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

Find out how one hacker stole millions as Craig discusses SIM hacking and trends at this year's DEFCON with Ken and Matt

Craig is putting up a new membership site (Yes, it is free, but you have to sign up)  On it will have all his special reports that he puts out and you will be the first to get them.

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

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Related Articles:

3 Trends Hackers At Black Hat And Defcon Are Watching

How A Hacker Allegedly Stole Millions By Hijacking Phone Numbers
---

Transcript:

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

Airing date: 08/15/2018

Security Secrets We Learned At Blackhat And Defcon

Craig Peterson:[00:00:00] Hey, Good morning, Craig Peterson, here. I had a conference yesterday well actually a webinar. And I was running it. And my guest for the FBI InfraGard's program on the Webinar was a gentleman from Black Ops partners. Now, Black Ops partners is an intelligence firm. They deal a ton with various types of intelligence and they provide information to the government, to businesses, and NGOs all of those people. They had a bunch of warnings for us yesterday, some of that stuff I really can't share with you at this point. But we do know about what's been going on out in Vegas with the Black Hat conference and with DEF CON. So, this morning with Ken and Matt I kind of loaded them up with articles on security and some of the things we need to be very cautious with. Things are boards of directors need to be paying more attention to than most of them are. And, things that you should be paying attention to including I don't know. Ever heard of sim hijacking. Well, I explain that this morning and how this could cause you to lose a ton. Including it already did, One guy lost five million dollars, because of it. So, here we go with Ken and Matt. 

[00:01:25] Were back again and it is that time of the week again, 738 on a Wednesday means time for Craig Peterson on deck. Craig how are you this morning. 

[00:01:34] Hey, good morning gentlemen. Doing just fine.

[00:01:37] So, now Craig now can they steal information from our love our online accounts through voicemail.

[00:01:45] Yeah listen a surprising. I assume you guys know what two-factor authentication is, right. 

[00:01:52] I do. I wouldn't bet on that. 

[00:01:57] It's hard to say, what it's called. 

[00:02:00] Most of us now are have started using something called two-factor authentication where in most cases we're using our phones and we're getting a text message. So, for instance, you're logging in from a new location, a new browser, etc. and the Web site's going to pop up and say I'm not sure I've seen this device before so, I need to verify you, and in most cases, it sends you a text message. So, that text message comes into your phone and it's got a number and you type that number into the Website and now it knows it's you. Well, we just had a conference going on in Vegas and there were two of them they run back to back every year in August. There is Defcon and there's black hat. These are where there's all kinds of fun games. For instance, they're talking in these conferences about hacking and how to hack in and leads basically to help the good guys understand how the bad guys are getting in, OK. And they have games like well the normal one, spot the Fed. So, they are in a conference talking about something and they try and figure out who the people in the room are that are from the federal government so, that's kind of a fun game. 

[00:03:17] Another big one this year, was hack the voting machines and we'll have to talk about that next week a little bit. But, we had an 11-year-old win this year on the hack of the voting machines, just to show you how great these things are. But in this case, we had a presentation about using that text message type functionality to get into almost any account including WhatsApp and Signal, even. But, your standard accounts from Microsoft and Apple and Google. What they did in order to hack these accounts was they figured Oh well wait a minute now they're going to send a text message. Wow. These places all we're talking with all of your major vendors will all give you the option to call you on the phone. So, all the bad guy has to do if he's targeting you is go ahead and hack your voicemail account. Well, how would you hack your voicemail account? Well, they run a little program and the programs available online that will call your voicemail. Now, you guys I assume you both use voicemail to some degree right.

[00:04:27] As much as I hate it, Yes. And how many digits is your pin? You have to type in a pin right. 

[00:04:33] No, actually no I don't. I have Verizon and I have the visual voicemail thing to call in. 

[00:04:41] I think when I used to call anything I just portion of it talks me. I've got to I've got to I've got an app in my phone that does. Yeah, but when I used to call it it was like four digits, I think. All right. I might have an iPhone Ten I push it and it talks to me. But, I also see that message as well.

[00:05:02] I noticed when you push, Matt, he talks to you too.

[00:05:05] But, anyway here's a couple of problems that are inherent in this system. One is if you call into your voicemail and your voicemail automatically starts talking to you, right, giving you your messages etc. It's probably using your caller ID and that is easily faked. So, for instance, if I wanted to find out messages that came in the Ken Altschuler all I need is a phone number and I can get his voicemail. If you're using an app for your voicemail you may be a little bit safer. But even if you have a pin on your voicemail account, does it back off? So, for instance, Ken when you had your iPhone what was your previous on a, 7.

[00:05:48] Yes.

[00:05:50] So, when you had your iPhone 7 and knew you had to type in the code on the front of your phone and you made a mistake you'd have to re-enter it. 

[00:05:59] Correct, Yeah. And, Matt the same thing with you right with Right. Yeah. So, we make a mistake. It gives you the chance to do it again. Did you notice that it backs off? 

[00:06:11] So, every time you make a mistake you may get ten tries. But the first two tries are right away. Then third try it's going wait a couple of minutes so forth to try it's going to wait many minutes. And by the time you get to the 10th try, it can be as long as a week. That's called an incremental backoff. And the idea is if you've only got a four character or four-digit PIN it's going to take them at least a year or two or three to break in if they're able to do it. So, that's incremental backup. Does your voicemail have that? Well, it turns out most of them don't. So, if they can get your phone number if they're targeting you. And remember the FBI is warning us that they're targeting small businesses and I have another one last week that I was talking to that was targeted. But, if they're targeting you, this little program just sits there and keeps trying pins because most voicemail systems do not back off. So, within a few minutes, the hacker has your voicemail and has the ability to get into it. So, all they have to do is go into your account, online. 

[00:07:20] say forgot my password have it use the voice option. Call it to leave a message on your voicemail with a new pin. The hacker now has full access to your account because they already hacked your voicemail using an automated system. So, there's something more to think about our voicemail systems. Most of them are really bad when it comes to this. Now some of the professional stuff is good, it does a good job but you might want to think twice before using your phone and SMS text messaging. Think twice before using text messaging as your two-factor authentication method, Google Authenticator, and there a company called Duo. If you're really paranoid, like I am because I got to take care of my customer's data right. Use things like Yubi keys. There's a lot, and of course, you can see a lot of this up on my Web site. I've got this article up there for people. We're talking to Craig Peterson as we typically do at this time every Wednesday. 

[00:08:22] Craig speaking of being paranoid about my phone ruining my life. Apparently, a hacker has stolen millions of dollars by hijacking phone numbers I guess 40 victims or so five million dollars. Tell us about this. 

[00:08:35] Yeah, isn't that something you know when you get right down to it we're just confident with our technology, Right. It's like Matt you were saying last week, yeah. There may be vulnerabilities in Android, but you're using it, right. The same thing with having an Alexa in your home or a Google home etc. etc.. This technique came out again here. This is a this is a 20-year-old who is from Boston and he has hacked about 40 different victims that they know of. There were probably some accomplices involved, but this is a different technique called Sim swapping. And, again what happens is they're able to redirect and not your voicemail in this case but your entire phone number etcetera, etcetera to a third party phone. So, this has been happening more and more. We've got alerts out on this. You have to be careful with here. It works for any provider. This is a provider thing AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon. If they can defraud the carrier into switching your phone number to the different SIM card they can pull off the scam. In this case, it was about five million dollars in cryptocurrencies that were stolen by this guy. So, five million bucks not so bad for 20-year-old although he stole it and it's going to be very bad for him because he ended up in jail you know getting charged and down in New York City. Yes, and may He did a bunch of this stuff so you may get transferred to a different district. But, all would all of the entrepreneur knew whose money cryptocurrency was stolen in this case was his phone stopped working and he didn't notice it until later in the day and then he called up they tracked it down. The FBI got involved. But if your phone stops working you may think you may want to hop on it really quickly and not just think your phone broke. That's the bottom line, there.

[00:10:44] We're on our Craig Peterson our tech guru. You can always go to Craig Peterson dot com and get all of the information first. So, so you know we talk about terrorism and all these horrible things facing America. But, do most people fear are most intelligence agencies authorities fear a cyber attack is that the worst thing that could happen to America.

[00:11:05] Yeah, this is interesting. I ran webinars yesterday for the FBI. Their Infragard program. And I had on the head of Black Ops partners. Now, this is a company that provides a lot of intelligence for the government, for private industry, et cetera and that's all very interesting stuff and it was fun talking to a great guy. But, again there's a lot to be aware of. And, we've got to get boards of directors aware of this stuff. And on top of it. Because, we are talking now about crippling cyberattack that can happen. Now, this is scary because again all levels of government are warning about this but, a well executed cyberattack could knock out the electric grid, shut off power, compromise vital government systems, financial data. We've got General David Petraeus. He's a former CIA director saying this is a quote "What worries me most is the cyber equivalent of a weapon of mass destruction fall into the hands of extremists". "They'd be very difficult to deter and the willingness to blow themselves up on the battlefield and take us with them says a lot". Now, China has been hacking us for a long time. Microsoft yesterday just announced that they had found Russian involvement, where they were pretending to be various U.S.

[00:12:35] based political party sites. In other words, Microsoft caught and stopped the Russians from pretending they were the Democrats and pretending they were the Republicans. They're equal opportunity offenders. This is going to continue. This is the next battlefield. And, as of yesterday BlackOps Partners was talking about this. This is the typical unconventional warfare. Rights were really big. They're really small. Sun Tzu, The Art of War. They have ways of attacking us, they can frankly cripple us. So, we've got to continue to improve. We are improving security with things like power stations. But your business has to improve your cybersecurity. We've got to step up. We need to pay attention even as consumers, because things will get critical, right. Three days after our computer systems go off-line there will no longer be bread in the grocery stores etc., etc. You going to have to go out fishing off the coast to get your food all by yourself. It's very scary, and I can't emphasize this enough, I know we speak about it all the time, but it's very real, very real Ken. We've been talking to Craig Peterson, our tech guru who joins us on Wednesdays at this time to give us an eye on technology.

[00:13:59] Craig thanks so much. We will talk to you again next Wednesday. Hey, take care guys. Bye-bye. We're going to take a quick break here.

[00:14:06] By the way I should mention, if you are interested in getting involved with the FBI InfraGard program go to InfraGard.org or I N F R A G A R D dot Org. Lots of great information you'll be getting some of it's a little bit of inside information that is not shared with the general public. It is not like top secret stuff or anything. But it's important stuff to know. So, check it out Ifraguard dot org. Take care. Have a great rest of the week and I'll be back with you on Saturday. Although, I am starting to try and get this posted my radio show when, I prerecord which I've been doing lately. I try and get it up on Friday, so, keep an eye out for that. We can podcast as early as Friday and you can get there from Craig Peterson dot com slash iTunes, make sure you subscribe. Give me a rating 5-star. I hope, Take care.

---

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

Find out how one hacker stole millions as Craig discusses SIM hacking and trends at this year's DEFCON with Ken and Matt

Craig is putting up a new membership site (Yes, it is free, but you have to sign up)  On it will have all his special reports that he puts out and you will be the first to get them.

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

---

Related Articles:

3 Trends Hackers At Black Hat And Defcon Are Watching

How A Hacker Allegedly Stole Millions By Hijacking Phone Numbers
---

Transcript:

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

Airing date: 08/15/2018

Security Secrets We Learned At Blackhat And Defcon

Craig Peterson:[00:00:00] Hey, Good morning, Craig Peterson, here. I had a conference yesterday well actually a webinar. And I was running it. And my guest for the FBI InfraGard's program on the Webinar was a gentleman from Black Ops partners. Now, Black Ops partners is an intelligence firm. They deal a ton with various types of intelligence and they provide information to the government, to businesses, and NGOs all of those people. They had a bunch of warnings for us yesterday, some of that stuff I really can't share with you at this point. But we do know about what's been going on out in Vegas with the Black Hat conference and with DEF CON. So, this morning with Ken and Matt I kind of loaded them up with articles on security and some of the things we need to be very cautious with. Things are boards of directors need to be paying more attention to than most of them are. And, things that you should be paying attention to including I don't know. Ever heard of sim hijacking. Well, I explain that this morning and how this could cause you to lose a ton. Including it already did, One guy lost five million dollars, because of it. So, here we go with Ken and Matt. 

[00:01:25] Were back again and it is that time of the week again, 738 on a Wednesday means time for Craig Peterson on deck. Craig how are you this morning. 

[00:01:34] Hey, good morning gentlemen. Doing just fine.

[00:01:37] So, now Craig now can they steal information from our love our online accounts through voicemail.

[00:01:45] Yeah listen a surprising. I assume you guys know what two-factor authentication is, right. 

[00:01:52] I do. I wouldn't bet on that. 

[00:01:57] It's hard to say, what it's called. 

[00:02:00] Most of us now are have started using something called two-factor authentication where in most cases we're using our phones and we're getting a text message. So, for instance, you're logging in from a new location, a new browser, etc. and the Web site's going to pop up and say I'm not sure I've seen this device before so, I need to verify you, and in most cases, it sends you a text message. So, that text message comes into your phone and it's got a number and you type that number into the Website and now it knows it's you. Well, we just had a conference going on in Vegas and there were two of them they run back to back every year in August. There is Defcon and there's black hat. These are where there's all kinds of fun games. For instance, they're talking in these conferences about hacking and how to hack in and leads basically to help the good guys understand how the bad guys are getting in, OK. And they have games like well the normal one, spot the Fed. So, they are in a conference talking about something and they try and figure out who the people in the room are that are from the federal government so, that's kind of a fun game. 

[00:03:17] Another big one this year, was hack the voting machines and we'll have to talk about that next week a little bit. But, we had an 11-year-old win this year on the hack of the voting machines, just to show you how great these things are. But in this case, we had a presentation about using that text message type functionality to get into almost any account including WhatsApp and Signal, even. But, your standard accounts from Microsoft and Apple and Google. What they did in order to hack these accounts was they figured Oh well wait a minute now they're going to send a text message. Wow. These places all we're talking with all of your major vendors will all give you the option to call you on the phone. So, all the bad guy has to do if he's targeting you is go ahead and hack your voicemail account. Well, how would you hack your voicemail account? Well, they run a little program and the programs available online that will call your voicemail. Now, you guys I assume you both use voicemail to some degree right.

[00:04:27] As much as I hate it, Yes. And how many digits is your pin? You have to type in a pin right. 

[00:04:33] No, actually no I don't. I have Verizon and I have the visual voicemail thing to call in. 

[00:04:41] I think when I used to call anything I just portion of it talks me. I've got to I've got to I've got an app in my phone that does. Yeah, but when I used to call it it was like four digits, I think. All right. I might have an iPhone Ten I push it and it talks to me. But, I also see that message as well.

[00:05:02] I noticed when you push, Matt, he talks to you too.

[00:05:05] But, anyway here's a couple of problems that are inherent in this system. One is if you call into your voicemail and your voicemail automatically starts talking to you, right, giving you your messages etc. It's probably using your caller ID and that is easily faked. So, for instance, if I wanted to find out messages that came in the Ken Altschuler all I need is a phone number and I can get his voicemail. If you're using an app for your voicemail you may be a little bit safer. But even if you have a pin on your voicemail account, does it back off? So, for instance, Ken when you had your iPhone what was your previous on a, 7.

[00:05:48] Yes.

[00:05:50] So, when you had your iPhone 7 and knew you had to type in the code on the front of your phone and you made a mistake you'd have to re-enter it. 

[00:05:59] Correct, Yeah. And, Matt the same thing with you right with Right. Yeah. So, we make a mistake. It gives you the chance to do it again. Did you notice that it backs off? 

[00:06:11] So, every time you make a mistake you may get ten tries. But the first two tries are right away. Then third try it's going wait a couple of minutes so forth to try it's going to wait many minutes. And by the time you get to the 10th try, it can be as long as a week. That's called an incremental backoff. And the idea is if you've only got a four character or four-digit PIN it's going to take them at least a year or two or three to break in if they're able to do it. So, that's incremental backup. Does your voicemail have that? Well, it turns out most of them don't. So, if they can get your phone number if they're targeting you. And remember the FBI is warning us that they're targeting small businesses and I have another one last week that I was talking to that was targeted. But, if they're targeting you, this little program just sits there and keeps trying pins because most voicemail systems do not back off. So, within a few minutes, the hacker has your voicemail and has the ability to get into it. So, all they have to do is go into your account, online. 

[00:07:20] say forgot my password have it use the voice option. Call it to leave a message on your voicemail with a new pin. The hacker now has full access to your account because they already hacked your voicemail using an automated system. So, there's something more to think about our voicemail systems. Most of them are really bad when it comes to this. Now some of the professional stuff is good, it does a good job but you might want to think twice before using your phone and SMS text messaging. Think twice before using text messaging as your two-factor authentication method, Google Authenticator, and there a company called Duo. If you're really paranoid, like I am because I got to take care of my customer's data right. Use things like Yubi keys. There's a lot, and of course, you can see a lot of this up on my Web site. I've got this article up there for people. We're talking to Craig Peterson as we typically do at this time every Wednesday. 

[00:08:22] Craig speaking of being paranoid about my phone ruining my life. Apparently, a hacker has stolen millions of dollars by hijacking phone numbers I guess 40 victims or so five million dollars. Tell us about this. 

[00:08:35] Yeah, isn't that something you know when you get right down to it we're just confident with our technology, Right. It's like Matt you were saying last week, yeah. There may be vulnerabilities in Android, but you're using it, right. The same thing with having an Alexa in your home or a Google home etc. etc.. This technique came out again here. This is a this is a 20-year-old who is from Boston and he has hacked about 40 different victims that they know of. There were probably some accomplices involved, but this is a different technique called Sim swapping. And, again what happens is they're able to redirect and not your voicemail in this case but your entire phone number etcetera, etcetera to a third party phone. So, this has been happening more and more. We've got alerts out on this. You have to be careful with here. It works for any provider. This is a provider thing AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon. If they can defraud the carrier into switching your phone number to the different SIM card they can pull off the scam. In this case, it was about five million dollars in cryptocurrencies that were stolen by this guy. So, five million bucks not so bad for 20-year-old although he stole it and it's going to be very bad for him because he ended up in jail you know getting charged and down in New York City. Yes, and may He did a bunch of this stuff so you may get transferred to a different district. But, all would all of the entrepreneur knew whose money cryptocurrency was stolen in this case was his phone stopped working and he didn't notice it until later in the day and then he called up they tracked it down. The FBI got involved. But if your phone stops working you may think you may want to hop on it really quickly and not just think your phone broke. That's the bottom line, there.

[00:10:44] We're on our Craig Peterson our tech guru. You can always go to Craig Peterson dot com and get all of the information first. So, so you know we talk about terrorism and all these horrible things facing America. But, do most people fear are most intelligence agencies authorities fear a cyber attack is that the worst thing that could happen to America.

[00:11:05] Yeah, this is interesting. I ran webinars yesterday for the FBI. Their Infragard program. And I had on the head of Black Ops partners. Now, this is a company that provides a lot of intelligence for the government, for private industry, et cetera and that's all very interesting stuff and it was fun talking to a great guy. But, again there's a lot to be aware of. And, we've got to get boards of directors aware of this stuff. And on top of it. Because, we are talking now about crippling cyberattack that can happen. Now, this is scary because again all levels of government are warning about this but, a well executed cyberattack could knock out the electric grid, shut off power, compromise vital government systems, financial data. We've got General David Petraeus. He's a former CIA director saying this is a quote "What worries me most is the cyber equivalent of a weapon of mass destruction fall into the hands of extremists". "They'd be very difficult to deter and the willingness to blow themselves up on the battlefield and take us with them says a lot". Now, China has been hacking us for a long time. Microsoft yesterday just announced that they had found Russian involvement, where they were pretending to be various U.S.

[00:12:35] based political party sites. In other words, Microsoft caught and stopped the Russians from pretending they were the Democrats and pretending they were the Republicans. They're equal opportunity offenders. This is going to continue. This is the next battlefield. And, as of yesterday BlackOps Partners was talking about this. This is the typical unconventional warfare. Rights were really big. They're really small. Sun Tzu, The Art of War. They have ways of attacking us, they can frankly cripple us. So, we've got to continue to improve. We are improving security with things like power stations. But your business has to improve your cybersecurity. We've got to step up. We need to pay attention even as consumers, because things will get critical, right. Three days after our computer systems go off-line there will no longer be bread in the grocery stores etc., etc. You going to have to go out fishing off the coast to get your food all by yourself. It's very scary, and I can't emphasize this enough, I know we speak about it all the time, but it's very real, very real Ken. We've been talking to Craig Peterson, our tech guru who joins us on Wednesdays at this time to give us an eye on technology.

[00:13:59] Craig thanks so much. We will talk to you again next Wednesday. Hey, take care guys. Bye-bye. We're going to take a quick break here.

[00:14:06] By the way I should mention, if you are interested in getting involved with the FBI InfraGard program go to InfraGard.org or I N F R A G A R D dot Org. Lots of great information you'll be getting some of it's a little bit of inside information that is not shared with the general public. It is not like top secret stuff or anything. But it's important stuff to know. So, check it out Ifraguard dot org. Take care. Have a great rest of the week and I'll be back with you on Saturday. Although, I am starting to try and get this posted my radio show when, I prerecord which I've been doing lately. I try and get it up on Friday, so, keep an eye out for that. We can podcast as early as Friday and you can get there from Craig Peterson dot com slash iTunes, make sure you subscribe. Give me a rating 5-star. I hope, Take care.

---

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

Do you know that you can scare burglars off with Alexa's new skill? 

Learn more about this amazing skill as well as more information on hackers seizing your accounts via voicemail as Craig discusses it with Jim Polito.

Craig is putting up a new membership site (Yes, it is free, but you have to sign up)  On it will have all his special reports that he puts out and you will be the first to get them.

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

---

Related Articles:

Ever left your lights on a timer to scare off burglars? Now you can use your Alexa

Hackers can seize practically all your online accounts, and it’s your voicemail’s fault
---

Transcript:

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

Airing date: 08/21/2018

Tripping To Italy - Hackers Seizing Accounts Via Voicemail - New Alexa Skill Scaring Burglars

Craig Peterson: 

[00:00:00] Hi, Craig Peterson, here. I was on this morning with Jim Polito. I don't know if you know it or not, but he is doing this guided tour. Actually, it's a professional firm that's doing it and they go over to Italy in March. That would be kind of fun to go over there with them. So, we talked a little bit about that. Did you know hackers can seize practically all your online accounts, and it's your voicemails fault? Well, I talked in detail with Jim about that this morning. Also, that new Alexa skill that's designed to fake arguments and scare off the stupid or burglars. So, here we go with Jim Polito. 

[00:00:36] He's one of the most popular guys we have on the show. He is our tech talk guru, and he is Craig Peterson. Good morning, sir. 

[00:00:46] Hey, good morning. You know that trip to Italy it sounds fantastic. I went to the home page there on iHeart radio for the radio station. I clicked through and I looked at some of the pictures. Now, I've got to say there's probably a lot of people who have never been over to Europe and I have. I don't know if you've been over there before. 

[00:01:03] I've been to England and to France, but I've never been to the to the motherland, you know for me, Italy or Ireland my other motherland. 

[00:01:15] Well, People were afraid about the language and I got to say if you are in these places, especially with a tour group like this where you've got a professional tour, it is fantastic because everybody that you're with of course speaks English, right they are all from our area. And the tour guides speak English and people in the cafes are speaking English. And that was always a concern of mine because I only speak French and English, so Italy I have problems. 

[00:01:42] I have problems because you're a Canadian. 

[00:01:46] Craig. Yeah, exactly. It was funny, I was up in Toronto for a wedding here last weekend one of my nieces got married and I started speaking French, because I knew my sister speaks French and she went to French high school like me and one of my sons speaks French and I just assumed that I'm in Canada everybody speaks French but I've forgotten no. This is Ontario.

[00:02:10] They don't speak French don't, they don't. That's frankly Craig I like Ontario better. Oh, Did I say that? I know. Just kidding. No. Right. Right. But they still have to have everything bilingual there. I mean I do. I just love when I'm in Canada and you look at the packaging and they have the language police you know like it's in English. It's got to be in French. Same size same font. You know, it's even worse.

[00:02:41] And in Quebec, did you know that you could not you couldn't move your business with a name that sounded like it was English. Yeah. And in fact it was so crazy, Jim, that they had stop signs in Quebec and now stop is a valid French command to stop. But the language police in Quebec decided it didn't sound that English didn't sound French enough so they changed them all to Arret and then pass the language police said you know really that's bad grammar so, they changed them all back to stop thinking of the tens of millions of dollars just came up some silly of waste. 

[00:03:15] A complete waste of time. Kerry is telling me well, there's folks in Italy who speak French too in northern Italy. 

[00:03:24] You're right don't worry about it people if you're thinking about going, Go. You are going to enjoy this. The language isn't going to be an issue. You'll have the time of your life. The only drawback is I heard this Polito character is going to. You know I'm going to be.

[00:03:40] You're going to have to be with me. You don't have to room with me. You know, my poor wife is going to have to do that. You don't have to room with me. 

[00:03:48] But the food will all be gone.

[00:03:51] I'll be gone. No, I promise not to eat all of the continental breakfast at the hotel before we start the day. I promise. So. anyway. hey, you've got some great stuff for this us this week. And, I want to get to the one that really caught my eye. I want to start with this, OK. 

[00:04:10] Hackers can seize practically all of my online accounts and it's my voicemails fault. This one scares the heck out of me. What's going on here Craig?

[00:04:21] Yeah, this is a real problem for people. We're aware that hackers try and get into our accounts, right, just normally. So. a lot of people have been talking about two-factor authentication. Now, do you use that at all? Jim, are you familiar with that. 

[00:04:37] Yeah, I do now because remember was it was it Instagram that had the big hack. And, they said hey you should go to two-factor identification and, I said all right I don't want somebody posting stuff on my Instagram account. 

[00:04:51] Exactly. So, that's one type of two-factor authentication is where you might give them your phone number and they text you, right. And that's probably the most common and it's very hackable, frankly. 

[00:05:06] But, if they want to go after you, right, there they're not going to cast a wide net and pick you up because of the text messages. But, if they are going after you and we're finding out now the FBI is coming out with all kinds of warnings about this that small businesses are being specifically attacked more and more.

[00:05:26] But, if you give them your phone number and them be you know the Facebook, Microsoft, Google, etc. Give them your phone number where they can text you. Here's where the problem starts coming in. Now, many of us use WhatsApp or we use signal. Signal is a great app for communication right back and forth and a keep your data safe it's all encrypted. And, with those as well many people have given their phone number. So, here's what hackers are doing. There is a big conference out in Vegas, here just about a week or two ago. Two of them. There's Black Hat and Defcon. And, at these conferences, they were talking about the new techniques the bad guys are using. Well, what they're doing now is, these places including Whatsapp and Signal have your phone number and, they give you the option if you want to verify that it is you. Yeah, I did forget my password. Yeah. Give me a new password. They have the option of calling you on the phone to see where this is going. 

[00:06:31] Ok. Yes. 

[00:06:33] So, all you have to do, now were protecting many of our systems but how many offices are protecting their voicemail system. So, here's what happens. All you have to do this takes about 30 seconds to as much as three or four minutes. All they have to do is say OK, I'm targeting this financial planner, OK. This company over here and they know what the phone number is for that company. So, they find that number within that company that's going straight to voicemail and then they know the person's extension they might want to get to. They then have a little program that keeps calling that number and, it calls it, it gets into the voicemail system and it just sequentially tries to all of the passwords, because of voicemail systems don't have a limit on how many times. 

[00:07:26] Oh that's right. My my my my iPhone right. You try 10 times you're locked out. Right. Right. Right. 

[00:07:35] Yeah. Gets longer right. So you do the first few times or correct the third time that way a and then it's five minutes. So, they don't go back and try. It's a week later. OK. It's time and you out. Voicemails, don't do that. He demonstrated here on the stage over at Defcon, that he could brute force almost any voicemail system in the world. And, he was ensuring the calls were straight to voicemail. All automated right he didn't have to do anything. And then we went to the Web site, did a password reset process, using call me feature.

[00:08:09] It called him. Now, these systems that are calling you to reset your password and verify it's you. The systems will leave you a voicemail with the new password. 

[00:08:21] So, you have to do is go there. The hacker, all they have to do is go there and get it.

[00:08:26] You already have the voicemail password, right. Now you have a secret code, you are in the account and boom there it is. Yeah ok. 

[00:08:34] Not good. We're talking with our good friend Craig Peterson tech talk Guru the end of this segment. We will give you a number you can text my name to. And he'll provide you with this information plus more, standard data and text rates apply. 

[00:08:47] Ok. There is more work around here Jim. OK. go ahead. 

[00:08:51] Well you can use don't use your SMS as your phone number for verification. There are other ways to do this. You can use things like Google Authenticator. There's another app called Duo. There's also things like Yubi keys. Ok. It's getting complicated at this point. But, if you have any money to protect, you might want to pay attention, if you send me a note or write something up and send it off to you.

[00:09:17] Excellent. All right, Craig quickly I do have my lights on timers at my house to make it look like there is somebody home or to protect from burglars. Also, have lighting around the perimeter to make sure that a night nobody sneaks up to the house. But, you're saying that Alexa can take care of this for me. 

[00:09:37] Yeah, this is kind of cool. Alexa has the ability to learn what it calls news skills. So a skill can be, for instance, I Heart Radio has skills and many other Web sites. Now there's hundreds of thousands of these things. My wife made a skill for Alexa to drill one of our grandkids in some of that history lesson stuff. So, it's really cool. Alexa has a new skill called away mode, and what you can do is go into your Alexa app on your phone. Look for the skill called away mode instead of turning on your lights and turn them off or making noises. 

[00:10:14] Alexa can do by the way right. 

[00:10:17] It is. It has real and completely ridiculous conversations. These were penned by comedy writers from Saturday Night Live, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and others. There's a really kind of cute thing that it's doing, for instance, the gems are a couple has a breakup while also trying to watch TV two average guys discuss what's unique about themselves, so they can start a Podcast. Emergency PTA meeting to discuss memes, fidget spinners and other teen fads. And, this is my favorite, Jim, conversations from a book club where no one discusses a book, and a mom walking her daughter through Ikea assembly over the phone. 

[00:11:01] So. So the burglar comes in the House. Oh, there's somebody in there. There's people in there talking. There's a guy. I mean as opposed to the old they used to have those things it was a recording of a barking dog, people would have, you know. And that was supposed to scare people away, but now you had a conversation, of course. I think if the burglar sticks around long enough if it's that much of a joke, now they might not get the joke because people do have absurd conversations like that.

[00:11:30] I get to read this quote here. Hand me the rule book. No, the rule book that's the rule and reference no. Learn to play guide. 

[00:11:38] That's the quick reference. That's pretty good.

[00:11:42] Now that's realistic, that's realistic.

[00:11:46] Having done that. You know what else is realistic. Craig Peterson offers you all this information for free. He doesn't go and sell your name. He doesn't give you away to hackers. He does it all for free. 

[00:11:59] All you have to do is text my name, Jim to this number 8 5 5 3 8 5 55 53. That's 8 5 5 3 8 5 55 53.

[00:12:12] That's right. Standard data and text rates apply. And then if there is ever an emergency like a massive hack. Guess what your on Craig Peterson's list to notify and he won't try to sell you anything, won't annoy you, Craig. That was a great segment. And what do I say? Oh yes.

[00:12:30] Avoir. 

[00:12:34] Thanks, Craig.

[00:12:37] Bye. bye-bye. Bilingual. Craig Peterson okay. Don't go anywhere. 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

Do you know that you can scare burglars off with Alexa's new skill? 

Learn more about this amazing skill as well as more information on hackers seizing your accounts via voicemail as Craig discusses it with Jim Polito.

Craig is putting up a new membership site (Yes, it is free, but you have to sign up)  On it will have all his special reports that he puts out and you will be the first to get them.

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

---

Related Articles:

Ever left your lights on a timer to scare off burglars? Now you can use your Alexa

Hackers can seize practically all your online accounts, and it’s your voicemail’s fault
---

Transcript:

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

Airing date: 08/21/2018

Tripping To Italy - Hackers Seizing Accounts Via Voicemail - New Alexa Skill Scaring Burglars

Craig Peterson: 

[00:00:00] Hi, Craig Peterson, here. I was on this morning with Jim Polito. I don't know if you know it or not, but he is doing this guided tour. Actually, it's a professional firm that's doing it and they go over to Italy in March. That would be kind of fun to go over there with them. So, we talked a little bit about that. Did you know hackers can seize practically all your online accounts, and it's your voicemails fault? Well, I talked in detail with Jim about that this morning. Also, that new Alexa skill that's designed to fake arguments and scare off the stupid or burglars. So, here we go with Jim Polito. 

[00:00:36] He's one of the most popular guys we have on the show. He is our tech talk guru, and he is Craig Peterson. Good morning, sir. 

[00:00:46] Hey, good morning. You know that trip to Italy it sounds fantastic. I went to the home page there on iHeart radio for the radio station. I clicked through and I looked at some of the pictures. Now, I've got to say there's probably a lot of people who have never been over to Europe and I have. I don't know if you've been over there before. 

[00:01:03] I've been to England and to France, but I've never been to the to the motherland, you know for me, Italy or Ireland my other motherland. 

[00:01:15] Well, People were afraid about the language and I got to say if you are in these places, especially with a tour group like this where you've got a professional tour, it is fantastic because everybody that you're with of course speaks English, right they are all from our area. And the tour guides speak English and people in the cafes are speaking English. And that was always a concern of mine because I only speak French and English, so Italy I have problems. 

[00:01:42] I have problems because you're a Canadian. 

[00:01:46] Craig. Yeah, exactly. It was funny, I was up in Toronto for a wedding here last weekend one of my nieces got married and I started speaking French, because I knew my sister speaks French and she went to French high school like me and one of my sons speaks French and I just assumed that I'm in Canada everybody speaks French but I've forgotten no. This is Ontario.

[00:02:10] They don't speak French don't, they don't. That's frankly Craig I like Ontario better. Oh, Did I say that? I know. Just kidding. No. Right. Right. But they still have to have everything bilingual there. I mean I do. I just love when I'm in Canada and you look at the packaging and they have the language police you know like it's in English. It's got to be in French. Same size same font. You know, it's even worse.

[00:02:41] And in Quebec, did you know that you could not you couldn't move your business with a name that sounded like it was English. Yeah. And in fact it was so crazy, Jim, that they had stop signs in Quebec and now stop is a valid French command to stop. But the language police in Quebec decided it didn't sound that English didn't sound French enough so they changed them all to Arret and then pass the language police said you know really that's bad grammar so, they changed them all back to stop thinking of the tens of millions of dollars just came up some silly of waste. 

[00:03:15] A complete waste of time. Kerry is telling me well, there's folks in Italy who speak French too in northern Italy. 

[00:03:24] You're right don't worry about it people if you're thinking about going, Go. You are going to enjoy this. The language isn't going to be an issue. You'll have the time of your life. The only drawback is I heard this Polito character is going to. You know I'm going to be.

[00:03:40] You're going to have to be with me. You don't have to room with me. You know, my poor wife is going to have to do that. You don't have to room with me. 

[00:03:48] But the food will all be gone.

[00:03:51] I'll be gone. No, I promise not to eat all of the continental breakfast at the hotel before we start the day. I promise. So. anyway. hey, you've got some great stuff for this us this week. And, I want to get to the one that really caught my eye. I want to start with this, OK. 

[00:04:10] Hackers can seize practically all of my online accounts and it's my voicemails fault. This one scares the heck out of me. What's going on here Craig?

[00:04:21] Yeah, this is a real problem for people. We're aware that hackers try and get into our accounts, right, just normally. So. a lot of people have been talking about two-factor authentication. Now, do you use that at all? Jim, are you familiar with that. 

[00:04:37] Yeah, I do now because remember was it was it Instagram that had the big hack. And, they said hey you should go to two-factor identification and, I said all right I don't want somebody posting stuff on my Instagram account. 

[00:04:51] Exactly. So, that's one type of two-factor authentication is where you might give them your phone number and they text you, right. And that's probably the most common and it's very hackable, frankly. 

[00:05:06] But, if they want to go after you, right, there they're not going to cast a wide net and pick you up because of the text messages. But, if they are going after you and we're finding out now the FBI is coming out with all kinds of warnings about this that small businesses are being specifically attacked more and more.

[00:05:26] But, if you give them your phone number and them be you know the Facebook, Microsoft, Google, etc. Give them your phone number where they can text you. Here's where the problem starts coming in. Now, many of us use WhatsApp or we use signal. Signal is a great app for communication right back and forth and a keep your data safe it's all encrypted. And, with those as well many people have given their phone number. So, here's what hackers are doing. There is a big conference out in Vegas, here just about a week or two ago. Two of them. There's Black Hat and Defcon. And, at these conferences, they were talking about the new techniques the bad guys are using. Well, what they're doing now is, these places including Whatsapp and Signal have your phone number and, they give you the option if you want to verify that it is you. Yeah, I did forget my password. Yeah. Give me a new password. They have the option of calling you on the phone to see where this is going. 

[00:06:31] Ok. Yes. 

[00:06:33] So, all you have to do, now were protecting many of our systems but how many offices are protecting their voicemail system. So, here's what happens. All you have to do this takes about 30 seconds to as much as three or four minutes. All they have to do is say OK, I'm targeting this financial planner, OK. This company over here and they know what the phone number is for that company. So, they find that number within that company that's going straight to voicemail and then they know the person's extension they might want to get to. They then have a little program that keeps calling that number and, it calls it, it gets into the voicemail system and it just sequentially tries to all of the passwords, because of voicemail systems don't have a limit on how many times. 

[00:07:26] Oh that's right. My my my my iPhone right. You try 10 times you're locked out. Right. Right. Right. 

[00:07:35] Yeah. Gets longer right. So you do the first few times or correct the third time that way a and then it's five minutes. So, they don't go back and try. It's a week later. OK. It's time and you out. Voicemails, don't do that. He demonstrated here on the stage over at Defcon, that he could brute force almost any voicemail system in the world. And, he was ensuring the calls were straight to voicemail. All automated right he didn't have to do anything. And then we went to the Web site, did a password reset process, using call me feature.

[00:08:09] It called him. Now, these systems that are calling you to reset your password and verify it's you. The systems will leave you a voicemail with the new password. 

[00:08:21] So, you have to do is go there. The hacker, all they have to do is go there and get it.

[00:08:26] You already have the voicemail password, right. Now you have a secret code, you are in the account and boom there it is. Yeah ok. 

[00:08:34] Not good. We're talking with our good friend Craig Peterson tech talk Guru the end of this segment. We will give you a number you can text my name to. And he'll provide you with this information plus more, standard data and text rates apply. 

[00:08:47] Ok. There is more work around here Jim. OK. go ahead. 

[00:08:51] Well you can use don't use your SMS as your phone number for verification. There are other ways to do this. You can use things like Google Authenticator. There's another app called Duo. There's also things like Yubi keys. Ok. It's getting complicated at this point. But, if you have any money to protect, you might want to pay attention, if you send me a note or write something up and send it off to you.

[00:09:17] Excellent. All right, Craig quickly I do have my lights on timers at my house to make it look like there is somebody home or to protect from burglars. Also, have lighting around the perimeter to make sure that a night nobody sneaks up to the house. But, you're saying that Alexa can take care of this for me. 

[00:09:37] Yeah, this is kind of cool. Alexa has the ability to learn what it calls news skills. So a skill can be, for instance, I Heart Radio has skills and many other Web sites. Now there's hundreds of thousands of these things. My wife made a skill for Alexa to drill one of our grandkids in some of that history lesson stuff. So, it's really cool. Alexa has a new skill called away mode, and what you can do is go into your Alexa app on your phone. Look for the skill called away mode instead of turning on your lights and turn them off or making noises. 

[00:10:14] Alexa can do by the way right. 

[00:10:17] It is. It has real and completely ridiculous conversations. These were penned by comedy writers from Saturday Night Live, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and others. There's a really kind of cute thing that it's doing, for instance, the gems are a couple has a breakup while also trying to watch TV two average guys discuss what's unique about themselves, so they can start a Podcast. Emergency PTA meeting to discuss memes, fidget spinners and other teen fads. And, this is my favorite, Jim, conversations from a book club where no one discusses a book, and a mom walking her daughter through Ikea assembly over the phone. 

[00:11:01] So. So the burglar comes in the House. Oh, there's somebody in there. There's people in there talking. There's a guy. I mean as opposed to the old they used to have those things it was a recording of a barking dog, people would have, you know. And that was supposed to scare people away, but now you had a conversation, of course. I think if the burglar sticks around long enough if it's that much of a joke, now they might not get the joke because people do have absurd conversations like that.

[00:11:30] I get to read this quote here. Hand me the rule book. No, the rule book that's the rule and reference no. Learn to play guide. 

[00:11:38] That's the quick reference. That's pretty good.

[00:11:42] Now that's realistic, that's realistic.

[00:11:46] Having done that. You know what else is realistic. Craig Peterson offers you all this information for free. He doesn't go and sell your name. He doesn't give you away to hackers. He does it all for free. 

[00:11:59] All you have to do is text my name, Jim to this number 8 5 5 3 8 5 55 53. That's 8 5 5 3 8 5 55 53.

[00:12:12] That's right. Standard data and text rates apply. And then if there is ever an emergency like a massive hack. Guess what your on Craig Peterson's list to notify and he won't try to sell you anything, won't annoy you, Craig. That was a great segment. And what do I say? Oh yes.

[00:12:30] Avoir. 

[00:12:34] Thanks, Craig.

[00:12:37] Bye. bye-bye. Bilingual. Craig Peterson okay. Don't go anywhere. 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

Do you use your voice as part of your security?  It is an option in some situations.  Listen in as Jack and I discuss what we learned from the two big security conferences held last week in Vegas.

These home assistants are becoming quite popular.  Today, Jack and I talk about a new skill for the Alexa home assistant.

Craig is putting up a new membership site (Yes, it is free, but you have to sign up)  On it will have all his special reports that he puts out and you will be the first to get them.

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

---

Related Articles

Hackers can seize practically all your online accounts, and it’s your voicemail’s fault

Ever left your lights on a timer to scare off burglars? Now you can use your Alexa

---

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

Airing date: 08/20/2018

Audio Hacking and Alexa skill that may stop Burglars.

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Hey, Happy Monday to everybody. Craig Peterson here. This morning, I spoke with Jack Heath about a couple of different things. We've got a new skill from Alexa. Do you have one of these things? You'll probably end up seeing and maybe ultimately on Siri, or on one of the other devices like the Google home. But, this is used to protect your house that's really quite cool and an innovative way to do it. Who thought the comedy writers over at Saturday Night Live, and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, would be able to help protect your house. So, anyhow we have them coming up. We also have a couple of different things from the Black Hat conference and DEFCON. Three tips and trends that you really need to be watching when it comes to your security, and in this case audio hacking. Who knew that they were doing that? That's a bit of a surprise, isn't it.

[00:00:54] Here we go with Jack this morning. Joining us now the Autofair listener line with some tech talk and perspective, Craig Peterson. His show airs Saturday mornings, right after movers and shakers, he joins us on the Autofair listener lines. Good morning, Mr. Craig. 

[00:01:08] Hey, good morning Jack. We've got a few interesting stories today. You have a unique voice. You recognize my voice. It's a pretty typical thing. We all can use voice recognition to identify each other. Did you know that your bank is probably using that as well Jack when you call in? They're picking up the voice.

[00:01:31] I do know that some of these scams I've heard of, and I am not talking about your bank. 

[00:01:34] But, some people try and get your voice like they call your cell phone and say Is this Craig Peterson and you'll say yes what's your name. You'll see Craig Peterson, Craig Peterson and they'll take that word, Yes and your name and they'll try and use it to prove certain things where the voice is kind of part of your security. 

[00:01:49] Yeah, it is. And, in fact, what's happening is the banks are using something called voice I.D. now, to verify customers. So, when you call in you know they go through that anti-fraud thing where they are trying to get your Social Security number. Parts of it and other things to verify you are who you say you are. Well, they're also analyzing your voice while you're doing that. So, the next time you call in that voice I.D. and voice print if you will can be used to help verify you. Well, we just have a couple of really big conferences out in Vegas, called Black Hat and Defcon, and these are the conferences where all of hacking techniques are discussed by the good guys and the bad guys. And, for cybercriminals now they are looking at how they can spoof some of these voice-based services. 

[00:02:41] And, they really are providing quite an enticing target. So, we're seeing some major changes now in how the bad guys are going to hack us. We've got mobile, mobile devices are moving up the list of the attack vectors. 

[00:02:56] We've got the internet of vulnerable things, basically all of our TV's and now refrigerators and stoves etc. They're all getting hacked and audio hacking is now a thing. It's really kind of a scary thing when you get right down to it because of some of these hacking techniques.

[00:03:14] You have no idea that you've been hacked until your bank accounts been emptied. We got another really interesting thing out there, Jack. You have one of those Alexa things in your house. 

[00:03:27] I do not. I'm not saying other people don't in the house, but I don't, and I do not use it, but I know more and more people are talking to this thing all around the house. Hey, who won the Red Sox game? Or did they lose last night? Hey, you know what's the weather today? And you got this thing talking to you. I tend to try not trying to become too dependent on technology.

[00:03:45] Well, they are handy. There's no question about that, and we know about some of the problems they've had previously.

[00:03:51] David, are you, Hold on Craig. Are you like a subscriber? Yea, Google home. Google home. 

[00:03:59] Yeah, Same basic thing. And, of course, we're talking about these devices that go in your home or office wherever they might be that are constantly listening to what's being said, And then they have an activation word that you use now and they wake up basically and they send the audio up to the internet where it is recorded and we have a number of cases of police department having subpoenaed the records those audio recordings of those devices are making. Well, there is a new skill Alexa has the ability to have new programs new apps if you will installed on them, And in the Alexa world, these are called skills. And, who is doing this skills are absolutely funny, they're hilarious. Again, Jack to you and I probably over the years we've got those little light timers that you put on your lamps so that when you're out on vacation it looks like someone's home.

[00:04:55] Right. I'm sure yeah, you've done the right to light traps Yeah, yeah. 

[00:04:59] Well, Here's a new skill for your Alexa. It's called away mode and instead of lights and maybe even some noises like leaving your TV or radio turned on. Now, you can keep your home safe by having the Alexa play these lengthy audio tracks. I like the real and completely ridiculous conversation. So, you watch your way mode and the Alexa is going to play one of these seven audio tracks that were put together by some comedy writers already Saturday Night Live. It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and others. So, here's some of the gems Jack that you can play in your home. Couple has a break up while trying to watch TV, Two average guys brainstorm what's unique about them so they can start a podcast, an emergency PTA meeting to discuss memes, fidget spinner's another teen fads, and more, Really, really funny including I love this one, a mom walking her daughter through Ikea assembly over the phone. So, these things are designed to make it sound like there's a real conversation going on in your home. And, to keep the burglars out. Kind of an interesting twist on the Alexa technology. Now

[00:06:13] Just a quick question going back to what you were mentioning about you know wanting to subpoena some of the audio. Have they been successful in doing that? Or are Google and Alexa kind of being like Apple is, where they want to unlock a phone, they won't give you any information, subpoena or no subpoena.

[00:06:29] No, they have been successful. Subpoenas have been served and they have been fulfilled. So, the company that Amazon for instance or Google have provided the audio. But what's interesting is that the cases that I'm aware of David, and Jack have not actually yielded any real results. Because what they're doing is they listen for the wake-up word. For instance, you might say Alexa or google home or whatever the word is you have programmed, they listen for that word and then the audio from a few seconds before that word for about 30 seconds, give or take, is sent up to the cloud. So, unless you're having a fight and threatening to kill someone or whatever it might be and you're asking, maybe you're you know like the old Siri where can I hide a body. At the same time, there is nothing that stored up in the cloud from these devices. So, yeah they have honored them, but they really haven't really yielded any results.

[00:07:29] Craig, make it a good Monday. Thank you very much, Craig Peterson, with some tech talk and tech perspective. Thanks, Craig. Thanks, Jack. All right some of the other stories that are trending. 

[00:07:39] Quick reminder if you have any questions or comments send them directly to me 8 5 5 3 8 5 55 53. I had quite a few actually over the weekend. I was surprised for my Saturday show 8 5 5 3 8 5 55 53 and by the way, we're trying to get the Saturday show if I'm pre-recording it, up so that it's available on iTunes by Saturday, as well as Soundcloud etc. etc. Let me know what you think about that, too if you think that's a great idea. Take care. Thanks again. Bye-bye.

---

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Do you use your voice as part of your security?  It is an option in some situations.  Listen in as Jack and I discuss what we learned from the two big security conferences held last week in Vegas.

These home assistants are becoming quite popular.  Today, Jack and I talk about a new skill for the Alexa home assistant.

Craig is putting up a new membership site (Yes, it is free, but you have to sign up)  On it will have all his special reports that he puts out and you will be the first to get them.

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

---

Related Articles

Hackers can seize practically all your online accounts, and it’s your voicemail’s fault

Ever left your lights on a timer to scare off burglars? Now you can use your Alexa

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

Airing date: 08/20/2018

Audio Hacking and Alexa skill that may stop Burglars.

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Hey, Happy Monday to everybody. Craig Peterson here. This morning, I spoke with Jack Heath about a couple of different things. We've got a new skill from Alexa. Do you have one of these things? You'll probably end up seeing and maybe ultimately on Siri, or on one of the other devices like the Google home. But, this is used to protect your house that's really quite cool and an innovative way to do it. Who thought the comedy writers over at Saturday Night Live, and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, would be able to help protect your house. So, anyhow we have them coming up. We also have a couple of different things from the Black Hat conference and DEFCON. Three tips and trends that you really need to be watching when it comes to your security, and in this case audio hacking. Who knew that they were doing that? That's a bit of a surprise, isn't it.

[00:00:54] Here we go with Jack this morning. Joining us now the Autofair listener line with some tech talk and perspective, Craig Peterson. His show airs Saturday mornings, right after movers and shakers, he joins us on the Autofair listener lines. Good morning, Mr. Craig. 

[00:01:08] Hey, good morning Jack. We've got a few interesting stories today. You have a unique voice. You recognize my voice. It's a pretty typical thing. We all can use voice recognition to identify each other. Did you know that your bank is probably using that as well Jack when you call in? They're picking up the voice.

[00:01:31] I do know that some of these scams I've heard of, and I am not talking about your bank. 

[00:01:34] But, some people try and get your voice like they call your cell phone and say Is this Craig Peterson and you'll say yes what's your name. You'll see Craig Peterson, Craig Peterson and they'll take that word, Yes and your name and they'll try and use it to prove certain things where the voice is kind of part of your security. 

[00:01:49] Yeah, it is. And, in fact, what's happening is the banks are using something called voice I.D. now, to verify customers. So, when you call in you know they go through that anti-fraud thing where they are trying to get your Social Security number. Parts of it and other things to verify you are who you say you are. Well, they're also analyzing your voice while you're doing that. So, the next time you call in that voice I.D. and voice print if you will can be used to help verify you. Well, we just have a couple of really big conferences out in Vegas, called Black Hat and Defcon, and these are the conferences where all of hacking techniques are discussed by the good guys and the bad guys. And, for cybercriminals now they are looking at how they can spoof some of these voice-based services. 

[00:02:41] And, they really are providing quite an enticing target. So, we're seeing some major changes now in how the bad guys are going to hack us. We've got mobile, mobile devices are moving up the list of the attack vectors. 

[00:02:56] We've got the internet of vulnerable things, basically all of our TV's and now refrigerators and stoves etc. They're all getting hacked and audio hacking is now a thing. It's really kind of a scary thing when you get right down to it because of some of these hacking techniques.

[00:03:14] You have no idea that you've been hacked until your bank accounts been emptied. We got another really interesting thing out there, Jack. You have one of those Alexa things in your house. 

[00:03:27] I do not. I'm not saying other people don't in the house, but I don't, and I do not use it, but I know more and more people are talking to this thing all around the house. Hey, who won the Red Sox game? Or did they lose last night? Hey, you know what's the weather today? And you got this thing talking to you. I tend to try not trying to become too dependent on technology.

[00:03:45] Well, they are handy. There's no question about that, and we know about some of the problems they've had previously.

[00:03:51] David, are you, Hold on Craig. Are you like a subscriber? Yea, Google home. Google home. 

[00:03:59] Yeah, Same basic thing. And, of course, we're talking about these devices that go in your home or office wherever they might be that are constantly listening to what's being said, And then they have an activation word that you use now and they wake up basically and they send the audio up to the internet where it is recorded and we have a number of cases of police department having subpoenaed the records those audio recordings of those devices are making. Well, there is a new skill Alexa has the ability to have new programs new apps if you will installed on them, And in the Alexa world, these are called skills. And, who is doing this skills are absolutely funny, they're hilarious. Again, Jack to you and I probably over the years we've got those little light timers that you put on your lamps so that when you're out on vacation it looks like someone's home.

[00:04:55] Right. I'm sure yeah, you've done the right to light traps Yeah, yeah. 

[00:04:59] Well, Here's a new skill for your Alexa. It's called away mode and instead of lights and maybe even some noises like leaving your TV or radio turned on. Now, you can keep your home safe by having the Alexa play these lengthy audio tracks. I like the real and completely ridiculous conversation. So, you watch your way mode and the Alexa is going to play one of these seven audio tracks that were put together by some comedy writers already Saturday Night Live. It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and others. So, here's some of the gems Jack that you can play in your home. Couple has a break up while trying to watch TV, Two average guys brainstorm what's unique about them so they can start a podcast, an emergency PTA meeting to discuss memes, fidget spinner's another teen fads, and more, Really, really funny including I love this one, a mom walking her daughter through Ikea assembly over the phone. So, these things are designed to make it sound like there's a real conversation going on in your home. And, to keep the burglars out. Kind of an interesting twist on the Alexa technology. Now

[00:06:13] Just a quick question going back to what you were mentioning about you know wanting to subpoena some of the audio. Have they been successful in doing that? Or are Google and Alexa kind of being like Apple is, where they want to unlock a phone, they won't give you any information, subpoena or no subpoena.

[00:06:29] No, they have been successful. Subpoenas have been served and they have been fulfilled. So, the company that Amazon for instance or Google have provided the audio. But what's interesting is that the cases that I'm aware of David, and Jack have not actually yielded any real results. Because what they're doing is they listen for the wake-up word. For instance, you might say Alexa or google home or whatever the word is you have programmed, they listen for that word and then the audio from a few seconds before that word for about 30 seconds, give or take, is sent up to the cloud. So, unless you're having a fight and threatening to kill someone or whatever it might be and you're asking, maybe you're you know like the old Siri where can I hide a body. At the same time, there is nothing that stored up in the cloud from these devices. So, yeah they have honored them, but they really haven't really yielded any results.

[00:07:29] Craig, make it a good Monday. Thank you very much, Craig Peterson, with some tech talk and tech perspective. Thanks, Craig. Thanks, Jack. All right some of the other stories that are trending. 

[00:07:39] Quick reminder if you have any questions or comments send them directly to me 8 5 5 3 8 5 55 53. I had quite a few actually over the weekend. I was surprised for my Saturday show 8 5 5 3 8 5 55 53 and by the way, we're trying to get the Saturday show if I'm pre-recording it, up so that it's available on iTunes by Saturday, as well as Soundcloud etc. etc. Let me know what you think about that, too if you think that's a great idea. Take care. Thanks again. Bye-bye.

---

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Cyber attacks are getting more sophisticated and are being perpetrated on everyone and more often than ever before.  Today we are going to discuss Security and Two-factor authentication schemes and what you can do to protect your self.

Craig is putting up a new membership site (Yes, it is free, but you have to sign up)  On it will have all his special reports that he puts out and you will be the first to get them.

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: 08/018/2018

Two Factor Authentication. Security and Highlights from Defcon Conference

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Hi, there everybody, Craig Peterson here, and as usual I've got a ton to talk about. We've got a special report about America's greatest threat. They're calling it a hurricane for cyber attacks. We've got an interesting hacker out there, who has allegedly stolen millions of dollars by hijacking phone numbers and in turn asking kids parents to send some money. Isn't that something. Another trick here. Your Voicemail. Did you know that hackers are seizing practically all online accounts just using your voicemail? We'll tell you how some practical security here for the prudent American, great little article that came out in medium, we'll be talking a little bit about that. Everything you want to know about VPN's but didn't want to ask. In fact, I had a request from one of our listeners this week about the VPN stuff because he's heading out of the country. I love this new Alexa skill, I've been playing a lot with my Alexa. You know about the timers, that people have been using for years to make their lights go on and off while they're out of the house. Well, listen to what you can do with your Alexa. And three trends that hackers, a Black Hat and DEFCON are watching. Did you know that just happened to hear about a week ago? So here we go. Of course, you're listening to Craig Peterson, right. So, we're playing around with some different things, let me know what you think? We've got some different bumper music and beds and things, and you'll hear some of the same stuff we've always been using, as well today. But, you know it's been years since we changed any of that stuff so, we'll just let it go for now, OK. So, our special report, to start things off here today. 

[00:01:51] We know about the security vulnerabilities, we've seen the vulnerabilities, we know what's up, and many of us have been hacked, right. Have you been hacked? You may not even know it. But almost every computer that's online that's running Windows has been hacked. If you've been online for more than a year. Well, what is ahead when we go forward? What are we looking at here? I did a really interesting interview this week for the FBI for their Infraguard program. It's with a company called Black Ops partners, and you might want to look them up. They've got just a ton of cool information. It's headed by the guy who started IBM Corporation's whole security division, which is really kind of neat here. He's won the cybersecurity excellence award, and everything else. So, he and I were talking about cybersecurity 3.0 and where's it going. What should we be doing? And, you know it's really interesting when we get right down to it. But, the bad guys are out there. They are coming after us, and they're coming after us in a big way. We've known that right. We've we know the Russians are coming after us. We know the Chinese, in fact, this customer I just picked up. We've been cleaning things up, and just yesterday we installed a brand new Next-Generation Firewall filter and Security Operations Center support for him. 

[00:03:19] And, this is just a small family-owned company. But, he had been compromised. They were able to get past his firewall, he had a great firewall. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I've heard that story before, and the bad guys got past it and got into his accounting system, found all of his clients, and managed to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars. It's just crazy what happened. He ended up going over to China. To try and find out. So, can we get our money back because the money got transferred over to China? Tens of thousands of dollars later and, of course, now there's lawsuits and legal fees involved and it's pretty crippling. So, that's not surprising, right. It's just like President Trump going out and saying something crazy on Twitter, right. We're used to hearing that new thing that he says out there, but it is not going to change our opinion about President Trump, right. If you had a pro-opinion, you have one after if you had an anti-opinion, you have the same one after, right. That's not going to change things. What changes things is a surprise. What changes things is wow, that's just not what I would expect. And if you had another President in there that didn't normally do the types of things President Trump does, you would be surprised maybe your opinion would change when he did something on Twitter that just shocks everybody in the whole nation or the whole world, 

[00:04:48] right. You kind of get used to it. Well, here's the big picture. The bad guys aren't just going after your money. They're not just trying to get at your clients, and not just trying to get that information. It turns out that the bad guys include nation-state actors. It's not just some kids in the basement somewhere over in Ukraine that is trying to hack in now. And, we're talking about the risk here of a crippling cyber attack. The Homeland Security secretary, Kirsten Nielson said just this last week, that the U.S. is in crisis mode comparing the dangers of a massive attack to a Category 5 hurricane looming on the horizon. You heard that right. Category 5 hurricane, and there is no graver threat to the United States. An interesting article that I posted up on my Web site by Axios. You can find it there. They've got some quotes from General David Petraeus. He's the former CIA director, and he's quoted as saying, what worries me most is a cyber equivalent of a weapon of mass destruction falling into the hands of extremists who would needless to say be very difficult to deter because of their willingness to blow themselves up on the battlefield and take us with them. Leon Panetta, of course, who was President Obama's former CIA director. 

[00:06:20] Quotes and On and on and on. But, the bottom line here is we not only have to protect our businesses from these bad guys that we're familiar with, that have been out there for a very long time, but in fact, we've got to protect our businesses from the nation-state actors, as well. Now, I know the FBI has been working closely with businesses to try and secure our infrastructure and headway is being made there. But, it's shocking to me more and more as I get into it, how many hospitals, clinics, doctors offices, small banks, et cetera don't have what's needed. And, they are part of the critical infrastructure. So, again looking into the FBI Infragard, if you're involved with one of these businesses and see if you can't join up if you can pass the Infragard background check and start getting some of this information firsthand that I'm providing and other people are providing to the Infragard members. It is so critically important. And if you're a regular business guy is, I'm just a business regular guy, What do people care? Think about losing everything. Think about your retirement caught up in the business. What's going to happen if that's all stolen from you? And that's what's going to happen, by the way, it's guaranteed. It's going to happen. It's happening every day. And you've got to reconsider your whole security infrastructure. 

[00:07:55] You've got to work with the company that knows what they're doing, and just a funny note here. I've got to add this in. I got an e-mail this week that came from a mailing list that I'm on, and they were promoting this two thousand dollar course, become a managed security services provider in six weeks. And, you know I have to chuckle because people have a hard time differentiating, right now. How would you differentiate between my company, Mainstream, and one of these guys that six weeks later puts up a shingle, saying yeah I'm a security services provider, right? And I started adding up the hours. And this is the part that really shocked me. Of course, it helps to be a little bit older and having done this for a long time. I have more than 100,000 hours in the I.T. business doing network related stuff including security. Personally, me personally. This isn't our company has a combined 20 years. Me personally, 100,000 hours and I have I just laughed when I saw this. Are you kidding me? People are going to be out there peddling themselves as security providers when all they have is a couple of certifications under their belt and a six-week course. Oh, man anyhow, so now let's go over to our next topic here. 

[00:09:33] Well, we kind of started out by talking about hackers and what they're doing. We've got a new problem up there, pretty darn big problem. frankly, and this is a phone hijacking now. 

[00:09:45] You know I've told you before that these two-factor authentication schemes that are using your phone where they send you a text are not terribly secure, right. In fact, they're not secure at all. Well, this is something that's just a little bit different. We've got an article here from Motherboard, talking about California authorities who are saying, that a 20-year-old college student has hijacked more than 40 phone numbers and stolen five million dollars, including some from cryptocurrency investors. Wow. OK, wow is all I have to say here. Here's what's happening this guy Joel Ortiz, he's a 20 year old from Boston. He's alleged to have hacked these victims, using some accomplices who are unnamed, at least as of yet. And, this is the first reported case against someone who's allegedly used a technique known as Sim swapping. So, in Sim swapping so, you know you get a phone, you have an unlocked phone you have a sim that Sim has your contacts and other stuff on it. And, that sim also was used to authorize you to the cellular network. So, now that's what you use to identify your phone, right. So, when someone calls your number it uses the sim, to identify you. That's how that all works. With sim hijacking what happens is they basically steal your sim. Now, they don't even have to have access to your sim. All, they have to do is trick your provider. You know like AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, and whatever trick your provider into transferring the target's phone number to a SIM card that's controlled by the bad guy. So, once they get that phone number and there's ways to do this, this is really, well documented where they will call up and pretend they're your wife, or your husband or even you.

[00:11:52] And, so many of us are posting information online that makes it possible for them to be able to very easily impersonate you. So they know your wife's name your kid's names your dog's names where you work where you were born where you graduate from college. So, they can pass the so-called anti-fraud stuff when they call up the provider. So, once they get your phone number the bad guys are using it now to reset your passwords and break into your online accounts. Because remember I was saying that using a text message is not true two-factor authentication. In some cases even working, if you do have a separate type of two-factor authentication. And, its called a port-out scam. It's relatively easy to pull off, it's become widespread and that is where they say, yeah I am transferring my phone number from T-Mobile to Verizon, just as an example, right. And, you arrange for that. You're transferring your phone number and when you do that, you have to have a new sim. In many cases you have to, in this case, you'd have to have a Verizon type sim. And, obviously, you'd have to be working on the frequencies Verizon uses et cetera but easy enough to pull off. So, this guy Ortiz was arrested at the L.A. International Airport was on his way to Europe. He apparently had a Gucci bag that was part of a recent spending spree that, of course, they seized because they're alleging that it was financed by some of these scams. He's facing 28 charges, 13 counts of identity theft, 13 counts of hacking, and two counts of grand theft, according to a complaint that was filed. They're going after some of his co-conspirators apparently they have access to millions of dollars in cryptocurrency. 

[00:13:50] And the interesting quote in here, that I'm not going to quote because it is full of all kinds of nasty stuff. OK. So it's interesting. Think about that. There's a sim swapping community that's out there on the dark web, where people are swapping the information back and forth. At least three of the attacks that happened, he stole more than a half million from a cryptocurrency entrepreneur including a million he'd crowdfunded and an initial coin offering. And, you know I am absolutely against putting money into these things. I don't look at them as an investment. I look at them as highly, risky. It goes on and on. So, bottom line DO NOT tie it to your phone, into authentication for any of these Web sites. Use some of these some of these apps that are out there like Duo or Google authenticator, if you want to learn more about it let me know I'd be glad to put together a special little free mini-course on it, as to how to do all of that. But, that's what we do. We go even further. We not only use those types of apps, we have physical keys that we have to use in order to get on to certain Web sites. In fact, we're expert witnesses right now in a case involving a managed services provider, that they obviously they didn't go to the six week course or they would have known better, who messed up, and wow, major stuff, can't really talk about the case, but similar type of thing that happened with this other client, that we were talking about that we just picked up. It's happening every day. Now, you've got to pull up your socks and pay attention. All right. So, let's get on to the voicemail and how that ties into all of this as well. 

[00:15:46] Well, remember I was just saying that if you use your phone for authentication, where they send you a text message to make sure you, because you're logging into a new browser or you're logging in from a place that they're not familiar with, right. So, they'll send you a text message and then you enter that code in. Well, the same type of problem exists with your voicemail. Your Google, your Microsoft, Apple, WhatsApp, signal account, they all have an Achilles heel. Now, Signal is interesting because it is designed to keep things secure. WhatsApp is supposed to keep things secure, not as secure as Signal does. But, here is the weakness, and that weakness was disclosed this last week again in Vegas. In case you weren't aware of it, there was the Black Hat conference. And at that people were talking about different ways to hack, new things they found, Defcon as part of that, right. One right after the other, these two conferences out there in Vegas. So, this particular one was by Martin Vigo. He was over at the Defcon convention, and he explained how he managed to reset passwords for a whole bunch of different types of online accounts. So, he took advantage of the weakest link in the security chain which is. believe it or not, your voicemail. 

[00:17:17] So, what he did was he requested a password reset on some of these services, like WhatsApp, because you have the option of requesting you receive a call with the reset code. So, that's more than just receiving a text, it's actually a phone call. So, people think OK, well that's safe right.

[00:17:40] Well, no it's even worse than getting a text message because all he had to do was hack the voicemail account first. 

[00:17:49] How does he do that? Well, he just wrote a little script that just brute force attacked the passwords. All right. Most people are using a four-digit password. And most of the voicemail systems don't have incremental backoffs, where they time out. You know where you get it wrong the first time you have to wait five seconds, you can try again, if you get it wrong three times you have to wait five minutes. Yet are wrong again. You might have to wait an hour etc.. No, no. They just let you hack, hack, hack, hack, hack, hack, hack. And, in fact, he did get access to the account's password reset codes. And, ultimately he got control of the account itself because they sent a reset code via voicemail called up your reset code as 1 2 3 4, and he had previously hacked that voicemail account, and many people it's easy to find. I was on again research for this case, where we are acting as a consultant to the law firm and we may end up on the stand, as an expert witness. But in that type of a situation, all that has to happen is you go to the website, you can find that person's password, you can be again password reset information by just finding what is their phone number. Because people are posting their personal cell phone numbers on websites, or they're posting their business work number on the website. Then I get it right. You 

[00:19:22] Want people to be able to contact you. But in this case, he got into all of these accounts and he was able to reset them because he got the password via voicemail reset. 

[00:19:32] Oh man, some of the stuff just never ends does it? All right. So let's talk a little bit about practical security. Got a lot of kids going back to school. 

[00:19:47] You've got college kids, of course, going back to school. We just had a client bring in a hard disk that was being used for backup. You know one of those pluggable USB drives and guess what it had failed and apparently, their daughter's dissertation was there on that hard drive. And so we took it apart, the case and everything and it looks like it's actually a problem with a hard disk itself might be the voice call. You can hear clicking. So, hopefully, that's what it is it's only going to cost about five thousand dollars to get that a hard disk fixed. We're going to send it out to a lab. We don't actually do that in-house right. Let the experts deal with it. So, guess what doctoral dissertation. Because the machine went south and the backup wasn't working. We hear that all the time. It's incredible. That's why you have multiple layers of backup as well not just one backup. Because in this case her machine failed and she didn't realize her backup wasn't working. Oh man. Anyhow it's really distressing when that happens to you. We've got kids now that are starting to get involved with politics for the 2018 election cycle, the same thing is going to be true with the 2020 cycle. We've got of course harassment hate campaigns. There's doxing going on. Russian hackers going on, and these same people that have been involved in trying to disrupt our elections, are going to be busy again this year and in 2020. 

[00:21:24] So, anyone who touches sensitive confidential documents, financial records, voter data, you have to protect yourselves. And you might not have thought about that when it comes to these kids, that are working as volunteers may be in election offices that are out there, right. Their favorite candidate left, or right, or center, whatever they might be. 

[00:21:47] There is a ton of bad advice out there because most of the security folklore that's out there in the I.T. industry really is wrong. It can be even dangerously incorrect. The security world five years ago, today, It's not the same thing, right. So, there are a few things you have to do. I've got a special report. You can no longer get it on my Web site. But it's all about passwords, PASSWORD managers. I give some reviews in there we have some links to using them if you want to find out about password managers e-mail me or just send me a text 8 5 5 3 8 5 55 53, send me a text asking for it. I'll send you the PDF. 

[00:22:33] I think it's like five or six pages, it's pretty detailed pretty in-depth, I'll send to you. It's something I use with my clients. But, you can you can get that from me. But number one user password manager again if you missed it 8 5 5 3 8 5 fifty-five fifty-three. So, anyhow you've got to generate passwords. Get a security key, a Yubi key is probably one of the better ones out there. But, be careful of using the security keys make sure you know what you're doing because you could break your computer completely if you lose the key. OK. It's kind of crazy but you know Yubi key is out there. There's a lot of other things there. Chrome browser has some really good extensions. HTTPS Everywhere is a good extension to use it. You can enroll Google's advanced program protection and a good article and Medium that I have put my Web site Craig Peterson dot com. You can go there and read up a little bit more. Well only got a few minutes left so, let's kind of whip through these last few things for this week again you will find all of this and more in the newsletter. Now, we sent out the newsletter on Thursday this week as opposed to Saturday morning. 

[00:23:51] We want to see if that's a little better if you guys pick it up that way. I think a lot of people are subscribed to their work e-mail address, which means you might not notice it when you come in on Monday morning. So, if you check your e-mail you'll see it's from me at Craig Peterson dot com. All of these articles with direct links to them so you can find out more. We also have special offers, from time to time, like a couple of months ago we offered that password special report, as well. But a VPN is very important. We use them all the time. We have our own VPN. And, the whole idea behind it is you have a tunnel, hopefully, a secure tunnel. Be careful where you are going, when it comes to VPNs. Geo-blocking is a good thing to get around with a VPN, but as I mentioned at the beginning of the show I have a client that is heading over to Europe and he was asking about VPNs and what he might want to do what he should do. So, I got good advice on that as well. I know I can send you more information. There's a cool new Alexa's skill. 

[00:25:02] Is really really neat. It's plain these fake stupid arguments to make people burglars think that you're at home.

[00:25:10] Ok, so one of them is an emergency PTA meeting to discuss Memes, fidget spinner's, and other teen fads. There's another one where couples having a breakup while also trying to watch TV. Another one-two average guys brainstorm what's unique about themselves so, they can start a podcast about that. Oh man. There's another one that they can play where they have conversations from a book club, where no one discusses the book. A mom walking her daughter through Ikea assembly over the phone, a stay at home mom losing her mind, and an argument over a board game. Very cool you can. You can find those for Alexa. Great article in Slashdot. You'll find it on my Web site and cool for burglars keep them out of your home. Three trends that the hackers a black hat and DefCon were talking about and what they're watching. Mobile devices have moved up the list. The Internet of valuable things, IoT has become very, very big deal. I should do some special stuff on some of this for people and audio hacking. It is now a thing. So, you can find all of this and more details. CRAIG Peterson dot com check your e-mail if you're on my list. Also, I've been trying to send it out via a massive few are on my text list, a link I send out to everybody with this week's articles but you'll find all of this. Craig Peterson dot com, any questions any requests. Just text me. I've been answering people all week long and fact to getting more and more every week 8 5 5 3 8 5 55 fifty-three and I'll send you I'll put on my text list and let you know about current events what's happening and little reminders about the show and stop 8 5 5 3 8 5 55 53. Have a great week and we'll be back again next week and I'll be sure to let you know if anything big is hitting the fan during the week. Take care. Bye-bye.

 ---

Related articles:

Hackers can seize practically all your online accounts, and it’s your voicemail’s fault

Practical Security for the Prudent American

Ever left your lights on a timer to scare off burglars? Now you can use your Alexa

Special Report: America’s Greatest Threat Is A Hurricane-Force Cyberattack

How A Hacker Allegedly Stole Millions By Hijacking Phone Numbers

Everything You Wanted To Know About VPNs (But Didn’t Want To Ask)

3 Trends Hackers At Black Hat And Defcon Are Watching

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Cyber attacks are getting more sophisticated and are being perpetrated on everyone and more often than ever before.  Today we are going to discuss Security and Two-factor authentication schemes and what you can do to protect your self.

Craig is putting up a new membership site (Yes, it is free, but you have to sign up)  On it will have all his special reports that he puts out and you will be the first to get them.

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Transcript:

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

Airing date: 08/018/2018

Two Factor Authentication. Security and Highlights from Defcon Conference

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Hi, there everybody, Craig Peterson here, and as usual I've got a ton to talk about. We've got a special report about America's greatest threat. They're calling it a hurricane for cyber attacks. We've got an interesting hacker out there, who has allegedly stolen millions of dollars by hijacking phone numbers and in turn asking kids parents to send some money. Isn't that something. Another trick here. Your Voicemail. Did you know that hackers are seizing practically all online accounts just using your voicemail? We'll tell you how some practical security here for the prudent American, great little article that came out in medium, we'll be talking a little bit about that. Everything you want to know about VPN's but didn't want to ask. In fact, I had a request from one of our listeners this week about the VPN stuff because he's heading out of the country. I love this new Alexa skill, I've been playing a lot with my Alexa. You know about the timers, that people have been using for years to make their lights go on and off while they're out of the house. Well, listen to what you can do with your Alexa. And three trends that hackers, a Black Hat and DEFCON are watching. Did you know that just happened to hear about a week ago? So here we go. Of course, you're listening to Craig Peterson, right. So, we're playing around with some different things, let me know what you think? We've got some different bumper music and beds and things, and you'll hear some of the same stuff we've always been using, as well today. But, you know it's been years since we changed any of that stuff so, we'll just let it go for now, OK. So, our special report, to start things off here today. 

[00:01:51] We know about the security vulnerabilities, we've seen the vulnerabilities, we know what's up, and many of us have been hacked, right. Have you been hacked? You may not even know it. But almost every computer that's online that's running Windows has been hacked. If you've been online for more than a year. Well, what is ahead when we go forward? What are we looking at here? I did a really interesting interview this week for the FBI for their Infraguard program. It's with a company called Black Ops partners, and you might want to look them up. They've got just a ton of cool information. It's headed by the guy who started IBM Corporation's whole security division, which is really kind of neat here. He's won the cybersecurity excellence award, and everything else. So, he and I were talking about cybersecurity 3.0 and where's it going. What should we be doing? And, you know it's really interesting when we get right down to it. But, the bad guys are out there. They are coming after us, and they're coming after us in a big way. We've known that right. We've we know the Russians are coming after us. We know the Chinese, in fact, this customer I just picked up. We've been cleaning things up, and just yesterday we installed a brand new Next-Generation Firewall filter and Security Operations Center support for him. 

[00:03:19] And, this is just a small family-owned company. But, he had been compromised. They were able to get past his firewall, he had a great firewall. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I've heard that story before, and the bad guys got past it and got into his accounting system, found all of his clients, and managed to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars. It's just crazy what happened. He ended up going over to China. To try and find out. So, can we get our money back because the money got transferred over to China? Tens of thousands of dollars later and, of course, now there's lawsuits and legal fees involved and it's pretty crippling. So, that's not surprising, right. It's just like President Trump going out and saying something crazy on Twitter, right. We're used to hearing that new thing that he says out there, but it is not going to change our opinion about President Trump, right. If you had a pro-opinion, you have one after if you had an anti-opinion, you have the same one after, right. That's not going to change things. What changes things is a surprise. What changes things is wow, that's just not what I would expect. And if you had another President in there that didn't normally do the types of things President Trump does, you would be surprised maybe your opinion would change when he did something on Twitter that just shocks everybody in the whole nation or the whole world, 

[00:04:48] right. You kind of get used to it. Well, here's the big picture. The bad guys aren't just going after your money. They're not just trying to get at your clients, and not just trying to get that information. It turns out that the bad guys include nation-state actors. It's not just some kids in the basement somewhere over in Ukraine that is trying to hack in now. And, we're talking about the risk here of a crippling cyber attack. The Homeland Security secretary, Kirsten Nielson said just this last week, that the U.S. is in crisis mode comparing the dangers of a massive attack to a Category 5 hurricane looming on the horizon. You heard that right. Category 5 hurricane, and there is no graver threat to the United States. An interesting article that I posted up on my Web site by Axios. You can find it there. They've got some quotes from General David Petraeus. He's the former CIA director, and he's quoted as saying, what worries me most is a cyber equivalent of a weapon of mass destruction falling into the hands of extremists who would needless to say be very difficult to deter because of their willingness to blow themselves up on the battlefield and take us with them. Leon Panetta, of course, who was President Obama's former CIA director. 

[00:06:20] Quotes and On and on and on. But, the bottom line here is we not only have to protect our businesses from these bad guys that we're familiar with, that have been out there for a very long time, but in fact, we've got to protect our businesses from the nation-state actors, as well. Now, I know the FBI has been working closely with businesses to try and secure our infrastructure and headway is being made there. But, it's shocking to me more and more as I get into it, how many hospitals, clinics, doctors offices, small banks, et cetera don't have what's needed. And, they are part of the critical infrastructure. So, again looking into the FBI Infragard, if you're involved with one of these businesses and see if you can't join up if you can pass the Infragard background check and start getting some of this information firsthand that I'm providing and other people are providing to the Infragard members. It is so critically important. And if you're a regular business guy is, I'm just a business regular guy, What do people care? Think about losing everything. Think about your retirement caught up in the business. What's going to happen if that's all stolen from you? And that's what's going to happen, by the way, it's guaranteed. It's going to happen. It's happening every day. And you've got to reconsider your whole security infrastructure. 

[00:07:55] You've got to work with the company that knows what they're doing, and just a funny note here. I've got to add this in. I got an e-mail this week that came from a mailing list that I'm on, and they were promoting this two thousand dollar course, become a managed security services provider in six weeks. And, you know I have to chuckle because people have a hard time differentiating, right now. How would you differentiate between my company, Mainstream, and one of these guys that six weeks later puts up a shingle, saying yeah I'm a security services provider, right? And I started adding up the hours. And this is the part that really shocked me. Of course, it helps to be a little bit older and having done this for a long time. I have more than 100,000 hours in the I.T. business doing network related stuff including security. Personally, me personally. This isn't our company has a combined 20 years. Me personally, 100,000 hours and I have I just laughed when I saw this. Are you kidding me? People are going to be out there peddling themselves as security providers when all they have is a couple of certifications under their belt and a six-week course. Oh, man anyhow, so now let's go over to our next topic here. 

[00:09:33] Well, we kind of started out by talking about hackers and what they're doing. We've got a new problem up there, pretty darn big problem. frankly, and this is a phone hijacking now. 

[00:09:45] You know I've told you before that these two-factor authentication schemes that are using your phone where they send you a text are not terribly secure, right. In fact, they're not secure at all. Well, this is something that's just a little bit different. We've got an article here from Motherboard, talking about California authorities who are saying, that a 20-year-old college student has hijacked more than 40 phone numbers and stolen five million dollars, including some from cryptocurrency investors. Wow. OK, wow is all I have to say here. Here's what's happening this guy Joel Ortiz, he's a 20 year old from Boston. He's alleged to have hacked these victims, using some accomplices who are unnamed, at least as of yet. And, this is the first reported case against someone who's allegedly used a technique known as Sim swapping. So, in Sim swapping so, you know you get a phone, you have an unlocked phone you have a sim that Sim has your contacts and other stuff on it. And, that sim also was used to authorize you to the cellular network. So, now that's what you use to identify your phone, right. So, when someone calls your number it uses the sim, to identify you. That's how that all works. With sim hijacking what happens is they basically steal your sim. Now, they don't even have to have access to your sim. All, they have to do is trick your provider. You know like AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, and whatever trick your provider into transferring the target's phone number to a SIM card that's controlled by the bad guy. So, once they get that phone number and there's ways to do this, this is really, well documented where they will call up and pretend they're your wife, or your husband or even you.

[00:11:52] And, so many of us are posting information online that makes it possible for them to be able to very easily impersonate you. So they know your wife's name your kid's names your dog's names where you work where you were born where you graduate from college. So, they can pass the so-called anti-fraud stuff when they call up the provider. So, once they get your phone number the bad guys are using it now to reset your passwords and break into your online accounts. Because remember I was saying that using a text message is not true two-factor authentication. In some cases even working, if you do have a separate type of two-factor authentication. And, its called a port-out scam. It's relatively easy to pull off, it's become widespread and that is where they say, yeah I am transferring my phone number from T-Mobile to Verizon, just as an example, right. And, you arrange for that. You're transferring your phone number and when you do that, you have to have a new sim. In many cases you have to, in this case, you'd have to have a Verizon type sim. And, obviously, you'd have to be working on the frequencies Verizon uses et cetera but easy enough to pull off. So, this guy Ortiz was arrested at the L.A. International Airport was on his way to Europe. He apparently had a Gucci bag that was part of a recent spending spree that, of course, they seized because they're alleging that it was financed by some of these scams. He's facing 28 charges, 13 counts of identity theft, 13 counts of hacking, and two counts of grand theft, according to a complaint that was filed. They're going after some of his co-conspirators apparently they have access to millions of dollars in cryptocurrency. 

[00:13:50] And the interesting quote in here, that I'm not going to quote because it is full of all kinds of nasty stuff. OK. So it's interesting. Think about that. There's a sim swapping community that's out there on the dark web, where people are swapping the information back and forth. At least three of the attacks that happened, he stole more than a half million from a cryptocurrency entrepreneur including a million he'd crowdfunded and an initial coin offering. And, you know I am absolutely against putting money into these things. I don't look at them as an investment. I look at them as highly, risky. It goes on and on. So, bottom line DO NOT tie it to your phone, into authentication for any of these Web sites. Use some of these some of these apps that are out there like Duo or Google authenticator, if you want to learn more about it let me know I'd be glad to put together a special little free mini-course on it, as to how to do all of that. But, that's what we do. We go even further. We not only use those types of apps, we have physical keys that we have to use in order to get on to certain Web sites. In fact, we're expert witnesses right now in a case involving a managed services provider, that they obviously they didn't go to the six week course or they would have known better, who messed up, and wow, major stuff, can't really talk about the case, but similar type of thing that happened with this other client, that we were talking about that we just picked up. It's happening every day. Now, you've got to pull up your socks and pay attention. All right. So, let's get on to the voicemail and how that ties into all of this as well. 

[00:15:46] Well, remember I was just saying that if you use your phone for authentication, where they send you a text message to make sure you, because you're logging into a new browser or you're logging in from a place that they're not familiar with, right. So, they'll send you a text message and then you enter that code in. Well, the same type of problem exists with your voicemail. Your Google, your Microsoft, Apple, WhatsApp, signal account, they all have an Achilles heel. Now, Signal is interesting because it is designed to keep things secure. WhatsApp is supposed to keep things secure, not as secure as Signal does. But, here is the weakness, and that weakness was disclosed this last week again in Vegas. In case you weren't aware of it, there was the Black Hat conference. And at that people were talking about different ways to hack, new things they found, Defcon as part of that, right. One right after the other, these two conferences out there in Vegas. So, this particular one was by Martin Vigo. He was over at the Defcon convention, and he explained how he managed to reset passwords for a whole bunch of different types of online accounts. So, he took advantage of the weakest link in the security chain which is. believe it or not, your voicemail. 

[00:17:17] So, what he did was he requested a password reset on some of these services, like WhatsApp, because you have the option of requesting you receive a call with the reset code. So, that's more than just receiving a text, it's actually a phone call. So, people think OK, well that's safe right.

[00:17:40] Well, no it's even worse than getting a text message because all he had to do was hack the voicemail account first. 

[00:17:49] How does he do that? Well, he just wrote a little script that just brute force attacked the passwords. All right. Most people are using a four-digit password. And most of the voicemail systems don't have incremental backoffs, where they time out. You know where you get it wrong the first time you have to wait five seconds, you can try again, if you get it wrong three times you have to wait five minutes. Yet are wrong again. You might have to wait an hour etc.. No, no. They just let you hack, hack, hack, hack, hack, hack, hack. And, in fact, he did get access to the account's password reset codes. And, ultimately he got control of the account itself because they sent a reset code via voicemail called up your reset code as 1 2 3 4, and he had previously hacked that voicemail account, and many people it's easy to find. I was on again research for this case, where we are acting as a consultant to the law firm and we may end up on the stand, as an expert witness. But in that type of a situation, all that has to happen is you go to the website, you can find that person's password, you can be again password reset information by just finding what is their phone number. Because people are posting their personal cell phone numbers on websites, or they're posting their business work number on the website. Then I get it right. You 

[00:19:22] Want people to be able to contact you. But in this case, he got into all of these accounts and he was able to reset them because he got the password via voicemail reset. 

[00:19:32] Oh man, some of the stuff just never ends does it? All right. So let's talk a little bit about practical security. Got a lot of kids going back to school. 

[00:19:47] You've got college kids, of course, going back to school. We just had a client bring in a hard disk that was being used for backup. You know one of those pluggable USB drives and guess what it had failed and apparently, their daughter's dissertation was there on that hard drive. And so we took it apart, the case and everything and it looks like it's actually a problem with a hard disk itself might be the voice call. You can hear clicking. So, hopefully, that's what it is it's only going to cost about five thousand dollars to get that a hard disk fixed. We're going to send it out to a lab. We don't actually do that in-house right. Let the experts deal with it. So, guess what doctoral dissertation. Because the machine went south and the backup wasn't working. We hear that all the time. It's incredible. That's why you have multiple layers of backup as well not just one backup. Because in this case her machine failed and she didn't realize her backup wasn't working. Oh man. Anyhow it's really distressing when that happens to you. We've got kids now that are starting to get involved with politics for the 2018 election cycle, the same thing is going to be true with the 2020 cycle. We've got of course harassment hate campaigns. There's doxing going on. Russian hackers going on, and these same people that have been involved in trying to disrupt our elections, are going to be busy again this year and in 2020. 

[00:21:24] So, anyone who touches sensitive confidential documents, financial records, voter data, you have to protect yourselves. And you might not have thought about that when it comes to these kids, that are working as volunteers may be in election offices that are out there, right. Their favorite candidate left, or right, or center, whatever they might be. 

[00:21:47] There is a ton of bad advice out there because most of the security folklore that's out there in the I.T. industry really is wrong. It can be even dangerously incorrect. The security world five years ago, today, It's not the same thing, right. So, there are a few things you have to do. I've got a special report. You can no longer get it on my Web site. But it's all about passwords, PASSWORD managers. I give some reviews in there we have some links to using them if you want to find out about password managers e-mail me or just send me a text 8 5 5 3 8 5 55 53, send me a text asking for it. I'll send you the PDF. 

[00:22:33] I think it's like five or six pages, it's pretty detailed pretty in-depth, I'll send to you. It's something I use with my clients. But, you can you can get that from me. But number one user password manager again if you missed it 8 5 5 3 8 5 fifty-five fifty-three. So, anyhow you've got to generate passwords. Get a security key, a Yubi key is probably one of the better ones out there. But, be careful of using the security keys make sure you know what you're doing because you could break your computer completely if you lose the key. OK. It's kind of crazy but you know Yubi key is out there. There's a lot of other things there. Chrome browser has some really good extensions. HTTPS Everywhere is a good extension to use it. You can enroll Google's advanced program protection and a good article and Medium that I have put my Web site Craig Peterson dot com. You can go there and read up a little bit more. Well only got a few minutes left so, let's kind of whip through these last few things for this week again you will find all of this and more in the newsletter. Now, we sent out the newsletter on Thursday this week as opposed to Saturday morning. 

[00:23:51] We want to see if that's a little better if you guys pick it up that way. I think a lot of people are subscribed to their work e-mail address, which means you might not notice it when you come in on Monday morning. So, if you check your e-mail you'll see it's from me at Craig Peterson dot com. All of these articles with direct links to them so you can find out more. We also have special offers, from time to time, like a couple of months ago we offered that password special report, as well. But a VPN is very important. We use them all the time. We have our own VPN. And, the whole idea behind it is you have a tunnel, hopefully, a secure tunnel. Be careful where you are going, when it comes to VPNs. Geo-blocking is a good thing to get around with a VPN, but as I mentioned at the beginning of the show I have a client that is heading over to Europe and he was asking about VPNs and what he might want to do what he should do. So, I got good advice on that as well. I know I can send you more information. There's a cool new Alexa's skill. 

[00:25:02] Is really really neat. It's plain these fake stupid arguments to make people burglars think that you're at home.

[00:25:10] Ok, so one of them is an emergency PTA meeting to discuss Memes, fidget spinner's, and other teen fads. There's another one where couples having a breakup while also trying to watch TV. Another one-two average guys brainstorm what's unique about themselves so, they can start a podcast about that. Oh man. There's another one that they can play where they have conversations from a book club, where no one discusses the book. A mom walking her daughter through Ikea assembly over the phone, a stay at home mom losing her mind, and an argument over a board game. Very cool you can. You can find those for Alexa. Great article in Slashdot. You'll find it on my Web site and cool for burglars keep them out of your home. Three trends that the hackers a black hat and DefCon were talking about and what they're watching. Mobile devices have moved up the list. The Internet of valuable things, IoT has become very, very big deal. I should do some special stuff on some of this for people and audio hacking. It is now a thing. So, you can find all of this and more details. CRAIG Peterson dot com check your e-mail if you're on my list. Also, I've been trying to send it out via a massive few are on my text list, a link I send out to everybody with this week's articles but you'll find all of this. Craig Peterson dot com, any questions any requests. Just text me. I've been answering people all week long and fact to getting more and more every week 8 5 5 3 8 5 55 fifty-three and I'll send you I'll put on my text list and let you know about current events what's happening and little reminders about the show and stop 8 5 5 3 8 5 55 53. Have a great week and we'll be back again next week and I'll be sure to let you know if anything big is hitting the fan during the week. Take care. Bye-bye.

 ---

Related articles:

Hackers can seize practically all your online accounts, and it’s your voicemail’s fault

Practical Security for the Prudent American

Ever left your lights on a timer to scare off burglars? Now you can use your Alexa

Special Report: America’s Greatest Threat Is A Hurricane-Force Cyberattack

How A Hacker Allegedly Stole Millions By Hijacking Phone Numbers

Everything You Wanted To Know About VPNs (But Didn’t Want To Ask)

3 Trends Hackers At Black Hat And Defcon Are Watching

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

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Is someone spying on your through your computer?  Listen in as Ken, Matt and I discuss how it can happen.

Omarosa!  Yes, Matt asked me about this and we discussed how these recording work and the problems with them.

Craig is putting up a new membership site (Yes, it is free, but you have to sign up)  On it will have all his special reports that he puts out and you will be the first to get them.

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

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Related Articles:

Is anyone spying on your computer? How do you know?

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Transcript:

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

Airing date: 08/15/2018

Computer Spying. Does Recording Conversations Kill Free Speech?

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Hi, Craig Peterson here. I don't know. Did that get political, this morning? I guess you'll have to decide. I don't think every discussion where people disagree is political, right. You could agree or disagree with me on economics. You could agree or disagree with me on policing strategies. Does that mean that it is political? I don't think so. I think we've gone far too far on the political realm. This morning when I was talking to Matt, it was interesting because he was asking about technology and some of its effects here. And I took all of that and I really ran with it this morning. So, there were a couple of quick, one actually kind of quick question before that where Ken Altshuler was asking a little bit about the computer spying on us. So, I did talk a little bit about that at first but then, Matt Gagnon and I talked about a subject that is going to change the world. Has changed the world. Does that make it political? Am I wrong for having brought this up, or what do you think? Let me know 8 5 5 3 8 5. Fifty-five fifty-three. Am I wrong doing this, right? So, many people, you know I get fed up, when you get Hollywood or you get musicians out there with political stands and there are obviously political, right. You're going out against President Obama or President Trump, and you're just slamming them for things that are where there is nothing to it. That's political. Where is that line? This is a really interesting problem, and something obviously I'd thought about because I was able to respond to Matt and I love to know what to think. Anyhow here we go this morning with Ken Alschuler and Matt Gagnon then up in Maine on WGAN a.m. 560 and FM 1 0 5 5 and I guess there's a couple of repeaters as well. Anyhow here we go. Thanks, for listening. 

[00:02:12] It's that time again. It is a Wednesday at 738 which means Craig Peterson is joining us, as he typically does. Give us an eye on technology, Sir. How are you this morning?

[00:02:20] Hey, that's me, doing good.

[00:02:23] So, I'm sitting here working on my laptop and sometimes it's a little light up, on the top and I keep thinking somebody is looking at me. Am I just being paranoid? 

[00:02:34] Braggers, somebody play that somebody still looking at me. 

[00:02:39] Well, in your case, yes, your just being paranoid. Who would want to? Exactly, yeah spying on computers is a problem.

[00:02:47] You guys remember the L.A. Unified School District and the problem they had with their laptops. 

[00:02:54] I actually do not. No, what was it? 

[00:02:57] Ok. Well, it turned out that the laptops were issued by the school district two students had spyware on them and some of the young ladies would have their laptops open in their bedrooms, while they were getting changed et cetera. And apparently, some of the IT people in the L.A. Unified School District decided that it might be kind of fun to watch. And that's kind of the long and short of it. That happened maybe what now a couple of years ago, and the whole thing obviously backfired, and I think they pulled back all of these laptops. But, Ken it's not unreasonable to be concerned about that. You've got the actual spying where you're talking about a camera that might be on. And, even though the computer has a little light that comes on when the camera is activated, that's not 100 percent positive indication that light that the camera is in use or is not in use. In other words, there are ways particularly with Windows computers, not so much with Macs. There are ways to have the camera active, but not have a light on. And, we're not going to go into details here but it is a concern. There is a lot of people that are concerned about it. The employers may be spying on them while we were at work or in the case of an L.A. County unified. Maybe these school district people spying on the kids while they had their computers at home. Now, in both cases usually what you end up seeing, is people are are saying, hey listen we're just trying to track these laptops so, we know where they are. So, they don't get stolen. But, there are some real privacy concerns there.

[00:04:45] So, there's a great article that I found on Popular Science that posted it up on my Web site, that talks about how to secure your systems, not just from the camera watching you but all of the software that might be on your computer that might be spying on you. Because we know we've got more and more activity by the Chinese the Russians the North Koreans and others to try and get into our computer. So, this article goes through and talks about the layers of security that you have to have. Bottom line, this is not the world that was even just five years ago. Things are getting more complicated. You and I are getting caught in the crossfire, between these countries that are out there trying to come after the United States, and just having an anti-virus isn't enough. So, this article goes through talks about some of the different layers of software you should have, A it gives you some links so you can buy some of the software. But bottom line, if you're a home user it's going to cost you two to three maybe four hundred dollars a year for the software, that you should have on your computer. Now, that's a huge jump from you know where we were before where you were using free anti-virus although it does have a link to some free antivirus software. There's more to it than that. And if you're a business you should be spending about a hundred fifty dollars, a month on software and services to keep your computers up to date and to keep them secure. It's a much, much, different world out there, Ken.

[00:06:26] Craig Peterson, our tech guru, joins us at this time every Wednesday to give us an eye on technology. So, Craig, I'm going to go a little rogue here and I'm going to ask you about Omarosa because I'm not sure if this is even a question, Craig but I just want to talk about it. So, she's recording, secretly people in the White House, not just the president, but you know aides, who are having certain discussions and she's clearly you know running around just trying to get as much leverage as possible, in the event she got fired, which she did. It's kind of weird new world we live in, isn't it? I mean you know I have an app on my phone. I almost never use it. But just in case I have an app on my phone, that will record my phone calls, right. So, that I can have that kind of thing recorded. Usually, I would use it for something, I want to keep notes or something but, I mean I can absolutely see that being you know almost a weapon when you call somebody up in hope that they say something crazy, that you can then have on recording and then use it against them later. Then you know you can have a pen that has a recording device on it, you can have you know any number of devices now, that have this type of thing on it. 

[00:07:30] How do we live in a world like this, especially if you live in the White House and work in the White House? And, be secure that anything can ever be, sort of, private, ever. 

[00:07:43] Matt, That's is a good question right? We just had the governor on, you know you've got senators on, you've got all kinds of people on the radio, when you're calling into a radio station, There is a basic assumption you are being recorded, but you're right the rest of your life isn't. And we mentioned that whole two-party consent thing before on the show, I think it was even last week, there's 15 states in the country. I think it is about 15, that have two-party consent laws, which means you can not record the other party if they are in a two party consent state. Now, let's get to an interesting way to look at it. For instance, Washington D.C. is a single party consent for that district area, which means that all would have to happen as one person says I'm going to record this conversation by themselves and they start recording, and it's all legal. But let's say Omarosa is there in Washington D.C. and the President is in Florida. Well, Florida is a two party consent state. So, what happens to them is she has committed under Florida law a felony by recording the president. 

[00:08:57] So, if he was calling her from the golf course in Mar Lago or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

[00:09:03] She's in serious trouble if that was the case. But what we're talking about is a little higher level than that. You know Omarosa, he brought her into the White House. I was a huge fan of The Apprentice. It was just so much fun. It was fascinating seeing how they approach marketing problems and things, right. She was the villain on The Apprentice. And, from what I've heard on these tapes you know I think the White House is certainly just fine. They're in the clear. But I don't know that Matt. What do you do? You could potentially have a device that is set up to make sure there's nothing around you electronic, you could go that far. There are some devices that are out there. There is a case for your phone for your iPhone and that iPhone case monitors what your iPhone is doing as far as the broadcast goes, or the electronic sounds, if you will coming out of it so talking to the data on the cell towers talking to the voice on the cell towers. So, you know hey listen wait a minute, there's something going on with my phone but Matt you can't be certain anymore. Now, you have to be careful and you know what that's going to do. This is the same problem we have with the fascist movement. Where you have fascists out on the street beating people who disagree with them. And, that is people just are watching what they're saying and that means you can't have an honest discussion. You and I cannot disagree on some subject. 

[00:10:42] You can never I can never risk saying something offensive anymore so everybody's so guarded that nobody's actually exploring any issues, anymore. Nobody's, actually getting into depth on anything. 

[00:10:52] Yeah, the opposite is what we need right. Exactly. We need we need to protect the type of speech that offends us more than any other type of speech. And when we're talking about one party or two party consent laws and states under the federal government any federal agency it's always considered to be one party so they can prosecute in the federal system with one party. So, what can happen is the police are investigating. They've got an informant they say Mr. informant, I want to call up your drug supplier and let's get them on tape. So, the feds can do that in any state. However, in a two-party consent state, they can use that, in court, if it goes down to the state courts. Law enforcement prefers a single party because they really don't have to get much permission when it comes to recording. You know my feeling on this I think that in the performance of their public duties that officers, you know police officers all the way down through town clerk et cetera, it should be legal to record them. But, in this day and age shouldn't you should assume you are being recorded, right. How many times have we seen a news broadcast, and there's 50 people with their iPhone and Android smartphones up videotaping something that's going on? Even in a two-party consent state. That has to be the assumption, and I don't know what to do.  It's bad, it's not good. I think, frankly, to have a single party consent in most cases I think both parties should consent. And, I think we've got to stop saying all speech is political because it's not. We have to stop beating people with medieval weapons like clubs with nails coming out of them when we disagree with them.

[00:12:51] The left has gone, far too far, and when we're talking about this whole thing, we know when it comes to the right when it's when it's too far. When someone is being racist it's too far. When someone is like David Duke it's too far. But there's very few of those people, and everyone on the right rejects that type of speech. And, we see that every week. When is it too far on the left? When they cross the line? You know the Antifa movement is out there. They're wearing black masks and black clothes et cetera. And, they are shutting down free speech whenever possible. They're breaking windows, cars, setting fires. Is that too far? I don't hear most of the media talking about that. And because they are stopping the free speech we are in a sad, sad, position in this country. So, this I put this all in one bucket Matt because I think it's all very, very related. We're concerned now, about what we say back in the day someone could be yelling the N word all day long and assuming they weren't a rapper. You could reasonably assume that they were racist. Right now the racist can hide. And they do hide and the free speech is certainly still, kind of there. But I think everyone's being careful. You have to watch it. You know you can be a teenager, teenagers do stupid things, right. You're not an adult really until you're well into your 30s, most people. Those stupid things you said, are going to show up when you apply for a job because people the first thing the hiring managers get to do is search for you online. So, this is a huge problem and I don't know where it's going to end up. 

[00:14:44] Matt, Craig Peterson, our tech guru joining us every Wednesday. We'll talk to you next week. 

[00:14:51] Take care gentlemen. Thank you, sir. All right, we're going to a quick break here.

---

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

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

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

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For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Is someone spying on your through your computer?  Listen in as Ken, Matt and I discuss how it can happen.

Omarosa!  Yes, Matt asked me about this and we discussed how these recording work and the problems with them.

Craig is putting up a new membership site (Yes, it is free, but you have to sign up)  On it will have all his special reports that he puts out and you will be the first to get them.

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

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Related Articles:

Is anyone spying on your computer? How do you know?

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Transcript:

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

Airing date: 08/15/2018

Computer Spying. Does Recording Conversations Kill Free Speech?

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Hi, Craig Peterson here. I don't know. Did that get political, this morning? I guess you'll have to decide. I don't think every discussion where people disagree is political, right. You could agree or disagree with me on economics. You could agree or disagree with me on policing strategies. Does that mean that it is political? I don't think so. I think we've gone far too far on the political realm. This morning when I was talking to Matt, it was interesting because he was asking about technology and some of its effects here. And I took all of that and I really ran with it this morning. So, there were a couple of quick, one actually kind of quick question before that where Ken Altshuler was asking a little bit about the computer spying on us. So, I did talk a little bit about that at first but then, Matt Gagnon and I talked about a subject that is going to change the world. Has changed the world. Does that make it political? Am I wrong for having brought this up, or what do you think? Let me know 8 5 5 3 8 5. Fifty-five fifty-three. Am I wrong doing this, right? So, many people, you know I get fed up, when you get Hollywood or you get musicians out there with political stands and there are obviously political, right. You're going out against President Obama or President Trump, and you're just slamming them for things that are where there is nothing to it. That's political. Where is that line? This is a really interesting problem, and something obviously I'd thought about because I was able to respond to Matt and I love to know what to think. Anyhow here we go this morning with Ken Alschuler and Matt Gagnon then up in Maine on WGAN a.m. 560 and FM 1 0 5 5 and I guess there's a couple of repeaters as well. Anyhow here we go. Thanks, for listening. 

[00:02:12] It's that time again. It is a Wednesday at 738 which means Craig Peterson is joining us, as he typically does. Give us an eye on technology, Sir. How are you this morning?

[00:02:20] Hey, that's me, doing good.

[00:02:23] So, I'm sitting here working on my laptop and sometimes it's a little light up, on the top and I keep thinking somebody is looking at me. Am I just being paranoid? 

[00:02:34] Braggers, somebody play that somebody still looking at me. 

[00:02:39] Well, in your case, yes, your just being paranoid. Who would want to? Exactly, yeah spying on computers is a problem.

[00:02:47] You guys remember the L.A. Unified School District and the problem they had with their laptops. 

[00:02:54] I actually do not. No, what was it? 

[00:02:57] Ok. Well, it turned out that the laptops were issued by the school district two students had spyware on them and some of the young ladies would have their laptops open in their bedrooms, while they were getting changed et cetera. And apparently, some of the IT people in the L.A. Unified School District decided that it might be kind of fun to watch. And that's kind of the long and short of it. That happened maybe what now a couple of years ago, and the whole thing obviously backfired, and I think they pulled back all of these laptops. But, Ken it's not unreasonable to be concerned about that. You've got the actual spying where you're talking about a camera that might be on. And, even though the computer has a little light that comes on when the camera is activated, that's not 100 percent positive indication that light that the camera is in use or is not in use. In other words, there are ways particularly with Windows computers, not so much with Macs. There are ways to have the camera active, but not have a light on. And, we're not going to go into details here but it is a concern. There is a lot of people that are concerned about it. The employers may be spying on them while we were at work or in the case of an L.A. County unified. Maybe these school district people spying on the kids while they had their computers at home. Now, in both cases usually what you end up seeing, is people are are saying, hey listen we're just trying to track these laptops so, we know where they are. So, they don't get stolen. But, there are some real privacy concerns there.

[00:04:45] So, there's a great article that I found on Popular Science that posted it up on my Web site, that talks about how to secure your systems, not just from the camera watching you but all of the software that might be on your computer that might be spying on you. Because we know we've got more and more activity by the Chinese the Russians the North Koreans and others to try and get into our computer. So, this article goes through and talks about the layers of security that you have to have. Bottom line, this is not the world that was even just five years ago. Things are getting more complicated. You and I are getting caught in the crossfire, between these countries that are out there trying to come after the United States, and just having an anti-virus isn't enough. So, this article goes through talks about some of the different layers of software you should have, A it gives you some links so you can buy some of the software. But bottom line, if you're a home user it's going to cost you two to three maybe four hundred dollars a year for the software, that you should have on your computer. Now, that's a huge jump from you know where we were before where you were using free anti-virus although it does have a link to some free antivirus software. There's more to it than that. And if you're a business you should be spending about a hundred fifty dollars, a month on software and services to keep your computers up to date and to keep them secure. It's a much, much, different world out there, Ken.

[00:06:26] Craig Peterson, our tech guru, joins us at this time every Wednesday to give us an eye on technology. So, Craig, I'm going to go a little rogue here and I'm going to ask you about Omarosa because I'm not sure if this is even a question, Craig but I just want to talk about it. So, she's recording, secretly people in the White House, not just the president, but you know aides, who are having certain discussions and she's clearly you know running around just trying to get as much leverage as possible, in the event she got fired, which she did. It's kind of weird new world we live in, isn't it? I mean you know I have an app on my phone. I almost never use it. But just in case I have an app on my phone, that will record my phone calls, right. So, that I can have that kind of thing recorded. Usually, I would use it for something, I want to keep notes or something but, I mean I can absolutely see that being you know almost a weapon when you call somebody up in hope that they say something crazy, that you can then have on recording and then use it against them later. Then you know you can have a pen that has a recording device on it, you can have you know any number of devices now, that have this type of thing on it. 

[00:07:30] How do we live in a world like this, especially if you live in the White House and work in the White House? And, be secure that anything can ever be, sort of, private, ever. 

[00:07:43] Matt, That's is a good question right? We just had the governor on, you know you've got senators on, you've got all kinds of people on the radio, when you're calling into a radio station, There is a basic assumption you are being recorded, but you're right the rest of your life isn't. And we mentioned that whole two-party consent thing before on the show, I think it was even last week, there's 15 states in the country. I think it is about 15, that have two-party consent laws, which means you can not record the other party if they are in a two party consent state. Now, let's get to an interesting way to look at it. For instance, Washington D.C. is a single party consent for that district area, which means that all would have to happen as one person says I'm going to record this conversation by themselves and they start recording, and it's all legal. But let's say Omarosa is there in Washington D.C. and the President is in Florida. Well, Florida is a two party consent state. So, what happens to them is she has committed under Florida law a felony by recording the president. 

[00:08:57] So, if he was calling her from the golf course in Mar Lago or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

[00:09:03] She's in serious trouble if that was the case. But what we're talking about is a little higher level than that. You know Omarosa, he brought her into the White House. I was a huge fan of The Apprentice. It was just so much fun. It was fascinating seeing how they approach marketing problems and things, right. She was the villain on The Apprentice. And, from what I've heard on these tapes you know I think the White House is certainly just fine. They're in the clear. But I don't know that Matt. What do you do? You could potentially have a device that is set up to make sure there's nothing around you electronic, you could go that far. There are some devices that are out there. There is a case for your phone for your iPhone and that iPhone case monitors what your iPhone is doing as far as the broadcast goes, or the electronic sounds, if you will coming out of it so talking to the data on the cell towers talking to the voice on the cell towers. So, you know hey listen wait a minute, there's something going on with my phone but Matt you can't be certain anymore. Now, you have to be careful and you know what that's going to do. This is the same problem we have with the fascist movement. Where you have fascists out on the street beating people who disagree with them. And, that is people just are watching what they're saying and that means you can't have an honest discussion. You and I cannot disagree on some subject. 

[00:10:42] You can never I can never risk saying something offensive anymore so everybody's so guarded that nobody's actually exploring any issues, anymore. Nobody's, actually getting into depth on anything. 

[00:10:52] Yeah, the opposite is what we need right. Exactly. We need we need to protect the type of speech that offends us more than any other type of speech. And when we're talking about one party or two party consent laws and states under the federal government any federal agency it's always considered to be one party so they can prosecute in the federal system with one party. So, what can happen is the police are investigating. They've got an informant they say Mr. informant, I want to call up your drug supplier and let's get them on tape. So, the feds can do that in any state. However, in a two-party consent state, they can use that, in court, if it goes down to the state courts. Law enforcement prefers a single party because they really don't have to get much permission when it comes to recording. You know my feeling on this I think that in the performance of their public duties that officers, you know police officers all the way down through town clerk et cetera, it should be legal to record them. But, in this day and age shouldn't you should assume you are being recorded, right. How many times have we seen a news broadcast, and there's 50 people with their iPhone and Android smartphones up videotaping something that's going on? Even in a two-party consent state. That has to be the assumption, and I don't know what to do.  It's bad, it's not good. I think, frankly, to have a single party consent in most cases I think both parties should consent. And, I think we've got to stop saying all speech is political because it's not. We have to stop beating people with medieval weapons like clubs with nails coming out of them when we disagree with them.

[00:12:51] The left has gone, far too far, and when we're talking about this whole thing, we know when it comes to the right when it's when it's too far. When someone is being racist it's too far. When someone is like David Duke it's too far. But there's very few of those people, and everyone on the right rejects that type of speech. And, we see that every week. When is it too far on the left? When they cross the line? You know the Antifa movement is out there. They're wearing black masks and black clothes et cetera. And, they are shutting down free speech whenever possible. They're breaking windows, cars, setting fires. Is that too far? I don't hear most of the media talking about that. And because they are stopping the free speech we are in a sad, sad, position in this country. So, this I put this all in one bucket Matt because I think it's all very, very related. We're concerned now, about what we say back in the day someone could be yelling the N word all day long and assuming they weren't a rapper. You could reasonably assume that they were racist. Right now the racist can hide. And they do hide and the free speech is certainly still, kind of there. But I think everyone's being careful. You have to watch it. You know you can be a teenager, teenagers do stupid things, right. You're not an adult really until you're well into your 30s, most people. Those stupid things you said, are going to show up when you apply for a job because people the first thing the hiring managers get to do is search for you online. So, this is a huge problem and I don't know where it's going to end up. 

[00:14:44] Matt, Craig Peterson, our tech guru joining us every Wednesday. We'll talk to you next week. 

[00:14:51] Take care gentlemen. Thank you, sir. All right, we're going to a quick break here.

---

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