. So we're going to get into that. There were a few articles, CNN had a thing on it as did FOX. We're going to get into James Clear what he has to say he has a great article about it as well. So we'll get into all of that when we get back. There is no charge. I'm not selling anything. Remember that you're listening to Craig Peterson. Right here on WGAN. You'll find me online, Craig Peterson.com. Slash YouTube. That's Craig Peterson with an O slash YouTube stick around because we're going to get into it when we get back.

Hello, everybody, welcome back. Craig Peterson here on WGAN. And online, Craig Peterson dot com slash YouTube. That's where you can watch me you can see me waving and right now Hi to and see all of the episodes of today's show online. Also, of course, I podcast this and try and get the information out to as many people as I can. 

Well before the break, we were talking about something that's a huge deal to me, and that is intermittent fasting. I think I've become one of the world's most prominent proponents of the thing. It doesn't matter what kind of illness somebody has, and I always seem to end up saying, you have to try intermittent fasting. You just got to try it, because it just plain works. 

So what is it? Before the break, I mentioned some of the religious types of fasts. Now, Intermittent fasting is when you don't eat, right? That's what fasting is. Now, we're not talking about the biblical fasting, although some people do that where it's like 40 days and 40 nights with no eating, right, the whole temptation thing. I'm talking about is a daily regimen that will keep our insulin under control. Now, remember, I'm not a doctor. I've read a lot of books on this. I'm doing it myself, as is my family. We have had excellent, excellent results. But you're going to have to check on this yourself. If you have diabetes, Dr. Fung, actually has a whole book written for diabetics and how to do intermittent fasting and you're going to want to talk to your doctor about it, as well, because you're already going down that road, but you can get off of it. Dr. Fung has a cure. I think it was every one of his patients, like 1200 people with type two diabetes, have stopped their diabetes by doing one thing, and that is getting people not to eat. So, we're going to talk about what that means in just a second here. When you think about studies, there have been some studies done on intermittent fasting. You can see behind me here, the reference to this particular study I'm going to pull it up on the desktop here, there you go, should be able to see it. And this is from Fox News. Just this last week's fasting diets may add years to your life, as well as help you lose weight new study suggests there are also similar things that are available some articles that are up on CNN and many other sites out there. And it may help you lose weight. But here's your problem. Who's going to pay for a study that says, Don't eat, don't take medicine. Don't even see a doctor right, who's going to pay for that study. Obviously, there are a lot of people who are sick and who need doctors and medicine. Some people need to eat. You got to figure this stuff out for yourself. Now, here's how the basics work. There are two standard types of intermittent fasting regimens that people do. And there are frankly as many regimens as there are people. But the two basic things are one, you fast for 16 hours, and then you eat during an eight-hour window. That's probably one of the most common there's another widespread one, which is almost the same, which is you fast for 18 hours, and then eat during a six-hour window. So what does that mean? Well, for most people, it means you skip breakfast. So remember, you finish eating at like six o'clock the night before. You should never eat after seven, by the way. If you finish eating at six o'clock pm then at 6 am, the next morning, you've already fasted for 12 hours, right? And if you're doing 18 hours, you know what to noon news another four hours. So 12 plus four is 16. That's why it's kind of simple. So all you do is you skipped breakfast now you can have black coffee, you can have tea, but you're skipping breakfast, which many of us have done, but you're not snacking, you're not eating a snack. You're not having that smoothie. You're not having that Carmel mocha frappuccino thing you're not doing any of that, then you have lunch. When you eat, you eat, freely during that two-hours. So the meal, if you're going to have dessert, have dessert, eat whatever you want. If you like bread, if you like pasta, if you like fats, if you like steak, eat it during that two-hour window, and then you can have one more two-hour window later on that day. About four or 5 pm, you eat again. Then you're done for the day. Just doing that will change your life, your cells will get a chance to rejuvenate, you will lose weight, and you will become healthier. Again, if you have any medical issues at all, make sure you talk to your doctor first. And you might want to talk to your doctor first before doing this anyways, but this is a great regimen, and I've tried it myself I've been doing it as I said for a little over two years as has my wife, as have some of my kids and my brain is sharper. I'm even better looking. As you can see it Craig Peterson comm dot com slash YouTube. And I am losing weight and losing it nicely because over two years I've lost one about a half a pound a week. Isn't that nice? And I can eat whatever I want. The question is when I can eat what I want. It's just when I eat, and it becomes an issue. So that's the first type of unwritten fasting that most people follow, which is 16:8, and 18:6, which is the number of hours that you fast versus eat, not like you don't eat for six hours straight. Okay, I made that clear. You might eat one or two meals, and each meal should be no longer than two hours. So, you have your soup and your salad, and then you have your meal, you have your dessert, all within two hours, then you're done. The other type is what's called a 5:2 diet, very, very popular. 5:2 diet is where you normally eat for five days out of the week, and then for two days, you don't eat. Now, there are variations on this. We'll talk about that in a second. But the main idea is that your body needs a chance to recover and to recoup and if you normally eat for five days You're recovering. Remember, no snacks, no snacks, you'll never have a snack again, I know you need all the chips, whatever, eat it with your meal. Okay? You can have a chocolate bar, eat it with your meal, don't eat it afterward, don't eat it as a snack. Okay, so you have your, maybe you could start with your Doritos right and then move into the rest of the meal. You are trying to keep the insulin reaction down to a limited timeframe. That's what we're trying to do. Now, the five to some people will not eat for the two days, and by the way, those days should be randomized. So, as your body doesn't get used to a schedule. Those two days, your fasting can be" fasting-mimicking." A fast mimicking diet where you eat less than 500 calories. So two days a week eat less than 500 calories the rest of the time eat normally. Now, what does this do for you? Well, it's amazing. It could add years to your life, and it could cure you of diabetes. It could cure you of all kinds of brain issues from brain fog through the kind of name it right Snell at all timers Parkinson's it is they got diseases that people have celiac. The list goes on and on. I want you guys to read up on this and study it because it's amazing. doctors aren't taught much about this. It's relatively new, as I said, that Nobel prize that kind of led me into this is only three, maybe four years old. Okay, so it's all relatively new, but check with them. But I want to pull up here, this thing from James clear. Let me pull this up. Okay. So he has this little thing on his site that he calls the big Beginner's Guide to intermittent fasting. And he says I skip breakfast each day and eat two meals, the first around 1 pm and the second around 8 pm. 8 pm later than Dr. Fung recommends, okay. But as I said, everyone's different. Then I fast for 16 hours until I start eating the next day again, but at 1 pm surprisingly, since I started intermittent fasting, I've increased muscle mass, up 10 pounds from 205 to 15. Decreased body fat down 3%. He was at 14% body fat, now down to 11% increased explosiveness. He said a personal best with a clean and jerk of 253 pounds and decreased the amount of time spent training down from seven and a half hours per week to two and a half hours per week. So he's cut his training by about what two thirds and increased his muscle mass and decreased his fat. That's all that he did. Okay. So he has this quick start fasting guide. I didn't use any of his stuff, okay, but he has some good information. He talks about intermittent fasting how it works. Benefits. Number one, it makes your day simpler boy does it because you're not making three meals. You're not eating three meals plus snacks. Okay? intermittent fasting helps you live longer. We already know about calories and calorie starvation, how he will live longer on a low-calorie diet than if you are on a regular calorie diet. Now, most of us don't want that miserable life to have only been able to eat 500 800 calories a day, right? Not me. I love bread. I like chocolate every once in a while, right. It helps you live longer. Okay, and enjoying life, you're my joints don't crack walking downstairs, they don't hurt anymore. It may reduce the risk of cancer. And there are some serious studies out of Cambridge, Boston area just last late last year, showing that a five day fast every year will pretty much guarantee that you will never have cancer. It's just amazing. Much easier than dieting. It isn't a diet; all you're doing is cutting out snacks and one meal a day for most of the time. Right. And he's got a lot more detail on this too if you're interested. But he's got some schedules of different people do I think you're going to like this? Okay. There is a lot to know and understand here. But let me see. I'm going to bring that up. Okay. So here's our article again from Fox News. As I said, it's on CNN, and it's kind of all over the place over the holiday. Today's, and this is a new study at John Hopkins University, finds that diets involve intermittent fasting may add years to your life. And it's not just yours, and it's good healthy years. Studies have linked fasting to improve metabolism, decrease blood pressure, and improve control of blood sugars. So take a look at these guys and do a little exploration. Talk to your doctor if you're on medications because this will affect your medications. If you have diabetes, there are plans for you, maybe look up Dr. Jason Fung out of the University of Toronto, read up on his stuff, and present it to your doctor. See what they say, if this is the right thing for you. I am not a doctor, and this is not medical advice. I'm encouraging you to do your research. You're listening to Craig Peterson on WGAN.

Hello, everybody welcome. Craig Peterson here WGAN and online. Craig Peterson dot com slash YouTube. You can also check out Craig Peterson dot com slash Facebook. On my Facebook page and you can see some of the training, I do the pop-up pieces of training and, of course, my weekend shows, and I've been doing more lives lately too and answering people's questions. We got some big things coming up this year. So make sure you are on my email list. I have some special things for you. some surprises, prize giveaways. If you sign up for my email list, it doesn't even say anything about it on my website and lets you sign up. But it doesn't say anything about all of these giveaways. I've got some amazing things for you. So if you're not on my list already, make sure you check it out. Right now, Craig peterson.com. All right, right now, we are going to start by talking about the new year. So what are some of the things that you might want to do for this new year? Well, this is a great little article that came out in Fast Company this last week. And it is about the 27 smartphone apps you should delete. Now they're saying before 2020, but you know, it's a new decade. Let's get around to it right now. And what we're talking about here isn't just smartphone apps, we're going to talk about a whole category of apps. Now you know that there are a lot of apps that do nasty things to you, right, and to your data and your information. We talk about those all the time here on my show, but let's talk about them a little bit more right now. Number one app That depresses you. Now, in many cases, what we're talking about here, kind of the behind the scenes inside information, are apps that are, frankly, social media apps. Because social media apps are many people look at those and say all my life isn't like that my life's terrible. Right? It's like these. Have you seen these influencers online? that had come out and said, Yeah, I took 1000 pictures before I got that one. the perfect picture that one picture where it was from the writing goal, and she had the right luck and the stars lined up, right. That's the reality of things. The reality of things. Isn't that everyone's a multimillionaire and I mentioned earlier, right? The reality is I'm not right I'm, I'm the guy that was 280 pounds, and I was in Two twice, lose, lose the weight, which is kind of cool. But none of us are perfect. But we think because of the way social media is portraying people and the things that they're putting up there that somehow we should have a better life a different life than we have. Okay? So when people are trying to curate this perfect image of themselves in their lives, it's a bad thing. Okay, so research has shown that this can make you feel depressed, it can make you feel lonely. And now we're seeing that the younger generation isn't getting married until they're 33 on average. Can you believe that? You know, I was married ten years earlier than that started my family. There they are wondering about themselves, and they're wondering about whether or not they can get married. They're judging their potential partner against This perfect facade of a person that they've seen online and social media, and the guys are doing the same thing. They're, you know, they're judging this woman against Kylie Jenner or whomever online. They're their favorite Stars that have the perfect bodies. And they're available 24 seven, whenever they want, just look and bam, there they are. And this woman, she's not as nice that I'm dating as she should be, because I see all of these women that are just so tolerant and wonderful. And, you know, my gosh, she weighs too much, or she's not pretty enough. Her teeth aren't straight enough. I've seen this before, and I've seen it with my kids, their friends as well. You know, I'm not a big believer in a perfect match. I think there's a lot of people that frankly, we could marry and be quite happy. So don't go crazy. Don't try and match everybody up on social media. And we're talking about Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, of course, TikTok, which we've talked about before. Just delete those things as they are not reality. Too many of us are sitting there scrolling through our phones every day, looking at something that just isn't real. So there's number one. Number two to get rid of these are app categories and going to mention a few of our apps and don't protect your privacy. Now, we've talked about some of this stuff before, right? It basically Hey, if it's free, it's not the product, you're the product. I think that's a simple enough thing for people to understand least I would hope so. There are some major apps out there. The people are using billions of people are using every day that don't protect our privacy. And of course, the big one I'm thinking of right now is Facebook. It is not protecting our privacy. It's selling our information. Now, not all that bad, right? I understand the marketing side. I was in the whole marketing business years ago, decades ago, many, many decades ago. And what I was doing back then is finding people who read this magazine and that newspaper and, and put them together to come up with people that might be interested in buying my clients stuff, right? Well, it's the same thing nowadays you said to know a lot more about you than which magazine subscriptions. 

But look for businesses that are building privacy into their business models, Facebook Messenger That's something you don't want to use as it does not have an end to end encryption. What that means is the message you type in on your computer gets sent to Facebook and then to the other person. So Facebook being in the middle can see the message knows what you said, and is now using that to target you by advertisers. Okay, so be careful with Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, which is another messaging product from Facebook. The Facebook bot does provide end and equipment so that you might want to encryption, so you might want to look at WhatsApp. There are some better ones out there. Some good ones signal one of them that encrypts all of your data, its end, and then everything.

Google Chrome, I still use it sometimes because browser extensions But most of the Chrome browser plugins and extensions will work on opera. Many of them will work on Firefox as well, and there are adapters, if you will, the let you take the chrome stuff and run it on other machines, right other browsers. Now, Chrome harvests so much of your data that the Washington Post is calling it the spy software browser because it is just continually uploading your data. If you want a browser that is protecting your privacy, look at the epic browser API. See, and if you want more about this stuff, send me a note. I'll be more than glad to let you know more little bit more details of all of this stuff, right? Because some of the browsers out there like epic are great. Some of them are good like Firefox and Opera, and others are bad like well Chrome. And you already know what I think about Microsoft browsers, which is they're pretty weak. Apps that are free, but aren't Okay, free is great. But just keep in mind, they got to make money somehow has to keep the lights on, right? You got to keep the heat down in the winter and the air conditioning in the summertime. These face morphine apps that we've seen, and the big ones are actually out of Russia. We've got other apps that are out of China. They're not free, that is getting our information and are using it against us and using it against the country. So be very careful. And then the last category is apps that are compelling you to spend money. So what we're talking about here are apps like Amazon, Walmart, eBay, those are the obvious ones. And Amazon, Amazon, and Apple are the two companies that have at least up until now kept your privacy kind of paramount. In front of them, but that doesn't mean they don't use your data themselves. And that's very, very true. When we're talking about Amazon, they use your data that trying to get you to buy something from Amazon and you know, that can be good, that can be bad. And Amazon also has plugins that you can put into the Chrome browser that let Amazon spy on you when you're on other websites and buying things, so keep that in mind. You probably don't want to install those browsers.

Games like Harry Potter Wizard, Fortnight, Candy Crush Jelly Saga, Pokemon GO, Marvel Contest of Champions, and hundreds of thousands more each have options that let you buy your way into a higher score, or give you play the game more. I advise you to get rid of those. I know people hooked on Candy Crush. Nobody enables you to play so many times a day, and I have fun and Candy Crush, right? But I stopped playing it about a year ago because it won't let you play so many times a day, then I wanted you to buy stuff from them. And it just isn't for me. It isn't worth it right. I'm not a big video game thing. And then the last thing to consider is the Office apps. Now, these are the things that kind of get you to work 24 seven, I kind of work 24 hours. But that doesn't mean it's a good idea. And that's not necessarily something that you're going to want to do either. So there you go.

There are some categories. You might want to delete apps to depress you and those that don't protect your privacy. Those that are free, but on are not and those that compel you to spend money listening to Craig Peters on here on WGAN and online. Craig Peterson dot com slash YouTube.

Hey everybody, welcome back. Craig Peterson here on w GN online at Craig Peters on comm slash YouTube. You can find me there all of my videos, and I'm starting to post them more and more. And you can watch me as I recorded them. I put them up as YouTube lives. So you'll see them up there. Well, let's talk about social credit and some of the things that are going on. China is the world leader right now when it comes to facial recognition. And what China is doing is not only recognizing people's faces, and then this case mostly their citizens, but China is also taking that data and using it for what they're calling the social credit system. So if you jaywalk in China, there are enough cameras and enough facial right ignition artificial intelligence software out there to identify that it was you who jaywalked you specifically. And then what it does is it puts that onto your permanent records. And that becomes part of your social credit score. And if your score gets low enough, you're out of luck. You won't be able to get another train to travel a bus, and you won't be able to get to work, you definitely won't be able to leave the country. So there's a lot of things China's doing on social credit. Now I want to go back to my last segment here where I was talking about the apps that you want to delete, and I looked at it from a category standpoint, what are the different categories of apps that you probably should delete? And one of the ones I mentioned was TikTok, and remember I mentioned that TikTok was a Chinese based company, and TikTok allows you to put together these little short videos and have fun haha sharing with your friends. And there are some pretty cute TikTok videos out there Will Smith did one and put it up on TikTok. So you know, that's all well and good. Here's the problem when you use the app you're sending your face and anything that's behind you in the environment and your location information - to China. They know what you're wearing, they know your face, your hair, they know everything about you even where you are, which lets them know, by the way, hey, you're at home. You're at work, you're out with friends, right using the location data. And because China is the world's leader in surveillance technology and facial recognition, technology, and social credit systems that they're trying to sell to other countries. What's happening, They're using TikTok data. And they're likely using it to train their artificial intelligence systems for even better facial recognition of Westerners. And people here in the US and the UK are our facial recognition software in the US has problems with oriental faces with Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, right? It has problems with those. Some of theirs have problems with white faces with negroid features kind of goes on and on. So they want as much as they can get when it comes to data. They want as many faces as they can get their hands on, right to use those faces Now, to frankly be able to train their systems. So enter this article from the DailyCaller. that says American universities are starting to use social credit systems. So these are likely to be coming here to the US. China's already using them. They're probably using them to identify our military personnel. We know some things they've been doing that are to identify our military personnel. But a handful of colleges us colleges, according to Chris White, who is over at The Daily Caller, are using a type of social credit system through various technologies designed to track students as they attend courses and walk across campus. They're using something called SpotterEdu, which is an app that connects with the student's smartphones, and it has as its purpose the ability to boost attendance points. So it knows that you're on campus and it knows you're in the right building and it knows you're in the right class. Some now you get social credit points for attending class, heaven forbid that the professor has to keep track of that sort of thing. Syracuse University Professor Jeff Rubin told The Washington Post that the students want these points if you can believe that, right. They know I'm watching and I'm acting on it. So behaviorally, they change. This professor is admitting that he uses this app to engineer the behavior of the students socially. Now that's nothing new. We've known for a long time that teachers use all kinds of techniques to get students to agree with them politically, to do things that they want them to do. Well, now it's kind of getting out of hand apparent Lee This is according to The Washington Post, not every student's on board with the app, and it's in it and its implications. A sophomore here, Virginia Commonwealth University said, we are adults, so why do we need to be tracked. Why is this necessary? How does it benefit us? And is it just going to keep progressing until they are micromanaging every second of the day? I think it's an excellent question. The SpotterEdu is working with about 40 schools, including Central Florida, Missouri, Indiana, that's according to their guess he's their CEO, Rick Carter. He's a former basketball court quote to develop the app and 2015.

I think this is a bit of a problem. You know he's talking about students having a lot of distractions and, and they need a system like this to make sure they're doing, and I love this quote, right. He wants to make sure that the students are doing the right thing, according to him. Okay. He prefers the term monitor instead of the track because you know tracking has a negative connotation. Schools can turn to a startup called degree analytics, which uses Wi-Fi check-ins. That is something that technology something's been out there for a long time. businesses use it. When you get free Wi-Fi at a business, they use it to track you they know your back, that it's you who's here now, they even know where you are in the store. They watch you. They know what shelves are in front of you and how long you were there, what you might be looking at, okay, just from the fact that you use their Wi-Fi. So they are tracking a quarter of a million students across 19 different state universities. Over 98% of college students can be measured to Analyze your degree analytics. Yeah, because the students are using the WiFi that Sarah, the school. Now sometimes you have to use their Wi-Fi because that's the only way you can connect to Blackboard or something, whatever software they're using for the professors to share the courses with you. Sometimes it's the only way you can get on to submit some of your materials to the professor that we're doing is your assignment, right? But most of the time here's my advice to you. Use the WiFi, not the Wi-Fi, but use the data plan that comes with your phone. And that means Verizon T Mobile etc. Use tethering nowadays is usually no additional charge for tethering. If you have an unlimited plan, use the tethering on campus, use it when you are at work, use it when you are At the local coffee shop, use a tethering. Don't use the Wi-Fi provided for free because now you can be tracked. Okay. Very, very big deal. And I'm concerned about these American universities Now, using social credit systems to track students on campus as this sort of thing that you expect out of a socialist government like socialist China is not the sort of thing we expect here in the United States. So, stick around because we are going to talk about those influencers I mentioned earlier in the show, what they are doing and what the future will look like for advertising and us. You're listening to Craig Peterson on WGAN and online at Craig Peterson dot com slash YouTube.

Hello everybody. Welcome back. Craig Peterson here online at Craig Peterson dot com slash YouTube. I'm heard on multiple stations every week. And right now, I'm on WGAN, and this is the show that I take, and I put up on YouTube and share it on Facebook as well. So if you're interested, you'll find me right there Craig Peterson dot com slash YouTube and Craig Peterson dot com slash Facebook.

We're going to talk about influencers right now. Many of us kind of have a little bit of a chuckle when we think of influencers, right — these people on social media. Haha, you know, the Generation Z, who are just making fools of themselves. Last hour I was talking about how you should be deleting most of your social media apps, if not all of them because frankly, they are depressing. Well, if you want to know what I find sad, I want you to think of Kylie Jenner. Here's a girl who can even order a beer in a restaurant who's already worth over a billion dollars. So that shows you what multi-generational can do. 

But why is she worth so much money?  

Why are so many of these influencers worth so much money?  

Why are they paid so much? 

Well, the New York Times had a great little article on this. I've got that up on my screen right now. And they're talking about these social media influencers, and how dominant they are in our culture today, and how they can get people to think twice about products. By steering the direction of online conversations, as the Times puts it. So this article by Kevin ruse was written because he went to a conference called VidCon. An annual social media convention down in Anaheim, California, yay. And there were a few thousand current and future internet celebrities who were there. And it's increasingly apparent to him he says that the teenagers and 20 somethings have mastered these platforms. And those people are going to dominate not just internet culture, or the entertainment industry, but society as a whole. You know, we've had presidents in the past I can think of a couple, frankly, who have been entertainers we've got, of course, currently Donald Trump, who had a show called The Apprentice show. I valued it because it gave me a lot of business ideas and taught me a little bit of business acumen. And we had Ronald Reagan. Remember, people an actor who is president. Both of these presidents seem to have been outstanding Presidents as it turns out, but how about the future? When will our first social media influencer be president? And that's a great question. He's asking it in this article. Now, this came out a few months ago, but I just found it fascinating.

Most of the time, you said these people were filming what they called collabs with other creators complementing one another on their drips. Drips are influencing or speaking for clothes and accessories. In some of these cases, we're talking about head to toe Gucci and all kinds of outfits. Some I can't even pronounce, as I never heard of before. Diamond necklace. Designer sneakers because they're all promoting these things they're wearing. Another day he says he witnessed an awkward dance battle between two budding TikTok influencers, neither of whom could have been older than10 years old. Okay, TikTokagain, that's one of the apps I keep saying delete, delete, delete, and okay.

But if you look past what he calls the silliness, the status he can many people add VidCon is hard at work being an influencer can be an exhausting burnout inducing job. People who spent years working were up the ladder I've been on the radio now for 25 years. I don't have anywhere near the influence of a Kylie Jenner or most of these other top influencers out there. It's just absolutely crazy. So he's saying how a lot of these influencers they've got him, real business people, because frankly, they're dealing with your money. Some of them are doing media politics, either different fields, you know, I tend to do technology and security. But these people are influencers. Brazil YouTubers are winning political elections by mobilizing their online fan bases. So what's establishment going to do when these guys and gals start winning out there? You look at AOC Alexandria or Cassio Cortez, and how she's been able to use social media to build a following and build her power and influence. It's massive. Glossier is another company to look at the recently raised 100 million valuations of more than a billion way is a luggage startup who has Instagram ads, and it reached an evaluation of 1.4 billion. They make luggage. They are a startup. How are they worth $1.4 billion. And a lot of the social media stars are making this endorsement deals with these major brands and these startups. It's just crazy. Here's another one, a YouTuber's named Natalie Alzate. She has more than 10 million subscribers. She calls her channel Natalie's outlet, an online brand building a business frankly, for her rather than just a fun hobby. Four years ago, when she first came to Vid Con, she was a marketing student with fewer than 7000 subscribers. So in four years, she went from less than 7000 subscribers to 10 million. She decided to study her favorite YouTubers. She watched how they made their videos, tested videos in multiple genres seeking which ones perform the best. She says she grew up watching people like Michelle Fon that were building legacies out of honestly just being relatable online, it was always an aspiration. Then she hit on formats like beauty tips, life hacks, performed well. And today she's a full-time YouTuber with a small staff and production studio and the kind of fame she always coveted. New York Times article this thing's just amazing. In truth, influencers have been running the world for years. Yeah, we know that, don't we? We haven't just called them that we call the movie stars to talk radio hosts, Davos, then these are really with devils. The ability to stay relevant. So these people get that type of audience. And with 10 million followers, she's making millions of dollars a year. It goes on and on.

The culture General Manager, oh my gosh, what you call culture is people watch this stuff, right? I don't. And maybe that's a problem for me. Perhaps that's why I don't have 10 million followers. I just started my YouTube channel again I was doing a few years ago, but I've been too busy taking care of my customers and helping you guys out, right? So I'm starting it up again. And I would love it if you guys would subscribe to my YouTube channel or and follow me at Craig Peterson dot com slash YouTube, share these videos, get them out there I'm providing you with excellent information, that type of thing. I think everybody needs to know. And the only way it's going to get out there now is if you share it right and I know most of you guys, I'd be surprised if I have any real Gen Z's in the audience. There's probably a few. I know there's a lot of millennials and a ton of baby boomers. What is my audience for please subscribe if you have a YouTube account? Just go to Craig Peterson comm slash YouTube, we've got to be able to compete with these social media influencers out there, we've got to get the messages out. Because Heaven knows their words are not the same as our messages. And I want to get it out. And I would appreciate it because, man, I've put thousands of hours into this over the years anyhow, stick around, because we are going to be back here in our last segment, we're going to talk about Chinese farmers. Let me pull that up right now. There you go. Criminals using drones to infect pigs. Why are they doing that? And we're going to talk about the New York Times also tracking Trump's movements. What's going on out there? You're listening to Craig Peterson, and you'll find me online Craig Peterson dot com slash YouTube.

Hello, everybody, we have been busy today. We just talked about YouTube influencers and how much money they're making. We started by talking about the old internet, how it's died, and what that meant to us. The loss of all of our pictures and the things that we wrote and that we put up online. What happened to all these old sites and what to do about it today and into the future. How close did Russia come to affecting and hacking the 2016 election? We talked about that, and we talked about what could happen here in the 2020 election because Russia was able to get their fingers into our last election. So we talked about what we discovered over the last three years from that. We talked a lot about fasting and fasting diet, because my wife I've been doing it and how it is not a diet, but intermittent fasting is a lifestyle that lets me eat whatever I want, whenever I want. Well, past summer issue, isn't it? It's not whenever I want. So I talked a lot about that, of course, I'm not selling anything here. I just want to let you know what I'm doing because it hit the news again this week. I told you about 27 smartphone apps and four categories of apps, you're going to want to delete from your smartphone this year. American universities using social credit, and I talked about what chip or excuse me China is doing with social credit, and why they want your face what they're probably doing with TikTok pictures and others. American universities using social credit for that it's a shame. And, of course, the last segment, we talked about influencers, and you can't scoff at these kids. They're making a lot of money. They may be young, but wow, they are booking it in. Let me tell you making bank, and if you would, I'd appreciate you following me. You can follow me on pretty much any podcast, podcast platform out there, bar none. And you can follow me online, and Craig Peterson dot com slash YouTube. I'd love it if you'd subscribe to my channel. So let's get to our last two articles here of the day. This first one, I think it's fascinating, but it is talking about a trick that is in use now. The word trick is a misnomer because this is nasty nastiness. And leave it to criminals, right? It doesn't matter where in the world they are. They always come up with a nasty way to try and ruin our lives. But here's what's happening. We have drones, and many of these drones are big enough to carry. Fully automatic weapons. We know China's selling those to the Middle East right now. So, a drone that can not only carry automatic weapons in the Middle East but that can automatically, using AI, pick its targets and kill people that it wants to kill without a human ever having to get involved. Well, we're not going there right now, but I had to mention it, right? Let's talk about what's happening with the pigs. You might know where we get our cases of flu from every year. Most of the flu's that come to the United States originate actually in China. And No it isn't the socialists trying to kill us here in the West is often bird flu or swine flu or virus that originates in pigs or from birds. There are various types, and every year. Every year researchers have a look at what's happening over in Asia and China. They look at what flus they have experienced and assume that they're going to spread. And so they come with a flu shot that takes some swag to figure out what type of flu we need to worry about this year, and then goes ahead and inoculates us against that flu. And this year, they weren't quite right. Most years. They are not quite right. But you know, hopefully, they get most of it right. And that's going to help us right. And that's the whole idea behind it. So what's happening here is, there is a very, very violent version of the swine flu in China right now. And part of the trade deal that President Trump has for China. He allows us to export our processed and unprocessed wine over to China in large quantities because they need it. They've had to send 10's of millions of pigs to slaughter and just late to waste because of the swine flu. Apparently, what was happening in this particular area in China planes began having issues with their airplane navigation when flying overhead. So its equivalent FAA was trying to figure out did a little digging, and they figured out, we know what it is. There are jammers that the farmers are using that are messing with our communications, with our GPS, etc. They delved into a little bit more, and what they found out was that bad guys in this area of China, were using drones to spread the swine flu to these pigs. They were intentionally infecting pigs with swine flu on a farm so the farmer can no longer sell his pigs for full fair market, normal farm market value. He could only sell them to these bad guys at a huge discount. These are criminal gangs or bad guys, right? They would buy the infected pigs from the farmers cheaply and sell the pork as healthy pork. And they'd have this huge markup because of it. So what happened was these farmers bought jammers to stop these criminal gangs from using drones to drop the infection on the pigs. How's that for multiple steps? Hey, thinking it through. It is kind of scary. So that's our first little fun story for the day. And now let's get into our New York Times story here. A fascinating one also from the Business Insider is where I got this page. It is a photo if you're watching me at Craig Peterson dot com slash YouTube, you'll see me on these desks my desktop as we pull these up.

But the New York Times was able to track the movements of President Trump using cell phone data. The Times said it used to leak to phone data to track the movements of someone his in his entourage, believed to be a secret service agent. And they also found the agent's name and home address now think how easy it is to find the home. If you can track their cell phone, wherever that cell phone goes at night and stays at night. It's probably the residents, mainly if it's there frequently. Okay. The time said it replicated Exercising identified workers at numerous sensitive sites in Washington DC, including the Pentagon, the Supreme Court, and Capitol Hill. The ease with which non-experts, at the Times, could do this shows the extreme vulnerability in location data. Hostile states are almost certainly able to do far more. Now we know this is the case because we've seen stingrays that were set up illegally in the Washington DC area. Stingrays are fake sites. They are phony cell phone sites that your cell phone will connect to, thinking it's talking to a real cell site. And now, they can read your text messages SMS the non-encrypted ones, and they can read your regular text messages, no problem. Plus, they can get information about your phone calls your phone's ID and use it now to track You the time said God is data from anonymous whistleblowers concerned about the vulnerability and a lack of regulations. And then it took only minutes to turn a massive anonymized data set with 50 billion location pings from the phones and more than 12 million people in the US to get specific information on President Trump. So this is very, very scary, isn't it? They also this is the time said that they were able to ping nearby Secret Service field offices and events with the elected officials. This person's movements outside work hours could also be tracked, which gave them as I was saying earlier the home address and name identities of family members. However, the times did not publish this information. Track people in the White House Capitol Hill Supreme Court, the Pentagon military bases FBI headquarters, again leading to valid home addresses. And names This is not good. The President's phone conversations have previously put national security at risk. And he did not use a secure phone to tweet until months and despite the presidency. Now, this isn't a Donald Trump issue. Remember, the same thing happened with President Obama. They all come in with their technology. President Obama wanted to continue to use this personal smartphone instead of using one that had been approved by the Pentagon. He was sending messages in the clear, of course, the times aren't going to bother mentioning that right. Why would they do that? That would be fair and balanced. But we have this problem, and it's going to be a continuing challenge. Think about all of the Congress critters that don't have access to this technology that is provided by the secret service to the president and various other high-end influence a leader here in the country. There. They are in real trouble. And so are you, easy enough to track you. And, you know, I'm afraid to say, because I have a phone and it is trackable and followable. It's like wearing one of those tracking bracelets/anklets, as you see criminals having to wear. They can figure out who you are, they can figure out where you were, where you live, all kinds of things, at least in my case, because I'm using an iPhone and I keep it patched up. And I use secure messaging applications. The bad guys cannot get at that information. But it's a scary world out there, isn't it? So we're going to be doing more and more FacebookLives, and YouTube lives, where I'm going to be doing pop-up pieces of training, I want to thank all of you who thanked me for the pop-up training that did last year. I appreciate it. You know these pieces of training take a lot of time on my part. And I understand you guys with, you know, spend taking the time to thank me for it and taking the time to attend them, because they do take me a long time to put together, but I'm going to do one more of those. So I want to ask you to make sure you are on my list. Make sure you follow me on Facebook. And if you're on Facebook, which is Craig Peterson comm slash Facebook. Follow my page there, and you'll find out about all these free trainings, I am not selling new, anything and any of these free pieces of training. My webinars are free, and it's real training. It is not you know hour worth of pounding you to get you to buy something. That's not what I'm doing. Now sometimes I might have something to sell you, but I will give you the free training I promised, and then I'll you know if you're interested, you can stay on, and I'll tell you about an offer. Anyways, have a great week, and We'll be back next week with more tech talk with Craig Peterson. Take care, everybody. Bye-bye.

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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For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome,

Good morning, everybody.  The New Year is almost here and it comes with a warning about the apps on your smartphone.  Today I was on with Justin McIsaac who was sitting in for Jack Heath today and we discussed some advice about apps you may be using and what they are collecting and who has access to that information. Hint -- the people with access are not our friends. Here we go.  

These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com

--- 

Automated Machine Transcript:

Craig
Good morning everybody. Happy New Year. Wow, I can't believe it is coming right up. It's hard to believe that another year, another decade, and another century. Oh my gosh, the time just flies by anyhow. I hope you had a great Christmas, Hanukkah, Festivus, whatever it is you celebrate this time of year and enjoy time together with a family. We are going to be probably going to sleep at around 1011 o'clock. Maybe I'll make it to midnight. Who knows if the kids are up on New Year's Eve? It's always a good time. You know, we had friends and family come in for the Christmas celebration this year. And that was neat to see another granddaughter haven't seen in a few months. We try and get out there to Kentucky a couple of times a year. And my daughter as well. So shout out to them if they're listening and shout out to everybody else. So this morning, I was on Jack's show, and it was Justin who was running it today because Jack is out. Then the guest host ended up being out, and that left Justin trying to juggle all of these balls. But we had a lot of fun talking about maybe some new year's resolutions when it comes to apps on your phones. So here we go with Mr. Justin McIsaac.

Justin McIsaac
And joining us on the auto fair listener lines Craig Peterson, our tech talk guy. You can visit his website Craig Peterson dot com his show airs on the weekend Saturday right, Craig and all across these IHeart stations. Everywhere, all right.

Craig Peterson
I am. I spent some time on Netflix over the holidays watching the new Lost in Space TV show brings back memories you know still it says or when Alan man it just flashback to the 60s. But it's kind of fun. It's a different way to do things now where they released the whole season that one. I liked it a lot better because you got all the context continuity and everything, and yeah, and I like Season Two better than season one. So, I know you're a little bit of a sci-fi fan, but I back I enjoyed it.

Justin McIsaac
I watched season one with my wife, and we dug it. Who was it? The woman that was in Deadwood was a Mrs. Garrett was plays one of the leading roles. So we dug season one.

Craig Peterson
Yeah. Well, you're going to like to let me tell you, great,

Justin McIsaac
Lost the space guy, Matt Simon. I've never really watched it know what the audience is. It was pretty good. It's action-packed. But so so Craig focuses on the tech sphere. As one might say in Craig, a lot of people got to launch a lot of gadgets for Christmas, including Matt Simon, who got a Roomba that's currently mapping his house. But you've got some things as we close it on the new year that you might want to be careful with, especially some apps you might have kicking around on your phone that you might want to delete what sort of apps are we looking at, we might want to get rid of

Craig Peterson
Yeah, here's what's going on right now. There are a ton of apps. However, most people are only using about five to 10 of the apps on their smartphones. That's a bit of an issue, frankly. But you know, we all have the hundreds, at least over the years of different apps. The average American checks their phone 52 times a day, it changes our brains physically changes our brains. By spending so much time on these small screens. And so we've got to be a lot more careful about that. And, and I've got some categories that I think you should avoid here. First of all, 2020 is, as you mentioned before the break just around the corner. It's hard to believe it's almost here. So get rid of those apps that depress you. And guess what the number one group of apps that is responsible for that depression is guys. What would you think?

Justin McIsaac
Social media? My banking app, Yeah.

Craig Peterson
Yeah, absolutely. Getting off Facebook ditching Instagram, Snapchat, deleting TikTok, all of those will help you because they all tend to be kind of depressing, especially for the younger generations and TikTok, okay, as well as ToToTok, are apps that you have to delete.

Justin McIsaac
What you said, right so I told me guys are brilliant, I don't know, though. I understand what TikTok is because my kids don't have TikTok, but a lot of their friends do.

Craig Peterson
I know like the US military is telling, you know, their soldiers to get off the TikTok because that's a Chinese program. So what's ToToTok is that he had a Saudi Arabian program that does much the same thing. And both of them are designed to collect data to send it back to Beijing, and they're able to track who you are where you are. All the location information, what you're doing the pictures you're taking. They're using it to map our faces. The Chinese are number one in the world for facial recognition. And so you're right. The military's not only warning about TikTok, but we've had the NSA, the National Security Agency out there now warning us about it. So that's number one category, get rid of those social media apps. Number two is apps that don't protect your privacy. Of course, we already mentioned one TikTok, but Facebook Messenger is one such app because it is not encrypted end to end. So be careful of that. In other words, Facebook sitting in the middle, watching what you're saying watching what you're doing. However, Facebook does have another messaging app called WhatsApp. That does keep it safe. If you have an iPhone or a Mac. Imessage does keep it secure. It protects your privacy, and to and of course The FBI has for the last 30 years been pretty upset about that type of software. But be careful of spy software, which leads us to the next category. Apps that are free, but aren't. Most of these apps are using our data. They're telling the app developers where you are. If you ever wondered why you walk into that hairstylist in the morning, Justin, and then you get to add about a week later from other hairstylists that say they can do a better job.

Justin McIsaac
It's more like a minute later. Yeah, it's like I've noticed this, like if you talk about, like, oh, I'm going to buy a new car, and then I go on Instagram like 20 minutes later, all of a sudden, ads are going to my feed. Mercedes Benz. I guess Mercedes Benz isn't checking my banking app because I'm not buying one of those. But the point is like, yeah, your phone's kind of spying on you listen to it, right.

Craig Peterson
Yeah. Well, if we could get into that and take another hour, but yeah, Free VPN app today. Here are the worst ones right now for spying on you, the so-called free VPN apps, because they track absolutely everything you're doing and where you're going. Menstruation apps are one of the worst. Bible apps, Flashlight apps, and face morphing apps like face app. Now, these are kind of cool apps. But you know, where you can put in your picture, and I'll show you what you'll look like in 20 years, 30 years. But again, it's using technology to map us and onto the banking. The next category apps that are making you spend the money want to get, and you might want to get rid of Amazon, eBay, and Walmart apps out there. But also look at right I know somebody who is addicted to Candy Crush, and she pays to play Candy Crush, okay.

Justin McIsaac
Yes, night wizard tonight. So you know, get rid of all some of those.
Some of those games. Not so much now. But when my kids were little, they're basically like pay to win, like data. I spend three bucks I can get more More, more XP and I'm like, no, we're not doing that. Let's just buy a PlayStation. They'll be cheaper in the long run. So all right, Craig. Craig Peterson's calm is the website Tech Talk. You can hear it here on these IR news-talk stations. Have you got big, bad plans for New Year's Craig?

Craig Peterson
Well, oh, yeah, kind of like you. I will probably just sleep through it until I hear someone say the ball just drops, and then I'll be back up and then go back to sleep. But yeah, I'll probably binge-watch another sci-fi show on the First.

Justin McIsaac
The Mandalorian. That's my pick if you haven't watched it yet. It is on Disney plus, that's my recommendation. It was awesome.

Craig Peterson
It is. It's terrific. I haven't watched the latest episode yet.

Justin McIsaac
It's excellent. That's all I'll tell you. All right, Craig Peterson. Craig Happy New Year. Thanks for joining us this morning. And today. You guys to take care. Bye. Bye. All right. There is Craig Peterson. I got noses tech stuff, and I'd say so he didn't warn you about your Roomba. So I think you're all right, Matt.

Craig Peterson
I think so. There is an app that comes along with that, though. Might I might want to check into that a little more. All right, yeah.

Justin McIsaac
I have to basically what Christ is I have to throw my phone in the river. So I'm going to do that during the break. And we'll come back with more.

Craig Peterson
Yeah, that's because Justin has an Android phone. And I'm always warning him calling you guys to do about Android phones. Anyhow, I should mention that the map got one of these shark robots to do some vacuuming is mapping out the house. People are wondering about that, and are worried about that. In reality, it is something that you must be concerned about why it is sending those floorplans up to the internet. I'm not as worried as I'd be if it had like cameras on it and things. But it's still you know, it's part of that big illusion, I guess. Anyways, have a great day, everybody, and we'll be back, and we got a big year plan next year. Bye-bye.

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

Message Input:

Message #techtalk

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome,

Good morning, everybody.  The New Year is almost here and it comes with a warning about the apps on your smartphone.  Today I was on with Justin McIsaac who was sitting in for Jack Heath today and we discussed some advice about apps you may be using and what they are collecting and who has access to that information. Hint -- the people with access are not our friends. Here we go.  

These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com

--- 

Automated Machine Transcript:

Craig
Good morning everybody. Happy New Year. Wow, I can't believe it is coming right up. It's hard to believe that another year, another decade, and another century. Oh my gosh, the time just flies by anyhow. I hope you had a great Christmas, Hanukkah, Festivus, whatever it is you celebrate this time of year and enjoy time together with a family. We are going to be probably going to sleep at around 1011 o'clock. Maybe I'll make it to midnight. Who knows if the kids are up on New Year's Eve? It's always a good time. You know, we had friends and family come in for the Christmas celebration this year. And that was neat to see another granddaughter haven't seen in a few months. We try and get out there to Kentucky a couple of times a year. And my daughter as well. So shout out to them if they're listening and shout out to everybody else. So this morning, I was on Jack's show, and it was Justin who was running it today because Jack is out. Then the guest host ended up being out, and that left Justin trying to juggle all of these balls. But we had a lot of fun talking about maybe some new year's resolutions when it comes to apps on your phones. So here we go with Mr. Justin McIsaac.

Justin McIsaac
And joining us on the auto fair listener lines Craig Peterson, our tech talk guy. You can visit his website Craig Peterson dot com his show airs on the weekend Saturday right, Craig and all across these IHeart stations. Everywhere, all right.

Craig Peterson
I am. I spent some time on Netflix over the holidays watching the new Lost in Space TV show brings back memories you know still it says or when Alan man it just flashback to the 60s. But it's kind of fun. It's a different way to do things now where they released the whole season that one. I liked it a lot better because you got all the context continuity and everything, and yeah, and I like Season Two better than season one. So, I know you're a little bit of a sci-fi fan, but I back I enjoyed it.

Justin McIsaac
I watched season one with my wife, and we dug it. Who was it? The woman that was in Deadwood was a Mrs. Garrett was plays one of the leading roles. So we dug season one.

Craig Peterson
Yeah. Well, you're going to like to let me tell you, great,

Justin McIsaac
Lost the space guy, Matt Simon. I've never really watched it know what the audience is. It was pretty good. It's action-packed. But so so Craig focuses on the tech sphere. As one might say in Craig, a lot of people got to launch a lot of gadgets for Christmas, including Matt Simon, who got a Roomba that's currently mapping his house. But you've got some things as we close it on the new year that you might want to be careful with, especially some apps you might have kicking around on your phone that you might want to delete what sort of apps are we looking at, we might want to get rid of

Craig Peterson
Yeah, here's what's going on right now. There are a ton of apps. However, most people are only using about five to 10 of the apps on their smartphones. That's a bit of an issue, frankly. But you know, we all have the hundreds, at least over the years of different apps. The average American checks their phone 52 times a day, it changes our brains physically changes our brains. By spending so much time on these small screens. And so we've got to be a lot more careful about that. And, and I've got some categories that I think you should avoid here. First of all, 2020 is, as you mentioned before the break just around the corner. It's hard to believe it's almost here. So get rid of those apps that depress you. And guess what the number one group of apps that is responsible for that depression is guys. What would you think?

Justin McIsaac
Social media? My banking app, Yeah.

Craig Peterson
Yeah, absolutely. Getting off Facebook ditching Instagram, Snapchat, deleting TikTok, all of those will help you because they all tend to be kind of depressing, especially for the younger generations and TikTok, okay, as well as ToToTok, are apps that you have to delete.

Justin McIsaac
What you said, right so I told me guys are brilliant, I don't know, though. I understand what TikTok is because my kids don't have TikTok, but a lot of their friends do.

Craig Peterson
I know like the US military is telling, you know, their soldiers to get off the TikTok because that's a Chinese program. So what's ToToTok is that he had a Saudi Arabian program that does much the same thing. And both of them are designed to collect data to send it back to Beijing, and they're able to track who you are where you are. All the location information, what you're doing the pictures you're taking. They're using it to map our faces. The Chinese are number one in the world for facial recognition. And so you're right. The military's not only warning about TikTok, but we've had the NSA, the National Security Agency out there now warning us about it. So that's number one category, get rid of those social media apps. Number two is apps that don't protect your privacy. Of course, we already mentioned one TikTok, but Facebook Messenger is one such app because it is not encrypted end to end. So be careful of that. In other words, Facebook sitting in the middle, watching what you're saying watching what you're doing. However, Facebook does have another messaging app called WhatsApp. That does keep it safe. If you have an iPhone or a Mac. Imessage does keep it secure. It protects your privacy, and to and of course The FBI has for the last 30 years been pretty upset about that type of software. But be careful of spy software, which leads us to the next category. Apps that are free, but aren't. Most of these apps are using our data. They're telling the app developers where you are. If you ever wondered why you walk into that hairstylist in the morning, Justin, and then you get to add about a week later from other hairstylists that say they can do a better job.

Justin McIsaac
It's more like a minute later. Yeah, it's like I've noticed this, like if you talk about, like, oh, I'm going to buy a new car, and then I go on Instagram like 20 minutes later, all of a sudden, ads are going to my feed. Mercedes Benz. I guess Mercedes Benz isn't checking my banking app because I'm not buying one of those. But the point is like, yeah, your phone's kind of spying on you listen to it, right.

Craig Peterson
Yeah. Well, if we could get into that and take another hour, but yeah, Free VPN app today. Here are the worst ones right now for spying on you, the so-called free VPN apps, because they track absolutely everything you're doing and where you're going. Menstruation apps are one of the worst. Bible apps, Flashlight apps, and face morphing apps like face app. Now, these are kind of cool apps. But you know, where you can put in your picture, and I'll show you what you'll look like in 20 years, 30 years. But again, it's using technology to map us and onto the banking. The next category apps that are making you spend the money want to get, and you might want to get rid of Amazon, eBay, and Walmart apps out there. But also look at right I know somebody who is addicted to Candy Crush, and she pays to play Candy Crush, okay.

Justin McIsaac
Yes, night wizard tonight. So you know, get rid of all some of those.
Some of those games. Not so much now. But when my kids were little, they're basically like pay to win, like data. I spend three bucks I can get more More, more XP and I'm like, no, we're not doing that. Let's just buy a PlayStation. They'll be cheaper in the long run. So all right, Craig. Craig Peterson's calm is the website Tech Talk. You can hear it here on these IR news-talk stations. Have you got big, bad plans for New Year's Craig?

Craig Peterson
Well, oh, yeah, kind of like you. I will probably just sleep through it until I hear someone say the ball just drops, and then I'll be back up and then go back to sleep. But yeah, I'll probably binge-watch another sci-fi show on the First.

Justin McIsaac
The Mandalorian. That's my pick if you haven't watched it yet. It is on Disney plus, that's my recommendation. It was awesome.

Craig Peterson
It is. It's terrific. I haven't watched the latest episode yet.

Justin McIsaac
It's excellent. That's all I'll tell you. All right, Craig Peterson. Craig Happy New Year. Thanks for joining us this morning. And today. You guys to take care. Bye. Bye. All right. There is Craig Peterson. I got noses tech stuff, and I'd say so he didn't warn you about your Roomba. So I think you're all right, Matt.

Craig Peterson
I think so. There is an app that comes along with that, though. Might I might want to check into that a little more. All right, yeah.

Justin McIsaac
I have to basically what Christ is I have to throw my phone in the river. So I'm going to do that during the break. And we'll come back with more.

Craig Peterson
Yeah, that's because Justin has an Android phone. And I'm always warning him calling you guys to do about Android phones. Anyhow, I should mention that the map got one of these shark robots to do some vacuuming is mapping out the house. People are wondering about that, and are worried about that. In reality, it is something that you must be concerned about why it is sending those floorplans up to the internet. I'm not as worried as I'd be if it had like cameras on it and things. But it's still you know, it's part of that big illusion, I guess. Anyways, have a great day, everybody, and we'll be back, and we got a big year plan next year. Bye-bye.

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

Message Input:

Message #techtalk

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome,

Good morning, everybody.  The New Year is almost here and it comes with a warning about the apps on your smartphone.  Today I was on with Justin McIsaac who was sitting in for Jack Heath today and we discussed some advice about apps you may be using and what they are collecting and who has access to that information. Hint -- the people with access are not our friends. Here we go.  

These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com

--- 

Automated Machine Transcript:

Craig
Good morning everybody. Happy New Year. Wow, I can't believe it is coming right up. It's hard to believe that another year, another decade, and another century. Oh my gosh, the time just flies by anyhow. I hope you had a great Christmas, Hanukkah, Festivus, whatever it is you celebrate this time of year and enjoy time together with a family. We are going to be probably going to sleep at around 1011 o'clock. Maybe I'll make it to midnight. Who knows if the kids are up on New Year's Eve? It's always a good time. You know, we had friends and family come in for the Christmas celebration this year. And that was neat to see another granddaughter haven't seen in a few months. We try and get out there to Kentucky a couple of times a year. And my daughter as well. So shout out to them if they're listening and shout out to everybody else. So this morning, I was on Jack's show, and it was Justin who was running it today because Jack is out. Then the guest host ended up being out, and that left Justin trying to juggle all of these balls. But we had a lot of fun talking about maybe some new year's resolutions when it comes to apps on your phones. So here we go with Mr. Justin McIsaac.

Justin McIsaac
And joining us on the auto fair listener lines Craig Peterson, our tech talk guy. You can visit his website Craig Peterson dot com his show airs on the weekend Saturday right, Craig and all across these IHeart stations. Everywhere, all right.

Craig Peterson
I am. I spent some time on Netflix over the holidays watching the new Lost in Space TV show brings back memories you know still it says or when Alan man it just flashback to the 60s. But it's kind of fun. It's a different way to do things now where they released the whole season that one. I liked it a lot better because you got all the context continuity and everything, and yeah, and I like Season Two better than season one. So, I know you're a little bit of a sci-fi fan, but I back I enjoyed it.

Justin McIsaac
I watched season one with my wife, and we dug it. Who was it? The woman that was in Deadwood was a Mrs. Garrett was plays one of the leading roles. So we dug season one.

Craig Peterson
Yeah. Well, you're going to like to let me tell you, great,

Justin McIsaac
Lost the space guy, Matt Simon. I've never really watched it know what the audience is. It was pretty good. It's action-packed. But so so Craig focuses on the tech sphere. As one might say in Craig, a lot of people got to launch a lot of gadgets for Christmas, including Matt Simon, who got a Roomba that's currently mapping his house. But you've got some things as we close it on the new year that you might want to be careful with, especially some apps you might have kicking around on your phone that you might want to delete what sort of apps are we looking at, we might want to get rid of

Craig Peterson
Yeah, here's what's going on right now. There are a ton of apps. However, most people are only using about five to 10 of the apps on their smartphones. That's a bit of an issue, frankly. But you know, we all have the hundreds, at least over the years of different apps. The average American checks their phone 52 times a day, it changes our brains physically changes our brains. By spending so much time on these small screens. And so we've got to be a lot more careful about that. And, and I've got some categories that I think you should avoid here. First of all, 2020 is, as you mentioned before the break just around the corner. It's hard to believe it's almost here. So get rid of those apps that depress you. And guess what the number one group of apps that is responsible for that depression is guys. What would you think?

Justin McIsaac
Social media? My banking app, Yeah.

Craig Peterson
Yeah, absolutely. Getting off Facebook ditching Instagram, Snapchat, deleting TikTok, all of those will help you because they all tend to be kind of depressing, especially for the younger generations and TikTok, okay, as well as ToToTok, are apps that you have to delete.

Justin McIsaac
What you said, right so I told me guys are brilliant, I don't know, though. I understand what TikTok is because my kids don't have TikTok, but a lot of their friends do.

Craig Peterson
I know like the US military is telling, you know, their soldiers to get off the TikTok because that's a Chinese program. So what's ToToTok is that he had a Saudi Arabian program that does much the same thing. And both of them are designed to collect data to send it back to Beijing, and they're able to track who you are where you are. All the location information, what you're doing the pictures you're taking. They're using it to map our faces. The Chinese are number one in the world for facial recognition. And so you're right. The military's not only warning about TikTok, but we've had the NSA, the National Security Agency out there now warning us about it. So that's number one category, get rid of those social media apps. Number two is apps that don't protect your privacy. Of course, we already mentioned one TikTok, but Facebook Messenger is one such app because it is not encrypted end to end. So be careful of that. In other words, Facebook sitting in the middle, watching what you're saying watching what you're doing. However, Facebook does have another messaging app called WhatsApp. That does keep it safe. If you have an iPhone or a Mac. Imessage does keep it secure. It protects your privacy, and to and of course The FBI has for the last 30 years been pretty upset about that type of software. But be careful of spy software, which leads us to the next category. Apps that are free, but aren't. Most of these apps are using our data. They're telling the app developers where you are. If you ever wondered why you walk into that hairstylist in the morning, Justin, and then you get to add about a week later from other hairstylists that say they can do a better job.

Justin McIsaac
It's more like a minute later. Yeah, it's like I've noticed this, like if you talk about, like, oh, I'm going to buy a new car, and then I go on Instagram like 20 minutes later, all of a sudden, ads are going to my feed. Mercedes Benz. I guess Mercedes Benz isn't checking my banking app because I'm not buying one of those. But the point is like, yeah, your phone's kind of spying on you listen to it, right.

Craig Peterson
Yeah. Well, if we could get into that and take another hour, but yeah, Free VPN app today. Here are the worst ones right now for spying on you, the so-called free VPN apps, because they track absolutely everything you're doing and where you're going. Menstruation apps are one of the worst. Bible apps, Flashlight apps, and face morphing apps like face app. Now, these are kind of cool apps. But you know, where you can put in your picture, and I'll show you what you'll look like in 20 years, 30 years. But again, it's using technology to map us and onto the banking. The next category apps that are making you spend the money want to get, and you might want to get rid of Amazon, eBay, and Walmart apps out there. But also look at right I know somebody who is addicted to Candy Crush, and she pays to play Candy Crush, okay.

Justin McIsaac
Yes, night wizard tonight. So you know, get rid of all some of those.
Some of those games. Not so much now. But when my kids were little, they're basically like pay to win, like data. I spend three bucks I can get more More, more XP and I'm like, no, we're not doing that. Let's just buy a PlayStation. They'll be cheaper in the long run. So all right, Craig. Craig Peterson's calm is the website Tech Talk. You can hear it here on these IR news-talk stations. Have you got big, bad plans for New Year's Craig?

Craig Peterson
Well, oh, yeah, kind of like you. I will probably just sleep through it until I hear someone say the ball just drops, and then I'll be back up and then go back to sleep. But yeah, I'll probably binge-watch another sci-fi show on the First.

Justin McIsaac
The Mandalorian. That's my pick if you haven't watched it yet. It is on Disney plus, that's my recommendation. It was awesome.

Craig Peterson
It is. It's terrific. I haven't watched the latest episode yet.

Justin McIsaac
It's excellent. That's all I'll tell you. All right, Craig Peterson. Craig Happy New Year. Thanks for joining us this morning. And today. You guys to take care. Bye. Bye. All right. There is Craig Peterson. I got noses tech stuff, and I'd say so he didn't warn you about your Roomba. So I think you're all right, Matt.

Craig Peterson
I think so. There is an app that comes along with that, though. Might I might want to check into that a little more. All right, yeah.

Justin McIsaac
I have to basically what Christ is I have to throw my phone in the river. So I'm going to do that during the break. And we'll come back with more.

Craig Peterson
Yeah, that's because Justin has an Android phone. And I'm always warning him calling you guys to do about Android phones. Anyhow, I should mention that the map got one of these shark robots to do some vacuuming is mapping out the house. People are wondering about that, and are worried about that. In reality, it is something that you must be concerned about why it is sending those floorplans up to the internet. I'm not as worried as I'd be if it had like cameras on it and things. But it's still you know, it's part of that big illusion, I guess. Anyways, have a great day, everybody, and we'll be back, and we got a big year plan next year. Bye-bye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

--- 

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Welcome,

Good morning, everybody.  The Christmas Holiday season is underway, and it comes with a warning.  Today I was on with Jeff Chidester who was sitting in for Jack Heath today and we discussed some advice about getting that 5G phone right now and other issues related to Chinese network manufacturer Huawei. Here we go.  

I will be doing some Facebook Lives, so keep an eye out.

These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com

--- 

Related Articles:

Huawei Mate 30 Pro review: Don't even think about buying this phone

--- 

Automated Machine Transcript:

Craig Peterson
Hey, good morning, everybody. It is an awesome week, Happy Hanukkah, to all of my Jewish friends Christmas, of course, this week coming up as well for all our Christian friends and everybody else out there. I hope you're having a great time of year. This morning. I was on Jackie's show, but it was a couple a little bit short because of some scheduling issues that they had. But we talked a bit of Huawei, and I'm going to plan on talking about that more with Jim Polito as well. So here we go. On Jack's show.

Jeff Chidester
So in the dark. Hey, up next, of course, America's leading network security expert. You hear more tech talk, of course, to find out more by going to Craig Peterson dot com. Craig, we don't get to talk a lot much anymore.

Craig Peterson
Hey, I'm doing great. I love that song too. By the way, I went to Apple Music, and I said play 1960s Christmas music, and then it played a bunch of stuff from the 50s and 60s. Jason, Dominic - the donkey, came up. It just brings back memories of my childhood. It's just it's great. I love it. Seeing the grandkids. Yeah, that's kind of cool, too.

Jeff Chidester
You don't seem old enough to have grandchildren? Of course, you know, once again, you probably like the 12 Days of Christmas from Bob and Doug McKenzie, too, right? Yeah.

Craig Peterson
Great White North heritage there.

Jeff Chidester
Excellent. Hey, Huawei, Don't get me going on this company. I'm glad it was on your list. What's going on with Huawei?

Craig Peterson
Let me tell you, you know, we're all excited about 5g and what 5g is going to bring for us. It's going to bring ultimately real fast wireless internet. Still, it is going to cause all kinds of disruption for the cable industry because you're not going to need cable TV anymore, you know, with the streaming and now cheap, fast data. And so there's been a lot of talk going on about well, you know, we got to keep Huawei out of our networks are 5g networks. Right now, we're working with the country over in Africa. Who has had their entire infrastructure built out by Huawei? And now, there are reports about Huawei spying on these countries and people and everything right. So I want to start with an answer to a question I'm hearing all the time now. And that is, is Huawei building our next generation of internet infrastructure when it comes to our cell phones, our cell data, and everything else? So here's the answer. In the United States, it's obvious, no, Huawei, this is these Chinese companies excluded from the US market by the US government. So we've got Ericsson, and we've got a Nokia and Samsung, are all working with our significant providers like Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, even Nokia is involved with T Mobile. Still, those are the guys that are building out our 5g networks, and that's an excellent thing because I want to do a flashback. You've been in tech for quite a while. Yep. And have you heard of Nortel? I assume Nortel. Yeah, yeah Nortel used to make all kinds of switching equipment that made central office equipment. They made some of the best networking equipment out there. And Nortel is no longer in business. So think about Christmas, Christmas this past year. Here's what happened. I remind people, and this is new information for many. But back in early 2004 Nortel was hacked by them unknown company from China called Huawei. And Nortel got into all of their major executives. IT systems, emails, accounts, including the CEOs. Frank has done, Brian McFadden. Oh yeah, it stole all of the documents that contain the future product and marketing plans of Nortel, and then two years later, all of a sudden, out of nowhere comes wow way. Absolutely.

Jeff Chidester
We're actually up against the wall. So no, I won't forget that. No, I want to give people your website before we do break Craig Peterson dot com. You got to find out why you do not buy Huawei TVs either. I'm sure I'm getting the Chinese medical right now.

Craig Peterson
Yeah, I tried to squeeze in our phones there, but we got cut off. Oh, well, that's like the top of the hour is always a tough one because it's a hard, hard, hard break, and I like the bottom of the hour. Anyways, have a great week. I'm kind of taking a little time off here over the next week or two. I'm going to be doing a few things, and so we'll be chatting them. By the way, if you want to have any questions answered, just email me at Craig Peterson, calm. Take care, everybody. Talk to you later. Bye-bye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

--- 

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www.craigpeterson.com

Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating:

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Message Input:

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Welcome,

Good morning, everybody.  The Christmas Holiday season is underway, and it comes with a warning.  Today I was on with Jeff Chidester who was sitting in for Jack Heath today and we discussed some advice about getting that 5G phone right now and other issues related to Chinese network manufacturer Huawei. Here we go.  

I will be doing some Facebook Lives, so keep an eye out.

These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com

--- 

Related Articles:

Huawei Mate 30 Pro review: Don't even think about buying this phone

--- 

Automated Machine Transcript:

Craig Peterson
Hey, good morning, everybody. It is an awesome week, Happy Hanukkah, to all of my Jewish friends Christmas, of course, this week coming up as well for all our Christian friends and everybody else out there. I hope you're having a great time of year. This morning. I was on Jackie's show, but it was a couple a little bit short because of some scheduling issues that they had. But we talked a bit of Huawei, and I'm going to plan on talking about that more with Jim Polito as well. So here we go. On Jack's show.

Jeff Chidester
So in the dark. Hey, up next, of course, America's leading network security expert. You hear more tech talk, of course, to find out more by going to Craig Peterson dot com. Craig, we don't get to talk a lot much anymore.

Craig Peterson
Hey, I'm doing great. I love that song too. By the way, I went to Apple Music, and I said play 1960s Christmas music, and then it played a bunch of stuff from the 50s and 60s. Jason, Dominic - the donkey, came up. It just brings back memories of my childhood. It's just it's great. I love it. Seeing the grandkids. Yeah, that's kind of cool, too.

Jeff Chidester
You don't seem old enough to have grandchildren? Of course, you know, once again, you probably like the 12 Days of Christmas from Bob and Doug McKenzie, too, right? Yeah.

Craig Peterson
Great White North heritage there.

Jeff Chidester
Excellent. Hey, Huawei, Don't get me going on this company. I'm glad it was on your list. What's going on with Huawei?

Craig Peterson
Let me tell you, you know, we're all excited about 5g and what 5g is going to bring for us. It's going to bring ultimately real fast wireless internet. Still, it is going to cause all kinds of disruption for the cable industry because you're not going to need cable TV anymore, you know, with the streaming and now cheap, fast data. And so there's been a lot of talk going on about well, you know, we got to keep Huawei out of our networks are 5g networks. Right now, we're working with the country over in Africa. Who has had their entire infrastructure built out by Huawei? And now, there are reports about Huawei spying on these countries and people and everything right. So I want to start with an answer to a question I'm hearing all the time now. And that is, is Huawei building our next generation of internet infrastructure when it comes to our cell phones, our cell data, and everything else? So here's the answer. In the United States, it's obvious, no, Huawei, this is these Chinese companies excluded from the US market by the US government. So we've got Ericsson, and we've got a Nokia and Samsung, are all working with our significant providers like Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, even Nokia is involved with T Mobile. Still, those are the guys that are building out our 5g networks, and that's an excellent thing because I want to do a flashback. You've been in tech for quite a while. Yep. And have you heard of Nortel? I assume Nortel. Yeah, yeah Nortel used to make all kinds of switching equipment that made central office equipment. They made some of the best networking equipment out there. And Nortel is no longer in business. So think about Christmas, Christmas this past year. Here's what happened. I remind people, and this is new information for many. But back in early 2004 Nortel was hacked by them unknown company from China called Huawei. And Nortel got into all of their major executives. IT systems, emails, accounts, including the CEOs. Frank has done, Brian McFadden. Oh yeah, it stole all of the documents that contain the future product and marketing plans of Nortel, and then two years later, all of a sudden, out of nowhere comes wow way. Absolutely.

Jeff Chidester
We're actually up against the wall. So no, I won't forget that. No, I want to give people your website before we do break Craig Peterson dot com. You got to find out why you do not buy Huawei TVs either. I'm sure I'm getting the Chinese medical right now.

Craig Peterson
Yeah, I tried to squeeze in our phones there, but we got cut off. Oh, well, that's like the top of the hour is always a tough one because it's a hard, hard, hard break, and I like the bottom of the hour. Anyways, have a great week. I'm kind of taking a little time off here over the next week or two. I'm going to be doing a few things, and so we'll be chatting them. By the way, if you want to have any questions answered, just email me at Craig Peterson, calm. Take care, everybody. Talk to you later. Bye-bye.

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

Message Input:

Message #techtalk

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome,

Good morning, everybody.  The Christmas Holiday season is underway, and it comes with a warning.  Today I was on with Jeff Chidester who was sitting in for Jack Heath today and we discussed some advice about getting that 5G phone right now and other issues related to Chinese network manufacturer Huawei. Here we go.  

I will be doing some Facebook Lives, so keep an eye out.

These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com

--- 

Related Articles:

Huawei Mate 30 Pro review: Don't even think about buying this phone

--- 

Automated Machine Transcript:

Craig Peterson
Hey, good morning, everybody. It is an awesome week, Happy Hanukkah, to all of my Jewish friends Christmas, of course, this week coming up as well for all our Christian friends and everybody else out there. I hope you're having a great time of year. This morning. I was on Jackie's show, but it was a couple a little bit short because of some scheduling issues that they had. But we talked a bit of Huawei, and I'm going to plan on talking about that more with Jim Polito as well. So here we go. On Jack's show.

Jeff Chidester
So in the dark. Hey, up next, of course, America's leading network security expert. You hear more tech talk, of course, to find out more by going to Craig Peterson dot com. Craig, we don't get to talk a lot much anymore.

Craig Peterson
Hey, I'm doing great. I love that song too. By the way, I went to Apple Music, and I said play 1960s Christmas music, and then it played a bunch of stuff from the 50s and 60s. Jason, Dominic - the donkey, came up. It just brings back memories of my childhood. It's just it's great. I love it. Seeing the grandkids. Yeah, that's kind of cool, too.

Jeff Chidester
You don't seem old enough to have grandchildren? Of course, you know, once again, you probably like the 12 Days of Christmas from Bob and Doug McKenzie, too, right? Yeah.

Craig Peterson
Great White North heritage there.

Jeff Chidester
Excellent. Hey, Huawei, Don't get me going on this company. I'm glad it was on your list. What's going on with Huawei?

Craig Peterson
Let me tell you, you know, we're all excited about 5g and what 5g is going to bring for us. It's going to bring ultimately real fast wireless internet. Still, it is going to cause all kinds of disruption for the cable industry because you're not going to need cable TV anymore, you know, with the streaming and now cheap, fast data. And so there's been a lot of talk going on about well, you know, we got to keep Huawei out of our networks are 5g networks. Right now, we're working with the country over in Africa. Who has had their entire infrastructure built out by Huawei? And now, there are reports about Huawei spying on these countries and people and everything right. So I want to start with an answer to a question I'm hearing all the time now. And that is, is Huawei building our next generation of internet infrastructure when it comes to our cell phones, our cell data, and everything else? So here's the answer. In the United States, it's obvious, no, Huawei, this is these Chinese companies excluded from the US market by the US government. So we've got Ericsson, and we've got a Nokia and Samsung, are all working with our significant providers like Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, even Nokia is involved with T Mobile. Still, those are the guys that are building out our 5g networks, and that's an excellent thing because I want to do a flashback. You've been in tech for quite a while. Yep. And have you heard of Nortel? I assume Nortel. Yeah, yeah Nortel used to make all kinds of switching equipment that made central office equipment. They made some of the best networking equipment out there. And Nortel is no longer in business. So think about Christmas, Christmas this past year. Here's what happened. I remind people, and this is new information for many. But back in early 2004 Nortel was hacked by them unknown company from China called Huawei. And Nortel got into all of their major executives. IT systems, emails, accounts, including the CEOs. Frank has done, Brian McFadden. Oh yeah, it stole all of the documents that contain the future product and marketing plans of Nortel, and then two years later, all of a sudden, out of nowhere comes wow way. Absolutely.

Jeff Chidester
We're actually up against the wall. So no, I won't forget that. No, I want to give people your website before we do break Craig Peterson dot com. You got to find out why you do not buy Huawei TVs either. I'm sure I'm getting the Chinese medical right now.

Craig Peterson
Yeah, I tried to squeeze in our phones there, but we got cut off. Oh, well, that's like the top of the hour is always a tough one because it's a hard, hard, hard break, and I like the bottom of the hour. Anyways, have a great week. I'm kind of taking a little time off here over the next week or two. I'm going to be doing a few things, and so we'll be chatting them. By the way, if you want to have any questions answered, just email me at Craig Peterson, calm. Take care, everybody. Talk to you later. Bye-bye.

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

Message Input:

Message #techtalk

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome!  

The Holidays are almost here -- Hannakah begins tonight and the middle of next week is Christmas - Boy this year has flown by.  There is a lot of Tech in the News so let's get going!

For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com

---

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---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson

Hey, hello everybody, Craig Peters on here on w GAM and online at Craig peterson.com. Hopefully, you're able to join me on Wednesday mornings as well as I am on live with Ken and Matt, we always talk about the latest in technology and news and of course in security since that's primarily what I've been doing for the last 20 plus years here in the online world, man, just thinking back, it's, you know, I first got on the internet. Of course, it wasn't called that. But way back in the early 1980s. And I remember in fact when I first started doing networking professionally back in 75, and there was no worry about anything with you know, yeah, okay, we didn't want people to hack into so you'd have leased lines for your business and I was doing a bunch of work. from banks way back when right, one of my first jobs, and I was really enjoying it, I just learned a whole lot up to today. And we're going to cover this here because my gosh, it's it has changed. The Internet used to be very libertarian, everybody on it was very libertarian or conservative. Of course, that's because there were a whole ton of government contractors on the ARPANET as well as some colleges and universities. And you look at it today, and you think that really it's changed dramatically which it has. But I think the ratio is probably still about the same. You've got the silent majority that just doesn't say much about anything, right. And then you've got this hugely vocal minority who's just yelling and screaming all of the time. And then some of these tech companies that are trying to straddle somehow in the middle and not get everybody all upset with them. It's really a Much different world. But when we're talking about security, it is nothing at all like it used to be. You used to go online, and you'd have some fun you, you know, exchange emails with people, you'd share some files and some fun things. I remember this one whole thread on chases. That was just absolutely amazing. I think I came up this time of years while it was all these puns about different cheeses. It was a lot of fun. Now today, we've got a whole different internet out there and a great article by Robert Limos and he is looking at WatchGuard Technologies' latest quarterly report that was published just last week. And this network security firm found that the percentage of malware that successfully bypassed anti-virus scanners IT companies network gateways has increased Significantly, watch guard technology is saying that the amount of malware that signature-based antivirus software catches, has plummeted to about 50%. Now, I think their numbers are high because I think it's more like 20%. But they're getting specific here. They're talking about the amount of malware that comes into a network via an external source. In other words, people are accidentally pulling it from a website they visit, or perhaps it's been injected into their systems through someone who's visiting their network and using another vulnerability. But they're saying that antivirus software This is signature-based stuff, that's what you get from Norton Antivirus. That's what you get from, you know, the Symantec people from McAfee from all of these different antivirus companies out there. It is just horrific what's happening because of what's known as zero-day now you might have heard of this before you might not have but basically what zero-day malware is, is malware is nasty software and malware includes things like viruses, worms, Trojans, etc. It is this type of malicious software that has not been seen in the wild before. And what it used to me is they would, you know, some brilliant person who as my mother would say, Why don't they do something useful with their time, some brilliant PR person would come up with a piece of software, no one had ever seen a way of attacking that no one had ever seen before. And they would attack us and they would get through because there was no signature for it or the engines in the antivirus software just could not manage to handle. You know malware like this new piece of malware that just came out the problem we're having today is that the majority of malware act just like zero-day. So here's what happens with a signature-based attack. You can think of it just like your body's anti-virus system night than what you have in your body. And your body looks at something that it sees and says, Have I seen this before. And if it has seen it before, it knows to attack it before. It grows really big and kind of starts to get out of control, and then the body has to attack it after it's already really, you know, it's taken the beachhead if you will use a military term. I've been watching a lot of world war two movies lately, but it's taken that beachhead and now has control of the beach and is starting to get in further and it's very difficult to get out versus it recognizes it almost right away as a nasty virus. And goes ahead and end the Jackson You know you have more cells in inside your body inside your skin there are more cells that are foreign to your body then there are body cells when you start counting all the bacteria and everything that's in your system and on your skin. It's just incredible. So our body relies on a lot of these things. In order to keep us healthy, if we had no bacteria, you be in trouble. It's like you know if you go on antibiotics, which is an anti-bacterial, what does the doctor tell you to do? Well, you know, start eating yogurt and, and other things. Maybe take some Kombucha or various other things in order to try and stay healthy. Get that good bacteria going in your gut again. Well, when your body is attacked by something that hasn't seen before. That's what we would call in the computer world as a zero-day virus has never been seen by Your body or in the case of a computer's never been seen by this signature-based antivirus software. So what the bad guys have been doing is they figured out how Yes, indeed we are trying to block them. And they figured out that the majority of us are using these signature-based antivirus software packages. So they've designed the viruses and the malware to change itself every time. So no longer can the antivirus software, just look for certain signatures. So for instance, if you were always attacked by blonde-haired blue-eyed Norwegians, you might be cautious next time you see a blonde-haired blue-eyed Norwegian approaching towards you maybe with a baseball bat or whatever it is, they might have in their hands, right? So you get worried about it. What's the old expression? Once burn shame on me. You twice burn shame on me. Right? So we learn we respond based on how we've been attacked before. And so does the antivirus software now it can take them days or weeks, even months to get a signature out and get it all dispersed. You know, I'm talking about the old software, not the newest stuff, not the enterprise stuff we use for our business client. But the stuff that you use as a consumer and Heaven forbid if your business and you're using stuff like Norton Symantec, or McAfee or any of these other a VG antivirus software packages that are based on signatures because they just don't work. So what happens is they change themselves constantly. So it might be a Norwegian, but they dyed their hair they put on colored contact lenses, and they change their clothing. That's effectively what's happening with our computers nowadays. It may be that Viking that's approaching you but you Don't know it because it just doesn't look like they change everything about themselves at least most everything except the malicious intent and what they end up doing once they've got control of you. So watch guard is saying that this is a major change here. Now I'm going to quote directly from them. The big change is that more and more malware is becoming evasive. So the signature-based protection is no longer sufficient. There's nothing wrong with having it because it will catch 50% to two-thirds of the traffic but you definitely need something more. And that's why I've been recommending you guys do a few things you can do the free stuff. If you are not a business, you can go to my favorite right now. Open DNS and sign up for an account. They have some paid stuff. I think it's $20 a month per computer, for business to get the basic business service. It's free. For a regular home user, but it does not allow you to do any customization. And then there are a few packages in between open DNS. Now we use a commercial version of is an enterprise version called brawler. That's where the calling it now, but it's the highest level where we can, you know, watch it and maintain it. So that's step number one of what you need to do get open DNS so that if you do get one of these pieces of nastiness like ransomware, and it tries to call home, it can't get the phone number, right. He can't call home because there's another phone number. And I think that's a very important thing to do. It's free if you're home user, you might want to pay for the family plan would block certain scary sites and certain things you probably don't want your kids to see pornography and other things open dns.com and then the other thing to do, I had it in my big course this last year and that was how to harden Windows machine. It's rather involved. And I'll probably do a course early next year on this. But make sure you harden your machine, you're going to want to turn off stuff you don't need, you're going to want to make sure your firewall is set up properly to do the types of blocks that you need. You're going to want to make sure that you've got Microsoft's new malware software installed properly and running properly. So I'll have a course on this early next year that you can get. Because when you're talking about 50%, and I've seen numbers as low as 20% effectiveness with anti-virus software, you have to do something. Hey, if you're looking to buy some gifts, I'm going to be talking about some of them in today's show, including five g should you get that phone, you're listening to Craig Peterson on w GAN and online. Greg peterson.com. Stick around. We'll be right back.

Craig Peterson

Hey, are you thinking about buying a mobile phone? We're going to talk about that right now. You're listening to Craig Peterson on WGN and online at Craig Peterson calm. Now you've heard about 5g. You're probably using 4g LTE right now, on your phone and maybe mobile devices you may be your iPad or a tablet that you might have. Amazon has its Kindles. They do not, by the way, have 4g LTE on them, at least, for the most part, they're using some of the much older technology because frankly, all they're doing is sending books right? Which are pretty small. But it is that time of year that we're buying presents and there are only a few days left here for that holiday season, purchasing time. And we've got a lot of competition in the 5g world. So let's talk about what this is. And I'll give you some tips. But what is going on? 5g holds a lot of promise. Now I don't know if you remember I remember how shocked I was at how fast 4g was. I bought a phone. And it had 4g LTE in on it. It was an Android phone. And I vowed never again for so many reasons. And you've heard them on the show here before, but I had bought an Android phone, and I didn't have 4g up where I lived. And I drove down. We were heading down. I think it was till Pennsylvania take one of the kids to camp. And I was going through Valley and I noticed Wait a minute. There's a big city right there. I got 4g so I immediately went to speed test.net and I ran the test to see just how fast is for G. And I was just shocked. I was getting like 20 megabits a second, which was absolutely amazing. Because I've been using cell phones since they first came out. And you know, back in the day it was 14 for right? Oh, cell phone so fast. And now just to see 20 megabits was absolutely mind-blowing. But there are some major limitations to the 4g LTE network that we are using today. And those limitations are speed for one. And then the other thing is the number of devices that can be supported. And then the cost of the data and the data transfers. So 5g has been under development for quite a while. And this is not we're not going to get into Huawei and how they stole all their technology. It really appears to be from our friends up at Nortel and put the whole company out of business because of the spine that they did. And thank goodness finally, we've got a president who's trying to do something about it. But five G's real promise for us right now is that we will get two things will get a gigabit worth of data bandwidth, which means by the way, that we may not even bother with Wi-Fi in our homes if you live in an area that has full 4g or 5g coverage because it's just going to be just as fast as your cable is right now. Now the cable companies are probably going to try and compensate by lowering their prices and giving you faster and faster and faster internet. But for a lot of people, it's going to make economic sense because the cost isn't going to be high. And then the second thing that 5g is going to give us is the ability to have billions of devices connected to the 5g network. That means that everything from our cars Which really the next generation of cars self-driving cars really do need 5g so they can talk to each other. So they can continually upload data to the cloud to let all of the routing computers know about local weather conditions and, and road and where the potholes are and everything is just, it's going to be amazing, right? On the one hand, on the other hand, well, there might be some data leakage that we might not want. So the cars are going to have it but so is pretty much every device that you have. A couple of years ago, I talked about the new jacket, the new trucker jacket that Levi's hat out. And that trucker jacket was designed specifically to connect your phone to your phone and allow you to control your phone. So it had Bluetooth in it. You could touch these little wires that were embedded into the sleeve with your hand and use that to control your cell phone. You know, listen to music and Suddenly things are just kind of cool. So our clothes are going to have the internet in them. Our computers, of course, everything you buy a laptop, it's going to have 5g built-in, you're not going to need to have an external device anymore. Just list goes on and on and on. I've everything that's going to happen is going to be phenomenal. But it is not there yet. And Apple did not include 5g with the iPhone 11 this year, it will include it with the iPhone 12. That's coming out next year. And I saw a very, very good summary of what's probably going to be coming out of Apple in September next year. The guy that published it has been spot on with most everything that Apple was coming up with. And they are he's saying that they are going to be having 5G on the phone and it would make a lot of sense. But right now you can put in orders for the Samsung Galaxy Note 10 plus the one plus 70 that's There are other phones that are claimed to have 5g. But listen, everybody, it is still too early to buy a 5g phone. That is really my big tip when it comes to 5g right now, these networks have not fully standardized, they are not running, none of them are running full 5g anywhere except in a couple of major cities. The biggest problem with building out the 5g networks is that they need to have basically what we've come to know as cell towers everywhere. I mean, everywhere. These are little micro things that are not big towers like we have right now. You know, those fake trees that you see that are actually cell towers. Now, these are going to be small boxes and they're going to be on pretty much every street corner in the big cities. They'll be on the sides of buildings. They'll be on the sides of people's houses. Cell companies are going to pay us to put these on our homes so that we can now provide 5g to us and to our neighbors. And then there's going to be people who will be upset because of the radiation, even though it's non-ionizing, and it's not known to cause any harm, people will be upset about it. But these things are going to be everywhere. And that's because remember, I'm talking about one gigabit worth of bandwidth coming down to your device. Well, you cannot do gigabit service on lower frequency so they have moved to higher frequencies. The old UHF TV channels are pretty much I think they're all gone now throughout the country. And the FCC has bought back the bandwidth and has auctioned it off to all of these different companies that wanted to buy it. And it's just everything is going to change and with the high frequencies that they need in order to deliver these beads, they now have a problem and that is these higher frequencies do not penetrate glass. They don't penetrate walls very well at all. And they just don't penetrate metal at all basically, it's really bad. So it T Mobile has announced nationwide 5g available as of last Friday. That is pretty darn cool. It's got a 600 megahertz 5g network which is going to cover most of the country. That is pretty impressive. But the trade-off is it's using low band 5g which means it is good at providing slightly boosted speeds inside buildings and is available in a lot more places than what competitors offer 18 T and Verizon are offering the opposite. They have ultra-wideband networks right now superfast speeds, but very, very small footprints very small pocket, and you got to be standing near one of these towns

This is kinda cool T Mobile is expecting with theirs. That actually is p mag is PC Magazine, you can expect a boost of about 15 megabits with their new 5g nationwide. And you might see 150 megabits if you have a new 5g phone or 700 megabits if you have 4g LTE. So not a huge right now, but just wait. Okay, wait until next summer next fall, when things are really going to start happening. All right, stick around. We got a lot to cover still we're going to be talking about some guests who will talk about some of the big hacks of the year. What does it mean to us? What can we do? I'm going to give you some tips and some tricks, what not to do on your work computer third party security risks and some lessons from the National Security Agency. You're getting it right here from Craig Peterson on WGA and

Craig Peterson

Hello, welcome back. Greg Peterson here on w GAN will be enjoying the show today. We got a lot to cover here. Awesome. Good news, some gift ideas. I've got a very cool article from Ars Technica, about nine gift ideas for the tech enthusiasts in your life. And frankly, I am totally into this. It gave me a couple of ideas in fact of things that I'm going to be getting for people. So you might want to stick around and listen to that for the enthusiast in your life. And we're going to start right now with something that I think pretty much everyone's can be interested in. If you are, you know an employee, if you work at a company, and you use computers, there is a couple of words of caution here. In this segment, Now, first of all, the business computers are owned by the business. And that's kind of where this Bring Your Own Device thing has gotten everything a little bit fuzzy, you know, so if you are using your phone, for instance, your smartphone, and you're using it for work purposes, it's not the businesses phone. So there's not a whole lot that they can say about your phone and how you use your phone. However, the business has an absolute right to its data, and kinking troll, frankly, how you use your phone for the business data, right? Well, how about the computers that are actually owned by the computer? What can you do legally? And what can't you do? What can the business tell you that you should do with it and what can they not tell you what to do? Well, the bottom line is it depends. It depends on the business and what their policies are. So overall, that's kind of the first place you should check your employee handbook. Now we've provided a lot of businesses with employee handbook sections on this and you can certainly get them from your attorney from your corporate attorney, or from HR if you're an employee there. But if you're using a work-issued computer, now that includes a desktop computer includes a laptop, it's going to include things like iPads, even phones, you've probably checked your personal email on that device, you might have stored some files on there. You, you might have used it for a number of different things. Now in many cases, it's not a big deal as far as the company is concerned. You know, if you've got kids right to have a life outside the office, so for you to be able to send an email to the BBC. Or to make a few phone calls because babysitting didn't show up or a kid is sick or whatever. Most employers say that's absolutely fine if I died personally would not work for an employer. That said, That's not fine. I think that's a very, very big deal a very bad thing, the right companies that are like that. But when you start to store your private files on the company's computer, or maybe the company's Dropbox or Google Drive, or you are maybe going down a rabbit hole, as you started with something on Cora or you started with something somewhere else, and all of a sudden before you know it, it's an hour two hours later, or heaven for Ben, you are going to Facebook or some of these other sites to poke around. Then things change. Now many of us use messenger on Facebook in order to keep in contact with family and friends. So is it legit to have a messenger window open? Is it legit to do that, right? Well, the bottom line is you probably shouldn't do any of this on a computer provided by your employer. You're not necessarily breaking the law, but you could get fired if it's against your company's policies. And also, you need to remember that employers can install software to monitor what you do on your work-issued laptop or desktop. Now we do not monitor employees and what they're doing on a computer, except to watch for things that the employees might be doing that might harm the business directly. In other words, if an employee's bringing in a file from home, we're going to check that file. If they're downloading something from the internet. We're going to check that download. We're going to check their emails are going to clean them up, we're going to stop the ransomware we're going to stop the zero-day attacks that I talked about earlier. As well as all of the known types of vulnerabilities. But remember that not everybody is like us, right? We are not interested in getting involved in the businesses Workplace Relations, a lawsuit that a business might want to bring to against an employee, right? That's not what we do. Although we've certainly been pulled into those before in the past. And you need to keep that in mind as an employee because they can monitor what you do, they might put keyloggers on there to see what you're typing, they might have a software that takes a random screenshot. We've done that before with these workers that are doing a specific project. So we outsource something, there might be a graphic or might be writing an article or something, and we're paying by the hour for that contractor to do the work. So as part of the agreement, we have software that sits on the computer and randomly takes screenshots So we have an idea that yes, indeed, they are actually working on our stuff. And it took them five hours and we spent it to take one hour. And it's because they're slow, not because they were out wandering the internet and doing research on the party that's going to be coming up next week at the office or at their home, right. So be very careful about it. And the type of surveillance and security software that's installed on the company computer is usually based on two things, one, how large the company is, and what kind of resources they have to dedicate to watching you, and what type of information you deal within your role. Now, almost all of our clients in fact, now I think of it I think all of our clients are in what are called regulated industries. So if you're a car dealer, you're in a regulated industry, because you have payment card information, you have financing information on all kinds of personal information. So that has to be monitored, right? We have doctors' offices that have HIPAA requirements personal again, personally identifiable information, healthcare information. So security numbers, phone numbers, email addresses, and under the new regulations that are coming out right now, January one in California and Massachusetts in the European Union right now, and they are working on similar regulations on the federal level, even an email address is considered to be personally identifiable information. Until the list goes on and on if you have government contracts, we have clients that have DFARs or Defense Department requirements or FINRA, which is for financial organizations, right? That's what we do. So all of these heavily regulated businesses need to have software that is going to detect that someone is trying to exfiltrate data, shut it down immediately. We need to know that employees are trying to steal information. And in many of these cases, we will work with the company if there are lawsuits and ensue because of the regulation or because of other reasons out there. So if you're working with a company like this, which is frankly, in this day and age, every company, right, what, what employer does not have security numbers of employees? How do you pay them if you don't have the social security numbers, those are all falling under the regulations nowadays. And unfortunately, a lot of businesses don't pay attention to that. So a very small company, they're probably not doing this. But larger companies are definitely going to be doing this. And there's a great little quote here from Jesse crims. He's an Information Security Analyst over the New York Times and he said Without supporting evidence at this scale, at scale, it's pretty rare that people are not doing heavy surveillance and tends to generate a lot of useless data, roped employee into liability issues and generally make the team that monitors the surveillance systems miserable. In other words, you probably don't want to know. And that's the standard we take. We make sure that all of the regulations are complied with, but whether or not someone's sending an email to the babysitter or whatever, it's just not worth it. We're worried about espionage. Okay, so there you go. There are some tips for you. And using business security or using a business computer at work. Stick around. We'll be right back. We got some more stuff to talk about, including some major updates to the Google Chrome browser. Should you be using it anymore. We'll be right back.

Craig Peterson

Hello everybody, Craig Peterson here. Welcome back. We're listening Of course on WGAN or online at Craig Peterson dot com, you'll find me on pretty much every podcasting platform out there. And if you really enjoy the show, you know one of the best ways to let me know is to share it. I love to see all of the people who are listening and getting feedback from everybody so send me a note as well. But here's where you can go if you would like to give me a five-star review, just go to Craig Peterson comm slash iTunes. And right there, you can give me a five-star review. on Apple, they're still kind of the 800-pound gorilla in this space. Rumor has it that the next release of iOS is going to have some major improvement to this whole podcasting stuff. Apple really kind of started it with the iPod, which is where it got the name from. I still have one of my original iPods kicking around. It was frankly, it was my favorite device for listening to music. Anyhow, let's talk a little bit about some of the browser issues that are out there right now. Many people are concerned about the web browsers you're using. We know we're being monitored. We know we're being watched right now, by these big companies. Google makes its money by what? By selling our information. Facebook's the same way. Now Google is going to sell us advertising, and so is Facebook. And frankly, I would rather know about cars and see advertisements for cars. When it is the time I'm looking to buy a car right? And I'm never going to buy a lot of from Russia, right? So why would I want to see ads for that? So I am Pro, the monitoring in that space. Right. I, you know, you kind of go back and forth about that. You look at what President Obama's team did back when he was running for election the first time where they grabbed all of Facebook's data about everyone. And then they used highly targeted advertising. And then you saw what happened eight years later with President Trump and while the Cambridge Analytica scandal that was Child's Play compared to what President Obama's team did, but somehow President Obama's team didn't get in trouble for it. But President Trump's team certainly did even though Trump's don't get into that right now. But the browsers that we're using are tracking us. And remember, again, this old adage, it's old now, right? It's relatively new frankly. But if you do not pay for service, the odds are you are the product. And Google certainly considers that. And so does Facebook, that you are the product. So when you're looking at browsers, what should you be using the biggest browser out there right now the one that any software developers going to aim at is the Google Chrome browser. Because that's what most people use. It is really a great browser. From a functionality standpoint, people are using Google's Of course search engine, which has been very, very good here over the years. They, they've just done some wonderful things. And Google has added more and more features to their browser. Now, people ask me constantly, what is it that I use? What is it that I recommend? Well, I can tell you that Craig recommends that you don't use the Chrome browser when you can avoid it. Now I do use Chrome. When I am on a website, and I'm trying to do something and one of these other browsers doesn't work quite right. I go over to Chrome because it's not the worst thing in the world. It's not as though it has a direct backdoor into Russia, at least not that we're aware of, or into the CIA or the NSA. We know that Google doesn't like to cooperate with the US military, in some of its research projects, but Google also loves to cooperate with China and has three artificial intelligence labs in China. So it's giving China our next generation of computing technology for free but won't share it with our government. Yeah. Well, anyway, I guess I do get kind of political sometimes on the show. Google's Chrome version 79 just came up with a new feature. Now you know, when it comes to password, That I highly recommend you use some software called one password. They have some free stuff, they have some paid offerings. And what one password does is it keeps all of your passwords keeps them secure. You only have to remember one password, which is, frankly a huge win. And it was great in the business environment where you can set up vaults of passwords so that you know HR can have their own vault and this software development teams can all have their own vaults, and you can have your own personal vault, and it'll create passwords for you that are highly secure, that conform to the requirements for different websites and, and you can share them within vaults. There are just all kinds of wonderful things that you can do using one password. And then if you've been around a while, a couple of years ago, you know I offered a service that we were doing internally. We did this for free for over 1000 People, but we double-checked their password to see if not passwords but email address to see if their email addresses and passwords are out on the dark web. And you know, we checked it at least a month and generated reports for people. And that might be something we decided to do in the future. Well, there is a huge database out there that we've talked about on the show before. Google has now adopted in its Chrome browser. So Chrome 79 has what they're calling as a password checkup extension. So that was what how it all started. It was for desktop versions of Chrome, and it audited your passwords when you entered them, and took a look at them to see if those passwords were known to have been breached. Now, it's not necessarily that your account was breached, although it might have been it the password in the Heres why. Here's why they looked at the password itself. What the bad guys are doing nowadays is they are comparing your password against millions, hundreds of millions, in fact, billions of known passwords that people have used. And they start with the most common passwords and then work their way out from there. So if you're using a password that has been known to been breached in the past, it isn't something you should use. So I thought that was great. They had this password checkout extension. So now what they've done is they've integrated into every Google account and on-demand audit that you can run on all of your saved passwords. And in version 79. Google has a password checkout integrated into both the desktop and mobile versions of Chrome. So what will happen now is that if you are using Chrome to save your passwords, which I do not do as a rule, except for a few accounts I don't really care about because again, I'm using one password to keep my passwords and can keep them all straight? So it is built-in now. And anytime you enter in a password, it's going to check to see if that password has been breached anywhere online. Google is calling this private set intersection, which means you don't get to see Google's list of bad credentials. And Google doesn't get to learn your credentials. But the two can be compared four matches and basically what it's doing is it's doing mild encryption on your password and comparing it against this known setup password. So it's very, very good to do. One password has this feature already built-in password will warn you if I website that you're going to has been known to have been compromised. And Google's figuring here, that since it has a big encrypted database of all your passwords, I might as well compare against, compare them against this 4 billion strong public list of compromised usernames and passwords. They've been exposed in all kinds of security breaches over the years. And little on little later on today, we're going to talk about the top half dozen or so big security breaches, what caused them and then you might want to pay attention to to see if your information was exposed. But the main reason I like to talk about this stuff is so that you can look at your position, you know, at home or at work and ask yourself, hey, listen, there is this breach something that would have worked against us, right? I think it's very, very good. So Here we go. I'm not going to get any details here on what exactly what Google is doing and how they're doing it. If you are a chrome fan, you might want to use it. So let's talk about what the alternatives to Chrome or opera is a big one. And I have heard rumors that the Opera browser, which is kind of my primary browser, I have another one will tell you about in just a second, but opera very fast. It's designed to be secure. It also blocks a lot of spyware out there. Very good. But the rumors are that it is now in the hands of the Chinese government apparently owns it. I'm not sure that's entirely true. But, you know, it's up to you whether you want to take any risks. I'll tell you also about an extension I use in all of my browsers, which makes it much more secure much safer for me. We'll probably have to wait until after the top of the hour to get into that, but I'll tell about that.

So what do I use the most? And what do I trust the most? Well, Netscape, the Netscape browser. Mozilla is the next one that I use opera is number one, at least for the time being. I use Firefox as well. Both of them do a lot of blocking, oh, I have a lot of privacy enhancements. Those are the two I use the most. And then I also use Apple Safari. Apple, again, is not selling your information as Google does. So it's considered to be a little bit safer. So far, we haven't known Apple to really leak information. They've been relatively safe, they certainly aren't selling it to anyone. And that's what I use. And then if I have to all fall back to Google Now, if I wanted to be extra safe online, there is another browser out there that I do like, and it's called epic EP, I see the epic browser. And it is actually based on Google's Chrome browser underneath the hood, just as Microsoft's browser is based on Google's Chrome browser. And Google is actually using a base form from Apple's Safari browser, which is kind of interesting. They all share code nowadays. But the epic browser is the browser if you absolutely want to keep your data safe. It even has a built-in privacy VPN. So check it out as well. When we come back, I'll give you a little clue here. A couple of tips on what you can do to keep every browser just a little bit safer. We'll get into some gift ideas and more. So stick around you're listening to Craig Peterson on WGAN and online at Craig Peterson dot com. Stick around. We'll be right back.

Craig Peterson

Hello, everybody, Craig Peterson here. Welcome back and listening to me on WG A in an online, Craig peterson.com. Hey, if you are a new listener, I just want to let you know a little bit about my background I've been helping to develop the internet, they in fact, just called a pie in the air you the other day, which is kind of interesting to think about. But yes, indeed, I designed and made some of the very first routers and some of the very first firewalls and load balancers and stuff back in the day. Let me tell you back in the day, we had to write these things from scratch because they just didn't exist as commercial products. And, you know, there's a lot of products I could have sold over the years but I'm just wasn't that kind of guy. Anyhow, so now I do a lot of cybersecurity for businesses, government agencies, most particularly really, for anybody in a regulated business, which today in this day and age means any business because we are all regulators I talked about in the last segment. Well, we have some gift ideas. And let me just start with one here. And then we'll get into some more articles from this week. We've we're going to be talking about the NSA here and what their top recommendation is for businesses. But you know, I am a techie guy, and I love tech and tech gifts and it's all just a pretty darn cool thing. When you get right down to it, just like, you know, I just love playing with this stuff. I guess that's the way to put it. And using it and making my life a little easier and faster, more efficient, effective, etc. But I want to talk about the high-end tech gifts that you might want to give, and you might want to give for yourself. In fact, that's exactly what I'm doing with one of these this year. Well, if you have somebody who's a gaming enthusiast, there are so many things out there that you can get for them. There's this one particular mouse that is very highly rated for gamers. It's called the razor Viper. It has some very, very fast, maneuverability stuff built in. Because of course, when you're playing some of these video games interactive, you need to be able to move very quickly so anyhow, we'll leave it at that because I am not a game type person. I used to play some, some games way back when you're in a dungeon with twisty mages, mazes, remember right how things started. But let's get into this. Now. This is one of the things I think would be a great gift for almost anyone, it's great for a computer that has the USBC which is the newest version of the USB cable. It is what the new Mac books come with the new max do as well. It's the next generation of the high-speed stuff that the last generation max had. But it also works with regular USB cable has a little adapter that you can use with it. It's called SanDisk extreme portable SSD. This thing is very, very nice. It's a good option for data you need to have with you wherever you go. It's surprisingly small. It is rated for the extremely high shock it's like 500 G's or something crazy like that. And it will withstand water and dust as well as vibration. You can drop it from six feet in the air without suffering any damage at all. This thing is amazing. And right now it is half price. Over on Amazon. Just look it up there. SanDisk is the name of the company S-A-N-D-I-S-K, it's their extreme portable SSD fits in the palm of your hand that you're going to love this. It's available in 250 gig 500 gig one terabyte and two terabytes now, I would not get the 250 gig, not that it's too small. But for an extra $10 you double your space up to 500 gig. Now when you go up to the one terabyte, which again is twice the space, it's twice the cost. So the one terabyte you're gonna have to ask yourself what makes sense and two terabyte options. But this thing is so fast, or what I love this for is to have different virtual machines on it. It's the one I use when I am doing a demo or for when I need to do a client-side install.  I can have every version of Windows on my need to use Mac OS all the different versions of that a few versions of Linux all right there on the drive. It's very very convenient. And very, very fast you're going to love this thing. In fact, that's one of the fastest portable storage solutions that has ever been tested. It's kind of similar you know you can get Samsung T five SSD, they have very good SSDs. Okay, don't get me wrong here.  The Samsung t five is more affordable but the SanDisk extreme SSD is better. Now I got to tell you that the cost right now on Amazon for this portable drive, there's no moving parts in it. As I said it fits in the palm of your hand. The cost on that is lower on Amazon right now. It's half price is lower than I can buy it from my distributors at So just to give you an idea of what a great value that is, coming up, we're going to talk about, I think the coolest gift you can give to somebody that is truly a hobbyist in the computer world, you're going to love it. And then if you are that person when you go to someone's house for Hanukkah, Thanksgiving, Christmas birthdays, whatever it is, and they say, hey, Craig, come over here for a second. my computer's not working right can you have a look at it will will tell you about the best gift for somebody like that and maybe some need to get get for yourself as well. So I'm going to talk right now about some of the biggest security breaches we'll go over one and then we'll get to some others little later on in this our last hour. And by the way, if you want to listen to the whole show, my podcast and everything. You can just go to Craig Peterson comm slash iTunes or slash tune in if you'd like to listen to it. On tune in or slash pretty much anything well actually if you type in slash pretty much everything you need an error page right? But you'll find me Craig Peters on on most of the major podcast sites that are out there by just going to Craig Peterson comm slash, whatever it is like Sasha Hart or slash SoundCloud or slash tune in, etc, etc.

Well, data aggregators are big targets that are out there and who is a data aggregator? Well, let me tell you about what happened when I was at a wedding last week I was staying with my sister in law my wife and I, and there we got home and there was a card in the door and there's from an insurance company members like all state or something and, and it asked for one of my sisters in law, who had been living in that house to call so we thought okay, well, it's just a hoax thing. You know, they're they're trying to sell some insurance or something. So we just ignore that fact, I think we just threw the card in the trash. Well, the next night, we were sitting there at home and there's a knock at the door. And it's the same insurance agent. And she wants to talk to my deceased sister in law. And we get into this a little bit more and talking and talking to her trying to figure out what, what, what, why, what's going on. It turns out that someone was involved in a fatal car accident. And that person gave my deceased sister in-law's identity as her own. Yes, indeed, the dead are, quite frequently in fact, a victim of identity theft. Now we know about the dead voting right particularly in Chicago, and but in other places around the country. Well, in this case, apparently according to the report - she had been involved in a fatal car wreck about six months after she had died, and someone was dead. Obviously, this was a case of mistaken identity, but the insurance lady who's at the door, and she's obviously, some sort of an investigator used one of these skip trace databases in case you're not familiar with those. These are databases that are put together by data aggregators and data aggregators are these companies that suck up data from every public source they possibly can. And even some paid sources. And it includes records from credit card companies, and you name it, they pull it all together, they try and make heads or tails of it. So she had this report from a data aggregator and listed my long-deceased father in law's name is part of this and, and my kids, couple of my kids that had at one point staying for a visit with their grandmother, for a few months, while going to school, etc. and include my wife's name, my name just kind of went on and on. They got a lot of data wrong. And that's what I found to typically 25 to 50%, sometimes even more the data they have is incorrect. But enough of it was correct that she could kind of start piecing things together. And she was able to figure out that this was insurance fraud. Well, these data aggregators have massive databases as frankly, you might imagine. And they have these databases online. Yeah, you know where I'm going. This was a Mongo DB Mongo database, which is used, it's kind of it's called NO SEQUEL. It's an unformatted database. It's perfect for these data aggregators, and a company called verifications.io. That provided email verification services, had a Mongo database Continued over 800 million records publicly accessible to anyone in the world with an internet connection. And they had four sets of data. They'd had email addresses, dates of birth, phone numbers, physical addresses, employer information, IP addresses, business leads and other information. Not everything was sensitive. So when we get back we'll talk about what lessons should be learned what you can pick up from this a couple of tips for you. If you are a business person of any sort, or if you have data that might be in one of these databases, so we'll talk about these big verifications Mongo DB breach from this year and some more gift ideas right area listening to Craig Peters on online and here on WGAN terrestrial radio.

Craig Peterson

Hello everybody Greg Peterson back here on WG and online at Craig peterson.com. If you enjoy my show, by all means, make sure you subscribe to the podcast. Pretty much everything that I do goes up there my Wednesday mornings with Matt and can during their drive time show Wednesday morning that goes up there Other appearances go up there the whole radio show goes up there as well. Craig Peters on comm slash iTunes and do leave me a review if you wouldn't mind. You know those five-star reviews help get the message out. And we just passed another hundred thousand downloads, which is kind of cool. I appreciate it. Every one of you guys for listening. We try and get as much information as we can. So let's get back to our Well actually, you know There's something I forgot to button up from the last hour. Let's get to that. And then we'll get to some, some gifts and some more risks and what the NSA is saying right now, I had been talking earlier in the show about web browsers, and which browsers you should be using, which ones I recommend, then, you know, if you missed all of that, again, you will find it at Craig peterson.com, slash iTunes, you can listen to the whole thing right there. But I was talking a little bit about a plugin that I use. This is a plugin that works with pretty much any browser out there and works differently than any plugin that you might have been familiar with before. This is from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Now I've had my disagreements with them in the past. Overall, I agree with a lot of what they're doing. But this is a plugin that goes into Chrome Opera or Firefox or pretty much anything that is called Privacy Badger Privacy Badger. So think about badgers if you know these things, they you'll find them a lot over in England, but they're over here too. They burrow underneath hedges and they like to live in the ground. And they are mean they will fight anything way bigger than they are. They don't care. They're going to win because they go all in. Well, that's what this is all about Privacy Badger. So I am on a website. Right now I'm looking at my browser and the Privacy Badger plugin, and it's got a nine on it right now. So what that means is that Privacy Badger detected nine potential trackers on this web page that I'm on right now. And it has sliders for them up there and it says you shouldn't need to adjust the sliders unless something is broken. So what Privacy Badger does is it watches you As you go to different websites, it looks at the cookies that are placed on your browser from these websites and determines, Hey, wait a minute. Now, this is a cross-site tracker. This is another type of tracker that we probably don't want to have. So it's showing them all to me. So here we go. Here's what I have right now on this website that I'm on. And the website is otter in case you don't use otter it is phenomenal transcription service, very inexpensive. 600 minutes for free every month. otter.ai but it turns out otter is using some tracker. So the first tracker showing me that Privacy Badger blocked is graph.facebook.com. So this is Facebook gathering data about me what I do where I go, the next one that's marked yellow, which is it has three different indications here on the slider. One is a blocks it entire The next one is that it could block cookies and then the far right one is to allow a domain to do it. So graph.facebook.com was blocked automatically static.facebook.com was allowed the regular facebook.com was allowed Google Analytics completely blocked API's Google com was allowed stripe checkout was allowed stripe as a payment service. JavaScript on stripe com was allowed and stripe network usually m dot means it's a mobile site. So that was blocked and Q dot stripe com was allowed but those are tagged the one these all of the ones I mentioned that were tagged, are considered to caution level.

So by adding Privacy Badger as a plugin to any of your browsers Basically is going to stop sites from tracking you and it does a very good job. It learns as you go. It is not something that is prefixed with I'm going to block this site or that site. It is absolutely dynamic. I really, really like it. So check that out. This is kind of a flashback, as I said to an earlier segment where I was talking about which browser to use, what the considerations are. And this will work with any of them out there. So just do a search for Privacy Badger, it should come up near the top of your DuckDuckGo search. And it's five the Electronic Frontier Foundation e FF, check it out online. Okay, so now let's get into gifts again. I mentioned my top gift recommendation in the last segment. This one is for total geeks. Now we are using this for actually keeping timing tracking It's called raspberry pi. So we have a special card that goes along with this that has a GPS antenna attached to it and GPS readers so that we can track the satellites in the sky. We use the timing that they provide us with, we do some advertising. So that one of the things we do for our clients is we have to track their logs and keep real detailed records on their logs. We need to know exactly when Did something happen? So that if after the fact heaven forbid, someone gets in, some piece of malware gets in when did it come in? Where did it go? What did it do, right? Because you want to be able to know after the fact Well, what does it get access to? unlike so many of these companies that have no idea what they lost? In fact, most businesses don't even know until six months later that they were even the hack versus what the best in the biz are doing right now is about six hours, not just to detected but to remediation, which is where we sit well, usually within that six-hour time frame. Well, this is called a Raspberry Pi. And they've got the newest version of Raspberry Pi four. This is a small Linux computer. So if anybody that you know likes to hack together science projects or you know, do a little bit of experimenting, this is phenomenal, absolutely phenomenal. You can turn it into a retro game console, it'll play a lot of these old video games. A smart speaker that's a DIY thing. You can build it into your Legos to make a real fancy remote-controlled car. Anything your hobbyist mind comes into mind. This is phenomenal. You can for 100 less than 100 bucks, you can get a complete kit. Okay? The Raspberry Pi fours a lot faster and the older Raspberry Pi three Model B plus faster CPU you can put up to four gigs of ram in this thing. It is a phenomenal USB 3.0 port. So if you are or you know somebody that's really into DIY hobbies, this is the way to go. Okay? The Raspberry Pi four does get closer to your general and genuine desktop PC performance. But it's not really there yet. It's not one running Windows, it does run Linux, as I mentioned. And you can write basic programs for it, which is a programming language Python. If you have a kid that wants to learn Python, this might be a nice way for them to learn because they can kind of hack it together but it's just it's basically just a motherboard, you're gonna have to put it in a case by a case forward, you're gonna have to put a keyboard on it. A mouse, you have to put a display on it, okay, all kinds of stuff, but you can get just the basic Raspberry Pi four For someone that that really, really is a total hacker here, for like 4050 bucks, it's absolutely amazing. Okay, plenty of power for your money. Very versatile. In fact, it's more versatile in many ways than your Windows PC is. And for the budding engineer in your life, they will love you for it. So stick around, we're going to come back, I've got some more ideas for tech gifts that you might like. And we're going to talk about a couple more big hacks this year, and what it means to you. We've got third party security risks, the NSA has some advice for business and we'll tell you about that too. When we get back, you're listening to Craig Peterson right here on w GAN and online at Craig Peter song.com. That's Peterson with an O. Stick around because we'll be right back.

Craig Peterson

Hello, everybody, welcome back, Craig Peters on here on WGAN. And we're talking about stuff we usually talk about, you know, some of the security things, some of the latest technology that's out there. We're also doing a bit of a recap here some great gift ideas for the techie people in your life, even frankly, some of the non-techie people. And the security side, which is, I think, very important, can't talk enough about that. Because it could destroy your company, it could ruin that, frankly, the rest of your life could be a bit of misery, depending on what the bad guys do to you. Oh, it's absolutely crazy. told the story a little earlier of what happened with my deceased sister in law's identity, and how it was used in a fatal car accident and it's just it's amazing what some of these people are. Doing nowadays. And by the way, one of the most valuable segments of our population. We are know already about the retired people, the older people, right, who might be a little confused, hopefully, have some assets. But one of the most valuable identities out there online is that they have a child because their social security number and their identity are going to be very useful for at least a decade, if not longer because those kids probably not going to use it until they get their first job. So keep that in mind as well. Well, I want to get into these two things before the last half hour, so we'll cover these fairly quickly. But the big one, and that is waking up to third party security risks. Now one of the big attacks this year was Capital One and that's on my list of the ones I wanted to talk about today. They had personal information blog into overall hundred million US individuals and 6 million Canadian residents. Now, this was exposed. And when a former employee at Amazon Web Services inappropriately accessed the data, we could get into all of the real details behind this but the compromised information included names addresses, dates of birth, credit scores, payment history, contact information, and other information on people who had applied for Capital One credit card dating back to 2005. also exposed where the social security numbers of 140,000 individuals and bank account data blogging belonging to 80,000 secured credit card customers. So think about this for a little minute here. How many of us are using a service like Amazon Web Services, how many of us are relying on cloud services to keep our information safe? Right? Frankly, that's most of us, isn't it? And when you're talking about somebody like Amazon Web Services, or now there's Microsoft Azure, those are kind of the two really big players. IBM also has its cloud online that they sell access to. Most businesses look at it as a way to save money. Most businesses consider, hey, I don't need to keep track of the security, because my vendor is keeping track of it for me. And what we found out is, that's not true. So the lessons learned here. We'll start with that here from Capital One is that cloud service may be attractive because it's cheaper than doing it yourself. And that's particularly true, frankly, throughout the whole range, but it's particularly true for large businesses, but even for small business. businesses, can you really afford the right kind of server? Now I know a lot of small businesses go to the local staples store and buy a computer and call it a server, right? And maybe $800,000 later, they're out of there. Whereas a real server that's going to be really reliable is going to last years, you should be looking at more like 15 to $20,000 for. So businesses say, well, I'll just do it in the cloud. I'll use Amazon Web Services for this and we'll hire a consultant who's going to help us set it up. And we're going to use maybe Dropbox for that and maybe office 365 for this and now all of a sudden, I'm safe. Well, you're not. And companies, you guys are putting your data at risk, because you haven't adopted a security infrastructure, with the vigor that you need to apply. It should be at least as good as what You're using for your on-premise stuff. But you know what so many SMEs aren't even doing it right for on-premise stuff. Okay? So you're ending up with all of the financial cost of the penalties that you rack up, and the lawsuit and the cost of those lawsuits, which will vastly outweigh any it savings that you might have down the road. So keep that in mind. And that's what Capital One just learned this year. The Why? Because we're not taking third party security risk to heart Ponemon Institute did a study here 2018 founded 60% of customers surveyed, had suffered a data breach caused by third parties or vendors in the last 12 months. So what's causing it? Well, these applications are being built very different than they were a decade ago. They are online. They're using APIs. And they are not considering the security risks. So all services are connecting internally and externally via these APIs, popular finance websites load on your browser mobile apps, you can see the results. Dozens of third party services, okay, web apps, middleware, other code. This is a real problem. So, protect your own infrastructure, Step number one. Step number two demanded the others protect their infrastructure, okay. And trust yet verify. What we do is we wrap special security software around all of these third party infrastructure Software-as-a-Service sites that are out there, okay. So be very, very careful and you have to test even more for third party sites and you know, businesses just aren't testing as much as they should. So there you go. There's a couple of tips here three tips on what to do. When you are talking about third party security risk, and that is with all of these guys, Okay, number one, make sure your infrastructure is protected that you have the right kinds of firewalls and you have the right kind of malware treatment that's in place. All the other security controls, make sure they're configured right? If you're using something like Amazon Web Services, or Sure, or office 365, make sure you have the right settings. You know, it's difficult I get it, Microsoft has over 10,000 skews 10,000 products that are available in they're all software and services. There are dozens and dozens just for office 365 based systems. So make sure you have the right stuff. Make sure that they have proper compliance and certifications. And remember too that the certifications they have just represented a point in time. Do they still have the right kind of security? And because we are running our technology in this new type of infrastructure, make sure, frankly, that we keep track of everything because a breach can happen quickly do millions of dollars of damages right away. And 20% of businesses will file for bankruptcy the very next day. All right, well, let's talk about another gift here real quick before we go to a quick break. And this is for those of us that we go to a family event, and we go anywhere, and it's a Craig come over here for a minute, I need some help and you go over there and of course, it's questions and problems about their computers. So here's what I recommend. Get that person in your life if they're fixing the computer for that for you.

I fix it. Great site painting Go online to find out how to fix physical problems. But they have something called the I fix it pro tech tool kit. I have one of these my kids have one of these. My technicians in my business have one of these. It's a 64-bit driver set that has all these weird types of sockets and everything on them. Because these parts and the computers that have the special locking screws and everything else, you need this Okay, the I fix it pro tech tool kit. Stick around. We'll be back with a wrap up for today's show. And we'll talk a little bit more about some gifts right here. You're listening to Craig Peterson on w GN. And the course online Craig Peterson calm. Stick around because we'll be right back.

Craig Peterson

Hello everybody Craig Peterson here WGAN and online at, of course, Craig Peterson dot com. Hope you've enjoyed the show today we have covered a lot of different things we talked about third party security risks for businesses which web browser you should be using. If you want to keep safe and some of the updates that Chrome has from Google, they'll keep you safer online. What not to do on your work computer. Why it's still too early to buy a 5g phone and signature antivirus and how it is at best catching 50% of the malware out there. It's getting really, really bad. And we've talked a little bit about some of the top breaches this year and there are some pretty scary Ones out there. But how does it apply to you? And how does it apply to your business as well? And we got one more that was brought up on the website at Craig Peterson calm, you can see all of these up there, a little bit of mind commentary and links to other articles online. But this is about the NSA and what the NSA, the National Security Agency is saying that we should be doing as businesses, but this applies 100% as well, to you as an individual. And the basics are to focus on your assets. And this is a very, very big deal. What are your assets and what should you be focusing on? And the things that come to mind very quickly for most people are things like your bank accounts, you know, the money that's in them, maybe your intellectual property, but companies just aren't keeping Tracking that well enough. earlier in the show, I talked about some of the problems with third parties and how some of these third party vulnerabilities have led to a massive problem in the business, right. And some very big businesses that got nailed pretty bad out there. Well, did you secure your assets properly, even when they're in the cloud? And you got to think this all the way through because people are bringing in their iPhone or their Android phones, heaven forbid, or other devices that have known security problems. And they're putting your corporate jewels on those devices. People are taking the laptops home, and maybe the VPN in the end. And that VPN is allowing the viruses that are on their kid's computer as they use for gaming and who knows what else, allowing those viruses to piggyback on to your network at the office via VPN is remember VPN aren't a panacea. And I talked a lot about that in some of my training, I did a pop-up training on VPN man, but about a month ago, you'll probably still find it over on my Facebook page at Craig peterson.com slash Facebook if you're interested in finding out more about VPN. But when you're looking at securing a company, this is something that takes a long time, a lot of experience to do. And it's not something that your nephew is going to be able to do. It's not something that your standard brake fix shop is going to be able to do. This is something that takes years and years of experience decades, frankly, in order to be able to do this right. And that's where it becomes a problem for the very small businesses. So I really would encourage you to look at some of the pop-up-trainings I've done. They're absolutely free to learn a little bit more. Keep an eye out because I will be doing more pop up Trains after the first of the year, we're going to do some great training. And I have also a couple of courses planned. And, you know, I gave away 120 pages of sheet cheat sheets this last summer, we may do something again like that later on next year. But we've got to be very, very careful, because these people who are trying to get at our assets, know what they want. And we've got nation-states who are trying to get at them to look at what China's doing. They, they just passed a law in China that makes it so that you cannot use encryption that the Chinese government cannot decrypt. And the law allows them to use any information that they find by any means. And give that to anyone that they want to including your competitors in China.

So if you are making anything in China, you know, quit it, stop it right away and many businesses already Have they moved into other parts of Southeast Asia, the manufacturing of Vietnam and of course, Korea, which is a little more expensive, but very, very good. Indonesia, the Philippines, there are a lot of places where intellectual property rights are honored. So if you are doing it, man, get it out of there. Don't do anything in China anymore, frankly here. But be careful with your cyber hygiene. Be careful with your assets. The first step you have to do in a business is to secure your assets in order to secure assets is to know what they are. All right. And we also talked about the big Capital One hack Mongo DB, a massive database used by verifications.io and the problems that came because of that as well. There are some other American Medical collection agencies, massive breach just bought disclosed in May of this year. We're talking about 12 million quest patients, almost 8 million LabCorp patients, all of their information was disclosed in the breach. This is a classic one, also, about third party risk about their data being in the hands of someone else who did not take care of it. And we already know you're going to take better care of your data, you're going to take better care of your customers in somebody else's. So you've got to watch the security posture of these other companies out there. insider threat. Another big one out there, which also hit these guys. The Federal Emergency Management Agency. 2.3 million survivors of California wildfires, Hurricane Harvey, Irma Maria, they were shared with a third party contractor, social security information of at least the last four digits went out there. All this stuff goes on and on. Right, Macy's, why pro many, many others in the last 12 months, we have to secure our businesses and I was talking to somebody of an idol of mine. And just an amazing man who has helped so many people. And he doesn't have his assets secured properly and he could really end up being and frankly, a whole bunch of problems. So be careful felt of this. So let's get back to a few more gifts here for the holiday season. And I'm really like this next one, I don't have one myself. This is something I never bought because I had some older versions made by other manufacturers. And I was never really happy with them. But this is the Apple Pencil. They've got a new one out. This is their second generation that works with all the newest iPad Pro models and has really built on top of that first generation pencil so we'll pay Apparently the latency problems you know, this is what I didn't like you draw and it would be about a half a second behind you. They've fixed a lot of that it's very smooth now very responsive. It is the smoothest writing tool for iPad pros it doesn't really like so keep an eye out for that one you might enjoy it and enjoy sharing that to see they are 120 bucks right now over at Walmart. There are some nice headphones these are really again kind of for gaming. It's called Cooler Master their headphones with a microphone built on to them. relatively neutral, well-balanced sound and it's great that locating sounds where they should be in the mix. So if you are more professional, a DJ if you're doing what I do here on the radio, a lot of people really like them. It has a detachable microphone as well and can do a very good job with me. The sound clear, they say exceptionally comfortable. And it's about 80 bucks online. How's that for cheap? If you have a Mac Book now of any sort, and an iPad now, Apple's OS and iOS, both natively support using that iPad as an extra screen for your computer. How's that for cool? Very, very neat. And Lenovo, a company I recommend against using it's a Chinese firm now has been for some years, and there's a lot of suspicions about what they're doing with spying and putting spyware on them. But Lenovo has this USBC portable monitor that I might actually have a look at as well. But it's 250 bucks, much cheaper than buying an iPad, and now gives you a portable 14-inch monitor that you can take with you anywhere. And now you've got your second screen. I use two screens. Least on all of my computers, I'm just thinking about that now. The one I'm in front of has two screens. And when I normally use has two screens, it's if you haven't used two screens, it's just absolutely marvelous to check out. So think vision m 14, it's USBC screen. And there's some other stuff that you can look at. And I've got all of these up online at Craig Peterson calm, as well as of course, a whole bunch more stuff I think that you might enjoy. This is a keyboard By the way, I'm thinking man, I think I really might want this. It's one of those old mechanical style ones, but it's 350 bucks. I can't. I haven't been able to bring myself to spend that much money on a keyboard but I have broken two of these big mechanical keyboards and other ones go click, click-click-click book, because I learned to type on a completely manual typewriter that no motors in it at all. Some of you might have learned that way too with no letters on the keys. You had to learn how to type and I got pretty good with that. And then that teletypes that TTY 30, threes, and on and on and on. So I really like those. Hey, I hope you guys have a phenomenal week. We've got Hanukkah coming up this week. We've got Christmas, of course, this week. And who could forget Seinfeld? Right? You know what I'm going to talk about here right? I have a real problem with you people. Yes, Festivus is coming up this week as well. And we've got family coming out to visit I hope you do too. I hope you have friends and relatives you can be with. Maybe if you don't, you can bump a little Christmas meal and Christmas cheer off of some friends. I know there's a lot of holiday office parties going on. including all the way through January this year. We may end up having hours then to just makes life a lot easier, frankly and tends to be a little cheaper to then trying to do it over the holidays here. I just want to share my love with everybody. Thanks for being with us. I'm probably going to end up doing a Best of Show this next weekend. So keep an eye open for that or an ear open for that as well as I am going to be kind of busy here during the holidays but it's going to be a wonderful time. And then after the first of the year, we have a ton of stuff coming up, pop-up-trainings like crazy and choruses and more cheat sheets everything to help make your 2020 a safer year than any you've had before. So have a great week. Have a great time New Year's as well. Make sure you visit me online Craig peterson.com. Take care, everybody. And I really, really hope that everything goes well for you and yours. You're listening to Craig Peters on WGAN and online Craig Peterson dot com.

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The Holidays are almost here -- Hannakah begins tonight and the middle of next week is Christmas - Boy this year has flown by.  There is a lot of Tech in the News so let's get going!

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Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson

Hey, hello everybody, Craig Peters on here on w GAM and online at Craig peterson.com. Hopefully, you're able to join me on Wednesday mornings as well as I am on live with Ken and Matt, we always talk about the latest in technology and news and of course in security since that's primarily what I've been doing for the last 20 plus years here in the online world, man, just thinking back, it's, you know, I first got on the internet. Of course, it wasn't called that. But way back in the early 1980s. And I remember in fact when I first started doing networking professionally back in 75, and there was no worry about anything with you know, yeah, okay, we didn't want people to hack into so you'd have leased lines for your business and I was doing a bunch of work. from banks way back when right, one of my first jobs, and I was really enjoying it, I just learned a whole lot up to today. And we're going to cover this here because my gosh, it's it has changed. The Internet used to be very libertarian, everybody on it was very libertarian or conservative. Of course, that's because there were a whole ton of government contractors on the ARPANET as well as some colleges and universities. And you look at it today, and you think that really it's changed dramatically which it has. But I think the ratio is probably still about the same. You've got the silent majority that just doesn't say much about anything, right. And then you've got this hugely vocal minority who's just yelling and screaming all of the time. And then some of these tech companies that are trying to straddle somehow in the middle and not get everybody all upset with them. It's really a Much different world. But when we're talking about security, it is nothing at all like it used to be. You used to go online, and you'd have some fun you, you know, exchange emails with people, you'd share some files and some fun things. I remember this one whole thread on chases. That was just absolutely amazing. I think I came up this time of years while it was all these puns about different cheeses. It was a lot of fun. Now today, we've got a whole different internet out there and a great article by Robert Limos and he is looking at WatchGuard Technologies' latest quarterly report that was published just last week. And this network security firm found that the percentage of malware that successfully bypassed anti-virus scanners IT companies network gateways has increased Significantly, watch guard technology is saying that the amount of malware that signature-based antivirus software catches, has plummeted to about 50%. Now, I think their numbers are high because I think it's more like 20%. But they're getting specific here. They're talking about the amount of malware that comes into a network via an external source. In other words, people are accidentally pulling it from a website they visit, or perhaps it's been injected into their systems through someone who's visiting their network and using another vulnerability. But they're saying that antivirus software This is signature-based stuff, that's what you get from Norton Antivirus. That's what you get from, you know, the Symantec people from McAfee from all of these different antivirus companies out there. It is just horrific what's happening because of what's known as zero-day now you might have heard of this before you might not have but basically what zero-day malware is, is malware is nasty software and malware includes things like viruses, worms, Trojans, etc. It is this type of malicious software that has not been seen in the wild before. And what it used to me is they would, you know, some brilliant person who as my mother would say, Why don't they do something useful with their time, some brilliant PR person would come up with a piece of software, no one had ever seen a way of attacking that no one had ever seen before. And they would attack us and they would get through because there was no signature for it or the engines in the antivirus software just could not manage to handle. You know malware like this new piece of malware that just came out the problem we're having today is that the majority of malware act just like zero-day. So here's what happens with a signature-based attack. You can think of it just like your body's anti-virus system night than what you have in your body. And your body looks at something that it sees and says, Have I seen this before. And if it has seen it before, it knows to attack it before. It grows really big and kind of starts to get out of control, and then the body has to attack it after it's already really, you know, it's taken the beachhead if you will use a military term. I've been watching a lot of world war two movies lately, but it's taken that beachhead and now has control of the beach and is starting to get in further and it's very difficult to get out versus it recognizes it almost right away as a nasty virus. And goes ahead and end the Jackson You know you have more cells in inside your body inside your skin there are more cells that are foreign to your body then there are body cells when you start counting all the bacteria and everything that's in your system and on your skin. It's just incredible. So our body relies on a lot of these things. In order to keep us healthy, if we had no bacteria, you be in trouble. It's like you know if you go on antibiotics, which is an anti-bacterial, what does the doctor tell you to do? Well, you know, start eating yogurt and, and other things. Maybe take some Kombucha or various other things in order to try and stay healthy. Get that good bacteria going in your gut again. Well, when your body is attacked by something that hasn't seen before. That's what we would call in the computer world as a zero-day virus has never been seen by Your body or in the case of a computer's never been seen by this signature-based antivirus software. So what the bad guys have been doing is they figured out how Yes, indeed we are trying to block them. And they figured out that the majority of us are using these signature-based antivirus software packages. So they've designed the viruses and the malware to change itself every time. So no longer can the antivirus software, just look for certain signatures. So for instance, if you were always attacked by blonde-haired blue-eyed Norwegians, you might be cautious next time you see a blonde-haired blue-eyed Norwegian approaching towards you maybe with a baseball bat or whatever it is, they might have in their hands, right? So you get worried about it. What's the old expression? Once burn shame on me. You twice burn shame on me. Right? So we learn we respond based on how we've been attacked before. And so does the antivirus software now it can take them days or weeks, even months to get a signature out and get it all dispersed. You know, I'm talking about the old software, not the newest stuff, not the enterprise stuff we use for our business client. But the stuff that you use as a consumer and Heaven forbid if your business and you're using stuff like Norton Symantec, or McAfee or any of these other a VG antivirus software packages that are based on signatures because they just don't work. So what happens is they change themselves constantly. So it might be a Norwegian, but they dyed their hair they put on colored contact lenses, and they change their clothing. That's effectively what's happening with our computers nowadays. It may be that Viking that's approaching you but you Don't know it because it just doesn't look like they change everything about themselves at least most everything except the malicious intent and what they end up doing once they've got control of you. So watch guard is saying that this is a major change here. Now I'm going to quote directly from them. The big change is that more and more malware is becoming evasive. So the signature-based protection is no longer sufficient. There's nothing wrong with having it because it will catch 50% to two-thirds of the traffic but you definitely need something more. And that's why I've been recommending you guys do a few things you can do the free stuff. If you are not a business, you can go to my favorite right now. Open DNS and sign up for an account. They have some paid stuff. I think it's $20 a month per computer, for business to get the basic business service. It's free. For a regular home user, but it does not allow you to do any customization. And then there are a few packages in between open DNS. Now we use a commercial version of is an enterprise version called brawler. That's where the calling it now, but it's the highest level where we can, you know, watch it and maintain it. So that's step number one of what you need to do get open DNS so that if you do get one of these pieces of nastiness like ransomware, and it tries to call home, it can't get the phone number, right. He can't call home because there's another phone number. And I think that's a very important thing to do. It's free if you're home user, you might want to pay for the family plan would block certain scary sites and certain things you probably don't want your kids to see pornography and other things open dns.com and then the other thing to do, I had it in my big course this last year and that was how to harden Windows machine. It's rather involved. And I'll probably do a course early next year on this. But make sure you harden your machine, you're going to want to turn off stuff you don't need, you're going to want to make sure your firewall is set up properly to do the types of blocks that you need. You're going to want to make sure that you've got Microsoft's new malware software installed properly and running properly. So I'll have a course on this early next year that you can get. Because when you're talking about 50%, and I've seen numbers as low as 20% effectiveness with anti-virus software, you have to do something. Hey, if you're looking to buy some gifts, I'm going to be talking about some of them in today's show, including five g should you get that phone, you're listening to Craig Peterson on w GAN and online. Greg peterson.com. Stick around. We'll be right back.

Craig Peterson

Hey, are you thinking about buying a mobile phone? We're going to talk about that right now. You're listening to Craig Peterson on WGN and online at Craig Peterson calm. Now you've heard about 5g. You're probably using 4g LTE right now, on your phone and maybe mobile devices you may be your iPad or a tablet that you might have. Amazon has its Kindles. They do not, by the way, have 4g LTE on them, at least, for the most part, they're using some of the much older technology because frankly, all they're doing is sending books right? Which are pretty small. But it is that time of year that we're buying presents and there are only a few days left here for that holiday season, purchasing time. And we've got a lot of competition in the 5g world. So let's talk about what this is. And I'll give you some tips. But what is going on? 5g holds a lot of promise. Now I don't know if you remember I remember how shocked I was at how fast 4g was. I bought a phone. And it had 4g LTE in on it. It was an Android phone. And I vowed never again for so many reasons. And you've heard them on the show here before, but I had bought an Android phone, and I didn't have 4g up where I lived. And I drove down. We were heading down. I think it was till Pennsylvania take one of the kids to camp. And I was going through Valley and I noticed Wait a minute. There's a big city right there. I got 4g so I immediately went to speed test.net and I ran the test to see just how fast is for G. And I was just shocked. I was getting like 20 megabits a second, which was absolutely amazing. Because I've been using cell phones since they first came out. And you know, back in the day it was 14 for right? Oh, cell phone so fast. And now just to see 20 megabits was absolutely mind-blowing. But there are some major limitations to the 4g LTE network that we are using today. And those limitations are speed for one. And then the other thing is the number of devices that can be supported. And then the cost of the data and the data transfers. So 5g has been under development for quite a while. And this is not we're not going to get into Huawei and how they stole all their technology. It really appears to be from our friends up at Nortel and put the whole company out of business because of the spine that they did. And thank goodness finally, we've got a president who's trying to do something about it. But five G's real promise for us right now is that we will get two things will get a gigabit worth of data bandwidth, which means by the way, that we may not even bother with Wi-Fi in our homes if you live in an area that has full 4g or 5g coverage because it's just going to be just as fast as your cable is right now. Now the cable companies are probably going to try and compensate by lowering their prices and giving you faster and faster and faster internet. But for a lot of people, it's going to make economic sense because the cost isn't going to be high. And then the second thing that 5g is going to give us is the ability to have billions of devices connected to the 5g network. That means that everything from our cars Which really the next generation of cars self-driving cars really do need 5g so they can talk to each other. So they can continually upload data to the cloud to let all of the routing computers know about local weather conditions and, and road and where the potholes are and everything is just, it's going to be amazing, right? On the one hand, on the other hand, well, there might be some data leakage that we might not want. So the cars are going to have it but so is pretty much every device that you have. A couple of years ago, I talked about the new jacket, the new trucker jacket that Levi's hat out. And that trucker jacket was designed specifically to connect your phone to your phone and allow you to control your phone. So it had Bluetooth in it. You could touch these little wires that were embedded into the sleeve with your hand and use that to control your cell phone. You know, listen to music and Suddenly things are just kind of cool. So our clothes are going to have the internet in them. Our computers, of course, everything you buy a laptop, it's going to have 5g built-in, you're not going to need to have an external device anymore. Just list goes on and on and on. I've everything that's going to happen is going to be phenomenal. But it is not there yet. And Apple did not include 5g with the iPhone 11 this year, it will include it with the iPhone 12. That's coming out next year. And I saw a very, very good summary of what's probably going to be coming out of Apple in September next year. The guy that published it has been spot on with most everything that Apple was coming up with. And they are he's saying that they are going to be having 5G on the phone and it would make a lot of sense. But right now you can put in orders for the Samsung Galaxy Note 10 plus the one plus 70 that's There are other phones that are claimed to have 5g. But listen, everybody, it is still too early to buy a 5g phone. That is really my big tip when it comes to 5g right now, these networks have not fully standardized, they are not running, none of them are running full 5g anywhere except in a couple of major cities. The biggest problem with building out the 5g networks is that they need to have basically what we've come to know as cell towers everywhere. I mean, everywhere. These are little micro things that are not big towers like we have right now. You know, those fake trees that you see that are actually cell towers. Now, these are going to be small boxes and they're going to be on pretty much every street corner in the big cities. They'll be on the sides of buildings. They'll be on the sides of people's houses. Cell companies are going to pay us to put these on our homes so that we can now provide 5g to us and to our neighbors. And then there's going to be people who will be upset because of the radiation, even though it's non-ionizing, and it's not known to cause any harm, people will be upset about it. But these things are going to be everywhere. And that's because remember, I'm talking about one gigabit worth of bandwidth coming down to your device. Well, you cannot do gigabit service on lower frequency so they have moved to higher frequencies. The old UHF TV channels are pretty much I think they're all gone now throughout the country. And the FCC has bought back the bandwidth and has auctioned it off to all of these different companies that wanted to buy it. And it's just everything is going to change and with the high frequencies that they need in order to deliver these beads, they now have a problem and that is these higher frequencies do not penetrate glass. They don't penetrate walls very well at all. And they just don't penetrate metal at all basically, it's really bad. So it T Mobile has announced nationwide 5g available as of last Friday. That is pretty darn cool. It's got a 600 megahertz 5g network which is going to cover most of the country. That is pretty impressive. But the trade-off is it's using low band 5g which means it is good at providing slightly boosted speeds inside buildings and is available in a lot more places than what competitors offer 18 T and Verizon are offering the opposite. They have ultra-wideband networks right now superfast speeds, but very, very small footprints very small pocket, and you got to be standing near one of these towns

This is kinda cool T Mobile is expecting with theirs. That actually is p mag is PC Magazine, you can expect a boost of about 15 megabits with their new 5g nationwide. And you might see 150 megabits if you have a new 5g phone or 700 megabits if you have 4g LTE. So not a huge right now, but just wait. Okay, wait until next summer next fall, when things are really going to start happening. All right, stick around. We got a lot to cover still we're going to be talking about some guests who will talk about some of the big hacks of the year. What does it mean to us? What can we do? I'm going to give you some tips and some tricks, what not to do on your work computer third party security risks and some lessons from the National Security Agency. You're getting it right here from Craig Peterson on WGA and

Craig Peterson

Hello, welcome back. Greg Peterson here on w GAN will be enjoying the show today. We got a lot to cover here. Awesome. Good news, some gift ideas. I've got a very cool article from Ars Technica, about nine gift ideas for the tech enthusiasts in your life. And frankly, I am totally into this. It gave me a couple of ideas in fact of things that I'm going to be getting for people. So you might want to stick around and listen to that for the enthusiast in your life. And we're going to start right now with something that I think pretty much everyone's can be interested in. If you are, you know an employee, if you work at a company, and you use computers, there is a couple of words of caution here. In this segment, Now, first of all, the business computers are owned by the business. And that's kind of where this Bring Your Own Device thing has gotten everything a little bit fuzzy, you know, so if you are using your phone, for instance, your smartphone, and you're using it for work purposes, it's not the businesses phone. So there's not a whole lot that they can say about your phone and how you use your phone. However, the business has an absolute right to its data, and kinking troll, frankly, how you use your phone for the business data, right? Well, how about the computers that are actually owned by the computer? What can you do legally? And what can't you do? What can the business tell you that you should do with it and what can they not tell you what to do? Well, the bottom line is it depends. It depends on the business and what their policies are. So overall, that's kind of the first place you should check your employee handbook. Now we've provided a lot of businesses with employee handbook sections on this and you can certainly get them from your attorney from your corporate attorney, or from HR if you're an employee there. But if you're using a work-issued computer, now that includes a desktop computer includes a laptop, it's going to include things like iPads, even phones, you've probably checked your personal email on that device, you might have stored some files on there. You, you might have used it for a number of different things. Now in many cases, it's not a big deal as far as the company is concerned. You know, if you've got kids right to have a life outside the office, so for you to be able to send an email to the BBC. Or to make a few phone calls because babysitting didn't show up or a kid is sick or whatever. Most employers say that's absolutely fine if I died personally would not work for an employer. That said, That's not fine. I think that's a very, very big deal a very bad thing, the right companies that are like that. But when you start to store your private files on the company's computer, or maybe the company's Dropbox or Google Drive, or you are maybe going down a rabbit hole, as you started with something on Cora or you started with something somewhere else, and all of a sudden before you know it, it's an hour two hours later, or heaven for Ben, you are going to Facebook or some of these other sites to poke around. Then things change. Now many of us use messenger on Facebook in order to keep in contact with family and friends. So is it legit to have a messenger window open? Is it legit to do that, right? Well, the bottom line is you probably shouldn't do any of this on a computer provided by your employer. You're not necessarily breaking the law, but you could get fired if it's against your company's policies. And also, you need to remember that employers can install software to monitor what you do on your work-issued laptop or desktop. Now we do not monitor employees and what they're doing on a computer, except to watch for things that the employees might be doing that might harm the business directly. In other words, if an employee's bringing in a file from home, we're going to check that file. If they're downloading something from the internet. We're going to check that download. We're going to check their emails are going to clean them up, we're going to stop the ransomware we're going to stop the zero-day attacks that I talked about earlier. As well as all of the known types of vulnerabilities. But remember that not everybody is like us, right? We are not interested in getting involved in the businesses Workplace Relations, a lawsuit that a business might want to bring to against an employee, right? That's not what we do. Although we've certainly been pulled into those before in the past. And you need to keep that in mind as an employee because they can monitor what you do, they might put keyloggers on there to see what you're typing, they might have a software that takes a random screenshot. We've done that before with these workers that are doing a specific project. So we outsource something, there might be a graphic or might be writing an article or something, and we're paying by the hour for that contractor to do the work. So as part of the agreement, we have software that sits on the computer and randomly takes screenshots So we have an idea that yes, indeed, they are actually working on our stuff. And it took them five hours and we spent it to take one hour. And it's because they're slow, not because they were out wandering the internet and doing research on the party that's going to be coming up next week at the office or at their home, right. So be very careful about it. And the type of surveillance and security software that's installed on the company computer is usually based on two things, one, how large the company is, and what kind of resources they have to dedicate to watching you, and what type of information you deal within your role. Now, almost all of our clients in fact, now I think of it I think all of our clients are in what are called regulated industries. So if you're a car dealer, you're in a regulated industry, because you have payment card information, you have financing information on all kinds of personal information. So that has to be monitored, right? We have doctors' offices that have HIPAA requirements personal again, personally identifiable information, healthcare information. So security numbers, phone numbers, email addresses, and under the new regulations that are coming out right now, January one in California and Massachusetts in the European Union right now, and they are working on similar regulations on the federal level, even an email address is considered to be personally identifiable information. Until the list goes on and on if you have government contracts, we have clients that have DFARs or Defense Department requirements or FINRA, which is for financial organizations, right? That's what we do. So all of these heavily regulated businesses need to have software that is going to detect that someone is trying to exfiltrate data, shut it down immediately. We need to know that employees are trying to steal information. And in many of these cases, we will work with the company if there are lawsuits and ensue because of the regulation or because of other reasons out there. So if you're working with a company like this, which is frankly, in this day and age, every company, right, what, what employer does not have security numbers of employees? How do you pay them if you don't have the social security numbers, those are all falling under the regulations nowadays. And unfortunately, a lot of businesses don't pay attention to that. So a very small company, they're probably not doing this. But larger companies are definitely going to be doing this. And there's a great little quote here from Jesse crims. He's an Information Security Analyst over the New York Times and he said Without supporting evidence at this scale, at scale, it's pretty rare that people are not doing heavy surveillance and tends to generate a lot of useless data, roped employee into liability issues and generally make the team that monitors the surveillance systems miserable. In other words, you probably don't want to know. And that's the standard we take. We make sure that all of the regulations are complied with, but whether or not someone's sending an email to the babysitter or whatever, it's just not worth it. We're worried about espionage. Okay, so there you go. There are some tips for you. And using business security or using a business computer at work. Stick around. We'll be right back. We got some more stuff to talk about, including some major updates to the Google Chrome browser. Should you be using it anymore. We'll be right back.

Craig Peterson

Hello everybody, Craig Peterson here. Welcome back. We're listening Of course on WGAN or online at Craig Peterson dot com, you'll find me on pretty much every podcasting platform out there. And if you really enjoy the show, you know one of the best ways to let me know is to share it. I love to see all of the people who are listening and getting feedback from everybody so send me a note as well. But here's where you can go if you would like to give me a five-star review, just go to Craig Peterson comm slash iTunes. And right there, you can give me a five-star review. on Apple, they're still kind of the 800-pound gorilla in this space. Rumor has it that the next release of iOS is going to have some major improvement to this whole podcasting stuff. Apple really kind of started it with the iPod, which is where it got the name from. I still have one of my original iPods kicking around. It was frankly, it was my favorite device for listening to music. Anyhow, let's talk a little bit about some of the browser issues that are out there right now. Many people are concerned about the web browsers you're using. We know we're being monitored. We know we're being watched right now, by these big companies. Google makes its money by what? By selling our information. Facebook's the same way. Now Google is going to sell us advertising, and so is Facebook. And frankly, I would rather know about cars and see advertisements for cars. When it is the time I'm looking to buy a car right? And I'm never going to buy a lot of from Russia, right? So why would I want to see ads for that? So I am Pro, the monitoring in that space. Right. I, you know, you kind of go back and forth about that. You look at what President Obama's team did back when he was running for election the first time where they grabbed all of Facebook's data about everyone. And then they used highly targeted advertising. And then you saw what happened eight years later with President Trump and while the Cambridge Analytica scandal that was Child's Play compared to what President Obama's team did, but somehow President Obama's team didn't get in trouble for it. But President Trump's team certainly did even though Trump's don't get into that right now. But the browsers that we're using are tracking us. And remember, again, this old adage, it's old now, right? It's relatively new frankly. But if you do not pay for service, the odds are you are the product. And Google certainly considers that. And so does Facebook, that you are the product. So when you're looking at browsers, what should you be using the biggest browser out there right now the one that any software developers going to aim at is the Google Chrome browser. Because that's what most people use. It is really a great browser. From a functionality standpoint, people are using Google's Of course search engine, which has been very, very good here over the years. They, they've just done some wonderful things. And Google has added more and more features to their browser. Now, people ask me constantly, what is it that I use? What is it that I recommend? Well, I can tell you that Craig recommends that you don't use the Chrome browser when you can avoid it. Now I do use Chrome. When I am on a website, and I'm trying to do something and one of these other browsers doesn't work quite right. I go over to Chrome because it's not the worst thing in the world. It's not as though it has a direct backdoor into Russia, at least not that we're aware of, or into the CIA or the NSA. We know that Google doesn't like to cooperate with the US military, in some of its research projects, but Google also loves to cooperate with China and has three artificial intelligence labs in China. So it's giving China our next generation of computing technology for free but won't share it with our government. Yeah. Well, anyway, I guess I do get kind of political sometimes on the show. Google's Chrome version 79 just came up with a new feature. Now you know, when it comes to password, That I highly recommend you use some software called one password. They have some free stuff, they have some paid offerings. And what one password does is it keeps all of your passwords keeps them secure. You only have to remember one password, which is, frankly a huge win. And it was great in the business environment where you can set up vaults of passwords so that you know HR can have their own vault and this software development teams can all have their own vaults, and you can have your own personal vault, and it'll create passwords for you that are highly secure, that conform to the requirements for different websites and, and you can share them within vaults. There are just all kinds of wonderful things that you can do using one password. And then if you've been around a while, a couple of years ago, you know I offered a service that we were doing internally. We did this for free for over 1000 People, but we double-checked their password to see if not passwords but email address to see if their email addresses and passwords are out on the dark web. And you know, we checked it at least a month and generated reports for people. And that might be something we decided to do in the future. Well, there is a huge database out there that we've talked about on the show before. Google has now adopted in its Chrome browser. So Chrome 79 has what they're calling as a password checkup extension. So that was what how it all started. It was for desktop versions of Chrome, and it audited your passwords when you entered them, and took a look at them to see if those passwords were known to have been breached. Now, it's not necessarily that your account was breached, although it might have been it the password in the Heres why. Here's why they looked at the password itself. What the bad guys are doing nowadays is they are comparing your password against millions, hundreds of millions, in fact, billions of known passwords that people have used. And they start with the most common passwords and then work their way out from there. So if you're using a password that has been known to been breached in the past, it isn't something you should use. So I thought that was great. They had this password checkout extension. So now what they've done is they've integrated into every Google account and on-demand audit that you can run on all of your saved passwords. And in version 79. Google has a password checkout integrated into both the desktop and mobile versions of Chrome. So what will happen now is that if you are using Chrome to save your passwords, which I do not do as a rule, except for a few accounts I don't really care about because again, I'm using one password to keep my passwords and can keep them all straight? So it is built-in now. And anytime you enter in a password, it's going to check to see if that password has been breached anywhere online. Google is calling this private set intersection, which means you don't get to see Google's list of bad credentials. And Google doesn't get to learn your credentials. But the two can be compared four matches and basically what it's doing is it's doing mild encryption on your password and comparing it against this known setup password. So it's very, very good to do. One password has this feature already built-in password will warn you if I website that you're going to has been known to have been compromised. And Google's figuring here, that since it has a big encrypted database of all your passwords, I might as well compare against, compare them against this 4 billion strong public list of compromised usernames and passwords. They've been exposed in all kinds of security breaches over the years. And little on little later on today, we're going to talk about the top half dozen or so big security breaches, what caused them and then you might want to pay attention to to see if your information was exposed. But the main reason I like to talk about this stuff is so that you can look at your position, you know, at home or at work and ask yourself, hey, listen, there is this breach something that would have worked against us, right? I think it's very, very good. So Here we go. I'm not going to get any details here on what exactly what Google is doing and how they're doing it. If you are a chrome fan, you might want to use it. So let's talk about what the alternatives to Chrome or opera is a big one. And I have heard rumors that the Opera browser, which is kind of my primary browser, I have another one will tell you about in just a second, but opera very fast. It's designed to be secure. It also blocks a lot of spyware out there. Very good. But the rumors are that it is now in the hands of the Chinese government apparently owns it. I'm not sure that's entirely true. But, you know, it's up to you whether you want to take any risks. I'll tell you also about an extension I use in all of my browsers, which makes it much more secure much safer for me. We'll probably have to wait until after the top of the hour to get into that, but I'll tell about that.

So what do I use the most? And what do I trust the most? Well, Netscape, the Netscape browser. Mozilla is the next one that I use opera is number one, at least for the time being. I use Firefox as well. Both of them do a lot of blocking, oh, I have a lot of privacy enhancements. Those are the two I use the most. And then I also use Apple Safari. Apple, again, is not selling your information as Google does. So it's considered to be a little bit safer. So far, we haven't known Apple to really leak information. They've been relatively safe, they certainly aren't selling it to anyone. And that's what I use. And then if I have to all fall back to Google Now, if I wanted to be extra safe online, there is another browser out there that I do like, and it's called epic EP, I see the epic browser. And it is actually based on Google's Chrome browser underneath the hood, just as Microsoft's browser is based on Google's Chrome browser. And Google is actually using a base form from Apple's Safari browser, which is kind of interesting. They all share code nowadays. But the epic browser is the browser if you absolutely want to keep your data safe. It even has a built-in privacy VPN. So check it out as well. When we come back, I'll give you a little clue here. A couple of tips on what you can do to keep every browser just a little bit safer. We'll get into some gift ideas and more. So stick around you're listening to Craig Peterson on WGAN and online at Craig Peterson dot com. Stick around. We'll be right back.

Craig Peterson

Hello, everybody, Craig Peterson here. Welcome back and listening to me on WG A in an online, Craig peterson.com. Hey, if you are a new listener, I just want to let you know a little bit about my background I've been helping to develop the internet, they in fact, just called a pie in the air you the other day, which is kind of interesting to think about. But yes, indeed, I designed and made some of the very first routers and some of the very first firewalls and load balancers and stuff back in the day. Let me tell you back in the day, we had to write these things from scratch because they just didn't exist as commercial products. And, you know, there's a lot of products I could have sold over the years but I'm just wasn't that kind of guy. Anyhow, so now I do a lot of cybersecurity for businesses, government agencies, most particularly really, for anybody in a regulated business, which today in this day and age means any business because we are all regulators I talked about in the last segment. Well, we have some gift ideas. And let me just start with one here. And then we'll get into some more articles from this week. We've we're going to be talking about the NSA here and what their top recommendation is for businesses. But you know, I am a techie guy, and I love tech and tech gifts and it's all just a pretty darn cool thing. When you get right down to it, just like, you know, I just love playing with this stuff. I guess that's the way to put it. And using it and making my life a little easier and faster, more efficient, effective, etc. But I want to talk about the high-end tech gifts that you might want to give, and you might want to give for yourself. In fact, that's exactly what I'm doing with one of these this year. Well, if you have somebody who's a gaming enthusiast, there are so many things out there that you can get for them. There's this one particular mouse that is very highly rated for gamers. It's called the razor Viper. It has some very, very fast, maneuverability stuff built in. Because of course, when you're playing some of these video games interactive, you need to be able to move very quickly so anyhow, we'll leave it at that because I am not a game type person. I used to play some, some games way back when you're in a dungeon with twisty mages, mazes, remember right how things started. But let's get into this. Now. This is one of the things I think would be a great gift for almost anyone, it's great for a computer that has the USBC which is the newest version of the USB cable. It is what the new Mac books come with the new max do as well. It's the next generation of the high-speed stuff that the last generation max had. But it also works with regular USB cable has a little adapter that you can use with it. It's called SanDisk extreme portable SSD. This thing is very, very nice. It's a good option for data you need to have with you wherever you go. It's surprisingly small. It is rated for the extremely high shock it's like 500 G's or something crazy like that. And it will withstand water and dust as well as vibration. You can drop it from six feet in the air without suffering any damage at all. This thing is amazing. And right now it is half price. Over on Amazon. Just look it up there. SanDisk is the name of the company S-A-N-D-I-S-K, it's their extreme portable SSD fits in the palm of your hand that you're going to love this. It's available in 250 gig 500 gig one terabyte and two terabytes now, I would not get the 250 gig, not that it's too small. But for an extra $10 you double your space up to 500 gig. Now when you go up to the one terabyte, which again is twice the space, it's twice the cost. So the one terabyte you're gonna have to ask yourself what makes sense and two terabyte options. But this thing is so fast, or what I love this for is to have different virtual machines on it. It's the one I use when I am doing a demo or for when I need to do a client-side install.  I can have every version of Windows on my need to use Mac OS all the different versions of that a few versions of Linux all right there on the drive. It's very very convenient. And very, very fast you're going to love this thing. In fact, that's one of the fastest portable storage solutions that has ever been tested. It's kind of similar you know you can get Samsung T five SSD, they have very good SSDs. Okay, don't get me wrong here.  The Samsung t five is more affordable but the SanDisk extreme SSD is better. Now I got to tell you that the cost right now on Amazon for this portable drive, there's no moving parts in it. As I said it fits in the palm of your hand. The cost on that is lower on Amazon right now. It's half price is lower than I can buy it from my distributors at So just to give you an idea of what a great value that is, coming up, we're going to talk about, I think the coolest gift you can give to somebody that is truly a hobbyist in the computer world, you're going to love it. And then if you are that person when you go to someone's house for Hanukkah, Thanksgiving, Christmas birthdays, whatever it is, and they say, hey, Craig, come over here for a second. my computer's not working right can you have a look at it will will tell you about the best gift for somebody like that and maybe some need to get get for yourself as well. So I'm going to talk right now about some of the biggest security breaches we'll go over one and then we'll get to some others little later on in this our last hour. And by the way, if you want to listen to the whole show, my podcast and everything. You can just go to Craig Peterson comm slash iTunes or slash tune in if you'd like to listen to it. On tune in or slash pretty much anything well actually if you type in slash pretty much everything you need an error page right? But you'll find me Craig Peters on on most of the major podcast sites that are out there by just going to Craig Peterson comm slash, whatever it is like Sasha Hart or slash SoundCloud or slash tune in, etc, etc.

Well, data aggregators are big targets that are out there and who is a data aggregator? Well, let me tell you about what happened when I was at a wedding last week I was staying with my sister in law my wife and I, and there we got home and there was a card in the door and there's from an insurance company members like all state or something and, and it asked for one of my sisters in law, who had been living in that house to call so we thought okay, well, it's just a hoax thing. You know, they're they're trying to sell some insurance or something. So we just ignore that fact, I think we just threw the card in the trash. Well, the next night, we were sitting there at home and there's a knock at the door. And it's the same insurance agent. And she wants to talk to my deceased sister in law. And we get into this a little bit more and talking and talking to her trying to figure out what, what, what, why, what's going on. It turns out that someone was involved in a fatal car accident. And that person gave my deceased sister in-law's identity as her own. Yes, indeed, the dead are, quite frequently in fact, a victim of identity theft. Now we know about the dead voting right particularly in Chicago, and but in other places around the country. Well, in this case, apparently according to the report - she had been involved in a fatal car wreck about six months after she had died, and someone was dead. Obviously, this was a case of mistaken identity, but the insurance lady who's at the door, and she's obviously, some sort of an investigator used one of these skip trace databases in case you're not familiar with those. These are databases that are put together by data aggregators and data aggregators are these companies that suck up data from every public source they possibly can. And even some paid sources. And it includes records from credit card companies, and you name it, they pull it all together, they try and make heads or tails of it. So she had this report from a data aggregator and listed my long-deceased father in law's name is part of this and, and my kids, couple of my kids that had at one point staying for a visit with their grandmother, for a few months, while going to school, etc. and include my wife's name, my name just kind of went on and on. They got a lot of data wrong. And that's what I found to typically 25 to 50%, sometimes even more the data they have is incorrect. But enough of it was correct that she could kind of start piecing things together. And she was able to figure out that this was insurance fraud. Well, these data aggregators have massive databases as frankly, you might imagine. And they have these databases online. Yeah, you know where I'm going. This was a Mongo DB Mongo database, which is used, it's kind of it's called NO SEQUEL. It's an unformatted database. It's perfect for these data aggregators, and a company called verifications.io. That provided email verification services, had a Mongo database Continued over 800 million records publicly accessible to anyone in the world with an internet connection. And they had four sets of data. They'd had email addresses, dates of birth, phone numbers, physical addresses, employer information, IP addresses, business leads and other information. Not everything was sensitive. So when we get back we'll talk about what lessons should be learned what you can pick up from this a couple of tips for you. If you are a business person of any sort, or if you have data that might be in one of these databases, so we'll talk about these big verifications Mongo DB breach from this year and some more gift ideas right area listening to Craig Peters on online and here on WGAN terrestrial radio.

Craig Peterson

Hello everybody Greg Peterson back here on WG and online at Craig peterson.com. If you enjoy my show, by all means, make sure you subscribe to the podcast. Pretty much everything that I do goes up there my Wednesday mornings with Matt and can during their drive time show Wednesday morning that goes up there Other appearances go up there the whole radio show goes up there as well. Craig Peters on comm slash iTunes and do leave me a review if you wouldn't mind. You know those five-star reviews help get the message out. And we just passed another hundred thousand downloads, which is kind of cool. I appreciate it. Every one of you guys for listening. We try and get as much information as we can. So let's get back to our Well actually, you know There's something I forgot to button up from the last hour. Let's get to that. And then we'll get to some, some gifts and some more risks and what the NSA is saying right now, I had been talking earlier in the show about web browsers, and which browsers you should be using, which ones I recommend, then, you know, if you missed all of that, again, you will find it at Craig peterson.com, slash iTunes, you can listen to the whole thing right there. But I was talking a little bit about a plugin that I use. This is a plugin that works with pretty much any browser out there and works differently than any plugin that you might have been familiar with before. This is from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Now I've had my disagreements with them in the past. Overall, I agree with a lot of what they're doing. But this is a plugin that goes into Chrome Opera or Firefox or pretty much anything that is called Privacy Badger Privacy Badger. So think about badgers if you know these things, they you'll find them a lot over in England, but they're over here too. They burrow underneath hedges and they like to live in the ground. And they are mean they will fight anything way bigger than they are. They don't care. They're going to win because they go all in. Well, that's what this is all about Privacy Badger. So I am on a website. Right now I'm looking at my browser and the Privacy Badger plugin, and it's got a nine on it right now. So what that means is that Privacy Badger detected nine potential trackers on this web page that I'm on right now. And it has sliders for them up there and it says you shouldn't need to adjust the sliders unless something is broken. So what Privacy Badger does is it watches you As you go to different websites, it looks at the cookies that are placed on your browser from these websites and determines, Hey, wait a minute. Now, this is a cross-site tracker. This is another type of tracker that we probably don't want to have. So it's showing them all to me. So here we go. Here's what I have right now on this website that I'm on. And the website is otter in case you don't use otter it is phenomenal transcription service, very inexpensive. 600 minutes for free every month. otter.ai but it turns out otter is using some tracker. So the first tracker showing me that Privacy Badger blocked is graph.facebook.com. So this is Facebook gathering data about me what I do where I go, the next one that's marked yellow, which is it has three different indications here on the slider. One is a blocks it entire The next one is that it could block cookies and then the far right one is to allow a domain to do it. So graph.facebook.com was blocked automatically static.facebook.com was allowed the regular facebook.com was allowed Google Analytics completely blocked API's Google com was allowed stripe checkout was allowed stripe as a payment service. JavaScript on stripe com was allowed and stripe network usually m dot means it's a mobile site. So that was blocked and Q dot stripe com was allowed but those are tagged the one these all of the ones I mentioned that were tagged, are considered to caution level.

So by adding Privacy Badger as a plugin to any of your browsers Basically is going to stop sites from tracking you and it does a very good job. It learns as you go. It is not something that is prefixed with I'm going to block this site or that site. It is absolutely dynamic. I really, really like it. So check that out. This is kind of a flashback, as I said to an earlier segment where I was talking about which browser to use, what the considerations are. And this will work with any of them out there. So just do a search for Privacy Badger, it should come up near the top of your DuckDuckGo search. And it's five the Electronic Frontier Foundation e FF, check it out online. Okay, so now let's get into gifts again. I mentioned my top gift recommendation in the last segment. This one is for total geeks. Now we are using this for actually keeping timing tracking It's called raspberry pi. So we have a special card that goes along with this that has a GPS antenna attached to it and GPS readers so that we can track the satellites in the sky. We use the timing that they provide us with, we do some advertising. So that one of the things we do for our clients is we have to track their logs and keep real detailed records on their logs. We need to know exactly when Did something happen? So that if after the fact heaven forbid, someone gets in, some piece of malware gets in when did it come in? Where did it go? What did it do, right? Because you want to be able to know after the fact Well, what does it get access to? unlike so many of these companies that have no idea what they lost? In fact, most businesses don't even know until six months later that they were even the hack versus what the best in the biz are doing right now is about six hours, not just to detected but to remediation, which is where we sit well, usually within that six-hour time frame. Well, this is called a Raspberry Pi. And they've got the newest version of Raspberry Pi four. This is a small Linux computer. So if anybody that you know likes to hack together science projects or you know, do a little bit of experimenting, this is phenomenal, absolutely phenomenal. You can turn it into a retro game console, it'll play a lot of these old video games. A smart speaker that's a DIY thing. You can build it into your Legos to make a real fancy remote-controlled car. Anything your hobbyist mind comes into mind. This is phenomenal. You can for 100 less than 100 bucks, you can get a complete kit. Okay? The Raspberry Pi fours a lot faster and the older Raspberry Pi three Model B plus faster CPU you can put up to four gigs of ram in this thing. It is a phenomenal USB 3.0 port. So if you are or you know somebody that's really into DIY hobbies, this is the way to go. Okay? The Raspberry Pi four does get closer to your general and genuine desktop PC performance. But it's not really there yet. It's not one running Windows, it does run Linux, as I mentioned. And you can write basic programs for it, which is a programming language Python. If you have a kid that wants to learn Python, this might be a nice way for them to learn because they can kind of hack it together but it's just it's basically just a motherboard, you're gonna have to put it in a case by a case forward, you're gonna have to put a keyboard on it. A mouse, you have to put a display on it, okay, all kinds of stuff, but you can get just the basic Raspberry Pi four For someone that that really, really is a total hacker here, for like 4050 bucks, it's absolutely amazing. Okay, plenty of power for your money. Very versatile. In fact, it's more versatile in many ways than your Windows PC is. And for the budding engineer in your life, they will love you for it. So stick around, we're going to come back, I've got some more ideas for tech gifts that you might like. And we're going to talk about a couple more big hacks this year, and what it means to you. We've got third party security risks, the NSA has some advice for business and we'll tell you about that too. When we get back, you're listening to Craig Peterson right here on w GAN and online at Craig Peter song.com. That's Peterson with an O. Stick around because we'll be right back.

Craig Peterson

Hello, everybody, welcome back, Craig Peters on here on WGAN. And we're talking about stuff we usually talk about, you know, some of the security things, some of the latest technology that's out there. We're also doing a bit of a recap here some great gift ideas for the techie people in your life, even frankly, some of the non-techie people. And the security side, which is, I think, very important, can't talk enough about that. Because it could destroy your company, it could ruin that, frankly, the rest of your life could be a bit of misery, depending on what the bad guys do to you. Oh, it's absolutely crazy. told the story a little earlier of what happened with my deceased sister in law's identity, and how it was used in a fatal car accident and it's just it's amazing what some of these people are. Doing nowadays. And by the way, one of the most valuable segments of our population. We are know already about the retired people, the older people, right, who might be a little confused, hopefully, have some assets. But one of the most valuable identities out there online is that they have a child because their social security number and their identity are going to be very useful for at least a decade, if not longer because those kids probably not going to use it until they get their first job. So keep that in mind as well. Well, I want to get into these two things before the last half hour, so we'll cover these fairly quickly. But the big one, and that is waking up to third party security risks. Now one of the big attacks this year was Capital One and that's on my list of the ones I wanted to talk about today. They had personal information blog into overall hundred million US individuals and 6 million Canadian residents. Now, this was exposed. And when a former employee at Amazon Web Services inappropriately accessed the data, we could get into all of the real details behind this but the compromised information included names addresses, dates of birth, credit scores, payment history, contact information, and other information on people who had applied for Capital One credit card dating back to 2005. also exposed where the social security numbers of 140,000 individuals and bank account data blogging belonging to 80,000 secured credit card customers. So think about this for a little minute here. How many of us are using a service like Amazon Web Services, how many of us are relying on cloud services to keep our information safe? Right? Frankly, that's most of us, isn't it? And when you're talking about somebody like Amazon Web Services, or now there's Microsoft Azure, those are kind of the two really big players. IBM also has its cloud online that they sell access to. Most businesses look at it as a way to save money. Most businesses consider, hey, I don't need to keep track of the security, because my vendor is keeping track of it for me. And what we found out is, that's not true. So the lessons learned here. We'll start with that here from Capital One is that cloud service may be attractive because it's cheaper than doing it yourself. And that's particularly true, frankly, throughout the whole range, but it's particularly true for large businesses, but even for small business. businesses, can you really afford the right kind of server? Now I know a lot of small businesses go to the local staples store and buy a computer and call it a server, right? And maybe $800,000 later, they're out of there. Whereas a real server that's going to be really reliable is going to last years, you should be looking at more like 15 to $20,000 for. So businesses say, well, I'll just do it in the cloud. I'll use Amazon Web Services for this and we'll hire a consultant who's going to help us set it up. And we're going to use maybe Dropbox for that and maybe office 365 for this and now all of a sudden, I'm safe. Well, you're not. And companies, you guys are putting your data at risk, because you haven't adopted a security infrastructure, with the vigor that you need to apply. It should be at least as good as what You're using for your on-premise stuff. But you know what so many SMEs aren't even doing it right for on-premise stuff. Okay? So you're ending up with all of the financial cost of the penalties that you rack up, and the lawsuit and the cost of those lawsuits, which will vastly outweigh any it savings that you might have down the road. So keep that in mind. And that's what Capital One just learned this year. The Why? Because we're not taking third party security risk to heart Ponemon Institute did a study here 2018 founded 60% of customers surveyed, had suffered a data breach caused by third parties or vendors in the last 12 months. So what's causing it? Well, these applications are being built very different than they were a decade ago. They are online. They're using APIs. And they are not considering the security risks. So all services are connecting internally and externally via these APIs, popular finance websites load on your browser mobile apps, you can see the results. Dozens of third party services, okay, web apps, middleware, other code. This is a real problem. So, protect your own infrastructure, Step number one. Step number two demanded the others protect their infrastructure, okay. And trust yet verify. What we do is we wrap special security software around all of these third party infrastructure Software-as-a-Service sites that are out there, okay. So be very, very careful and you have to test even more for third party sites and you know, businesses just aren't testing as much as they should. So there you go. There's a couple of tips here three tips on what to do. When you are talking about third party security risk, and that is with all of these guys, Okay, number one, make sure your infrastructure is protected that you have the right kinds of firewalls and you have the right kind of malware treatment that's in place. All the other security controls, make sure they're configured right? If you're using something like Amazon Web Services, or Sure, or office 365, make sure you have the right settings. You know, it's difficult I get it, Microsoft has over 10,000 skews 10,000 products that are available in they're all software and services. There are dozens and dozens just for office 365 based systems. So make sure you have the right stuff. Make sure that they have proper compliance and certifications. And remember too that the certifications they have just represented a point in time. Do they still have the right kind of security? And because we are running our technology in this new type of infrastructure, make sure, frankly, that we keep track of everything because a breach can happen quickly do millions of dollars of damages right away. And 20% of businesses will file for bankruptcy the very next day. All right, well, let's talk about another gift here real quick before we go to a quick break. And this is for those of us that we go to a family event, and we go anywhere, and it's a Craig come over here for a minute, I need some help and you go over there and of course, it's questions and problems about their computers. So here's what I recommend. Get that person in your life if they're fixing the computer for that for you.

I fix it. Great site painting Go online to find out how to fix physical problems. But they have something called the I fix it pro tech tool kit. I have one of these my kids have one of these. My technicians in my business have one of these. It's a 64-bit driver set that has all these weird types of sockets and everything on them. Because these parts and the computers that have the special locking screws and everything else, you need this Okay, the I fix it pro tech tool kit. Stick around. We'll be back with a wrap up for today's show. And we'll talk a little bit more about some gifts right here. You're listening to Craig Peterson on w GN. And the course online Craig Peterson calm. Stick around because we'll be right back.

Craig Peterson

Hello everybody Craig Peterson here WGAN and online at, of course, Craig Peterson dot com. Hope you've enjoyed the show today we have covered a lot of different things we talked about third party security risks for businesses which web browser you should be using. If you want to keep safe and some of the updates that Chrome has from Google, they'll keep you safer online. What not to do on your work computer. Why it's still too early to buy a 5g phone and signature antivirus and how it is at best catching 50% of the malware out there. It's getting really, really bad. And we've talked a little bit about some of the top breaches this year and there are some pretty scary Ones out there. But how does it apply to you? And how does it apply to your business as well? And we got one more that was brought up on the website at Craig Peterson calm, you can see all of these up there, a little bit of mind commentary and links to other articles online. But this is about the NSA and what the NSA, the National Security Agency is saying that we should be doing as businesses, but this applies 100% as well, to you as an individual. And the basics are to focus on your assets. And this is a very, very big deal. What are your assets and what should you be focusing on? And the things that come to mind very quickly for most people are things like your bank accounts, you know, the money that's in them, maybe your intellectual property, but companies just aren't keeping Tracking that well enough. earlier in the show, I talked about some of the problems with third parties and how some of these third party vulnerabilities have led to a massive problem in the business, right. And some very big businesses that got nailed pretty bad out there. Well, did you secure your assets properly, even when they're in the cloud? And you got to think this all the way through because people are bringing in their iPhone or their Android phones, heaven forbid, or other devices that have known security problems. And they're putting your corporate jewels on those devices. People are taking the laptops home, and maybe the VPN in the end. And that VPN is allowing the viruses that are on their kid's computer as they use for gaming and who knows what else, allowing those viruses to piggyback on to your network at the office via VPN is remember VPN aren't a panacea. And I talked a lot about that in some of my training, I did a pop-up training on VPN man, but about a month ago, you'll probably still find it over on my Facebook page at Craig peterson.com slash Facebook if you're interested in finding out more about VPN. But when you're looking at securing a company, this is something that takes a long time, a lot of experience to do. And it's not something that your nephew is going to be able to do. It's not something that your standard brake fix shop is going to be able to do. This is something that takes years and years of experience decades, frankly, in order to be able to do this right. And that's where it becomes a problem for the very small businesses. So I really would encourage you to look at some of the pop-up-trainings I've done. They're absolutely free to learn a little bit more. Keep an eye out because I will be doing more pop up Trains after the first of the year, we're going to do some great training. And I have also a couple of courses planned. And, you know, I gave away 120 pages of sheet cheat sheets this last summer, we may do something again like that later on next year. But we've got to be very, very careful, because these people who are trying to get at our assets, know what they want. And we've got nation-states who are trying to get at them to look at what China's doing. They, they just passed a law in China that makes it so that you cannot use encryption that the Chinese government cannot decrypt. And the law allows them to use any information that they find by any means. And give that to anyone that they want to including your competitors in China.

So if you are making anything in China, you know, quit it, stop it right away and many businesses already Have they moved into other parts of Southeast Asia, the manufacturing of Vietnam and of course, Korea, which is a little more expensive, but very, very good. Indonesia, the Philippines, there are a lot of places where intellectual property rights are honored. So if you are doing it, man, get it out of there. Don't do anything in China anymore, frankly here. But be careful with your cyber hygiene. Be careful with your assets. The first step you have to do in a business is to secure your assets in order to secure assets is to know what they are. All right. And we also talked about the big Capital One hack Mongo DB, a massive database used by verifications.io and the problems that came because of that as well. There are some other American Medical collection agencies, massive breach just bought disclosed in May of this year. We're talking about 12 million quest patients, almost 8 million LabCorp patients, all of their information was disclosed in the breach. This is a classic one, also, about third party risk about their data being in the hands of someone else who did not take care of it. And we already know you're going to take better care of your data, you're going to take better care of your customers in somebody else's. So you've got to watch the security posture of these other companies out there. insider threat. Another big one out there, which also hit these guys. The Federal Emergency Management Agency. 2.3 million survivors of California wildfires, Hurricane Harvey, Irma Maria, they were shared with a third party contractor, social security information of at least the last four digits went out there. All this stuff goes on and on. Right, Macy's, why pro many, many others in the last 12 months, we have to secure our businesses and I was talking to somebody of an idol of mine. And just an amazing man who has helped so many people. And he doesn't have his assets secured properly and he could really end up being and frankly, a whole bunch of problems. So be careful felt of this. So let's get back to a few more gifts here for the holiday season. And I'm really like this next one, I don't have one myself. This is something I never bought because I had some older versions made by other manufacturers. And I was never really happy with them. But this is the Apple Pencil. They've got a new one out. This is their second generation that works with all the newest iPad Pro models and has really built on top of that first generation pencil so we'll pay Apparently the latency problems you know, this is what I didn't like you draw and it would be about a half a second behind you. They've fixed a lot of that it's very smooth now very responsive. It is the smoothest writing tool for iPad pros it doesn't really like so keep an eye out for that one you might enjoy it and enjoy sharing that to see they are 120 bucks right now over at Walmart. There are some nice headphones these are really again kind of for gaming. It's called Cooler Master their headphones with a microphone built on to them. relatively neutral, well-balanced sound and it's great that locating sounds where they should be in the mix. So if you are more professional, a DJ if you're doing what I do here on the radio, a lot of people really like them. It has a detachable microphone as well and can do a very good job with me. The sound clear, they say exceptionally comfortable. And it's about 80 bucks online. How's that for cheap? If you have a Mac Book now of any sort, and an iPad now, Apple's OS and iOS, both natively support using that iPad as an extra screen for your computer. How's that for cool? Very, very neat. And Lenovo, a company I recommend against using it's a Chinese firm now has been for some years, and there's a lot of suspicions about what they're doing with spying and putting spyware on them. But Lenovo has this USBC portable monitor that I might actually have a look at as well. But it's 250 bucks, much cheaper than buying an iPad, and now gives you a portable 14-inch monitor that you can take with you anywhere. And now you've got your second screen. I use two screens. Least on all of my computers, I'm just thinking about that now. The one I'm in front of has two screens. And when I normally use has two screens, it's if you haven't used two screens, it's just absolutely marvelous to check out. So think vision m 14, it's USBC screen. And there's some other stuff that you can look at. And I've got all of these up online at Craig Peterson calm, as well as of course, a whole bunch more stuff I think that you might enjoy. This is a keyboard By the way, I'm thinking man, I think I really might want this. It's one of those old mechanical style ones, but it's 350 bucks. I can't. I haven't been able to bring myself to spend that much money on a keyboard but I have broken two of these big mechanical keyboards and other ones go click, click-click-click book, because I learned to type on a completely manual typewriter that no motors in it at all. Some of you might have learned that way too with no letters on the keys. You had to learn how to type and I got pretty good with that. And then that teletypes that TTY 30, threes, and on and on and on. So I really like those. Hey, I hope you guys have a phenomenal week. We've got Hanukkah coming up this week. We've got Christmas, of course, this week. And who could forget Seinfeld? Right? You know what I'm going to talk about here right? I have a real problem with you people. Yes, Festivus is coming up this week as well. And we've got family coming out to visit I hope you do too. I hope you have friends and relatives you can be with. Maybe if you don't, you can bump a little Christmas meal and Christmas cheer off of some friends. I know there's a lot of holiday office parties going on. including all the way through January this year. We may end up having hours then to just makes life a lot easier, frankly and tends to be a little cheaper to then trying to do it over the holidays here. I just want to share my love with everybody. Thanks for being with us. I'm probably going to end up doing a Best of Show this next weekend. So keep an eye open for that or an ear open for that as well as I am going to be kind of busy here during the holidays but it's going to be a wonderful time. And then after the first of the year, we have a ton of stuff coming up, pop-up-trainings like crazy and choruses and more cheat sheets everything to help make your 2020 a safer year than any you've had before. So have a great week. Have a great time New Year's as well. Make sure you visit me online Craig peterson.com. Take care, everybody. And I really, really hope that everything goes well for you and yours. You're listening to Craig Peters on WGAN and online Craig Peterson dot com.

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The Holidays are almost here -- Hannakah begins tonight and the middle of next week is Christmas - Boy this year has flown by.  There is a lot of Tech in the News so let's get going!

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Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson

Hey, hello everybody, Craig Peters on here on w GAM and online at Craig peterson.com. Hopefully, you're able to join me on Wednesday mornings as well as I am on live with Ken and Matt, we always talk about the latest in technology and news and of course in security since that's primarily what I've been doing for the last 20 plus years here in the online world, man, just thinking back, it's, you know, I first got on the internet. Of course, it wasn't called that. But way back in the early 1980s. And I remember in fact when I first started doing networking professionally back in 75, and there was no worry about anything with you know, yeah, okay, we didn't want people to hack into so you'd have leased lines for your business and I was doing a bunch of work. from banks way back when right, one of my first jobs, and I was really enjoying it, I just learned a whole lot up to today. And we're going to cover this here because my gosh, it's it has changed. The Internet used to be very libertarian, everybody on it was very libertarian or conservative. Of course, that's because there were a whole ton of government contractors on the ARPANET as well as some colleges and universities. And you look at it today, and you think that really it's changed dramatically which it has. But I think the ratio is probably still about the same. You've got the silent majority that just doesn't say much about anything, right. And then you've got this hugely vocal minority who's just yelling and screaming all of the time. And then some of these tech companies that are trying to straddle somehow in the middle and not get everybody all upset with them. It's really a Much different world. But when we're talking about security, it is nothing at all like it used to be. You used to go online, and you'd have some fun you, you know, exchange emails with people, you'd share some files and some fun things. I remember this one whole thread on chases. That was just absolutely amazing. I think I came up this time of years while it was all these puns about different cheeses. It was a lot of fun. Now today, we've got a whole different internet out there and a great article by Robert Limos and he is looking at WatchGuard Technologies' latest quarterly report that was published just last week. And this network security firm found that the percentage of malware that successfully bypassed anti-virus scanners IT companies network gateways has increased Significantly, watch guard technology is saying that the amount of malware that signature-based antivirus software catches, has plummeted to about 50%. Now, I think their numbers are high because I think it's more like 20%. But they're getting specific here. They're talking about the amount of malware that comes into a network via an external source. In other words, people are accidentally pulling it from a website they visit, or perhaps it's been injected into their systems through someone who's visiting their network and using another vulnerability. But they're saying that antivirus software This is signature-based stuff, that's what you get from Norton Antivirus. That's what you get from, you know, the Symantec people from McAfee from all of these different antivirus companies out there. It is just horrific what's happening because of what's known as zero-day now you might have heard of this before you might not have but basically what zero-day malware is, is malware is nasty software and malware includes things like viruses, worms, Trojans, etc. It is this type of malicious software that has not been seen in the wild before. And what it used to me is they would, you know, some brilliant person who as my mother would say, Why don't they do something useful with their time, some brilliant PR person would come up with a piece of software, no one had ever seen a way of attacking that no one had ever seen before. And they would attack us and they would get through because there was no signature for it or the engines in the antivirus software just could not manage to handle. You know malware like this new piece of malware that just came out the problem we're having today is that the majority of malware act just like zero-day. So here's what happens with a signature-based attack. You can think of it just like your body's anti-virus system night than what you have in your body. And your body looks at something that it sees and says, Have I seen this before. And if it has seen it before, it knows to attack it before. It grows really big and kind of starts to get out of control, and then the body has to attack it after it's already really, you know, it's taken the beachhead if you will use a military term. I've been watching a lot of world war two movies lately, but it's taken that beachhead and now has control of the beach and is starting to get in further and it's very difficult to get out versus it recognizes it almost right away as a nasty virus. And goes ahead and end the Jackson You know you have more cells in inside your body inside your skin there are more cells that are foreign to your body then there are body cells when you start counting all the bacteria and everything that's in your system and on your skin. It's just incredible. So our body relies on a lot of these things. In order to keep us healthy, if we had no bacteria, you be in trouble. It's like you know if you go on antibiotics, which is an anti-bacterial, what does the doctor tell you to do? Well, you know, start eating yogurt and, and other things. Maybe take some Kombucha or various other things in order to try and stay healthy. Get that good bacteria going in your gut again. Well, when your body is attacked by something that hasn't seen before. That's what we would call in the computer world as a zero-day virus has never been seen by Your body or in the case of a computer's never been seen by this signature-based antivirus software. So what the bad guys have been doing is they figured out how Yes, indeed we are trying to block them. And they figured out that the majority of us are using these signature-based antivirus software packages. So they've designed the viruses and the malware to change itself every time. So no longer can the antivirus software, just look for certain signatures. So for instance, if you were always attacked by blonde-haired blue-eyed Norwegians, you might be cautious next time you see a blonde-haired blue-eyed Norwegian approaching towards you maybe with a baseball bat or whatever it is, they might have in their hands, right? So you get worried about it. What's the old expression? Once burn shame on me. You twice burn shame on me. Right? So we learn we respond based on how we've been attacked before. And so does the antivirus software now it can take them days or weeks, even months to get a signature out and get it all dispersed. You know, I'm talking about the old software, not the newest stuff, not the enterprise stuff we use for our business client. But the stuff that you use as a consumer and Heaven forbid if your business and you're using stuff like Norton Symantec, or McAfee or any of these other a VG antivirus software packages that are based on signatures because they just don't work. So what happens is they change themselves constantly. So it might be a Norwegian, but they dyed their hair they put on colored contact lenses, and they change their clothing. That's effectively what's happening with our computers nowadays. It may be that Viking that's approaching you but you Don't know it because it just doesn't look like they change everything about themselves at least most everything except the malicious intent and what they end up doing once they've got control of you. So watch guard is saying that this is a major change here. Now I'm going to quote directly from them. The big change is that more and more malware is becoming evasive. So the signature-based protection is no longer sufficient. There's nothing wrong with having it because it will catch 50% to two-thirds of the traffic but you definitely need something more. And that's why I've been recommending you guys do a few things you can do the free stuff. If you are not a business, you can go to my favorite right now. Open DNS and sign up for an account. They have some paid stuff. I think it's $20 a month per computer, for business to get the basic business service. It's free. For a regular home user, but it does not allow you to do any customization. And then there are a few packages in between open DNS. Now we use a commercial version of is an enterprise version called brawler. That's where the calling it now, but it's the highest level where we can, you know, watch it and maintain it. So that's step number one of what you need to do get open DNS so that if you do get one of these pieces of nastiness like ransomware, and it tries to call home, it can't get the phone number, right. He can't call home because there's another phone number. And I think that's a very important thing to do. It's free if you're home user, you might want to pay for the family plan would block certain scary sites and certain things you probably don't want your kids to see pornography and other things open dns.com and then the other thing to do, I had it in my big course this last year and that was how to harden Windows machine. It's rather involved. And I'll probably do a course early next year on this. But make sure you harden your machine, you're going to want to turn off stuff you don't need, you're going to want to make sure your firewall is set up properly to do the types of blocks that you need. You're going to want to make sure that you've got Microsoft's new malware software installed properly and running properly. So I'll have a course on this early next year that you can get. Because when you're talking about 50%, and I've seen numbers as low as 20% effectiveness with anti-virus software, you have to do something. Hey, if you're looking to buy some gifts, I'm going to be talking about some of them in today's show, including five g should you get that phone, you're listening to Craig Peterson on w GAN and online. Greg peterson.com. Stick around. We'll be right back.

Craig Peterson

Hey, are you thinking about buying a mobile phone? We're going to talk about that right now. You're listening to Craig Peterson on WGN and online at Craig Peterson calm. Now you've heard about 5g. You're probably using 4g LTE right now, on your phone and maybe mobile devices you may be your iPad or a tablet that you might have. Amazon has its Kindles. They do not, by the way, have 4g LTE on them, at least, for the most part, they're using some of the much older technology because frankly, all they're doing is sending books right? Which are pretty small. But it is that time of year that we're buying presents and there are only a few days left here for that holiday season, purchasing time. And we've got a lot of competition in the 5g world. So let's talk about what this is. And I'll give you some tips. But what is going on? 5g holds a lot of promise. Now I don't know if you remember I remember how shocked I was at how fast 4g was. I bought a phone. And it had 4g LTE in on it. It was an Android phone. And I vowed never again for so many reasons. And you've heard them on the show here before, but I had bought an Android phone, and I didn't have 4g up where I lived. And I drove down. We were heading down. I think it was till Pennsylvania take one of the kids to camp. And I was going through Valley and I noticed Wait a minute. There's a big city right there. I got 4g so I immediately went to speed test.net and I ran the test to see just how fast is for G. And I was just shocked. I was getting like 20 megabits a second, which was absolutely amazing. Because I've been using cell phones since they first came out. And you know, back in the day it was 14 for right? Oh, cell phone so fast. And now just to see 20 megabits was absolutely mind-blowing. But there are some major limitations to the 4g LTE network that we are using today. And those limitations are speed for one. And then the other thing is the number of devices that can be supported. And then the cost of the data and the data transfers. So 5g has been under development for quite a while. And this is not we're not going to get into Huawei and how they stole all their technology. It really appears to be from our friends up at Nortel and put the whole company out of business because of the spine that they did. And thank goodness finally, we've got a president who's trying to do something about it. But five G's real promise for us right now is that we will get two things will get a gigabit worth of data bandwidth, which means by the way, that we may not even bother with Wi-Fi in our homes if you live in an area that has full 4g or 5g coverage because it's just going to be just as fast as your cable is right now. Now the cable companies are probably going to try and compensate by lowering their prices and giving you faster and faster and faster internet. But for a lot of people, it's going to make economic sense because the cost isn't going to be high. And then the second thing that 5g is going to give us is the ability to have billions of devices connected to the 5g network. That means that everything from our cars Which really the next generation of cars self-driving cars really do need 5g so they can talk to each other. So they can continually upload data to the cloud to let all of the routing computers know about local weather conditions and, and road and where the potholes are and everything is just, it's going to be amazing, right? On the one hand, on the other hand, well, there might be some data leakage that we might not want. So the cars are going to have it but so is pretty much every device that you have. A couple of years ago, I talked about the new jacket, the new trucker jacket that Levi's hat out. And that trucker jacket was designed specifically to connect your phone to your phone and allow you to control your phone. So it had Bluetooth in it. You could touch these little wires that were embedded into the sleeve with your hand and use that to control your cell phone. You know, listen to music and Suddenly things are just kind of cool. So our clothes are going to have the internet in them. Our computers, of course, everything you buy a laptop, it's going to have 5g built-in, you're not going to need to have an external device anymore. Just list goes on and on and on. I've everything that's going to happen is going to be phenomenal. But it is not there yet. And Apple did not include 5g with the iPhone 11 this year, it will include it with the iPhone 12. That's coming out next year. And I saw a very, very good summary of what's probably going to be coming out of Apple in September next year. The guy that published it has been spot on with most everything that Apple was coming up with. And they are he's saying that they are going to be having 5G on the phone and it would make a lot of sense. But right now you can put in orders for the Samsung Galaxy Note 10 plus the one plus 70 that's There are other phones that are claimed to have 5g. But listen, everybody, it is still too early to buy a 5g phone. That is really my big tip when it comes to 5g right now, these networks have not fully standardized, they are not running, none of them are running full 5g anywhere except in a couple of major cities. The biggest problem with building out the 5g networks is that they need to have basically what we've come to know as cell towers everywhere. I mean, everywhere. These are little micro things that are not big towers like we have right now. You know, those fake trees that you see that are actually cell towers. Now, these are going to be small boxes and they're going to be on pretty much every street corner in the big cities. They'll be on the sides of buildings. They'll be on the sides of people's houses. Cell companies are going to pay us to put these on our homes so that we can now provide 5g to us and to our neighbors. And then there's going to be people who will be upset because of the radiation, even though it's non-ionizing, and it's not known to cause any harm, people will be upset about it. But these things are going to be everywhere. And that's because remember, I'm talking about one gigabit worth of bandwidth coming down to your device. Well, you cannot do gigabit service on lower frequency so they have moved to higher frequencies. The old UHF TV channels are pretty much I think they're all gone now throughout the country. And the FCC has bought back the bandwidth and has auctioned it off to all of these different companies that wanted to buy it. And it's just everything is going to change and with the high frequencies that they need in order to deliver these beads, they now have a problem and that is these higher frequencies do not penetrate glass. They don't penetrate walls very well at all. And they just don't penetrate metal at all basically, it's really bad. So it T Mobile has announced nationwide 5g available as of last Friday. That is pretty darn cool. It's got a 600 megahertz 5g network which is going to cover most of the country. That is pretty impressive. But the trade-off is it's using low band 5g which means it is good at providing slightly boosted speeds inside buildings and is available in a lot more places than what competitors offer 18 T and Verizon are offering the opposite. They have ultra-wideband networks right now superfast speeds, but very, very small footprints very small pocket, and you got to be standing near one of these towns

This is kinda cool T Mobile is expecting with theirs. That actually is p mag is PC Magazine, you can expect a boost of about 15 megabits with their new 5g nationwide. And you might see 150 megabits if you have a new 5g phone or 700 megabits if you have 4g LTE. So not a huge right now, but just wait. Okay, wait until next summer next fall, when things are really going to start happening. All right, stick around. We got a lot to cover still we're going to be talking about some guests who will talk about some of the big hacks of the year. What does it mean to us? What can we do? I'm going to give you some tips and some tricks, what not to do on your work computer third party security risks and some lessons from the National Security Agency. You're getting it right here from Craig Peterson on WGA and

Craig Peterson

Hello, welcome back. Greg Peterson here on w GAN will be enjoying the show today. We got a lot to cover here. Awesome. Good news, some gift ideas. I've got a very cool article from Ars Technica, about nine gift ideas for the tech enthusiasts in your life. And frankly, I am totally into this. It gave me a couple of ideas in fact of things that I'm going to be getting for people. So you might want to stick around and listen to that for the enthusiast in your life. And we're going to start right now with something that I think pretty much everyone's can be interested in. If you are, you know an employee, if you work at a company, and you use computers, there is a couple of words of caution here. In this segment, Now, first of all, the business computers are owned by the business. And that's kind of where this Bring Your Own Device thing has gotten everything a little bit fuzzy, you know, so if you are using your phone, for instance, your smartphone, and you're using it for work purposes, it's not the businesses phone. So there's not a whole lot that they can say about your phone and how you use your phone. However, the business has an absolute right to its data, and kinking troll, frankly, how you use your phone for the business data, right? Well, how about the computers that are actually owned by the computer? What can you do legally? And what can't you do? What can the business tell you that you should do with it and what can they not tell you what to do? Well, the bottom line is it depends. It depends on the business and what their policies are. So overall, that's kind of the first place you should check your employee handbook. Now we've provided a lot of businesses with employee handbook sections on this and you can certainly get them from your attorney from your corporate attorney, or from HR if you're an employee there. But if you're using a work-issued computer, now that includes a desktop computer includes a laptop, it's going to include things like iPads, even phones, you've probably checked your personal email on that device, you might have stored some files on there. You, you might have used it for a number of different things. Now in many cases, it's not a big deal as far as the company is concerned. You know, if you've got kids right to have a life outside the office, so for you to be able to send an email to the BBC. Or to make a few phone calls because babysitting didn't show up or a kid is sick or whatever. Most employers say that's absolutely fine if I died personally would not work for an employer. That said, That's not fine. I think that's a very, very big deal a very bad thing, the right companies that are like that. But when you start to store your private files on the company's computer, or maybe the company's Dropbox or Google Drive, or you are maybe going down a rabbit hole, as you started with something on Cora or you started with something somewhere else, and all of a sudden before you know it, it's an hour two hours later, or heaven for Ben, you are going to Facebook or some of these other sites to poke around. Then things change. Now many of us use messenger on Facebook in order to keep in contact with family and friends. So is it legit to have a messenger window open? Is it legit to do that, right? Well, the bottom line is you probably shouldn't do any of this on a computer provided by your employer. You're not necessarily breaking the law, but you could get fired if it's against your company's policies. And also, you need to remember that employers can install software to monitor what you do on your work-issued laptop or desktop. Now we do not monitor employees and what they're doing on a computer, except to watch for things that the employees might be doing that might harm the business directly. In other words, if an employee's bringing in a file from home, we're going to check that file. If they're downloading something from the internet. We're going to check that download. We're going to check their emails are going to clean them up, we're going to stop the ransomware we're going to stop the zero-day attacks that I talked about earlier. As well as all of the known types of vulnerabilities. But remember that not everybody is like us, right? We are not interested in getting involved in the businesses Workplace Relations, a lawsuit that a business might want to bring to against an employee, right? That's not what we do. Although we've certainly been pulled into those before in the past. And you need to keep that in mind as an employee because they can monitor what you do, they might put keyloggers on there to see what you're typing, they might have a software that takes a random screenshot. We've done that before with these workers that are doing a specific project. So we outsource something, there might be a graphic or might be writing an article or something, and we're paying by the hour for that contractor to do the work. So as part of the agreement, we have software that sits on the computer and randomly takes screenshots So we have an idea that yes, indeed, they are actually working on our stuff. And it took them five hours and we spent it to take one hour. And it's because they're slow, not because they were out wandering the internet and doing research on the party that's going to be coming up next week at the office or at their home, right. So be very careful about it. And the type of surveillance and security software that's installed on the company computer is usually based on two things, one, how large the company is, and what kind of resources they have to dedicate to watching you, and what type of information you deal within your role. Now, almost all of our clients in fact, now I think of it I think all of our clients are in what are called regulated industries. So if you're a car dealer, you're in a regulated industry, because you have payment card information, you have financing information on all kinds of personal information. So that has to be monitored, right? We have doctors' offices that have HIPAA requirements personal again, personally identifiable information, healthcare information. So security numbers, phone numbers, email addresses, and under the new regulations that are coming out right now, January one in California and Massachusetts in the European Union right now, and they are working on similar regulations on the federal level, even an email address is considered to be personally identifiable information. Until the list goes on and on if you have government contracts, we have clients that have DFARs or Defense Department requirements or FINRA, which is for financial organizations, right? That's what we do. So all of these heavily regulated businesses need to have software that is going to detect that someone is trying to exfiltrate data, shut it down immediately. We need to know that employees are trying to steal information. And in many of these cases, we will work with the company if there are lawsuits and ensue because of the regulation or because of other reasons out there. So if you're working with a company like this, which is frankly, in this day and age, every company, right, what, what employer does not have security numbers of employees? How do you pay them if you don't have the social security numbers, those are all falling under the regulations nowadays. And unfortunately, a lot of businesses don't pay attention to that. So a very small company, they're probably not doing this. But larger companies are definitely going to be doing this. And there's a great little quote here from Jesse crims. He's an Information Security Analyst over the New York Times and he said Without supporting evidence at this scale, at scale, it's pretty rare that people are not doing heavy surveillance and tends to generate a lot of useless data, roped employee into liability issues and generally make the team that monitors the surveillance systems miserable. In other words, you probably don't want to know. And that's the standard we take. We make sure that all of the regulations are complied with, but whether or not someone's sending an email to the babysitter or whatever, it's just not worth it. We're worried about espionage. Okay, so there you go. There are some tips for you. And using business security or using a business computer at work. Stick around. We'll be right back. We got some more stuff to talk about, including some major updates to the Google Chrome browser. Should you be using it anymore. We'll be right back.

Craig Peterson

Hello everybody, Craig Peterson here. Welcome back. We're listening Of course on WGAN or online at Craig Peterson dot com, you'll find me on pretty much every podcasting platform out there. And if you really enjoy the show, you know one of the best ways to let me know is to share it. I love to see all of the people who are listening and getting feedback from everybody so send me a note as well. But here's where you can go if you would like to give me a five-star review, just go to Craig Peterson comm slash iTunes. And right there, you can give me a five-star review. on Apple, they're still kind of the 800-pound gorilla in this space. Rumor has it that the next release of iOS is going to have some major improvement to this whole podcasting stuff. Apple really kind of started it with the iPod, which is where it got the name from. I still have one of my original iPods kicking around. It was frankly, it was my favorite device for listening to music. Anyhow, let's talk a little bit about some of the browser issues that are out there right now. Many people are concerned about the web browsers you're using. We know we're being monitored. We know we're being watched right now, by these big companies. Google makes its money by what? By selling our information. Facebook's the same way. Now Google is going to sell us advertising, and so is Facebook. And frankly, I would rather know about cars and see advertisements for cars. When it is the time I'm looking to buy a car right? And I'm never going to buy a lot of from Russia, right? So why would I want to see ads for that? So I am Pro, the monitoring in that space. Right. I, you know, you kind of go back and forth about that. You look at what President Obama's team did back when he was running for election the first time where they grabbed all of Facebook's data about everyone. And then they used highly targeted advertising. And then you saw what happened eight years later with President Trump and while the Cambridge Analytica scandal that was Child's Play compared to what President Obama's team did, but somehow President Obama's team didn't get in trouble for it. But President Trump's team certainly did even though Trump's don't get into that right now. But the browsers that we're using are tracking us. And remember, again, this old adage, it's old now, right? It's relatively new frankly. But if you do not pay for service, the odds are you are the product. And Google certainly considers that. And so does Facebook, that you are the product. So when you're looking at browsers, what should you be using the biggest browser out there right now the one that any software developers going to aim at is the Google Chrome browser. Because that's what most people use. It is really a great browser. From a functionality standpoint, people are using Google's Of course search engine, which has been very, very good here over the years. They, they've just done some wonderful things. And Google has added more and more features to their browser. Now, people ask me constantly, what is it that I use? What is it that I recommend? Well, I can tell you that Craig recommends that you don't use the Chrome browser when you can avoid it. Now I do use Chrome. When I am on a website, and I'm trying to do something and one of these other browsers doesn't work quite right. I go over to Chrome because it's not the worst thing in the world. It's not as though it has a direct backdoor into Russia, at least not that we're aware of, or into the CIA or the NSA. We know that Google doesn't like to cooperate with the US military, in some of its research projects, but Google also loves to cooperate with China and has three artificial intelligence labs in China. So it's giving China our next generation of computing technology for free but won't share it with our government. Yeah. Well, anyway, I guess I do get kind of political sometimes on the show. Google's Chrome version 79 just came up with a new feature. Now you know, when it comes to password, That I highly recommend you use some software called one password. They have some free stuff, they have some paid offerings. And what one password does is it keeps all of your passwords keeps them secure. You only have to remember one password, which is, frankly a huge win. And it was great in the business environment where you can set up vaults of passwords so that you know HR can have their own vault and this software development teams can all have their own vaults, and you can have your own personal vault, and it'll create passwords for you that are highly secure, that conform to the requirements for different websites and, and you can share them within vaults. There are just all kinds of wonderful things that you can do using one password. And then if you've been around a while, a couple of years ago, you know I offered a service that we were doing internally. We did this for free for over 1000 People, but we double-checked their password to see if not passwords but email address to see if their email addresses and passwords are out on the dark web. And you know, we checked it at least a month and generated reports for people. And that might be something we decided to do in the future. Well, there is a huge database out there that we've talked about on the show before. Google has now adopted in its Chrome browser. So Chrome 79 has what they're calling as a password checkup extension. So that was what how it all started. It was for desktop versions of Chrome, and it audited your passwords when you entered them, and took a look at them to see if those passwords were known to have been breached. Now, it's not necessarily that your account was breached, although it might have been it the password in the Heres why. Here's why they looked at the password itself. What the bad guys are doing nowadays is they are comparing your password against millions, hundreds of millions, in fact, billions of known passwords that people have used. And they start with the most common passwords and then work their way out from there. So if you're using a password that has been known to been breached in the past, it isn't something you should use. So I thought that was great. They had this password checkout extension. So now what they've done is they've integrated into every Google account and on-demand audit that you can run on all of your saved passwords. And in version 79. Google has a password checkout integrated into both the desktop and mobile versions of Chrome. So what will happen now is that if you are using Chrome to save your passwords, which I do not do as a rule, except for a few accounts I don't really care about because again, I'm using one password to keep my passwords and can keep them all straight? So it is built-in now. And anytime you enter in a password, it's going to check to see if that password has been breached anywhere online. Google is calling this private set intersection, which means you don't get to see Google's list of bad credentials. And Google doesn't get to learn your credentials. But the two can be compared four matches and basically what it's doing is it's doing mild encryption on your password and comparing it against this known setup password. So it's very, very good to do. One password has this feature already built-in password will warn you if I website that you're going to has been known to have been compromised. And Google's figuring here, that since it has a big encrypted database of all your passwords, I might as well compare against, compare them against this 4 billion strong public list of compromised usernames and passwords. They've been exposed in all kinds of security breaches over the years. And little on little later on today, we're going to talk about the top half dozen or so big security breaches, what caused them and then you might want to pay attention to to see if your information was exposed. But the main reason I like to talk about this stuff is so that you can look at your position, you know, at home or at work and ask yourself, hey, listen, there is this breach something that would have worked against us, right? I think it's very, very good. So Here we go. I'm not going to get any details here on what exactly what Google is doing and how they're doing it. If you are a chrome fan, you might want to use it. So let's talk about what the alternatives to Chrome or opera is a big one. And I have heard rumors that the Opera browser, which is kind of my primary browser, I have another one will tell you about in just a second, but opera very fast. It's designed to be secure. It also blocks a lot of spyware out there. Very good. But the rumors are that it is now in the hands of the Chinese government apparently owns it. I'm not sure that's entirely true. But, you know, it's up to you whether you want to take any risks. I'll tell you also about an extension I use in all of my browsers, which makes it much more secure much safer for me. We'll probably have to wait until after the top of the hour to get into that, but I'll tell about that.

So what do I use the most? And what do I trust the most? Well, Netscape, the Netscape browser. Mozilla is the next one that I use opera is number one, at least for the time being. I use Firefox as well. Both of them do a lot of blocking, oh, I have a lot of privacy enhancements. Those are the two I use the most. And then I also use Apple Safari. Apple, again, is not selling your information as Google does. So it's considered to be a little bit safer. So far, we haven't known Apple to really leak information. They've been relatively safe, they certainly aren't selling it to anyone. And that's what I use. And then if I have to all fall back to Google Now, if I wanted to be extra safe online, there is another browser out there that I do like, and it's called epic EP, I see the epic browser. And it is actually based on Google's Chrome browser underneath the hood, just as Microsoft's browser is based on Google's Chrome browser. And Google is actually using a base form from Apple's Safari browser, which is kind of interesting. They all share code nowadays. But the epic browser is the browser if you absolutely want to keep your data safe. It even has a built-in privacy VPN. So check it out as well. When we come back, I'll give you a little clue here. A couple of tips on what you can do to keep every browser just a little bit safer. We'll get into some gift ideas and more. So stick around you're listening to Craig Peterson on WGAN and online at Craig Peterson dot com. Stick around. We'll be right back.

Craig Peterson

Hello, everybody, Craig Peterson here. Welcome back and listening to me on WG A in an online, Craig peterson.com. Hey, if you are a new listener, I just want to let you know a little bit about my background I've been helping to develop the internet, they in fact, just called a pie in the air you the other day, which is kind of interesting to think about. But yes, indeed, I designed and made some of the very first routers and some of the very first firewalls and load balancers and stuff back in the day. Let me tell you back in the day, we had to write these things from scratch because they just didn't exist as commercial products. And, you know, there's a lot of products I could have sold over the years but I'm just wasn't that kind of guy. Anyhow, so now I do a lot of cybersecurity for businesses, government agencies, most particularly really, for anybody in a regulated business, which today in this day and age means any business because we are all regulators I talked about in the last segment. Well, we have some gift ideas. And let me just start with one here. And then we'll get into some more articles from this week. We've we're going to be talking about the NSA here and what their top recommendation is for businesses. But you know, I am a techie guy, and I love tech and tech gifts and it's all just a pretty darn cool thing. When you get right down to it, just like, you know, I just love playing with this stuff. I guess that's the way to put it. And using it and making my life a little easier and faster, more efficient, effective, etc. But I want to talk about the high-end tech gifts that you might want to give, and you might want to give for yourself. In fact, that's exactly what I'm doing with one of these this year. Well, if you have somebody who's a gaming enthusiast, there are so many things out there that you can get for them. There's this one particular mouse that is very highly rated for gamers. It's called the razor Viper. It has some very, very fast, maneuverability stuff built in. Because of course, when you're playing some of these video games interactive, you need to be able to move very quickly so anyhow, we'll leave it at that because I am not a game type person. I used to play some, some games way back when you're in a dungeon with twisty mages, mazes, remember right how things started. But let's get into this. Now. This is one of the things I think would be a great gift for almost anyone, it's great for a computer that has the USBC which is the newest version of the USB cable. It is what the new Mac books come with the new max do as well. It's the next generation of the high-speed stuff that the last generation max had. But it also works with regular USB cable has a little adapter that you can use with it. It's called SanDisk extreme portable SSD. This thing is very, very nice. It's a good option for data you need to have with you wherever you go. It's surprisingly small. It is rated for the extremely high shock it's like 500 G's or something crazy like that. And it will withstand water and dust as well as vibration. You can drop it from six feet in the air without suffering any damage at all. This thing is amazing. And right now it is half price. Over on Amazon. Just look it up there. SanDisk is the name of the company S-A-N-D-I-S-K, it's their extreme portable SSD fits in the palm of your hand that you're going to love this. It's available in 250 gig 500 gig one terabyte and two terabytes now, I would not get the 250 gig, not that it's too small. But for an extra $10 you double your space up to 500 gig. Now when you go up to the one terabyte, which again is twice the space, it's twice the cost. So the one terabyte you're gonna have to ask yourself what makes sense and two terabyte options. But this thing is so fast, or what I love this for is to have different virtual machines on it. It's the one I use when I am doing a demo or for when I need to do a client-side install.  I can have every version of Windows on my need to use Mac OS all the different versions of that a few versions of Linux all right there on the drive. It's very very convenient. And very, very fast you're going to love this thing. In fact, that's one of the fastest portable storage solutions that has ever been tested. It's kind of similar you know you can get Samsung T five SSD, they have very good SSDs. Okay, don't get me wrong here.  The Samsung t five is more affordable but the SanDisk extreme SSD is better. Now I got to tell you that the cost right now on Amazon for this portable drive, there's no moving parts in it. As I said it fits in the palm of your hand. The cost on that is lower on Amazon right now. It's half price is lower than I can buy it from my distributors at So just to give you an idea of what a great value that is, coming up, we're going to talk about, I think the coolest gift you can give to somebody that is truly a hobbyist in the computer world, you're going to love it. And then if you are that person when you go to someone's house for Hanukkah, Thanksgiving, Christmas birthdays, whatever it is, and they say, hey, Craig, come over here for a second. my computer's not working right can you have a look at it will will tell you about the best gift for somebody like that and maybe some need to get get for yourself as well. So I'm going to talk right now about some of the biggest security breaches we'll go over one and then we'll get to some others little later on in this our last hour. And by the way, if you want to listen to the whole show, my podcast and everything. You can just go to Craig Peterson comm slash iTunes or slash tune in if you'd like to listen to it. On tune in or slash pretty much anything well actually if you type in slash pretty much everything you need an error page right? But you'll find me Craig Peters on on most of the major podcast sites that are out there by just going to Craig Peterson comm slash, whatever it is like Sasha Hart or slash SoundCloud or slash tune in, etc, etc.

Well, data aggregators are big targets that are out there and who is a data aggregator? Well, let me tell you about what happened when I was at a wedding last week I was staying with my sister in law my wife and I, and there we got home and there was a card in the door and there's from an insurance company members like all state or something and, and it asked for one of my sisters in law, who had been living in that house to call so we thought okay, well, it's just a hoax thing. You know, they're they're trying to sell some insurance or something. So we just ignore that fact, I think we just threw the card in the trash. Well, the next night, we were sitting there at home and there's a knock at the door. And it's the same insurance agent. And she wants to talk to my deceased sister in law. And we get into this a little bit more and talking and talking to her trying to figure out what, what, what, why, what's going on. It turns out that someone was involved in a fatal car accident. And that person gave my deceased sister in-law's identity as her own. Yes, indeed, the dead are, quite frequently in fact, a victim of identity theft. Now we know about the dead voting right particularly in Chicago, and but in other places around the country. Well, in this case, apparently according to the report - she had been involved in a fatal car wreck about six months after she had died, and someone was dead. Obviously, this was a case of mistaken identity, but the insurance lady who's at the door, and she's obviously, some sort of an investigator used one of these skip trace databases in case you're not familiar with those. These are databases that are put together by data aggregators and data aggregators are these companies that suck up data from every public source they possibly can. And even some paid sources. And it includes records from credit card companies, and you name it, they pull it all together, they try and make heads or tails of it. So she had this report from a data aggregator and listed my long-deceased father in law's name is part of this and, and my kids, couple of my kids that had at one point staying for a visit with their grandmother, for a few months, while going to school, etc. and include my wife's name, my name just kind of went on and on. They got a lot of data wrong. And that's what I found to typically 25 to 50%, sometimes even more the data they have is incorrect. But enough of it was correct that she could kind of start piecing things together. And she was able to figure out that this was insurance fraud. Well, these data aggregators have massive databases as frankly, you might imagine. And they have these databases online. Yeah, you know where I'm going. This was a Mongo DB Mongo database, which is used, it's kind of it's called NO SEQUEL. It's an unformatted database. It's perfect for these data aggregators, and a company called verifications.io. That provided email verification services, had a Mongo database Continued over 800 million records publicly accessible to anyone in the world with an internet connection. And they had four sets of data. They'd had email addresses, dates of birth, phone numbers, physical addresses, employer information, IP addresses, business leads and other information. Not everything was sensitive. So when we get back we'll talk about what lessons should be learned what you can pick up from this a couple of tips for you. If you are a business person of any sort, or if you have data that might be in one of these databases, so we'll talk about these big verifications Mongo DB breach from this year and some more gift ideas right area listening to Craig Peters on online and here on WGAN terrestrial radio.

Craig Peterson

Hello everybody Greg Peterson back here on WG and online at Craig peterson.com. If you enjoy my show, by all means, make sure you subscribe to the podcast. Pretty much everything that I do goes up there my Wednesday mornings with Matt and can during their drive time show Wednesday morning that goes up there Other appearances go up there the whole radio show goes up there as well. Craig Peters on comm slash iTunes and do leave me a review if you wouldn't mind. You know those five-star reviews help get the message out. And we just passed another hundred thousand downloads, which is kind of cool. I appreciate it. Every one of you guys for listening. We try and get as much information as we can. So let's get back to our Well actually, you know There's something I forgot to button up from the last hour. Let's get to that. And then we'll get to some, some gifts and some more risks and what the NSA is saying right now, I had been talking earlier in the show about web browsers, and which browsers you should be using, which ones I recommend, then, you know, if you missed all of that, again, you will find it at Craig peterson.com, slash iTunes, you can listen to the whole thing right there. But I was talking a little bit about a plugin that I use. This is a plugin that works with pretty much any browser out there and works differently than any plugin that you might have been familiar with before. This is from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Now I've had my disagreements with them in the past. Overall, I agree with a lot of what they're doing. But this is a plugin that goes into Chrome Opera or Firefox or pretty much anything that is called Privacy Badger Privacy Badger. So think about badgers if you know these things, they you'll find them a lot over in England, but they're over here too. They burrow underneath hedges and they like to live in the ground. And they are mean they will fight anything way bigger than they are. They don't care. They're going to win because they go all in. Well, that's what this is all about Privacy Badger. So I am on a website. Right now I'm looking at my browser and the Privacy Badger plugin, and it's got a nine on it right now. So what that means is that Privacy Badger detected nine potential trackers on this web page that I'm on right now. And it has sliders for them up there and it says you shouldn't need to adjust the sliders unless something is broken. So what Privacy Badger does is it watches you As you go to different websites, it looks at the cookies that are placed on your browser from these websites and determines, Hey, wait a minute. Now, this is a cross-site tracker. This is another type of tracker that we probably don't want to have. So it's showing them all to me. So here we go. Here's what I have right now on this website that I'm on. And the website is otter in case you don't use otter it is phenomenal transcription service, very inexpensive. 600 minutes for free every month. otter.ai but it turns out otter is using some tracker. So the first tracker showing me that Privacy Badger blocked is graph.facebook.com. So this is Facebook gathering data about me what I do where I go, the next one that's marked yellow, which is it has three different indications here on the slider. One is a blocks it entire The next one is that it could block cookies and then the far right one is to allow a domain to do it. So graph.facebook.com was blocked automatically static.facebook.com was allowed the regular facebook.com was allowed Google Analytics completely blocked API's Google com was allowed stripe checkout was allowed stripe as a payment service. JavaScript on stripe com was allowed and stripe network usually m dot means it's a mobile site. So that was blocked and Q dot stripe com was allowed but those are tagged the one these all of the ones I mentioned that were tagged, are considered to caution level.

So by adding Privacy Badger as a plugin to any of your browsers Basically is going to stop sites from tracking you and it does a very good job. It learns as you go. It is not something that is prefixed with I'm going to block this site or that site. It is absolutely dynamic. I really, really like it. So check that out. This is kind of a flashback, as I said to an earlier segment where I was talking about which browser to use, what the considerations are. And this will work with any of them out there. So just do a search for Privacy Badger, it should come up near the top of your DuckDuckGo search. And it's five the Electronic Frontier Foundation e FF, check it out online. Okay, so now let's get into gifts again. I mentioned my top gift recommendation in the last segment. This one is for total geeks. Now we are using this for actually keeping timing tracking It's called raspberry pi. So we have a special card that goes along with this that has a GPS antenna attached to it and GPS readers so that we can track the satellites in the sky. We use the timing that they provide us with, we do some advertising. So that one of the things we do for our clients is we have to track their logs and keep real detailed records on their logs. We need to know exactly when Did something happen? So that if after the fact heaven forbid, someone gets in, some piece of malware gets in when did it come in? Where did it go? What did it do, right? Because you want to be able to know after the fact Well, what does it get access to? unlike so many of these companies that have no idea what they lost? In fact, most businesses don't even know until six months later that they were even the hack versus what the best in the biz are doing right now is about six hours, not just to detected but to remediation, which is where we sit well, usually within that six-hour time frame. Well, this is called a Raspberry Pi. And they've got the newest version of Raspberry Pi four. This is a small Linux computer. So if anybody that you know likes to hack together science projects or you know, do a little bit of experimenting, this is phenomenal, absolutely phenomenal. You can turn it into a retro game console, it'll play a lot of these old video games. A smart speaker that's a DIY thing. You can build it into your Legos to make a real fancy remote-controlled car. Anything your hobbyist mind comes into mind. This is phenomenal. You can for 100 less than 100 bucks, you can get a complete kit. Okay? The Raspberry Pi fours a lot faster and the older Raspberry Pi three Model B plus faster CPU you can put up to four gigs of ram in this thing. It is a phenomenal USB 3.0 port. So if you are or you know somebody that's really into DIY hobbies, this is the way to go. Okay? The Raspberry Pi four does get closer to your general and genuine desktop PC performance. But it's not really there yet. It's not one running Windows, it does run Linux, as I mentioned. And you can write basic programs for it, which is a programming language Python. If you have a kid that wants to learn Python, this might be a nice way for them to learn because they can kind of hack it together but it's just it's basically just a motherboard, you're gonna have to put it in a case by a case forward, you're gonna have to put a keyboard on it. A mouse, you have to put a display on it, okay, all kinds of stuff, but you can get just the basic Raspberry Pi four For someone that that really, really is a total hacker here, for like 4050 bucks, it's absolutely amazing. Okay, plenty of power for your money. Very versatile. In fact, it's more versatile in many ways than your Windows PC is. And for the budding engineer in your life, they will love you for it. So stick around, we're going to come back, I've got some more ideas for tech gifts that you might like. And we're going to talk about a couple more big hacks this year, and what it means to you. We've got third party security risks, the NSA has some advice for business and we'll tell you about that too. When we get back, you're listening to Craig Peterson right here on w GAN and online at Craig Peter song.com. That's Peterson with an O. Stick around because we'll be right back.

Craig Peterson

Hello, everybody, welcome back, Craig Peters on here on WGAN. And we're talking about stuff we usually talk about, you know, some of the security things, some of the latest technology that's out there. We're also doing a bit of a recap here some great gift ideas for the techie people in your life, even frankly, some of the non-techie people. And the security side, which is, I think, very important, can't talk enough about that. Because it could destroy your company, it could ruin that, frankly, the rest of your life could be a bit of misery, depending on what the bad guys do to you. Oh, it's absolutely crazy. told the story a little earlier of what happened with my deceased sister in law's identity, and how it was used in a fatal car accident and it's just it's amazing what some of these people are. Doing nowadays. And by the way, one of the most valuable segments of our population. We are know already about the retired people, the older people, right, who might be a little confused, hopefully, have some assets. But one of the most valuable identities out there online is that they have a child because their social security number and their identity are going to be very useful for at least a decade, if not longer because those kids probably not going to use it until they get their first job. So keep that in mind as well. Well, I want to get into these two things before the last half hour, so we'll cover these fairly quickly. But the big one, and that is waking up to third party security risks. Now one of the big attacks this year was Capital One and that's on my list of the ones I wanted to talk about today. They had personal information blog into overall hundred million US individuals and 6 million Canadian residents. Now, this was exposed. And when a former employee at Amazon Web Services inappropriately accessed the data, we could get into all of the real details behind this but the compromised information included names addresses, dates of birth, credit scores, payment history, contact information, and other information on people who had applied for Capital One credit card dating back to 2005. also exposed where the social security numbers of 140,000 individuals and bank account data blogging belonging to 80,000 secured credit card customers. So think about this for a little minute here. How many of us are using a service like Amazon Web Services, how many of us are relying on cloud services to keep our information safe? Right? Frankly, that's most of us, isn't it? And when you're talking about somebody like Amazon Web Services, or now there's Microsoft Azure, those are kind of the two really big players. IBM also has its cloud online that they sell access to. Most businesses look at it as a way to save money. Most businesses consider, hey, I don't need to keep track of the security, because my vendor is keeping track of it for me. And what we found out is, that's not true. So the lessons learned here. We'll start with that here from Capital One is that cloud service may be attractive because it's cheaper than doing it yourself. And that's particularly true, frankly, throughout the whole range, but it's particularly true for large businesses, but even for small business. businesses, can you really afford the right kind of server? Now I know a lot of small businesses go to the local staples store and buy a computer and call it a server, right? And maybe $800,000 later, they're out of there. Whereas a real server that's going to be really reliable is going to last years, you should be looking at more like 15 to $20,000 for. So businesses say, well, I'll just do it in the cloud. I'll use Amazon Web Services for this and we'll hire a consultant who's going to help us set it up. And we're going to use maybe Dropbox for that and maybe office 365 for this and now all of a sudden, I'm safe. Well, you're not. And companies, you guys are putting your data at risk, because you haven't adopted a security infrastructure, with the vigor that you need to apply. It should be at least as good as what You're using for your on-premise stuff. But you know what so many SMEs aren't even doing it right for on-premise stuff. Okay? So you're ending up with all of the financial cost of the penalties that you rack up, and the lawsuit and the cost of those lawsuits, which will vastly outweigh any it savings that you might have down the road. So keep that in mind. And that's what Capital One just learned this year. The Why? Because we're not taking third party security risk to heart Ponemon Institute did a study here 2018 founded 60% of customers surveyed, had suffered a data breach caused by third parties or vendors in the last 12 months. So what's causing it? Well, these applications are being built very different than they were a decade ago. They are online. They're using APIs. And they are not considering the security risks. So all services are connecting internally and externally via these APIs, popular finance websites load on your browser mobile apps, you can see the results. Dozens of third party services, okay, web apps, middleware, other code. This is a real problem. So, protect your own infrastructure, Step number one. Step number two demanded the others protect their infrastructure, okay. And trust yet verify. What we do is we wrap special security software around all of these third party infrastructure Software-as-a-Service sites that are out there, okay. So be very, very careful and you have to test even more for third party sites and you know, businesses just aren't testing as much as they should. So there you go. There's a couple of tips here three tips on what to do. When you are talking about third party security risk, and that is with all of these guys, Okay, number one, make sure your infrastructure is protected that you have the right kinds of firewalls and you have the right kind of malware treatment that's in place. All the other security controls, make sure they're configured right? If you're using something like Amazon Web Services, or Sure, or office 365, make sure you have the right settings. You know, it's difficult I get it, Microsoft has over 10,000 skews 10,000 products that are available in they're all software and services. There are dozens and dozens just for office 365 based systems. So make sure you have the right stuff. Make sure that they have proper compliance and certifications. And remember too that the certifications they have just represented a point in time. Do they still have the right kind of security? And because we are running our technology in this new type of infrastructure, make sure, frankly, that we keep track of everything because a breach can happen quickly do millions of dollars of damages right away. And 20% of businesses will file for bankruptcy the very next day. All right, well, let's talk about another gift here real quick before we go to a quick break. And this is for those of us that we go to a family event, and we go anywhere, and it's a Craig come over here for a minute, I need some help and you go over there and of course, it's questions and problems about their computers. So here's what I recommend. Get that person in your life if they're fixing the computer for that for you.

I fix it. Great site painting Go online to find out how to fix physical problems. But they have something called the I fix it pro tech tool kit. I have one of these my kids have one of these. My technicians in my business have one of these. It's a 64-bit driver set that has all these weird types of sockets and everything on them. Because these parts and the computers that have the special locking screws and everything else, you need this Okay, the I fix it pro tech tool kit. Stick around. We'll be back with a wrap up for today's show. And we'll talk a little bit more about some gifts right here. You're listening to Craig Peterson on w GN. And the course online Craig Peterson calm. Stick around because we'll be right back.

Craig Peterson

Hello everybody Craig Peterson here WGAN and online at, of course, Craig Peterson dot com. Hope you've enjoyed the show today we have covered a lot of different things we talked about third party security risks for businesses which web browser you should be using. If you want to keep safe and some of the updates that Chrome has from Google, they'll keep you safer online. What not to do on your work computer. Why it's still too early to buy a 5g phone and signature antivirus and how it is at best catching 50% of the malware out there. It's getting really, really bad. And we've talked a little bit about some of the top breaches this year and there are some pretty scary Ones out there. But how does it apply to you? And how does it apply to your business as well? And we got one more that was brought up on the website at Craig Peterson calm, you can see all of these up there, a little bit of mind commentary and links to other articles online. But this is about the NSA and what the NSA, the National Security Agency is saying that we should be doing as businesses, but this applies 100% as well, to you as an individual. And the basics are to focus on your assets. And this is a very, very big deal. What are your assets and what should you be focusing on? And the things that come to mind very quickly for most people are things like your bank accounts, you know, the money that's in them, maybe your intellectual property, but companies just aren't keeping Tracking that well enough. earlier in the show, I talked about some of the problems with third parties and how some of these third party vulnerabilities have led to a massive problem in the business, right. And some very big businesses that got nailed pretty bad out there. Well, did you secure your assets properly, even when they're in the cloud? And you got to think this all the way through because people are bringing in their iPhone or their Android phones, heaven forbid, or other devices that have known security problems. And they're putting your corporate jewels on those devices. People are taking the laptops home, and maybe the VPN in the end. And that VPN is allowing the viruses that are on their kid's computer as they use for gaming and who knows what else, allowing those viruses to piggyback on to your network at the office via VPN is remember VPN aren't a panacea. And I talked a lot about that in some of my training, I did a pop-up training on VPN man, but about a month ago, you'll probably still find it over on my Facebook page at Craig peterson.com slash Facebook if you're interested in finding out more about VPN. But when you're looking at securing a company, this is something that takes a long time, a lot of experience to do. And it's not something that your nephew is going to be able to do. It's not something that your standard brake fix shop is going to be able to do. This is something that takes years and years of experience decades, frankly, in order to be able to do this right. And that's where it becomes a problem for the very small businesses. So I really would encourage you to look at some of the pop-up-trainings I've done. They're absolutely free to learn a little bit more. Keep an eye out because I will be doing more pop up Trains after the first of the year, we're going to do some great training. And I have also a couple of courses planned. And, you know, I gave away 120 pages of sheet cheat sheets this last summer, we may do something again like that later on next year. But we've got to be very, very careful, because these people who are trying to get at our assets, know what they want. And we've got nation-states who are trying to get at them to look at what China's doing. They, they just passed a law in China that makes it so that you cannot use encryption that the Chinese government cannot decrypt. And the law allows them to use any information that they find by any means. And give that to anyone that they want to including your competitors in China.

So if you are making anything in China, you know, quit it, stop it right away and many businesses already Have they moved into other parts of Southeast Asia, the manufacturing of Vietnam and of course, Korea, which is a little more expensive, but very, very good. Indonesia, the Philippines, there are a lot of places where intellectual property rights are honored. So if you are doing it, man, get it out of there. Don't do anything in China anymore, frankly here. But be careful with your cyber hygiene. Be careful with your assets. The first step you have to do in a business is to secure your assets in order to secure assets is to know what they are. All right. And we also talked about the big Capital One hack Mongo DB, a massive database used by verifications.io and the problems that came because of that as well. There are some other American Medical collection agencies, massive breach just bought disclosed in May of this year. We're talking about 12 million quest patients, almost 8 million LabCorp patients, all of their information was disclosed in the breach. This is a classic one, also, about third party risk about their data being in the hands of someone else who did not take care of it. And we already know you're going to take better care of your data, you're going to take better care of your customers in somebody else's. So you've got to watch the security posture of these other companies out there. insider threat. Another big one out there, which also hit these guys. The Federal Emergency Management Agency. 2.3 million survivors of California wildfires, Hurricane Harvey, Irma Maria, they were shared with a third party contractor, social security information of at least the last four digits went out there. All this stuff goes on and on. Right, Macy's, why pro many, many others in the last 12 months, we have to secure our businesses and I was talking to somebody of an idol of mine. And just an amazing man who has helped so many people. And he doesn't have his assets secured properly and he could really end up being and frankly, a whole bunch of problems. So be careful felt of this. So let's get back to a few more gifts here for the holiday season. And I'm really like this next one, I don't have one myself. This is something I never bought because I had some older versions made by other manufacturers. And I was never really happy with them. But this is the Apple Pencil. They've got a new one out. This is their second generation that works with all the newest iPad Pro models and has really built on top of that first generation pencil so we'll pay Apparently the latency problems you know, this is what I didn't like you draw and it would be about a half a second behind you. They've fixed a lot of that it's very smooth now very responsive. It is the smoothest writing tool for iPad pros it doesn't really like so keep an eye out for that one you might enjoy it and enjoy sharing that to see they are 120 bucks right now over at Walmart. There are some nice headphones these are really again kind of for gaming. It's called Cooler Master their headphones with a microphone built on to them. relatively neutral, well-balanced sound and it's great that locating sounds where they should be in the mix. So if you are more professional, a DJ if you're doing what I do here on the radio, a lot of people really like them. It has a detachable microphone as well and can do a very good job with me. The sound clear, they say exceptionally comfortable. And it's about 80 bucks online. How's that for cheap? If you have a Mac Book now of any sort, and an iPad now, Apple's OS and iOS, both natively support using that iPad as an extra screen for your computer. How's that for cool? Very, very neat. And Lenovo, a company I recommend against using it's a Chinese firm now has been for some years, and there's a lot of suspicions about what they're doing with spying and putting spyware on them. But Lenovo has this USBC portable monitor that I might actually have a look at as well. But it's 250 bucks, much cheaper than buying an iPad, and now gives you a portable 14-inch monitor that you can take with you anywhere. And now you've got your second screen. I use two screens. Least on all of my computers, I'm just thinking about that now. The one I'm in front of has two screens. And when I normally use has two screens, it's if you haven't used two screens, it's just absolutely marvelous to check out. So think vision m 14, it's USBC screen. And there's some other stuff that you can look at. And I've got all of these up online at Craig Peterson calm, as well as of course, a whole bunch more stuff I think that you might enjoy. This is a keyboard By the way, I'm thinking man, I think I really might want this. It's one of those old mechanical style ones, but it's 350 bucks. I can't. I haven't been able to bring myself to spend that much money on a keyboard but I have broken two of these big mechanical keyboards and other ones go click, click-click-click book, because I learned to type on a completely manual typewriter that no motors in it at all. Some of you might have learned that way too with no letters on the keys. You had to learn how to type and I got pretty good with that. And then that teletypes that TTY 30, threes, and on and on and on. So I really like those. Hey, I hope you guys have a phenomenal week. We've got Hanukkah coming up this week. We've got Christmas, of course, this week. And who could forget Seinfeld? Right? You know what I'm going to talk about here right? I have a real problem with you people. Yes, Festivus is coming up this week as well. And we've got family coming out to visit I hope you do too. I hope you have friends and relatives you can be with. Maybe if you don't, you can bump a little Christmas meal and Christmas cheer off of some friends. I know there's a lot of holiday office parties going on. including all the way through January this year. We may end up having hours then to just makes life a lot easier, frankly and tends to be a little cheaper to then trying to do it over the holidays here. I just want to share my love with everybody. Thanks for being with us. I'm probably going to end up doing a Best of Show this next weekend. So keep an eye open for that or an ear open for that as well as I am going to be kind of busy here during the holidays but it's going to be a wonderful time. And then after the first of the year, we have a ton of stuff coming up, pop-up-trainings like crazy and choruses and more cheat sheets everything to help make your 2020 a safer year than any you've had before. So have a great week. Have a great time New Year's as well. Make sure you visit me online Craig peterson.com. Take care, everybody. And I really, really hope that everything goes well for you and yours. You're listening to Craig Peters on WGAN and online Craig Peterson dot com.

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