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

Is Tuesday and Craig is back on the Jim Polito Show. This morning, Craig and Jim talked about Craig's travel to Europe. They also talked about why people should delete WhatsApp now.

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

---

Related Articles:

‘Delete Facebook Now’: WhatsApp Co-Founder Accuses Mark Zuckerberg Of Trading Privacy For Revenue After Allowing Ads On The Platform

--- 

Transcript:

Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors.

Airing date: 03/26/2019

Why Delete Whatsapp - Travel In Europe

Craig Peterson: 0:00
Hey, good morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. This morning I was on with Jim Polito. He just came back from quite the tour of Europe. And oh there's my puppy. Hi, Velma. I got a Great Dane name Velma.

Craig 0:15
She wants to say hi. Yes. Anyhow, he had a great tour of Europe, particularly Italy. And I also had some time going around Europe. We talked a little bit about that. And very quickly, we hit the WhatsApp story for this week. And there's of course, a whole lot more that you'll find online on my website. today. I'm also putting together the last module for this current course a bonus module on website security, how to secure your website, or if you make websites for other people how to secure their websites as well. So all of that man, what a week this week. I'll be back of course every other day this week, except maybe Sunday. But the real there's always news when it comes to tech and security. So here we go with Jim.

Jim Polito 1:06
He's our good friend, and he's been patiently waiting. And that's why we love him. We just can't get enough of them. I'm talking about our Tech Talk guru. Craig Peterson. Good morning, Craig.

Craig 1:19
Hey, good morning, Jim. It sounds like you had a great trip. I've been to Europe before but it was focused on Belgium and France. My wife and I, we rented a car. And we had a data plan for our phones. And all we did is for one month. We drove around. It was random. Where do we want to go today? And we used Hotwire to find good hotels. I was shocked that Hotwire worked over there. We found good hotels based on the ratings right? You have to ignore the stars, right? A five star one star whatever. And but these are rated hotels by people who use Hotwire. We drove around and we went everywhere. The castle that they had from Beauty and the Beast it was based on down in southern France. And of course, he went to Provence and we went down to the Met. And that was the first time I ever saw one of these toilets. That's basically a piece of porcelain in the floor. 

Jim 2:21
Yeah. Lovely. Lovely.

Craig 2:25
That's it. How could you ask for anything better? And there was stalls and you know how stalls here, the you know, the toilets, or the stalls around the toilets. They're like a foot or 18 inches, whatever off the ground. And you can kind of see if someone's in there. Like the airflow. They had the same thing. And they're like 18 inches off the ground. Oh my gosh. But Jim, that was the best time I think my wife and I have had just taking the time. Yeah, I could still feel do work. I called in to your show from France.

Jim 2:55 
Oh wait a minute. Yeah.

Craig 3:04
I don't think I mentioned that.

Jim 3:04
No, no. But I remember when you were away because Danny will give me a heads up. Like when you're traveling for business. And when you're traveling for pleasure, he always gives me a heads up like, you know, like bear in mind. Craig's away. Okay.

Craig 3:12 
On the road, yeah.

Jim 3:13
So careful.

Craig 3:15 
It was it was just so cool. The good news is I can still speak French after 40 years. Because I remember my education was in French schools. Right? My high school.

Jim 3:31
Right. Your High School was French.

Craig 3:34
Yeah, exactly. So I, you know, I stumbled a little bit of man is it come back fast. But what a trip and we went right to Italy, just barely, right there. And then, you know, in the Alps and stuff. But we didn't make it down. But we've got to do this. You have to look into going with you all and in March.

Jim 3:54
We're going on Ireland, Craig, we're going on. it's Gaelic and garlic. Now look, before I run out of time.

Craig 3:53 
Oh sorry.

Jim 4:01
No, no, no, it's not your fault. I could go on for hours, and I did about the toilet. But I want to hear this from you because I use WhatsApp. And you sent me this information. And by the way, folks, this is going to be an abbreviated version with Craig. But you're not going to miss out because if you text him my name, and he'll give you the number at the end of the segment, you'll get all this information plus a whole lot more. And I was getting updates while I was in Europe, which was great. Standard data in text rates apply. So the WhatsApp co founder says Mark Zuckerberg, is trading privacy for revenue. What What is what's going on? Is this just a fight between two Silicon Valley giants? Or is there some truth to this?

Craig 4:57
Yeah, there is truth to this. It's amazing to me now it's two faced, right. And we certainly seen that a lot in the news lately, especially in the political arena. But here's this guy who sold WhatsApp to Facebook. And he made I don't remember what was the sales over a billion dollars, I remember that much. It was not exactly pocket change. And so he sold it to Facebook. And he had always wanted to keep the basically your information private to allow you to enjoy you know, the conversations and stuff you have with friends without having advertising. Yeah, in the middle of it and everything being really obnoxious. Well, he's warning right now, because of some things that have happened at Facebook. And Facebook. Of course, they allowed over 150 companies, including Netflix, Spotify, and Bing in December of last year came out to access this crazy amounts of user data, private messages, even all of this right. So if you think your messages on WhatsApp are private, it allowed Bing for Microsoft search engine to see the name of all the Facebook users friends without their consent. Amazon, Facebook, allow them to obtain users names, contact information, their friends, their posts. Yahoo could view streams of friends post. And as of last year, Sony, Microsoft, Amazon could all get user's email addresses through the frenzy, you know, and it goes back and back right things that happened in September, etc. So now he's coming out after he made his billion dollars. And he's saying, Hey, listen, guys, I founded WhatsApp with a certain corporate sense that we wanted to keep our users information safe and secure, and not have you nailed with advertising all of the time and not giving your information away. And he's saying Mark Zuckerberg is doing the exact opposite in the values that WhatsApp was founded under.

Jim 6:47 
And WhatsApp you use in Europe, because as long as you have WiFi, you can do you know, talk, if you don't want to go get a data plan or something you can use that to talk to people.

Craig 7:04
Yeah, you can. And nowadays, most carriers, Verizon T-Mobile, etc. They will allow you to make calls over Wi Fi as well. So you can use your regular phone, you can receive calls while in Europe, if you are on a Wi Fi hotspot of some sort. WhatsApp is great about that. iOS just came out with a release yesterday and their Facetime application that group calling fixed and is now working again. So you could use that over there except for the fact that they had disabled it because of a bug. So.

Jim 7:45
Yeah, I saw that I was getting those updates a while while I was over there. But excellent. Craig, I'm sorry, this is short. And we'll make it up to you next week. But we can make it up to everybody right now. Because Because everything else we were going to talk about, including Michael Cohen, all of these different things. He's got some great, great info for you. And all you have to do is text my name to this number.

Craig 8:13
855-385-5553. Just text Jim to 855-385-5553.

Jim 8:22
That's right, standard data and text rates apply and Craig will not annoy you. Not in the least. Craig Thanks so much, buddy. We'll catch up with you next week.

Craig 8:26 
Take care Jim.

Jim 8:27 
Take care. All right, Craig Peterson everybody and final word when we return. You're listening to the Jim Polito Show.

Craig 8:42
Always a fun time. Make sure you subscribe by the way, go to http://CraigPeterson.com/iTunes and subscribe there. Or I think you can go to http://CraigPeterson.com/SoundCloud. I know you can go to http://CraigPeterson.com/TuneIn. There are a lot of options for everybody out there. But do subscribe. It really helps our numbers. And that helps us also to move up in the charts because it's just subscriptions that really matter. Thanks. Take care. Bye bye.

---

Don't miss any episode from Craig. Visit http://CraigPeterson.com/itunes. Subscribe and give us a rating!

Thanks, everyone, for listening and sharing our podcasts. We're really hitting it out of the park. This will be a great year! 

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Is Tuesday and Craig is back on the Jim Polito Show. This morning, Craig and Jim talked about Craig's travel to Europe. They also talked about why people should delete WhatsApp now.

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

---

Related Articles:

‘Delete Facebook Now’: WhatsApp Co-Founder Accuses Mark Zuckerberg Of Trading Privacy For Revenue After Allowing Ads On The Platform

--- 

Transcript:

Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors.

Airing date: 03/26/2019

Why Delete Whatsapp - Travel In Europe

Craig Peterson: 0:00
Hey, good morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. This morning I was on with Jim Polito. He just came back from quite the tour of Europe. And oh there's my puppy. Hi, Velma. I got a Great Dane name Velma.

Craig 0:15
She wants to say hi. Yes. Anyhow, he had a great tour of Europe, particularly Italy. And I also had some time going around Europe. We talked a little bit about that. And very quickly, we hit the WhatsApp story for this week. And there's of course, a whole lot more that you'll find online on my website. today. I'm also putting together the last module for this current course a bonus module on website security, how to secure your website, or if you make websites for other people how to secure their websites as well. So all of that man, what a week this week. I'll be back of course every other day this week, except maybe Sunday. But the real there's always news when it comes to tech and security. So here we go with Jim.

Jim Polito 1:06
He's our good friend, and he's been patiently waiting. And that's why we love him. We just can't get enough of them. I'm talking about our Tech Talk guru. Craig Peterson. Good morning, Craig.

Craig 1:19
Hey, good morning, Jim. It sounds like you had a great trip. I've been to Europe before but it was focused on Belgium and France. My wife and I, we rented a car. And we had a data plan for our phones. And all we did is for one month. We drove around. It was random. Where do we want to go today? And we used Hotwire to find good hotels. I was shocked that Hotwire worked over there. We found good hotels based on the ratings right? You have to ignore the stars, right? A five star one star whatever. And but these are rated hotels by people who use Hotwire. We drove around and we went everywhere. The castle that they had from Beauty and the Beast it was based on down in southern France. And of course, he went to Provence and we went down to the Met. And that was the first time I ever saw one of these toilets. That's basically a piece of porcelain in the floor. 

Jim 2:21
Yeah. Lovely. Lovely.

Craig 2:25
That's it. How could you ask for anything better? And there was stalls and you know how stalls here, the you know, the toilets, or the stalls around the toilets. They're like a foot or 18 inches, whatever off the ground. And you can kind of see if someone's in there. Like the airflow. They had the same thing. And they're like 18 inches off the ground. Oh my gosh. But Jim, that was the best time I think my wife and I have had just taking the time. Yeah, I could still feel do work. I called in to your show from France.

Jim 2:55 
Oh wait a minute. Yeah.

Craig 3:04
I don't think I mentioned that.

Jim 3:04
No, no. But I remember when you were away because Danny will give me a heads up. Like when you're traveling for business. And when you're traveling for pleasure, he always gives me a heads up like, you know, like bear in mind. Craig's away. Okay.

Craig 3:12 
On the road, yeah.

Jim 3:13
So careful.

Craig 3:15 
It was it was just so cool. The good news is I can still speak French after 40 years. Because I remember my education was in French schools. Right? My high school.

Jim 3:31
Right. Your High School was French.

Craig 3:34
Yeah, exactly. So I, you know, I stumbled a little bit of man is it come back fast. But what a trip and we went right to Italy, just barely, right there. And then, you know, in the Alps and stuff. But we didn't make it down. But we've got to do this. You have to look into going with you all and in March.

Jim 3:54
We're going on Ireland, Craig, we're going on. it's Gaelic and garlic. Now look, before I run out of time.

Craig 3:53 
Oh sorry.

Jim 4:01
No, no, no, it's not your fault. I could go on for hours, and I did about the toilet. But I want to hear this from you because I use WhatsApp. And you sent me this information. And by the way, folks, this is going to be an abbreviated version with Craig. But you're not going to miss out because if you text him my name, and he'll give you the number at the end of the segment, you'll get all this information plus a whole lot more. And I was getting updates while I was in Europe, which was great. Standard data in text rates apply. So the WhatsApp co founder says Mark Zuckerberg, is trading privacy for revenue. What What is what's going on? Is this just a fight between two Silicon Valley giants? Or is there some truth to this?

Craig 4:57
Yeah, there is truth to this. It's amazing to me now it's two faced, right. And we certainly seen that a lot in the news lately, especially in the political arena. But here's this guy who sold WhatsApp to Facebook. And he made I don't remember what was the sales over a billion dollars, I remember that much. It was not exactly pocket change. And so he sold it to Facebook. And he had always wanted to keep the basically your information private to allow you to enjoy you know, the conversations and stuff you have with friends without having advertising. Yeah, in the middle of it and everything being really obnoxious. Well, he's warning right now, because of some things that have happened at Facebook. And Facebook. Of course, they allowed over 150 companies, including Netflix, Spotify, and Bing in December of last year came out to access this crazy amounts of user data, private messages, even all of this right. So if you think your messages on WhatsApp are private, it allowed Bing for Microsoft search engine to see the name of all the Facebook users friends without their consent. Amazon, Facebook, allow them to obtain users names, contact information, their friends, their posts. Yahoo could view streams of friends post. And as of last year, Sony, Microsoft, Amazon could all get user's email addresses through the frenzy, you know, and it goes back and back right things that happened in September, etc. So now he's coming out after he made his billion dollars. And he's saying, Hey, listen, guys, I founded WhatsApp with a certain corporate sense that we wanted to keep our users information safe and secure, and not have you nailed with advertising all of the time and not giving your information away. And he's saying Mark Zuckerberg is doing the exact opposite in the values that WhatsApp was founded under.

Jim 6:47 
And WhatsApp you use in Europe, because as long as you have WiFi, you can do you know, talk, if you don't want to go get a data plan or something you can use that to talk to people.

Craig 7:04
Yeah, you can. And nowadays, most carriers, Verizon T-Mobile, etc. They will allow you to make calls over Wi Fi as well. So you can use your regular phone, you can receive calls while in Europe, if you are on a Wi Fi hotspot of some sort. WhatsApp is great about that. iOS just came out with a release yesterday and their Facetime application that group calling fixed and is now working again. So you could use that over there except for the fact that they had disabled it because of a bug. So.

Jim 7:45
Yeah, I saw that I was getting those updates a while while I was over there. But excellent. Craig, I'm sorry, this is short. And we'll make it up to you next week. But we can make it up to everybody right now. Because Because everything else we were going to talk about, including Michael Cohen, all of these different things. He's got some great, great info for you. And all you have to do is text my name to this number.

Craig 8:13
855-385-5553. Just text Jim to 855-385-5553.

Jim 8:22
That's right, standard data and text rates apply and Craig will not annoy you. Not in the least. Craig Thanks so much, buddy. We'll catch up with you next week.

Craig 8:26 
Take care Jim.

Jim 8:27 
Take care. All right, Craig Peterson everybody and final word when we return. You're listening to the Jim Polito Show.

Craig 8:42
Always a fun time. Make sure you subscribe by the way, go to http://CraigPeterson.com/iTunes and subscribe there. Or I think you can go to http://CraigPeterson.com/SoundCloud. I know you can go to http://CraigPeterson.com/TuneIn. There are a lot of options for everybody out there. But do subscribe. It really helps our numbers. And that helps us also to move up in the charts because it's just subscriptions that really matter. Thanks. Take care. Bye bye.

---

Don't miss any episode from Craig. Visit http://CraigPeterson.com/itunes. Subscribe and give us a rating!

Thanks, everyone, for listening and sharing our podcasts. We're really hitting it out of the park. This will be a great year! 

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Craig is with Jack Heath on the Auto Fair listener lines. They discussed the importance of STEM education and the current problems on the Boeing 737 Max.

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

---

Related Articles 

---

Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors.

Airing date: 03/25/2019

Boeing 737 Max Problems - Importance Of STEM Education For Society

Craig Peterson 0:00
Hey, good morning, everybody. Man we've been busy delivering, I don't think I've been this busy in 20 years. Well, I don't know, maybe five, six years ago, we're doing a big deployment, I was pretty busy back then. But putting this course together and teaching it, it has been energizing for me, even though I've been so busy working so hard. So that last module is coming out this week. That's eight major modules on do it yourself, cyber security. And I am putting together these bonus modules on securing your website. We've got a lot of stuff to release, the last coaching call is this week. It has been quite the little trip here. It's been fun. I appreciate everybody that bought the course that signed up and has participated we had amazing participation too. I'm really quite, quite shocked. I'm very happy about it. It has been good all the way around. And I am going to do it again. Probably in another month or so once I kind of calmed down, take care of a few other things. And I'm going to add a few things, move some things around. And you know how that always goes. But anyhow, it has been great. And thank you. Thank you. Thank you to everybody who has been involved. Also, thanks to our listeners here in the podcast. I've been getting some nice feedback and you know, basically any feedback I think is good feedback. It really helps me to hone things in but some people listening on the weekend, some people listening to and from work. People listening at the gym, it's it's fascinating to think about all of the different people involved here listening and participating. So if you have any comments, suggestions, whatever, just email [email protected] or you can always text me 855-385-5553. Excuse me. 855-385-5553 Well, this morning, I was on with Mr. Jack Heath. And we spend quite a bit of time talking about what's happening with Boeing and my concerns about it as well as what's happening with the army recruiting they were on a little earlier on his radio show and they mentioned stem so of course I got into that little bit as well so here we go.

Jack Heath 2:34
Colonel Anzalone as we go to some Tech Talk we just had Colonel Ron Anzalone with us arm and he was talking about how Craig Peterson as we turn to our Tech Talk guy on the Auto Fair listener lines. Craig and his show airs Saturday later in the morning on our iHeart news talk stations. Craig, the colonel somewhat in effort to recruit young people in the army in Boston, they're going to be taking part in that gamer weekend, you know, these these games and some colleges now are basically coming up with four year courses and what I would call, you know, e-game. You know, I don't know, gaming, you know, video stuff, games and all the technology that goes with it as a way to reach more recruits. But interesting stuff. The other thing I want to get from you, Craig, is Boeing has a real challenge now working on the software adjustment for the 737 max class.

Craig 3:19
Yeah, Hey, good morning, Jack. There. I love the fact that you brought up STEM because I've always felt it's so important. That's the science, technology, engineering and mathematics. It's something that US First has really emphasized over the years. And of course, that's started right here. Something Dean Kamen helped to really spearhead. And that's the first robotics competition. You know, when I had a longer show, in fact, we used to go three, four hours during the finals.

Jack 3:50
I remember that.

Craig 3:51 
Yeah, it was fantastic. But these kids, these are the future. And I've said that for so long, getting your kid involved. Almost every school in New Hampshire has a program. It starts when they're young with Lego. And then moves all the way up to the big robots, where they're doing everything from the business plan, how we're going to raise money, how we're going to do out to outreach, how we're going to have safety when we're building these things? They have different sub teams, the marketing people that are involved, and we're talking about kids in high school, all the way through, how do we accomplish this task were assigned to accomplish with the robot? Well, we are given some very, very limited parts of basically just the controllers. So how do we want to make our robot? What we're gonna make it out of? You see these things made out of PVC, out of wood, out of different types of metals, and then they come to the competition, and we're in competition season now. And it's just fantastic. And that's what the not only the military's looking for, is the kids with these abilities, not only to to play the games, but to design the software, design the hardware, design the systems. And I think this outreach you're doing is fantastic. It's going to be great for the military. And then we get down to the FAA side of things, Jack, and what's happening with Boeing. And, man, this is a really big story. And again, I don't want to say I told you so. So I'm not going to say it.

Craig 5:29
I really was worried about these European airplanes, because the basic design difference between what Boeing was doing at the time, and these European planes, Boeing bowling was designed so that if you wanted to disagree with the plane, you fought against the plane, you pulled harder on that stick or push harder or turn harder or, or with the flaps or whatever you wanted to do. Whereas the European planes are coming out were all based on computers and, and you had to walk through multiple screens. You might remember the first error, but I think it was the very first one crashed right when they were demonstrating it for the very first time to potential purchasers, because it overrode what the pilots wanted to do. And the pilots' natural instincts were completely ignored. Well, this is what I've warned about when we're talking about automation, it really appears that these 737 Max jets with this new anti stall system, and it's technically called the maneuvering characteristics Augmentation System. But this new anti stall system is overriding the pilot's inputs. The pilot should be able to fight with pet stick, if it works. If the pilot one set nose up, it should be able to fight with the plane. And the plane should then be saying, okay, pilot, I'm going to do what you want to do. But you know, I'm going to fight with you a little bit because I disagree. That is a huge design change in Boeing's mind from what it was 20 years ago. And it is scary as heck. Because we are not computer operators. We have our natural instincts, the way we respond, the way we worked all of these gears. You can't all of a sudden put a system in place. not have the instrumentation on on the board, but you can't put a system in place that overrides the pilots input. 

Jack 7:42
Well that's why I'm not a big fan of Teslas, the driverless cars are always the more automation I think the driver always needs to be, you know, ultimately responsible. Anyway. That's good stuff, Craig, we'll see where it all goes and pointing to talk about on the tech side. Thank you.

Craig 7:50 
Absolutely. Thanks Jack.

---

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

Craig is with Jack Heath on the Auto Fair listener lines. They discussed the importance of STEM education and the current problems on the Boeing 737 Max.

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

---

Related Articles 

---

Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors.

Airing date: 03/25/2019

Boeing 737 Max Problems - Importance Of STEM Education For Society

Craig Peterson 0:00
Hey, good morning, everybody. Man we've been busy delivering, I don't think I've been this busy in 20 years. Well, I don't know, maybe five, six years ago, we're doing a big deployment, I was pretty busy back then. But putting this course together and teaching it, it has been energizing for me, even though I've been so busy working so hard. So that last module is coming out this week. That's eight major modules on do it yourself, cyber security. And I am putting together these bonus modules on securing your website. We've got a lot of stuff to release, the last coaching call is this week. It has been quite the little trip here. It's been fun. I appreciate everybody that bought the course that signed up and has participated we had amazing participation too. I'm really quite, quite shocked. I'm very happy about it. It has been good all the way around. And I am going to do it again. Probably in another month or so once I kind of calmed down, take care of a few other things. And I'm going to add a few things, move some things around. And you know how that always goes. But anyhow, it has been great. And thank you. Thank you. Thank you to everybody who has been involved. Also, thanks to our listeners here in the podcast. I've been getting some nice feedback and you know, basically any feedback I think is good feedback. It really helps me to hone things in but some people listening on the weekend, some people listening to and from work. People listening at the gym, it's it's fascinating to think about all of the different people involved here listening and participating. So if you have any comments, suggestions, whatever, just email [email protected] or you can always text me 855-385-5553. Excuse me. 855-385-5553 Well, this morning, I was on with Mr. Jack Heath. And we spend quite a bit of time talking about what's happening with Boeing and my concerns about it as well as what's happening with the army recruiting they were on a little earlier on his radio show and they mentioned stem so of course I got into that little bit as well so here we go.

Jack Heath 2:34
Colonel Anzalone as we go to some Tech Talk we just had Colonel Ron Anzalone with us arm and he was talking about how Craig Peterson as we turn to our Tech Talk guy on the Auto Fair listener lines. Craig and his show airs Saturday later in the morning on our iHeart news talk stations. Craig, the colonel somewhat in effort to recruit young people in the army in Boston, they're going to be taking part in that gamer weekend, you know, these these games and some colleges now are basically coming up with four year courses and what I would call, you know, e-game. You know, I don't know, gaming, you know, video stuff, games and all the technology that goes with it as a way to reach more recruits. But interesting stuff. The other thing I want to get from you, Craig, is Boeing has a real challenge now working on the software adjustment for the 737 max class.

Craig 3:19
Yeah, Hey, good morning, Jack. There. I love the fact that you brought up STEM because I've always felt it's so important. That's the science, technology, engineering and mathematics. It's something that US First has really emphasized over the years. And of course, that's started right here. Something Dean Kamen helped to really spearhead. And that's the first robotics competition. You know, when I had a longer show, in fact, we used to go three, four hours during the finals.

Jack 3:50
I remember that.

Craig 3:51 
Yeah, it was fantastic. But these kids, these are the future. And I've said that for so long, getting your kid involved. Almost every school in New Hampshire has a program. It starts when they're young with Lego. And then moves all the way up to the big robots, where they're doing everything from the business plan, how we're going to raise money, how we're going to do out to outreach, how we're going to have safety when we're building these things? They have different sub teams, the marketing people that are involved, and we're talking about kids in high school, all the way through, how do we accomplish this task were assigned to accomplish with the robot? Well, we are given some very, very limited parts of basically just the controllers. So how do we want to make our robot? What we're gonna make it out of? You see these things made out of PVC, out of wood, out of different types of metals, and then they come to the competition, and we're in competition season now. And it's just fantastic. And that's what the not only the military's looking for, is the kids with these abilities, not only to to play the games, but to design the software, design the hardware, design the systems. And I think this outreach you're doing is fantastic. It's going to be great for the military. And then we get down to the FAA side of things, Jack, and what's happening with Boeing. And, man, this is a really big story. And again, I don't want to say I told you so. So I'm not going to say it.

Craig 5:29
I really was worried about these European airplanes, because the basic design difference between what Boeing was doing at the time, and these European planes, Boeing bowling was designed so that if you wanted to disagree with the plane, you fought against the plane, you pulled harder on that stick or push harder or turn harder or, or with the flaps or whatever you wanted to do. Whereas the European planes are coming out were all based on computers and, and you had to walk through multiple screens. You might remember the first error, but I think it was the very first one crashed right when they were demonstrating it for the very first time to potential purchasers, because it overrode what the pilots wanted to do. And the pilots' natural instincts were completely ignored. Well, this is what I've warned about when we're talking about automation, it really appears that these 737 Max jets with this new anti stall system, and it's technically called the maneuvering characteristics Augmentation System. But this new anti stall system is overriding the pilot's inputs. The pilot should be able to fight with pet stick, if it works. If the pilot one set nose up, it should be able to fight with the plane. And the plane should then be saying, okay, pilot, I'm going to do what you want to do. But you know, I'm going to fight with you a little bit because I disagree. That is a huge design change in Boeing's mind from what it was 20 years ago. And it is scary as heck. Because we are not computer operators. We have our natural instincts, the way we respond, the way we worked all of these gears. You can't all of a sudden put a system in place. not have the instrumentation on on the board, but you can't put a system in place that overrides the pilots input. 

Jack 7:42
Well that's why I'm not a big fan of Teslas, the driverless cars are always the more automation I think the driver always needs to be, you know, ultimately responsible. Anyway. That's good stuff, Craig, we'll see where it all goes and pointing to talk about on the tech side. Thank you.

Craig 7:50 
Absolutely. Thanks Jack.

---

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Transcript:

Below is a rush transcript of this segment; it might contain errors.

Airing date: 03/23/2019

Using Social Media Posts For Insurance Rates - Virtual Kidnapping - The Surveillance State

Craig Peterson 0:00  
This has kind of become my theme music, hasn't it? Over the last couple of months.

Craig 0:09
I like it. I've been using it all of my training videos and just all over the place.

Craig 0:13
And it's nice because I have the rights to use it, right? I don't have to worry about getting banned on YouTube or some other place because I'm using music I don't own right? Copyrighted stuff. But it's crazy when people do that. And just, I guess just don't know. Well, we have a bunch to talk about today. 

Craig 0:34
Also, I don't know if you caught it this week. But make sure you catch my podcast at http://CraigPeterson.com/iTunes. But I talked about two business problems. This week, we got a huge aluminum manufacturing giant over in Norway. It's not just basic manufacturer, I mean, these guys are huge. It's called Norsk Hydro, they also provide power and other things, had to shut down because they were nailed with ransomware. So I went through what happened there, what the whole thing was about some pros and cons, some things that we as business people can kind of keep an eye out for. 

Craig 1:13
And then I also talked a little bit about this, Michael, in fact, quite a bit about this Michael Cohen investigation and triggerfish, and what that is all about? And yeah, I thought that they had pretty much stopped using triggerfish and some of these other technologies. But as it turns out, no, that is not the case. So, that's what I talked about this week. It's a Security Thing. And right now, of course, we are live on the radio. And we're going to talk about a half a dozen other things that we just never managed to have quite enough time to get to, right. We're going to be talking about HR departments and the problem we have right now, with the huge high employment rate, how some of them are turning to artificial intelligence and how you might too. The guy who founded WhatsApp has a warning for us about Facebook, and I don't know this guy, come on, you made your money you got out and now you're upset. Bizarre malware is disabling some safety systems that industrial plants. And it's an interesting, quote, ethical line, unquote, for hackers, because historically, they have avoided things that would cause problems with public safety. But now they are no longer doing that. I talked a bit about that as well. This week, it's a security thing. On my podcast again, http://CraigPeterson.com/iTunes, a massive database leak. And we know we're seeing these almost every week but this one's more interesting, because it turns out, it's surveillance on Chinese citizens by China. So what are they doing over there in China's digital surveillance state and what's coming here because these companies that are providing them with the tech are based in the US? And life insurers can now use social media posts to determine your premiums. That's an interesting one.

Craig 3:17 
And we will start up with two virtual kidnapping scams that occurred within 24 hours this week over in Laguna Beach. And it's something that I have a bit of a personal tie to, not in Laguna Beach, but these virtual kidnapping scams. One of the ladies that work with me, her friend had one of these happened to her. In fact, I think she got called out, this lady that works with me. And man, Maria, the thing that happened. It was just absolutely amazing. This is an article from the Orange County Register on California, it's up on my website, http://CraigPeterson.com. Two virtual kidnap cases within 24 hours, have led please to alert all local schools. Both these incidents were similar phone calls who were made to potential victims, with the color demanding a large sum of money or threatening to harm a loved one. Quote, we definitely believe these incidents are connected and said Sergeant Jim Kota, who last summer spearheaded assistance for Laguna mother who sought help after receiving a threatening call. They are happening and surrounding cities and all appear to be connected to the same group. All of them want money transferred to an account in Mexico. And they are directing victims outside of the city to withdraw money. It's like they've been there before. They're sending them all to Costa Mesa to make this payment.

Craig 4:53
So they had a report on March 7, and the victim here of this scam had already paid $5,000. And the article goes into some detail. But the here's the bottom line on it.

Craig 5:11
The FBI got involved about a week ago. And of course, they investigate the scams, and they work with local law enforcement agencies. So if something like this happens to you, you can call your local police department. But what it is these virtual kidnapping scams, and what happened to the lady that works with me is that they call you up pretending they have kidnapped a loved one. Now, usually, they found out a little bit about you, they might have gone on to your social media to figure out who you are or what you're doing or where you are, etc. who your friends are. And so many of us have that information out in public on Facebook and elsewhere. So they reach out to you, they say I'm holding so and so hostage. And unless you make this payment, I am not going to release, I'm gonna kill them or whatever it is. So these are virtual kidnapping cases. Now in the case of a lady that works with me, she got a call about a friend she has. And sometimes these are, hey, they're out of the country, they need money to get back in, and I'm with the government, and we're holding them because they did something wrong, etc. There's all kinds of these scams. But she was smart enough to call up that person and found out that yeah, that's not me, I don't know what's going on, I'm fine. There's nothing going on at all. So that's something to keep in mind, too, that you can call, do a little research on your own and follow up because these people are not necessarily really smart or thorough in what they're doing. So keep that in mind as well. But Laguna police department is warning people that it's happening on a wider basis right now.

Craig 6:58
Next up, we have this questionable practice by life insurers; you know that many life insurance companies use your credit rating, to come up to the premium. They do that for all kinds of things now. They do it for health, they do it for employment, looking at your credit rating. And we've also talked before about how in some countries like China, they're using your social credit now to determine whether or not you're worthy for a loan, etc. You know, five years ago, we wouldn't have thought twice about this, who would have thought this is crazy. It's not likely to happen. You guys haven't because we've been talking about this for what 10 or 15 years. But New York's Department of Financial Services has released new guidelines that will allow the life insurance company to use data from customers social media posts to determine their premiums. And experts are saying these rules could potentially extend to other states and you know, some of these federally chartered companies and agencies. So the new guidelines are suggesting that companies can use the data from other nontraditional sources as well, though insurers will have to prove the information doesn't unfairly discriminate against protected groups.

Craig 8:20
There's a bunch of really press release stuff here in the article if you're interested that that's up at http://CraigPeterson.com.

Craig 8:28
The National Association of insurance commissioners released a white paper back in 2012, from what they call their social media working group that address the ways that insurance companies couldn't use social media in their marketing, and also ways to use it to monitor customers. And they're saying that as of 2012, they are already using it. So we've warned everybody for a very long time, do not post things online that you don't want to have shown up later on. Because that's one of the first things that police do when they start investigating someone now, they'll go to your social media; they'll search for you online. Right? Google is their first line of investigation. And it looks like even for this dossier they've been using to go after President Trump and try to show Russian collusion, that even that dossier was put together from online searches on the CNN website of posts people had put up. Man, I heard that this week, I have no idea about the validity of that. But what we say online, reflects us to some degree. And if you do say it online, it can and will be used against you. Now, you know, I like Apple, and I love the way they handled privacy, they don't give all kinds of information out to third parties. They're not trying to mine that information themselves to have some sort of a significant advantage about you or in what you're doing and what you're going etc. So Apple's pretty good about that. But remember that Apple too, if they have a subpoena, that's obviously legitimately issued, they will give up information about you. And they have turned over iCloud accounts and other things. So just because you have things online that you've posted, that are considered private and you shared with your best friend or your family, remember that law enforcement can certainly get at it. Bad guys can get at it, they're always cracking into Facebook accounts, and your friend or family has it and could possibly reshare it at which point now it's no longer private, right? They could repost it; they could save it, they can put it away for a rainy day when they want to play blackmail you. So, be very, very careful about what you say online because much of that can and will be used against you in the court of public or company opinion. And I think New York might have done us a bit of a favor here too. Because it's not just about going on to social media, you know, Facebook, or Twitter or whatever. It really goes to the next level. You know, we've seen deep fakes, we've talked about them here before, one of the big ones is this plane that's kind of flipping around, and it's a big ass jet, that passenger jet. And it was a total fake, and it was shared millions of times online. So you've got that. But you also have legitimate stuff. But I think part of the favor they're doing here is putting something on the record that can be challenged. These life insurance, actuarial tables, the car insurance that you buy, that is based at least partially on your credit rating, how do they work? What are the parameters that go into these? How is the program written? What bugs are there in that program? You don't know they won't tell you. And that's part of the problem I have with what California is doing with getting rid of the bail bondsman. They say well; we can trust this algorithm. No, we can't. How many times have we talked about having computer programs fail on us?

Craig 12:20
So there are are no states right now that have any rules or regulations about how life insurance and the automobile insurers and the bondsman can populate the data for their algorithms for their programs. There's no rules, there's no regulations, you can't challenge them in court. They'll bring in some professional that says some mumbo jumbo that's beyond the judge. It's beyond the jury, and is beyond the truth, right, all in one. But you don't know that. We do know that. They're currently using public records like home ownership data, credit information, education level that you had in college or high school, any civil judgment, any licenses you have anything they can find that's public, and even your internet use in the history of they can get their hands on it. And now this is an extra step and people are freaking out. And I get it; I understand that I would too. And but now we can get the legal system into action. And I hope they do. And I hope that there's a good precedent set and not some lousy precedent. So you know, I just, you see that too much when you have judges, juries, and you know, defense attorneys and prosecution attorneys that really don't understand what's going on. And so then you end up with bad judgments, right? Bad dicta in the cases, from the judges, etc., etc.

Craig 13:59
We got this massive database leak, and I found out about it over the Electronic Frontier Foundation, I put their article up on my site at http://CraigPeterson.com. Earlier this month or security researcher found and disclosed and exposed an unexposed database.

Craig 14:19
And this database was online that these things happen all of the time, people are building software, they don't understand the implications of what they're doing. And I talked about it in my It's a Security Thing, podcast this week.

Craig 14:35
They just don't understand. And because they don't understand, they're just messing everybody up. And I see this almost everywhere. You know businesses, when you have a new product or designing when you have a product you're using, even when you're using a third party software as a service that you might trust, have a true security professional look it over. And there are security professionals available. I know there are almost 3 million job openings in our security world out there. But they are available, pay them you can't pay them enough to come and have a serious look at this.

Craig 15:18
You'll pay to have an attorney come in at hundreds of dollars an hour, some of these attorneys are over $1,000 an hour to look at something to look at the legality because well, you might save tens of thousands or even a million dollars in a lawsuit.

Craig 15:35
Well, the same thing is true with security.

Craig 15:40
If your data is breached, you could easily face it more than a million dollars and find and no judge or jury is going to protect you from that. These are fines that are levied by the regulating agencies. And there's basically nowhere to turn; then on top of it, you could have your customers suing you, you could have consumers, so we knew because their information got out. And you could end up with hundreds of millions of dollars and judgment against you. But no, what are you going to do? Oh, you're just going to trust your IT guy who was a programmer who has his bachelor's or even masters or doctorate in computer programming from some University.

Craig 16:25
No. You need a specialist just like you go to a specialist law firm. You need a true specialist. And the people just aren't doing it. So here's an example of this security researcher. And yeah, we're talking about China here. But China has hired some American companies to build this. So in this case, this database owned by a company called SenseNets. It's a private artificial intelligence company that advertises facial recognition, crowd analysis technologies. So you'd think that they would have some modicum of understanding about security, but they didn't. And they didn't hire a security expert to come in.

Craig 17:20
And what's that going to cost you? 100,000? 200,000? Half a million maybe? And instead of that, they'd rather just lose the whole business because they don't see that as a real risk. Well, let's talk about this risk because we'll get to this Chinese company here in just a second. But let's talk about the risk.

Craig 17:42
There was a cyber security firm that just released a little report saying that they found at least 468 Mongo DB servers exposed to the public internet. Almost 500. Well, what's a Mongo DB server? These are database servers, the main technology group is called No Sequel, but typically used for huge databases. So what is this database that this company SenseNet have in them? SenseNets, excuse me, having it?

Craig 18:21
Well, it turned out all it had was DNA samples, voice samples, fingerprints, iris scans, and much, much more. These were all residents between the ages of 12 and 65 that were from Xinjiang. And they had been questioned about their use of mobile and internet tools. Over there, just having WhatsApp or Skype installed in your phone is classified as subversive behavior. Remember that China is a socialist country, I don't know. But most people I get it, most people don't want to mention the fact that they're Communist or socialist, or they are just incredibly under the thumb of the government. Heaven forbid, you know, we want that here, right in the United States. Right? Yeah. Okay. And since 2017, the authorities and China have told all of the Xinjiang mobile phone users, they have to install the spyware app, to prevent them from accessing terrorist information. That's a quote. Okay. 

Craig 19:37
So we've got evidence now of mass detention centers, newly erected surveillance systems, that China has been bulldozing whole towns because of subversive behavior. All the systems in China that are has been pouring billions of dollars into physical and digital means of, of substantial surveillance in Xinjiang and other regions over there in China. So it's been unclear to a lot of researchers and human rights activists, just what extent these projects as they're operating, you know, heaven forbid, that happened in our country. Oh, wait a minute. It did. Right. We did have surveillance going on. The NSA is scrapping some of those programs; maybe it wasn't the same. Perhaps we haven't been putting people into detention centers. But come on, guys. We're already at a place where five years ago, we didn't think we would be, right? We just discussed that ten years ago, where are we going to be in five or 10 years from now? Hopefully, civil libertarians are out there. Indeed, the major parties have been stepping up; the Democrat Party really hasn't been looking at what Obama did with significant increases in surveillance. I kind of get it after 911 that maybe we want to have a look or look see and figure out what's going on because it kind of hit us from the middle of nowhere in some ways. But that has to go away; it looks like it is going to go away this year under President Trump. And hopefully, the democratic house is going to go along with it as well.

Craig 21:05
But now we have found out we found out more because of this data leak that happened with this security company, I'd laugh and laugh about that, over in the US helping China.

Craig 21:21
So in addition to some of the biometric and other information, this database of 2.6 million people includes their national ID number think social security number, which our government obviously has on us as well. Ethnicity. Well, you know, we've been giving that to our government for years and forms that we fill out. Our nationality, our government has that. Phone number, our government has that. Date of birth, our government has that. Home addresses, our government has that. Employer, our government has that. And photos, our government has that.

Craig 21:57
So all of these same things, types of records that our government has, were found on this database online, from a company that's selling technology to track citizens to the Chinese government. Now over 24 hours, this database collected, just one day, 6.2 million individual GPS coordinates linking these citizens of this province over in China, of this area in China, connecting them to various public camera streams all automatically where they're tracking them in the streets, and identification checkpoints. You love that idea of inspections right? Like Checkpoint Charlie, for those of us that are old enough to remember that.

Craig 22:51
Checkpoints associated with location tags such as hotels, mosques, police stations, the GPS coordinates, all located within Xinjiang where they're doing this service.

Craig 23:05
My gosh, so Givers of he reported a second open database tracking the movements of millions of cars and pedestrians violations, like jaywalking speeding, going through a red light are detected. They trigger the camera to take a photo and ping a WeChat app, presumably to try and tie the event to an identity.

Craig 23:28
It goes on and on. So this database exposed to anyone with an internet connection for the last six months. Oh, by the way, some of these other 468 database servers that were found on the open Internet that were open, contain detailed information about remote access consoles owned by China General Nuclear Power Group, and through GPS coordinates of bike rentals. So there you go with the surveillance state, they're in China.

Craig 24:01
They're tolerating poor engineering, that is getting crackdown on by the way, in western countries, Europe, the United States, companies are getting sued over this. We were helping out a company that, small practice, this is a doctor's office, they're trying to upgrade. Trying to secure things trying to do the right thing. And it was just shocking when we looked into all of these medical apps that are supposedly HIPAA compliant. We did not find a single app; they claimed it was HIPAA compliant, that was HIPAA compliant. Nothing being done about data at rest, and just on and on from there. It's nuts. How bad most of the programming, most of the software is out there. So I feel sorry for a lot of companies because you're stuck. You are stuck. But you've got to find and hire security experts to review what you have in place if they're willing to do it because you know, good guys, I don't run out willy nilly and, and look at networks and look at security setups and everything else. There's just too much for me to do. There's too much business out there. But you still got to do it. And you've got to investigate the people that are working for you that say they have a security background because they may or may not. That leads us to our last story we're able to get to today. Well, I'll get I'll just do this really briefly because I want to hit one other topic, but HR department, now, according to The Wall Street Journal are turning to artificial intelligence to try and find talent because good people are disappearing off the market almost instantly. They're using AI by getting into Microsoft's databases. Remember, they bought LinkedIn, so they've got all kinds of information about people. It's combing through the profiles of more than 610 million members tens of thousands of skills and titles and the looking at behavioral data. And going on and on what jobs candidates are applying for. Citizens Bank launches an AI-powered career coach named Myca, which is short for my career. IBM has a chat box that has AI built into it. And you may have to do that yourself. If you're looking to hire. It's getting more and more difficult to get excellent talent, especially in the IT space and more specifically in the computer security space. And WhatsApp, you probably heard about that if you're not using it. But what tap is a company that was purchased and became part of the Facebook group? And man, the guy that sold it made some clear money. I can't remember what it is offhand. But I think it was in the billion plus range. Well, the founder of WhatsApp is warning people. He's saying you need to delete Facebook immediately. And this article from the Daily Mail over in the UK talks about why all of the reasons why you should and how the disclosure of your information is just it's rampant over at Facebook anyhow.

Craig 27:36
Have a great week we are finishing up our DIY cybersecurity course. This week will be our last week of coaching calls. So shout out to everybody and a big thanks to everybody that's been involved in asking questions. And we've been answering all kinds of questions from everybody. This week. It's getting busier. You can text me 855-385-5553 anytime or just email [email protected]. Hey, have a great week. Bye-bye.

--- 

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---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

That last tweet or facebook picture may raise your insurance rates? We will explore why?

Extortion and the Internet. Now even normal people are the targets of these tactics?  Unpacking the trend in Virtual Kidnapping.

Whose watching us? Why? Yes, it is time to talk more deeply about Surveillance.

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

---

Transcript:

Below is a rush transcript of this segment; it might contain errors.

Airing date: 03/23/2019

Using Social Media Posts For Insurance Rates - Virtual Kidnapping - The Surveillance State

Craig Peterson 0:00  
This has kind of become my theme music, hasn't it? Over the last couple of months.

Craig 0:09
I like it. I've been using it all of my training videos and just all over the place.

Craig 0:13
And it's nice because I have the rights to use it, right? I don't have to worry about getting banned on YouTube or some other place because I'm using music I don't own right? Copyrighted stuff. But it's crazy when people do that. And just, I guess just don't know. Well, we have a bunch to talk about today. 

Craig 0:34
Also, I don't know if you caught it this week. But make sure you catch my podcast at http://CraigPeterson.com/iTunes. But I talked about two business problems. This week, we got a huge aluminum manufacturing giant over in Norway. It's not just basic manufacturer, I mean, these guys are huge. It's called Norsk Hydro, they also provide power and other things, had to shut down because they were nailed with ransomware. So I went through what happened there, what the whole thing was about some pros and cons, some things that we as business people can kind of keep an eye out for. 

Craig 1:13
And then I also talked a little bit about this, Michael, in fact, quite a bit about this Michael Cohen investigation and triggerfish, and what that is all about? And yeah, I thought that they had pretty much stopped using triggerfish and some of these other technologies. But as it turns out, no, that is not the case. So, that's what I talked about this week. It's a Security Thing. And right now, of course, we are live on the radio. And we're going to talk about a half a dozen other things that we just never managed to have quite enough time to get to, right. We're going to be talking about HR departments and the problem we have right now, with the huge high employment rate, how some of them are turning to artificial intelligence and how you might too. The guy who founded WhatsApp has a warning for us about Facebook, and I don't know this guy, come on, you made your money you got out and now you're upset. Bizarre malware is disabling some safety systems that industrial plants. And it's an interesting, quote, ethical line, unquote, for hackers, because historically, they have avoided things that would cause problems with public safety. But now they are no longer doing that. I talked a bit about that as well. This week, it's a security thing. On my podcast again, http://CraigPeterson.com/iTunes, a massive database leak. And we know we're seeing these almost every week but this one's more interesting, because it turns out, it's surveillance on Chinese citizens by China. So what are they doing over there in China's digital surveillance state and what's coming here because these companies that are providing them with the tech are based in the US? And life insurers can now use social media posts to determine your premiums. That's an interesting one.

Craig 3:17 
And we will start up with two virtual kidnapping scams that occurred within 24 hours this week over in Laguna Beach. And it's something that I have a bit of a personal tie to, not in Laguna Beach, but these virtual kidnapping scams. One of the ladies that work with me, her friend had one of these happened to her. In fact, I think she got called out, this lady that works with me. And man, Maria, the thing that happened. It was just absolutely amazing. This is an article from the Orange County Register on California, it's up on my website, http://CraigPeterson.com. Two virtual kidnap cases within 24 hours, have led please to alert all local schools. Both these incidents were similar phone calls who were made to potential victims, with the color demanding a large sum of money or threatening to harm a loved one. Quote, we definitely believe these incidents are connected and said Sergeant Jim Kota, who last summer spearheaded assistance for Laguna mother who sought help after receiving a threatening call. They are happening and surrounding cities and all appear to be connected to the same group. All of them want money transferred to an account in Mexico. And they are directing victims outside of the city to withdraw money. It's like they've been there before. They're sending them all to Costa Mesa to make this payment.

Craig 4:53
So they had a report on March 7, and the victim here of this scam had already paid $5,000. And the article goes into some detail. But the here's the bottom line on it.

Craig 5:11
The FBI got involved about a week ago. And of course, they investigate the scams, and they work with local law enforcement agencies. So if something like this happens to you, you can call your local police department. But what it is these virtual kidnapping scams, and what happened to the lady that works with me is that they call you up pretending they have kidnapped a loved one. Now, usually, they found out a little bit about you, they might have gone on to your social media to figure out who you are or what you're doing or where you are, etc. who your friends are. And so many of us have that information out in public on Facebook and elsewhere. So they reach out to you, they say I'm holding so and so hostage. And unless you make this payment, I am not going to release, I'm gonna kill them or whatever it is. So these are virtual kidnapping cases. Now in the case of a lady that works with me, she got a call about a friend she has. And sometimes these are, hey, they're out of the country, they need money to get back in, and I'm with the government, and we're holding them because they did something wrong, etc. There's all kinds of these scams. But she was smart enough to call up that person and found out that yeah, that's not me, I don't know what's going on, I'm fine. There's nothing going on at all. So that's something to keep in mind, too, that you can call, do a little research on your own and follow up because these people are not necessarily really smart or thorough in what they're doing. So keep that in mind as well. But Laguna police department is warning people that it's happening on a wider basis right now.

Craig 6:58
Next up, we have this questionable practice by life insurers; you know that many life insurance companies use your credit rating, to come up to the premium. They do that for all kinds of things now. They do it for health, they do it for employment, looking at your credit rating. And we've also talked before about how in some countries like China, they're using your social credit now to determine whether or not you're worthy for a loan, etc. You know, five years ago, we wouldn't have thought twice about this, who would have thought this is crazy. It's not likely to happen. You guys haven't because we've been talking about this for what 10 or 15 years. But New York's Department of Financial Services has released new guidelines that will allow the life insurance company to use data from customers social media posts to determine their premiums. And experts are saying these rules could potentially extend to other states and you know, some of these federally chartered companies and agencies. So the new guidelines are suggesting that companies can use the data from other nontraditional sources as well, though insurers will have to prove the information doesn't unfairly discriminate against protected groups.

Craig 8:20
There's a bunch of really press release stuff here in the article if you're interested that that's up at http://CraigPeterson.com.

Craig 8:28
The National Association of insurance commissioners released a white paper back in 2012, from what they call their social media working group that address the ways that insurance companies couldn't use social media in their marketing, and also ways to use it to monitor customers. And they're saying that as of 2012, they are already using it. So we've warned everybody for a very long time, do not post things online that you don't want to have shown up later on. Because that's one of the first things that police do when they start investigating someone now, they'll go to your social media; they'll search for you online. Right? Google is their first line of investigation. And it looks like even for this dossier they've been using to go after President Trump and try to show Russian collusion, that even that dossier was put together from online searches on the CNN website of posts people had put up. Man, I heard that this week, I have no idea about the validity of that. But what we say online, reflects us to some degree. And if you do say it online, it can and will be used against you. Now, you know, I like Apple, and I love the way they handled privacy, they don't give all kinds of information out to third parties. They're not trying to mine that information themselves to have some sort of a significant advantage about you or in what you're doing and what you're going etc. So Apple's pretty good about that. But remember that Apple too, if they have a subpoena, that's obviously legitimately issued, they will give up information about you. And they have turned over iCloud accounts and other things. So just because you have things online that you've posted, that are considered private and you shared with your best friend or your family, remember that law enforcement can certainly get at it. Bad guys can get at it, they're always cracking into Facebook accounts, and your friend or family has it and could possibly reshare it at which point now it's no longer private, right? They could repost it; they could save it, they can put it away for a rainy day when they want to play blackmail you. So, be very, very careful about what you say online because much of that can and will be used against you in the court of public or company opinion. And I think New York might have done us a bit of a favor here too. Because it's not just about going on to social media, you know, Facebook, or Twitter or whatever. It really goes to the next level. You know, we've seen deep fakes, we've talked about them here before, one of the big ones is this plane that's kind of flipping around, and it's a big ass jet, that passenger jet. And it was a total fake, and it was shared millions of times online. So you've got that. But you also have legitimate stuff. But I think part of the favor they're doing here is putting something on the record that can be challenged. These life insurance, actuarial tables, the car insurance that you buy, that is based at least partially on your credit rating, how do they work? What are the parameters that go into these? How is the program written? What bugs are there in that program? You don't know they won't tell you. And that's part of the problem I have with what California is doing with getting rid of the bail bondsman. They say well; we can trust this algorithm. No, we can't. How many times have we talked about having computer programs fail on us?

Craig 12:20
So there are are no states right now that have any rules or regulations about how life insurance and the automobile insurers and the bondsman can populate the data for their algorithms for their programs. There's no rules, there's no regulations, you can't challenge them in court. They'll bring in some professional that says some mumbo jumbo that's beyond the judge. It's beyond the jury, and is beyond the truth, right, all in one. But you don't know that. We do know that. They're currently using public records like home ownership data, credit information, education level that you had in college or high school, any civil judgment, any licenses you have anything they can find that's public, and even your internet use in the history of they can get their hands on it. And now this is an extra step and people are freaking out. And I get it; I understand that I would too. And but now we can get the legal system into action. And I hope they do. And I hope that there's a good precedent set and not some lousy precedent. So you know, I just, you see that too much when you have judges, juries, and you know, defense attorneys and prosecution attorneys that really don't understand what's going on. And so then you end up with bad judgments, right? Bad dicta in the cases, from the judges, etc., etc.

Craig 13:59
We got this massive database leak, and I found out about it over the Electronic Frontier Foundation, I put their article up on my site at http://CraigPeterson.com. Earlier this month or security researcher found and disclosed and exposed an unexposed database.

Craig 14:19
And this database was online that these things happen all of the time, people are building software, they don't understand the implications of what they're doing. And I talked about it in my It's a Security Thing, podcast this week.

Craig 14:35
They just don't understand. And because they don't understand, they're just messing everybody up. And I see this almost everywhere. You know businesses, when you have a new product or designing when you have a product you're using, even when you're using a third party software as a service that you might trust, have a true security professional look it over. And there are security professionals available. I know there are almost 3 million job openings in our security world out there. But they are available, pay them you can't pay them enough to come and have a serious look at this.

Craig 15:18
You'll pay to have an attorney come in at hundreds of dollars an hour, some of these attorneys are over $1,000 an hour to look at something to look at the legality because well, you might save tens of thousands or even a million dollars in a lawsuit.

Craig 15:35
Well, the same thing is true with security.

Craig 15:40
If your data is breached, you could easily face it more than a million dollars and find and no judge or jury is going to protect you from that. These are fines that are levied by the regulating agencies. And there's basically nowhere to turn; then on top of it, you could have your customers suing you, you could have consumers, so we knew because their information got out. And you could end up with hundreds of millions of dollars and judgment against you. But no, what are you going to do? Oh, you're just going to trust your IT guy who was a programmer who has his bachelor's or even masters or doctorate in computer programming from some University.

Craig 16:25
No. You need a specialist just like you go to a specialist law firm. You need a true specialist. And the people just aren't doing it. So here's an example of this security researcher. And yeah, we're talking about China here. But China has hired some American companies to build this. So in this case, this database owned by a company called SenseNets. It's a private artificial intelligence company that advertises facial recognition, crowd analysis technologies. So you'd think that they would have some modicum of understanding about security, but they didn't. And they didn't hire a security expert to come in.

Craig 17:20
And what's that going to cost you? 100,000? 200,000? Half a million maybe? And instead of that, they'd rather just lose the whole business because they don't see that as a real risk. Well, let's talk about this risk because we'll get to this Chinese company here in just a second. But let's talk about the risk.

Craig 17:42
There was a cyber security firm that just released a little report saying that they found at least 468 Mongo DB servers exposed to the public internet. Almost 500. Well, what's a Mongo DB server? These are database servers, the main technology group is called No Sequel, but typically used for huge databases. So what is this database that this company SenseNet have in them? SenseNets, excuse me, having it?

Craig 18:21
Well, it turned out all it had was DNA samples, voice samples, fingerprints, iris scans, and much, much more. These were all residents between the ages of 12 and 65 that were from Xinjiang. And they had been questioned about their use of mobile and internet tools. Over there, just having WhatsApp or Skype installed in your phone is classified as subversive behavior. Remember that China is a socialist country, I don't know. But most people I get it, most people don't want to mention the fact that they're Communist or socialist, or they are just incredibly under the thumb of the government. Heaven forbid, you know, we want that here, right in the United States. Right? Yeah. Okay. And since 2017, the authorities and China have told all of the Xinjiang mobile phone users, they have to install the spyware app, to prevent them from accessing terrorist information. That's a quote. Okay. 

Craig 19:37
So we've got evidence now of mass detention centers, newly erected surveillance systems, that China has been bulldozing whole towns because of subversive behavior. All the systems in China that are has been pouring billions of dollars into physical and digital means of, of substantial surveillance in Xinjiang and other regions over there in China. So it's been unclear to a lot of researchers and human rights activists, just what extent these projects as they're operating, you know, heaven forbid, that happened in our country. Oh, wait a minute. It did. Right. We did have surveillance going on. The NSA is scrapping some of those programs; maybe it wasn't the same. Perhaps we haven't been putting people into detention centers. But come on, guys. We're already at a place where five years ago, we didn't think we would be, right? We just discussed that ten years ago, where are we going to be in five or 10 years from now? Hopefully, civil libertarians are out there. Indeed, the major parties have been stepping up; the Democrat Party really hasn't been looking at what Obama did with significant increases in surveillance. I kind of get it after 911 that maybe we want to have a look or look see and figure out what's going on because it kind of hit us from the middle of nowhere in some ways. But that has to go away; it looks like it is going to go away this year under President Trump. And hopefully, the democratic house is going to go along with it as well.

Craig 21:05
But now we have found out we found out more because of this data leak that happened with this security company, I'd laugh and laugh about that, over in the US helping China.

Craig 21:21
So in addition to some of the biometric and other information, this database of 2.6 million people includes their national ID number think social security number, which our government obviously has on us as well. Ethnicity. Well, you know, we've been giving that to our government for years and forms that we fill out. Our nationality, our government has that. Phone number, our government has that. Date of birth, our government has that. Home addresses, our government has that. Employer, our government has that. And photos, our government has that.

Craig 21:57
So all of these same things, types of records that our government has, were found on this database online, from a company that's selling technology to track citizens to the Chinese government. Now over 24 hours, this database collected, just one day, 6.2 million individual GPS coordinates linking these citizens of this province over in China, of this area in China, connecting them to various public camera streams all automatically where they're tracking them in the streets, and identification checkpoints. You love that idea of inspections right? Like Checkpoint Charlie, for those of us that are old enough to remember that.

Craig 22:51
Checkpoints associated with location tags such as hotels, mosques, police stations, the GPS coordinates, all located within Xinjiang where they're doing this service.

Craig 23:05
My gosh, so Givers of he reported a second open database tracking the movements of millions of cars and pedestrians violations, like jaywalking speeding, going through a red light are detected. They trigger the camera to take a photo and ping a WeChat app, presumably to try and tie the event to an identity.

Craig 23:28
It goes on and on. So this database exposed to anyone with an internet connection for the last six months. Oh, by the way, some of these other 468 database servers that were found on the open Internet that were open, contain detailed information about remote access consoles owned by China General Nuclear Power Group, and through GPS coordinates of bike rentals. So there you go with the surveillance state, they're in China.

Craig 24:01
They're tolerating poor engineering, that is getting crackdown on by the way, in western countries, Europe, the United States, companies are getting sued over this. We were helping out a company that, small practice, this is a doctor's office, they're trying to upgrade. Trying to secure things trying to do the right thing. And it was just shocking when we looked into all of these medical apps that are supposedly HIPAA compliant. We did not find a single app; they claimed it was HIPAA compliant, that was HIPAA compliant. Nothing being done about data at rest, and just on and on from there. It's nuts. How bad most of the programming, most of the software is out there. So I feel sorry for a lot of companies because you're stuck. You are stuck. But you've got to find and hire security experts to review what you have in place if they're willing to do it because you know, good guys, I don't run out willy nilly and, and look at networks and look at security setups and everything else. There's just too much for me to do. There's too much business out there. But you still got to do it. And you've got to investigate the people that are working for you that say they have a security background because they may or may not. That leads us to our last story we're able to get to today. Well, I'll get I'll just do this really briefly because I want to hit one other topic, but HR department, now, according to The Wall Street Journal are turning to artificial intelligence to try and find talent because good people are disappearing off the market almost instantly. They're using AI by getting into Microsoft's databases. Remember, they bought LinkedIn, so they've got all kinds of information about people. It's combing through the profiles of more than 610 million members tens of thousands of skills and titles and the looking at behavioral data. And going on and on what jobs candidates are applying for. Citizens Bank launches an AI-powered career coach named Myca, which is short for my career. IBM has a chat box that has AI built into it. And you may have to do that yourself. If you're looking to hire. It's getting more and more difficult to get excellent talent, especially in the IT space and more specifically in the computer security space. And WhatsApp, you probably heard about that if you're not using it. But what tap is a company that was purchased and became part of the Facebook group? And man, the guy that sold it made some clear money. I can't remember what it is offhand. But I think it was in the billion plus range. Well, the founder of WhatsApp is warning people. He's saying you need to delete Facebook immediately. And this article from the Daily Mail over in the UK talks about why all of the reasons why you should and how the disclosure of your information is just it's rampant over at Facebook anyhow.

Craig 27:36
Have a great week we are finishing up our DIY cybersecurity course. This week will be our last week of coaching calls. So shout out to everybody and a big thanks to everybody that's been involved in asking questions. And we've been answering all kinds of questions from everybody. This week. It's getting busier. You can text me 855-385-5553 anytime or just email [email protected]. Hey, have a great week. Bye-bye.

--- 

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‘Delete Facebook Now’: WhatsApp Co-Founder Accuses Mark Zuckerberg Of Trading Privacy For Revenue After Allowing Ads On The Platform

Michael Cohen Investigation Involved Secretive “Triggerfish” Tracking Device

2 ‘Virtual Kidnap’ Scams Within 24 Hours Have Laguna Beach Police On Alert

Life Insurers Can Use Social Media Posts To Determine Premiums, As Long As They Don’t Discriminate

Bizarre Malware Is Disabling Safety Systems At Industrial Plants

Massive Database Leak Gives Us A Window Into China’s Digital Surveillance State

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HR Departments Turn To AI-Enabled Recruiting In Race For Talent
---

More stories and tech updates at:

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

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It's Friday. Time for It's a Security Thing with Craig Peterson. Today, Craig discusses triggerfish, stngrays, and the Michael Cohen investigation.

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

---

Related Articles 

---

Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors.

Airing date: 03/22/2019

Michael Cohen Investigation - Triggerfish - Stingrays - Were You Caught Up In The Net

Craig Peterson 0:04
Hello, everybody, Craig Peterson here. And we're going to talk about a technology and security problem from a little bit of a different angle today. You know that we've had police surveillance for years. When they get a warrant, they can start to investigate a little bit further delve in, get some of our records, maybe our cell phone records, maybe even travel records and other things. And of course, they've been casting a pretty wide net with the whole NSA investigations and what they've been allegedly doing for many years. And of course as you know, the good news is it looks like those are coming rapidly to an end. Well, let's look at this Michael Cohen story that came out this week. And you'll see it up. This is on my website at http://CraigPeterson.com and this is from CBS News. The FBI and this is by Graham Kate's, the FBI wanted Michael Cohen cell phones, but they knew they couldn't be found at his home. The problem was Cohen and his family moved into hotel while renovating their apartment. So on April 8, 2018, they decided that they would use something called triggerfish. And they wanted to find his exact location which was a room on the 17th floor at Lowes Regency Hotel. The FBI Special Agent wrote in an affidavit that was unsealed last Tuesday, that federal agents quote sought and obtained authority to employ electronic technique commonly known as trigger fish. To determine the locations of Cohen's two iPhones. The other federal agents ended up obtaining a warrant to retrieve the phones from the room. And there was a court ordered special master that later determined that the federal agents could review the vast majority of nearly 300,000 files on the two phones as well as an iPad, obtained in the search. Now, a special master's someone who can look at the evidence and determine if it might be client confidential, in the case of an attorney like Michael Cohen was, and that the FBI really shouldn't have access to it, or that the information is maybe something that might be pursuant to the case, and legit for them to look at. Now, you might have heard these triggerfishes called stingrays before. And what stingrays do is mimics cell phone towers. So they can pinpoint a phone's location, sometimes even before it makes a call or a text just because of the unique identifier that the phone has.

Craig 2:50
And we're not sure what law enforcement was hoping to get from its use of the stingrays that we're targeting Cohen, because these devices can also collect them calls a text messages and even emails that are sent to and from phones, because they're sitting in the middle and you can do what's known as a man in the middle attack. Now, because they're acting the cell towers, they not they don't just get the data and information from one phone. But any other cell phones a deer in the area are going to see it and try and connect to it. So they can take in information from entire neighborhoods, which is why civil liberties groups for years have objected to the use of these things. They are absolutely crazy. Now they're made by defense contractor Harris Corporation, and the patents that it's filed indicate that they've been used for about two decades, although law enforcement rarely even admits that they have them. So now we found that they are using them, they have been using them for a long time, and they were using them specifically in the Michael Cohen investigation.

Craig 4:01
Now that really is a very big deal because Michael Cohen of course with is the attorney who was involved with President Trump, in this whole Russian collusion investigation.

Craig 4:16
I don't want to go into a whole lot of detail here. But the Congress did authorize what's called a pen register, which is a process that records or decodes the dialing routing address, and you're signaling information so they can figure out who's someone called when they called it from. And a pen register is basically referring referring to back in the day where someone would have a pen and paper in the phone offices, right, the switching office and track the switches and where call was being routed and would write it all down. But there's some serious Fourth Amendment concerns. The rights of citizens against unreasonable searches and seizures. In this case, obviously, for Michael Cohen, they did have a warrant. But how about for everybody else that was caught up in this thing? Yeah, it's a really good question, frankly. But these are cell site simulators. You can make them. I've got the plans to make something kind of similar to use cell phones on the ham radio bands and basically it pretends it's a cell site is not intended to do grab all of this data from all these people. But they are the most interesting know they are out there. There's passive and active ones. I am SI catchers, which are the passer ones as well as the cell site simulators. There is a ton of information out there you can find on it. Check out eff.org. To find out more the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They've got a lot of really good stuff on it. But it looks like the FBI was using some of this latest technology to investigate Cohen and by doing so probably ended up catching a lot of other data that they may or may not have had legal access to as well. So keep that in mind next time you are online. You know it's a Security Thing. And that's what we talked about are right here on my podcast. And visit me online. http://CraigPeterson.com. Make sure you subscribe so you get all of these. http://CraigPeterson.com/iTunes and hit the subscribe button.

---

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:

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For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

It's Friday. Time for It's a Security Thing with Craig Peterson. Today, Craig discusses triggerfish, stngrays, and the Michael Cohen investigation.

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

---

Related Articles 

---

Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors.

Airing date: 03/22/2019

Michael Cohen Investigation - Triggerfish - Stingrays - Were You Caught Up In The Net

Craig Peterson 0:04
Hello, everybody, Craig Peterson here. And we're going to talk about a technology and security problem from a little bit of a different angle today. You know that we've had police surveillance for years. When they get a warrant, they can start to investigate a little bit further delve in, get some of our records, maybe our cell phone records, maybe even travel records and other things. And of course, they've been casting a pretty wide net with the whole NSA investigations and what they've been allegedly doing for many years. And of course as you know, the good news is it looks like those are coming rapidly to an end. Well, let's look at this Michael Cohen story that came out this week. And you'll see it up. This is on my website at http://CraigPeterson.com and this is from CBS News. The FBI and this is by Graham Kate's, the FBI wanted Michael Cohen cell phones, but they knew they couldn't be found at his home. The problem was Cohen and his family moved into hotel while renovating their apartment. So on April 8, 2018, they decided that they would use something called triggerfish. And they wanted to find his exact location which was a room on the 17th floor at Lowes Regency Hotel. The FBI Special Agent wrote in an affidavit that was unsealed last Tuesday, that federal agents quote sought and obtained authority to employ electronic technique commonly known as trigger fish. To determine the locations of Cohen's two iPhones. The other federal agents ended up obtaining a warrant to retrieve the phones from the room. And there was a court ordered special master that later determined that the federal agents could review the vast majority of nearly 300,000 files on the two phones as well as an iPad, obtained in the search. Now, a special master's someone who can look at the evidence and determine if it might be client confidential, in the case of an attorney like Michael Cohen was, and that the FBI really shouldn't have access to it, or that the information is maybe something that might be pursuant to the case, and legit for them to look at. Now, you might have heard these triggerfishes called stingrays before. And what stingrays do is mimics cell phone towers. So they can pinpoint a phone's location, sometimes even before it makes a call or a text just because of the unique identifier that the phone has.

Craig 2:50
And we're not sure what law enforcement was hoping to get from its use of the stingrays that we're targeting Cohen, because these devices can also collect them calls a text messages and even emails that are sent to and from phones, because they're sitting in the middle and you can do what's known as a man in the middle attack. Now, because they're acting the cell towers, they not they don't just get the data and information from one phone. But any other cell phones a deer in the area are going to see it and try and connect to it. So they can take in information from entire neighborhoods, which is why civil liberties groups for years have objected to the use of these things. They are absolutely crazy. Now they're made by defense contractor Harris Corporation, and the patents that it's filed indicate that they've been used for about two decades, although law enforcement rarely even admits that they have them. So now we found that they are using them, they have been using them for a long time, and they were using them specifically in the Michael Cohen investigation.

Craig 4:01
Now that really is a very big deal because Michael Cohen of course with is the attorney who was involved with President Trump, in this whole Russian collusion investigation.

Craig 4:16
I don't want to go into a whole lot of detail here. But the Congress did authorize what's called a pen register, which is a process that records or decodes the dialing routing address, and you're signaling information so they can figure out who's someone called when they called it from. And a pen register is basically referring referring to back in the day where someone would have a pen and paper in the phone offices, right, the switching office and track the switches and where call was being routed and would write it all down. But there's some serious Fourth Amendment concerns. The rights of citizens against unreasonable searches and seizures. In this case, obviously, for Michael Cohen, they did have a warrant. But how about for everybody else that was caught up in this thing? Yeah, it's a really good question, frankly. But these are cell site simulators. You can make them. I've got the plans to make something kind of similar to use cell phones on the ham radio bands and basically it pretends it's a cell site is not intended to do grab all of this data from all these people. But they are the most interesting know they are out there. There's passive and active ones. I am SI catchers, which are the passer ones as well as the cell site simulators. There is a ton of information out there you can find on it. Check out eff.org. To find out more the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They've got a lot of really good stuff on it. But it looks like the FBI was using some of this latest technology to investigate Cohen and by doing so probably ended up catching a lot of other data that they may or may not have had legal access to as well. So keep that in mind next time you are online. You know it's a Security Thing. And that's what we talked about are right here on my podcast. And visit me online. http://CraigPeterson.com. Make sure you subscribe so you get all of these. http://CraigPeterson.com/iTunes and hit the subscribe button.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

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

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Message Input:

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Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

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It's A Security Thing Thursday. Today, Craig discusses the bizarre malware that is disabling the safety systems in our industrial plants.

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

---

Related Articles 

---

Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors.

Airing date: 03/21/2019

Bizarre Malware Disabling Safety Systems

Craig Peterson 0:06
Hey, welcome all you podcast listeners, it's time for another Security Thing. I want to talk about this bizarre malware that MIT wrote a really interesting article on a report over at MIT Technology Review. Futurism.com picked it up and it's really been kind of making the rounds and mold in certain circles within the security community. And it's different in its attack, because we're talking about malware here that is designed to disable the safety systems at industrial plants. We know that the US and Israel were involved with Stuxnet. And we know about the whole thing that happened over in Iran at the nuclear facility. And that was engineered by two countries. And they were trying to shut down the processing of uranium and those centrifuges. And if you've never seen the centrifuges, you got to have a look at it, because I had in mind something to look like my high school chemistry centrifuges, or the things they use for spinning down blood. These things much, much, much different and more complex, really, they don't even look like a centrifuge frankly, you know, at least from the, you know, the outside point of view. But the US and the Israel apparently designed this malware, and it was very, very well designed. It did two things. One, it caused the centrifuges to spin out of control and destroy themselves, because they were spinning so fast way beyond their normal tolerances. And you'd think, of course, that the centrifuges, which were not made in Iran, by the way, that the centrifuges and their control systems which are not made in Iran would be able to handle this. And in fact, that's what the malware went against was these controllers not made in Iran, that the bad guys in this case, Israel and the US, apparently,that they had the ability to examine and play with and and then come up with this whole attack vector.

Craig 2:25
So they went ahead, they made malware the attacked the controllers for the centrifuges, and apparently ruined a more than 1000 of them. And they also had the malware go after the control systems that were being monitored. So really the monitor systems so that everyone who was in the control portion of the plant would be seeing everything being normal. No alarms going off, no klaxon sounding and lights flashing. All of the charts would look pretty darn normal, that they were all spinning about the right speed. It was just done very, very well, very professional. But it was also done in such a way that no one would lose life over it, these things would spin themselves to the point where they would just destroy themselves. But you know, they were trying not to kill anyone, but it wasn't their primary goal, obviously. Well, now we've got this new hacker tool that's been found. And it's been out there for quite a while. It's called Triton. And it's been out there apparently since 2014. But researchers didn't really become aware of it until around 2017. That's a little worrisome, isn't it? The malware also crosses a new ethical line. Now I know you say malware and ethics, look at what ransomware has done and shut down hospitals, police department. Ransomware is going all the way through taking all of your family pictures away from you. malware is bad. And there is a really there's no ethics involved for these hackers that are spreading it. But they have always in the past, been careful about what they targeted. And they never have seemed in the past to target the safety systems that are in our industrial plants. But that's exactly what's happened right now. There is a gentleman by the name of Joe Slowik, he's a former information warfare officer warfare officer in the US Navy. He's now working at Dragos which is an industrial cyber security firm, according to Futurism. And that firm Dragos has been tracking the spread of Triton.

Craig 4:53
And Joe says that targeting safety systems just seemed to be off limits morally, really hard to do technically. So now we've got to really question things. We've got Dan Coats. He's a former US Director of National Intelligence, who has been warning that things are changing. And here's a quote from him. Here we are nearly two decades later, this was a speech last year. And I'm here to say the warning lights are blinking red again. Today, the digital infrastructure that serves this country is literally under attack. So they are attacking it, they're attacking it in different ways. Triton has been used as a core for attacking a lot of different business systems over the years. But now we're talking about safety systems, the systems that protect nuclear power stations all the way through water treatment facilities, the same types of controllers that were attacked by our government and Israel in that Iranian plant, those same time types of control systems are all over the place in our businesses. They control everything from the heating and air conditioning, through manufacturing systems, through cooling systems, nuclear power plants, and they are dead under attack. So I have a friend that's been in this business for years, I haven't talked to him in probably 20 or 30 years, but he has been trying to really sound the alarm and hasn't been terribly successful. We've got to be careful, we've got to be more careful about our industrial plants and our security. And that means at the very least, we've got to separate our networks. I've got a great module and one of my courses on this, but how to split it up? You know, we're, we're bringing internet of things into our industrial plants. We're bringing in these lights that are controlled by computer to save us money. We're bringing in control systems that heat up the plastics, that will heat up the copper to make wires and, and pull them all out and they're all being automated. And in many places, far too many places, they're on a flat network, you know, the same network, they can all address each other. Even if you separate out the networks, if they can get from one to another, you've got problems. And if you can get to any of these systems via the internet, you've got problems. And just because I've got a firewall doesn't mean it's working for you. Believe me, I have yet to go into one of these companies, you know, 10 million all the way up through half a billion dollars, and have and audited their systems and find that there aren't major problems, where they could have they religious lucky, they haven't been hacked. And of course, you already know, I've been in many businesses where they've already been hacked, where they've already had a failure of the lack of security systems, but a failure of their security systems to the point where they got sued, they went out of business, they lost hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars. In one case, it was tens of millions of dollars. So keep this in mind, they are coming after us. If you are an industrial plant, they want you, they want your equipment, they want to control it. And remember that our enemies have a first line of attack against us being cyber. So many of these attacks are coming from Iran, they are coming from China, they are coming from Russia, they are government sponsored. And their idea is to flip a switch just all of a sudden flip that switch and it's done and over with and we're in deep trouble. Okay?

Craig 8:53
So do the right thing. split your networks, make sure there's no routing between them that you minimize any access to any data, and that there's no external access, and that any access from the inside is tightly controlled. So there you go. All in a nutshell. It sounds like what a weekend's work for you.

Craig 9:10
All right. Take care, but hey, it's a Security Thing. And we'll be back with another one tomorrow, of course, Craig Peterson and that's where you'll find me online. http://CraigPeterson.com

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It's A Security Thing Thursday. Today, Craig discusses the bizarre malware that is disabling the safety systems in our industrial plants.

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

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Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors.

Airing date: 03/21/2019

Bizarre Malware Disabling Safety Systems

Craig Peterson 0:06
Hey, welcome all you podcast listeners, it's time for another Security Thing. I want to talk about this bizarre malware that MIT wrote a really interesting article on a report over at MIT Technology Review. Futurism.com picked it up and it's really been kind of making the rounds and mold in certain circles within the security community. And it's different in its attack, because we're talking about malware here that is designed to disable the safety systems at industrial plants. We know that the US and Israel were involved with Stuxnet. And we know about the whole thing that happened over in Iran at the nuclear facility. And that was engineered by two countries. And they were trying to shut down the processing of uranium and those centrifuges. And if you've never seen the centrifuges, you got to have a look at it, because I had in mind something to look like my high school chemistry centrifuges, or the things they use for spinning down blood. These things much, much, much different and more complex, really, they don't even look like a centrifuge frankly, you know, at least from the, you know, the outside point of view. But the US and the Israel apparently designed this malware, and it was very, very well designed. It did two things. One, it caused the centrifuges to spin out of control and destroy themselves, because they were spinning so fast way beyond their normal tolerances. And you'd think, of course, that the centrifuges, which were not made in Iran, by the way, that the centrifuges and their control systems which are not made in Iran would be able to handle this. And in fact, that's what the malware went against was these controllers not made in Iran, that the bad guys in this case, Israel and the US, apparently,that they had the ability to examine and play with and and then come up with this whole attack vector.

Craig 2:25
So they went ahead, they made malware the attacked the controllers for the centrifuges, and apparently ruined a more than 1000 of them. And they also had the malware go after the control systems that were being monitored. So really the monitor systems so that everyone who was in the control portion of the plant would be seeing everything being normal. No alarms going off, no klaxon sounding and lights flashing. All of the charts would look pretty darn normal, that they were all spinning about the right speed. It was just done very, very well, very professional. But it was also done in such a way that no one would lose life over it, these things would spin themselves to the point where they would just destroy themselves. But you know, they were trying not to kill anyone, but it wasn't their primary goal, obviously. Well, now we've got this new hacker tool that's been found. And it's been out there for quite a while. It's called Triton. And it's been out there apparently since 2014. But researchers didn't really become aware of it until around 2017. That's a little worrisome, isn't it? The malware also crosses a new ethical line. Now I know you say malware and ethics, look at what ransomware has done and shut down hospitals, police department. Ransomware is going all the way through taking all of your family pictures away from you. malware is bad. And there is a really there's no ethics involved for these hackers that are spreading it. But they have always in the past, been careful about what they targeted. And they never have seemed in the past to target the safety systems that are in our industrial plants. But that's exactly what's happened right now. There is a gentleman by the name of Joe Slowik, he's a former information warfare officer warfare officer in the US Navy. He's now working at Dragos which is an industrial cyber security firm, according to Futurism. And that firm Dragos has been tracking the spread of Triton.

Craig 4:53
And Joe says that targeting safety systems just seemed to be off limits morally, really hard to do technically. So now we've got to really question things. We've got Dan Coats. He's a former US Director of National Intelligence, who has been warning that things are changing. And here's a quote from him. Here we are nearly two decades later, this was a speech last year. And I'm here to say the warning lights are blinking red again. Today, the digital infrastructure that serves this country is literally under attack. So they are attacking it, they're attacking it in different ways. Triton has been used as a core for attacking a lot of different business systems over the years. But now we're talking about safety systems, the systems that protect nuclear power stations all the way through water treatment facilities, the same types of controllers that were attacked by our government and Israel in that Iranian plant, those same time types of control systems are all over the place in our businesses. They control everything from the heating and air conditioning, through manufacturing systems, through cooling systems, nuclear power plants, and they are dead under attack. So I have a friend that's been in this business for years, I haven't talked to him in probably 20 or 30 years, but he has been trying to really sound the alarm and hasn't been terribly successful. We've got to be careful, we've got to be more careful about our industrial plants and our security. And that means at the very least, we've got to separate our networks. I've got a great module and one of my courses on this, but how to split it up? You know, we're, we're bringing internet of things into our industrial plants. We're bringing in these lights that are controlled by computer to save us money. We're bringing in control systems that heat up the plastics, that will heat up the copper to make wires and, and pull them all out and they're all being automated. And in many places, far too many places, they're on a flat network, you know, the same network, they can all address each other. Even if you separate out the networks, if they can get from one to another, you've got problems. And if you can get to any of these systems via the internet, you've got problems. And just because I've got a firewall doesn't mean it's working for you. Believe me, I have yet to go into one of these companies, you know, 10 million all the way up through half a billion dollars, and have and audited their systems and find that there aren't major problems, where they could have they religious lucky, they haven't been hacked. And of course, you already know, I've been in many businesses where they've already been hacked, where they've already had a failure of the lack of security systems, but a failure of their security systems to the point where they got sued, they went out of business, they lost hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars. In one case, it was tens of millions of dollars. So keep this in mind, they are coming after us. If you are an industrial plant, they want you, they want your equipment, they want to control it. And remember that our enemies have a first line of attack against us being cyber. So many of these attacks are coming from Iran, they are coming from China, they are coming from Russia, they are government sponsored. And their idea is to flip a switch just all of a sudden flip that switch and it's done and over with and we're in deep trouble. Okay?

Craig 8:53
So do the right thing. split your networks, make sure there's no routing between them that you minimize any access to any data, and that there's no external access, and that any access from the inside is tightly controlled. So there you go. All in a nutshell. It sounds like what a weekend's work for you.

Craig 9:10
All right. Take care, but hey, it's a Security Thing. And we'll be back with another one tomorrow, of course, Craig Peterson and that's where you'll find me online. http://CraigPeterson.com

---

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