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

Craig is on with Jim on the Jim Polito Show. They talked about the Google Chrome feature and website that can help you check if your password has been compromised. They also talked about how hackers are doing to infiltrate US utilities.

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

---

Related Articles:

Report Highlights The Crazy Lengths Hackers Took To Infiltrate US Utilities

Chrome Can Tell You If Your Passwords Have Been Compromised
---

Transcript:

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

Airing date: 02/12/2019

How To Check Your Passwords And Why It Matters - WSJ Article About Russian Attacks On US

Craig Peterson: 0:00

Hi everybody, Craig Peterson here. Hey, I hope you're enjoying this training I'm doing this is invaluable I think. I'm giving away my best stuff absolutely free. This is just phenomenal. It's up to this week that will be taking it down because I don't want to present information that's out of date or old. So I may do something in the future again about this, but we are going through the basics this week. Stuff you need to know to keep your small business or even your home safe. But I'm really trying to help out the small business people and it's all free. It's absolutely free. The training is there. I'm not upselling anything. On Thursday, we've got a live Q and A live webinar so make sure you check it out if you haven't already. http://CraigPeterson.com. It's right there on the homepage.

Hey, this morning I talked about a couple of really cool password checkup techniques you can use some free stuff and I'm sending that out in fact everybody that's on my SMS list. If you want to be on that by the way to get the alerts about the latest hack when it's really important. I don't send out, there's hacks every hour every minute in fact. Just the big ones that might affect you. Make sure you text me just text the word Craig or your message or your question or anything because this is me This is my phone number 855-385-5553. So just text Craig to 855-385-5553.

If you do that you're not going to be even letting me know that you did anything because guess what? It's automated if you say Craig but if you say something else then it's not automated but we'll get back to you. We'll answer your questions or problems. I'd love to do that again. Just text my name Craig.

Now I will also send you this information if you want it so let me know, on the password checkups stuff. And that's the main thing we talked about. But we also talked about an article in the Wall Street Journal that just came out about the hackers and, and some implications of it that I really hadn't thought of before until I was discussing it with one of the guests that's going to be on my FBI infra guard webinar this afternoon. So lots of great stuff today. Have a great day. We'll be back tomorrow. And don't forget. Get that training. http://CraigPeterson.com.

Unknown 2:37
Here he is Ladies and gentlemen, the man who helped invent the internet. Now like Al Gore, who took credit for it. He actually wrote code that you don't realize is helping you while you're on the internet. Our good friend tech talk guru Craig Peterson. Good morning, sir.

Unknown 2:56
Good morning, Jim. Waiting for some snow. Winter is coming.

Unknown 3:00
Yeah, you love you love that. You. You. You Canadian you. You love it. You don't care. You know, it makes no difference to you Craig Peterson whether it's you know what I mean. Like when you hear that forecast, you're like, Okay Yeah,

Unknown 3:18
It's like the winter vortex, right, that came down. All the complaints about. I remember days were not high when I was walking to school is 40 below zero. Come on people. Grow up.

Unknown 3:35
That's true. Hey listen, I'm with you. Suck it.

Unknown 3:37 
Well you get used to it. I have a friend who works with me who is now down in Florida. And he's he's actually from right outside Boston, and it gets to 60 degrees and he's dressing in layers now. So I guess it's just a time thing you know, we were down there with our kids and school was still open. No one was coming in and our kids are out there running around and bathing suits every everybody else's all bundled up. So I guess it can happen.

Unknown 4:13 
I will never, I would never acclimate to Florida. I could never do it because I'm. I'm always hot. I mean, but that's just me. But hey listen it is it is what it is. Pretty soon we'll have virtual reality. You want to feel what it's like and where Craig Peterson went to school. You just press a button put on your headset and your suit and it will be like you're walking to school barefoot in the snow with little Craig Peterson. So.

Unknown 4:37
Yeah, that's coming. You're right because we've we've already got some of this stuff it isn't where I had hoped it would be by now but when you're talking about things like the Oculus and these 3d virtual reality glasses and and now there's suits you can wear it or have you seen the gamers use things but they're thinking chairs for quite a while that that will kind of you know vibrate and stuff when stuff happens. Now there's a suit. It's kind of like a vest they can wear and it squeezes them. If they got get shot, they feel it hit them in the back, or wherever it hits them. It's coming. But it's really slow. I guess most people really aren't that interested in it. And I've tried it before. And, kind of a whole home, at least for me. But, you know, us 30 year olds, we're just not as interested as the kids does.

Unknown 5:27
I love that. We're taling to Craig Peterson. And at the end of this segment, I'm going to give you will Craig's gonna give you a number and if you text my name, you'll get a lot of great information from Craig free, no obligation. He doesn't sell your name, and he doesn't try to sell you anything. And standard data in text rates apply. Okay, this caught my attention Chrome, the browser, Chrome can tell you if your passwords have been compromised. Is this difficult or could the average person like me figure out how to use this because I'd like to know if my passwords have been compromised.

Unknown 6:00
Yeah, it's a really good idea to use some of these password check up programs. You know, I've recommended one password many times to a lot of people. And in here on your show as well. It has this built in so it when you generate a password or you type on in it, double checks to see if it's been hacked or not. And there's a website out there, I'll text it out to everybody. After we get off the air. Everyone on my text list called Have I Been Pawned and that now allows you to type in your password and see if it's a known password that's been stolen before. Now why would you want to know that right? If you have a bad guy that's trying to break in what they do is they use these huge databases. We talked about one a couple of weeks ago, 750 million records in the database. And now by the way, there have been more of those databases released over the last two weeks, and were over 2 billion now. So what happens is the bad guys grab a copy of a database from some website that they've stolen it from. And oftentimes, it's encrypted. So your password has some protection on it. So what are the bad guys do they use the passwords that they have seen before out there and they try them all because it doesn't matter if they're trying to log into the website yet they're just using their computers to figure out what your password is.

So if you're using a password that is known to have been stolen previously they will test that against the database then they've got your password and now they try and login. So that's how it all works. So when you're talking about using something like Have I Been Pawned I think it's important to do that but having something like this is called password checkup. So I'll I'll put together a little thing. And I'll send it out here to everyone on my text list afterwards on password checkup, and the other website to have as many times and what happens is you you install that on to your Chrome browser. And it will now tell you if you're using a username and password combination that Google knows to be unsafe and using the same database. Yeah. Isn't that great?

Unknown 8:31 
That is good. That is good. Right up front, you'll know. Right up right up you'll know.

Unknown 8:37
Yeah, like so what will happen is it'll, it has a little pop up, it's going to be in your browser bar and it's going to warn you if you're using a password that's been known to be compromised, it'll have a pop up that comes up when you visit the website and try to use that password it will say change your password and it'll allows you right now you can say I ignore the site or you can go ahead and change your password on that site. But Google saying they have a database of 4 billion credentials that they know have been compromised, and various data breaches. And it uses those to check and see if you're legit or not. So I love that that's so important Jim.

Unknown 9:17
We're talking I'm with Craig Peterson, our tech talk guru. He is the man with the plan. And again, we're going to give you a number at the end of this segment. If you want to get more information about what he's talking about today.

Let's go to US utilities. We when we worry about hackers and cyber war, I guess I guess our utilities are Ground Zero. You knock out the utilities you don't need to roll tanks down Main Street. You've had a major impact on a country. I mean, you could defeat them in a war. So Russian hackers I guess are going after the electrical grid. Wall Street Journal had a report Friday that talked about their techniques. I know you're concerned about this. Why don't you elaborate?

Unknown 10:08 
Yeah, it's a very big deal. In fact, I'm holding a webinar this afternoon for the FBI Infragard program, talking about some of this stuff. But yeah, critical infrastructure. So important. So think about what could happen in a power failure situation. And what we're gonna be talking about this afternoon is it goes beyond much beyond what most people think about because obviously, you've got hospitals, but you've got first responders, but you've also got the guys and gals that that drive the trucks, it's scheduled the loading of the trucks. If there's no power the phone's not going to get shipped, right? It goes on and on.

And when we're talking about these types of hacks, there's another thing that can happen. Think about what we apparently did along with the Israelis to the Iranians we went ahead and we got a virus into the the Iranian plant that was manufacturing the necessary steps to make a nuclear bomb and all of these devices that were in there, but what are we gonna do? We're gonna just shut them down because all they have to do is turn them back on, right? If we shut off the power to the plant, then they just restore the power Yeah. So what we did is we made cold understood the centrifuges and understood how to play with the centrifuges and play with a monitoring system. So the Iranian operators were sitting there and everything looked normal Jim. It looked like it was doing its thing it was making this powder cake that was going to be used for nuclear war. I mean, you know, power plants not they've never done that.

And what we did is we made it look normal and we had those centrifuges, very expensive, very fancy, not like we had in our chemistry lab. We made them self destruct. So we destroyed thousands of these things. So when you're talking about the Russian hackers and what the Wall Street Journal was talking about him and what we'll be talking about later on today, in the Infragard webinar, we're talking about not just turning off the power but destroying the infrastructure Yeah, getting it to self-destruct.

Unknown 12:30
Yeah. Getting it to self destruct.

Unknown 12:37 
And if we lose, like these big transformers we have, and we talked about EMP, is the electromagnetic pulses before that happens naturally, as well as man made, it could take 30 years for us to restore all of our power here in the United States. So it's Yes, it's a very, very big deal. It's something we need to be conscious about.

It's something we need to pay attention to and I'm going to send out a text after we get off the air as password checkup plugin for Chrome and also the website you can go to detect your passwords . And then if you go to my website as well I sent out a text I think it was yesterday morning I have four training sessions this week absolutely free about Do It Yourself cyber security if your business yeah if your business here's exactly what you need to do. So I talked yesterday about securing your Wi Fi and that video's up you can watch that. I talked today about your firewalls what you need to do there. I'm talking tomorrow about the right kinds of backup, 3-2-1 backups and also what you need to do for disaster recovery. This is my best stuff, Jim. It's absolutely free. I'm trying to help people out businesses out because this is really happening Jim.

Unknown 14:00
That's why we have you here, folks. Craig Peterson. Get ready to write this number down and get ready to text my name to get this information and more from Craig Peterson. Craig. The number is?

Unknown 14:12 
855-385-5553. That's 855-385-5553.

Unknown 14:21
Just text Jim to that number. Jimmy if you like. He'll answer to both. Standard data and text rates apply. He will not sell your name. He will not try to sell you something. You'll get great information like this. And as Craig said during this segment updates when things are going on, and things are happening out there. You will know first, Craig, thank you so much for your time. We look forward to talking with you next week.

Unknown 14:50
Hey thanks, Jim. Take care.

Unknown 14:52 
Take care. Bye bye. All right, when we return a final word.

---

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 Jim on the Jim Polito Show. They talked about the Google Chrome feature and website that can help you check if your password has been compromised. They also talked about how hackers are doing to infiltrate US utilities.

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

---

Related Articles:

Report Highlights The Crazy Lengths Hackers Took To Infiltrate US Utilities

Chrome Can Tell You If Your Passwords Have Been Compromised
---

Transcript:

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

Airing date: 02/12/2019

How To Check Your Passwords And Why It Matters - WSJ Article About Russian Attacks On US

Craig Peterson: 0:00

Hi everybody, Craig Peterson here. Hey, I hope you're enjoying this training I'm doing this is invaluable I think. I'm giving away my best stuff absolutely free. This is just phenomenal. It's up to this week that will be taking it down because I don't want to present information that's out of date or old. So I may do something in the future again about this, but we are going through the basics this week. Stuff you need to know to keep your small business or even your home safe. But I'm really trying to help out the small business people and it's all free. It's absolutely free. The training is there. I'm not upselling anything. On Thursday, we've got a live Q and A live webinar so make sure you check it out if you haven't already. http://CraigPeterson.com. It's right there on the homepage.

Hey, this morning I talked about a couple of really cool password checkup techniques you can use some free stuff and I'm sending that out in fact everybody that's on my SMS list. If you want to be on that by the way to get the alerts about the latest hack when it's really important. I don't send out, there's hacks every hour every minute in fact. Just the big ones that might affect you. Make sure you text me just text the word Craig or your message or your question or anything because this is me This is my phone number 855-385-5553. So just text Craig to 855-385-5553.

If you do that you're not going to be even letting me know that you did anything because guess what? It's automated if you say Craig but if you say something else then it's not automated but we'll get back to you. We'll answer your questions or problems. I'd love to do that again. Just text my name Craig.

Now I will also send you this information if you want it so let me know, on the password checkups stuff. And that's the main thing we talked about. But we also talked about an article in the Wall Street Journal that just came out about the hackers and, and some implications of it that I really hadn't thought of before until I was discussing it with one of the guests that's going to be on my FBI infra guard webinar this afternoon. So lots of great stuff today. Have a great day. We'll be back tomorrow. And don't forget. Get that training. http://CraigPeterson.com.

Unknown 2:37
Here he is Ladies and gentlemen, the man who helped invent the internet. Now like Al Gore, who took credit for it. He actually wrote code that you don't realize is helping you while you're on the internet. Our good friend tech talk guru Craig Peterson. Good morning, sir.

Unknown 2:56
Good morning, Jim. Waiting for some snow. Winter is coming.

Unknown 3:00
Yeah, you love you love that. You. You. You Canadian you. You love it. You don't care. You know, it makes no difference to you Craig Peterson whether it's you know what I mean. Like when you hear that forecast, you're like, Okay Yeah,

Unknown 3:18
It's like the winter vortex, right, that came down. All the complaints about. I remember days were not high when I was walking to school is 40 below zero. Come on people. Grow up.

Unknown 3:35
That's true. Hey listen, I'm with you. Suck it.

Unknown 3:37 
Well you get used to it. I have a friend who works with me who is now down in Florida. And he's he's actually from right outside Boston, and it gets to 60 degrees and he's dressing in layers now. So I guess it's just a time thing you know, we were down there with our kids and school was still open. No one was coming in and our kids are out there running around and bathing suits every everybody else's all bundled up. So I guess it can happen.

Unknown 4:13 
I will never, I would never acclimate to Florida. I could never do it because I'm. I'm always hot. I mean, but that's just me. But hey listen it is it is what it is. Pretty soon we'll have virtual reality. You want to feel what it's like and where Craig Peterson went to school. You just press a button put on your headset and your suit and it will be like you're walking to school barefoot in the snow with little Craig Peterson. So.

Unknown 4:37
Yeah, that's coming. You're right because we've we've already got some of this stuff it isn't where I had hoped it would be by now but when you're talking about things like the Oculus and these 3d virtual reality glasses and and now there's suits you can wear it or have you seen the gamers use things but they're thinking chairs for quite a while that that will kind of you know vibrate and stuff when stuff happens. Now there's a suit. It's kind of like a vest they can wear and it squeezes them. If they got get shot, they feel it hit them in the back, or wherever it hits them. It's coming. But it's really slow. I guess most people really aren't that interested in it. And I've tried it before. And, kind of a whole home, at least for me. But, you know, us 30 year olds, we're just not as interested as the kids does.

Unknown 5:27
I love that. We're taling to Craig Peterson. And at the end of this segment, I'm going to give you will Craig's gonna give you a number and if you text my name, you'll get a lot of great information from Craig free, no obligation. He doesn't sell your name, and he doesn't try to sell you anything. And standard data in text rates apply. Okay, this caught my attention Chrome, the browser, Chrome can tell you if your passwords have been compromised. Is this difficult or could the average person like me figure out how to use this because I'd like to know if my passwords have been compromised.

Unknown 6:00
Yeah, it's a really good idea to use some of these password check up programs. You know, I've recommended one password many times to a lot of people. And in here on your show as well. It has this built in so it when you generate a password or you type on in it, double checks to see if it's been hacked or not. And there's a website out there, I'll text it out to everybody. After we get off the air. Everyone on my text list called Have I Been Pawned and that now allows you to type in your password and see if it's a known password that's been stolen before. Now why would you want to know that right? If you have a bad guy that's trying to break in what they do is they use these huge databases. We talked about one a couple of weeks ago, 750 million records in the database. And now by the way, there have been more of those databases released over the last two weeks, and were over 2 billion now. So what happens is the bad guys grab a copy of a database from some website that they've stolen it from. And oftentimes, it's encrypted. So your password has some protection on it. So what are the bad guys do they use the passwords that they have seen before out there and they try them all because it doesn't matter if they're trying to log into the website yet they're just using their computers to figure out what your password is.

So if you're using a password that is known to have been stolen previously they will test that against the database then they've got your password and now they try and login. So that's how it all works. So when you're talking about using something like Have I Been Pawned I think it's important to do that but having something like this is called password checkup. So I'll I'll put together a little thing. And I'll send it out here to everyone on my text list afterwards on password checkup, and the other website to have as many times and what happens is you you install that on to your Chrome browser. And it will now tell you if you're using a username and password combination that Google knows to be unsafe and using the same database. Yeah. Isn't that great?

Unknown 8:31 
That is good. That is good. Right up front, you'll know. Right up right up you'll know.

Unknown 8:37
Yeah, like so what will happen is it'll, it has a little pop up, it's going to be in your browser bar and it's going to warn you if you're using a password that's been known to be compromised, it'll have a pop up that comes up when you visit the website and try to use that password it will say change your password and it'll allows you right now you can say I ignore the site or you can go ahead and change your password on that site. But Google saying they have a database of 4 billion credentials that they know have been compromised, and various data breaches. And it uses those to check and see if you're legit or not. So I love that that's so important Jim.

Unknown 9:17
We're talking I'm with Craig Peterson, our tech talk guru. He is the man with the plan. And again, we're going to give you a number at the end of this segment. If you want to get more information about what he's talking about today.

Let's go to US utilities. We when we worry about hackers and cyber war, I guess I guess our utilities are Ground Zero. You knock out the utilities you don't need to roll tanks down Main Street. You've had a major impact on a country. I mean, you could defeat them in a war. So Russian hackers I guess are going after the electrical grid. Wall Street Journal had a report Friday that talked about their techniques. I know you're concerned about this. Why don't you elaborate?

Unknown 10:08 
Yeah, it's a very big deal. In fact, I'm holding a webinar this afternoon for the FBI Infragard program, talking about some of this stuff. But yeah, critical infrastructure. So important. So think about what could happen in a power failure situation. And what we're gonna be talking about this afternoon is it goes beyond much beyond what most people think about because obviously, you've got hospitals, but you've got first responders, but you've also got the guys and gals that that drive the trucks, it's scheduled the loading of the trucks. If there's no power the phone's not going to get shipped, right? It goes on and on.

And when we're talking about these types of hacks, there's another thing that can happen. Think about what we apparently did along with the Israelis to the Iranians we went ahead and we got a virus into the the Iranian plant that was manufacturing the necessary steps to make a nuclear bomb and all of these devices that were in there, but what are we gonna do? We're gonna just shut them down because all they have to do is turn them back on, right? If we shut off the power to the plant, then they just restore the power Yeah. So what we did is we made cold understood the centrifuges and understood how to play with the centrifuges and play with a monitoring system. So the Iranian operators were sitting there and everything looked normal Jim. It looked like it was doing its thing it was making this powder cake that was going to be used for nuclear war. I mean, you know, power plants not they've never done that.

And what we did is we made it look normal and we had those centrifuges, very expensive, very fancy, not like we had in our chemistry lab. We made them self destruct. So we destroyed thousands of these things. So when you're talking about the Russian hackers and what the Wall Street Journal was talking about him and what we'll be talking about later on today, in the Infragard webinar, we're talking about not just turning off the power but destroying the infrastructure Yeah, getting it to self-destruct.

Unknown 12:30
Yeah. Getting it to self destruct.

Unknown 12:37 
And if we lose, like these big transformers we have, and we talked about EMP, is the electromagnetic pulses before that happens naturally, as well as man made, it could take 30 years for us to restore all of our power here in the United States. So it's Yes, it's a very, very big deal. It's something we need to be conscious about.

It's something we need to pay attention to and I'm going to send out a text after we get off the air as password checkup plugin for Chrome and also the website you can go to detect your passwords . And then if you go to my website as well I sent out a text I think it was yesterday morning I have four training sessions this week absolutely free about Do It Yourself cyber security if your business yeah if your business here's exactly what you need to do. So I talked yesterday about securing your Wi Fi and that video's up you can watch that. I talked today about your firewalls what you need to do there. I'm talking tomorrow about the right kinds of backup, 3-2-1 backups and also what you need to do for disaster recovery. This is my best stuff, Jim. It's absolutely free. I'm trying to help people out businesses out because this is really happening Jim.

Unknown 14:00
That's why we have you here, folks. Craig Peterson. Get ready to write this number down and get ready to text my name to get this information and more from Craig Peterson. Craig. The number is?

Unknown 14:12 
855-385-5553. That's 855-385-5553.

Unknown 14:21
Just text Jim to that number. Jimmy if you like. He'll answer to both. Standard data and text rates apply. He will not sell your name. He will not try to sell you something. You'll get great information like this. And as Craig said during this segment updates when things are going on, and things are happening out there. You will know first, Craig, thank you so much for your time. We look forward to talking with you next week.

Unknown 14:50
Hey thanks, Jim. Take care.

Unknown 14:52 
Take care. Bye bye. All right, when we return a final word.

---

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 WGIR at the Auto Fair listener lines with Jack and Justin. They talked about Lowe's Iris smart home technology shutting down on March 31st as well as the things you can teach your Amazon Alexa.

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

---

Related Articles 

Lowe’s Smart Home Device Platform Shuts Down March 31st
---

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

Airing date: 02/11/2019

Lowes Iris Smart Home Technology Dies - Amazon Alexa Tricks And Tips

Craig Peterson 0:00
Hey good morning everybody. I kind of have a voice left that we get this bug it's been going around. Thank goodness I don't have the flu but I'm kind of congested and here I am making videos doing all of the training this week. I just finished the firewall video explaining what they are, how to use them, when you should turn them off, when you should turn them on, how to use the free firewalls in your computers. And I was just struggling through this. It's I guess it's that time of the year right everything's closed up and you're indoors who knows maybe it's even an allergy but anyhow. So I'm a little clogged up today. What am I gonna do? What am I going to say well this morning I was on with Mr. Jack Heath and we've talked about a couple of technology things when it comes to smart homes Lowe's and if you've seen their Iris displays that's about to change. That's Lowe's whole foray into the smart home technology platform. And we also, this morning, talked about Amazon and the Alexa and the Dot and, and Justin got a new one. So talk a little bit about how I use them in my home and what Justin thinks of them as well. So here we go with Jack Heath.

Unknown 1:16
Hey, right now Craig Peterson our Tech Talk guy. And Craig joins us for a few moments on this Monday morning on the Auto Fair listener lines. Craig I guess maybe the Smart Home app by Lowe's may not be around much longer.

Unknown 1:31
Hey, good morning, Jack. Yeah, this is an interesting turn. But it's something that could be pretty easily predicted. You know, in every industry, when it starts out, there's a lot of players. We had hundreds of automobile manufacturers at the turn of the last century and goes it narrowed right down as there was consolidation. Well, Lowe's you might have noticed has something called Iris. You've probably seen it on the end caps at the local Lowe's stores. And this was their answer to home automation. And it was a pretty decent little package but you know, I kind of kept an eye on it and never saw anyone standing there looking at it. And apparently Lowe's has decided that maybe having their own smart home technology brand isn't the way to go. So they have announced that the app for Iris as well as their devices are going to be shut down on March 31, Jack, and that means that they're going to be reimbursing some people. They will be giving out some gift certificates to people. It looks like Samsung is going to kind of step in and trying to help with this whole transition, maybe take over some of the devices. But as Justin and I were talking about during the break here is Amazon man they seem to be winning this game and Lowe's is obviously lost.

Unknown 2:54
Interesting. Hey are you just as you were saying earlier what would you say you have in your home now Justin? 

Unknown 3:00
I got that Amazon Alexa Dot thing. I got a subscription to something. They sent me one for free. So listen, I know Bezos probably knows everything about me at this point but I don't care. I love the thing. You can spy on me all you want.

Unknown 3:14
Well it's just the pictures I think he's after but the other story. It doesn't spy on you. It's a real interesting technology the way it's set up. But basically when you give it the wake word, and by the way you can change that wake word. It doesn't have to be Alexa. It can be computer. It can be Amazon. You can change that. But when it when you give that wake word that's all local. It is not sending your data. It's not sending your audio up to the cloud for people to spy on. It is being processed locally. And then once it wakes up and start sending the data to the cloud. But Justin I agree with you. I've got some of these Alexas in my house too. I've got the show. I've got the Dot and I have pre-ordered the Amazon Alexa for the car. It's a little thing that's going to sit on the dashboard. But I don't know about you Justin. I have found it to be really really handy. I use it to tune into WGIR. I use it to listen to music. I get the weather report. I get a recap of the news. It's incredible.

Unknown 4:21  
So here's what I do Craig because my my kids don't listen to me. But the listen to a machine. I set a reminder to tell it to tell my daughter it's time for her to go, you know, get the shower at night because she's stuck on her phone. But when she hears Alexa, yell at her. She'll do it. It's like wow. Alexa could parent for me now too it's great.

Unknown 4:41
Alexa. Yeah. Wow. What's the next one? What is next? All right. Craig Peterson. Good stuff on this Monday morning. Thanks, Craig. Joining us in the Auto Fair listener lines.

Unknown 4:51
Take care guys.

Hey, a reminder, by the way. If you are trying to do computer cybersecurity yourself, for your business where you're just trying to keep them safe. Right. You know, you're not trying to become an expert or anything. That's what I'm doing this week. So make sure you are on it. Go to http://CraigPeterson..com. Sign up right there on the homepage. I'm giving away my best stuff for free. This is not a pitch fest. http://CraigPeterson..com,right there at the top of the page, click the sign up button. Sign up for that webinar will tell you about all of the other stuff we're doing this week and get you a little bit more information. Let's put it that way about what to do and how to do it to keep them safe. Take care. We'll be back tomorrow. Bye bye.

---

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www.craigpeterson.com

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

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Craig is on WGIR at the Auto Fair listener lines with Jack and Justin. They talked about Lowe's Iris smart home technology shutting down on March 31st as well as the things you can teach your Amazon Alexa.

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

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Related Articles 

Lowe’s Smart Home Device Platform Shuts Down March 31st
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Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors.

Airing date: 02/11/2019

Lowes Iris Smart Home Technology Dies - Amazon Alexa Tricks And Tips

Craig Peterson 0:00
Hey good morning everybody. I kind of have a voice left that we get this bug it's been going around. Thank goodness I don't have the flu but I'm kind of congested and here I am making videos doing all of the training this week. I just finished the firewall video explaining what they are, how to use them, when you should turn them off, when you should turn them on, how to use the free firewalls in your computers. And I was just struggling through this. It's I guess it's that time of the year right everything's closed up and you're indoors who knows maybe it's even an allergy but anyhow. So I'm a little clogged up today. What am I gonna do? What am I going to say well this morning I was on with Mr. Jack Heath and we've talked about a couple of technology things when it comes to smart homes Lowe's and if you've seen their Iris displays that's about to change. That's Lowe's whole foray into the smart home technology platform. And we also, this morning, talked about Amazon and the Alexa and the Dot and, and Justin got a new one. So talk a little bit about how I use them in my home and what Justin thinks of them as well. So here we go with Jack Heath.

Unknown 1:16
Hey, right now Craig Peterson our Tech Talk guy. And Craig joins us for a few moments on this Monday morning on the Auto Fair listener lines. Craig I guess maybe the Smart Home app by Lowe's may not be around much longer.

Unknown 1:31
Hey, good morning, Jack. Yeah, this is an interesting turn. But it's something that could be pretty easily predicted. You know, in every industry, when it starts out, there's a lot of players. We had hundreds of automobile manufacturers at the turn of the last century and goes it narrowed right down as there was consolidation. Well, Lowe's you might have noticed has something called Iris. You've probably seen it on the end caps at the local Lowe's stores. And this was their answer to home automation. And it was a pretty decent little package but you know, I kind of kept an eye on it and never saw anyone standing there looking at it. And apparently Lowe's has decided that maybe having their own smart home technology brand isn't the way to go. So they have announced that the app for Iris as well as their devices are going to be shut down on March 31, Jack, and that means that they're going to be reimbursing some people. They will be giving out some gift certificates to people. It looks like Samsung is going to kind of step in and trying to help with this whole transition, maybe take over some of the devices. But as Justin and I were talking about during the break here is Amazon man they seem to be winning this game and Lowe's is obviously lost.

Unknown 2:54
Interesting. Hey are you just as you were saying earlier what would you say you have in your home now Justin? 

Unknown 3:00
I got that Amazon Alexa Dot thing. I got a subscription to something. They sent me one for free. So listen, I know Bezos probably knows everything about me at this point but I don't care. I love the thing. You can spy on me all you want.

Unknown 3:14
Well it's just the pictures I think he's after but the other story. It doesn't spy on you. It's a real interesting technology the way it's set up. But basically when you give it the wake word, and by the way you can change that wake word. It doesn't have to be Alexa. It can be computer. It can be Amazon. You can change that. But when it when you give that wake word that's all local. It is not sending your data. It's not sending your audio up to the cloud for people to spy on. It is being processed locally. And then once it wakes up and start sending the data to the cloud. But Justin I agree with you. I've got some of these Alexas in my house too. I've got the show. I've got the Dot and I have pre-ordered the Amazon Alexa for the car. It's a little thing that's going to sit on the dashboard. But I don't know about you Justin. I have found it to be really really handy. I use it to tune into WGIR. I use it to listen to music. I get the weather report. I get a recap of the news. It's incredible.

Unknown 4:21  
So here's what I do Craig because my my kids don't listen to me. But the listen to a machine. I set a reminder to tell it to tell my daughter it's time for her to go, you know, get the shower at night because she's stuck on her phone. But when she hears Alexa, yell at her. She'll do it. It's like wow. Alexa could parent for me now too it's great.

Unknown 4:41
Alexa. Yeah. Wow. What's the next one? What is next? All right. Craig Peterson. Good stuff on this Monday morning. Thanks, Craig. Joining us in the Auto Fair listener lines.

Unknown 4:51
Take care guys.

Hey, a reminder, by the way. If you are trying to do computer cybersecurity yourself, for your business where you're just trying to keep them safe. Right. You know, you're not trying to become an expert or anything. That's what I'm doing this week. So make sure you are on it. Go to http://CraigPeterson..com. Sign up right there on the homepage. I'm giving away my best stuff for free. This is not a pitch fest. http://CraigPeterson..com,right there at the top of the page, click the sign up button. Sign up for that webinar will tell you about all of the other stuff we're doing this week and get you a little bit more information. Let's put it that way about what to do and how to do it to keep them safe. Take care. We'll be back tomorrow. Bye bye.

---

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

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Cryptocurrency is in the news, again.  I am sure you all know by now what I think of cryptocurrency as an investment. Listen in and you'll learn more of why I came to that opinion.

Browsers -- which one is your favorite?  For me, it's Epic which is a more secure browser based on the Google Chrome platform. Today, I am going to talk about some plug-ins that you can use to help keep you more secure!

The FBI seized a lot of counterfeit bills this week.  But there is an interesting twist to the story so Listen in.

Utilities are under attack.  Listen to hear about all the "unique" ways that Hackers use to break in.

Have you heard of Iris?  That is a Lowes brand smart home brand, well they are shutting it down. Listen in for more information if you are a customer with these devices. 

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

---

Transcript:

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

Airing date: 02/09/2019

Counterfeit Cash And Cryptocurrency - Lowe's Shuts Down Smarthome Iris

Craig Peterson: 0:00
Hey, another Saturday, another radio show. Craig Peterson here, enjoying our new intro music. Hopefully, you like it too. Kind of lively gets the blood flowing at least for me. Well, today we're going to be talking about a few interesting things. Have you heard one of these warnings come on your phones? They have a number of them now. For instance, they have warnings about you know, big storms coming your way. You probably heard about what happened in Hawaii with their nuclear warning. Wow. Hijackers are involved now. So we'll talk about that. What these hackers are doing.

Hey, have you invested in cryptocurrency? Do you know when I say invest? I'm just joking, right? Because cryptocurrency is just one of the silliest investments ever. Not that I give investment advice on my show/ But wow do we have some news for you. Yeah.

Chrome, this is fantastic if you use the Chrome browser and I do use it but I use Epic which is based on Chrome. You can run some of the Chrome plugins and is much safer doesn't doesn't monitor you like regular Chrome does. I gotta tell you about this wonderful tool now that you can plug right into Chrome and it's going to help you with your passwords and tell you they've been compromised. I love this one. Our friends at the FBI. This is an LA Times article and they seized a whole, I'm looking at it right now, a ton of fake $100 bills. I'll tell you about that and how they found out what was going on. And yes, they were using Bitcoin to buy them and sell them but Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are not untraceable and proven again by our FBI and hackers and scammers how they're breaking into iCloud locked phones. And a very interesting report that is in the Daily Caller and up on my website as well about the crazy links that hackers have taken to infiltrate US utilities. And Lowe's, if you bought their Iris stuff. You got to hear what's happening with Lowe's. Now, all of this, of course, is up on my website. I did not send out the regular email of this morning. This morning's email was all about what I'm doing this coming week. I had hoped to get it done last week, just too many things came up. You know how that goes. Right? You have to take care of your customers, you have to take care of your family. And that's what I had to do last week.

So this week is the training course. You are going to love this, okay. It really is going to change your life. I'm giving away some of my best stuff for free. I'm going to teach you some things you can do yourself. And it's aimed at small businesses, medium businesses. Even larger businesses can take this information and run with it. But hopefully, they have the right people in place that are security people that know what they're doing. But if you heard me this weekend, heard my podcasts you heard about this huge shortage. 3 million cybersecurity workers short. That's guaranteed now to get a lot of people saying that they are cybersecurity experts hanging up their shingles. And they don't know what they're doing. Guaranteed. It's going to happen. Happens every time. I hated it back in the 90s when people said, Hey, I'm an internet expert. I can build your website and they had no idea what they were doing. And they hurt the whole industry. They gave us all a bad name. And I'm afraid that's exactly what's going to happen with cybersecurity.

Anyhow, DIY, you can do it yourself, you'll see a sign up on my homepage at http://CraigPeterson.com. I'm going to walk through this with you, you are going to love it if you've already been hacked. If you're concerned about getting hacked if you are already wearing 100 hats at work. And this is a security thing is just one more hats you have to wear. You have to attend this training this week. It's free. Like so much stuff that I do. Obviously, I have to pay bills, right? So hey, if you want to hire me, that's one thing. But this is the free training with my best stuff, you are absolutely going to love it. So if you did not get these articles in your email this morning. And for that, I apologize. Because I wanted to focus in on the training. And it is so so important to you. But you can find all of these articles up on my website, there's always at http://CraigPeterson.com.

So if you scroll down below the sign-up, because today, there's a sign up on my site, and it'll be up for a few more days, and I'm taking this stuff all down, right, this is not going to be up forever. If you miss it. This week, you are going to miss this training. All right. But if you scroll down on that homepage, you'll see today's articles. Because I can guarantee you with only about 20 minutes left. In today's show, I'm not going to be able to get into a whole lot of detail. So if you want to find out more, that's where you go. If you want to find out about these pieces of training because I'm going to have different trainings coming up. The odds are almost 100% that this training I'm about to do will never be done again. Okay. Because it's always different. There's always more things to know and learn. But make sure you're on my email list. http://CraigPeterson.com/subscribe or you can just text me right now get out a piece of paper and a pencil if you want to write down that number. Because this text number is my number. And you can always ask me questions. I'm always available to help we do so much stuff for free for small businesses and home users. That it's, you know, it's open to you anytime you wanted. So write it down right now. Hopefully, you got that pencil and paper in hand write down 855-385-5553 or you can text to it right now. And that way you can remember this, go back in your texting history. 855-385-5553. If you text my name to it, just text Craig, I will sign you up for my text alert. And those come out to remind you that my show is live on the Air. I also will text you when there's something big happening in the security round that you need to know about. Because the regular news sources sometimes take a week or two to catch up with the stuff you need to know.

So it's pretty rare. I do this maybe every couple of months or might be a text on that. But I'll let you know when something critical is happening. But I only let you know if you reach out to me. And the easiest way to do that is to just text me 855-385 5553 and text my name Craig and I will be more than glad to answer any questions or help you with any problems that you might be having okay? You don't have to be my customer. We will help you with you know, we're not going to spend a week with you. But we're going to help you we're going to send you on the right track.

So let's talk about some of these articles for today. Well, we're going to start with Lowe's because this is something we're going to see more and more of in the future. And you know, just like any industry, any business that's been started historically, you have a lot of people in it. And then it kind of settles down to a few big players and they buy out the smaller players. Well, we're seeing that shakeout now in the smart home business. If you've been into Lowe's or Home Depot, you've seen Smart Home stuff. In fact, in the Lowe's store, it's usually right by the Service Desk by that little counter where you return things are asked questions. And right there they have a whole bunch of different smart home devices that you can use. Lowe's also had their own stuff, and I've seen this on the end cap of over by the electric section where you have the wires and the switches and the cables and all the stuff that you might need to use in your house. You got to replace a socket or you know, whatever it might be. It's right there. And it's called Iris. I-R-I-S and you might have seen it there before. I certainly have. I poked at a little bit. But I never bought any of their stuff because I knew there'd be a shakeout and I wasn't sure that Lowe's is going to win it. And I never ever saw anyone else looking at that display.

Now the stuff up front where they've got some of the Amazon Home stuff in the Google Home stuff. Yes, I've seen people up there, but never looking at the Iris stuff. Well, Lowe's tried to become kind of the main player in smart home technology. And that's what I was all about. It was all integrated. It was all designed to do all of the things you'd normally want to do in your home. But it did not make Lowe's enough money. It just really wasn't successful. And Lowe's last November said, Hey, we're going to get out of this category, at least with our own product. And it has now announced that it is completely shutting down Iris, your app is not going to work as of March 31, 2019.

So if you bought this Iris stuff, the app's going to go away. But I've got a little bit of good news for you. Make sure you upgrade the firmware in your devices and in the app because it looks like what they've done is they have partnered with Samsung and Samsung is going to be working with them to help take over those Iris products that you already have. So it stopped charging paying customers as a January 31. So should not have received any more bills from Iris for monitoring or other things and is issuing visa prepaid cards to customers to help them migrate to other smart home platforms. So keep an eye out. The good news is you're going to get a few bucks out of Lowe's most likely if you've registered. And they also have some other gadgets that are using Zigbee. And I've had the founders of Zigbee on my show before. So if there are Zigbee compatible Z-wave compatible, or you can switch to the Samsung ecosystem. So you have some options if you're interested in doing that.

But again, the big players right now it looks like Amazon's winning this game. Google with the Google Home has some nice stuff they're not winning. Philips is now using and tying into the Amazon Echo and all the whole Amazon infrastructure as are a number of other vendors. We saw that at the Consumer Electronics Show this year where really Amazon is starting to appear almost everywhere. So that's really really good news. I think for all of us. Finally, the big shakeout might be happening and that makes you feel a lot more comfortable when it's time to buy things.

Speaking of buying things. Let's talk about this counterfeit ring and
interesting how do you promote yourself if you're a counterfeiter? Well, some of you know that I run the webinars for the FBI is Infragard program and I get different guests and, you know, I in pre-interview them, I talk with them, I have them do presentations. I do q&a with them. Right? I'm kind of in the middle of all of that stuff with the FBI Infragard program anyways, right. A little bit of an FBI insider thing, I guess. But obviously, they don't tell me anything right there. Well, they don't tell me anything that's like a secret or underway. But I do get a little bit more information the general public does. And I attended a briefing. And this was with the secret service where they were talking about shutting down a nefarious dark webring. And this ring was selling drugs online, it was selling just all kinds of things. You can find prostitution, and find everything out there on the dark web if you look for it. And they were using Bitcoin, the bad guys, in order to be untrackable, untraceable. And guess what? Of course, you're not. Yeah, there is certain degree of anonymity in cryptocurrencies. And I'm going to talk about the negative side of n Just a minute. But there is also a way to really track people and make sure that, you know, you can kind of police it. And in fact, that's what they did. The Secret Service was policing it and they did find this ring and they did get convictions on it a very interesting how they did it, and what was involved with it.

Now, we have a story that's coming out of the LA Times about a secret service agent, his name is Matthew Britsch, I guess. B-R-I-T-S-C-H. And he went online and started looking for major counterfeiters. And in case you didn't know the Secret Service, besides protecting the president handles counterfeiting cases as well.

So he was online looking for counterfeiters trying to figure out what was going on. And so he went out into the dark web and was out there trolling and there are a lot of police organizations even down to local police departments that spend a fair amount of time looking for bad guys on the dark web. They look for and catch pedophiles and counterfeiters and other things and this story is about a counterfeiter. Now he found this counterfeiter who went by the name of Billmaker, not very original I guess but that was his online persona and he promised high quality hundred dollar bills and he had a money back guarantee. He even had thought of eBay here or Etsy he even had reviews out there from fans that said his work was excellent That was really good and so apparently this the Secret Service agent said well let's give this a shot right. Here's a guy one of the reviews said very good quality and got here quick. Then other one said all passed with no issue whatsoever fresh clean bills. Billmaker's, a five-star guys the Secret Service agent he wanted those five-star reviews to help them sell more bills that were clearly his goal. So the Secret Service agent bought the bills and in September 2017 he purchased the four fake hundred dollar bills for $120 in Bitcoin which is this online cryptocurrency. Of course, the idea is, hey, bitcoins anonymous, and I'll be able to do it and everything's going to be just fine, right? So he'd been carrying on as it turns out for quite a while because these counterfeit bills arrive right on time. They were as good as promised. And when the Secret Service got their hands on them, they examined them and they found these bills were a match for about $4.1 million dollars worth of other $100 counterfeit bills that the Secret Service had found.

So, this guy named Billmaker, the nation's most prolific domestic counterfeiter. Isn't that amazing. So that September 2017 purchase sparked this nine-month investigation where they poked around more in the dark web they found more cyber-savvy criminals are using online bazaars to buy and sell more these goods from illegal firearms and illegal drugs, illegal identification. Stolen cars even they poked around but it's really interesting because I love this quote these guys were right out there quote right in the open it's all there for sale. But while it provides some anonymity to criminals, it provides anonymity to law enforcement. They can't tell who they're selling to and so we went fishing. Isn't that interesting?

So the Secret Service has made more than 15, 15 actually almost 1600 counterfeiting related arrests last year seizing 204 million and phony bills. Banks and retailers collected in addition 100 and $7 million and fake bills. It used to be these artisans who made carefully forged bills on large offset printing presses kind of like the way the federal government does it. Nowadays these counterfeiters are relying on computers scanners laser printers and they use the dark web to sell it. So it's interesting there's a lot of detail and how it happened and it's good to know this if your a security professional. In fact I there's open jobs I wanted was a Thursday I guess it was I do a podcast in case you don't know you can sign up at http://CraigPeterson.com/iTunes and you'll find them right there. http://CraigPeterson.com/iTunes. But I do a podcast called It's a Security Thing. And it's a brand new podcast. And I talked about specific security interests. You know, if you're a security guy if that's what you do as part of your job, and I was talking about these cyber crimes that are now advertising online paying $700,000 to a million dollars a year to hackers, some very serious money so they're really going after it.

And in this case, Billmaker was caught and they're using the US mail, which made it very easy for the Secret Service to find who he was. And they said they were, by the way, very impressed with the quality of the work that he had done. They had a pretty good fake security strip on them. They even felt like they were real. There's pictures in this article up on my website http://CraigPeterson.com of these bills. And the picture of the guy who was making them as a young guy would guess his early 30s based on the picture, but very interesting, interesting stuff at Oklahoma City.

Wow, we are running out of time I got to talk about this whole thing around the cryptocurrencies as well because I know some of you have bought them because you've told me. Now You already know I don't give investment advice on this show. There's other shows on the stations, another podcast, they give lots of investment advice, most of which I take with a grain of salt especially when it involves technology. But when we're talking about cryptocurrencies, yes, it's
the future there's no question it's the future. That's how things are going to shake out. But we are so early on now that I have refused to put any money into cryptocurrencies. I think it's absolutely insane to do. They are so volatile. Look at the money people have lost just this year. It's really, really nuts.

So when I saw this article this week from Gizmodo, it was a week ago, it was Sunday. So as of tomorrow, it's been a week a company in Canada is one of these crypto exchange companies. And there's lots of them, these are the places you go you give them good old American currency that you can wire in from PayPal or from your bank or on your credit card and they then turn it into the cryptocurrency of your choice. And that might be Bitcoin. There are many other cryptocurrencies out there and they then send you the cryptocurrency. Now it's kind of complicated. You have to have a wallet, these crypto exchange companies can hold your currency for you. Some of it's in hot stored some of it's in cold storage. There are passwords involved. There are big keys involved. That's what it's all about. Right? And that's part of the reason I don't trust it. Well

This crypto exchange called QuadrigaCX and if you had money in there. Listen up. QuadrigaCX has about $200 million of people's cryptocurrencies that they are holding. Its founder's is a 30-year-old guy who went to India and died in India. Okay, so that's bad, right? The CEO of any company dying it's a bad thing because all the company goes through a bit of a slump. Oh, no, CEO died CFO died, whatever it was, but in this case, the founder and CEO died and you know the slump you kind of expect but it'll be back on its feet, right? Well, in this case, Mr. 30 years, smarty pants held the keys himself and did not have anyone else with any access to the keys. So this exchange was holding roughly 92 million US dollars in Bitcoin. 1.3 million of Bitcoin cash, almost a million in Bitcoin cash SV. It had Bitcoin gold that had Litecoin and had Ether, you've heard of that, I'm sure if you're really into this. So totaling about 150 million, according to the affidavit and apparently, more as well, that brings it up to close to $200 million.

So there was a filing in Canadian courts last week about this saying bankruptcy. No one else has the passwords for it. So basically, we're talking about at least 140 million dollars lost. Now the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, according to the CBC froze 26 million worth of QuadrigaCX's assets in January this year after finding irregularities for the payment processing and the documents in the Ontario Superior Court Justice concluded that 67 million worth of transactions ended up and properly transferred into the personal account of Custodian Inc the payment processor. That's part of the reason I don't buy any of these cryptocurrencies and although I don't give investment advice, I would advise you not to either. This Bitcoin is lost. Now, if you have good old greenbacks, cold hard cash, and the money burns in the fire, hey, if you can get the ashes to the Secret Service, you can get your money back. If it's torn up. If it's shredded by your dog, you can get your money back. If a crypto exchange goes out of business or loses your money. And it's happened many times, we're talking about many hundreds of millions of dollars so far that have been lost or stolen in these, you are in deep trouble.

Okay, so this week you guys have to attend. I'm going to be explaining why you need to secure your Wi-Fi network and how to do it step by step. I'm going to be explaining how to use the firewall that's on your Mac, that's on your Windows machine and how to use it. So you can still conduct business, but you can keep yourself safer. And then the lesson in the third video this week is how to do backups properly, the 3-2-1 rule of backups and how you can do it inexpensively. I'm going to show you the free tools you have. I'm going to show you some of the best companies out there to use to do some of these other things, inexpensively. Companies that I've used personally that I've advised people to use that are doing an amazing job. Right? That's what we're going to be talking about this week. And you have to sign up I'm going to put these videos up these are going to be some training videos. We're going to do a live webinar where I'm going to take your questions on Thursday and answer your questions that you can email me during the week. As you watch the videos, new ones, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. This week, I may do one on Thursday. But Thursday's the day I'm going to be doing the live webinars. So on Thursday, it's going to be a little bit of a busy day. So I don't know I'm going to get a video out. But this is step by step like you've never seen it before. Really.

You know, if you've been frustrated going online, trying to search on YouTube or on Google to try and find the best stuff and you hope that what comes up first is right. But you know what is not going to work properly. If you do this other thing. This is an integrated approach to make it all work. I'm even going to be showing you how to automate the whole thing so that you get the upgrade. How to use this stack of security tools so that you are not only resistant to viruses, but also to Trojans, to malware, to crypto mining, to all of the major problems that people have. So that's what I'm going to be doing and none of it costs you a dime. I'm given away my best stuff for free because I want businesses to be safe.

That's the goal. That's the goal of the Saturday show and personal as well. But this is about businesses. Businesses have lost tens of billions of dollars accorded the FBI over the last 12 months. So I want to stop that. Make sure you sign up. Visit http://CraigPeterson.com. Or check this morning's email. If you get my weekly email. There's a sign up in that as well. Make sure you follow along because this is for this week. Only. I am taking it down because this stuff changes so frequently. I don't want to leave it up and then have you get confused if someone finds it later on. I want you to stay up to date. http://CraigPeterson.com. Anyways, have a great week. I got a busy one ahead of me. Take care and be safe out there. Bye-bye. 

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Related articles:

Lowe’s Smart Home Device Platform Shuts Down March 31st

Hackers Hijacked A Family’s Smart Home, Spammed Nuclear Missile Alerts

Chrome Can Tell You If Your Passwords Have Been Compromised

Crypto Exchange Says It Can’t Repay $190 Million To Clients After Founder Dies With the Only Password

Glowing Reviews Tout Counterfeit Cash On The Dark Web

Report Highlights The Crazy Lengths Hackers Took To Infiltrate Us Utilities

How Hackers And Scammers Break Into Icloud-Locked iPhones

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More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

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For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Cryptocurrency is in the news, again.  I am sure you all know by now what I think of cryptocurrency as an investment. Listen in and you'll learn more of why I came to that opinion.

Browsers -- which one is your favorite?  For me, it's Epic which is a more secure browser based on the Google Chrome platform. Today, I am going to talk about some plug-ins that you can use to help keep you more secure!

The FBI seized a lot of counterfeit bills this week.  But there is an interesting twist to the story so Listen in.

Utilities are under attack.  Listen to hear about all the "unique" ways that Hackers use to break in.

Have you heard of Iris?  That is a Lowes brand smart home brand, well they are shutting it down. Listen in for more information if you are a customer with these devices. 

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

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Transcript:

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

Airing date: 02/09/2019

Counterfeit Cash And Cryptocurrency - Lowe's Shuts Down Smarthome Iris

Craig Peterson: 0:00
Hey, another Saturday, another radio show. Craig Peterson here, enjoying our new intro music. Hopefully, you like it too. Kind of lively gets the blood flowing at least for me. Well, today we're going to be talking about a few interesting things. Have you heard one of these warnings come on your phones? They have a number of them now. For instance, they have warnings about you know, big storms coming your way. You probably heard about what happened in Hawaii with their nuclear warning. Wow. Hijackers are involved now. So we'll talk about that. What these hackers are doing.

Hey, have you invested in cryptocurrency? Do you know when I say invest? I'm just joking, right? Because cryptocurrency is just one of the silliest investments ever. Not that I give investment advice on my show/ But wow do we have some news for you. Yeah.

Chrome, this is fantastic if you use the Chrome browser and I do use it but I use Epic which is based on Chrome. You can run some of the Chrome plugins and is much safer doesn't doesn't monitor you like regular Chrome does. I gotta tell you about this wonderful tool now that you can plug right into Chrome and it's going to help you with your passwords and tell you they've been compromised. I love this one. Our friends at the FBI. This is an LA Times article and they seized a whole, I'm looking at it right now, a ton of fake $100 bills. I'll tell you about that and how they found out what was going on. And yes, they were using Bitcoin to buy them and sell them but Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are not untraceable and proven again by our FBI and hackers and scammers how they're breaking into iCloud locked phones. And a very interesting report that is in the Daily Caller and up on my website as well about the crazy links that hackers have taken to infiltrate US utilities. And Lowe's, if you bought their Iris stuff. You got to hear what's happening with Lowe's. Now, all of this, of course, is up on my website. I did not send out the regular email of this morning. This morning's email was all about what I'm doing this coming week. I had hoped to get it done last week, just too many things came up. You know how that goes. Right? You have to take care of your customers, you have to take care of your family. And that's what I had to do last week.

So this week is the training course. You are going to love this, okay. It really is going to change your life. I'm giving away some of my best stuff for free. I'm going to teach you some things you can do yourself. And it's aimed at small businesses, medium businesses. Even larger businesses can take this information and run with it. But hopefully, they have the right people in place that are security people that know what they're doing. But if you heard me this weekend, heard my podcasts you heard about this huge shortage. 3 million cybersecurity workers short. That's guaranteed now to get a lot of people saying that they are cybersecurity experts hanging up their shingles. And they don't know what they're doing. Guaranteed. It's going to happen. Happens every time. I hated it back in the 90s when people said, Hey, I'm an internet expert. I can build your website and they had no idea what they were doing. And they hurt the whole industry. They gave us all a bad name. And I'm afraid that's exactly what's going to happen with cybersecurity.

Anyhow, DIY, you can do it yourself, you'll see a sign up on my homepage at http://CraigPeterson.com. I'm going to walk through this with you, you are going to love it if you've already been hacked. If you're concerned about getting hacked if you are already wearing 100 hats at work. And this is a security thing is just one more hats you have to wear. You have to attend this training this week. It's free. Like so much stuff that I do. Obviously, I have to pay bills, right? So hey, if you want to hire me, that's one thing. But this is the free training with my best stuff, you are absolutely going to love it. So if you did not get these articles in your email this morning. And for that, I apologize. Because I wanted to focus in on the training. And it is so so important to you. But you can find all of these articles up on my website, there's always at http://CraigPeterson.com.

So if you scroll down below the sign-up, because today, there's a sign up on my site, and it'll be up for a few more days, and I'm taking this stuff all down, right, this is not going to be up forever. If you miss it. This week, you are going to miss this training. All right. But if you scroll down on that homepage, you'll see today's articles. Because I can guarantee you with only about 20 minutes left. In today's show, I'm not going to be able to get into a whole lot of detail. So if you want to find out more, that's where you go. If you want to find out about these pieces of training because I'm going to have different trainings coming up. The odds are almost 100% that this training I'm about to do will never be done again. Okay. Because it's always different. There's always more things to know and learn. But make sure you're on my email list. http://CraigPeterson.com/subscribe or you can just text me right now get out a piece of paper and a pencil if you want to write down that number. Because this text number is my number. And you can always ask me questions. I'm always available to help we do so much stuff for free for small businesses and home users. That it's, you know, it's open to you anytime you wanted. So write it down right now. Hopefully, you got that pencil and paper in hand write down 855-385-5553 or you can text to it right now. And that way you can remember this, go back in your texting history. 855-385-5553. If you text my name to it, just text Craig, I will sign you up for my text alert. And those come out to remind you that my show is live on the Air. I also will text you when there's something big happening in the security round that you need to know about. Because the regular news sources sometimes take a week or two to catch up with the stuff you need to know.

So it's pretty rare. I do this maybe every couple of months or might be a text on that. But I'll let you know when something critical is happening. But I only let you know if you reach out to me. And the easiest way to do that is to just text me 855-385 5553 and text my name Craig and I will be more than glad to answer any questions or help you with any problems that you might be having okay? You don't have to be my customer. We will help you with you know, we're not going to spend a week with you. But we're going to help you we're going to send you on the right track.

So let's talk about some of these articles for today. Well, we're going to start with Lowe's because this is something we're going to see more and more of in the future. And you know, just like any industry, any business that's been started historically, you have a lot of people in it. And then it kind of settles down to a few big players and they buy out the smaller players. Well, we're seeing that shakeout now in the smart home business. If you've been into Lowe's or Home Depot, you've seen Smart Home stuff. In fact, in the Lowe's store, it's usually right by the Service Desk by that little counter where you return things are asked questions. And right there they have a whole bunch of different smart home devices that you can use. Lowe's also had their own stuff, and I've seen this on the end cap of over by the electric section where you have the wires and the switches and the cables and all the stuff that you might need to use in your house. You got to replace a socket or you know, whatever it might be. It's right there. And it's called Iris. I-R-I-S and you might have seen it there before. I certainly have. I poked at a little bit. But I never bought any of their stuff because I knew there'd be a shakeout and I wasn't sure that Lowe's is going to win it. And I never ever saw anyone else looking at that display.

Now the stuff up front where they've got some of the Amazon Home stuff in the Google Home stuff. Yes, I've seen people up there, but never looking at the Iris stuff. Well, Lowe's tried to become kind of the main player in smart home technology. And that's what I was all about. It was all integrated. It was all designed to do all of the things you'd normally want to do in your home. But it did not make Lowe's enough money. It just really wasn't successful. And Lowe's last November said, Hey, we're going to get out of this category, at least with our own product. And it has now announced that it is completely shutting down Iris, your app is not going to work as of March 31, 2019.

So if you bought this Iris stuff, the app's going to go away. But I've got a little bit of good news for you. Make sure you upgrade the firmware in your devices and in the app because it looks like what they've done is they have partnered with Samsung and Samsung is going to be working with them to help take over those Iris products that you already have. So it stopped charging paying customers as a January 31. So should not have received any more bills from Iris for monitoring or other things and is issuing visa prepaid cards to customers to help them migrate to other smart home platforms. So keep an eye out. The good news is you're going to get a few bucks out of Lowe's most likely if you've registered. And they also have some other gadgets that are using Zigbee. And I've had the founders of Zigbee on my show before. So if there are Zigbee compatible Z-wave compatible, or you can switch to the Samsung ecosystem. So you have some options if you're interested in doing that.

But again, the big players right now it looks like Amazon's winning this game. Google with the Google Home has some nice stuff they're not winning. Philips is now using and tying into the Amazon Echo and all the whole Amazon infrastructure as are a number of other vendors. We saw that at the Consumer Electronics Show this year where really Amazon is starting to appear almost everywhere. So that's really really good news. I think for all of us. Finally, the big shakeout might be happening and that makes you feel a lot more comfortable when it's time to buy things.

Speaking of buying things. Let's talk about this counterfeit ring and
interesting how do you promote yourself if you're a counterfeiter? Well, some of you know that I run the webinars for the FBI is Infragard program and I get different guests and, you know, I in pre-interview them, I talk with them, I have them do presentations. I do q&a with them. Right? I'm kind of in the middle of all of that stuff with the FBI Infragard program anyways, right. A little bit of an FBI insider thing, I guess. But obviously, they don't tell me anything right there. Well, they don't tell me anything that's like a secret or underway. But I do get a little bit more information the general public does. And I attended a briefing. And this was with the secret service where they were talking about shutting down a nefarious dark webring. And this ring was selling drugs online, it was selling just all kinds of things. You can find prostitution, and find everything out there on the dark web if you look for it. And they were using Bitcoin, the bad guys, in order to be untrackable, untraceable. And guess what? Of course, you're not. Yeah, there is certain degree of anonymity in cryptocurrencies. And I'm going to talk about the negative side of n Just a minute. But there is also a way to really track people and make sure that, you know, you can kind of police it. And in fact, that's what they did. The Secret Service was policing it and they did find this ring and they did get convictions on it a very interesting how they did it, and what was involved with it.

Now, we have a story that's coming out of the LA Times about a secret service agent, his name is Matthew Britsch, I guess. B-R-I-T-S-C-H. And he went online and started looking for major counterfeiters. And in case you didn't know the Secret Service, besides protecting the president handles counterfeiting cases as well.

So he was online looking for counterfeiters trying to figure out what was going on. And so he went out into the dark web and was out there trolling and there are a lot of police organizations even down to local police departments that spend a fair amount of time looking for bad guys on the dark web. They look for and catch pedophiles and counterfeiters and other things and this story is about a counterfeiter. Now he found this counterfeiter who went by the name of Billmaker, not very original I guess but that was his online persona and he promised high quality hundred dollar bills and he had a money back guarantee. He even had thought of eBay here or Etsy he even had reviews out there from fans that said his work was excellent That was really good and so apparently this the Secret Service agent said well let's give this a shot right. Here's a guy one of the reviews said very good quality and got here quick. Then other one said all passed with no issue whatsoever fresh clean bills. Billmaker's, a five-star guys the Secret Service agent he wanted those five-star reviews to help them sell more bills that were clearly his goal. So the Secret Service agent bought the bills and in September 2017 he purchased the four fake hundred dollar bills for $120 in Bitcoin which is this online cryptocurrency. Of course, the idea is, hey, bitcoins anonymous, and I'll be able to do it and everything's going to be just fine, right? So he'd been carrying on as it turns out for quite a while because these counterfeit bills arrive right on time. They were as good as promised. And when the Secret Service got their hands on them, they examined them and they found these bills were a match for about $4.1 million dollars worth of other $100 counterfeit bills that the Secret Service had found.

So, this guy named Billmaker, the nation's most prolific domestic counterfeiter. Isn't that amazing. So that September 2017 purchase sparked this nine-month investigation where they poked around more in the dark web they found more cyber-savvy criminals are using online bazaars to buy and sell more these goods from illegal firearms and illegal drugs, illegal identification. Stolen cars even they poked around but it's really interesting because I love this quote these guys were right out there quote right in the open it's all there for sale. But while it provides some anonymity to criminals, it provides anonymity to law enforcement. They can't tell who they're selling to and so we went fishing. Isn't that interesting?

So the Secret Service has made more than 15, 15 actually almost 1600 counterfeiting related arrests last year seizing 204 million and phony bills. Banks and retailers collected in addition 100 and $7 million and fake bills. It used to be these artisans who made carefully forged bills on large offset printing presses kind of like the way the federal government does it. Nowadays these counterfeiters are relying on computers scanners laser printers and they use the dark web to sell it. So it's interesting there's a lot of detail and how it happened and it's good to know this if your a security professional. In fact I there's open jobs I wanted was a Thursday I guess it was I do a podcast in case you don't know you can sign up at http://CraigPeterson.com/iTunes and you'll find them right there. http://CraigPeterson.com/iTunes. But I do a podcast called It's a Security Thing. And it's a brand new podcast. And I talked about specific security interests. You know, if you're a security guy if that's what you do as part of your job, and I was talking about these cyber crimes that are now advertising online paying $700,000 to a million dollars a year to hackers, some very serious money so they're really going after it.

And in this case, Billmaker was caught and they're using the US mail, which made it very easy for the Secret Service to find who he was. And they said they were, by the way, very impressed with the quality of the work that he had done. They had a pretty good fake security strip on them. They even felt like they were real. There's pictures in this article up on my website http://CraigPeterson.com of these bills. And the picture of the guy who was making them as a young guy would guess his early 30s based on the picture, but very interesting, interesting stuff at Oklahoma City.

Wow, we are running out of time I got to talk about this whole thing around the cryptocurrencies as well because I know some of you have bought them because you've told me. Now You already know I don't give investment advice on this show. There's other shows on the stations, another podcast, they give lots of investment advice, most of which I take with a grain of salt especially when it involves technology. But when we're talking about cryptocurrencies, yes, it's
the future there's no question it's the future. That's how things are going to shake out. But we are so early on now that I have refused to put any money into cryptocurrencies. I think it's absolutely insane to do. They are so volatile. Look at the money people have lost just this year. It's really, really nuts.

So when I saw this article this week from Gizmodo, it was a week ago, it was Sunday. So as of tomorrow, it's been a week a company in Canada is one of these crypto exchange companies. And there's lots of them, these are the places you go you give them good old American currency that you can wire in from PayPal or from your bank or on your credit card and they then turn it into the cryptocurrency of your choice. And that might be Bitcoin. There are many other cryptocurrencies out there and they then send you the cryptocurrency. Now it's kind of complicated. You have to have a wallet, these crypto exchange companies can hold your currency for you. Some of it's in hot stored some of it's in cold storage. There are passwords involved. There are big keys involved. That's what it's all about. Right? And that's part of the reason I don't trust it. Well

This crypto exchange called QuadrigaCX and if you had money in there. Listen up. QuadrigaCX has about $200 million of people's cryptocurrencies that they are holding. Its founder's is a 30-year-old guy who went to India and died in India. Okay, so that's bad, right? The CEO of any company dying it's a bad thing because all the company goes through a bit of a slump. Oh, no, CEO died CFO died, whatever it was, but in this case, the founder and CEO died and you know the slump you kind of expect but it'll be back on its feet, right? Well, in this case, Mr. 30 years, smarty pants held the keys himself and did not have anyone else with any access to the keys. So this exchange was holding roughly 92 million US dollars in Bitcoin. 1.3 million of Bitcoin cash, almost a million in Bitcoin cash SV. It had Bitcoin gold that had Litecoin and had Ether, you've heard of that, I'm sure if you're really into this. So totaling about 150 million, according to the affidavit and apparently, more as well, that brings it up to close to $200 million.

So there was a filing in Canadian courts last week about this saying bankruptcy. No one else has the passwords for it. So basically, we're talking about at least 140 million dollars lost. Now the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, according to the CBC froze 26 million worth of QuadrigaCX's assets in January this year after finding irregularities for the payment processing and the documents in the Ontario Superior Court Justice concluded that 67 million worth of transactions ended up and properly transferred into the personal account of Custodian Inc the payment processor. That's part of the reason I don't buy any of these cryptocurrencies and although I don't give investment advice, I would advise you not to either. This Bitcoin is lost. Now, if you have good old greenbacks, cold hard cash, and the money burns in the fire, hey, if you can get the ashes to the Secret Service, you can get your money back. If it's torn up. If it's shredded by your dog, you can get your money back. If a crypto exchange goes out of business or loses your money. And it's happened many times, we're talking about many hundreds of millions of dollars so far that have been lost or stolen in these, you are in deep trouble.

Okay, so this week you guys have to attend. I'm going to be explaining why you need to secure your Wi-Fi network and how to do it step by step. I'm going to be explaining how to use the firewall that's on your Mac, that's on your Windows machine and how to use it. So you can still conduct business, but you can keep yourself safer. And then the lesson in the third video this week is how to do backups properly, the 3-2-1 rule of backups and how you can do it inexpensively. I'm going to show you the free tools you have. I'm going to show you some of the best companies out there to use to do some of these other things, inexpensively. Companies that I've used personally that I've advised people to use that are doing an amazing job. Right? That's what we're going to be talking about this week. And you have to sign up I'm going to put these videos up these are going to be some training videos. We're going to do a live webinar where I'm going to take your questions on Thursday and answer your questions that you can email me during the week. As you watch the videos, new ones, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. This week, I may do one on Thursday. But Thursday's the day I'm going to be doing the live webinars. So on Thursday, it's going to be a little bit of a busy day. So I don't know I'm going to get a video out. But this is step by step like you've never seen it before. Really.

You know, if you've been frustrated going online, trying to search on YouTube or on Google to try and find the best stuff and you hope that what comes up first is right. But you know what is not going to work properly. If you do this other thing. This is an integrated approach to make it all work. I'm even going to be showing you how to automate the whole thing so that you get the upgrade. How to use this stack of security tools so that you are not only resistant to viruses, but also to Trojans, to malware, to crypto mining, to all of the major problems that people have. So that's what I'm going to be doing and none of it costs you a dime. I'm given away my best stuff for free because I want businesses to be safe.

That's the goal. That's the goal of the Saturday show and personal as well. But this is about businesses. Businesses have lost tens of billions of dollars accorded the FBI over the last 12 months. So I want to stop that. Make sure you sign up. Visit http://CraigPeterson.com. Or check this morning's email. If you get my weekly email. There's a sign up in that as well. Make sure you follow along because this is for this week. Only. I am taking it down because this stuff changes so frequently. I don't want to leave it up and then have you get confused if someone finds it later on. I want you to stay up to date. http://CraigPeterson.com. Anyways, have a great week. I got a busy one ahead of me. Take care and be safe out there. Bye-bye. 

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Related articles:

Lowe’s Smart Home Device Platform Shuts Down March 31st

Hackers Hijacked A Family’s Smart Home, Spammed Nuclear Missile Alerts

Chrome Can Tell You If Your Passwords Have Been Compromised

Crypto Exchange Says It Can’t Repay $190 Million To Clients After Founder Dies With the Only Password

Glowing Reviews Tout Counterfeit Cash On The Dark Web

Report Highlights The Crazy Lengths Hackers Took To Infiltrate Us Utilities

How Hackers And Scammers Break Into Icloud-Locked iPhones

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More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

It's A Security Thing Friday. Craig talks about ransomware hitting the local schools and how you can help them.

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

---

Related Articles 

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

Airing date: 02/08/2019

Ransomware Hits Local Schools - A Little Advice

Craig Peterson 0:00

Hey, everybody. Getting ready for another weekend and we got a big week next week. We are doing some more courses and some more teaching. This should be fun. And what I want to talk about right now in our little, It's a Security Thing Friday is guys, you know, you're only listening to this if you're interested in security. And I've got to kind of build you up a little bit because if you're interested in security, you are probably way ahead of almost everybody else, you know. And I know of two times now where we have had some serious problems with schools personally, right here in the area. We had one that happened here in New Hampshire, and we had another one that just just happened in Connecticut. And what I'd like to propose to you guys is that since you are interested in security that you go ahead and volunteer for your school district. Now you're going to have a fight on your hand. Because there are people working for the schools. This is true in every business.
But there's people working for the schools who are supposed to be handling security and may well be doing the best job in the world. And then there may be other people who know they need a little bit more help. Or maybe they don't understand something quite right. Or maybe they need help installing some software. That's where you can come in.

So that's where you can go to your local school and say, Hey, listen, I'm kind of a security guy, even if you're not professional, right? Even if you're you haven't spent the last 10, 20, 30, 40 years worrying about security of computer systems. You may be in a better spot than some poor math teacher that has been been grabbed and dragged over and and told hey, now you are our security champion. So do that for people, right. It's a security thing. It's what we do.

We get pulled aside when we go for Christmas, or New Year's or whatever, a birthday, Hanukkah, you name it, we get pulled the side. I can't go on a visit to a family member and not spend almost the whole time on computers, trying to fix them, secure them, help them, train them. And you're the same way. Right? You have had same problem because you're the computer guy. Well, now you are the security guy or gal right obviously a lot of women out there and one of my daughters is is top notch security person.

So that's what I'm proposing to you and as I get into this little story here from Connecticut, Bridgeport, Connecticut their public schools and this is a K through 12 district, just had a big problem. There was a attack launched by a malicious outsider and it got in to their network. Now, this happens all the time. It's hard to secure against. That's part of what I'm going over this week, this next week in my course, for people how to stop this sort of thing. But it got in, and then it started to spread. And that's the other thing. We're going to be talking about this week. How to stop that spread from occurring. And the district hasn't said the amount of ransom or whether it will pay it. In other words, guess what happened and got in and started encrypting files and then demanded around some now, you know my position, you know the FBI position, don't pay ransoms it not only does it encourage these bad guys to go after other people to try and get ransom money from them. But it now confirms to the bad guys that hey, you are somebody that pays ransom, so they're going to try and go after you again. And when you have a big network, like as public school where there's a lot of people who weren't well trained or necessarily trained at all it's pretty darn easy to get into the network.

Now this article that I'm reading, it's from http://Edscoop.com is saying that the guy in charge over there, they reported it to the superintendent who reported it to the police, he's saying that several teachers have lost access to lesson plans and teaching material saved on work computers. Teacher and student work saved on cloud based platforms appear to have been unaffected. Well of course it was depending on the type of cloud platform and if they had cloud backups it might be in trouble. But if they're using Google's whole Education Suite that's a little bit of a different deal. It's not going to spread on to that. Now the district's power school platform also was on touch. Hopefully it had some really good security. The IT department reportedly reportedly began taking steps to remedy the problem over the weekend and how the district declined to say how far along the IT team is. Have you ever done that? I've had to go into companies after the fact where they don't have anything properly set up. And you got to try and recover machines. And I want to warn you when it comes to ransomware, you may not be aware of this. But new machines, of course, don't have BIOSes anymore. They boot off a special partition on the hard disk. And then that loads in some special device drivers and other things that then that then loads in Window. So it's kind of a bootstrap loader process that's involved nowadays.

So if you get some of these infections, particularly root kits, but this is also true when you're talking about the some of the ransomware, it can get pretty darn deep right there right into your machines and in be impossible to remove all most absolutely impossible to remove. So in those cases, you may have to replace the hard disk but in other machines it's that little bootstrap operating system and it's often Linux based. But it's not secured particularly well. In most cases, a little bootstrapped operating system may be in non volatile memory on the motherboard. So go to extra steps of the machines been compromised and it's a newer piece of hardware and it doesn't have the BIOS anymore. Even if it does have the BIOS go to the extra steps of making sure that you do a very low level not just a format on the hard disk, but also looking at all of the firmware and bootstrap code that's there on the machine.

Now we had a I was a speaker keynote at a big event as insurance company that is a conglomeration of a bunch of school districts up here and I spoke there and we talked about the risk and well how it's getting in and what you can do and what you don't want really want to do. And one of the attendees came up to me afterwards and said, Hey, we just got ransomware throughout the whole school now they were dealing with it and they had obviously a talk to the police, the FBI is usually not that interested in it. But the local police department will be and they started to work to restore stuff. I gave them a little bit of advice, but it is happening. And since it's a security thing, I thought I would bring it up with you guys and gals.

Go volunteer, help out your school districts, help them understand what they can do, how to prepare the 3-2-1 rules of backup, everything they need, and you can send them my way as well. I'd be more than glad to do training I do trainings all of the time. I charge for these bigger events but you know already that my master classes and other things that I do are absolutely free, these virtual events where it just doesn't take quite as much of my time as having to go someplace and and give a presentation. 

Anyhow, do that little outreach outreach you're the security guy as well So reach out to these people have a great weekend and I will be back tomorrow course with my terrestrial radio show who thought you'd ever be saying that right? 30 years ago that and I've been doing it I'm almost 1000 weeks of weekly radio shows and podcasts so it's a long time So join me tomorrow on the air or you can of course listen to it in replay right here on the podcast. So take care. Bye bye.

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More stories and tech updates at:

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

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It's A Security Thing Friday. Craig talks about ransomware hitting the local schools and how you can help them.

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: 02/08/2019

Ransomware Hits Local Schools - A Little Advice

Craig Peterson 0:00

Hey, everybody. Getting ready for another weekend and we got a big week next week. We are doing some more courses and some more teaching. This should be fun. And what I want to talk about right now in our little, It's a Security Thing Friday is guys, you know, you're only listening to this if you're interested in security. And I've got to kind of build you up a little bit because if you're interested in security, you are probably way ahead of almost everybody else, you know. And I know of two times now where we have had some serious problems with schools personally, right here in the area. We had one that happened here in New Hampshire, and we had another one that just just happened in Connecticut. And what I'd like to propose to you guys is that since you are interested in security that you go ahead and volunteer for your school district. Now you're going to have a fight on your hand. Because there are people working for the schools. This is true in every business.
But there's people working for the schools who are supposed to be handling security and may well be doing the best job in the world. And then there may be other people who know they need a little bit more help. Or maybe they don't understand something quite right. Or maybe they need help installing some software. That's where you can come in.

So that's where you can go to your local school and say, Hey, listen, I'm kind of a security guy, even if you're not professional, right? Even if you're you haven't spent the last 10, 20, 30, 40 years worrying about security of computer systems. You may be in a better spot than some poor math teacher that has been been grabbed and dragged over and and told hey, now you are our security champion. So do that for people, right. It's a security thing. It's what we do.

We get pulled aside when we go for Christmas, or New Year's or whatever, a birthday, Hanukkah, you name it, we get pulled the side. I can't go on a visit to a family member and not spend almost the whole time on computers, trying to fix them, secure them, help them, train them. And you're the same way. Right? You have had same problem because you're the computer guy. Well, now you are the security guy or gal right obviously a lot of women out there and one of my daughters is is top notch security person.

So that's what I'm proposing to you and as I get into this little story here from Connecticut, Bridgeport, Connecticut their public schools and this is a K through 12 district, just had a big problem. There was a attack launched by a malicious outsider and it got in to their network. Now, this happens all the time. It's hard to secure against. That's part of what I'm going over this week, this next week in my course, for people how to stop this sort of thing. But it got in, and then it started to spread. And that's the other thing. We're going to be talking about this week. How to stop that spread from occurring. And the district hasn't said the amount of ransom or whether it will pay it. In other words, guess what happened and got in and started encrypting files and then demanded around some now, you know my position, you know the FBI position, don't pay ransoms it not only does it encourage these bad guys to go after other people to try and get ransom money from them. But it now confirms to the bad guys that hey, you are somebody that pays ransom, so they're going to try and go after you again. And when you have a big network, like as public school where there's a lot of people who weren't well trained or necessarily trained at all it's pretty darn easy to get into the network.

Now this article that I'm reading, it's from http://Edscoop.com is saying that the guy in charge over there, they reported it to the superintendent who reported it to the police, he's saying that several teachers have lost access to lesson plans and teaching material saved on work computers. Teacher and student work saved on cloud based platforms appear to have been unaffected. Well of course it was depending on the type of cloud platform and if they had cloud backups it might be in trouble. But if they're using Google's whole Education Suite that's a little bit of a different deal. It's not going to spread on to that. Now the district's power school platform also was on touch. Hopefully it had some really good security. The IT department reportedly reportedly began taking steps to remedy the problem over the weekend and how the district declined to say how far along the IT team is. Have you ever done that? I've had to go into companies after the fact where they don't have anything properly set up. And you got to try and recover machines. And I want to warn you when it comes to ransomware, you may not be aware of this. But new machines, of course, don't have BIOSes anymore. They boot off a special partition on the hard disk. And then that loads in some special device drivers and other things that then that then loads in Window. So it's kind of a bootstrap loader process that's involved nowadays.

So if you get some of these infections, particularly root kits, but this is also true when you're talking about the some of the ransomware, it can get pretty darn deep right there right into your machines and in be impossible to remove all most absolutely impossible to remove. So in those cases, you may have to replace the hard disk but in other machines it's that little bootstrap operating system and it's often Linux based. But it's not secured particularly well. In most cases, a little bootstrapped operating system may be in non volatile memory on the motherboard. So go to extra steps of the machines been compromised and it's a newer piece of hardware and it doesn't have the BIOS anymore. Even if it does have the BIOS go to the extra steps of making sure that you do a very low level not just a format on the hard disk, but also looking at all of the firmware and bootstrap code that's there on the machine.

Now we had a I was a speaker keynote at a big event as insurance company that is a conglomeration of a bunch of school districts up here and I spoke there and we talked about the risk and well how it's getting in and what you can do and what you don't want really want to do. And one of the attendees came up to me afterwards and said, Hey, we just got ransomware throughout the whole school now they were dealing with it and they had obviously a talk to the police, the FBI is usually not that interested in it. But the local police department will be and they started to work to restore stuff. I gave them a little bit of advice, but it is happening. And since it's a security thing, I thought I would bring it up with you guys and gals.

Go volunteer, help out your school districts, help them understand what they can do, how to prepare the 3-2-1 rules of backup, everything they need, and you can send them my way as well. I'd be more than glad to do training I do trainings all of the time. I charge for these bigger events but you know already that my master classes and other things that I do are absolutely free, these virtual events where it just doesn't take quite as much of my time as having to go someplace and and give a presentation. 

Anyhow, do that little outreach outreach you're the security guy as well So reach out to these people have a great weekend and I will be back tomorrow course with my terrestrial radio show who thought you'd ever be saying that right? 30 years ago that and I've been doing it I'm almost 1000 weeks of weekly radio shows and podcasts so it's a long time So join me tomorrow on the air or you can of course listen to it in replay right here on the podcast. So take care. Bye bye.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

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It's time for another Security Thing with Craig Peterson. Today, Craig discusses about the cybercrime gangs advertising the high paying cybercrime jobs that are available out there.

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

---

Related Articles 

Cybercrime Gangs Advertise Fresh Jobs, Hacking Services

---

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

Airing date: 02/07/2019

High Paying Cybercrime Jobs Available

Craig Peterson 0:00

Hey, good morning everybody. Craig Peterson here with A Security Thing, hey, if you aren't into security and trying to understand it and trying to fight against the bad guys, you're in the wrong place. Because that's all this is about is security. And today we have another real quick one that I think is important for everybody to understand. I heard in the ad the other day from this company that we've all heard their ads before. The company's called Lifelock. And you know, I already have a special report out about how to protect your data and keep it safe and how Lifelock is you know, essentially a waste of money. You can freeze your credit and it doesn't have to cost you a dime and all Lifelock does this come in afterwards and maybe help you clean up right? So should you do it? Shouldn't you do it? I don't know. I've got a special report about it and I've got an explainer video that I produced about it as well. And you can get that if you want. But anyhow.

What they said in that ad was that there is a job offer right now out on the dark web for $700,000 for a hacker. $700,000 a year, supposedly. So knowing how Lifelock some time to says, played a little fast and loose with things in the past, and in fact, got sued by the federal government and a whole whole big mass, I decided I would look it up a little bit. Now, the dark web is a little more difficult, right? It's not like there is Google for the dark web. Yeah, there's some search engine-ish things out there that you can use and you can do a little poking around. So I did but I also look for articles that made a similar claim because at least then you've got something to go on.

And sometimes it's an echo chamber, right? Like what happened with this whole Russian investigation thing with President Trump, where it was a democratic investigation that was entirely politically motivated. And then the it was they told it to a friend who told to a friend who told to a friend, and all of a sudden now the FBI, it's got to come in from six different sources, the same basic story. And you know, from playing broken telephone as a kid that the story changes a little bit, right, every time it's passed along. And of course, some people purposely change it. So of course, the FBI is going to get a bunch of different stories from bunch of different people and say, Oh, well, maybe there's something here, maybe we should look into it.

So I expected to find at least that online. The Lifelock this commercial, they were saying $700,000 a year for a cyber hacker to try and steal people's personality. So I figured someone had to mention it. It had to be in the regular press somewhere, right? So I go and look at some of the left wing sites like the New York Times, and then Huffington Post and don't find anything there. And I look at some of the conservative sites that are out there. I look at Google, I do a Yahoo search. I do a Bing search, don't find anything. Try a couple of dark web search engines as they are. Couldn't find anything. So once again, that leaves me kind of wondering is Lifelock pulling in another fast one on us and it might be. But here's what we did find, a website called http://banksecurityinfo.com and this is talking about cyber crime gangs advertising fresh jobs for hacking services, and it goes through and lists a bunch of payments that they'll have.Now the the jobs it's not like a job Hey, you know, we'll pay you so much they do have some of those. In fact, this one hacking group out there according to Bankinfosecurity is offering full time employees a monthly salary of 50,000 pounds, likely rising to 70,000 pounds. Now, aren't those interesting numbers out there? So if you take 50,000 pounds, that's about what 65,000 US, and you multiply that by 12, you get $780,000. Tadah! I think I found where Lifelock might have gotten some of this stuff. So it's interesting. This is called dark overlord. In case you're wondering, and you want to go apply for a job.

But there are a lot of offers out there. For hacking a web server, they'll pay you 220 to as much as $3,000. Keyloggers, 170 bucks. Denial of service attacks, and those vary from 350 to 2500 bucks. Hacking a personal computer 280 to 3500. Cell phones, it's about 500 bucks. Email hacking again, about 750 bucks. Social media account hacking about 500 bucks. Of course that varies as well. Change school grades 1200 to 3700 bucks. Wow. It's gotten expensive. And a FUD ransomware and decryptor, depends. 12 months 900 bucks. Six months 490. 1 month, 120.

So interesting, right? And they're looking for fully undetectable ransomware. So there's some decent money out there who knows about these jobs? If these are legitimate. Multi lingual candidates are desirable. It'll add 5% of your salary or commission for fluency per language. Chinese, Arabic and German being particularly desirable. And must have a winning attitude. It sounds like something you would normally post doesn't it?

so I figured you know if you're interested in security you'd like to know a little bit about this. Digital Shadows found this job advertisement out online and the dark markets really do persist but I got a warn you. Of course you can get serious US prison time if you're caught doing any of this stuff and that's probably why they pay so well. So the bad guys are out there. They're trying to get us and no surprise there we got to defend ourselves.

Anyways that's today's Security Thing and we will be back tomorrow with another one and of course on Saturday with my regular radio show. Taking Sunday off per usual while at least from doing podcasts and I hope you keep an eye out for all these master classes I'm doing. http;//CraigPeterson.com/subscribe.

Alright, have a great day. Talk to you later. 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

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

It's time for another Security Thing with Craig Peterson. Today, Craig discusses about the cybercrime gangs advertising the high paying cybercrime jobs that are available out there.

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

---

Related Articles 

Cybercrime Gangs Advertise Fresh Jobs, Hacking Services

---

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

Airing date: 02/07/2019

High Paying Cybercrime Jobs Available

Craig Peterson 0:00

Hey, good morning everybody. Craig Peterson here with A Security Thing, hey, if you aren't into security and trying to understand it and trying to fight against the bad guys, you're in the wrong place. Because that's all this is about is security. And today we have another real quick one that I think is important for everybody to understand. I heard in the ad the other day from this company that we've all heard their ads before. The company's called Lifelock. And you know, I already have a special report out about how to protect your data and keep it safe and how Lifelock is you know, essentially a waste of money. You can freeze your credit and it doesn't have to cost you a dime and all Lifelock does this come in afterwards and maybe help you clean up right? So should you do it? Shouldn't you do it? I don't know. I've got a special report about it and I've got an explainer video that I produced about it as well. And you can get that if you want. But anyhow.

What they said in that ad was that there is a job offer right now out on the dark web for $700,000 for a hacker. $700,000 a year, supposedly. So knowing how Lifelock some time to says, played a little fast and loose with things in the past, and in fact, got sued by the federal government and a whole whole big mass, I decided I would look it up a little bit. Now, the dark web is a little more difficult, right? It's not like there is Google for the dark web. Yeah, there's some search engine-ish things out there that you can use and you can do a little poking around. So I did but I also look for articles that made a similar claim because at least then you've got something to go on.

And sometimes it's an echo chamber, right? Like what happened with this whole Russian investigation thing with President Trump, where it was a democratic investigation that was entirely politically motivated. And then the it was they told it to a friend who told to a friend who told to a friend, and all of a sudden now the FBI, it's got to come in from six different sources, the same basic story. And you know, from playing broken telephone as a kid that the story changes a little bit, right, every time it's passed along. And of course, some people purposely change it. So of course, the FBI is going to get a bunch of different stories from bunch of different people and say, Oh, well, maybe there's something here, maybe we should look into it.

So I expected to find at least that online. The Lifelock this commercial, they were saying $700,000 a year for a cyber hacker to try and steal people's personality. So I figured someone had to mention it. It had to be in the regular press somewhere, right? So I go and look at some of the left wing sites like the New York Times, and then Huffington Post and don't find anything there. And I look at some of the conservative sites that are out there. I look at Google, I do a Yahoo search. I do a Bing search, don't find anything. Try a couple of dark web search engines as they are. Couldn't find anything. So once again, that leaves me kind of wondering is Lifelock pulling in another fast one on us and it might be. But here's what we did find, a website called http://banksecurityinfo.com and this is talking about cyber crime gangs advertising fresh jobs for hacking services, and it goes through and lists a bunch of payments that they'll have.Now the the jobs it's not like a job Hey, you know, we'll pay you so much they do have some of those. In fact, this one hacking group out there according to Bankinfosecurity is offering full time employees a monthly salary of 50,000 pounds, likely rising to 70,000 pounds. Now, aren't those interesting numbers out there? So if you take 50,000 pounds, that's about what 65,000 US, and you multiply that by 12, you get $780,000. Tadah! I think I found where Lifelock might have gotten some of this stuff. So it's interesting. This is called dark overlord. In case you're wondering, and you want to go apply for a job.

But there are a lot of offers out there. For hacking a web server, they'll pay you 220 to as much as $3,000. Keyloggers, 170 bucks. Denial of service attacks, and those vary from 350 to 2500 bucks. Hacking a personal computer 280 to 3500. Cell phones, it's about 500 bucks. Email hacking again, about 750 bucks. Social media account hacking about 500 bucks. Of course that varies as well. Change school grades 1200 to 3700 bucks. Wow. It's gotten expensive. And a FUD ransomware and decryptor, depends. 12 months 900 bucks. Six months 490. 1 month, 120.

So interesting, right? And they're looking for fully undetectable ransomware. So there's some decent money out there who knows about these jobs? If these are legitimate. Multi lingual candidates are desirable. It'll add 5% of your salary or commission for fluency per language. Chinese, Arabic and German being particularly desirable. And must have a winning attitude. It sounds like something you would normally post doesn't it?

so I figured you know if you're interested in security you'd like to know a little bit about this. Digital Shadows found this job advertisement out online and the dark markets really do persist but I got a warn you. Of course you can get serious US prison time if you're caught doing any of this stuff and that's probably why they pay so well. So the bad guys are out there. They're trying to get us and no surprise there we got to defend ourselves.

Anyways that's today's Security Thing and we will be back tomorrow with another one and of course on Saturday with my regular radio show. Taking Sunday off per usual while at least from doing podcasts and I hope you keep an eye out for all these master classes I'm doing. http;//CraigPeterson.com/subscribe.

Alright, have a great day. Talk to you later. 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

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