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

Craig is with Ken and Phil, with Phil Harriman covering for Matt. They talked about smart assistants' ethical code, China mapping pigs' faces, and can you trust online reviews?

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

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Related Articles:

Alexa, Call The Police! Smart Assistants Should Come With A ‘Moral Ai’ To Decide Whether To Report Their Owners For Breaking The Law, Experts Say

Can You Trust Online Reviews? Here’s How To Find The Fakes

China’s Tech Firms Are Mapping Pig Faces
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Transcript:

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

Airing date: 03/06/2019

Moral Artificial Intelligence - China Mapping Pig Faces - Trusting Online Reviews

Craig Peterson 0:00
Hey, good morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. I had fun this morning, I was on with Ken Altshuler, and he had a guest host in with him Phil Harriman, he's a former senator there in the state of Maine. And we talked about a couple of things. And, and I managed to rip him a bit. He's a big time supporter of left wing causes. I don't want to call him a Democrat because he's not really a Democrat. But you know, I got to rip him this morning, we talked about smart assistance and whether or not they should have a moral artificial intelligence and we got into the Chinese tech firms mapping pig faces this morning. It was really kind of fun. You gotta listen anyhow, hope you're having a great day as well. And we did talk a little bit about online reviews, but not as much as yesterday with Jim so here we go.

Ken Altshuler 0:53 
Always on a Wednesday morning at 7:38. We welcome in our tech guru Craig Peterson. Good morning to you Craig.

Craig 1:02 
Hey good morning. Yeah I'm a little clogged up myself this morning I was just coughing and hacking. Oh my. That time of the year.

Ken 1:10
New England March isn't the weather like 20 degrees below what it's supposed to be?

Craig 1:15
I thought it was global warming. Is it not Ken?

Ken 1:20 
It is. No, it's climate change. Climate change.

Craig 1:24
Oh so when global warming doesn't work that it becomes climate

Ken 1:28 
Correct

Phil Harriman 1:28
No no no no. Its extreme weather.

Ken 1:32
Yes exactly. Extreme weather. Highs and lows and bad hurricanes, bad tornadoes.

Craig 1:37
Here in Maine, I'm a firm believer in climate change. Absolutely. We have four seasons at least every year. That's four times a climate changes.

Ken 1:46 
In Maine we have two seasons Craig, winter and Fourth of July. 

Craig 1:51
That's road repair and winter.

Ken 1:55 
Exactly. So let's talk about some tests. So I have as you know, Craig, Alexa. And let me, for all you people listening out there, Alexa, pay attention. So we do something with these smart assistants that kind of have a moral code to follow? 

Craig 2:05
Yeah, this is real interesting stuff. And I'm not sure exactly which side of this I come down on. We've heard a lot about artificial intelligence, right? It's been kind of the bane of science fiction writers for ever. Now the carbon project in the early 60s, a big movie that was out all the way through today. And of course, even before that, but artificial intelligence. The whole idea is that our computers are going to be smart enough to learn by themselves make decisions by themselves. And today we have really no artificial intelligence per se, but we do have what's called machine learning. Where are our computers etc. can learn your iPhone your newer iPhones have a machine learning chip built into them. And that helps them learn a little bit about you. And every time you use your Alexa or use your Google Home device, it's learning a little bit more about you and what you do and how you do it. So it's coming. It's kind of inevitable, we think and nothing's past what's called the Turing test yet for those of us that are a little more geeky about this but when we're talking about our Alexa there's been a proposal that comes out obviously it makes sense to have your Alexa be able to call the police, it can call your friends anybody that's in your phone book. My granddaughter used an Alexa we got for them just the other day. She was stuck outside the house she locked herself out. And we had an Amazon Alexa in the house that we've given them and she went ahead and yelled through the window Alexa, call mom and of course it did. And Mom said call me back. This is a bad connection. No, no, no, like outside the house until mom knew. And she managed to get home with the key and was able to to let my granddaughter in. Those are all really good things.

But we've got some scientists now over in Norway at the University of Bergen spore just speaking last week at a conference out in Hawaii and they were saying that what should happen well they're saying all of our smart devices should listen to what's going on in a home and then use artificial intelligence to determine if maybe they should report the goings on in the home to the police, child Family Services etc etc. And this is at a conference of ethics and society in Hawaii. You know Ken when you you're talking about Orwellian I can't think of anything more Orwellian than this. Where we have been putting these devices into our homes into our cars now pretty much everywhere in our phones and they're talking about turning them into spies for who, right? How far can this go? I don't know Phil and Ken. This really scares me.

Phil 5:36
Well just listening to you describe the power in a device in your home could have is frightening and in I would assume this has got a
an onboarding or in boarding opportunity as well meaning that they can put things into your system that gets communicated into the house or control things that are in your house that you know that you have no influence over?

Craig 5:54 
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, they could and they can upgrade them. For instance, Google just got nailed because they've been selling this home security device, and no one knew that Google had hidden inside of it a microphone that Google just activated this month. So it's, it's really, really scary. And we're talking about an ethical conflict here between people in the family, you know, between mom and dad in the kid, you know what happens when the kid is reaching up to grab a hot pot of water off of the stove, and mom screams at that the kid this is legitimately and now that little device in your home makes an ethical moral decision and report you to the police along with all of the recordings that devices made of anytime that device thinks, well, this was marginal, but it's not enough to call the police. And now all of a sudden the police have completely out of context, all of this stuff that makes you look really, really bad, you know, and then the ethical conflicts between not only the members of family, but the manufacturer, the shareholders, the manufacturers, programmers, the police department, and, and having these universities say yes, indeed we should have them recording and having other people jump on board and agree with them. I think we were in for some rough road.

But take that to our cars, right. And in in Maine, we've got some of these artificial intelligence companies doing some development along with a mapping technology, much of which originated right here in Maine. Right? Who, if you're in an accident, whose fault is it? Is it yours? Because you own the car? Is it the people who wrote the software? Is it the car manufacturer who hired the people who hired the company that hired the people that wrote the software, you know, Ken, man maybe you should get out of the family lawn into some of the ethical law because for the next 20 to 50 years things are going to be just crazy in that side of the business.

Ken 8:07
We're talking to Craig Peterson, our tech guru.

Phil 8:08 
Big Brother.

Ken 8:09 
What are you talking about?

Phil 8:10 
It was just frightening what he's saying.

Craig 8:14
BOC's on board. I'm sure so it'll be okay.

Ken 8:19
Is there a reason why you guys are ganging up on me today?

Phil 8:24
Yeah. Because I like you.

Ken 8:26
I think she does a very nice dance on rooftops. That's all I want to say. We're joined by Craig Peterson our tech guru who joins us Wednesdays at 7:38. Online reviews. Now, I went the other day to buy a wrist brace for my right wrist. I have something when I played piqua. And, you know, I went to read the reviews because how else do I know which of these products have good? I mean, I assume that those reviews were accurate? Not necessarily, huh?

Craig 8:53 
Yeah, the legitimacy of these things comes into question and it can be a very, very big deal because we're using them all the time I use them on Yelp. I I go into a new town, I'm I'm traveling somewhere. And I just sought my Yelp app and say, you know, where's the nice restaurants in the area? And how about you guys? What do you do? Do I tend to not trust reviews? When it's like, one or two? or five? Or 10, right?

Ken 9:25 
If it's like, if it's 400 or 500, I tend to pay attention.

Craig 9:27 
Yeah, exactly. And that makes sense. And there's reviews everywhere, right? Well, there are some tips of what to do, what not to do when you're looking at these reviews order to judge the veracity. And there was even a study done on this, like there's a study on everything nowadays, I think, frankly. But Amazon, Yelp, Facebook, Google, and it is easy for businesses and others to purchase hundreds of reviews within days. So there's your 400 number can you know that they can all be false. And then the other side of this is businesses will sometimes post negative reviews for their competitors which is another big problem. So when you get right down to it and looking at some of these studies and some 30% according to the study of online reviews are fake reviews. NBC News created a gardening business on Facebook they paid 168 bucks to some online websites that promise suppose positive reviews and for 168 bucks, they got 1000 the likes and a few days after that they got more than 600 5-star reviews.

So I think Ken we've got to be careful about this. I personally look at the reviews I look at what's been written and how it's phrased and stuff and I try and evaluate it from that but one of the easiest things you can do to figure out if reviews or false is took at the language that's being used. Because when you do purchase the reviews, you give a sample of what you're looking for these reviewers, these fake reviewers to say. And oftentimes they'll repeat it. Phil, you ready? They'll they'll repeat it. Just like democrats repeat the morning news bites, as opposed to talking about all day long.

Phil 11:27
Do you like us know, Kenny? I can't. I can't let this go any further. Without shifting gears to the China's tech firms are mapping. Wait for it. Wait for it, folks. They're mapping pig faces. Alright. Take it away. Take it away Craig.

Craig 11:44
We'll make this one really quick because I know we're out of time here. But yes, there is a very big problem in China right now. And it isn't the pig farts. What we're talking about is disease. And of course there's a lot of trans-species disease stuff that can happen. Certainly with birds. Most of our flus come from birds. But in this case, here's what's happening. China, China has been using facial recognition technology for a long time to spy on its own people. They've been doing that a lot in London, as well as other places in the UK. But right now what they're trying to do is track the pig farmers because many of the small pig farms are polluting the environment. Yes, indeed, that is the truth. An AOC thing was a bit of a joke there, but polluting the environment. So they want to keep track of the pigs where they came from, what diseases they might have, and they're doing it with facial recognition technology of the pigs as well as they're listening to the pigs conversations in order to determine if a pig might be sick because apparently pigs talk differently when they're not feeling well.

Phil 12:57
So Craig, as we move  on from this point forward when we refer to AOC we can also refer to KPA. Kenneth P. Altshuler.

Ken 13:09
Craig Peterson joining us. He joins us, Wednesdays at 7:38. Craig, thanks for joining us. We'll talk to you next Wednesday.

Craig 13:16
Hey Ken, thanks for being a good sport. It was kind of fun.

Ken 13:20 
I don't mind all. Thank you guys. We're gonna take a quick break.

Craig 13:26
Hey, I released module three yesterday we had a great coaching call, live coaching call yesterday as well for everyone in the course. So shout out to you guys. You should have gotten Module Three, let me know if you did not. And then three, of course, we're delving into network security stuff, what you can do and how to do it. Take care guys, I'll be back tomorrow. I'm going to do a couple of security things this week on. One on Thursday, one on Friday, so keep an eye out for those as well in the podcasts. Thanks again. Bye bye.

---

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 Ken and Phil, with Phil Harriman covering for Matt. They talked about smart assistants' ethical code, China mapping pigs' faces, and can you trust online reviews?

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

---

Related Articles:

Alexa, Call The Police! Smart Assistants Should Come With A ‘Moral Ai’ To Decide Whether To Report Their Owners For Breaking The Law, Experts Say

Can You Trust Online Reviews? Here’s How To Find The Fakes

China’s Tech Firms Are Mapping Pig Faces
---

Transcript:

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

Airing date: 03/06/2019

Moral Artificial Intelligence - China Mapping Pig Faces - Trusting Online Reviews

Craig Peterson 0:00
Hey, good morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. I had fun this morning, I was on with Ken Altshuler, and he had a guest host in with him Phil Harriman, he's a former senator there in the state of Maine. And we talked about a couple of things. And, and I managed to rip him a bit. He's a big time supporter of left wing causes. I don't want to call him a Democrat because he's not really a Democrat. But you know, I got to rip him this morning, we talked about smart assistance and whether or not they should have a moral artificial intelligence and we got into the Chinese tech firms mapping pig faces this morning. It was really kind of fun. You gotta listen anyhow, hope you're having a great day as well. And we did talk a little bit about online reviews, but not as much as yesterday with Jim so here we go.

Ken Altshuler 0:53 
Always on a Wednesday morning at 7:38. We welcome in our tech guru Craig Peterson. Good morning to you Craig.

Craig 1:02 
Hey good morning. Yeah I'm a little clogged up myself this morning I was just coughing and hacking. Oh my. That time of the year.

Ken 1:10
New England March isn't the weather like 20 degrees below what it's supposed to be?

Craig 1:15
I thought it was global warming. Is it not Ken?

Ken 1:20 
It is. No, it's climate change. Climate change.

Craig 1:24
Oh so when global warming doesn't work that it becomes climate

Ken 1:28 
Correct

Phil Harriman 1:28
No no no no. Its extreme weather.

Ken 1:32
Yes exactly. Extreme weather. Highs and lows and bad hurricanes, bad tornadoes.

Craig 1:37
Here in Maine, I'm a firm believer in climate change. Absolutely. We have four seasons at least every year. That's four times a climate changes.

Ken 1:46 
In Maine we have two seasons Craig, winter and Fourth of July. 

Craig 1:51
That's road repair and winter.

Ken 1:55 
Exactly. So let's talk about some tests. So I have as you know, Craig, Alexa. And let me, for all you people listening out there, Alexa, pay attention. So we do something with these smart assistants that kind of have a moral code to follow? 

Craig 2:05
Yeah, this is real interesting stuff. And I'm not sure exactly which side of this I come down on. We've heard a lot about artificial intelligence, right? It's been kind of the bane of science fiction writers for ever. Now the carbon project in the early 60s, a big movie that was out all the way through today. And of course, even before that, but artificial intelligence. The whole idea is that our computers are going to be smart enough to learn by themselves make decisions by themselves. And today we have really no artificial intelligence per se, but we do have what's called machine learning. Where are our computers etc. can learn your iPhone your newer iPhones have a machine learning chip built into them. And that helps them learn a little bit about you. And every time you use your Alexa or use your Google Home device, it's learning a little bit more about you and what you do and how you do it. So it's coming. It's kind of inevitable, we think and nothing's past what's called the Turing test yet for those of us that are a little more geeky about this but when we're talking about our Alexa there's been a proposal that comes out obviously it makes sense to have your Alexa be able to call the police, it can call your friends anybody that's in your phone book. My granddaughter used an Alexa we got for them just the other day. She was stuck outside the house she locked herself out. And we had an Amazon Alexa in the house that we've given them and she went ahead and yelled through the window Alexa, call mom and of course it did. And Mom said call me back. This is a bad connection. No, no, no, like outside the house until mom knew. And she managed to get home with the key and was able to to let my granddaughter in. Those are all really good things.

But we've got some scientists now over in Norway at the University of Bergen spore just speaking last week at a conference out in Hawaii and they were saying that what should happen well they're saying all of our smart devices should listen to what's going on in a home and then use artificial intelligence to determine if maybe they should report the goings on in the home to the police, child Family Services etc etc. And this is at a conference of ethics and society in Hawaii. You know Ken when you you're talking about Orwellian I can't think of anything more Orwellian than this. Where we have been putting these devices into our homes into our cars now pretty much everywhere in our phones and they're talking about turning them into spies for who, right? How far can this go? I don't know Phil and Ken. This really scares me.

Phil 5:36
Well just listening to you describe the power in a device in your home could have is frightening and in I would assume this has got a
an onboarding or in boarding opportunity as well meaning that they can put things into your system that gets communicated into the house or control things that are in your house that you know that you have no influence over?

Craig 5:54 
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, they could and they can upgrade them. For instance, Google just got nailed because they've been selling this home security device, and no one knew that Google had hidden inside of it a microphone that Google just activated this month. So it's, it's really, really scary. And we're talking about an ethical conflict here between people in the family, you know, between mom and dad in the kid, you know what happens when the kid is reaching up to grab a hot pot of water off of the stove, and mom screams at that the kid this is legitimately and now that little device in your home makes an ethical moral decision and report you to the police along with all of the recordings that devices made of anytime that device thinks, well, this was marginal, but it's not enough to call the police. And now all of a sudden the police have completely out of context, all of this stuff that makes you look really, really bad, you know, and then the ethical conflicts between not only the members of family, but the manufacturer, the shareholders, the manufacturers, programmers, the police department, and, and having these universities say yes, indeed we should have them recording and having other people jump on board and agree with them. I think we were in for some rough road.

But take that to our cars, right. And in in Maine, we've got some of these artificial intelligence companies doing some development along with a mapping technology, much of which originated right here in Maine. Right? Who, if you're in an accident, whose fault is it? Is it yours? Because you own the car? Is it the people who wrote the software? Is it the car manufacturer who hired the people who hired the company that hired the people that wrote the software, you know, Ken, man maybe you should get out of the family lawn into some of the ethical law because for the next 20 to 50 years things are going to be just crazy in that side of the business.

Ken 8:07
We're talking to Craig Peterson, our tech guru.

Phil 8:08 
Big Brother.

Ken 8:09 
What are you talking about?

Phil 8:10 
It was just frightening what he's saying.

Craig 8:14
BOC's on board. I'm sure so it'll be okay.

Ken 8:19
Is there a reason why you guys are ganging up on me today?

Phil 8:24
Yeah. Because I like you.

Ken 8:26
I think she does a very nice dance on rooftops. That's all I want to say. We're joined by Craig Peterson our tech guru who joins us Wednesdays at 7:38. Online reviews. Now, I went the other day to buy a wrist brace for my right wrist. I have something when I played piqua. And, you know, I went to read the reviews because how else do I know which of these products have good? I mean, I assume that those reviews were accurate? Not necessarily, huh?

Craig 8:53 
Yeah, the legitimacy of these things comes into question and it can be a very, very big deal because we're using them all the time I use them on Yelp. I I go into a new town, I'm I'm traveling somewhere. And I just sought my Yelp app and say, you know, where's the nice restaurants in the area? And how about you guys? What do you do? Do I tend to not trust reviews? When it's like, one or two? or five? Or 10, right?

Ken 9:25 
If it's like, if it's 400 or 500, I tend to pay attention.

Craig 9:27 
Yeah, exactly. And that makes sense. And there's reviews everywhere, right? Well, there are some tips of what to do, what not to do when you're looking at these reviews order to judge the veracity. And there was even a study done on this, like there's a study on everything nowadays, I think, frankly. But Amazon, Yelp, Facebook, Google, and it is easy for businesses and others to purchase hundreds of reviews within days. So there's your 400 number can you know that they can all be false. And then the other side of this is businesses will sometimes post negative reviews for their competitors which is another big problem. So when you get right down to it and looking at some of these studies and some 30% according to the study of online reviews are fake reviews. NBC News created a gardening business on Facebook they paid 168 bucks to some online websites that promise suppose positive reviews and for 168 bucks, they got 1000 the likes and a few days after that they got more than 600 5-star reviews.

So I think Ken we've got to be careful about this. I personally look at the reviews I look at what's been written and how it's phrased and stuff and I try and evaluate it from that but one of the easiest things you can do to figure out if reviews or false is took at the language that's being used. Because when you do purchase the reviews, you give a sample of what you're looking for these reviewers, these fake reviewers to say. And oftentimes they'll repeat it. Phil, you ready? They'll they'll repeat it. Just like democrats repeat the morning news bites, as opposed to talking about all day long.

Phil 11:27
Do you like us know, Kenny? I can't. I can't let this go any further. Without shifting gears to the China's tech firms are mapping. Wait for it. Wait for it, folks. They're mapping pig faces. Alright. Take it away. Take it away Craig.

Craig 11:44
We'll make this one really quick because I know we're out of time here. But yes, there is a very big problem in China right now. And it isn't the pig farts. What we're talking about is disease. And of course there's a lot of trans-species disease stuff that can happen. Certainly with birds. Most of our flus come from birds. But in this case, here's what's happening. China, China has been using facial recognition technology for a long time to spy on its own people. They've been doing that a lot in London, as well as other places in the UK. But right now what they're trying to do is track the pig farmers because many of the small pig farms are polluting the environment. Yes, indeed, that is the truth. An AOC thing was a bit of a joke there, but polluting the environment. So they want to keep track of the pigs where they came from, what diseases they might have, and they're doing it with facial recognition technology of the pigs as well as they're listening to the pigs conversations in order to determine if a pig might be sick because apparently pigs talk differently when they're not feeling well.

Phil 12:57
So Craig, as we move  on from this point forward when we refer to AOC we can also refer to KPA. Kenneth P. Altshuler.

Ken 13:09
Craig Peterson joining us. He joins us, Wednesdays at 7:38. Craig, thanks for joining us. We'll talk to you next Wednesday.

Craig 13:16
Hey Ken, thanks for being a good sport. It was kind of fun.

Ken 13:20 
I don't mind all. Thank you guys. We're gonna take a quick break.

Craig 13:26
Hey, I released module three yesterday we had a great coaching call, live coaching call yesterday as well for everyone in the course. So shout out to you guys. You should have gotten Module Three, let me know if you did not. And then three, of course, we're delving into network security stuff, what you can do and how to do it. Take care guys, I'll be back tomorrow. I'm going to do a couple of security things this week on. One on Thursday, one on Friday, so keep an eye out for those as well in the podcasts. Thanks again. Bye bye.

---

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 on the Jim Polito show this morning talking about how to spot fake online reviews. They also talked about storing your health records on your iPhone. Can Apple be trusted to keep your records safe?

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

---

Related Articles:

Storing Health Records On Your Phone: Can Apple Live Up To Its Privacy Values?

Can You Trust Online Reviews? Here’s How To Find The Fakes
--- 

Transcript:

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

Airing date: 03/05/2019

Who Should Store Our Health Records - Can You Trust Online Reviews

Craig Peterson: 0:00
Hey, good morning everybody. Craig Peterson here. I finally got that installing Windows bonus put together here for the second module in the course so it goes into a lot of depth. Got it done. Got it out. Put together all of the notes for people so keep an eye out if you are in that master course if you bought into that. We'll get some free master classes will be coming up in about a month or so. So keep an eye out for that as well. This morning on Jim Polito, a couple of frankly kind of big topics. One is about online fake reviews, can you trust them? And we got into some detail including that trick that um, I don't know anybody else that seems to know about about how to find the fake reviews and with this huge, huge economy. $10 trillion economy just in medical care. Can we trust Apple to keep our medical records safe because they are already doing it? If people are opting into it. So we chatted with Mr. Polito about that this morning as well. So here we go.

Jim Polito 1:16
Here he is. The guy who gets it all. I'm talking about our Tech Talk guru Craig Peterson. Good morning, sir. You are always a five star review on this show.

Craig 1:33
Thanks. Always glad to be here. Always.

Jim 1:34 
Always a five star review. Now that's the big question here. How do we tell whether or not we're looking at fake online reviews because I'll tell you, you know as you buy more stuff online and as you can't hold it, touch it, you know it's or maybe it's something you haven't bought before you want online reviews to see what it's like. And I have used them frequently. How do I know I'm not being scammed?

Craig 2:08 
Well, you're kind of average in some ways but some people.

Jim 2:12
I'm a little below average when you, when you get right down to it, but yeah.

Craig 2:17
Well most people do do that. They do go online. They do read reviews. And statistics out there right now we're showing that most people read about seven reviews before they make the purchase. Is that where you're at?

Jim 2:33
Yeah, I'll read about them. And you know, I was talking with the guys earlier, but I want to see a product that's get, that's got a lot of reviews because then that way I know I want to see a product that's got a lot of reviews and then that way I know that okay, you know, there's more than just three reviews I'm basing my opinion on.

Craig 2:57 
Yeah, you're absolutely right in doing that. That's kind of what I've done here over the years as the internet's kind of grown. But it makes sense, right? It's, it's the social justification. It's, you ask a friend, hey, should I buy this? What's the best? That's right. It's the same sort of thing. And there's, there's a Dr. Ted Lapis, who is an assistant professor of business down at Stevens Institute of Technology did a study and he valued at 2.3 million online reviews. And he was specifically looking at hotels, so to about 5000 hotels to try and figure out are there fake ones? Aren't there fake ones? He said that he thought that there were about 15 to 30% of all online reviews that are falsified. And he came up with two ways to figure out whether or not they're fake. And it's interesting because I've heard a lot of different ways to do it. You've got Danny who want whoever writes the review to be an English major right?

Jim 4:04
Well, sometimes grammar and all that also is an indication of intelligence and intellect. So I, I'm with Danny a little bit on this one, even though Steve is not but.

Craig 4:33
Yeah, well I'm kind of more with Steve because I look at these things and say well it's terrible English and grammar it may well be one of these sites that you can go to online you can go and buy reviews. I'm going to talk about how to figure out what's what. But you can go out and buy reviews right now you can get 100 reviews right now. If you wanted to double the number of reviews on your Facebook page Jim you could go out and you could get another hundred and you can buy them both ways because you can think of this right it isn't just hey, I don't want I want more people to come to my business. I'm going to try and get people to give five star reviews and you can do the opposite, like Danny did on the Jim Polito Facebook page where he used a fake name and gave you a one star.

Jim 5:08
You're trying to set up dissension in the ranks here.

Craig 5:13
So you can go either way. So a lot of businesses do post fake reviews for their competitors and many businesses do it for themselves to try and raise it. So people write though, you know, that's kind of the big difference here. So it was something like a fire TV stick or you know, the which is the Amazon Smart TV or Roku where you're talking about 100,000 or more reviews, you're not going to make a difference, right?

Jim 5:39
No but you can look at them in different, you know, like I read them because you might hear something in it a complaint from someone, even if it's a positive review of something like okay, I want to make sure this product does what I'm looking for. It doesn't have this and and so I go in like kind of an auditor does it just kind of sample the soup.

Craig 6:05 
Okay well let me give you a couple of tips here, alright? First of all if you see the same text again and again like the, for instance, the democrats talking points and they come up for the day and you hear every democrat say the exact same thing all day long okay,  when we're talking about their you know the guys and gals down in the cesspool in Washington DC, not that I have an opinion about the matter. But if you see that same text based over and over, if you see a lot of reviews for the same product or place that are kind of out of line gets felt like the mom and pop restaurant on Yelp. If they've got a few hundred reviews you get to kind of wonder the same reviewer a lot that's a problem but the here's an interesting way to figure it out as well. If you really want to get into it because a lot of the reviews will take will put up a picture. So it might be a picture of the reviewer, it might be a picture of the place or a picture of the product. And I got a little secret here. Most people don't know about if you really want to find out so you're not buying a $5 something rather, who cares if it works or not. And maybe you're buying a $300 pair of headphones or something, take that picture that they have either the reviewer and by the way, if the reviewer looks like George Clooney, okay? It's probably fake.

Jim 7:32
Danny's a pretty handsome guy. You know, I mean. It looks like the picture that's in the frame. When you buy a frame. You mean one of those?

Craig 7:46 
Exactly. What the guys will do is they'll go out and find pictures online and they'll use them as their own picture or they'll use them as a picture of the product. So you will see this a lot for home construction places you know, hey. We do renovations and stuff. And if you save that, so you right click on that picture, and you save it to your hard disk, save it to your machine, and then go to Google and select images. Now what Google has, if you look in that search bar on the right hand side, when your images, there's a little camera, you click on the camera, and you upload the picture. So the picture of the reviewer, the pictures of the product, the picture of the house redone, and Google will search online and find that picture.

Jim 8:35 
Oh, the reverse image search.

Craig 8:38 
It's the reverse image. This is exactly what it is. So it'll find that picture and now all of a sudden, you know, Hey, wait a minute. This is a stock photo. Now, one of my son's was kind of helping out with this dating site online, because, of course, you know, it's a picture of Jim Polito from 19 you know, XX right? But this is up there on Jim's page and.

Jim 9:05
He looks so thin.

Craig 9:08 
He looks like George Clooney I just can't get it so. So what he was doing up for the dating site and and it was a paid side. And so he did this kind of, you know your reviews so many you know I can remember that there's like 100 a month of people's posts when they apply for the dating site and he would use the reverse image search and find, he said more than half of the time, people were taking stock photos and using them as their own photo on the dating sites. So there's a couple of hints here for you.

Jim 9:49 
So the first thing you look for is you look at the picture that goes up with the review, you save it, you do a reverse image search and if it comes up like you're doing a product search on something and then it comes up like the company then you go all this is ridiculous. Or if it comes up as a stock photo somewhere else, you know it's not a real person.

Craig 10:11 
Yeah, exactly. Or if it comes up with a completely different name for that person, right which the reverse image is going to do and then look for the Democratic talking points of the day look for the same text the same phrases being used over and over again because what happens is that companies when they want to buy 50 reviews for instance, they have to give these reviewers the texts that they're going to use. Now, most of these companies are trying to stop this from happening, it's difficult to do, obviously, they don't want to see 50 reviews coming from the same internet address. So the bad guys excuse me, the bad guys, if you will, will go ahead and they'll use a whole bunch of different internet addresses. So what they do is they pay people all over the world and they pay them a nickel to post a review. And then they charge the business a couple hundred bucks. And they just made themselves a cool hundred and $180 for doing the work. And they they had other people around the world do it for them for next to nothing. So that's what's up?

Jim 11:17 
We're talking with Craig Peterson, our Tech Talk guru helping us to understand what's a fake online review and what's a real online review? All right, let's just shift gears here. Storing my health records on my phone. Now, that'd be great and convenient and helpful in an emergency. But can Apple with my iPhone live up to the privacy values they've established? Can they do it? 

Craig 12:00
That's such a good question because Apple of course has been very, very conscientious about making sure that they keep your data safe. They don't send it up to the cloud, unless you tell them to. They don't share it. They they don't love law enforcement into your phone. You know, they've been very, very conscientious about this. And now we have a whole new market that's been developing over the last couple of years. And this is really kind of interesting when you when you look at the numbers, but the global healthcare industry is expected to reach $10 trillion. My 2021 is bigger than the economy of any country in the world other than the US and China and trillion. So you've got Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Apple who are among the companies that are trying to get a piece of that pie. So we've got Amazon buying pharmacies. They've got this automated pharmacy that they've bought and they're they're trying to get the laws changed about pharmacies and how they can do it. The same thing with some of these other guys are buying retail pharmacies are using artificial intelligence now for disease detection. In fact, your iPhone can be better at spotting skin cancer than a skin cancer doctor. And that's been the studies have shown that again and again. Isn't that something? And Apple has now tied into cardiac monitors and other things.

Jim 13:33 
I know that. The FDA approved them for machines that basically give you and EKG.

Craig 13:40
Yeah, exactly. It's like a three lead EKG. So it's amazing what's happening in healthcare, but the problem is privacy. We got the HIPAA rules and regulations in place some years ago, and we were sold a bill of goods somehow it was going to keep everything more private. In fact, because they require doctors to digitize the records that turned out that it's been less private than it ever was before. So back to your original question, can we trust Apple when it comes to our healthcare records? Well, amongst the my choices Apple, Amazon, Google or Microsoft, Apple, hands down, there's, there's just no question about it. They really are trying to keep our data safe there as their CEO, Tim Cook has been a very vocal advocate for privacy, right? He's been talking against Google and Facebook for making money off of user data and all. So this is coming. It's already here. You may not be aware of it, but there's about 200 healthcare providers around the United States that are now using the health record feature that is part of Apple's iPhone. So they started to kind of use San Diego is expanded to 200 different healthcare organizations. This within the next five to 10 years is going to be the norm. And this is one game I really hope Apple wins.

Jim 15:14 
Wow, this has been fascinating. Now look, folks, what I want you to do is text my name to the number that Craig is going to give you. You'll get all this information plus more. Plus, if there's ever a massive hack or a data breach, Craig Peterson will send you information. He doesn't pester you. He doesn't charge for this. He doesn't try to sell you anything and he doesn't sell your name to anyone else. Standard data and text rates apply. Text my name to this number.

Craig 15:45 
855-385-5553. That's 855-385-5553.

Jim 15:54 
All right. Standard data and text rates apply. It's a great thing Craig as usual. Awesome segment Always a pleasure and we'll talk to you next week.

---

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

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For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Craig is on the Jim Polito show this morning talking about how to spot fake online reviews. They also talked about storing your health records on your iPhone. Can Apple be trusted to keep your records safe?

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

---

Related Articles:

Storing Health Records On Your Phone: Can Apple Live Up To Its Privacy Values?

Can You Trust Online Reviews? Here’s How To Find The Fakes
--- 

Transcript:

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

Airing date: 03/05/2019

Who Should Store Our Health Records - Can You Trust Online Reviews

Craig Peterson: 0:00
Hey, good morning everybody. Craig Peterson here. I finally got that installing Windows bonus put together here for the second module in the course so it goes into a lot of depth. Got it done. Got it out. Put together all of the notes for people so keep an eye out if you are in that master course if you bought into that. We'll get some free master classes will be coming up in about a month or so. So keep an eye out for that as well. This morning on Jim Polito, a couple of frankly kind of big topics. One is about online fake reviews, can you trust them? And we got into some detail including that trick that um, I don't know anybody else that seems to know about about how to find the fake reviews and with this huge, huge economy. $10 trillion economy just in medical care. Can we trust Apple to keep our medical records safe because they are already doing it? If people are opting into it. So we chatted with Mr. Polito about that this morning as well. So here we go.

Jim Polito 1:16
Here he is. The guy who gets it all. I'm talking about our Tech Talk guru Craig Peterson. Good morning, sir. You are always a five star review on this show.

Craig 1:33
Thanks. Always glad to be here. Always.

Jim 1:34 
Always a five star review. Now that's the big question here. How do we tell whether or not we're looking at fake online reviews because I'll tell you, you know as you buy more stuff online and as you can't hold it, touch it, you know it's or maybe it's something you haven't bought before you want online reviews to see what it's like. And I have used them frequently. How do I know I'm not being scammed?

Craig 2:08 
Well, you're kind of average in some ways but some people.

Jim 2:12
I'm a little below average when you, when you get right down to it, but yeah.

Craig 2:17
Well most people do do that. They do go online. They do read reviews. And statistics out there right now we're showing that most people read about seven reviews before they make the purchase. Is that where you're at?

Jim 2:33
Yeah, I'll read about them. And you know, I was talking with the guys earlier, but I want to see a product that's get, that's got a lot of reviews because then that way I know I want to see a product that's got a lot of reviews and then that way I know that okay, you know, there's more than just three reviews I'm basing my opinion on.

Craig 2:57 
Yeah, you're absolutely right in doing that. That's kind of what I've done here over the years as the internet's kind of grown. But it makes sense, right? It's, it's the social justification. It's, you ask a friend, hey, should I buy this? What's the best? That's right. It's the same sort of thing. And there's, there's a Dr. Ted Lapis, who is an assistant professor of business down at Stevens Institute of Technology did a study and he valued at 2.3 million online reviews. And he was specifically looking at hotels, so to about 5000 hotels to try and figure out are there fake ones? Aren't there fake ones? He said that he thought that there were about 15 to 30% of all online reviews that are falsified. And he came up with two ways to figure out whether or not they're fake. And it's interesting because I've heard a lot of different ways to do it. You've got Danny who want whoever writes the review to be an English major right?

Jim 4:04
Well, sometimes grammar and all that also is an indication of intelligence and intellect. So I, I'm with Danny a little bit on this one, even though Steve is not but.

Craig 4:33
Yeah, well I'm kind of more with Steve because I look at these things and say well it's terrible English and grammar it may well be one of these sites that you can go to online you can go and buy reviews. I'm going to talk about how to figure out what's what. But you can go out and buy reviews right now you can get 100 reviews right now. If you wanted to double the number of reviews on your Facebook page Jim you could go out and you could get another hundred and you can buy them both ways because you can think of this right it isn't just hey, I don't want I want more people to come to my business. I'm going to try and get people to give five star reviews and you can do the opposite, like Danny did on the Jim Polito Facebook page where he used a fake name and gave you a one star.

Jim 5:08
You're trying to set up dissension in the ranks here.

Craig 5:13
So you can go either way. So a lot of businesses do post fake reviews for their competitors and many businesses do it for themselves to try and raise it. So people write though, you know, that's kind of the big difference here. So it was something like a fire TV stick or you know, the which is the Amazon Smart TV or Roku where you're talking about 100,000 or more reviews, you're not going to make a difference, right?

Jim 5:39
No but you can look at them in different, you know, like I read them because you might hear something in it a complaint from someone, even if it's a positive review of something like okay, I want to make sure this product does what I'm looking for. It doesn't have this and and so I go in like kind of an auditor does it just kind of sample the soup.

Craig 6:05 
Okay well let me give you a couple of tips here, alright? First of all if you see the same text again and again like the, for instance, the democrats talking points and they come up for the day and you hear every democrat say the exact same thing all day long okay,  when we're talking about their you know the guys and gals down in the cesspool in Washington DC, not that I have an opinion about the matter. But if you see that same text based over and over, if you see a lot of reviews for the same product or place that are kind of out of line gets felt like the mom and pop restaurant on Yelp. If they've got a few hundred reviews you get to kind of wonder the same reviewer a lot that's a problem but the here's an interesting way to figure it out as well. If you really want to get into it because a lot of the reviews will take will put up a picture. So it might be a picture of the reviewer, it might be a picture of the place or a picture of the product. And I got a little secret here. Most people don't know about if you really want to find out so you're not buying a $5 something rather, who cares if it works or not. And maybe you're buying a $300 pair of headphones or something, take that picture that they have either the reviewer and by the way, if the reviewer looks like George Clooney, okay? It's probably fake.

Jim 7:32
Danny's a pretty handsome guy. You know, I mean. It looks like the picture that's in the frame. When you buy a frame. You mean one of those?

Craig 7:46 
Exactly. What the guys will do is they'll go out and find pictures online and they'll use them as their own picture or they'll use them as a picture of the product. So you will see this a lot for home construction places you know, hey. We do renovations and stuff. And if you save that, so you right click on that picture, and you save it to your hard disk, save it to your machine, and then go to Google and select images. Now what Google has, if you look in that search bar on the right hand side, when your images, there's a little camera, you click on the camera, and you upload the picture. So the picture of the reviewer, the pictures of the product, the picture of the house redone, and Google will search online and find that picture.

Jim 8:35 
Oh, the reverse image search.

Craig 8:38 
It's the reverse image. This is exactly what it is. So it'll find that picture and now all of a sudden, you know, Hey, wait a minute. This is a stock photo. Now, one of my son's was kind of helping out with this dating site online, because, of course, you know, it's a picture of Jim Polito from 19 you know, XX right? But this is up there on Jim's page and.

Jim 9:05
He looks so thin.

Craig 9:08 
He looks like George Clooney I just can't get it so. So what he was doing up for the dating site and and it was a paid side. And so he did this kind of, you know your reviews so many you know I can remember that there's like 100 a month of people's posts when they apply for the dating site and he would use the reverse image search and find, he said more than half of the time, people were taking stock photos and using them as their own photo on the dating sites. So there's a couple of hints here for you.

Jim 9:49 
So the first thing you look for is you look at the picture that goes up with the review, you save it, you do a reverse image search and if it comes up like you're doing a product search on something and then it comes up like the company then you go all this is ridiculous. Or if it comes up as a stock photo somewhere else, you know it's not a real person.

Craig 10:11 
Yeah, exactly. Or if it comes up with a completely different name for that person, right which the reverse image is going to do and then look for the Democratic talking points of the day look for the same text the same phrases being used over and over again because what happens is that companies when they want to buy 50 reviews for instance, they have to give these reviewers the texts that they're going to use. Now, most of these companies are trying to stop this from happening, it's difficult to do, obviously, they don't want to see 50 reviews coming from the same internet address. So the bad guys excuse me, the bad guys, if you will, will go ahead and they'll use a whole bunch of different internet addresses. So what they do is they pay people all over the world and they pay them a nickel to post a review. And then they charge the business a couple hundred bucks. And they just made themselves a cool hundred and $180 for doing the work. And they they had other people around the world do it for them for next to nothing. So that's what's up?

Jim 11:17 
We're talking with Craig Peterson, our Tech Talk guru helping us to understand what's a fake online review and what's a real online review? All right, let's just shift gears here. Storing my health records on my phone. Now, that'd be great and convenient and helpful in an emergency. But can Apple with my iPhone live up to the privacy values they've established? Can they do it? 

Craig 12:00
That's such a good question because Apple of course has been very, very conscientious about making sure that they keep your data safe. They don't send it up to the cloud, unless you tell them to. They don't share it. They they don't love law enforcement into your phone. You know, they've been very, very conscientious about this. And now we have a whole new market that's been developing over the last couple of years. And this is really kind of interesting when you when you look at the numbers, but the global healthcare industry is expected to reach $10 trillion. My 2021 is bigger than the economy of any country in the world other than the US and China and trillion. So you've got Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Apple who are among the companies that are trying to get a piece of that pie. So we've got Amazon buying pharmacies. They've got this automated pharmacy that they've bought and they're they're trying to get the laws changed about pharmacies and how they can do it. The same thing with some of these other guys are buying retail pharmacies are using artificial intelligence now for disease detection. In fact, your iPhone can be better at spotting skin cancer than a skin cancer doctor. And that's been the studies have shown that again and again. Isn't that something? And Apple has now tied into cardiac monitors and other things.

Jim 13:33 
I know that. The FDA approved them for machines that basically give you and EKG.

Craig 13:40
Yeah, exactly. It's like a three lead EKG. So it's amazing what's happening in healthcare, but the problem is privacy. We got the HIPAA rules and regulations in place some years ago, and we were sold a bill of goods somehow it was going to keep everything more private. In fact, because they require doctors to digitize the records that turned out that it's been less private than it ever was before. So back to your original question, can we trust Apple when it comes to our healthcare records? Well, amongst the my choices Apple, Amazon, Google or Microsoft, Apple, hands down, there's, there's just no question about it. They really are trying to keep our data safe there as their CEO, Tim Cook has been a very vocal advocate for privacy, right? He's been talking against Google and Facebook for making money off of user data and all. So this is coming. It's already here. You may not be aware of it, but there's about 200 healthcare providers around the United States that are now using the health record feature that is part of Apple's iPhone. So they started to kind of use San Diego is expanded to 200 different healthcare organizations. This within the next five to 10 years is going to be the norm. And this is one game I really hope Apple wins.

Jim 15:14 
Wow, this has been fascinating. Now look, folks, what I want you to do is text my name to the number that Craig is going to give you. You'll get all this information plus more. Plus, if there's ever a massive hack or a data breach, Craig Peterson will send you information. He doesn't pester you. He doesn't charge for this. He doesn't try to sell you anything and he doesn't sell your name to anyone else. Standard data and text rates apply. Text my name to this number.

Craig 15:45 
855-385-5553. That's 855-385-5553.

Jim 15:54 
All right. Standard data and text rates apply. It's a great thing Craig as usual. Awesome segment Always a pleasure and we'll talk to you next week.

---

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 on with Jack Heath as they discussed the email and phone scams that are happening right now, as well as the new hoax circulating, the Momo challenge.

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

---

Related Articles 

We Just Got a Phishing E-mail from Apple
---

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

Airing date: 03/04/2019

Telephone Scammers

Craig Peterson 0:00
Good morning, everybody. Monday morning. I was up early this morning on the air with Jack Heath, as I am pretty much every Monday and he wanted to talk a little bit about some of the scams that are going on because, man, they are hitting him and everybody else. The statistics are just crazy on these phone scams. You know, you pay for your mobile phone. And then they did try and scam you men paying for the bad guys. So here we go.

Jack Heath 0:29
Alright, joining us now on the Auto Fair listener lines. Thank you for the indulgence and patience. Our Tech Talk guy, Craig Peterson. And Craig, so many scams right now. So many emails, so many phone calls on the warranty department about a car you no longer own. So many people calling you about your Chase account even if you don't have one, wanting your credit information. It's impossible to keep up with this stuff.

Craig  0:51
Crazy eh? Good morning Jack. I got an email last week and I ended up writing an article put it up on my website because I got an email from Apple support supposedly. It is across the board. My father got caught up in one of these tech support scams where he was having some problems with his computer. And he got a phone call saying it looked like his computer might have been hacked. And they need to get on and have a look and he fell for it. It's really bad. So I went through and spend some time last week writing this whole thing up talking about what the red flags are, if it's legitimate, what you should do. The FBI has been telling us that there is about a $12 billion dollar industry out there right now trying to scam businesses into wiring money. And when I say 12 billion I mean they have $12 billion cash out of businesses by doing this.

Jack 1:53
Well Justin had a relative pass away where the other day you got a nice letter Justin, a Tweet?

Justin 1:57
A Twitter direct message. My uncle Husson Isaac, apparently had passed away in a tsunami in Indonesia and he left me $3.6 million. Craig. All I do is give my personal information and they will give me half of it.

Craig 2:12
Wow, that's really good. Half of the money. Wow, you didn't even know it was there. Another big one Jack did I got for one of our listeners. And Justin, you might have heard of this too. But in one of our live listeners and yours too Jack, he works at one of our local school districts. And after the kids come back from holidays here. He's going to be talking about this, but the Momo challenge has raised its ugly head again. Talking about scams. This is a hoax. Have you heard about this? The Momo challenge? 

Jack 2:43
Yes.

Justin 2:44 
Oh, yeah.

Craig 2:45 
And yeah, it's it's kind of a big deal. There are no reports, by the way from any police department that I could find, or in any articles I could find. There are no reports that anyone's actually been harmed as a result of the phenomena. But it's again another scam and it's the scammers are out there last year course was the year ransomware by the bad guys where they will take over your computer, yeah. And will hold it ransom, your information ransom. It's still a very big deal. But this year, they're changing their angles because of the popularity of some of these cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, and they're now taking over your computer to spread scams, but also to use your computer to mind for Bitcoin and it's going to cost you a lot of money because ultimately you have to pay the electric bill for all of their money they're doing but these scams are difficult. The FCC is trying to do some things FCC is doing some things. Our State Attorney General's office is doing things and there's also reporting available you can report online to the FBI in order to report to them the scams.

Jack 4:01
It's not just your computer anymore and of course our phones or computers but these scammers are calling people directly pretending to be the IRS, pretending to be your your bank, pretending to be some relative, and pretending to be the warranty department of a car you owned you know 10 years ago and the bottom line is just don't answer the call hang up you can call them back and you can tell it's a scam. And don't open an email and click anything and don't give information because most of your credit or legitimate organizations don't call you and ask for this information.

Craig 4:39
Yeah, absolutely. And they don't send the types of emails that we've been seeing. And the current reports that are out there by the way otter that this year 50% of all mobile calls will be scams so that means half of the time that call is going to be a scam. Massachusetts has seen a 500% growth in spam and fraud calls as of the end of last year we're seeing something similar so yeah Be careful there is software you can use I've mentioned Hiya before. H-I-Y-A on your show Jack. I use that to help block scam calls but it's gotten. So bad basically I block every call that comes to me that not from someone I already know. All of the rest of them end up going to voicemail.

Jack 5:28
All right, Craig Peterson good stuff. Craig Peterson with an O-N.com. Thank you on this Monday morning.

Craig 5:34
Thanks. Take care.

Craig 5:35
Hey, if you are in my current group coaching session, or if you run it last Thursday, I mentioned that I was releasing this week for all of the people who signed up for the course of very detailed installation instructions on Windows 10, what to do, what options to take. And we even included in that what hardware to get and what's the differences between the different hardware, why you should get this or that what's a workstation, the different types of processors and everything very, very in depth. So have a look for that. It's in your insider account. That video, the transcription, my slides, you know, everything per usual. So I'll have a lookout for that and I hope everybody has a great week. I'll be back tomorrow with Mr. Jim Polito.

---

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 on with Jack Heath as they discussed the email and phone scams that are happening right now, as well as the new hoax circulating, the Momo challenge.

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

---

Related Articles 

We Just Got a Phishing E-mail from Apple
---

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

Airing date: 03/04/2019

Telephone Scammers

Craig Peterson 0:00
Good morning, everybody. Monday morning. I was up early this morning on the air with Jack Heath, as I am pretty much every Monday and he wanted to talk a little bit about some of the scams that are going on because, man, they are hitting him and everybody else. The statistics are just crazy on these phone scams. You know, you pay for your mobile phone. And then they did try and scam you men paying for the bad guys. So here we go.

Jack Heath 0:29
Alright, joining us now on the Auto Fair listener lines. Thank you for the indulgence and patience. Our Tech Talk guy, Craig Peterson. And Craig, so many scams right now. So many emails, so many phone calls on the warranty department about a car you no longer own. So many people calling you about your Chase account even if you don't have one, wanting your credit information. It's impossible to keep up with this stuff.

Craig  0:51
Crazy eh? Good morning Jack. I got an email last week and I ended up writing an article put it up on my website because I got an email from Apple support supposedly. It is across the board. My father got caught up in one of these tech support scams where he was having some problems with his computer. And he got a phone call saying it looked like his computer might have been hacked. And they need to get on and have a look and he fell for it. It's really bad. So I went through and spend some time last week writing this whole thing up talking about what the red flags are, if it's legitimate, what you should do. The FBI has been telling us that there is about a $12 billion dollar industry out there right now trying to scam businesses into wiring money. And when I say 12 billion I mean they have $12 billion cash out of businesses by doing this.

Jack 1:53
Well Justin had a relative pass away where the other day you got a nice letter Justin, a Tweet?

Justin 1:57
A Twitter direct message. My uncle Husson Isaac, apparently had passed away in a tsunami in Indonesia and he left me $3.6 million. Craig. All I do is give my personal information and they will give me half of it.

Craig 2:12
Wow, that's really good. Half of the money. Wow, you didn't even know it was there. Another big one Jack did I got for one of our listeners. And Justin, you might have heard of this too. But in one of our live listeners and yours too Jack, he works at one of our local school districts. And after the kids come back from holidays here. He's going to be talking about this, but the Momo challenge has raised its ugly head again. Talking about scams. This is a hoax. Have you heard about this? The Momo challenge? 

Jack 2:43
Yes.

Justin 2:44 
Oh, yeah.

Craig 2:45 
And yeah, it's it's kind of a big deal. There are no reports, by the way from any police department that I could find, or in any articles I could find. There are no reports that anyone's actually been harmed as a result of the phenomena. But it's again another scam and it's the scammers are out there last year course was the year ransomware by the bad guys where they will take over your computer, yeah. And will hold it ransom, your information ransom. It's still a very big deal. But this year, they're changing their angles because of the popularity of some of these cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, and they're now taking over your computer to spread scams, but also to use your computer to mind for Bitcoin and it's going to cost you a lot of money because ultimately you have to pay the electric bill for all of their money they're doing but these scams are difficult. The FCC is trying to do some things FCC is doing some things. Our State Attorney General's office is doing things and there's also reporting available you can report online to the FBI in order to report to them the scams.

Jack 4:01
It's not just your computer anymore and of course our phones or computers but these scammers are calling people directly pretending to be the IRS, pretending to be your your bank, pretending to be some relative, and pretending to be the warranty department of a car you owned you know 10 years ago and the bottom line is just don't answer the call hang up you can call them back and you can tell it's a scam. And don't open an email and click anything and don't give information because most of your credit or legitimate organizations don't call you and ask for this information.

Craig 4:39
Yeah, absolutely. And they don't send the types of emails that we've been seeing. And the current reports that are out there by the way otter that this year 50% of all mobile calls will be scams so that means half of the time that call is going to be a scam. Massachusetts has seen a 500% growth in spam and fraud calls as of the end of last year we're seeing something similar so yeah Be careful there is software you can use I've mentioned Hiya before. H-I-Y-A on your show Jack. I use that to help block scam calls but it's gotten. So bad basically I block every call that comes to me that not from someone I already know. All of the rest of them end up going to voicemail.

Jack 5:28
All right, Craig Peterson good stuff. Craig Peterson with an O-N.com. Thank you on this Monday morning.

Craig 5:34
Thanks. Take care.

Craig 5:35
Hey, if you are in my current group coaching session, or if you run it last Thursday, I mentioned that I was releasing this week for all of the people who signed up for the course of very detailed installation instructions on Windows 10, what to do, what options to take. And we even included in that what hardware to get and what's the differences between the different hardware, why you should get this or that what's a workstation, the different types of processors and everything very, very in depth. So have a look for that. It's in your insider account. That video, the transcription, my slides, you know, everything per usual. So I'll have a lookout for that and I hope everybody has a great week. I'll be back tomorrow with Mr. Jim Polito.

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Browsers are being Attacked.  Just this week we are hearing about another attack against the browsers we use daily listen in for more details.

We have all seen reviews online. But can they be trusted?  Turns out --- maybe not....

New research is being done on Swine diseases in China. These diseases are rampant and now the Chinese are running full force to technology for answers.

Android is trying to up their Security.  Listen in to find out what they are doing.

The FTC has just issued a ruling on TokTok.  I'll be talking about that today too.

Health records are now a big business. I'll tell you why so many of the big tech players are trying to get into the game.

We will also talk about the MOMO challenge.  

There's lots to talk about tech this week.  So grab a seat and join me. 

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

---

Transcript:

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

Airing date: 03/02/2019

Researchers Our Smart Home Be Big Brother - Health Records On Smart Phones - New Browser Attacks - Momo Challenge

Craig Peterson: 0:00
Hey. Hi everybody. Craig Peterson here, it's time for our weekly radio show. A lot to cover as always, it has been a very fun week. For me. I have really been enjoying this as we've been doing more and more content for our Insider's site, and the people who signed up for this master course. And welcome aboard. Thanks, everybody, for being with us. You are, I'm sure going to continue to love it. We've had great feedback, more and more people giving us just, you know, a little bit of encouragement, which I always, always appreciate. Let me tell you, it is difficult to put some of this stuff together and to do it. Yeah, you know, so I appreciate the appreciate should including here on the radio show. So welcome to everybody.

I had a couple of conversations last week about some of the browser hacks that are going on so we're going to cover that again there's a new browser attack a whole new type the to really just kind of an old browser hack that is back again. Some very troubling news coming out of Hawaii and some scientists over there we're going to talk about and no, it's not about the volcano or global warming. It's about Alexa and what they're proposing trusting online reviews. This is a biggie, biggie, biggie, can you really trust them? And you know you go to a site like Amazon or eBay. And what do you see on there? You see people saying, Oh, this is the greatest thing ever. I love it. It's too big. And sometimes, oh, no, it's too small. It's never worked for me. How legitimate are those we rely on and those don't we know. We're going to talk a little bit about that China, they are doing some interesting things with pigs over there. you know, about the tracking that the law enforcement doing here to try and catch bad guys. And that makes sense, right? We want the bad guys caught on and off the street in London, the most surveilled city in the world, at least, it used to be, it's probably Shanghai nowadays. But in London, you can't go anywhere and not be caught on one of these closed-circuit cameras. Well they're doing
the same thing now and trying and with pigs. And we'll talk about why Android it kind of, you know, kudos to them. They've had all kinds of security issues they now have part of what's called Fido available on their devices is a fast identity thing, we'll talk about that and its use. We're just not gonna have enough time today, the Federal Trade Commission is ruling is find here a $5.7 million to a company that has an app called TikTok. And this is under the law that was passe, man it's been a few years now, I can't remember. I'm kind of looking through the article to see if it says when it came up at the COPA regulations, and it went beyond the statutory limits as to say that story. And storing health records now is a big business and Apple's trying to get into the game as, as Google and of course, many others, because there's so much money in it. But how about the privacy side of it is Apple going to continue to keep your data private. and in this case your medical data private.

We've got a note to this week, from one of the listeners to the podcast, he texted me and he was asking about this Momo challenge, then. So I want to bring that up as well. So a very busy day. Today, I'm going to try and keep these things short. But you know me I'll just have to explain them in a little bit to detail. So here we go.

Now, you've been online, I'm sure you've been to YouTube. This even made it onto most of the news sites is 24/7 news cycle that we have nowadays. But that bucket challenge writes the Ice Bucket Challenge. It was phenomenal. From a fundraising standpoint, it really helped to raise some funds for a very good cause. And the whole idea was, Hey, I'm going to get a bucket of water, I'm going to fill it with ice. And I'm going to dump it over my head. And it's part of a fundraising campaign where people would donate, you know, and if you do it I'll give you 10 bucks, or I'll donate 10 bucks to it. And so they did it, which is really kind of cool. I'm glad they did all of that.

Well, there's an internet home that's been around for a while now it is a hoax. But there is a problem with this as well. And it's called the Momo challenge. It's been spread by users on Facebook has been talked about in the media and different channels. And the whole idea behind this reporting is that children and teens are getting enticed by this username Momo, to ultimately commit suicide. And the whole concept is you start out small, you do some  you know, almost innocuous things, and then it gets keeps getting more and more violent. There's attacks and then eventually suicide. And it really reached worldwide proportions last summer, in July 2018, and the number of actual complaints was actually quite small. And there's no police force that is out there right now that I could find that reported that anybody was ever harmed as a result of this phenomena. no direct result, right? There could be other things and there's a great by the way page about this up on Wikipedia that you might want to check out.

But reports about this and the awareness of the digital challenge rose again this month after police in Northern Ireland posted a public warning on Facebook. And that's a problem it keeps popping up. As you know, we're actually concerned parents concerned police departments are trying to say hey, listen, everybody, keep an eye on what your kids are doing online because it could be very dangerous, which is very, very true. It could be. Let's see Momo WhatsApp messages apparently are being used to try and convince people to contact them and their cell phone there are some other ones out there known as blue whale where players quote unquote players are instructed to perform a succession of tasks and refusing to do so gets met with threats.

So, the messages are often accompanied by frightening or gory pictures. It really does appear to be a hoax. I've got a country by country breakdown where they have looked at this and the problems Quebec the police forces of the Longueuil, Sherbrooke, and Gatineau have indicated that people in their jurisdiction have been approached to participate in the Momo challenge. But there are no reports of any victims. They're asking people not to use a phone number provided in the WhatsApp messages to send screen captures and images of the of the phone to police authorities. Bottom line the phone numbers that have been used in these hoaxes just don't work. It goes through Columbia, Europe, Brazil, France, Germany, Luxembourg, India, Mexico, so pretty extensive run down and you'll find that online as well. Just look up Momo challenge over on Wikipedia. And thanks to the listener that sent in that question. It's a good question and good concerns. And it's hit the news cycle again, because of these police in Northern Ireland.

So next up here, let's talk about this new browser attack that has been hitting people.

Now one of the most interesting parts of this to me is it's not really a new attack. This particular type of attack was first documented in a research paper back in 2007, this new attack is called MarioNet. And what it does is it is opening the door for creating huge bought net and button that's are used to do a lot of things. They're used to attack businesses, somebody they don't like for their political opinion might be attacked with a botnet and the botnet then ends up sending just malicious data, basically, to whoever the intended victim is. So their website goes down, and they can no longer really conduct business at all. That's what a botnet that is there. They're also used for other types of attacks. And now the real big thing for botnets is called cryptojacking. And what cryptojacking does is it allows the bad guys to use your browser your machine in order to earn Bitcoin for themselves. And just oversimplifying it dramatically. Now, previous versions of this allowed you when you shut off your web browser, or close the window, get what it's no longer running. So the bad guys, we're not using your computer any longer. However, there is a new feature that has been added to the modern web browsers, it's using an API called service workers. And this allows the website to isolate the operation of the service worker from a web page. And the idea is that the web page UI isn't going to freeze up when it's processing a lot of data.

So you could go and this is there are legitimate purposes for this, you go to a website, and you wanted to have a look at something that a history of 23andMe type of site, for instance, I might do real-time live analysis, which 23andMe does not do, by the way, I don't want you to think poorly about them for that. But the service workers really are an update to an older API. But now this MarioNet, which is actually supposed to be pronounced to marionette, but it's spelled MarioNet, it's taken advantage of these things. It's a very silent attack, it doesn't require any user interaction at all the browsers on going to alert you about it, they're not going to ask for permission before registering your service worker. everything's happening under the browser's hood as the user waits for the website to load. And about, the only thing you're going to notice is that if it's used for cryptomining is that your machine is going to slow down, slow down a lot. But let some place malicious code on your high traffic websites gain a huge user base, it's it's a very scary thing. And there's not a whole lot that you can do about it, unfortunately. So the research is going on, it's been discovered. So, expect patches from all of the major vendors out there. And they will be hoping, hoping to have them fix this. Some vendors are course better at patching than others. And you already know who I think are some of the better ones. If you want privacy then the Epic browsers. Fantastic. The Google Chrome browser is the industry standard browser, frankly, very good browser. And Safari is very good. Dead last one you should never use is Microsoft Internet Explorer. They have their new Edge browser, which is nowhere near as bad as Internet Explorer. But Microsoft has come to realize that all other browsers are terrible. So Microsoft is switching over to Google Chrome. So in the future, the little IE button is going to launch the new Edge browser, which is not really IE Internet Explorer, nor is it edge it is actually Google Chrome. So how's that for a good time for all but at least Microsoft is finally realizing that they have no idea how to make a good web browser, right.

So let's talk a little bit here about your health record,

Great article that NPR has up, on their website about storing health records. I saw a lot of mentions of this all over the internet. So I had to have a look at it myself. And he, Well, he would back up a little bit. The author of this is Laura Sidell, and it's talking about Sam Cavalier, he's a San Diego tech worker. And he is using Apple's Health app. And a lot of us are, particularly people who have the Apple Watch, who might have some concerns about their cardiac rhythms. All of that stuff can be tracked now on your Apple device. So he's using the Apple Health app in order to keep track of his weight to his exercise routines, how many steps he takes a day find that really too when I'm going out and I'm walking, how far have I walked, where did I go, and I'll do the walk around the mall in the walk around the blocks. And it's really kind of nice to be able to see that and have that all tracked.

Well since March last year. So about a year now, Apple's had a feature that allows people to store their medical records as part of the Health app information. Then the University of California, San Diego health where this guy, the same guy goes to get his medical checkups, etc. But UC San Diego is one or more than 200 healthcare providers in the US who are using this new health records feature. He travels a lot for work, he likes to keep track, that was blood pressure. And he has a special confidence link to his health app. And he likes the convenience of having that app and really having all those records there with them. If you travel a lot, it's can be phenomenal to have all of your health records with you in case something were to happen, right? Doesn't that make sense? And then the doctor can also look at it and see what the trends are, and analyze where they're not, there might be some sort of a real problem with the guy's health that they may be want to have a look at.

Well, the global health industry is expected to reach $10 trillion by 2022, which is absolutely phenomenal. Just health alone is bigger than any economy of any country other than the US and China. And I mentioned earlier, we've got Apple who's in the foray, Google is in it. And so is Amazon and Microsoft, trying to get a piece of the medical pie in retail pharmacies, artificial intelligence for disease detection, and healthy living apps. And we've seen some of these apps, we've seen already that some of these computer programs are better at spotting skin cancer than even a cancer doctor is, that's actually pretty cool when you get right down to it. And they let you take a picture of moles, and they track the moles over time. And they look at the edges of the moles to see if they are real little rough, they look like there might be precancerous, etc. So the AI part of it, at least machine learning is really going to go a long way. And Apple has invested a lot in machine learning. If you have one of the newer iPhone models, it has a machine learning chip dedicated to machine learning built right into it kind of makes me wonder if maybe that's part of Apple's goal. That's why they put it in there. And part of the reason I should mention too is Apple tries not to send any data up to the cloud that it doesn't absolutely have to send up to the cloud. Which also means makes a ton of sense to me anyways. It's not like Google or Amazon that basically send everything up to the cloud for processing. Apple tries to process it locally, which is really good from a security standpoint.

So where are things going? I read a really great article about Apple and their direction just yesterday because a lot of people are saying, Hey, listen, iPhone sales are slowing down. Is this the end of apple? What should we be worrying about it? What should we be doing? And it turned out that no, no, no, none of those things were true. Apple is looking to get into the service areas. And one of them, of course, is health care.

Now, having privacy as a key like Apple does, and has done for quite a while is a big, big, big win for our friends over at Apple, because people are now used to expecting maybe that's even a better way to put it. People are expecting Apple to keep their data safe. And frankly, I think they will. Their CEO, Tim Cook's been very vocal about privacy rights. He also is really ticked off at Google and Facebook for making money off of user data, which is I know, I go back and forth on that.

But they certainly do keep it private. So how about you? What do you want to do? Do you want to give your medical data to any of these big companies, Facebook, or Amazon, Google, Microsoft or Apple, there are pros and cons to all of it. And the whole HIPAA regulations, that whole thing was supposed to make it so that our information would be digitized. And we could take it with us as we moved around the country or change doctors. But somehow that really hasn't come into fruition. Frankly, I don't know that it will, hey, I want to talk about this other thing right out of the universities. This is the University of Bergen. And we're going to talk about this conference over in Hawaii, and how this could have a huge, huge impact on our privacy.

There was a conference in Hawaii here recently. And they were talking about our fish, artificial listening devices. And we have those all over the place, we just found out that if you have a certain smart thermostat that's been on the market for a while that built into it was a microphone people had no idea it was there. And I personally don't like that idea, right. So it had a built-in microphone that was kind of hidden. Frankly, there's no mention of it in the marketing materials in the owner's manual, nothing. And then the company decided just about two weeks ago, hey, we're going to turn on that microphone so that you can ask questions and get things done. And it's a piece of hardware that Amazon had picked up through one of its acquisitions. So we have these we have the Amazon Alexa is we have our series, we have our Google Homes, and there will be many others, of course, coming over the years, I'm sure, but one of those three is probably going to be the winner. So we have these in our homes. We've already talked on the show about police departments who have since subpoenas to get the audio from these devices. And frankly, those subpoenas don't really go very far. Because they don't really have the audio from the devices, all they'll have is the audio for about 30 seconds after you give it the wake word whatever your wake word is. So in other words, you might wake it up by calling a computer or whatever might be, and it responds, it listens for up to 30 seconds, sends out audio up to the cloud words process tries to figure out what you're talking about. And then and then goes ahead and processes.

And I should mention too, that on that exact same front, a lot of people are upset with Apple, and how Siri just doesn't perform as well as Alexa does, for instance, or as Google Home does. And I want to remind everyone, again, it's a trade-off on privacy in the apple space. It's trying to do as much of the processing locally as it can. And so it doesn't have all the benefits of all of the cloud data that has been collected and stored and analyzed by the other competitors out there. So Apple, Apple is in a bit of a disadvantage because of their privacy stuff.

Anyhow, the devices are listening. So these scientists over at the University of Bergen decided, hey, let's do a little bit of study on these devices. Can we turn these into monitors for the home? And what they are suggesting is that these smart devices should have built into them in the future what they're calling a moral artificial intelligence so they're sitting there listening to what's going on they should be able to say wait a minute and it sounds like somebody's getting a beating, somebody's a whooping. Okay. And whooping weapon me not a great idea, right? But is frankly, the device really shouldn't be responsible to try and decide whether or not it should call the police on your behalf. I get it if you tell it if you wake it up and say you know, call the police it should right but if it's just listening does not sound like 1984 is in that very Orwellian where it's listening and it tries to make decisions based on all of this, right? It's, it's an interesting problem. If you ask me.

The University of Cambridge has stepped in and made their little comment saying humans and human situations are far messier than what the scientists over there from Norway, University of Bergen has been really saying and contemplating. Because you think about family and family dynamics, and there can be some pretty heated arguments, but that doesn't mean that there's a crime committed or someone was particularly harmed and when we see some agencies being very, very ready to just grab children and run away and then investigate later is is it something that's legitimate, something we should be doing? We had in the UK in April 2018, the House of Lords artificial intelligence committee said that ethics need to be put at the center of the development of AI so there you go. And Britain they're poised to become a world leader in the controversial technology field of you guessed it moral artificial intelligence. And remember, I said the Londoners are some of the most surveilled people in the world. It's very, very interesting. Also, in the UK, they are European actually parliament, they are looking at creating a legal status for robots. And it goes on and on. We have a lot of things we've got it assigned on over the next few years when it comes to artificial intelligence tracking us. And this whole concept of moral artificial intelligence, which frankly, really kind of scares me.

Well, I don't want this article to just go away. We have a couple of minutes left here. And today's show. So let's talk about this. This is called Fido, it's been around a little while. If you use your key or some of these other hardware tokens, many of them tie into Fido. And the idea behind Fido is to have a mechanism that gets rid of a password. That's the bottom line here, password list web. And that's the goal. So if you go on to the Internet, and you go to a particular website, the idea is that you can use this Fido certification to figure out if it's really the person that says it is right. So automated Google Play Services update is going to push that to your device. If you have that turned on. You can this is for Android, obviously they can log in with other forms of authentication compatible with final to spec like the yubi keys are or Google Titan. Titan was an internal project at Google, they use it for life getting into all of their devices. And now they are marketing that it's available for purchase. So have a look at that as well. We're helping a lot of businesses move over to start using hardware keys, particularly in the medical and legal realms, where access to information is severely limited on the legal side, right.

So let's see final two supports can allow Android to accept secure web logins using these devices including Bluetooth by the way so you can use your smartphone as part of your identifier Google's anticipating fingerprint nothing authentication will be the easiest way just like to become the users preferred method and in this case it doesn't send your fingerprint to the website the fingerprint is analyzed locally and then there is a cryptographically secure handshake that occurs between the website and your final compatible device anyways, there's a lot there. Naked Security blog had a very good article on this if you're interested. It's up on my website as well. http://CraigPeterson.com.

But that's it for now. I had a couple of really great webinars this week. I want to mention one for the FBI Infragard. This is their National Cyber camp program and it's really really kind of cool so I did a whole webinar on that for the leaders in all of the 80 Plus Local in for guard chapters. But as you're thinking about summer and summer programs and camps, have a look at that if you are an InfraGard member and if you're not, check it out Infragard.org. You'll find out more there, about what they're doing with this whole FBI related program. So, that's it for this week. Have a great week. And we'll be chatting again soon. You've been listening to Craig Peterson and all of this can be found at http://CraigPeterson.com. Bye-bye.

--- 

Related articles:

New Browser Attack Lets Hackers Run Bad Code Even After Users Leave A Web Page

Alexa, Call The Police! Smart Assistants Should Come With A ‘Moral Ai’ To Decide Whether To Report Their Owners For Breaking The Law, Experts Say

Can You Trust Online Reviews? Here’s How To Find The Fakes

China’s Tech Firms Are Mapping Pig Faces

FTC Ruling Sees Musical.Ly (Tiktok) Fined $5.7m For Violating Children’s Privacy Law, App Updated With Age Gate

Storing Health Records On Your Phone: Can Apple Live Up To Its Privacy Values?

Android Nudges Passwords Closer To The Cliff Edge With Fido2 Support

---

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

Browsers are being Attacked.  Just this week we are hearing about another attack against the browsers we use daily listen in for more details.

We have all seen reviews online. But can they be trusted?  Turns out --- maybe not....

New research is being done on Swine diseases in China. These diseases are rampant and now the Chinese are running full force to technology for answers.

Android is trying to up their Security.  Listen in to find out what they are doing.

The FTC has just issued a ruling on TokTok.  I'll be talking about that today too.

Health records are now a big business. I'll tell you why so many of the big tech players are trying to get into the game.

We will also talk about the MOMO challenge.  

There's lots to talk about tech this week.  So grab a seat and join me. 

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

---

Transcript:

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

Airing date: 03/02/2019

Researchers Our Smart Home Be Big Brother - Health Records On Smart Phones - New Browser Attacks - Momo Challenge

Craig Peterson: 0:00
Hey. Hi everybody. Craig Peterson here, it's time for our weekly radio show. A lot to cover as always, it has been a very fun week. For me. I have really been enjoying this as we've been doing more and more content for our Insider's site, and the people who signed up for this master course. And welcome aboard. Thanks, everybody, for being with us. You are, I'm sure going to continue to love it. We've had great feedback, more and more people giving us just, you know, a little bit of encouragement, which I always, always appreciate. Let me tell you, it is difficult to put some of this stuff together and to do it. Yeah, you know, so I appreciate the appreciate should including here on the radio show. So welcome to everybody.

I had a couple of conversations last week about some of the browser hacks that are going on so we're going to cover that again there's a new browser attack a whole new type the to really just kind of an old browser hack that is back again. Some very troubling news coming out of Hawaii and some scientists over there we're going to talk about and no, it's not about the volcano or global warming. It's about Alexa and what they're proposing trusting online reviews. This is a biggie, biggie, biggie, can you really trust them? And you know you go to a site like Amazon or eBay. And what do you see on there? You see people saying, Oh, this is the greatest thing ever. I love it. It's too big. And sometimes, oh, no, it's too small. It's never worked for me. How legitimate are those we rely on and those don't we know. We're going to talk a little bit about that China, they are doing some interesting things with pigs over there. you know, about the tracking that the law enforcement doing here to try and catch bad guys. And that makes sense, right? We want the bad guys caught on and off the street in London, the most surveilled city in the world, at least, it used to be, it's probably Shanghai nowadays. But in London, you can't go anywhere and not be caught on one of these closed-circuit cameras. Well they're doing
the same thing now and trying and with pigs. And we'll talk about why Android it kind of, you know, kudos to them. They've had all kinds of security issues they now have part of what's called Fido available on their devices is a fast identity thing, we'll talk about that and its use. We're just not gonna have enough time today, the Federal Trade Commission is ruling is find here a $5.7 million to a company that has an app called TikTok. And this is under the law that was passe, man it's been a few years now, I can't remember. I'm kind of looking through the article to see if it says when it came up at the COPA regulations, and it went beyond the statutory limits as to say that story. And storing health records now is a big business and Apple's trying to get into the game as, as Google and of course, many others, because there's so much money in it. But how about the privacy side of it is Apple going to continue to keep your data private. and in this case your medical data private.

We've got a note to this week, from one of the listeners to the podcast, he texted me and he was asking about this Momo challenge, then. So I want to bring that up as well. So a very busy day. Today, I'm going to try and keep these things short. But you know me I'll just have to explain them in a little bit to detail. So here we go.

Now, you've been online, I'm sure you've been to YouTube. This even made it onto most of the news sites is 24/7 news cycle that we have nowadays. But that bucket challenge writes the Ice Bucket Challenge. It was phenomenal. From a fundraising standpoint, it really helped to raise some funds for a very good cause. And the whole idea was, Hey, I'm going to get a bucket of water, I'm going to fill it with ice. And I'm going to dump it over my head. And it's part of a fundraising campaign where people would donate, you know, and if you do it I'll give you 10 bucks, or I'll donate 10 bucks to it. And so they did it, which is really kind of cool. I'm glad they did all of that.

Well, there's an internet home that's been around for a while now it is a hoax. But there is a problem with this as well. And it's called the Momo challenge. It's been spread by users on Facebook has been talked about in the media and different channels. And the whole idea behind this reporting is that children and teens are getting enticed by this username Momo, to ultimately commit suicide. And the whole concept is you start out small, you do some  you know, almost innocuous things, and then it gets keeps getting more and more violent. There's attacks and then eventually suicide. And it really reached worldwide proportions last summer, in July 2018, and the number of actual complaints was actually quite small. And there's no police force that is out there right now that I could find that reported that anybody was ever harmed as a result of this phenomena. no direct result, right? There could be other things and there's a great by the way page about this up on Wikipedia that you might want to check out.

But reports about this and the awareness of the digital challenge rose again this month after police in Northern Ireland posted a public warning on Facebook. And that's a problem it keeps popping up. As you know, we're actually concerned parents concerned police departments are trying to say hey, listen, everybody, keep an eye on what your kids are doing online because it could be very dangerous, which is very, very true. It could be. Let's see Momo WhatsApp messages apparently are being used to try and convince people to contact them and their cell phone there are some other ones out there known as blue whale where players quote unquote players are instructed to perform a succession of tasks and refusing to do so gets met with threats.

So, the messages are often accompanied by frightening or gory pictures. It really does appear to be a hoax. I've got a country by country breakdown where they have looked at this and the problems Quebec the police forces of the Longueuil, Sherbrooke, and Gatineau have indicated that people in their jurisdiction have been approached to participate in the Momo challenge. But there are no reports of any victims. They're asking people not to use a phone number provided in the WhatsApp messages to send screen captures and images of the of the phone to police authorities. Bottom line the phone numbers that have been used in these hoaxes just don't work. It goes through Columbia, Europe, Brazil, France, Germany, Luxembourg, India, Mexico, so pretty extensive run down and you'll find that online as well. Just look up Momo challenge over on Wikipedia. And thanks to the listener that sent in that question. It's a good question and good concerns. And it's hit the news cycle again, because of these police in Northern Ireland.

So next up here, let's talk about this new browser attack that has been hitting people.

Now one of the most interesting parts of this to me is it's not really a new attack. This particular type of attack was first documented in a research paper back in 2007, this new attack is called MarioNet. And what it does is it is opening the door for creating huge bought net and button that's are used to do a lot of things. They're used to attack businesses, somebody they don't like for their political opinion might be attacked with a botnet and the botnet then ends up sending just malicious data, basically, to whoever the intended victim is. So their website goes down, and they can no longer really conduct business at all. That's what a botnet that is there. They're also used for other types of attacks. And now the real big thing for botnets is called cryptojacking. And what cryptojacking does is it allows the bad guys to use your browser your machine in order to earn Bitcoin for themselves. And just oversimplifying it dramatically. Now, previous versions of this allowed you when you shut off your web browser, or close the window, get what it's no longer running. So the bad guys, we're not using your computer any longer. However, there is a new feature that has been added to the modern web browsers, it's using an API called service workers. And this allows the website to isolate the operation of the service worker from a web page. And the idea is that the web page UI isn't going to freeze up when it's processing a lot of data.

So you could go and this is there are legitimate purposes for this, you go to a website, and you wanted to have a look at something that a history of 23andMe type of site, for instance, I might do real-time live analysis, which 23andMe does not do, by the way, I don't want you to think poorly about them for that. But the service workers really are an update to an older API. But now this MarioNet, which is actually supposed to be pronounced to marionette, but it's spelled MarioNet, it's taken advantage of these things. It's a very silent attack, it doesn't require any user interaction at all the browsers on going to alert you about it, they're not going to ask for permission before registering your service worker. everything's happening under the browser's hood as the user waits for the website to load. And about, the only thing you're going to notice is that if it's used for cryptomining is that your machine is going to slow down, slow down a lot. But let some place malicious code on your high traffic websites gain a huge user base, it's it's a very scary thing. And there's not a whole lot that you can do about it, unfortunately. So the research is going on, it's been discovered. So, expect patches from all of the major vendors out there. And they will be hoping, hoping to have them fix this. Some vendors are course better at patching than others. And you already know who I think are some of the better ones. If you want privacy then the Epic browsers. Fantastic. The Google Chrome browser is the industry standard browser, frankly, very good browser. And Safari is very good. Dead last one you should never use is Microsoft Internet Explorer. They have their new Edge browser, which is nowhere near as bad as Internet Explorer. But Microsoft has come to realize that all other browsers are terrible. So Microsoft is switching over to Google Chrome. So in the future, the little IE button is going to launch the new Edge browser, which is not really IE Internet Explorer, nor is it edge it is actually Google Chrome. So how's that for a good time for all but at least Microsoft is finally realizing that they have no idea how to make a good web browser, right.

So let's talk a little bit here about your health record,

Great article that NPR has up, on their website about storing health records. I saw a lot of mentions of this all over the internet. So I had to have a look at it myself. And he, Well, he would back up a little bit. The author of this is Laura Sidell, and it's talking about Sam Cavalier, he's a San Diego tech worker. And he is using Apple's Health app. And a lot of us are, particularly people who have the Apple Watch, who might have some concerns about their cardiac rhythms. All of that stuff can be tracked now on your Apple device. So he's using the Apple Health app in order to keep track of his weight to his exercise routines, how many steps he takes a day find that really too when I'm going out and I'm walking, how far have I walked, where did I go, and I'll do the walk around the mall in the walk around the blocks. And it's really kind of nice to be able to see that and have that all tracked.

Well since March last year. So about a year now, Apple's had a feature that allows people to store their medical records as part of the Health app information. Then the University of California, San Diego health where this guy, the same guy goes to get his medical checkups, etc. But UC San Diego is one or more than 200 healthcare providers in the US who are using this new health records feature. He travels a lot for work, he likes to keep track, that was blood pressure. And he has a special confidence link to his health app. And he likes the convenience of having that app and really having all those records there with them. If you travel a lot, it's can be phenomenal to have all of your health records with you in case something were to happen, right? Doesn't that make sense? And then the doctor can also look at it and see what the trends are, and analyze where they're not, there might be some sort of a real problem with the guy's health that they may be want to have a look at.

Well, the global health industry is expected to reach $10 trillion by 2022, which is absolutely phenomenal. Just health alone is bigger than any economy of any country other than the US and China. And I mentioned earlier, we've got Apple who's in the foray, Google is in it. And so is Amazon and Microsoft, trying to get a piece of the medical pie in retail pharmacies, artificial intelligence for disease detection, and healthy living apps. And we've seen some of these apps, we've seen already that some of these computer programs are better at spotting skin cancer than even a cancer doctor is, that's actually pretty cool when you get right down to it. And they let you take a picture of moles, and they track the moles over time. And they look at the edges of the moles to see if they are real little rough, they look like there might be precancerous, etc. So the AI part of it, at least machine learning is really going to go a long way. And Apple has invested a lot in machine learning. If you have one of the newer iPhone models, it has a machine learning chip dedicated to machine learning built right into it kind of makes me wonder if maybe that's part of Apple's goal. That's why they put it in there. And part of the reason I should mention too is Apple tries not to send any data up to the cloud that it doesn't absolutely have to send up to the cloud. Which also means makes a ton of sense to me anyways. It's not like Google or Amazon that basically send everything up to the cloud for processing. Apple tries to process it locally, which is really good from a security standpoint.

So where are things going? I read a really great article about Apple and their direction just yesterday because a lot of people are saying, Hey, listen, iPhone sales are slowing down. Is this the end of apple? What should we be worrying about it? What should we be doing? And it turned out that no, no, no, none of those things were true. Apple is looking to get into the service areas. And one of them, of course, is health care.

Now, having privacy as a key like Apple does, and has done for quite a while is a big, big, big win for our friends over at Apple, because people are now used to expecting maybe that's even a better way to put it. People are expecting Apple to keep their data safe. And frankly, I think they will. Their CEO, Tim Cook's been very vocal about privacy rights. He also is really ticked off at Google and Facebook for making money off of user data, which is I know, I go back and forth on that.

But they certainly do keep it private. So how about you? What do you want to do? Do you want to give your medical data to any of these big companies, Facebook, or Amazon, Google, Microsoft or Apple, there are pros and cons to all of it. And the whole HIPAA regulations, that whole thing was supposed to make it so that our information would be digitized. And we could take it with us as we moved around the country or change doctors. But somehow that really hasn't come into fruition. Frankly, I don't know that it will, hey, I want to talk about this other thing right out of the universities. This is the University of Bergen. And we're going to talk about this conference over in Hawaii, and how this could have a huge, huge impact on our privacy.

There was a conference in Hawaii here recently. And they were talking about our fish, artificial listening devices. And we have those all over the place, we just found out that if you have a certain smart thermostat that's been on the market for a while that built into it was a microphone people had no idea it was there. And I personally don't like that idea, right. So it had a built-in microphone that was kind of hidden. Frankly, there's no mention of it in the marketing materials in the owner's manual, nothing. And then the company decided just about two weeks ago, hey, we're going to turn on that microphone so that you can ask questions and get things done. And it's a piece of hardware that Amazon had picked up through one of its acquisitions. So we have these we have the Amazon Alexa is we have our series, we have our Google Homes, and there will be many others, of course, coming over the years, I'm sure, but one of those three is probably going to be the winner. So we have these in our homes. We've already talked on the show about police departments who have since subpoenas to get the audio from these devices. And frankly, those subpoenas don't really go very far. Because they don't really have the audio from the devices, all they'll have is the audio for about 30 seconds after you give it the wake word whatever your wake word is. So in other words, you might wake it up by calling a computer or whatever might be, and it responds, it listens for up to 30 seconds, sends out audio up to the cloud words process tries to figure out what you're talking about. And then and then goes ahead and processes.

And I should mention too, that on that exact same front, a lot of people are upset with Apple, and how Siri just doesn't perform as well as Alexa does, for instance, or as Google Home does. And I want to remind everyone, again, it's a trade-off on privacy in the apple space. It's trying to do as much of the processing locally as it can. And so it doesn't have all the benefits of all of the cloud data that has been collected and stored and analyzed by the other competitors out there. So Apple, Apple is in a bit of a disadvantage because of their privacy stuff.

Anyhow, the devices are listening. So these scientists over at the University of Bergen decided, hey, let's do a little bit of study on these devices. Can we turn these into monitors for the home? And what they are suggesting is that these smart devices should have built into them in the future what they're calling a moral artificial intelligence so they're sitting there listening to what's going on they should be able to say wait a minute and it sounds like somebody's getting a beating, somebody's a whooping. Okay. And whooping weapon me not a great idea, right? But is frankly, the device really shouldn't be responsible to try and decide whether or not it should call the police on your behalf. I get it if you tell it if you wake it up and say you know, call the police it should right but if it's just listening does not sound like 1984 is in that very Orwellian where it's listening and it tries to make decisions based on all of this, right? It's, it's an interesting problem. If you ask me.

The University of Cambridge has stepped in and made their little comment saying humans and human situations are far messier than what the scientists over there from Norway, University of Bergen has been really saying and contemplating. Because you think about family and family dynamics, and there can be some pretty heated arguments, but that doesn't mean that there's a crime committed or someone was particularly harmed and when we see some agencies being very, very ready to just grab children and run away and then investigate later is is it something that's legitimate, something we should be doing? We had in the UK in April 2018, the House of Lords artificial intelligence committee said that ethics need to be put at the center of the development of AI so there you go. And Britain they're poised to become a world leader in the controversial technology field of you guessed it moral artificial intelligence. And remember, I said the Londoners are some of the most surveilled people in the world. It's very, very interesting. Also, in the UK, they are European actually parliament, they are looking at creating a legal status for robots. And it goes on and on. We have a lot of things we've got it assigned on over the next few years when it comes to artificial intelligence tracking us. And this whole concept of moral artificial intelligence, which frankly, really kind of scares me.

Well, I don't want this article to just go away. We have a couple of minutes left here. And today's show. So let's talk about this. This is called Fido, it's been around a little while. If you use your key or some of these other hardware tokens, many of them tie into Fido. And the idea behind Fido is to have a mechanism that gets rid of a password. That's the bottom line here, password list web. And that's the goal. So if you go on to the Internet, and you go to a particular website, the idea is that you can use this Fido certification to figure out if it's really the person that says it is right. So automated Google Play Services update is going to push that to your device. If you have that turned on. You can this is for Android, obviously they can log in with other forms of authentication compatible with final to spec like the yubi keys are or Google Titan. Titan was an internal project at Google, they use it for life getting into all of their devices. And now they are marketing that it's available for purchase. So have a look at that as well. We're helping a lot of businesses move over to start using hardware keys, particularly in the medical and legal realms, where access to information is severely limited on the legal side, right.

So let's see final two supports can allow Android to accept secure web logins using these devices including Bluetooth by the way so you can use your smartphone as part of your identifier Google's anticipating fingerprint nothing authentication will be the easiest way just like to become the users preferred method and in this case it doesn't send your fingerprint to the website the fingerprint is analyzed locally and then there is a cryptographically secure handshake that occurs between the website and your final compatible device anyways, there's a lot there. Naked Security blog had a very good article on this if you're interested. It's up on my website as well. http://CraigPeterson.com.

But that's it for now. I had a couple of really great webinars this week. I want to mention one for the FBI Infragard. This is their National Cyber camp program and it's really really kind of cool so I did a whole webinar on that for the leaders in all of the 80 Plus Local in for guard chapters. But as you're thinking about summer and summer programs and camps, have a look at that if you are an InfraGard member and if you're not, check it out Infragard.org. You'll find out more there, about what they're doing with this whole FBI related program. So, that's it for this week. Have a great week. And we'll be chatting again soon. You've been listening to Craig Peterson and all of this can be found at http://CraigPeterson.com. Bye-bye.

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Related articles:

New Browser Attack Lets Hackers Run Bad Code Even After Users Leave A Web Page

Alexa, Call The Police! Smart Assistants Should Come With A ‘Moral Ai’ To Decide Whether To Report Their Owners For Breaking The Law, Experts Say

Can You Trust Online Reviews? Here’s How To Find The Fakes

China’s Tech Firms Are Mapping Pig Faces

FTC Ruling Sees Musical.Ly (Tiktok) Fined $5.7m For Violating Children’s Privacy Law, App Updated With Age Gate

Storing Health Records On Your Phone: Can Apple Live Up To Its Privacy Values?

Android Nudges Passwords Closer To The Cliff Edge With Fido2 Support

---

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:

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For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

It's Friday! Time for another Security Thing podcast. Craig talked about the Apex Human Capital Management's ransomware attack.

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: 03/01/2019

Apex Capital Destroyed By Ransomware - They Thought They Knew What They Were Doing

Craig Peterson 0:00
Hey everybody. Craig Peterson here. We got a Security Thing today I want to talk about and this is a company called Apex Human Capital Management. You are just not going to believe this. Now I've been telling you for ever and if you're part of my master course I've gone through in some detail the best way to protect yourself your business from these extortionists that are running these ransomware attacks against us? Well, Mama in this case this happened February 19, 2019.

So a week ago at least from the time I'm recording this and man did they get nailed now they were pretty proud of themselves over there because they just put in place a let me see if I can get it exactly. There's a quote from them: "We had just recently completed a pretty state of the art disaster recovery plan off site and out of state that was mirroring our live system." Well, a real security expert would tell you that you are an idiot if you think that that sort of backup is going to protect you from ransomware. Mirroring a live system is great for having your power go out. For losing a server in your main data center it's great. Having a storm hit you it's great a tree fall on your data center, it's great. Ransomware, you're dead. Because you are mirroring the ransomware. So once it starts encrypting your systems, guess what is happening. It's encrypting your live recovery site, whether it's out of state or in state it doesn't matter. It's encrypting your live recovery site. And that's what backup 3-2-1 is all about. That's why I teach that. And on top of 3-2-1, I teach grandfather, father and son going back at least three years in most cases, businesses have to go back seven years in order to comply with taxes and if you are a legal firm you really have to go back about 10 years and that's becoming the standard.

So if they had done what they should have done Roswell, Georgia based Apex Human Capital Management who does payroll for multiple companies looks like they also had the ability to do outsourced leased employees, employee leasing. They have, they service some 350 payroll service bureaus that all that in turn, provide payroll services to small and mid sized businesses completely out of business. They could not carry on business. So Krebs On Security reached out to them for comment and they comment I read you is from their CMO, the chief marketing officer, interestingly enough, right? So they had hired two "outside security firms". They didn't hire me, you know, they don't get where they get these people from. They call themselves a security firm. They put some great quotes on their website, and somehow they get hired. I don't get it.

But apparently, by February 20, the consensus among all three was that paying the ransom was the fastest way to get back online. So what does Apex do because I always say, Hey, don't pay the ransom. In fact, you don't need to pay the ransom because we've got you covered. We've got the live hot backups, we've got multi generational backups, we can go back and restore files that were encrypted and from the last state, in fact, we even do snapshot backups. So we can instantly restore a whole machine to the state before the ransomware started running. And by the way, if you have the right kind of security, you will never get ransomware anyways. It's almost impossible. And if you do get it, it won't spread. We just had that last week. We had a client was data exfiltration, the systems automatically noticed it and bam! Shut it down right away. That's what should be happening, especially with a company like this. Can you imagine how many records they have? They have some 350 payroll service bureaus that use these guys and they're idiots when it comes to the security obviously, are you kidding me?

So they pay the ransomware and guess what they said they paid the ransom in, "In respect for clients who needed to get their businesses out up and running that was going to be obviously the quicker path". How about doing it right the first time?

Quote goes on when they encrypt the data that happens really fast. He said, when they gave us the keys to decrypt it, things didn't go quite as cleanly. One of Apex's business units, called ACA on demand is still offline. The company is now offering to move customers to a different platform and to train the customers and how to use this other platform. It's absolutely nuts because when they tried to do the decryption once they paid the ransom, instead of restoring all of the files and folders to their pre-encrypted state to decryption process broke countless file directories and rendered many executable files inoperable causing even more delays.

So this is a company that makes tens of millions of dollars a year they have professional it people on staff professional security people and they don't get it right. It drives me nuts. If your IT guy says you're all set. Let's talk about the reality of the situation. You probably aren't. Then if your IT guy says there's no way to stop this, I can't be 100% sure that we are secure because there's always a way around it. And he might be trying to be terribly honest because in the way he or she is right. There's no way to be 100% secure but you can be five nine secure. 99.999% secure and we do it every day. It's just a shame that this is what we're seeing out there. So rest in peace, Apex Human Capital Management. They are going to be in for a rough ride as they try and get their business back. Just incredible.

Anyways Take care guys will be back tomorrow with my weekend radio show as well as we put up right here as a podcast you can subscribe by going to http://CraigPeterson.com/iTunes. I appreciate it when you do that, because it helps to lift our ranking and that helps to make it more available. People know about the show more so by all means, subscribe to the podcast, http://CraigPeterson.com /iTunes and leave a comment there on the iTunes site. Hopefully I owned a five star review from you. Take care. We'll be back tomorrow.

---

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:

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It's Friday! Time for another Security Thing podcast. Craig talked about the Apex Human Capital Management's ransomware attack.

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: 03/01/2019

Apex Capital Destroyed By Ransomware - They Thought They Knew What They Were Doing

Craig Peterson 0:00
Hey everybody. Craig Peterson here. We got a Security Thing today I want to talk about and this is a company called Apex Human Capital Management. You are just not going to believe this. Now I've been telling you for ever and if you're part of my master course I've gone through in some detail the best way to protect yourself your business from these extortionists that are running these ransomware attacks against us? Well, Mama in this case this happened February 19, 2019.

So a week ago at least from the time I'm recording this and man did they get nailed now they were pretty proud of themselves over there because they just put in place a let me see if I can get it exactly. There's a quote from them: "We had just recently completed a pretty state of the art disaster recovery plan off site and out of state that was mirroring our live system." Well, a real security expert would tell you that you are an idiot if you think that that sort of backup is going to protect you from ransomware. Mirroring a live system is great for having your power go out. For losing a server in your main data center it's great. Having a storm hit you it's great a tree fall on your data center, it's great. Ransomware, you're dead. Because you are mirroring the ransomware. So once it starts encrypting your systems, guess what is happening. It's encrypting your live recovery site, whether it's out of state or in state it doesn't matter. It's encrypting your live recovery site. And that's what backup 3-2-1 is all about. That's why I teach that. And on top of 3-2-1, I teach grandfather, father and son going back at least three years in most cases, businesses have to go back seven years in order to comply with taxes and if you are a legal firm you really have to go back about 10 years and that's becoming the standard.

So if they had done what they should have done Roswell, Georgia based Apex Human Capital Management who does payroll for multiple companies looks like they also had the ability to do outsourced leased employees, employee leasing. They have, they service some 350 payroll service bureaus that all that in turn, provide payroll services to small and mid sized businesses completely out of business. They could not carry on business. So Krebs On Security reached out to them for comment and they comment I read you is from their CMO, the chief marketing officer, interestingly enough, right? So they had hired two "outside security firms". They didn't hire me, you know, they don't get where they get these people from. They call themselves a security firm. They put some great quotes on their website, and somehow they get hired. I don't get it.

But apparently, by February 20, the consensus among all three was that paying the ransom was the fastest way to get back online. So what does Apex do because I always say, Hey, don't pay the ransom. In fact, you don't need to pay the ransom because we've got you covered. We've got the live hot backups, we've got multi generational backups, we can go back and restore files that were encrypted and from the last state, in fact, we even do snapshot backups. So we can instantly restore a whole machine to the state before the ransomware started running. And by the way, if you have the right kind of security, you will never get ransomware anyways. It's almost impossible. And if you do get it, it won't spread. We just had that last week. We had a client was data exfiltration, the systems automatically noticed it and bam! Shut it down right away. That's what should be happening, especially with a company like this. Can you imagine how many records they have? They have some 350 payroll service bureaus that use these guys and they're idiots when it comes to the security obviously, are you kidding me?

So they pay the ransomware and guess what they said they paid the ransom in, "In respect for clients who needed to get their businesses out up and running that was going to be obviously the quicker path". How about doing it right the first time?

Quote goes on when they encrypt the data that happens really fast. He said, when they gave us the keys to decrypt it, things didn't go quite as cleanly. One of Apex's business units, called ACA on demand is still offline. The company is now offering to move customers to a different platform and to train the customers and how to use this other platform. It's absolutely nuts because when they tried to do the decryption once they paid the ransom, instead of restoring all of the files and folders to their pre-encrypted state to decryption process broke countless file directories and rendered many executable files inoperable causing even more delays.

So this is a company that makes tens of millions of dollars a year they have professional it people on staff professional security people and they don't get it right. It drives me nuts. If your IT guy says you're all set. Let's talk about the reality of the situation. You probably aren't. Then if your IT guy says there's no way to stop this, I can't be 100% sure that we are secure because there's always a way around it. And he might be trying to be terribly honest because in the way he or she is right. There's no way to be 100% secure but you can be five nine secure. 99.999% secure and we do it every day. It's just a shame that this is what we're seeing out there. So rest in peace, Apex Human Capital Management. They are going to be in for a rough ride as they try and get their business back. Just incredible.

Anyways Take care guys will be back tomorrow with my weekend radio show as well as we put up right here as a podcast you can subscribe by going to http://CraigPeterson.com/iTunes. I appreciate it when you do that, because it helps to lift our ranking and that helps to make it more available. People know about the show more so by all means, subscribe to the podcast, http://CraigPeterson.com /iTunes and leave a comment there on the iTunes site. Hopefully I owned a five star review from you. Take care. We'll be back tomorrow.

---

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