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

Could Using the Right Multi-Factor Authentication Save You?

I had a good friend who, this week, had his life's work stolen from him. Yeah. And you know what caused it? It was his password. Now, you know what you're supposed to be doing? I'm going to tell you exactly what to do right now.

Let's get right down to the whole problem with passwords.

I'm going to tell you a little bit about my friend this week. He has been building a business for. Maybe going on 10 years now, and this business relies on advertising. Most companies do so in some way; we need to have new customers. There's always some attrition. Some customers go away. So how do we keep them?

We do what we can. How do we get new customers? For him, it was. Advertising, primarily on Facebook. He did some Google ads as well, but Facebook is really where he was focused. So how did he do all of that? Here's the bottom line you have to, if you are going to be advertising on Facebook, you have to have an advertising account.

The same thing's true. Google. And then, on that account, you tie in either your bank account or your credit card. I recommend a credit card so that those transactions can be backed up. And on top of all of that now, of course, you have to use a pixel. So the way the tracking works is there are pixels on websites, about those already.

And the bottom line with the pixels. Those are also. Cookies are about the pixels are used to set a cookie so that Facebook knows what sites you've gone to. So he uses those. I use those. In fact, if you go to my website, I have a Facebook pixel that gets set. And the reason for all of that is so that we know with.

I'd be interested in something on the site. So I know that there are many people interested in this page or that page. And so I could, I have not ever, but I could now do some advertising. I could send ads to you so that if you were looking at something particular, you'd see ads related to that, which I've always said.

It is the right way to go. If I'm looking to buy a pickup truck, I love to see ads for different pickup trucks, but if I don't want a car or truck, I don't want to see the ads. It isn't like TV where it sometimes seems every other ad is about. Car or a pickup truck. It drives me crazy because it's a waste of their money in advertising to me. After all, I don't want those things.

And it's also not only just annoying in money-wasting. There are better ways to do targeting. And that's what the whole online thing is. Anyways, I told you about that because he had set up this pixel years ago. Basically, the Facebook pixel gets to know you. All of the people who like you that might've bought from you.

Cause you can have that pixel track people through your site, your purchase site, they know what you purchase on the shopping cart, et cetera. And you can identify these people over on Facebook and their ads because they abandoned the cart or whatever it is you want to do there. So there's just a whole ton of stuff that you can do for these people.

And it's so bad. It is so valuable. It takes years to build up that account. Years to put that pixel in place. And our friend here, he had done precisely that. Then he found that his account had been compromised. And that is a terrible thing in this case because the bad guy used his account to place ads. So now there are really two or three problems here.

We'll talk about one of them. Why was the bad guy going after him? He has been running ads on Facebook for a long time. So as far as Facebook is concerned, his account is credible. All of the ads he runs don't have to be reviewed by a human being. They can go up almost immediately. He doesn't have to wait days for some of these things to go up.

So our bad guy can get an account like his that has years' worth of advertising credibility and now start advertising things that are not correct. So there again is part of the value of having one of these older accounts for advertising. And so the bad guy did that use his credibility. And then secondly, he used 25 grand worth of my friend's money to run ads.

Also, of course, very bad, very bad. So I sat down with him. In fact, it was this last week, and I was out on a trip with just a vacation trip. It was absolutely fantastic. I never just do vacation. It's always business plus work whenever I do anything like this, but I was on a trip last week. And so my eldest son who works closely with me, and he's also part of the FBI InfraGard program. So I had him reach out to my friend, and he helped them out, and they talked back and forth. So here's the problem that he has. And I'm trying to figure out a perfect way to solve this. And I haven't figured that out yet.

And if you guys have an idea because you are the best and brightest, you really are. So go ahead and drop me an email at [email protected] if a good way around this particular problem, which is he has. This Facebook could count and many other accounts, including his website, hosting account, email account, et cetera.

And. He has people who manage his ads for him. Who operates his website for him, who put up some promotions, advertising, and everything else. So these are third-party. This is what we generically call a supply chain, risk people who are not him have access to his stuff, his private property.

And how does he do it, or how did he do it? Is he went ahead and gave them. Access by giving them accounts or passwords. How well were they guarding their passwords and their accounts? So the first thing I had my friend do was going to haveIbeenpwned.com.

I had him put in his email address, the one he uses the most, and it showed up in five different. Hacks data dumps. So these are five various sites where he had used that same email address in this case. And he found out that in those five cases, the bad guy's got his passwords and personal information.

All bad. And he went ahead and cleaned it up. So I said put in the password because have I been, pwned also let you check your password, just see if it has been used by someone else and then stolen. So there are billions of passwords in this database. It's incredible of all of these known passwords.

So he put in his password, and no, it had not been stolen, but the problem is how about the people that were managing his ads on Facebook and managing his Facebook ad. We're the usernames, which are typically the email addresses and the passwords kept securely. That's a supply chain thing I'm talking about, and that's where I'd love to get him.

But from you guys, [email protected]. If you think you have a good answer, What we've been doing. And our advice to him was use one password. That's the only one to use. I don't trust last pass anymore. After their last big hack where they got hacked one password, the digit one password. And go ahead.

And set it up. And in a business scenario, you can have multiple vaults. So have a vault. That's just for people that are dealing with your Facebook ad account, maybe have another vault for people who are posting for you on Facebook. Or better yet when it comes to Facebook, go ahead and have an intermediary that is trusted the, if this, then that, or there's a few of them out there that can see that you put the post up on the website and automatically posted on Facebook.

So you don't have to get. All of these people, your passwords, but again, it's up to you. You got to figure out if that makes sense to you that those are the types of things that I think you can do. And that is what we do as well. Now, one of the beauties of using one password like that, where you're not sharing all of your passwords to everything you're sharing, the minimum amount of login information that you possibly can share is that if they leave your employees, All you have to do is remove their access to the appropriate vault or vaults, or maybe all of your vaults.

And this is what I've done with people that worked for me in the US and people would work for me overseas, and there have been a lot of them and it has worked quite well for me. So with one pass, We can enforce password integrity. We can make sure the passwords on stolen. One password ties automatically into have I been postponed.

If a password has been exposed, if it's been stolen online, it's a great way to go. Now I've got an offer for you guys who are listening. I have a special report that I've sold before on passwords, and it goes through talks about one password. He talks about the last pass, which I'm no longer really recommending, but give some comparisons and how you can use these things.

Make sure you go and email me right now. Me, [email protected]. That's ME at Craig Peterson dot com and just ask me for the password special report, and I'll be glad to get that on-off to you. There is a lot of good detail in there and helps you, whether you're a home user or a business.

So the next step in your security is multi-factor authentication. Interesting study out saying that about 75% of people say that they've used it for work or for business, but the hard numbers, I don't think they agree

One of the things that you have to do is use good passwords. And the best way to do that is to use a password manager.

I was talking about a friend of mine who had been hacked this last week and his account was hacked. His Facebook ad account was hacked. We asked him if we could reach out to. BI and he said, sure. So we checked with the FBI and they're looking to turn this into a case, a real case, because they've never seen this type of thing, the hijacking of an advertising account who hijacked it.

And why did they hide jacket? Was this in preparation maybe for. Playing around with manipulating our next election cycle coming up. There could be a lot of things that they're planning on doing and taking over my friend's account would be a great way to have done it. So maybe they're going to do other things here.

And our friends at the FBI are looking into it. How now do you also keep your data safe? Easily simply. When we're talking about these types of accounts, the thing to look at is known as two factor authentication or multifactor authentication. You see my friend, if he had been using multi-factor authentication.

I would not have been vulnerable. Even if the bad guys had his username, email address and his password, they still would not be able to log in without having that little six-digit code. That's the best way to do multi-factor authentication. When we're talking about this code, whether it's four or 5, 6, 8 digits long, we should not be using our cell phones to receive those.

At least not as text messages, those have a problem because our phone numbers can be stolen from us and they are stolen from us. So if we're a real target, in other words, they're going after you. Joe Smith and they know you have some, $2 million in your account. So they're going after you while they can, in most cases, take control of your phone.

Now you might not know it and it doesn't have to be hacked. All they have to do is have the phone company move your phone number to a new phone. Once. So that means one of the things you need to do is contact your telephone vendor, whoever it is, who's providing new that service. That's a company like Verizon sprint T-Mobile a T and Tone of those companies that are giving you cell service, you have to contact them and set up a pass.

So that if they have a phone call coming in and that phone call can be faked. So it looks like it's coming from your phone, even if there was a phone call coming in, whether it's coming from your phone or not, they have to get that password or passcode that you gave them. And once they have that passcode now, and that's great, but if you don't have that in there targeting you specifically, then you're in trouble. So for many of us really it may not make a huge difference. But I would do it anyways. I have done it with every one of my cell phone carriers now. A couple of decades set up a password. So the next step is this multifactor authentication.

If I'm not supposed to get it via text message to my phone, how do I get it? There are a couple of apps out there. There's a free one called Google authentic. And Google authenticator runs on your phone. And once it's there on your phone and you are setting it up on a website, so Facebook, for instance, your bank, most websites out there, the bigger ones, all you have to do is say, I want to set up multi-factor authentication, and then it'll ask you a case.

So how do you want to do it? And you can say, I want an app and they will display. A Q R code. That's one of those square codes with a bunch of little lines inside of it. You're seeing QR codes before they become very common. And you take your phone with the Google authenticator app. Take a picture. Of that little QR code on the screen, and now it will start sinking up so that every 30 seconds Google authenticator on your phone will change that number.

So when you need to log back into that website, it's going to ask you for the code. You just pull up Google authenticator and there's the code. So that's the freeway to do it. And not necessarily the easiest way to. Again, going back to one password. I use this thing exclusively. It is phenomenal for keeping my passwords, keeping them all straight and then encrypted vault, actually in multiple encrypted vault it's so that I can share some of them.

Some of them are just strictly private, but it also has that same authenticator functionality built right into it. Microsoft has its own authenticator, but you can tell Microsoft that you want to use the standard authenticator. Of course, Microsoft has to do everything differently. But you can tell it.

And I do tell it, I want to use a regular authenticator app, not Microsoft authenticator. By the way. That's why I advise you to don't use the Microsoft authenticator, just use one authenticator for all of the sites, and then Microsoft will give you that same QR code. And then you can take that picture and you're off and running.

Next time you log in, it asks you for the code and instead of texting it to you to your phone smarter, otherwise it will not. That require you to open up your authenticator. So for me, for instance, when I'm logging into a website, it comes up and asks for the username, asked for the password. Both of those are filled out automatically by one password for me.

And then it asks for that code identification code and. One password automatically puts it into my pace to buffer copy-paste, buffer, and I just paste it in and they've got the code. So I don't have to remember the codes. I don't remember passwords. I don't have to remember usernames or email addresses.

One password remembers them all for me. Plus it'll remember notes and other things. So you can tell, I really one password. We use it with all of our clients. That's what we have for them. And it does meet even a lot of these DOD requirement on top of. Depending again, how much security you need. We will use duo D U O and it also has this authenticator functionality and we will also use UBI keys.

These are those hardware key. They do oh, can provide you with hardware tokens. Those are those little tokens that can go onto your key ring. That show a changing six-digit number every 30 seconds. And that's the same number that would be there in your smartphone app. Your one password or Google authenticator smartphone.

Hopefully, I didn't confuse you too much. I think most of the reason we're not using the security we should is because we're not sure how to, and we don't know what we're going to be. And I can see that being a big problem. So if you have questions about any of this, if you would like a copy of my password security, special report, just send an email to me.

M [email protected]. That's me M [email protected]. That's S O N.com. I'll be glad to send it to you. Also, if you sign up for my newsletter there on my [email protected], you are going to get. I was hold little series of the special reports to help you out, get you going. And then every week I send out a little bit of training and all of my articles for the week.

It's usually six to 10 articles that I consider to be important so that, what's going on in the cybersecurity world. So you can. With it for yourself, for your family, for your business. Craig peterson.com.

According to researchers. 32% of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse. And you know what Facebook knew and knows Instagram is toxic for teen girls.

There's a great article that came out in the Wall Street Journal.

And I'm going to read just a little bit here from some of the quotes first. When I went on Instagram, all I saw were images of chiseled bodies, perfect. Abs and women doing 100 burpees in 10 minutes, said, Ms. Now 18, who lives in Western Virginia. Amazing. Isn't it. The one that I opened now with 32% of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram, I made them feel worse.

So that is studies again, that looks like yeah, these were researchers inside Instagram and they said this in a March, 2020 slide presentation that was posted to Facebook's internal message board that was reviewed by the wall street journal quote comparisons on Instagram can change how young women view and describe themselves.

Apparently, for the past three years, Facebook has been conducting studies into how Instagram is affecting its millions of young users. Now, for those of you who don't know what Instagram is, it allows these users to create little stories, to have. Pictures videos of things that they're doing, and it's a lifestyle type thing you might've heard, of course, of how this I don't know what it is.

Kidnapping murder plot. These, this young couple and the body I think was found up in Wyoming. I'm trying to remember, but of her and it's yeah, there it is. It wasn't my OMI. And I'm looking up right now, Gabby potato. That's who it is. She was what they called a micro influence. And I know a lot of people who can loom, that's what they want to be.

There's a young lady that stayed with us for a few months. She had no other place to live. And so we invited her in here and we got some interesting stories to tell about that experience. And it's, a little sad, but anyhow, she got back up on her feet and then she decided she was going to become an influence.

And what an influencer is someone that has a lot of followers. And of course, a lot means different numbers. You get these massive influencers that have tens of millions of people that quote, follow unquote them. And of course, just think of the Kardashians they're famous for. Being famous, nothing else.

They have subsequently done some pretty amazing things. At least a few of them have. We've got one of those daughters who now was the first earliest billionaire. I think it was ever youngest. So they have accomplished some amazing things after the fact, but they got started. By just becoming famous by posting on these social media sites.

So you get a micro-influencer, like Gabby Petito, who is out there posting things and pictures. And you look at all of these pictures and, oh my gosh, they're up at this national park. Oh, isn't she so cute. I'll look at her boyfriend. They'll look so good together and people. Fall for that image, right? It's just like Photoshopping these pictures of models, changing them.

There've been some real complaints about those over the years. So Instagram sets these kids up with these pictures of people that are just totally unrealistic. One of the slides from a 2019 presentation says, quote, we make body. Excuse me. We make body image issues worse for one in three teenage girls teams, blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety.

And depression said another slide. This reaction was unprompted and consistent across. Groups among teens is this according to the wall street journal who reported suicidal thoughts, 13% of British users, and 6% of American users trace the desire to kill themselves to Instagram. Again, according to one of these presentations, isn't this just absolutely amazing.

And you might've heard it discussed a little bit. I saw some articles about it, obviously in the news wall street journal had it, but this is a $100 billion company, Instagram. That's what their annual revenues. More than 40% of Instagram users are 22 years old and younger. And about 22 million teens log into Instagram in the US each day, compared with 5 million that log into Facebook, the younger users have been declining.

Facebook it's getting the population there is getting older and older on Facebook. In average teens in the us spend 50% more time on Instagram than they do on Facebook. And also tick-tock, by the way I took talk has now surpassed YouTube in some of these metrics. Quote, Instagram is well-positioned to resonate and win with young people said a researcher's slide posted internally.

Inside Facebook. Another post said there is a path to growth. If Instagram can continue their trajectory. Amazing. So Facebook's public phase has really tried to downplay all of these negative effects that the Instagram app has on teens, particularly girls, and hasn't made its research public or available to academics or lawmakers who have asked for it.

Quote, the research that we've seen is that using social apps to connect with other people. Positive mental health benefits said Mark Zuckerberg. He's the CEO of course of Facebook. Now this was 2020. In March one at a congressional hearing, he was asked about children and mental health. So you see how he really lawyered the words that they can have positive mental health benefits, but Facebook's own internal research seems to show that they know it has a profound negative effect on a large percentage of their users.

Instagram had Adam Moseri told reporters in may of this year, that research he had seen suggest the app's effect on team's wellbeing is likely quote quite small. So what the wall street journal seems to be pointing out here is that Facebook is not giving us the truth on any of this stuff. It's really sad.

We've got to be careful. No, apparently Mr. Moseri also said that he's been pushing very hard for Facebook to really take their responsibilities more broadly. He says they're proud of this research. I'm just summarizing this before we run out of time here, but it shows the document. Internal documents on Facebook show that they are having a major impact on teen, mental health, political discourse, and even human trafficking.

These, this internal research offers an unparalleled picture. Courtney told the wall street journal of how Facebook is acutely aware that the products and systems central to its business success routine. Fail great article. I've got it in this week's newsletter. You can just open it up and click through on the link to the wall street journal.

They have a paywall and I hate to use payroll articles, but this one's well worth it. And they do give you some free articles every month. So if you're not on that newsletter, you can sign up right now. Craig peterson.com. You'll get the next one. If you miss a link today, if you want some, the special report on passwords, et cetera, just email me directly.

Give me a few days to respond. But me M [email protected]. That's me M [email protected].

We've all worked from home from time to time. At least if we're somehow in the information it industry, I want to talk right now about why you need a personal laptop. Even if the business is providing you with a laptop.

Laptops are something that was designed to be personal, but many of us are using them as our main computer.

I know I often am using my laptop, a couple of my kids and my wife. It's really their main computer, even though they all have other computers that they could potentially be using, laptops are just handy and you have them with, you can take them with you. We've got workstation set up that are kind of.

Workstations, if you will, where there are three screens set up and they're all hooked up into one central screen controller that then has a USBC connection that goes right into the, your laptop. So you can be sitting there with four screens on your Mac laptop on your mac pro if you need four screens, it's really handy.

No question. Many of us have a laptop for home and a laptop for business. And many of us also look at it and say, oh wow, this is a great laptop I got from work. It's much better than my home laptop. And you start to use the business laptop for work. At home. Okay. That's what it's for. Right. But then we start to use that business laptop for personal stuff.

That's where the problems start. We've seen surveys out there that are shown. Then half of workers are using work issue devices for personal tasks that might be doing it at home. They might be doing it at the office. Things like personal messages, shopping, online, social media, reading the news. So the prospect of using your work laptop as your only laptop, not just for work, but also for maybe watching some movies, group chat and messaging, reading, fan fiction, paying bills, emailing to family or friend.

It just seems not. It's so tempting. It's just natural. I'm on it. I'm on it all day long. Why wouldn't I just use it? And this is particularly true for people who are working from home, but we have to be careful with that. It's really something that you shouldn't be doing for a couple of reasons. One that.

Top that's a business. Laptop is the property of the business. It's just like walking home with boxes, full of pencils and paperback in the old days, it is not yours to use for personal use. We also have to assume, assume since it is the company's laptop that hopefully it's been secure. Hopefully they haven't set up.

So it's going through a special VPN at the office and it's going through special filters, maybe snort filters or something else. That's doing some deeper inspection on what's coming through your laptop. Well, there are also likely on that laptop. Tools that are monitoring your device. Things like key loggers, biometric tracking, Jill location, software that tracks your web browser and social media behavior, screenshot, snapshot software, maybe even your cam.

Is being used to keep track of you. I know a number of the websites that I've used in the past to hire temporary workers. Those workers have to agree to have you monitor what they're doing. These hourly workers, subtle take screenshots of their screen, unbeknownst to them. Pictures from the cameras at random intervals.

Again, unbeknownst to them, it'll track what they're doing. And so I can now go in and say, okay, well he billed me five hours for doing this. And I look at his screen and guess what? He wasn't doing that for all of those five hours that he just billed me. Well, the same thing could be true for your company, even if you're not paid by the hour.

Right now, we're looking at stats that show over half of the businesses that are providing laptops for the employees to use more than half of them are using monitoring software. And through this whole lockdown, the usage of these different types of monitoring systems has grown. Now there's some of the programs you're using.

You might be VPN in, you might be using slack or G suite enterprise, all good little pieces of software. They can monitor that obviously, but it goes all the way through to the business. And using your slack access as paid for, by the businesses also idiotic to do things like send messages to your buddies, set up drinks after work, complain to other people about someone else in the business, your boss, or otherwise your it, people at the business can see all of that.

They can see what you're doing with slack. Even if you have a separate personal account. It's still more likely that you'll end up mixing them up if you're logged into both on the same computer. So the bottom line is if you are on a work computer, whether it's a laptop or something else, you can reasonably assume that I T can see everything.

That's not. They own it. Okay. And they have to do some of this stuff to protect themselves. We put software on laptops for companies not to spy on employees. That's none of our business, but we put software on computers for employees. To make sure they stay safe. Think of what happens when your computer, your laptop, whatever it might be, connects to the company's network.

Now that can be through a VPN. It can be because you take your laptop home or on the road when you're traveling and you bring it back into the office. If that computer is infected, somehow now you've brought that infection into the office. And that's how a lot of the malware works. It goes from computer to computer.

So once they get in that front door where there's through a website and email that you clicked on or in a computer that you're bringing into the office, they can start to move around. Now it's not just your activity. And this is an interesting article from the verge by Monica chin. It's not just your activity that they can see on your laptop, but in many cases, they're also able to look at anything you're downloading any of your photographs or videos that you might've sinked up from your smart.

Laura loading these types of things, your text messages on your work device for safekeeping, or just because it's your primary device might seem harmless, right? Cause you're just going to remove them before you hand it in. But some companies such as Apple won't allow you to wipe your device before handing it in regardless of how personal the contents are.

And that makes sense too, because many times an employee leaves. And they don't give the company all of the information that they have, that they're obliged to give back to their employer. Things that they've been working on, customer information, et cetera. So Manalive, there are plenty of other devices out there.

Hopefully if you leave your company with plenty of notice, moving a bunch of things off your work device in the last few days, uh, might raise some eyebrows at the. And I'm saying hopefully, because they should notice that sort of thing, because it could be malicious activity. It could be an insider risk that maybe they're not even aware of.

There's so much you could go wrong here. So bottom line don't use the work laptop for home. So what should you use? You know, my personal recommendation. Almost always is get a Mac. They are safer to use the patches that they get are usually not destructive. You know, sometimes you can install a patch for windows and now your machine just won't work anymore.

Right. You've had that happen. I know every last one of us out there that are tried to install Microsoft patches for a while have had that happen to them. All of a sudden the patch has completely messed up your computer and you are so out of luck, it's ridiculous. Right? So don't, you know, hopefully don't do that, but I like the max because they are basically safer than windows.

And also because the patches just work on them, apple tends to get them out in plenty of time to try and protect us the next level. If he can't afford an apple and. Apple laptops really are not expensive when you consider how long they last and the quality that components, they are not expensive at all.

But if you can't afford that, the next thing I would look at is getting a Chromebook. There are a lot of companies that make Chromebooks Chrome is an operating system from Google. It's similar to Android. Google keeps the Chromebooks up-to-date. They patch them quite regularly and make sure that there aren't nastiness is going on.

You just have some of the same issues and Android has patches might take a while to get to you because it has to go through the vendor that made the Chromebook. You might have a Chromebook for Sam from Samsung, for instance, it's not Google's even though it's called a Google Chromebook. Now Chromebooks rely heavily on the cloud services that Google provides, but they can also run just locally.

So with a Chromebook and you can get them for as little as 150 bucks, but remember you get what you pay for. Or as much as I've seen them in the $2,000 price range with fancy GPU's, local storage and other things, but at 150 bucks, it could be well worth it for you. It lets you do the regular word processing.

Just think of what you can do with Google docs, spreadsheets against Google docs, spreadsheets, all of those types of things are built into it. You can. Cruz the web, obviously using Google Chrome on your Chromebook. And send and receive email, which is what most people do. That's really kind of all, most people do at home.

So consider that as well. I also like iPad. They are quite safe again, but they tend to be more expensive and they can do pretty much everything. And now with Android support built right into Google Chromebooks, you can even run Android apps. So there you go. Keep safe and be safe out there. Right. Have a hack free life.

Make sure you get my newsletter. Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Craig peterson.com/subscribe.

The national cyber director, Chris Inglis said that we need cyber bullets, that cyber bullets are part of the war on hacks. And it makes sense on one level. But when you get into the reality, it's a much different story..

I had an interesting email this week from a listener. Actually he sent it about two weeks ago when I finally was able to get to it this week and responded, and he was pointing out how there are some things that I talk about on the show that I put into my newsletter that are really good.

And. I'm paraphrasing here but theoretical to so many people, there's some things that you can figure out pretty easily yourself. Some things you can do yourselves and other things that are just different. To do still. And a lot of that has to do with the websites you go to in order to maintain your passwords.

And he was complaining specifically about bank of America and how you can, according to what he has found here in the real world, you can come up with a. Password a 20 character long password that is going to keep everything nice and safe at trend to be generated. You're using one password and great. So you set your password up in bank of America's account, and then you try and log in later, and it doesn't work because it lets you put 20 character passwords and when you're creating it, yeah.

But the login screen only takes the first 16. So of course they'd home match. You see it's things like that really are pushing us back, holding us back. But I'd say pushing us back from being secure as a country, there, there just aren't enough people paying enough attention to make sure this cyber security, even the basic stuff like passwords and two factor authentication are being done properly.

So one of the things I wanted to make sure you guys were aware of is I need to know when you're having these problems, because what I want to do is put together some trainings to show you exactly how to do it. Because on some websites you were saying, it's pretty hard to use one password he's paying for it, but it's kinda difficult for him.

And I think in some ways, a lack of understanding. Then, it can be difficult to spend a bunch of time trying to watch some training videos for some of the software. And so I want to hear when you're having problems so I can do what I did for him this week and spend a little time, write some stuff up, and I even am reaching out to some of this website.

People like bank of America who are really messing up cyber security for people who are trying to do the right thing and writing them and saying, Hey, listen, I'm part of the FBI InfraGard program. I'm a member of it. I paid a lot of attention to cybersecurity. Heck I ran the training for the FBI InfraGard program for a couple of years, and there are some real things lacking.

In the login anyways, and this one particular case of the cybersecurity, but I don't know all of this stuff. I'm not using all of these things and I have a disadvantage over you guys, and that is that I've been doing this for so long. I've forgotten what it's like to not know it. Does that make sense?

So if you have something that I've talked about on the show, that's appeared in my newsletter and you're having some confusion over, let me know. Just email me M [email protected]. What he did is he just hit reply to my newsletter. And of course, that goes to me and [email protected] and it tracks it.

So I know I need to reply, so I can sit down and go through and answer people's questions. I sent out a lot of the copies of my password, special report to people you guys had requested specifically some of the. People out there had requested a little bit of help. And I had sent out an email to most of the people that I could identify as being business people.

I sent out a little thing saying, Hey, listen, if you could use half-hour my help, let me know myself or my team. And then, again, you can just send me an E Craig. So I answered a lot of those questions this week. And in fact, that's how I come up with much of what I cover here on the show. You guys ask the questions and that's how I know that it's a real problem.

If I understand it, that's one thing. But for the people who don't do cybersecurity as their primary job or a strategy, I get it. I can get why you guys are confused. So make sure you get my weekly newsletter. So you can find out about all of the trainings, the free stuff, the paid courses, and. It's easy.

Just go to Craig peterson.com/subscribe. That's Craig Peterson, P E T E R S O N. Craig peterson.com/subscribe. And I'm more than glad. Add you to that list. And there are now thousands of people on that list to get my email pretty much every week. If you miss it one week, it's probably, cause I just got too busy, but I put out all my show notes.

I put it all a little bit of training notes, all. The us government is supposedly getting ready to fire what they're calling cyber bullets in response to these significant hacking attacks. This is what they're calling a comprehensive strategy to dissuade. Adversaries. And this is all from the national cyber security director, Chris Inglis.

This is from an article in American military news.com by Chris Strome. That was out this week. And of course I included that in my newsletter this week as well, coming out. Today or tomorrow, depends on how this all goes right with the weekend. I got to help a buddy out today, but president Joe Biden has been really talking about how do we use cyber weapons to retaliate.

For instance, he gave a list of industries that Russia should not be. As though Putin himself is running all of these hacks or come out of Russia. Yeah, certainly there are some that are part of their military, but there many of them that are just bad guys that are trying to make some money, we should feel sorry for them.

So Biden gives him this list and says, Hey, listen, if you attack any of these various industries or actually portions of our economy, We are going to retaliate. We have seen the us retaliate under President Trump and the retaliation. Of course he did all kinds of economic stuff to stop it. And much of which has been reversed by president Biden's administration, but also he attacked them directly in.

Down some power systems there in the Moscow area, which I thought was really kinda cool. So kudos to President Trump for doing that and for president and Biden now to say, Hey, we are going to attack back. Of course. The biggest question is. What would we be attacking? How would we be attacking it? And for what reason, for instance, the red Chinese have gone after our office of personnel management, OPM records and got them all back in 2015.

So they now know everything about everybody that had a secret security clearance or the took a paycheck from the federal government. All of those records, they would get their hands on them and get them on all of the records a lot. So Inglis was in front of the let's see here, the, yeah, he was a former director of the national security agency.

He's the first to hold his Senate-confirmed position at the white house, this national cyber director position. And he says there is a sense that we can perhaps fire some cyber bullets and shoot our way out of this English set at the conference. It was hosted by the way, by the national security agency and a nonprofit group, he said that will be useful in certain circumstances.

If you had a clear shot at a cyber aggressor and I can take them offline, I would advise that we do so as long as the collateral effects are acceptable. Yeah. What we have done here under president Biden administration is we have shut down some people who were operating illegally, we have shut down some cyber actors that were attacking us.

So we've been doing that, but it isn't exactly. Wow. We just saw a muzzle flash over there. And so we are returning fire to the area of that muzzle flash, because as I've said many times before, we just don't know. Where in fact that bullet is coming from, it makes it a lot more difficult. English went on to say there's a larger set of initiatives that have to be undertaken.

Not one of those elements is going to be sufficient to take this. Out let's see here, the us should make clear to Russia now their adversaries, what kinds of attacks would prompt a response, which is what president Biden did when he was talking with, of course, President Putin over there, red lines of both good and bad red lines are clear and crisp.

Although I got to say many of our administrations have. Really done anything about it. It's the red line in the sand and Syria president Obama didn't do anything when they stepped over that red line. So yeah. And then with what we just finished doing in Afghanistan, where we drew a red line and said, we're going to protect all of you who helped us.

And then we not only abandoned them, but we abandoned Americans behind there. I don't think a lot of people aren't going to believe us. So here's the last statement here. And again, this is an article in American military news from our cyber chief is the government actions. Aren't always going to be broadcast.

In some cases, it's not helpful to broadcast those for all of mankind to see another one. We are doing some things behind the scenes. And I have certainly seen some of the results of those over the last few years. Stick around. You're listening to Craig Peterson [email protected].

You've got a smartphone and there are some new versions out, right? New hardware, new software, Android iOS. How long should you keep that device? How long can you stay safe with that older device?

Apple has now done something. Different something they've never done before. One of the reasons that apple equipment tends to be safer than almost anything else out there is that they have, what's known as a closed ecosystem. There's arguments both directions here on whether that's safer or not.

But the real advantage when it comes to cybersecurity is there are only. So many versions of the iPhone out there. What are we now in a couple of dozen versions of the hardware platform that makes it easier for apple to be able to support older versions of the software and multiple pieces of hardware, much easier than for, let's say Microsoft windows.

It doesn't even have a single. Platform or Android, where there are hundreds of hardware platforms out there and tens of thousands of versions of the hardware, because one model phone can contain many. Changes different types of hardware to talk to the cell towers or the screen you name it. So it's very hard to keep up. Android has for quite a while now supported three versions of their operating system. Of course, we're talking about Google, but Android operating system. So they support the current release. Of Android and the Breviary release is two previous releases in fact of Android. Now that is frankly a pretty good thing to know, but there's over a billion Android devices out there that are no longer supported by security updates.

We've got Android 10, nine, and eight that are fairly supported right now. We're actually up to Android 12. So here's how it works. If you've got Android version 10 out, if that's the main one, then you can continue to do. Eight and nine and get updates, security updates. But then here's the problem, everybody, those security updates are coming out of Google, but that does not mean that they are making it all the way to you.

So there you go. It's one thing for Google to provide updates, but if you can't get them because your phone manufacturer is not supporting them, you've got trouble Samsung. Is probably the best company other than maybe Google and the Google Pixel phone. Samsung's the best company to go to. If you want some longer-term support.

Many of these other companies just don't provide support past the current version. So keep that in mind as well. Android 12 was the 12th major version of Android announced by Google, February, 2021. And it is starting to roll out a Android. The 11th, 11 is the one that was out in February of last year. At least it was announced then.

And we're, they're coming out, they're getting pushed out. So basically Google is saying the current version plus two prior versions. And that usually gives you about a four or maybe even a five year window. So if you're. An Android device from a major manufacturer, particularly Samsung on the Android side, your device is going to be good for at least four years, maybe five years now on the, and by the way, you don't necessarily have to upgrade the.

You could be continuing to run an older release saw, as I mentioned earlier, if it version 11 is the current one that's out there being supported, which it is right. 12 is early still, but version 11, that means two prior versions still get security updates. You don't get featured.

Dates, you don't get the new stuff, but you get security updates. So Android 11, the current one that means 10 and nine get security updates. So you don't, you're not being forced to do an upgrade. Most people don't upgrade their phones from an older major release to a newer major release. In other words, they don't try and go from Android eight to Android 11.

Because in fact, most of the time, the hardware manufacturer doesn't support it. That's why there's over a billion Android devices out there right now that cannot get security updates. So have a look at your phone and your vendors. See what you're running. You probably want to do an update because most phones cannot get any support on the, in the apple side.

Things are a lot different with Apple iOS, which is the operating system used on the iPhone and the I pad apple has always forced you to move to the next major version. No, they only force you to do that. If they support the hardware. And I've got to say kudos to them, they're still supporting the iPhone six S which came out quite a while.

The iPhone success is something that my wife has been using and that I had as well. In fact, she got my old iPhone success, but that's a six-year-old. Phone came out in September of 2015. So it is still getting security updates, and we'll probably continue to get them. Not only is it getting security update this six-year-old iPhone success is getting the latest and our iOS operating system.

It's getting iOS 15. Isn't that just amazing? Yeah, exactly. And so not just security updates, like you might get from some of the other vendors out there, Android vendors. So the apple keeps their arms around you for quite a while. Here's, what's changed now with Apple and iOS, the, for the first time ever in the iOS world, Apple is not forcing you to upgrade.

So you're not being forced to upgrade to iOS 15. You can continue to run iOS 14. And that's how apples got around the security patches in the past, because what happens is you get the updates and installs them. Basically. There's no reason for you not to upgrade your phone. And so you do so apple never had to worry about releasing some of these fixes for really old versions of iOS.

Although they have done that from time to time. In the Mac iOS side, Apple has done a couple of good things. The, where they always have supported basically three releases, what Google's doing with Android. So you now have a new feature. If you will, with iOS, here's a PSA for everyone. Public service announcement.

You don't have to take the iOS 15 upgrade. Now I did. I put it on my iPhone and I seem to have some sort of a problem with messages where it's telling people that my phone has notifications turned off, which it does not. So I haven't figured that one out yet. I'll have to look into that a little bit more, but.

This is nice because that means you're not going to have to upgrade your iPhone to iOS 15. You'll still get security updates for iOS 14, something Apple's never done before. We'll see if they continue this. We will see if they match Google going back. Three releases in Android. It just never been done before over on the iOS.

So good news for them. Also course in the windows world and the Mac world, you really should upgrade the operating system as much as you can. Windows 11 though, man, windows 11. And I said this to my newsletter. I warned you guys is going to be a nightmare. For many people. You are not going to be able to do an automatic upgrade unless you have the newest of hardware, with the highest end of features, Craig peterson.com.

One of the very big ransomware operations is back online. And now we have some inside information from one of the contractors working for this ransomware organization and oh yeah, there's an FBI tie, too..

This organization, ransomware gang, almost business, whatever you might want to describe them as is known as revolt. They have a few other names, but that's the really big one. And they are basically the 800 pound gorilla in the ransom. Business, you might be using cloud services right now.

Maybe you use Microsoft's email service. Their Microsoft 360, I think, is what they call it now and use it for email and various other things pretty handy. It's mostly in the cloud. Computers you own or operate or have to maintain. I think that makes some sense too, but here's the bottom line it's software as a service right now, salesforce.com software as a service, Oracle has their accounting stuff.

QuickBooks online, all software as a service. It isn't just those legitimate businesses that I just mentioned. That are using the cloud that are providing software as a service where you're paying monthly or however frequently. And you're getting this software as a service. That's what that means.

Typically it means it's in the cloud and you don't have any real control over it. That's what this ransomware gang has been doing. This gang known as rebill. They all appear to be in. And there's some interesting stuff. That's come out. A transcript was released of an interview with one of their contractors.

Now the original interview was in Russian. So I read through a translation of the Russian. I have no idea how good it is, but it is being quoted by a bank. Insider magazine that you might be familiar with bank info, security. That's one of the places that I follow. And there's a few interesting things that he talked about that I want to get into, but these are the people who have been behind things like the colonial pipeline attack and some of the other very large attacks, the way they work, their business model is.

You can license their software, their ransomware software, and you go after a business or a government agency, whatever it might be, you get that ransomware software inside. And the reveal gang will take a percentage of the money that you have in rent. Now, how is that for a, an interesting business model, right?

Taking something that the rest of the world has been using, and then take that model and put it into the legal side of the world. For three weeks, during this whole reveal ransomware attack, this summer turns out that the FBI secretly withheld the key that could have been used to decrypt. And computers that reveal had infected with ransomware and looks like kids up to maybe 1500 networks.

Now those are networks, not just computers. That includes networks run by hospitals, schools, and businesses, including critical infrastructure businesses. The way the FBI got their hands on this decryption game. Is by penetrating reveal gangs servers. So they got into it. They were able to grab the keys and then the FBI waited before.

Did anything with it. See, what they were trying to do is catch the people behind reveal. And so they didn't want to release information, get information out there to the press that might tip off those bad guys over there in Russia. And then shut down their operations. But as you might know, because I mentioned it here before the reveal gang went offline on July 13th, before the FBI could really track them down.

And then the FBI didn't release the key until July 21st. And then I think it was Malwarebytes released a decryption tool. So if you had been hacked by the gang, you could. Now, remember it isn't reveal itself. That's doing most of them. Ransomware hacking if you will or a placement it's small guys. And that's why some people, including this contractor that apparently worked for the reveal gang itself says, people think that it's the Russian government, that it's Putin, that's doing this.

He said, in fact, it's not it's small guys. And people like me are getting four or five hours a night. Because we're working so hard trying to make a whole of this work, come up with the new software approaches. We have to provide code tech support unquote to our affiliates, as well as tech support to the people who have had their computers and their data ransomed.

So it a real interesting mix. Absolutely. Interesting mix. Now Christopher Ray here a couple of weeks ago, he's the FBI director told Congress that cool. We make these decisions as a group, not unilaterally. To the FBI and working with other government agencies, these are complex decisions designed to create maximum impact.

And that takes time and going against adversaries, where we have to marshal resources, not just around the. But all over the world. So this Russian based gang first appeared in 2019, they've been around, they've been exporting large amounts of money from businesses for a very long time. One of the interest he'd things I think about all of this is that this reveal gang has their software as a service, and they provide it to quote affiliates, quote that, go ahead and then install the software, get you to install it on your computers in order to ransom you a double whammy ransom you, but there's now reports out there that there's a secret back door in the ransomwares code that allow.

Rebill to go around their affiliates and steal the proceeds. How's that for hilarious, you've got a bad guy who goes in and gets the software from revolt, pays them a commission, and then reveal apparently has been jumping in on these customer support chats. In other words, you just got nailed and because you got nailed with ransomware, you have to go to.

Chat room. And so you go in there and you're getting customer support on how to buy Bitcoin and how to transfer to their wallet. And apparently revival is getting right in the middle and is extorting money from these people directly instead of having the affiliates do it pretty amazing. So here's this part of this interview?

It was aired on the Russian news outlet, London. And was trans translated by yeah. Flashpoint. Here are the guys that got the full transcript of the interview. He says in the normal world, I was called a contractor, doing some tasks for many ransomware collectives that journalists considered to be famous.

Money is stolen or extorted with my hands, but I'm not ashamed of it. I do. And again, this goes into the thinking of many of these bad guys of Americans are all rich and they don't deserve what they have. He said, let's put it this way. This is a very time consuming job. And if you've earned enough, then you can quit the game.

But chronic fatigue, burnout, deadline. All of these words from the life of ordinary office workers are also relevant for malware developers. So there you go. You should feel sorry for these malware developers who are developing software to steal millions from you and. Down our critical infrastructure.

Hey, join me online. Craig peterson.com. And if you subscribe to my weekly newsletter right there on the site, I'll send you a few of my special reports. The most popular ones will come to you right there in your email box. Craig peterson.com/subscribe.

We all pretty much have some form of insurance. And we're going to talk right now about the types of cyber insurance you may have. Now this might be through your homeowners policy or perhaps a rider on a business policy.

Many of our homeowners policies have started coming with cyber insurance.

So we're going to talk about that. What is it? Businesses as well are also using cyber insurance and I'm sure you've heard of insurance basically called LifeLock and what that's all about. So let's kind of start. When we have a breach in a business, usually what happens is information about our customers is stolen.

Look at some of the biggest breaches in history where we. Hundreds of millions of our personal records stolen Equifax breach is an example of a huge breach where we had all kinds of personal information that was stolen by the bad guys. Now, some of this information gets stale pretty quickly, but of course, other parts of it like our address, our social security number, they are probably not going to change for years.

If for. No, of course our social security number will never change the social security administration. Just doesn't reissue them for very many reasons at all. And they do not reissue a social security number was stolen online because. Just about everybody's has, so what does a company like LifeLock do?

They keep an eye on your credit report for you. And they're looking at what's going on new accounts that are open. They look at various other things, just related to that. And they, at that point say, wait a minute, something weird is happening. Now my credit cards, for instance, I have a credit card that if let's say I buy two of the same thing, one after the other and the, both the same price that credit card company pops a message right up on my phone saying, Hey, did you just buy two?

Of these $15 things from and I can say yes or no, if I'm out on the road and I am purchasing gas, the credit card can pop up on my phone and it does and say, Hey, will you just trying to buy gas at this gas station? Because what'll happen as you use the credit card at the pump. And the pump says it was denied and then up at pops and yeah.

Okay. No, that was me. And they said, okay, we'll try the transaction. Okay. And we'll approve it next time. And that's all automated. And that has nothing to do with LifeLock. LifeLock is there to more or less detect that something happened and if something happened and it was a bad guy and basically your identity was stolen.

So they might be trying to buy a Ferrari in your name or maybe a 10 year old, four Ford focus, whatever it might be. And. They will help you try and clean it. That's what they do. So that's why it's cheap. And I don't know that it's terribly useful to you if you're really concerned. Go ahead and do that, but do keep an eye on your credit report.

I do as well. My bank has free credit reporting for me, my credit card. Same thing. Free credit reporting that lets me know everything that's going on. So that's an easy way to tell WhatsApp. And there are different types of cyber insurance beyond this sort of thing, beyond the LifeLocks of the world. And many of us just get our cyber insurance through our homeowner's policy.

It's a little rider. And businesses can buy cyber insurance as well. We have cyber insurance, that's underwritten by Lloyd's of London and we provide a $500,000 or million-dollar policy to our clients. As well, because that's what we do is cyber security, right? So the idea is if one of our clients gets hit, we have some insurance to back us up, but of course we go a lot further.

It's almost like the LifeLock where if you do get hit by ransomware or something else, we will help you get back in business. We'll help restore your data. We'll help you with providing you. The information you need in order to do press releases, which agencies you need to contact, which of your customers you need to contact.

And we've got scripts for all of that. So you can send it all out and just take care of it. So the idea is you don't want ransomware. So you hire us. We are extremely likely to keep ransomware out of your systems. And on top of that, if you are hit with ransomware, we restore everything. LifeLock does not do that.

Obviously they all, I'll only do stuff after the fact and the cyber insurance you buy from an insurance agency is much the same, and there's a huge caveat with these policies that we're buying for our businesses and for our homes. And that is. They have a checklist at the insurance companies. Did you do this and this?

And if you did, then they might payout if you did not, they may not payout. In fact, pay outs on cyber insurance policies are not known because. Bottom line. They really don't payout. Okay. I'm looking at some numbers right now and about paying ransoms and everything else. You may or may not.

You got to have a look at it. Many of these policies are never paid out by the cyber insurance covers. They usually just regular insurance companies, but it's a special rider. And what they do is they say, Hey, listen, you did not follow the rules, so we're not going to payout. And there are many cases.

If you go online and do a search, just use duck, go and say cyber insurance, payout. Lawsuits I'm doing that right now is. And it'll come up and show. Oh, okay. Does it cover lawsuits? Why are liability claims so costly? Yeah, exactly. A 2% payouts is talking about here. I'm invoicing, the most common cyber insurance claim denial.

Yeah, it goes on and on. There are a lot is an act of war clause could nix cyber insurance payouts. That's another big one that they've tried to use. So the cyber insurance company will say, Hey, that was China attacking you. Therefore it was an act of. And you can bet if there is a big hack, they will use that.

Think of what happens with the hurricanes coming onshore. How much do they push back on payouts? Especially with the real big one, it would bankrupt them. So we gotta be very careful. There are some different types of cyber insurance. Policies do which have different types of coverages. You've got the first party lost loss, I should say.

So that's you to covering you and your loss, your first-party expenses, third party liability. Each one of those has specific parameters. So sub-limit retention and others. First-party losses are usually including the loss of revenue due to business interruption. First party expenses would include all of the services and resources that you needed to use to recover from attack like forensic or system rebuilding services.

These third-party liabilities. May cover expenses and legal fees related to potential damage caused by the incident to third parties like partners, customers, or employees whose sensitive information may have been compromised. So read them carefully. Be very careful. There are next-generation, cyber insurance policies are going even further and make these types of services.

Prior to any incident to reduce exposures and prevent incidents in the first place. Now we don't provide insurance. We are not an insurance company, but that's basically what we're trying to do here. Not become an insurance company, but to make sure. The businesses have the right services so that the likelihood of anything happening or is extremely low.

And then following up after the fact it's different obviously than insurers in and insurance, the guardians, Jessica Crispin had a great article about a couple of weeks ago that I've been hanging on. And it's talking about this tattle where that's been incorporated into the computers we're using at home.

Now we're specifically talking about employers that are putting this. The software on computers, they belong to the companies. A lot of businesses are worried. If workers are at home or where we can't see them, how do we know that they're actually working, not watching Netflix or something else on.

They have, of course, come up with software that can reassure your boss. It does things like take snapshots of what you're doing. Record your keystrokes grabs photos from. Picture from your camera. There's a new program called sneak, which makes your webcam take a photo of you about once a minute and makes available to the supervisor to prove you're not away from your desk.

There's no warning in advance. It just takes that photograph catches your doom. Pretty much anything can be absolutely anything. Then, it's the type of thing you'd expect the national security agency to do. So there are some good reasons for this lack of trust because sometimes employees have not been doing what they should be doing, but this author is blaming mostly the employer here.

These companies that took out PPP loans to stay running through the end of the pandemic and then laid off thousands of workers. Anyway, there's widespread wage theft that end up to hundreds of millions of dollars a year. There's all kinds of stories out on social media, about restaurant owners, withholding waitstaff tips, et cetera, et cetera.

So this is a problem I would encourage you if you are a business owner to doublethink, should I be spying on my employees at home and a funeral employee realize it is probably perfectly legal for your employer to be using this tattle with. To keep track of you. Hey, I've got a bunch of training coming up.

There is stuff every week, in fact, in my newsletter and you can get it. Craig peterson.com/subscribe. And if you'd like my special report on passwords, make sure you send me an email. [email protected]. And if you subscribe, you'll get a bunch of my special reports. Take care. Have a great weekend and visit me Craig peterson.com

Are You Using Encrypted Email Yet? Here's How!

Security emails aren't something that most people think much about. Yet, they're becoming more and more important as the bad guys are monitoring us more closely to steal our information, and then there are advertisers. So, do you want them to see your stuff?

[Automated transcript]

Email is something that's been around now for quite a while.

It was undoubtedly even before the internet standards came out. Many of the systems had a version of the email. I remember some systems back in the early. The seventies, late sixties that had an email functionality is something that we've always needed. Usually, it was for just communicating within a group.

And then, in the early eighties, when I got on the internet, we could send email to people all over the world, and the email then looked a lot like it did. Now you net email, we use different types of addressing for, but basically, it's the same thing that we're used to today. Many of us have Gmail accounts.

I have some Gmail accounts. I use them basically for throw-away stuff that I don't want to have tracked. I don't use Gmail for anything that I consider particularly important, because again, it's not saying. So now there are two types of security. Really. We need to consider, and I got an email from one of the listeners today.

Who's on my newsletter? And he said, Hey, I love all of the stuff you put in the newsletter every week. It helps keep me updated on what's happening in cyber security and what things I need to know. But I'm reluctant to click on any of the links in your email because they're all trackers.

I do that so that I know what the people who subscribed to the newsletter are interested in. So, for example, I see many people clicking on an email I sent out a few months ago talking about different emails, services, and which ones provide the most WhatsApp security.

If a lot of people click on that, Then I know. Oh, okay. Great. People are interested in this. So I'll talk more about it on the radio show. I'll probably put something together for the newsletter so that they have it. It's like the example I've used for a couple of decades now, which is, Hey, if I'm looking to buy a car, I don't mind seeing a car.

Because it gives me something to compare. If I'm looking to buy an F150, I don't want to see ads for the latest Chrysler minivan. I'd like to see ads for people who are competing to sell me a Ford pickup truck. Maybe some competitors, maybe Dodge gets in there with the Ram or Chevy. Their truck, but I wanted to focus in it.

It just makes sense to me because I don't want to waste time on some shoes when that's not what I'm interested in and the person who's paying to show me this ad for shoes is wasting money and being a small businessman. I hate to see that I know what it's like. It gets really frustrating to be spending a lot of money on advertising.

That really is not going in. So you have that type of a monitoring where the advertisers are looking at, what you are looking at, what you're searching for. They know the sites you're going to, they know you're interested in that. F-150. Make sense to you? It certainly does to me as well. So I don't have a big problem at all with a people collecting basic advertising information about me.

It starts to go over a line. It's a little bit of a, an obscured thing, frankly, but it starts to go over the line where they're gathering all this information that could be useful for a bad. We don't want hackers to have the information. I want to have a hack free life. I don't want them going out there and finding information about me and, oh, I'm going to be on vacation.

I'm going to be out of town for three weeks and unable to be reached. And so that gives them the opportunity to now go in via phishing campaign. Maybe try and get my CFO to write a check to somebody or, do something that's frankly, quite malicious. What do we do? How do we deal with that? What makes sense there?

That's a really good question, frankly, and that line has to be drawn by you personally. I draw it as, I don't really care most of the time if someone knows. So here's what I do with my mail client. I turn off the automatic download of photos of pictures, and that way I can see the email. And if it's.

Piece of spam, where I don't even want that spammer to know that I opened the email. They're not going to be able to find out because my male client is not downloading photos. The way it works is you as a marketer or as a spammer. In this case, you are giving a unique URL for that. So that unique URL.

Now, if that photo's downloaded, tells you that almost certainly that person opened your email. What's a legitimate email address. You can spam it some more in the future, a little bit more about them. The same thing is true with my emails. For instance, if you sign up at Craig peterson.com/subscribe, and you get my weekly email.

The training and all the other stuff, that's, all for free in there. You now are telling me when you open it, that you opened my email. Now, why would you want to tell me that? Why would you want to tell anybody that? Nowadays when it comes to email delivery, one of the things we have to face as businesses and as a marketer, who am I using?

Mt. Is that you are great. Every email is scored. This has been true for a long time. SpamAssassin the software I've used for. I don't even know how long now, at least a decade, maybe two. And it looks at the content of the email. It looks to see how much of the email is a graphic. How much of it is using these types of words that are often used by spammers or.

Maybe crazy marketers. So they will score that email. And if it's above a certain score, if it's accumulated too many bad points that email doesn't get delivered, we have a similar system. We have some real fancy stuff that we use ourselves and we use for our clients from Cisco that compares all of these emails that are being delivered worldwide, millions of the members.

And learns from it and automatically blocks them for me, which is really great. But if I'm sending you emails, just like if you're on my email list, I'm going to send you an email at least one a week. Usually not more than two, but basically one email a week. It's not only scored on how my email reads the wording, the.

But it's also scored on how old is my domain. Have other people reported my emails as spam and how many people have opened that email sites? Google track that. So if you're on Google, if you're using. It will come up and the email come up and Google says, okay, he read the email. Maybe he downloaded the photos.

He was very interested in it. But if people are not opening the emails, you start to develop as a person sending an email, a low-risk. Lower and lower in this case, lowers is bad. Then the case of SpamAssassin hires bad. So what'll happen then is your emails will stop getting delivered. You don't want that.

I put a lot of work into these emails. I send out every week. I usually have a number of tips, usually six to eight different ones in each email. I don't want that to go to waste. So if people are not opening my email. Then I'm going to automatically remove them after a period of time from my email list, because I don't want to send email to people who aren't going to open it, because if I do that sites like Google and many others are going to stop delivering my emails to everybody else, the people that do want it, just see how that works.

So I am reliant on understanding if you open the. How can I tell? I can tell if you clicked on a link and I can also tell if you've downloaded any of the graphics that might be in that. Otherwise, I have to assume you're not opening that email. And if you're not opening that email, I don't want to send it to you because if I send it to you and you don't open it, it's going to slow down or completely stopped the delivery to other people within the.

For instance, gmail.com. And this is true for any of the major mail vendors that are out there. And I don't want that to happen. So what I ended up doing, if you have an open them for awhile, I'll send you an email saying, Hey sorry to be bothering you here. But I wanted to make sure that you did want to get these emails or I'm going to automatically remove them.

You might've had that from other people before then. The reason those emails are sent out isn't because I'm being snotty about it. It isn't because I'm upset that you subscribed and you haven't been reading the emails. It's because I don't want my email delivery to other people to be damaged because you have no pundit.

Even though I do block images from being downloaded on my emails at the top of the email when I open it up and it has a little button that says load images. And if that email is from someone that I care about it, isn't from just some spammer that stole my email address or bought it from somebody else.

If it's a legitimate email, I want to see, I click on that load images. So what happens now is the images in that email or downloaded the whoever sent me the email now knows that email was opened up and I don't also get kicked off for their list. Now, a few of you guys have complained about that with me, just not complained as much as said, why are you kicking me off of your email?

I told you it's because you haven't been opened that. Oh, but I haven't opened them. You haven't. But if you turn off the load images on emails, then I don't know that you've been reading them and therefore you're going to automatically end up being re removed. When we come back, I want to talk about secure email providers.

I'm going to compare some of them. And that came up this week because what was the number one secure email vendor out there? They no longer are. So we'll talk about that. It's all in the news. Visit me online. Craig peterson.com.

You use email, everybody uses email, but which providers provide you with security and what do these different types of security actually mean to you? Of frankly? What is security? What is a secure email?

There are a number of different secure email providers.

And there are multiple ways of defining secure email nowadays. All of the email that I send and receive from my company and I send and receive for our client companies is incorrect. There something called TLS. That is basically it's the same as HDDP S it's you know, that secure VPN that set up. No, I don't want you to get confused with these VPM services.

It has nothing to do. But if you go into your web browser and you look up in the URL bar, you'll see a little lock. It's typically on the left side of that bar, you click on it and it will come up and say, the connection is secure. What does that mean? It means that the data that you send from your browser.

We'll get to that remote server in a secure fashion will be encrypted. So if it's intercepted the third party, won't be able to decrypt it. Now there's exceptions to this, but we'll just keep it nice and simple. When we're talking about email and the two email servers talking to each other, we're talking about the same sort of thing.

If you send an email, you have an email provider. It might be my company, but it's not likely, right? Because we only deal with a certain number of small to medium businesses, but the email goes from you to a server. So let's say you're using Microsoft 365. So your email, as you're sending it to [email protected] that email.

Goes from your browser or your email client over to the Microsoft 365 server. Now I understand there's different ways to do it. In fact, we don't do it quite this way. We always go through an intermediate server that we maintain that helps keep things secure, but the email goes over to Microsoft 365. And that first connection is probably a secured connection also by TLS.

Now you're sending it to [email protected]. That was the two address in your email. So what happens next is it needs to find out who's handling the email for Craig peterson.com. It finds out, and then it says, A again, TLS session and encrypted session over to my email server. That encrypted session is much the same as what you have on your web browser.

It is. Very hard, very unlikely that anyone in between can see your email. And then the email ends up on my server, whatever service I'm using for my server. And then it ends up at my client. It might be on my phone. It might be on my desktop. It could be anywhere. And again, that is using another encrypted session.

There's different protocols that might be involved. For instance, I map S SMTP maybe there's TLS over SMTP, whatever. We're not going to get into all of those technical details before you guys all leave me because your eyes just glossed over, but there are a lot of ways to have that all encrypted.

So just sending an email from your phone to [email protected] means it's going through a minimum. Four machines and each time it gets to one of these machines it's encrypted. That's hopeful, right? I'm going to knock on wood here because in reality, not every one of these points has encryption. Not every email service has that type of encryption, TLS, or other ones.

What I want to talk about now is the secure email providers. If you have Microsoft 365 email, you can go to and Microsoft website and send and receive email there. Do your calendar there. You've seen that before. I've used that before, so you can do it all online on the web server. You can also do it on your client on whatever device you have.

These secure email providers. I'm going to talk about right now as a rule are using a web front. So what is a secure email? Obviously the first step needs to be the connection from you to the server needs to be encrypted. And if you're using a web based encryption, which again is that HTTPS, which is the TLS nowadays.

That is encrypted end to ended choosing public key encryption, the whole RSA patent. And it's just fascinating stuff. It was absolutely amazing what they were able to come up with. I love it. There is also the server itself, which needs to be secured somehow. And then how about the ultimate delivery to the third party?

Now we use Cisco again. For our email filters, but that our Cisco server that we have for ourselves here in our very own data center located right here then server also handles emails for some of our other clients. So what happens now is if I want to send a secure email to somebody. Party. So I want to send it to somebody working at the bank or working at the repair shop, whatever it might be.

All I have to do is in the subject line, just say secure and the Cisco email, server's going to notice that. And it is then going to send an email off to the recipient saying you need to come to this IP address. And it gives them a link and I, and grab your secure email. So in that way, I know it was delivered to curly because whoever the recipient is had to go to this secure site on this mail server that my company maintains.

Okay. So that's another way of doing it. If you don't have the types of equipment that I have here in software that we use for small businesses, then there are still some options. The number one for quite a while has been proton mail, P R O T O N M a I L. And I wrote a big thing about that. You would have got that in my newsletter a few months ago.

If you save those things, which you shouldn't do by the way, save them all, just do a search for proton mail in there, and you'll see my detailed explanation of what it is, why you might want to use it. Proton mail is located over in Switzerland. And of course, Swiss has some good privacy laws sodas, the European union, but that was their claim to fame.

Hey, we are in Switzerland. We do not do log. We do have self-destructing messages and we have some real neat little features that you can use on your on your device. That's proton mail. It's been very good, but just this month, a Swiss court ordered proton mail to log the attachment. To their service.

So now when I say attachments, what I mean is the IP address is the two addresses the, from addresses of any body that's using their service. No, they were specifically looking for this one individual. And so now they are doing some logging. They actually have to change their website. So that's a negative and we'll explain why that's a negative.

And we'll talk about a couple of. I of the email services that are out there right now and what you can use, what you might want to use, what the costs are, so that you have a good idea. So stick around because of course we'll be right back. And I want to invite you right now to just take a couple of minutes, go to CraigPeterson.com and subscribe to the newsletter so that you get everything.

You'll get my show notes every week. You'll get some of these free trainings I'm in trying to make it so that it's under three minutes to help you understand different concepts and things that are going on. Craig, Peterson.com/subscribe

What are the features? These secure email providers are providing, what are the costs? Which ones might you want to consider? We're going to run through the top three right now. What are their features and why would you want to use them?

We started talking a little bit about Proton Mail, some of the real basics here, and it is still the kind of 800 pound gorilla when it comes to secure email, finally they had to capitulate to the Swiss court because they are located in Switzerland.

So just goes to show that even being Swiss doesn't mean that it is. Completely secured, then there's a difference too. I want to point out between having a government issue, a subpoena and a court order to have your information revealed. There's a big difference between that and a hacker who's trying to hack you and get into your life.

So I think most of us understand that we need to be secure in our documents. We need to have that privacy is guaranteed to us from the constitution, but we also need to have one more level of security, which is okay. How. The hackers. So having a hack free life means you there's a lot of things that you have to be concerned about, email being one of them.

So I'm not too worried about Proton Mail and the fact that they had a court order to. Provide IP addresses for a specific group of people. And it was a very small group and I can see that. I can agree with that. Proton Mail does have a free version. That's the one I have because I want to try it out.

And it has a 500 megabytes of free. The storage, you can get up to 20 gigabytes and Proton Mail starts at $4 a month. It has end-to-end encryption, which is really important. Again, it means from you all the way to the recipient, all three of these that I'm going to talk about have end-to-end encryption.

They also all have. Two-factor authentication. Remember when we're talking about two factor authentication, a lot of places try to pass off this thing where they send you a text message with a number in it. They try and pass that off as two factor authentication. Yeah, it is a type of two factor authentication, but it's not a.

If you're already doing something like maybe you've got cryptocurrency, you are potentially not only under attack, but I'm very hackable. If you're using a text message in order to verify who you are. So that's an important thing to remember. Proton Mail has self-destructing messages, which is a very big thing, very positive.

It tends to be expensive. Proton Mail being the 800 pound gorilla kinda dictates what kind of price they want to charge and they are on the more expensive. Side the web client is a little bit on the outdated side. It does not support pop three, which I doubt is an issue for any of you guys out there because nowadays the modern email clients aren't using.

Anyways, any more now Proton Mail has PGP support. I use PGP, I have a built into my Mac mail and it allows me to send and receive and do end encrypted messages. And that's something you might want to look at a plugin that uses PGP or GPG, which is effectively the same. Which allows you to send and receive encrypted email using your regular email client.

However, the person who's receiving it at the far end has to have that PGP client or GPG client as it is. So it might not be the best idea in the world to use that. I use it and I use it for. People within the organization that I know have PGP, because again, we're dealing with third parties information.

We have clients and the clients trust us. So we have to be pretty darn careful with some of that stuff. So that's our first one, proton mail. It's something I've used. I know a lot of you are using it. I had so many responses to that email that I sent out to everybody talking about secure email and specifically proton mail.

And you guys were all telling me, Hey, listen, I'm switched on I'm away from Google forever because Google is by far the least secure of anybody you could be using out there. Now, the next one is called top-down. Two U T a N OTA. So it gets just what Tatan call 10 town, tow hours, something like that, but a N O T a I'm sure you guys are gonna all send me pronunciation guides and it has again, a free version, one gigabyte.

So twice as much as proton mail and it doesn't really offer quite as much storage, but it starts at a dollar 18 month. Down from proton mail's four bucks a month. It also has end to end. Encryption also has two factor authentication. It has an encrypted search function, a calendar function, and aliases. I use aliases not only for my hack free life, but I use aliases because I will.

To use a different email address for pretty much everybody I'm dealing with. So these, this way to do that is with an alias. One of the problems here with top I, this is a German company. I bet you it's a German word. Somehow Tottan TOA is that it is injured. Germany is one of those 14 eyes countries. That means it's one of the 14 countries, large countries that share information about people online and spy on each other's citizens.

See, that's how the government's gotten around it. The government have preclusions from monitoring citizens. So what did they do while they all get together, serve with the five eyes now once twenty-something eyes, but they're part of the 14 eyes agreement. So Germany, for instance, would spy on us citizens while they're in the U S.

And the U S will spy on German citizens while they're in Germany and all over the world. Okay. So that's a negative, however, as a general rule, the European union has pretty good privacy laws, so you're probably safe. And then the third one, which is again, the third in my priorities here too, is called counter mail.

Now it has. Interesting features, for instance, they have what are called Ram only servers. So the server boots up, obviously it has to boot off of some sort of a device, but once it's running, everything's in memory. So if that server loses power, it loses everything. Now that's an interesting thing to do and can be a problem if you're trying to store emails, right?

It has men in the middle attack protection, which all of these due to one degree or another, but counter male makes that a kind of a big deal. They have a safe box and anonymous payment systems that you can use. And it starts at $3 and 29 cents a month. They have a four gig storage limit. They do not have a free version.

So I liked this one counter mail, but I do use proton mail, at least for testing. Some mothers also rans here that allow you to send and receive encrypted mail. Secured mail is Zoho mail, Z O H O mail. The X, Y Z is another one post deal. So I've used Zoho before, by the way post geo P O S T E O.

You might want to [email protected] and start mail. So there you go. Top three proton mail. That's still my recommendation. If you want some secure email and it'll cost you a bit, if you want cheaper, look at this T U T A N O T A. All right, everybody make sure you spend right now about a minute.

Go to Craig peterson.com and sign up for my weekly newsletter and training.

Is there no such an example of Silicon valley and they're a hoity toity attitude of fake it until you make it, or is it the reality of Silicon valley? What's happening out there? WeWork and others.

Theranos. How many of you guys know about Theranos? They had a really great idea and it was started in 2003 by a 19 year old young lady named Elizabeth Holmes.

That is pretty young, but her idea was why do we need to have a whole tube or more of blood in order to do blood? With the technology we have nowadays, we should be able to just use a drop of blood and be able to test for hundreds of diseases with just a pinprick of blood. It seemed pretty incredible at the time, but she was able to.

Been a yarn that got a lot of people right into investing in her company. We're talking about nearly a billion dollars in capital that was put into their nose. How could she have fooled all of these people or was she fooling them? Was she doing what you expect to have done in Silicon valley? That is in fact the argument that her attorneys are using right now.

She is on trial because this company Theranos was never able to produce and tests. They could just take out a drop of blood and run hundreds of tests on it. And there's a lot of evidence that has come out that has shown in fact, a great little documentary that I watched not little on her and the company Theranos.

That showed that they had in fact, been taking vials of blood and using other people's equipment, not the Theranos equipment to do the valuations of the blood, to look for diseases, to look for things like vitamin D deficiency that is in fact, something that could have helped with this whole COVID-19 thing.

A real quick and cheap check a vitamin D levels in your blood, but what happened? Elizabeth Holmes was really a great talker. She was able to convince a lot of people and a lot of businesses, including Walgreens to invest in her. Not only did she have Walgreens invest in her, but some of the biggest names that you can think of in the investing community, including Rupert Murdoch, he invested in fairness.

Now her argument in her. At least her attorney's argument is, Hey, listen, we're not doing anything differently than any other Silicon valley company that's out there. It's this whole creed that they have of fake it until you make it. Is that legit. Is it just one more live from Silicon valley?

There's a great article that was in Forbes, talking about some of these, what are called unicorns. These are companies that are startups and are taken under the wing by investors, starting with angels, and then moving into venture capitalist, actually, even before angel. Friends and family and moving into venture capitalist positions, and then eventually public companies, all of these businesses really required proof before they got any funding.

So here's an example from Forbes, Airbnb. Obviously they, hadn't what we consider today to be a rather unique business model. But it had been tried before. The whole assumption was that people would rent rooms in their homes on this huge scale, but they didn't have any pre. They were the first to make it in this global trend, they built up this whole idea of becoming a hotelier yourself with your home.

But when the founder, Brian Chesky tried to get angel capital, he did not get a dime. He had to prove that renters were interested and people were interested in renting out their homes and that he could pull them together. Once he proved that, then he was able to get the money and prove is you. To have a viable business.

First, it's really rare that you don't have to, Facebook was started by Zuckerberg now, all of those stories, but the whole idea was having Harvard students connect with the. And then he expanded it to students and other universities and then expanded it to the world at large, his natural initial investors, like most or friends and family, people who give the money to you because they want to see you successful.

Eventually here. Zuckerberg was able to prove it and get money from Silicon valley. And then VCs, I'm not getting into any of the ethics of how he did it or any of these other people that had Google. Google was started by these two Stanford students page and Brin, and they got angel capital from investors.

And, but these investors were different than most the investors into Google, where people who were already very successful in the computer industry and could understand the ideas behind the algorithm and believed in page and Brynn and that they could grow this company. Microsoft. Again, another company that started with extremely questionable methods was started by gates.

And now. They didn't have any VCs, either. They started by running programs for other people. They convinced IBM that they needed to license an operating system from Microsoft and Microsoft didn't even have the rights to, and then they went out and acquired it on a non-exclusive basis. IBM acquired it from Microsoft and non-excludable exclusive basis.

Then they got VC money after they started to take off. Okay. Amazon was started by bayzos with funding from his family and small investors from Seattle. He got a VC from Silicon valley after he launched and was already earning thousands in revenues. Bezos had real proof. Walmart was started by Sam Walton with 25 grand from his father-in-law.

He built this business and financing strategy and used his skills to become one of the world's most successful companies as he grew. We work. I don't know if you've seen these. There's a great documentary out there. And we work that I watched too, but again, like Elizabeth Holmes, he was a great guy at standing in front of a group and getting investors to put money.

And he was even great at getting people to buy from. We work that he even started this whole, I think it was called wee life thing where he had people who would move into the building. That they were renting this office space from, and they'd all lived there. They all had their own little units and they'd get together every night and they'd eat together and have community and everything again, collapsed when they couldn't sustain the momentum.

And it was like a Bernie Madoff thing where he needed more money coming in order to support it. And he got incredible amounts of money from this big Japanese investor. And then we've got Theron. Elizabeth Holmes. She failed when this investigative reporter questioned whether the technology really works, the investigative reporter said, Hey, can you really do hundreds of tests reliably with just a drop of blood?

Why did this report, or even have to ask the question at all? How about all of these investors? Huge companies, my including medical field companies. How did all of them get built basically into spending about a billion dollars with her in an investor? It is a real problem. And it's a real question because ultimately what we're talking about is companies and Silicon valley thinking you fake it till you make it, who are bilking investors and everybody else out of it.

Now you have to have a certain amount of that. No matter what the company is. Do you think. Faith in yourself. You've gotta be able to stand up and make a presentation to customer or to an investor, an angel investor or friends or family, whatever it might be, but how could you have sold value to customers and convince them?

To pay the rent that's needed before you've even shown a profit. And that's a big question. Things have not changed in Silicon valley because of what we work did. And because of their failure, things have not changed because of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos and the major failure there. These people are investing money.

They hope that two times out of 10, one times out of 10, they will actually make money from their investments. We're talking about the venture capitalists and they are jumping on all of these things that are, maybe. Quite legal. That was actually the pitch that was used by the founder of Uber.

Yeah. We don't really know if this is quite legal or not, but we're going to let people use their own vehicles to drive their own cars, to pick up strangers and take them places. And it was obviously not legal, especially in big cities where they had laws about all of this. And then all of a sudden now Silicon valley.

Really listening closely and say, oh, not quite legal. Okay. That means you are going to completely overturn the whole industry. And that means we could make a whole lot of money on you again, just the knee jerk. So we've got to be careful. The other side of the point and coin is the secret sauce, which is many companies are being careful to not disclose things for very good reason.

They don't want an employee to leave and take with them. Their secrets. Look at the lawsuits that have been out there with Google and some of the other self-driving companies. You stole an executive, the executive brought all of this knowledge. Them. And maybe even some documents, this should not be legal.

And now you've got the Biden administration issuing an executive order, trying to change this whole thing by saying, while you cannot lock people in to not disclosing or to your secrets or to not compete with you. How well to Silicon valley or any business anywhere. To keep their secrets, their secret sauce, the recipe to Coke.

If you will, how are you going to keep it secret if you cannot hold people to these nondisclosure agreement? And so I think again, the Biden administration is going the complete. Wrong direction. I'm going to keep an eye on this whole Theranos thing, this trial that's going on. I didn't have an idea how it's going to turn out, but we do have to change the fake it till you make it.

Ideology of Silicon valley. Hey, take a minute and sign up online. Get my free special reports and trainings. Craig peterson.com. Your cybersecurity strategist.

It doesn't look like what's app is safe anymore. So what can you use if you want to have a conversation with someone, how many of you have a friend that's in China or Iran or Afghanistan or one of those other countries?

I was warning about our friends at Facebook. Of course they've been buying competition and in fact, they're being sued right now because of that.

And they have been going after these companies that look like they are going to eat Facebook's lunch and then they buy them for way more. The market value. So what are the founders supposed to do? If I was offered crazy money for my company, I'd sell it at the drop of a hat. Just like that. It'd be done.

Thank you very much. WhatsApp is one of those apps. My Facebook and Facebook bought it, allegedly because it looked like it was going to be serious competition. So our friends at the federal government decided, okay, we'll let this one go and we'll let them know. When Facebook gets their hands on something, it's like Google, getting their hands on, what's going to happen.

Ultimately Facebook is going to be using it in order to sell you things. I'm not against having these various websites that we use, online apps and other things going ahead and Colleen us a little bit. What about things we want things to mean might want that we don't even know we want because we don't know they're available.

So there's a lot of good reasons from a marketing perspective for them to be able to find out what we're into. They used to be a little bit different than it is today, but not that much. I was in the. Oh, direct marketing business way back in the seventies. It was my second job, really. And I wrote software.

That was part of this system that actually put all of our competitors in the country, out of business. Yeah. I wonder if they're still around. It's called marketing electronics of Canada. And let me see if it comes up. Eh, statistics and be okay, so it's not really around anymore. So they master gone out of business.

But what we would do for our customers is we'd say, okay, so who should you mail to this? It was direct mail back in the day. And so when we get asked a business, we were in and so they'd say, oh, okay. How about we mail to what 40 year old men who maybe want to buy a pickup truck? So how would we do that?

We would look for the magazines that 40 year old men were likely to be. We'd look for anything, the newspaper subscriptions, neighborhoods. It was a real big deal. When, of course the zip code came in. That's not what it is in Canada, but the postal codes came into place because then we could narrow it down based on neighborhoods.

So we'd put all of this together and we'd say, okay if someone is getting this magazine, And they're definitely not getting that magazine, but they're getting this newspaper and they live in this part of town. Then we put all of that together and we did the duplicate eliminations and figured out exactly.

Okay, this is who we want to be. And then we would do direct mail for the customer to all of those people. So it would be whatever it might be back in the day, it was Grolier encyclopedia was our, one of our customers and Columbia music. You remember, those guys was one of our customers and a few other places out there and we made pretty good money and the, it was pretty easy to do.

But back then we were doing almost the same thing. This was what now? 40 plus years ago, as they are doing today. But Facebook of course has way more information. They don't just know what website you might be going to, which is the equivalent of which magazines did you subscribe to back in the day, but they all say.

Are in the middle of your conversations, they know who your friends are. They know what your friends have bought. They know what your friends are interested in. So it's not that much different than it used to be, but it's more intrusive because now instead of only having one. A couple of hundred magazines Countrywide that people might subscribe to.

We now have millions of websites that we're likely to go to. And we have the conversations, the listen in which frankly, I think is the worst part of all of them. So when they bought WhatsApp, there was a warning of by myself and others saying, be careful, Facebook's going to start to watch you on WhatsApp and Facebook.

Good. No. That's never going to happen. There's an article that came out this week. Okay. It's absolutely amazing. This was from pro public. Who looked at the WhatsApp messaging platforms, privacy claims, WhatsApp of course offers quote end-to-end encryption and quote, which most people interpret means that Facebook who owns WhatsApp.

Can neither read your messages nor send them off to law enforcement. So some of us are concerned that they're reading it and they're using it from Arcadena et cetera, which okay. I can see, that's a little bit of an invasive invasion of privacy, but it's nothing that hasn't been going on since the 1950s.

And the other side of it is what happens if the bad guys get their hands on that information or law enforcement? It reminds me of the old days was stolen, remember stolen. And in his henchmen, they said, Hey, show me the person I'll show you the crime. And the reason he was able to say that is there's so many potential laws that you can bring.

If you tell me the person's name, I'll dig into them and watch them, and we'll be able to accuse them of a crime and get them convicted and thrown in prison. So there's those of us who are worried about that potentially happening, then you might say it's not going to happen today. I think frankly, it well could happen today more than it could have, or would have happened just a few years ago, but it keeps getting worse and worse.

So I get all. Stuff, but the claim to WhatsApp being safe to say anything on that. No one's monitoring you. No one can see what you're saying is basically false because what they've found a ProPublica is that Facebook employs about a thousand WhatsApp moderators whose entire job is reviewing WhatsApp messages.

Now, about some of the censorship this has been going on at Facebook. This is not the same thing because in general, in Facebook, of course, everything is open and available for their computer systems to flag. The automated systems will see it and say, oh, okay. Yeah, this is bad. And they'll just shut you down and then maybe send it off for a person to review.

What's happening here with WhatsApp is someone can flag a message that they have received at. Improper now that's where it starts getting to be a little bit crazy here, because with this loophole in WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption, now you don't have that to fall back on that they don't have it, that they can't read.

The recipient of any of the WhatsApp messages can flag it once. Flag the messages copied on the recipient's device and sent as a separate message to Facebook for review. Now, the messages are typically flagged for the same reasons they would be on Facebook, but one of the things that's been happening.

Is with this content moderation, people who have received the messages from people that they don't like are reporting these messages to Facebook. So they might be in, in a group. You typically is why it works happening. And in, within this group, there's people who are saying things that they just don't like.

That is frankly a loophole. Absolutely a loophole. So it's not any different from someone receiving a message screenshot in it or shown their device to another person that's received. But now it's an automated process. Millions of teams every year have found that out too, with their disappearing videos on Snapchat.

They don't all just disappear. And that's a problem we're having right now with WhatsApp. So what should you use? What could you use? The number one recommendation that I have for you guys is to use signal. You'll find it online. Signals available for every mobile device out there, pretty much it's available for most desktop operating systems and it is end to end encrypted.

And the guy who wrote it who has Mr. Marlin spike has an odd name? He has done this because he wants people to have true privacy in their messages. So signal pretty good. WhatsApp, not so good. You might not want to use it, but by the way, it's huge in use. Hey, take a minute. If you haven't already sign up for my weekly show notes and my trainings that are in them, you'll get them absolutely free.

Craig peterson.com. And if you had done that, you'd already know all about WhatsApp and signal and what type of email you should be using.

Big data has strikes again in this time it's in Los Angeles. If you get pulled over by the police, would you give them your social media information, your email address, et cetera. Question mark? Huh? Here we go.

LAPD has started doing something that most people are saying is unethical and may be illegal is well, they were sued the Los Angeles police department in order to.

Some information out of the police department. Cause some people had been reporting things and the Brennan center for justice is what it's called, sued them. Okay. Now this is at the New York school of law. The NYU school of law, the Brennan center is, and they filed a public records request with LAPD and police departments from other major cities.

And they were trying to find out what's going on. What kind of data are these police departments collecting and the LAPD resisted making these documents available? I guess that's a clue, right? And so they did ultimately provide over 6,000 pages of documents after the Brennan center. Sued the department.

And one of these documents was a memo from the LAPD chief. His name was Charlie. Back in May, 2015. He said that quote one, completing. F I report officers should ask for persons shall social media and email account or information and included in the additional info box. Now, what they're talking about is a, basically a field contact or field interview form, and he was telling them that they need to get all kinds of information, basically anything they can, but more specifically, once or Twitter handle Instagram.

Profiles. There's a spot on here for all kinds of information. I'm looking at the report right now. Who are the name your date of birth, your sex, your gang, your or your monitoring moniker? Yeah, not everyone's in a gang guys. And let's see field interview, incident number, the division detail.

So the only thing, oh, and by the way, social security number as well. And if you're asking them for their social security number, it tells you they have to read this assess federal law requires that you be in. When asked for your social security number that must be provided for use and identification authority for required.

This information is based upon field interview procedures operational prior to January 1st, 1975. Remember the social security number was only going to be used by the treasury department for. Income to verify that you'd been paying and would not be used by any other federal departments or state and local.

In fact, it was illegal at the time. Anyways, I guess I'm rambling about this. Cause the social security number thing really upsets me because of. Everybody's collecting it and the bad guys have your social security number and it's being used as some sort of a university universally unique number.

We call those UIDs IDs in the computer world, but it's not. And unlike a regular you ID that can easily be regenerated, they will not issue you in a new social security number. If your old one was stolen. It's really crazy. So it may be an unusual policy, even though the LAPD has been doing it for years.

Let's see. So a lawyer in the burn-in centers, the library in national security programs wrote, he said, apparently nothing bars officers from filling out field interview forms for each interaction, they engage. On patrol, notably our review of information about the field information cards in 40 other cities did not reveal any other police departments that use the cards to collect social media data though.

Details are spars, publicly available documents to try to determine if other police departments are channeling. I collect social media during the field interview were requested, but found that most are not very transparent about their practices. So I guess that's not too surprising. Here's where it starts getting more concerning for me anyways.

And that is, they are feeding all of this information from these contact cards into a system that was developed by. Amazon. This is a system called plant Palentier. There you go. Palentier. And in fact, there was an open letter that was written by the staff at Amazon to Jeff. Bayzos asking bayzos to stop selling this technology to law enforcement.

Okay. That's how bad it is. Here's an article from ARS Technica. Amazon staff have called on CEO, Jeff Bezos to stop selling facial recognition technology to law enforcement and government agencies. Do the book 10 channel that the tech is used to harm the most marginalized. Microsoft and Google also have done the same thing.

Now you hear that and you say, that's really good, kudos to you. I'm glad that you are trying to stop this. And yet at the same time, these same employees don't seem to have a problem with selling this technology to the red, Chinese. At all, they don't seem to have a problem with it in some of these other countries that are using it for just terrible things.

Further this letter that they wrote demanded that Amazon stopped selling their cloud services to data analytics from planet here. They have numerous government contracts involved in the operation of ISIS detention and deportation programs goes on and on. So what makes sense to you? The ACL you recently reported that Amazon's recognition facial technology is being sold to police departments.

It can identify faces in photos and videos. Amazon pitched in as a way of identifying and tracking suspects. The issue that is raised here by the ECLU is the militarization of the police. How far can it go? Should it go? The targeting of activists and ISIS family separation policy. Now this was in 2018, just so that okay. So back in the day, of course, anything president Trump did was evil. And so this stuff they came out and said was evil. I haven't, I looked and I haven't got anything more reasoned about this. So for some reason, the Biden administration using this, isn't a problem LAPD using this apparently was a problem and continues to be a problem.

Keep an eye out for it locally, because here's the other side of this whole thing they say. Are they being the police officer when they pull you over I need this information. I need to inspect your car. I need to search your person, et cetera. They may need to, but that doesn't mean that they have the.

Legal right or constitutional right to do it. So typically the police only ask for things that they can constitutionally asked for, that they should ask for. And people, most people know they can refuse a search depending on the circumstances and they, but they don't because you're honoring the police officer.

Going on from there honoring the police officer. I also mean that people are allowing the police to gather this information because of, again, the respect that giving to that police officer. And in fact, they apparently do. There's another study in this article that talks about that. It's a problem.

We gotta be careful all of this data being fed into a big system that tracks us, that, the bad guys are going to get their hands on that data. Eventually. Hey, visit online Craig peterson.com and check out today's newsletter. You'll find in there links to this and all of today's stories.

Do you remember when president Trump was trying to block Tik TOK, this Chinese social site that so many of us were using? Of course now that's all gone. That's all history. And there's another piece of news about them.

Tik TOK is a social media site that really rose a like crazy. It is owned by 10 cent, which is a Chinese company. Now, as all companies in China are controlled by the socialists, the communist party of China, the CC CCC CCP. Remember those initials from back in the day.

They are now being given access to location information about Americans, about all kinds of places in the United States, in photos, people's names, their locations, you name it. Through tick talk to Chinese government, the Chinese military, the people's liberation army as they call it. And we're giving all of this information voluntarily.

So president Trump had a problem with that. Why should a Chinese company be allowed to track American citizens? Now at the time, took talk was quite popular and was growing in popular. Now we're seeing a news story from the BBC saying the tech talk has overtaken YouTube in the average watch time per user in the United States and the United Kingdom.

YouTube is still the bigger video site. They have YouTube as far more users, they have far more video that's watched, but what we're talking about here is something that is specific, but it's still scary, which is the average us tick-tock user watches, more video than the average YouTube view. So if you're a marketer, maybe it's time to get on Tik TOK, but also right now, tick talk is really the younger generations.

It's not the older folk. Okay. I expect that eventually just like Facebook started with the college students and it has now really grown to being a an over 40, even over a 50 year old web. At Facebook, the same thing will happen for Tik TOK, but we're getting concerned here because tic talk is upended the streaming and social landscape.

With these small videos, it reminds me of how the goldfish, why is the gold fish or the happiest animal in the world? Because it only has a five second. That was just great from Ted lasso. I don't know if you've watched that show at all. That's one of these apple TV shows out there it's really it's really true because these Tik TOK videos are extremely short and the whole goal of it is to have something that's funny and they've had challenges and various other things that they've done too, but they have really gone crazy.

Google has tried to counter tic talk. They've had their own little thing. Facebook's had their own little thing with these short videos, but this time spent metric that we're talking about here is from the monitoring from app Annie. That's the name of it. And it only accounts. Android phones because some of this monitoring cannot be done on I-phones.

Okay. But it also does not include China where tech talk is a major app in over in China. It's called . I probably didn't pronounce that one quite right either, but it is a massive audience that they have out there and. I'm looking at all of the stat. It's just absolutely amazing. You can see those of course in the newsletter for today, but yeah.

Live streaming apps Twitch. For example, viewers can purchase bits virtual currency and send them to cheer for streamers journal, live stream and stuff. This is an interesting business. Tik TOK has definitely taken it over. And we're seeing that that nobody's been able to really do anything. YouTube has it's Tik TOK clone called YouTube short.

It was launched in may. This is a 62nd video clips, whole ideas. It's mobile first it's swipe up. Also out there with, I love this. This is ARS Technica, calling it a photocopier, which is what YouTube does, within an upstart video service comes along a Twitch, see YouTube gaming. Anyways, everybody's trying to get into it.

No one's being successful at it yet, other than tech talk. And do we really want the red, Chinese having access to all of that? Think what's innovative. You've got GPS information coming from your smartphone. So they know exactly where it's taken. They know who you are. They know information about you as a user.

I don't know. It gets scary. And then you think about what happened with the Wu Han lab and what escaped out of there. Could they use that? Might they use that home? My goodness on a very concerned. Okay. From Krebs on security, we have a warranty. For Microsoft users, attackers are now exploiting a windows zero day PLA.

So this is a previously unknown vulnerability in windows 10 and many windows server versions. And what it allows them to do is seize control over PCs. When users open a malicious document or. A booby trapped website. There's currently no official patch for it, but Microsoft has released recommendations in order to help mitigate the threat.

These mitigations aren't the best, frankly, but we'll see it affects what's called the Ms. HTML component of internet Exploder on windows 10 and many windows servers that are out there. And of course, internet Exploder has been deprecated. For use people should not be using it anymore. So for those of you who are still using internet Explorer, I've got two words for you from the famous Bob new heart, just an amazing guy.

So here we go. Okay. Here you're there. That's from an old routine. I couldn't help, but think of it, but yeah, that's the bottom line. You need to stop using internet Explorer. It does not work well. It is bug Laden. Like most Microsoft software seems to be, and it is now under direct attack. So make sure that.

Patch had Shirley patch off. And now I am in the middle of putting together. This is another bit of free content for everybody, but two things. One is a cyber health assessment that you can do yourself. And shall I show you how? And I'm going to have a course on that too. A paid course that gets into a lot more detail.

But the basics is, I want you guys to understand that. And then the other thing is in the next 90 days, what are the things that you should do and can do to make your computers safer? Now, as usual, this is aimed at businesses, but works great for. Individuals for home users. And we'll see how this ends up going.

But frankly, the zero day attacks are going to keep happening. They happen to Microsoft. They happen to apple. They happen to everybody, but they all release patches. The only one that you are going to have trouble with patches on is older versions of windows. And of course Android. What else do I have to say?

Any older Android phone? Cause they lose support very quickly. So don't use those, but make sure patch Tuesday. All of those patches are installed from Microsoft and visit me online. Craig peterson.com. Make sure you sign up for my newsletter so you can get these coming up and more.

Do You Know How to Identify a Fake Web Page? The FBI's reporting that more than 70% of all business hacks are because of our employees. They're clicking on emails, they're going to websites, what can we do? How do we know if a website is legitimate or not?

[Automated transcript]

[00:00:19] There's a great little article that McAfee published now, McAfee is a company that's been in the cybersecurity business for quite a while.

[00:00:28] I do not use their products. I use some competing products. I have not been impressed with their products.

[00:00:35] Let me tell you this particular web post that they put up is fantastic and you'll see it in my newsletter this week. Make sure you get that.

[00:00:45] Have you ever come across a website that didn't look quite right if you haven't, you haven't been on the internet very much because whether you're an individual at home or you are in a business environment, we are likely going to end up on websites that are not legitimate. Sometimes we'll see these things, that company logo might be wrong. There's not enough information on the page. You've been there before and this looks down page. The odds are that you were on a hack site, a site that's trying to get you to do something most of the time when you end up on these sites, they're trying to get you to put in your username and password.

[00:01:31] Already that the bad guys have stolen your username and password from so many websites out there. So why would they try and do it this way? It's because if they're pretending to be your bank and you try and log in, They know this as your bank account, and many times they immediately try and get into your bank account or your phone account, whatever it might be.

[00:01:56] This is a very long-standing tactic that's relied on by hackers everywhere. Usually it's a knockoff of a real page. They'll take it and they will recreate it. Then it's easy to do if you're in a web browser right now, when you go to your bank's website. You can just go to file, save as, and go ahead and save the entire webpage and you'll get everything.

[00:02:23] You'll get all of the links that are on there. All of the graphics that are there, it'll pull it in for you all automatically. And that's all they do. That's what they use. Just a copy. How do they get in front of you in the first place? Typically the hackers will go ahead and send a phishing email.

[00:02:43] They'll make the email sound legitimate. They'll make it look legitimate. They'll often even use a URL that looks a lot like it. B the real banks email. I've seen it before where the URL is bank of america.safe site.com. That sort of a thing. I'm not blaming safe site. They could be a great company.

[00:03:04] I don't know. I just made it up as we're going, but that type of a URL where it's not really bank of america.com or it's a misspelling of bank of America, that's the sort of thing that gets to be pretty darn common and. Clicking on that link and then submitting your information. It hasn't been leading to credit card fraud, data extraction, wire transfers, identity theft, and a whole lot more.

[00:03:34] Now with the COVID relief, that's been out there. All of these things from filing for unemployment claims through filing for PPP protection as a business, the whole. Industry has changed. I'm talking about the hacker industry here, because there are so many people who are falling for these scams and ransomware as well has gone up over 300%.

[00:04:08] It's just absolutely amazing. Now, if you go online and you duck, duck, go. Fake login pages. And for those of you who don't know what I mean by that duck go is the search engine I've been recommending lately. It is a search engine that doesn't take politics into play like Google does. And it also does not track you.

[00:04:31] And what you're looking at it is ad based. It gets its revenue from advertisement, but it's not selling your information just on the basic search. That you're doing. I think it's a very good alternative, but if you go ahead and your search for fake login pages, you're going to find thousands of guides on how to create websites.

[00:04:53] And these bad guys can create these websites in absolutely no time at all. It just a minute or two in order to make one of them. Now it can be difficult nowadays to figure out if it's a fake site, because the, again, the hackers are constantly updating their techniques to be more sophisticated. So it's made it more difficult for consumers to really recognize when something's fraudulent.

[00:05:22] Now I want to get it into a psychological term. In attentional, blindness. You've probably heard of this. I remember this from, I think it was college days for me, so a very long time ago, but there's a study that was done on inattentional blindness called the invisible gorilla test. If you go right now online and just search for invisible gorilla test, you'll see a bunch of these coming.

[00:05:52] No, there's even a book called that the invisible gorilla test that came out about 11 years ago, 12 years ago, I think. But here's the bottom line on this? They tell you to do something in this study. What they did here is there's a video. People there's six people, three of them are dressed with white shirts and three of them have black shirts and they're passing basketballs back and forth.

[00:06:20] The white shirts are only passing to the white shirts and the black shirts under the black shirts. And what they ask you to do is count the number of times the team in white past. Now, you're sitting there watching, knowing they're going to try and fool you, you're paying a whole lot of attention to it.

[00:06:40] And then at the end, they ask you a question that may be not expecting the video. I just watched on this, that was called the monkey business. Illusion is the name of this. I counted and I counted carefully and I came up with 16 passes. So the monkey business, illusion, 16 times the people in the white shirts passed the basketball back and forth.

[00:07:06] So I got that. But then they said did you notice the person in the gorilla costs? Who walked through the game. He didn't just walk through the game, walked in, beat on this chest and then walked out of the game. If you didn't know about this and okay. In chorus, all honesty, I always try and put everything upfront here.

[00:07:29] I knew about it beforehand. I remember from college days. But eight, most people actually about 50% of people who did not know, there is a gorilla in the middle of this. Would not have noticed the gorilla walking through the game, but this monkey business illusion video, there's something else too.

[00:07:52] And I've got to admit, I did not notice that. And that is the curtain color change. From red to gold, this curtain that was in the background of all of these players. And I didn't notice one other thing. I'm not going to tell you what that is. You'll have to watch the video of yourself too, to figure that out again, just go online and search for the monkey business illusion.

[00:08:19] And I think you'll find it. So the reason I brought this up is because if you come across a well forged login page and you're not actively looking for signs of fraud, you're fairly likely to miss a cybercriminals gorilla. You're likely to miss that the logo's not quite right, or the placement isn't the same as I'm used to.

[00:08:45] Because you're focused in, on doing what you're supposed to be doing. It's the whole concept as well of have tunnel vision. And I'm sure you're aware of that. We've all had that before, where we're really focused on this one little thing and we don't notice everything else going on. It particularly happens in high stress times.

[00:09:08] So how do you steer clear of the fake login pages? We're going to talk about that when we get. But it's absolutely crucial for everyone, even if you've had phishing training and you are trying to be cautious, you could fall for this invisible gorilla and enter in your personal details, not something that you really want.

[00:09:36] Hopefully you guys got my newsletter last weekend. I got a lot of comments on it. People are saving. In fact, that's the first thing I said in this email last week is don't lose this because it went through point by point on about 10 different things that you should be doing too. Yourself and your business safe during the holidays.

[00:10:03] Now, of course we had labor day coming up. We're going to have more holidays, right? There's always more holidays in the future and less it's after the first of the year, then you got to wait a long time. Make sure you get it, make sure you dig it out. If he didn't notice it just search for [email protected].

[00:10:23] That's where the email comes from and have a look at that. I have links on how to do all of those things. It's very important. FBI warning out just last week.

[00:10:33] I just told you about one of the biggest problems we are facing right now, when it comes to hackers and then has to do with fishing and going to fake login pages. Now I'm going to tell you exactly what to do.

[00:10:47] How do you steer clear of these fake log-in pages and how do you protect yourself in case you accidentally do provide the bad guys with the information that you shouldn't have?

[00:11:01] If they've got your email address or your login name and they have your password, it's pretty easy for them to log in. In most cases right into your bank account. So first of all, don't fall for phishing, but as we just described because of this whole inattentional blindness that we have, it's easy enough to fall, pray for this.

[00:11:28] Beat yourself up too bad if you followed, if you fell for some of that stuff, but there is a great little website the Google has that you might want to check out. And that website gives you a real quick quiz, is the best way to. And it shows you some emails and you get to determine whether or not you think it's fishing and then it tells you what the reality of it is.

[00:11:59] So go to fishing quiz. Dot with google.com. If you miss that, you can always email me M [email protected] and I'll send it off to, but phishing quiz dot with google.com. And of course, phishing is spelled P H I S H I N G fishing. Dot with google.com. So you can go there and right there on the screen, it says, take the quiz.

[00:12:30] You can hit it and make up a name and an email address. So it doesn't have to be your real name or your real email address. Okay. It's not going to send you anything. It's not going to sign you up for stuff. It just wants to use it in. Phishing email examples. That's going to give you, so I put in a fake name and a fake email address and it is showing me an email.

[00:13:00] So to me, from a Luke, John. And it says Luke Johnson shared a link to the following document, Tony 21 budget department dot doc. So if I click on that, I have now told them, Hey, I'm open to all that sort of stuff. It's so anyways, it's got the link and it's got the opening docs and you now up above say, is this phishing or is it.

[00:13:27] Legitimate. Okay. So if we say fishing that says, correct, this is a phishing email. You might have spotted the look alike, you are out. And that is indeed exactly what it is cause it it wasn't legitimate. And remember when you mouse over a link, you can see down at the bottom. The URL that is going to open up for you.

[00:13:51] So you can just go through this at your own speed at your own pace and figure it out again. If you didn't get that, you can always email me M E ed Craig peterson.com. And I'll be glad to get back to you. So that's a good way to learn about fishing. I want to con really warn, I should say businesses. If you are sending out phishing emails to your employees to see if they are opening fake phishing emails or not.

[00:14:23] That's an okay. Practice. The problems really come in with the companies that are sending out phishing emails and are then following up in such a way that employee is punished in some places they are being punished by if you've opened three fake emails over the last year or whatever it might be.

[00:14:47] But over the last year, you're. It's that bad. So we have to be careful. You're not going to increase the confidence of your employees by doing that. And what's, you're actually going to end up doing is slowing down the productivity of your employees. Because now they're going to be really worried about opening, any emails that look like they might be legitimate.

[00:15:14] And so your business is going to slow right down. So having some more training about it. Okay. I can see that everyone makes mistakes and we've got to remember that as well, but watch free, man. But we really are trying to get you to move quickly, act fast, or I need this answer right away. Or one of the big ones is we've got this vendor and in fact, I'll, let me give you a real world example.

[00:15:41] It's a manufacturing company and of course they. To buy product from vendors, as supplier. And then they use that product or whether it's copper or whatever it might be now to put it all together to make their products. And this one person, this one, hacker a lady again in Eastern Europe, she went and found out about this company.

[00:16:08] Okay, great. Found on their website, who the CEO was, who the CFO was. Okay, great. And was able to find the CEO online on Facebook and on his Facebook account, he said, yeah, we're going to The Bahamas. Rear-ending a sailboat. We're going to be out there, the whole family for two weeks. This is going to be fantastic disconnected.

[00:16:37] So she found all of that. Now what she had to do was she found out who it was. The CEO, what school he went to. So first she had to get around the restrictions. Cause he had said, don't share my posts with anyone other than friend. So she sent him a message because she found his LinkedIn profile. You see how easy this is to do.

[00:16:59] She found his LinkedIn profile and that he went to Harvard and got his MBA. So she sent him. A little note saying, Hey, remember me Janie from X, Y, Z class at Harvard, and want to be friends catch up a little bit. And then he doesn't remember who she is, but the picture looks cute enough. I might as well say yes.

[00:17:21] And now she had his contact information over on LinkedIn, send him a friend request over on Facebook as well. That's how she found out he was going to be gone for two weeks. And so now she knows when he's gone. And where he's going to be completely out of touch. So once he's gone about two or three days later, she sent an email off to the CFO inside the company and said, Hey.

[00:17:49] We've got this new vendor they've been providing us with product for the last three months. We haven't paid them at all yet. I need you to wire. It was a little more than $40 million because she'd done her homework. She knew how much money the company made, what their expenses probably were. I need you to wire $40 million to this account, or they're going to stop.

[00:18:17] All shipments to us. And instead of the CFO doing a little bit more homework into it and digging in and finding out because talking to the people in receiving that we've never received anything from that company. I don't know what you're talking about. And then talking with the guy on the manufacturing floor, the CFO didn't do any of that, just okay. This looks legit. And by the way, it is so easy for these hackers to also gain access to personal email accounts. And we're not going to spend time going into that right now. So he wired. Yes indeed. So there's an example of falling for fishing. A little bit of follow up on the part of the CFO would have shown him that this was not legitimate.

[00:19:07] Even over on Shark Tank. Barbara Cochran. She fell prey to this, actually it was her assistant and who wired some $400,000 to a vendor that wasn't real. Now the good news is the assistant copied Barbara who saw the email right away and said, whoa, wait a minute. They called the bank and they put a stop on it..

[00:19:34] Doing a little training here on how to spot fake log-in pages. We just covered fishing and some real world examples of it, of some free quiz stuff that you can use to help with it. And now we're moving on to the next step.

[00:19:50] The next thing to look for when it comes to the emails and these fake login pages is a spelling mistake or grammatical errors.

[00:20:02] Most of the time, these emails that we get that are faking emails are, have really poor grammar in them. Many times, of course the commas are in the wrong place, et cetera, et cetera. But most of us weren't English majors. So we're not going to pick that up myself included. That's why I use Grammarly.

[00:20:21] If you have to ever write anything or which includes anything from an email or a document you probably want to get Grammarly. There's a few out there, but that's the one I liked the best for making sure my grammar. So a tip, to the hackers out there, but the hackers will often use a URL that is very close to it.

[00:20:45] Where are you want to go? So they might put a zero in place of an O in the domain, or they might make up some other domain. So it might be amazon-aws.com or a TD bank-account.com. Something like that. Sometimes the registrars they'll catch that sort of thing and kill it. Sometimes the business that they are trying to fake will catch it and let them know as well.

[00:21:19] There's companies out there that watch for that sort of thing. But many times it takes a while and it's only fixed once enough people have reported it. So look at the URL. Make sure it's legitimate. I always advise that instead of clicking on the link in the email, try and go directly to the website.

[00:21:41] It's like the old days you got a phone call and somebody saying, yo, I'm from the bank and I need your name and social security numbers. So I can validate the someone broke into your account. No, they don't. They don't just call you up like that nowadays. They'll send you a message in their app.

[00:21:56] That's on your smart. But they're not going to call you. And the advice I've always given is look up their phone. And by the way, do it in the phone book, they remember those and then call them back. That's the safest way to do that sort of thing. And that's true for emails as well. If it's supposedly your bank and it's reporting something like someone has broken into your account, which is a pretty common technique for these fissures, these hackers that are out there, just type in the bank URL as it not what's in the email.

[00:22:33] There will be a message there for you if it's legitimate, always. Okay. So before you click on any website, Email links, just try and go directly to the website. Now, if it's one of these deep links where it's taking new Jew, something specific within the site, the next trick you can play is to just mouse over the link.

[00:22:58] So bring your mouse down to where the link is. And typically what'll happen is at the bottom left. Your screen or of the window. It'll give you the actual link. Now, if you look at some of them, for instance, the emails that I send out, I don't like to bother people. So if you have an open one of my emails in a while, I'll just automatically say, Hey, I have opened them in awhile, and then I will drop you off the list.

[00:23:28] Plus if you hit reply to one of my newsletters, my show notes, newsletters. That's just fine, but it's not going to go to [email protected] and some people you listeners being the best and brightest have noticed that what happens is it comes up and it's some really weird URL that's so I can track.

[00:23:51] Who responded to me. And that way I can just sit down and say, okay, now let me go through who has responded? And I've got a, kind of a customer relationship management system that lets me keep track of all of that stuff so that I know that you responded. I know you're interacting, so I know I'm not bothering you.

[00:24:11] And I know I need to respond. Much the same thing is true with some of these links. When I have a link in my newsletter and I say, Hey, I'm linking to MIT's article. It is not going to be an MIT. Because again, I want to know what are you guys interested in? So anytime you click on a link, I'll know, and I need to know that, so I know why, Hey, wait a minute.

[00:24:36] Now, 50% of all of the people that opened the emails are interested in identifying fake login pages. So what do I do? I do something like I'm doing right now. I go into depth on fake logs. Pages. I wouldn't have known that if I wasn't able to track it. So just because the link doesn't absolutely look legit doesn't mean it isn't legit, but then again, if it's a bank of it involves financial transactions or some of these other things be more cautious.

[00:25:11] So double check for misspellings or grammatical errors. Next thing to do is to check the certificate, the security certificate on the site. You're on this gets a little bit confusing. If you go to a website, you might notice up in the URL bar, the bar that has the universal resource locator, that's part of the internet.

[00:25:38] You might've noticed a. And people might've told you do check for the lock. That lock does not mean that you are safe. All it means is there is a secure VPN from your computer to the computer on the other side. So if it's a hacker on the other side, you're sending your data securely to the hacker, right?

[00:26:05] That's not really going to do you a whole lot of good. This is probably one of the least understood things in the whole computer security side, that connect. May be secure, but is this really who you think it is? So what you need to do is click on their certificate and the certificate will tell you more detail.

[00:26:29] So double check their certificate and make sure it is for the site. You really. To go to, so when it's a bank site, it's going to say, the bank is going to have the bank information on it. That makes sense. But if you go for instance on now, I'm going to throw a monkey wrench into this whole thing.

[00:26:48] If you go to Craig peterson.com, for instance, it's going to. Connection is secure. The certificate is valid, but if you look at their certificate and the trust in the details, it's going to be issued by some company, but it's going to just say Craig peterson.com. It's not going to give a business name like it would probably do for a bank.

[00:27:14] So you know, a little bit of a twist to it, but that's an important thing. Don't just count on the lock, make sure that the certificate is for the place you want to contact. Last, but not least is multi-factor authentication. I can't say this enough. If the bad guys have your username or email address and your password for a site, if you're using multifactor authentication, they cannot get in.

[00:27:53] So it's going to prevent credential stuffing tactics, or they'll use your email and password combinations that have already been stolen for mothers sites to try and hack in to your online profile. So very important to set up and I advise against using two factor authentication with your, just a cell phone, as in a text message SMS, it is not secure and it's being hacked all of the time.

[00:28:23] Get an authorization. Like one password, for instance, and you shouldn't be using one password anyways, for all of your passwords. And then Google has a free one called Google authenticator. Use those instead of your phone number for authentication.

[00:28:40] You're listening to Craig Peterson, cybersecurity strategist, and [email protected].

[00:28:48] I've been warning about biometric databases. And I sat down with a friend of mine who is an attorney, and he's using this clear thing at the airport. I don't know if you've seen it, but it's a biometric database. What are the real world risks?

[00:29:04] This clear company uses biometrics.

[00:29:08] It's using your eye. Brent, if you will, it's using your Iris. Every one of us has a pretty darn unique Iris, and they're counting on that and they're using it to let you through TSA very quickly. And this attorney, friend of mine thinks it's the best thing since sliced bread, because he can just. On through, but the problem here is that we're talking about biometrics.

[00:29:34] If your password gets stolen, you can change it. If your email account gets hacked, I have another friend who his account got hacked. You can get a new email account. If your Iris scan that's in this biometric database gets stolen. You cannot replace your eyes unless of course you're Tom cruise and you remember that movie, and it's impossible to replace your fingerprints. It's possible to replace your face print. I guess you could, to a degree or another, some fat injections or other things. Could be done to change your face sprint, but these Iris scans fingerprints and facial images are something I try not to provide any.

[00:30:29] Apple has done a very good job with the security of their face print, as well as their fingerprint, because they do not send any of that information out directly to themselves or to any database at all. Period. They are stored only on the device itself. And they're in this wonderful little piece of electronics that can not be physically compromised.

[00:30:59] And to date has not been electronically compromised either. They've done a very good job. Other vendors on other operating systems like Android, again, not so much, but there are also databases that are being kept out there by the federal government. I mentioned this clear database, which isn't the federal government, it's a private company, but the federal government obviously has its fingers into that thing.

[00:31:29] The office of personnel. For the federal government, they had their entire database, at least pretty much the entire database. I think it was 50 million people stolen by the red, Chinese about six years ago. So the communists. Copies of all of the information that the officer personnel management had about people, including background checks and things.

[00:31:55] You've probably heard me talk about that before. So having that information in a database is dangerous because it attracts the hackers. It attracts the cybercriminals. They want to get their hands on it. They'll do all kinds of things to try and get their hands. We now have completely quit Afghanistan.

[00:32:20] We left in a hurry. We did some incredibly stupid things. I just, I can't believe our president of the United States would do what was done here. And now it's been coming out that president and Biden completely ignored. The advice that he was getting from various military intelligence and other agencies out there and just said, no, we're going to be out of there.

[00:32:46] You have to limit your troops to this. And that's what causes them to close the air base battleground that we had for so many years. Apparently the Chinese are talking about taking it over now. Yeah. Isn't that nice. And whereas this wasn't an eternal war, right? We hadn't had anybody die in a year and a half.

[00:33:05] It's crazy. We have troops in south Vietnam. We have troops in Germany. We have troops in countries all over the world, Japan, you name it so that we have a local forest that can keep things calm. And we were keeping things calm. It's just mind blowing. But anyhow, politics aside, we left behind a massive database of biometric database.

[00:33:38] Of Afghanis that had been helping us over in Afghanistan, as well as a database that was built using us contractors of everyone in the Afghan military and the basically third genealogy. Who their parents were the grandparents blood type weight, height. I'm looking at it right now. All of the records in here, the sex ID nationality.

[00:34:11] Date of exploration, hair color, favorite fruit, favorite vegetables, place of birth, uncle's name marker signature approval. Signature date, place of birth. Date of birth address, permanent address national ID number place of ISS. Date of ISS native language salary data salary, group of salary, police of salary education, father's name, graduation, date, weapon and service now.

[00:34:41] These were all in place in Afghanistan. We put them in place because we were worried about ghost soldiers. A gold soldier was someone who we were paying the salary of taxpayers of the United States were paying the salaries of the Afghan military for quite some time. And we were thinking that about half of the.

[00:35:06] Payroll checks. We were funding. We're actually not going to people who were in the military, but we're going to people who were high up within the Afghan government and military. So we put this in place to get rid of the ghost soldiers. Everybody had to have all of this stuff. In the database, 36 pieces of information, just for police recruitment.

[00:35:39] Now this information we left behind and apparently this database is completely in the hand of the Taliban. Absolutely. So we were talking about Americans who helped construct Afghanistan and the military and the telephone. The looking for the networks of their Ponant supporters. This is just absolutely amazing.

[00:36:07] So all of the data doesn't have clear use, like who cares about the favorite fruit or vegetable, but the rest of it does the genealogy. Does they now know who was in the police department, who was in the military, who their family is, what their permanent address is. Okay. You see the problem here and the biometrics as well in the biometrics are part of this us system that we were using called hide H I D E.

[00:36:41] And this whole hide thing was a biometric reader. The military could keep with them. There were tens of thousands of these things out in the field. And when they had an encounter with someone, they would look up their biometrics, see if they were already in the database and in the database, it would say, yeah, they're friendly, they're an informant.

[00:37:03] Or we found them in this area or w we're watching them. We have concern about them, et cetera, et cetera. All of their actions were in. Turns out that this database, which covered about 80% of all Afghans and these devices are now in the hands of the Taliban. Now, the good news with this is that a lot of this information cannot be easily extracted.

[00:37:32] So you're not going to get some regular run of the mill Taliban guy to pick one of these up and start using. But the what's happening here is that we can really predict that one of these surrounding companies like Pakistan that has been very cooperative with the Taliban. In fact, they gave refuge to Saddam, not Saddam Hussein, but to a bin Ladin and also Iran and China and Russia.

[00:38:04] Any of those countries should be able to get into that database. Okay. So I think that's really important to remember now, a defense department spokesperson quote here, Eric Fay on says the U S has taken prudent actions to ensure that sensitive data does not fall into the Tolo bonds. And this data is not at risk of misuse.

[00:38:29] Misuse that's unfortunately about all I can say, but Thomas Johnson, a research professor at the Naval postgraduate school in Monterey, California says not so fast, the taller Bon may have used biometric information in the Coon dues. So instead of taking the data straight from the high devices, he told MIT technology review that it is possible that Tolo bond sympathizers in Kabul, provided them with databases of military personnel, against which they could verify prints.

[00:39:07] In other words, even back in 2016, it may have been the databases rather than these high devices themselves pose the greatest risk. This is very concerning big article here in MIT technology review. I'm quoting from it a little bit here, but there are a number of databases. They are biometric. Many of these, they have geological information.

[00:39:35] They have information that can be used to round up and track down. Now, I'm not going to mention world war two, and I'm not going to mention what happened with the government too, before Hitler took over, because to do that means you lose that government had registered firearms, that government had registered the civilians and the people and Afghanistan.

[00:40:04] The government was also as part of our identification papers, registering your religion. If you're Christian, they're hunting you down. If you were working for the military, they're hunting you down. And this is scary. That's part of the reason I do not want biometric information and databases to be kept here in the U S Hey, make sure you get my show notes every week on time, along with free training, I try to help you guys out.

[00:40:41] If you've never heard of the Carrington event, I really hope, frankly, I really do hope we never have to live through one of these. Again, there is a warning out there right now about an internet apocalypse that could happen because of the sun.

[00:40:58] Solar storms are something that happens really all of the time. The sun goes through solar cycles. About every seven years, there are longer cycles as well. You might know. I have an advanced class amateur radio license I've had for a long time, and we rely a lot when we're dealing with short wave on the solar cycle.

[00:41:22] You see what happens is that the sun charges, the atmosphere. That if you've ever seen the Northern light, that is. Part of the Sunzi missions, hitting our magnetic field and getting sucked into the core of the earth, if you will, as they get caught in that field. And the more charged the atmosphere is, the more bounce you get.

[00:41:46] That's what we call it bounce. And the reason us hams have all these different frequencies to use is because of the bow. We can go different frequencies with different distances, I should say, using different frequencies. So think about it right now. You've got the earth and I want to talk from Boston to Chicago.

[00:42:08] For instance, I know about how many miles it is, and I have to figure out in the ionosphere up in the higher levels of the atmosphere, what frequency. To use in order to go up into the atmosphere, bounce back, and then hit Chicago. That's the idea. It's not quite as simple or as complex in some ways, as it sounds, a lot of people just try different frequencies and a lot of hams just sit there, waiting for anybody anywhere to talk to, particularly if they are.

[00:42:41] It's really quite fun. Now what we're worried about, isn't so much just the regular solar activity. We get worried when the sun spots increase. Now, the solar cycle is what has primary image. On the temperature on earth. So no matter what, you might've heard that isn't your gas, guzzling car or a diesel truck that causes the Earth's temperature to change.

[00:43:10] Remember the only constant when it comes to the Earth's temperature has been changed over the millions of years. We had periods where the earth was much warmer than it is now had more common that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than it does now had less. In fact, right now we are at one of the lowest levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in earth long.

[00:43:36] So the sun, if you might remember, comes up in the morning, warms things up, right? And then it cools down. When the sun disappears at nighttime, it has a huge impact. It's almost exclusively the impact for our temperatures. There's other things too, for instance. eruption can spew all to hold a lot of carbon dioxide.

[00:44:01] In fact, just one, just Mount St. Helens wanted erupted, put more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than man has throughout our entire existence. Just to give you an idea, right? So these alarms that are out there, come on, people. Really, and now we're seeing that in this last year, we had a 30% increase in the ice cap up in the, in, up in the north, up in Northern Canada, around the polls.

[00:44:32] We also had some of these glaciers growing. It was so funny. I saw an article this year, or excuse me, this week that was showing a sign that was at one of our national parks. And it said this glacier will have disappeared by 2020. Of course it hasn't disappeared. In fact, it has grown now and it's past 2020.

[00:44:54] Anyhow, the sun has a huge impact on us in so many ways. And one of the ways is. Something called a coronal mass ejection. This is seriously charged particles. That tend to be very directional. So when it happens, when there's one of these CMS coronal, mass ejections, it's not just sending it out all the way around the sun everywhere.

[00:45:21] It's really rather concentrated in one. One particular spot. Now we just missed one not too long ago. And let me see if I can find it here. Just mast, a cm E near miss. Here we go. There a solar super storm in July, 2012, and it was a very close shave that we had most newspapers didn't mention it, but this could have been.

[00:45:51] AB absolutely incredible. We'd be picking up the pieces for the next 50 years. Yeah. Five, zero years from this one particular storm. And what happens is these solar flares, if you will, are very extreme, the CME. You're talking about x-rays extreme UV, ultraviolet radiation, reaching the earth at the speed of light ionizes, the upper layers of atmosphere.

[00:46:19] When that happens, by the way, it hurts our communications, but it can also have these massive effects where it burns out saddle. And then causes radio blackouts, GPS, navigation problems. Think about what happened up in Quebec. So let me just look at this back hit with an E and yeah, here we go. And March 13th, 1989.

[00:46:50] Here we go. Here's another one. Now I remembered. And this is where Quill back got nailed. I'm looking at a picture here, which is looking at the United States and Canada from the sky and where the light is. And you can see Quebec is just completely black, but they have this massive electrical blackout and it's becomes.

[00:47:13] Of this solar storm. Now they, these storms that I said are quite directional depending on where it hits and when it hits things can get very bad. This particular storm back in 1989 was so strong. We got to see their Rora Borealis, the Northern lights as far south, as Florida and cute. Isn't that something, when we go back further in time to this Carrington event that I mentioned, you could see the Northern lights at the eclipse.

[00:47:50] Absolutely amazing. Now the problem with all of this is we've never really had an internet up online. Like we have today when we had one of the storms hit. And guess what we're about to go into right now, we're going into an area or a time where the sun's going to be more active, certainly on this 11 year cycle and possibly another bigger cycle too, that we don't really know much about.

[00:48:22] But when this hit us back in the 1850s, what we saw was a a. Telegraph system that was brought to its knees. Our telegraphs were burned out. Some of the Telegraph buildings were lit. They caught on fire because of the charges coming in, people who were working the telegraphs, who are near them at the time, got electric shocks or worse than that.

[00:48:48] Okay. 1859 massive Carrington event compass needles were swinging wildly. The Aurora Borealis was visible in Columbia. It's just amazing. So that was a severe storm. A moderate severity storm was the one that hit in Quebec here knocked out Quebec electric. Nine hour blackout of Northeast Canada. What we think would happen if we had another Carrington event, something that happened to 150 years ago is that we would lose power on a massive scale.

[00:49:27] So that's one thing that would happen. And these massive transformers that would likely get burned out are only made in China and they're made on demand. Nobody has an inventory. So it would be at least six months before most of the country would get power back. Can you believe that would be just terrible and we would also lose internet connectivity.

[00:49:52] In fact, the thinking that we could lose internet connectivity with something much less than a severe storm, maybe if the Quebec power grid solar, a massive objection here. Maybe if that had happened, when. The internet was up. They might have burned out internet in the area and maybe further. So what we're worried about is if it hits us, we're going to lose power.

[00:50:20] We're going to lose transformers on the transmission lines and other places we're going to lose satellites and that's going to affect our GPS communication. We're going to lose radio communication, and even the undersea cables, even though they're now no longer. Regular copper cables. It's now being carried of course, by light in pieces of glass.

[00:50:45] The, those cables need to have repeaters about every 15 miles or so under underwater. So the power is provided by. Copper cables or maybe some other sort of power. So these undersea cables, they're only grounded at extensive intervals, like hundreds or thousands of kilometers apart. So there's going to be a lot of vulnerable components.

[00:51:12] This is all a major problem. We don't know when the next massive. Solar storm is going to happen. These coronal mass ejections. We do know they do happen from time to time. And we do know it's the luck of the draw and we are starting to enter another solar cycle. So be prepared. Of course, you're listening to Craig Peterson, cybersecurity strategist.

[00:51:42] If you'd like to find out more and what you can do, just visit Craig peterson.com and subscribe to my weekly show notes.

[00:51:52] Google's got a new admission and Forbes magazine has an article by Zach Dorfman about it. And he's saying you should delete Google Chrome now after Google's newest tracking admission. So here we go.

[00:52:09] Google's web browser. It's been the thing for people to use Google Chrome for many years, it's been the fastest. Yeah, not always people leapfrog it every once in a while, but it has become quite a standard. Initially Microsoft is trying to be the standard with their terrible browser and yeah, I to Exploder, which was really bad and they have finally completely and totally shot it in the head.

[00:52:42] Good move there on their part. In fact, they even got rid of their own browser, Microsoft edge. They shot that one in. They had to, I know I can hear you right now saying, oh, Craig, I don't know. I just use edge browser earlier today. Yeah. But guess what? It isn't edge browser. It's actually Google Chrome. The Microsoft has rebranded.

[00:53:04] You see the guts to Google Chrome are available as what's called an open source project. It's called chromium. And that allows you to take it and then build whatever you want on top of. No, that's really great. And by the way, Apple's web kit, Kat is another thing that many people build browsers on top of and is part of many of these browsers we're talking about right now, the biggest problem with the Google Chrome.

[00:53:35] Is they released it so they could track you, how does Google make its money? It makes us money through selling advertising primarily. And how does it sell advertising if it doesn't know much or anything about you? So they came out with the Google Chrome browser is a standard browser, which is a great.

[00:53:55] Because Microsoft, of course, is very well known for not bothering to follow standards and say what they have is the actual standard and ignoring everybody else. Yeah. Yeah. I'm picking on Microsoft. They definitely deserve it. There is what is being called here in Forbes magazine, a shocking new tracking admission from.

[00:54:17] One that has not yet made headlines. And there are about what 2.6 billion users of Google's Chrome worldwide. And this is probably going to surprise you and it's frankly, Pretty nasty and it's, I think a genuine reason to stop using it. Now, as you probably know, I have stopped using Chrome almost entirely.

[00:54:42] I use it when I have to train people on Chrome. I use it when I'm testing software. There's a number of times I use it, but I don't use it. The reality is that Chrome is an absolute terror. When it comes to privacy and security, it has fallen way behind its rivals in doing that. If you have an iPhone or an iPad or a Mac, and you're using safari, apple has gone a long ways to help secure your data.

[00:55:19] That's not true with Chrome. In fact, it's not protecting you from tracking and Dave data harvesting. And what Google has done is they've said, okay we're going to get these nasty third party cookies out of the whole equation. We're not going to do that anymore. And what they were planning on doing is instead of knowing everything specifically.

[00:55:43] You they'd be able to put you in a bucket. So they'd say, okay, you are a 40 year old female and you are like driving fast cars and you have some kids with a grandkid on the way, and you liked dogs, not cats, right? So that's a bucket of people that may be a few hundred or maybe up to a thousand. As opposed to right now where they can tell everything about you.

[00:56:12] And so they were selling that as a real advantage because they're not tracking you individually anymore. No, we're putting you in a bucket. It's the same thing. And in fact, it's easier for Google to put you in a bucket than to track everything about you and try and make assumptions. And it's easier for people who are trying to buy ads to place in front of you.

[00:56:34] It's easier for them to not have to reverse engineer all of the data the Google has gathered in instead. To send this ad to people that are in this bucket and then that bucket. Okay. It makes sense to you, but I, as it turns out here, Google has even postponed of that. All right. They really have, they're the Google's kind of hiding.

[00:56:59] It's really what's going on out there. They are trying to figure out what they should do, why they should do it, how they should do it, but it's going to be a problem. This is a bad habit. The Google has to break and just like any, anybody that's been addicted to something it's going to take a long time.

[00:57:19] They're going to go through some serious jitters. So Firefox is one of the alternatives and to Google Chrome. And it's actually a very good one. It is a browser that I use. I don't agree with some of the stuff that Mozilla and Firefox does, but again, nobody agrees on everything. Here's a quote from them.

[00:57:41] Ubiquitous surveillance harms individually. And society Chrome is the only major browser that does not offer meaningful protection against cross site tracking and Chrome will continue to leave users unprotected. And then it goes on here because. Google response to that. And they admit that this massive web tracking out of hand and it's resulted in, this is a quote from Google and erosion of trust, where 72% of people feel that almost all of what they do online is being.

[00:58:19] By advertisers, technology firms or others, 81% say the potential risks from data collection outweigh the benefit by the way, the people are wrong. 72% that feel almost all of what they do on online is being tracked. No. The answer is 100% of what you do is probably being tracked in some way online.

[00:58:41] Even these VPN servers and systems that say that they don't do logs. Do track you take a look at proton mail just last week. Proton mail it's in Switzerland. Their servers are in Switzerland. A whole claim to fame is, Hey, it's all encrypted. We keep it safe. We don't do logging. We don't do tracking guess what they handed over the IP addresses of some of the users to a foreign government.

[00:59:09] So how can you do that? If you're not logging, if you're not tracking. Yeah, they are. And the same thing is true for every paid VPN service I can think of. So how can Google openly admit that their tracking is in place tracking everything they can, and also admit that it's undermining our privacy.

[00:59:36] Their flagship browser is totally into it. It's really, it's gotta be the money. And Google does not have a plan B this anonymized tracking thing that they've been talking about, the buckets that I mentioned, isn't realistic, frankly. Google's privacy sandbox is supposed to Fitbit fix it.

[00:59:56] I should say. The whole idea and the way it's being implemented and the way they've talked about it, the advertisers on happy. So Google is not happy. The users are unhappy. So there you go. That's the bottom line here from the Forbes article by Zach Dorfman, delete Google Chrome. And I said that for a long time, I do use some others.

[01:00:20] I do use Firefox and I use. Which is a fast web browser. That's pretty good shape. Hey, if you sign up for my shows weekly newsletter, not only will you get all of my weekly tips that I send to the radio hosts, but you will get some of my special reports that go into detail on things like which browser you shouldn't be using.

[01:00:46] Sign up right now. Craig peterson.com.

[01:00:50] Many businesses have gone to the cloud, but the cloud is just another word for someone else's computer. And many of the benefits of the cloud just haven't materialized. A lot of businesses have pulled back and are building data centers.

[01:01:07] Now, the reason I mentioned this thing about Microsoft again, and the cloud is Microsoft has a cloud offering.

[01:01:17] It's called Microsoft Azure. Many people, many businesses use it. We have used it with some of our clients in the past. Now we have some special software that sits in front of it that helps to secure. And we do the same thing for Amazon web services. I think it's important to do that. And we also use IBM's cloud services, but Microsoft is been pitching for a long time.

[01:01:45] Come use our cloud services and we're expecting here probably within the next month, a big announcement from Microsoft. They're planning on making it so that you can have your desktop reside in Microsoft's cloud, in the Azure cloud. And they're selling really the feature of it doesn't matter where you are.

[01:02:11] You have your desktop and it doesn't matter what kind of computer you're on. As long as you can connect to your desktop, using some just reasonable software, you will be able to be just like you're in front of a computer. So if you have a Chromebook or a Mac, Or windows or tablet, whatever. And you're at the grocery store or the coffee shop or the office, you'll be able to get it, everything, all of your programs, all your files.

[01:02:41] And we, Microsoft will keep the operating system up to date for you automatically a lot of great selling points. And we're actually looking into that, not too heavily yet. We'll give them a year before we really delve into it at all. Cause it takes them a while to get things right. And Microsoft has always been one that adds all kinds of features, but most of the time, most of them don't work and we can document that pretty easily, even in things like Microsoft.

[01:03:11] The verge is now reporting that Microsoft has warned users of its as your cloud computing service, that their data has been exposed online for the last two years. Yeah, let me repeat that in case you missed it, you yeah. I'm I might've misspoken. Let me see, what does it say? It says users of Azure cloud competing service.

[01:03:36] So that's their cloud. Microsoft's big cloud. Okay. Their data has been. Exposed online. Okay. So that means that people could get the data, maybe manipulate the data that's exposed means for the last two years. Are you kidding me? Microsoft is again, the verge. Microsoft recently revealed that an error in its Azure cosmos database product left more than 3,300 as your customer's data.

[01:04:12] Completely exposed. Okay guys. So this is not a big thing, right? It can't possibly be big thing because you know who uses Azure, nobody uses a zer and nobody uses hosted databases. Come on, give me a break. Let me see, what else does this have to say? Oh, okay. It says that the vulnerability was reported, reportedly introduced into Microsoft systems in 2019, when the company added a data visualization feature called Jupiter notebook to cosmos DB.

[01:04:46] Okay. I'm actually familiar with that one and let's see what small companies let's see here. Some Azure cosmos DB clients include Coca Cola. Liberty mutual insurance, Exxon mobile Walgreens. Let me see. Could any of these people like maybe Liberty mutual insurance and Walgreens, maybe they'd have information about us, about our health and social security numbers and account numbers and credit cards. Names addresses. That's again, why I used to get so upset when these places absolutely insist on taking my social security number, right? It, first of all, when it was put in place, the federal government guaranteed, it would never be used for anything other than social security.

[01:05:34] And the law even said it could not be used for anything other than social security. And then the government started expanding it. And the IRS started using it. To track all of our income and that's one thing right there, the government computers, they gotta be secure. All of these breaches we hear about that.

[01:05:52] Can't be true. So how about when the insurance company wants your personal information? Like your social security number? What business is it of? There's really no. Why do they have to have my social security number? It's a social security number. It's not some number that's tattooed on my forehead. That's being used to track me.

[01:06:18] Is it this isn't a socialist country like China is, or the Soviet union was right. It's not social. So why are they tracking us like that? Walgreens? Why do they need some of that information? Why does the doctor that you go to that made the prescription for Walgreens? Why do they need that information?

[01:06:40] And I've been all over this because they don't. Really need it. They want, it makes their life easier, but they don't really need it. However, it exposes us. Now, if you missed the email, I sent out a week ago, two weeks ago now, you missed something big because I, in my weekly newsletter went through and described exactly what you could do in order to keep your information private.

[01:07:13] So in those cases where websites asking for information that they don't really need, right? You don't want to lie, but if they don't really need your real name, why you're giving them your real name? Why do you use a single email address? Why don't you have multiple addresses? Does that start make sense to you guys?

[01:07:33] And now we find out that Microsoft Azure, their cloud services, where they're selling cloud services, including a database that can be used online, a big database 3,300 customers looks like some of them are actually big. I don't know. ExxonMobil pretty big. Yeah. I think so. Walgreens, you think that might be yeah.

[01:07:57] Why. Why are we trusting these companies? If you have a lot of data, a lot of customers, you are going to be a major target of nation states to hack you and bat just general hackers, bad guys. But you're also if you've got all this information, you've also got to have a much higher level of security than somebody that doesn't have all of that information.

[01:08:24] Does that make sense to you? Did I say that right? You don't need the information and I've got to warn anybody that's in a business, whether you're a business owner or you're an employee, do not keep more data than you need the new absolutely need to run your company. And that includes data about your customers.

[01:08:48] And maybe it's even more specifically data about your customer. Because what can happen is that data can be stolen and we just found it. That? Yes, indeed. It could have been, it was exposed Microsoft the same. We don't know how much it was stolen. If anything was stolen. Yeah, Walgreens. Hey, I wonder if anyone's going to try and get some pain pills illegally through a, this database hack or a vulnerability anyways.

[01:09:17] All right, everyone. Stick around. We'll be back. Of course, you listening to Craig Peterson. I am a cybersecurity strategist for business, and I'm here to help you as well. You can ask any question any time consumers are the people I help the most, I wish I got a dime for every time I answered a question.

[01:09:38] Just email [email protected] and stick around.

[01:09:44] Whether or not, you agree with the lockdown orders that were put in place over this COVID pandemic that we had. There are some other parts of the world that are doing a lot more.

[01:10:00] Australia has. I don't know. I think that they went over the deep end that much, the same thing is true right next door to them.

[01:10:11] And I am looking at a report of what they are doing with this new app. You might be aware that both apple and Google came out with an application programming interface. That could be used for contract tack tracking, contact tracking. There you go. It wasn't terribly successful. Some states put some things in place.

[01:10:38] Of course you get countries like China. I love the idea because heaven forbid you get people getting together to talk about a Tannen square remembrance. Now you want to know who all of those people were, who were in close proximity, right? Good for China a while, as it turns out, Australia is putting something in place they have yet another COVID lockdown.

[01:11:03] They have COVID quarantine orders. Now I think if you are sick, you should stay here. I've always felt that I, I had 50 employees at one point and I would say, Hey, if you're sick, just stay home. Never required a doctor's note or any of that other silliness, come on. People. If someone's sick, they're sick and let them stay home.

[01:11:26] You don't want to get everybody else in the office, sick and spread things around. Doesn't that just make sense. They now in Australia, don't trust people to stay home, to get moving. Remember China, they were taking welders and we're going into apartments in anybody that tested positive.

[01:11:42] They were welding them into their apartment for minimum of two weeks. And so hopefully they had food in there and they had a way to get fresh water. Australia is not going quite that far, but some of the states down under. Using facial recognition and geolocation in order to enforce quarantine orders and Canada.

[01:12:07] One of the things they've been doing for very long time is if you come into the country from out of the country, even if you're a Canadian citizen, you have to quarantine and they'll send people by your house or you have to pay to stay for 10 days in a quarantine hope. So you're paying the, of course now inflated prices for the hotel, because they're a special quarantine hotel.

[01:12:34] You have to pay inflated prices to have food delivered outside your door. And that you're stuck there for the 10 days, or if you're at home though, they, you're stuck there and they'll send people by to check up on you. They'll make phone calls to check up on you. They have pretty hefty fines.

[01:12:54] What Australia has decided to do is in Australia is Charlene's even going from one state to another state are required to prove that they're obeying a 14 day quarantine. And what they have to do is have this little app on their phone and they, the app will ping them saying, prove it. And then they have to take a photo of themselves with geo location tag on it and send it up via the app to prove their location.

[01:13:32] And they have to do all of that within 15 minutes of getting the notification. Now the premier of the state of south Australia, Steven Marshall said, we don't tell them how often or when on a random basis, they have to reply within 15 minutes. And if you don't then a police, officer's going to show up at the address you're supposed to be at to conduct an in-person check.

[01:13:59] Very intrusive. Okay. Here's another one. This is an unnamed government spokesperson who was apparently speaking with Fox news quote. The home quarantine app is for a selected cohort of returning self Australians who have applied to be part of a trial. If successful, it will help safely ease the burden of travel restrictions associated with the pandemic.

[01:14:27] So there you go. People nothing to worry about. It's just a trial. It will go away. Just for instance, income tax, as soon as rule, number one is over, it will be removed and it will never be more than 3% and it will only apply to the top 1% of wage-earners. So there you go. And we all know that world war one isn't over yet.

[01:14:47] So that's why they still have it in somehow. Yeah, some of the middle class pays the most income tax. I don't know. Interesting. Interesting. So there you go. Little news from down under, we'll see if that ends up happening up here. News from China, China has China and Russia have some interesting things going on.

[01:15:08] First of all, Russia is no longer. Country, they are. They aren't, they are a lot freer in many ways than we are here in the United States. Of course, China, very heavily socialist. In fact, they're so socialists, they are communist and China. And Russia both want their kids to have a very good education in science, engineering, and mathematics.

[01:15:35] Not so much on history, not so much on, on politics. But definitely heavy on the sciences, which I can see that makes all the sense. I think everybody should be pretty heavily on the science. According to the wall street journal this week, gamers under the age of 18 will not be allowed to play online games between 8:00 PM and 9:00 PM on Friday, Saturdays and Sundays.

[01:16:02] Okay. So basically what they're doing, I reverse that what they're doing is they're only allowing the kids three hours of gaming per week. In other words, they can play between eight and 9:00 PM, Friday, Saturday, and Sundays. I think that might overload some gaming servers. Cov gaming addiction has affected studies and normal lives.

[01:16:23] And many parents have become miserable. That's China's press and public administration. Sedna state. Okay. There's going to be some relief during the school holidays. Children will be allowed 60 minutes per day for gaming hard to say how China plans didn't force it, but they have their ways, identity cards. By the way required for playing online. They've got a facial recognition system introduced in July by 10 cent. Remember all of the uproar around 10 cent and their apps and president Trump trying to get them blocked here in the U S yeah, there you go. Facial recognition bill right into the app, and it's proven effective at catching children pretending to be adults in order to get around government gaming curves.

[01:17:12] So this goes on and on and Korea as well, South Korea has had some very big problems. You might remember it was headlines just a few years ago of some of these south Korean kids dying because they were playing video games four days straight with no sleep, no real food. Just taking all of these energy.

[01:17:37] And we'll literally gaming themselves to death. So South Korea passed a law that prevented young people from playing online video games late at night. So that was introduced back in 2011 and it's targeted at players 16 or up. And south Korean miners were prevented from playing online PC games between midnight and six, 8:00 AM.

[01:18:03] Now South Korea has scrapped that law. Interesting. So they're saying it's out of respect for younger citizens, right? They're going to abolish this law, replace it by. Permit system that allows players to request a permit per game and play during self-assigned hours that their parents will sign off on.

[01:18:27] This is in an article from GameSpot, by the way, a gamespot.com. You might remember them too, the whole Robin hood scandal. But I think it's an interesting question. When my kids were young lo those many years ago I got this box that the, you took the TV wire, you ran it into the box and you could program.

[01:18:51] So that each kid had their own code and you could specify how much time the kid could watch TV or how much time or when they could watch TV and how much time cumulative the kids could have. And it actually worked pretty well. And the kids certainly complained a lot about it. And a couple of them tried to work the way around it hard to when the plug is inside the box.

[01:19:17] Yeah, ingenuity as they are. They were able to do that. They cut the wire off and put another power connector on the end of the TV wire. Anyhow Microsoft, we've been talking about them a lot. This show. I do not like Microsoft, that already the windows 11 is coming out and we talked about.

[01:19:38] Before, because windows 11 is plying. Microsoft is planning on requiring you to have a very modern computer. You need to have a TPM in it, which is this special security module. You need to have a certain speed, et cetera, but the TPM is a big thing. That's going to make it. So most of your computers won't work.

[01:20:04] Tons of pushback on that. I can see what Microsoft is trying to do it. They really would love to have a clean operating system that really wasn't getting hacked all the time. And this will help it won't solve their problem, but it will help. So that they're going to be doing now is they're going to over the course of months, starting October 5th.

[01:20:28] They're going to release windows 11 to certain people, one at a time type approach. So they're not going to force everyone to upgrade. They're not going to offer it to everyone. And Microsoft is going to offer a preview of the Android apps in the Microsoft store for windows insiders in the months ahead.

[01:20:51] But they're planning on having a phased rollout through winter. Date, and you're not going to see it most likely when it starts to roll out, but you will be seen and to end with the stringent system requirement, apparently what they're going to do is not auto update your computer if it's not new enough.

[01:21:13] And if it doesn't have a TPM, but you can manually install windows 11, at least that's what they're doing. That's it for today. We had some more stuff I didn't get to, but we always have more every week. And I try to keep you up to date. We do trainings, visit me online so you can find out about all of this stuff.

[01:21:33] The trainings, most of them are absolutely free. Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Craig peterson.com.

You Need to Start Using Burner Identities ASAP!

In this day and age, if you don't have a burner identity, you are really risking things from having your identities stolen through these business email compromises. It's really crazy. That's what we're going to talk about.

[Automated transcript]

An essential part of keeping ourselves safe in this day and age is to confuse the hackers. The hackers are out there. They're trying to do some things. Ransomware, for instance, like[00:00:30] business email compromise, is one of the most significant crimes times out there today.

It hits the news legitimately. It's terrifying. It can really destroy your business, and it can hurt you badly. If you're an individual, you don't want ransomware. How about those emails that come in? In fact, I just got an email from a listener this week, and they got a phone. His wife answered, and it was [00:01:00] Amazon on the phone, and Amazon said, Hey, listen, your account's been hacked.

We need to clear it up so that your identity doesn't get stolen. And there's a fee for this. It's a $500 fee. And what you have to do is just go to amazon.com. Buy a gift card, and we'll then take that gift card number from you. And we'll use that as the fee to help recover your stolen information. [00:01:30] So she went ahead and did it, and she went ahead and did all of the things that the hackers wanted.

And now they had a gift card. Thank you very much. We'll follow up on this and. Now she told her husband, and of course, this isn't a sex-specific thing, right? It could have happened to either one. My dad fell for one of these scams as well. So she told her husband, or her husband looked at what had happened and [00:02:00] said, oh my gosh, Don't think this is right.

Let me tell you, first of all, Amazon, your bank, various credit card companies are not going to call you on the phone. They'll send you a message right from their app, which is usually how I get notified about something. Or they will send an email to the registered email app. No, that you set up on that account.

So that [00:02:30] email address then is used by them to contact you, pretty simple. Or they might send you a text message. If you've registered a phone for notifications, that's how they contact you. It's like the IRS. I was at a trade show, and I was on the floor. We were exempt. And I got no less than six phone calls from a lady claiming to be from the IRS, and I needed to [00:03:00] pay right away.

And if I didn't pay right away, they were going to seize everything. And so all I had to do was. Buy a gift card, a visa gift card, give her the number and use that to pay the taxes. And this lady had an American accent to one that you would recognize. I'm sure. And it's not something that they do now.

They do send emails, as I [00:03:30] said. So the part of the problem with sending emails is it really them? Are they sending a legitimate email to a legitimate email address? Always a good question. Yeah. Here's the answer. Yeah, they'll do that. But how do you know that it isn't a hacker sending you the email?

It can get pretty complicated. Looking into the email headers, trying to track. Where did this come from? Which email servers did it go through? [00:04:00] Was it authenticated? Did we accept? Did the provider use proper records in their DNS, the SPIF, et cetera, to ensure that it's legitimate? How do you follow up on that?

That's what we do for our clients. And it gets pretty complicated looking at DKMS and everything else to verify that it was legitimate, ensuring that the email came from a registered MX server from the actual [00:04:30] server. There is a way around this. And this has to do with the identities, having these fake burner identities.

I've been doing this for decades myself, but now it's easy enough for anybody to be able to do it. There are some services out. And one of the more recommended ones. And this is even the New York times; they have an article about this. They [00:05:00] prefer something called simple login. You can find them online. You can go to simple login dot I O.

To get started now, it's pretty darn cool. Cause they're using what's called open-source software, it's software. So can anybody examine to figure out this is legitimate or not? And of course, it is fair, but it's all out there for the whole world to see. And that means it's less likely in some ways to be hacked.

There are people who [00:05:30] argue that having open-source software means even more. In some ways, you are, but in most ways, you're not; anyway, it doesn't matter. Simple login.io. Now, why would you consider doing this? Something like simple login? Simple login is friendly because it allows you to create dozens and dozens of different email addresses.

And the idea is with a simple login, it will [00:06:00] forward the email to you at your actual email address. So let's say you're doing some online shopping. So you can go ahead and set up an email address for, whatever it is, shopping company.com that you're going to use a shopping company.com. So you'd go there.

You put into simple login "I want to create a new identity," and you tag what it's for. You then go to some shopping company.com and [00:06:30] use the email address generated for you by simple login. Now you're a simple login account. Is it going to be tied into your real email account, wherever that might be if you're using proton mail, which is a very secure email system, or if using outlook or heaven forbid Gmail or one of these others, the email will be forwarded to you.

You will be able to see that indeed, that [00:07:00] email was sent to you. So shopping company.com email address or your bank of America, email address, et cetera, et cetera, that makes it much easier for you to be able to tell, was this a legitimate email? So, in other words, if your bank's really trying to get ahold of you, and they're going to send you an email, they're going to send you an email to an address that you use exclusively.

For bank of America. In reality, you only have the one email [00:07:30] box over there wherever proton, mail, outlook, Gmail, your business Excel. You only have that one box you have to look at, but the email is sent to simple login. Does that make sense? You guys, so you can create these alias email boxes.

It will go ahead and forward. Any emails sent to them, to you, and you'll be able to tell if this was indeed from the company, because [00:08:00] that's the only place that you use that email address. That makes it simple, but you don't have to maintain dozens or hundreds of email accounts. You only have one email account.

And by the way, you can respond to the email using that unique aliased email address you created for the shopping company or bank of America or TD or whomever. It might be, you can send from that address as well. [00:08:30] So check it out online, simple login dot IO. I really liked this idea. It has been used by a lot of people over, out there.

Now here's one other thing that it does for you, and this is important as well. Not using the same email address. Everywhere means that when the hackers get your email address from shopping company.com or wherever, pets.com, you name it. [00:09:00] They can not take that and put it together with other information and use that for business, email compromise.

Does that make sense? It's it makes it pretty simple, pretty straightforward. Don't get caught in the whole business email compromise thing. It can really hurt. And it has; it's one of the worst things out there right now, dollar for dollar, it's right up there. It, by the way, is one of the ways they get ransomware into your [00:09:30] systems.

So be very careful about that. Always use a different email address for every Website you sign up for. Oh, and they do have paid plans like a $30 a year plan over at simple IO will get you unlimited aliases, unlimited mailboxes, even your own domain name. So it makes it pretty simple, pretty handy.

There are other things you might want to do, for instance, use virtual credit cards. [00:10:00] And we'll talk about those a little bit. As well, because I think this is very important. But, hey, I want to remind everybody that I have started putting together some pieces of training. You're going to get a little training at least once a week, and we're going to put all of that into it.

What we have been calling our newsletter. I think we might change the name of it a little bit, but you'll be getting those every week. And the only way to get those is to be on [00:10:30] that email list. Go to Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Please do that right now. I am not going to harass you. I'm not going to be one of those.

And I've never been one of those internet marketers that sending you multiple dozens of emails a day. But I do want to keep you up to date. So stick around; we will be back here in just a couple of minutes. And, of course, you're listening to Craig Peter's son. [00:11:00] And again, the Website, Craig peterson.com. Stick around.

Cause we'll be right back.

One of the best ways to preserve your security online is by using what we're calling burner identities, something that I've been doing for more than 30 years. We're going to talk more about how to do that right now.

You can do some things [00:11:30] to help keep yourself and your identity safe online.

We've talked about email and how important that is. I want to talk now about fake identities. Now, a lot of people get worried about it. It sounds like it might be sketchy, but it is not to use fake identities to confuse the hackers to make it. So they really can't do the [00:12:00] things that they.

To do, they can't send you fishing ear emails, particularly spear-phishing emails. That'll catch you off guard because you're using a fake. How do you do that? I mentioned to you before that I have thousands of fake identities that I created using census data. And I'm going to tell you how you can do it as well.

There's a website out there called fake [00:12:30] name a generator. You'll find it [email protected]. I'm on that page right now. And I'm looking at a randomly generated identity. It has the option right on this page to specify the sex. And it says random by default, the name set, I chose American the country United States.

So it is applying both American [00:13:00] and Hispanic names to this creation. And now remember it's creating based on census data and some other public data. But, still, it is not giving you one identity of any real people. So I think that's important to remember, and you're not going to use these identities for illegal purposes.

And that includes, obviously, when you set up a bank account, you have to use your real [00:13:30] name. However, you don't have to use yours. If you have an actual email address, you can use things like simple login that will forward the email to you, but we'll let you know who was sent to. And if you only use that one email address for the bank, you know that it came from the bank or the email address was stolen from the bank.

All of that stuff. We've talked about that already. So, in this case, The name that has come up with [00:14:00] for me is Maurice de St. George in Jacksonville, Florida even gives an address. In this case it's 36 54 Willis avenue in Jacksonville, Florida. So if I go right now two, I'm going to use Google maps, and I will put in that address.

Here we go. Jacksonville willows avenue, all the guests. What? There is Willis avenue in Jacksonville [00:14:30], and it showing hoes oh, from Google street view. Let me pull that up even bigger. And there it is. So ta-da, it looks like it gave me. Fairly real address. Now the address it provided me was 36 54, which does not exist.

There is a 365, but anyway, so it is a fake street address. So that's good to know some, if [00:15:00] I were to use this, I'm going to get mine. Am I male saying about I pass. Maurissa tells you what Maurice means, which is neat. It'll give you a mother's maiden name. Gremillion is what gave me here a social security number.

So it creates one that passes what's called a checksum test so that if you put it into a computer system, it's going to do a real quick check and say, yeah, it looks good to me. So it was not just the right [00:15:30] number of digits. It also passes the check, some tasks. Well-known how to do a checksum on their social security numbers.

So again, it's no big deal. And remember, you're not going to use this to defraud anyone. You're going to use this for websites that don't really need to know; give me a break. Why do you need all this information? It gives me a phone number with the right area code. And so I'm going to go ahead and look up this phone number right now.

Remember, use duck go. Some [00:16:00] people will use Google search, and it says the phone number gave me is a robocall. As I slide down, there's some complaints on that. So there you go. So they giving us a phone number that is not a real person's phone number, country code, of course one, cause I said United state birth date.

Oh, I was born October 7th, year, 2000. I'm 20 years old. And that means I'm a Libra. Hey, look at all this stuff. So it's giving me an [00:16:30] email address, which is a real email address that you can click to activate or right there. Again, I mentioned the simple login.io earlier, but you can do a right here, and it's got a username and created for me a password, which is actually a pretty deal.

Password. It's a random one, a website for me, my browser user agent, a MasterCard, a fake MasterCard number with an expiration and a [00:17:00] CVC to code all of this stuff. My height is five-six on kind of short. My weight is 186 pounds own negative blood type ups tracking number Western union number MoneyGram number.

My favorite color is blue, and I drive a 2004 Kia Sorento, and it also has a unique ID. And you can use that wherever you want. So the reason I brought this up again, it's called [00:17:30] fake name generator.com is when you are going to a website where there is no legal responsibility for you to tell them the truth.

You can use this. And so I've used it all over the place. For instance, get hub where you have it's a site that allows you to have software projects as you're developing software. So you can put stuff in, get hub. They don't know to know, need to [00:18:00] know who I really am. Now they have a credit card number for me.

Because I'm on a paid plan. I pay every month, but guess what? It isn't my real credit card number. It isn't the number that I got from fake name generator. My credit card company allows me to generate either a single use credit card numbers, or in this case, a credit card number for get hub dock. So just as an example, that's how I use it.

So we've get hub gets hacked, the [00:18:30] hackers, have an email address and a name that tipped me off right away, where this is coming from. And if the email didn't come from GitHub by no, they either sold my information to a marketing company, or this is a hacker. Trying to manipulate me through some form of his fishing scheme.

So I know you guys are the breasts and best and brightest. A lot of you understand what I'm talking about, and I'm talking about how you [00:19:00] can create a burner identity. And let me tell you, it is more important today to create a burner identity. Than it has ever been at any point in the past, because frankly, burner identities are one of the ways that you can really mess up some of the marketing firms out there that are trying to put the information together, these data aggregator companies, and also the hackers.

And it's really the hackers that [00:19:30] were off up against here. And we're trying to prevent them from. Getting all of this information. So when we come back, I want to talk about the next step, which is which credit cards can you get? These single use card numbers from? Should you consider using PayPal when my Google voice be a really good alternative for you?

So we're going to get into all that stuff. Stick around in the [00:20:00] meantime, make sure you go to Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Get my newsletter. All of this. Is in there. It makes it simple. It's a simple thing to do. Craig Peterson.com. And if you have any questions, just email me, M [email protected].

Having your credit card stolen can be a real problem for any one of us. It gives the bad [00:20:30] guys, a lot of options to spend a lot of money very quickly. We're going to talk right now about virtual credit cards. What are they, what does it mean?

Virtual credit cards come in two basic forms.

One is a single use credit card, which was quite popular back when these things first came out, and another one is a virtual credit card that has either a specific life. In other words, it's only good for 30 days [00:21:00] or that can be used until you cancel it. If you have a credit card, a visa, MasterCard, American express, discover all of the major card issuers will give you the ability to reverse any charges that might come onto your cards.

If your card is stolen or misused. Now that makes it quite easy. Doesn't it? I want to point out that if you're using [00:21:30] a debit card, as opposed to a credit card, there's not much challenging you can do with the credit card. You can say, I am not going to make my payment. And because of this, that, and the other thing, this was stolen, et cetera, they can file it as a disputed charge.

They can do an investigation to find out. Yeah. I'm you probably were not at a bus terminal down in Mexico City, which happened to me. Because I was up [00:22:00] here in New Hampshire, quite a ways down to Mexico City. And so they just reversed it out. That money never came out of my bank account because it was on a credit card.

If I were using a debit card. That money would have come right out of my account. Now, mind you, a bus ticket in Mexico city is not very expensive, but many people have had charges of many thousands of dollars. And if you need that money in your checking account, [00:22:30] and you're using a debit card, you got a problem because your check for if you ever have to pay rent again, red check is going to.

Bound because they just empty it out to your bank account. So now you have to fight with the bank, get the money back. They will eventually refund it, but it could make some of you. Transactions that you might've written a check or something, it'll make them bounce. And that could be a real problem.

These, it could make them [00:23:00] bounce. So using a credit card is typically less of a hassle online. So why would you want to use a virtual card or also known as is a master credit card masked and may S K E D? The main reason behind this is to allow you. Control payment. I've used them. In fact, I use them exclusively on every Website [00:23:30] online.

And I'm going to tell you the names of some of them here in just a couple of minutes, but I use them all the time. And part of the reason is let's say, I want to cancel. A service. Have you ever tried to cancel a service before and you have to call them many times, and so you're arguing with somebody overseas somewhere who doesn't want you to close the account.

And of course, Bump you up to the next level person who also doesn't want you to close the account. And [00:24:00] so you have to fuss. Have you ever had that experience and I'm sure you have. It just happens all the time. So with using the virtual credit card, the advantage to me is, Hey, if you are going to try and fight with me, I don't care because I'm just going to cancel that credit card number.

So I don't have to cancel my credit card. I don't have to have the company reissue credit card for me. I don't have to do any of this sort of thing that [00:24:30] makes my life pretty easy. Doesn't it? And because of that, I am now I think in a much better. Place, because it just, I don't have to fight with people anymore.

So that's one of the reasons I used it. The other big reason is if it gets stolen, they can cause less harm. Some of these credit card it's virtual credit cards are set up in such a way that you can limit the amount that's charged on them. Do you like that? [00:25:00] So if you are using it on a site that maybe is charging you $50 a month, no problem.

$50 a month comes off of the credit card. And if someone tries to charge more bounces and then hopefully you find out, wait a minute, it just bounced on me. Then next step up is okay. It bounced and. I'm just going to cancel the card, and then you issue a new credit card number for that Website.

So an example. In my case is [00:25:30] get hub.com. We keep software up there, and they charge me every month if get hub were to get hacked and that credit card number stolen I'm I really don't care because there's almost nothing that can happen. And if good hub doesn't properly cancel. My account, I can just cancel the credit card and let them come after me.

This isn't going to happen. So then it's also called a master credit card number, cause it's a little safer than using your [00:26:00] real credit card details. I also want to point out something about debit card. I went for years with no credit cards at all. Nowadays, many of my vendors will take a credit card for payment.

And in fact, give me a bit of a better deal. And then with the credit card, I can get 2% cashback, which I use to pay down the credit card. It couldn't get any better than that, but when you're using a debit card, what I always do. [00:26:30] Is I had two accounts that I could transfer money between at the bank.

So I had one checking account. That was my main operating, if you will account. And then I had another checking account where I would be. Just moving money out of it. Or you could even do it with a savings account, but some banks, they only let you do so many transactions a month on a savings account. So the idea is I know that I have this much credit card [00:27:00] obligate while debit card obligations for this month, that money is going to be coming out.

So I make sure that. In the debit card account to cover the legitimate transactions I know are coming up and then I keep everything else in the other account. And then I manually transferred over every month. So that's how I dealt with the whole debit card thing. And it worked really well for me. Bottom line.

I think it's a really great idea. So there you go, who are the companies that [00:27:30] you can use to do this? I've used some of these before all of them have worked really well. If you have a capital one credit card, they have something called Eno, E N O, and it's available to all capital one cardholder. Eno even has an extension for your web browsers.

So if it notices you're on a webpage, it's asking for credit card number, it'll pop up and say, do you want me to create a [00:28:00] credit card number or a virtual one for this Website you can make your payment. Does it get much easier than that? Citibank has something they call a virtual credit cards available to all Citibank cardholders, master pass by MasterCard.

That's available to any MasterCard visa, American express discover diners club cardholders, credit, debit, and prepaid cards by their way. So you might want to check that one out. Yeah, [00:28:30] so that's the only one I see on my list here. That will do it for debit cards, master pass by MasterCard American express checkouts available to all American Express cardholders.

Chase pay available to all chase cardholders, Wells Fargo, wallet visa checkouts, available to all visa, MasterCard, and American express and discover color cardholders, credit and debit cards. Plus. Prepaid cards. Okay. So it does [00:29:00] do the debit cards as well. Final that's all owned by Goldman Sachs and is not accepting any new applicants and entro pay.

Also not accepting new applicants. There's a couple online. All right, everybody, make sure you check me out. Craig peterson.com/subscribe.

We're going to wrap up how you should be using these burner identities of [00:29:30] few more tips and tricks that are going to help keep you safe from the hackers that are out there. So here we go.

There are a lot of hackers out there.

The numbers are just astounding. The cost of these hackers coming in and stealing our information is just unbelievable. And it goes all the way from big corporations, from things like the colonial [00:30:00] pipeline, the US government all the way on down through you and me. I want to tell you a little story about a friend of mine.

He is about 75 years old, and he supplements his income by driving for Uber eats and one other company. And so what he'll do is someone puts in an order for food somewhere. He'll go pick it up and then he'll drive it to where whoever wanted, whoever ordered it. Now, [00:30:30] there are. Pricing number of scams with this.

So he's very careful about some of that orders, a cookie, for instance, because it's usually a bit of a scam anyway, we won't get into those, but I'll tell you what happened to him. His information was stolen online as it was probably yours. Mine I know was as well. So it's all stolen. What do you do? In his case, what ended up [00:31:00] happening is they managed to get into his email account.

Once they're in his email account, they now had access to the emails he was getting from one of these companies. Now it wasn't the Uber eats guy. He was, there was another company. So let's just explain this a little bit. Uber eats sends him a request for him to go ahead and do a deliver. Go to the restaurant, pick it up and take it to this client's house.

[00:31:30] And in order for him to register, he had to register an email address. Now, of course, he uses the same email address for everything. All of it. Now, personally, that drives me a little bit insane, but that's what he does. And he has just a few passwords. Now. He writes them down a little book and heaven forbid he ever lose the book so that he can remember them.

He [00:32:00] just wants to keep his life simple. He's 75. He's not technophobic, he's not up on all of this stuff. What he found was a paycheck didn't show. And it was an $800 paycheck. We're talking about real money that he should have had in his pocket. It didn't show up. So he calls up the company and says what happened to my paycheck and a record show?

Yes, indeed. It had been paid. We [00:32:30] paid you, we deposited right into your account. Just like you asked. Yeah. ACH into the account. Great. Wonderful. What had happened is bad guys had gone, gained control of his email address and use that now. Because they figured I see some emails in his account from this food delivery service, let's try and see if this email address that we're looking at right now.

All of his emails let's [00:33:00] look and see. Okay. Yeah. Same. Email address and same password as he used at this email address? Yeah, it worked. Okay. Great. So now we have access to this guy food delivery account. So they changed. The bank account number, no easy enough to confirm. They change it, Mel. Hey, I want to make sure that it was you until the bad guys, the hackers, click out, yada.

Yeah, it was [00:33:30] me and then lead the email. So he doesn't see it. And now his $800 paycheck. In fact, I think there were a couple of different checks is deposited directly into the bad guy's bank account and. The money of course has transferred out pretty quickly. Now the, that guys, these hackers are using what are called mules.

You might be familiar with that in the drug trade. They'll have a third [00:34:00] party deliver the drugs just to mule. They don't know what all is going on. They probably know the delivering drugs in this case. Most of the meals are useful idiots, of which there are many in this country, unfortunately. Political and otherwise.

And these people are convinced that all they need to do is transfer the money into this account so that the hackers can then pull it out. And now [00:34:30] they're gonna take care of their grandmother who is stuck in the hospital and they have no way to pay for it. And they can't transfer the money out of the country directly.

That's one of the stories they use for people. And in many cases, these mules know what they're doing. The FBI earlier this year arrested a whole group of mules out in California that were purposefully transferring the money. They knew what they were doing. So his money was now out [00:35:00] of the country. No way to get it.

And this food delivery company was not about to pay him. So it isn't just the big guys it's you and me as well. So what I want to talk about right now is multi-factor authentication. Now. You guys are the best and brightest. I hope you understand this. If you have questions, please reach out to me. I am more than glad to send you some good material on this.

Just [00:35:30] me. M E add Craig peterson.com. I am here to help. What multi-factor authentication does is allows you to not just log in by using an email address and a password, or maybe a username and a password. Which is much better, by the way. I don't like it. When sites require an email address to log in.

Although as I use multiple email addresses, and I think you should as well, a different email address for every site [00:36:00] out there beyond question, you should be doing that. So anyway, this is. You should be doing with multi-factor authentication. They will have you put in your email address, have you put in your password, and then they'll do something that is supposedly something you have.

So the best security is something, along with something you physically have. So in most cases, they'll use two factor [00:36:30] authentication by sending you a text message with a code. And then you type in that usually six digit code, and now you're in, and it only does that. If it doesn't recognize the browser, are you using, or in many cases of, it needs to be a little more secure than that it's only good for 24 hours or maybe a week.

That is not good enough. You should be using a code generator. Google [00:37:00] has one for free, but I want you guys to use something called one password. That's the digit one password. You'll find it online. You'll find it in all the app stores. It is what we use for the most part. It's great for families. And it's great for businesses because you can have different vaults and you can share them and control access.

Now there's a couple of reasons why that we're talking about multi-factor authentication right [00:37:30] now. So the first reason kind of the biggest reason is you can use it for generating passwords. Fairly random ones or fairly memorable ones. And then when you go to a site, one password can pop up and give you the password for the site.

So you don't even have to look it up. You don't have to remember it. You don't have to look it up. Isn't that phenomenal. And then it also has built into it. Token this six digit [00:38:00] key generator. I'm trying to keep this simple. So you can then use that for the site. So it says, okay, what's the code go to your code generator.

So you just go to one password. There it is. Copy it and paste it right in. And you're in that alone would have prevented my buddy's account from getting there. It's that simple, one more thing that you want to use one password. And that is those questions that you're [00:38:30] asked to verify. It's you many sites out there banks are really big into this and I don't get it cause it's not very good in most cases.

So they'll ask you things like where were you born? What's your mother's maiden name? Where did you go on your first day to what was the car that you owned first? Or, your dog's name, et cetera. The reason, those things are so bad is because the hackers can go online, look at your [00:39:00] social media and figure out the answers to a lot of those questions.

Bad. So what you should be doing is using one password, and it allows you to put notes pretty much anything you want to in the record for that Website. So you go to the Website and you log in, create your account right. To log in. So you're going to give it your, probably your email address, which is a bad idea, but [00:39:30] that's, what's required use one password.

To generate a strong password for you that you'll put in. You'll use one password. Hopefully they have multi factor authentication that allows you to use one of these code generators. Google has theirs is called Google authenticator, and one password is compatible with that. Microsoft has done. Own thing.

And it's not compatible with almost any Website online. So don't use the [00:40:00] Microsoft authenticator other than for Microsoft products, like using the, a windows 365 thing that they have does use Microsoft authenticator, but you can also use the Google one and the one password one, and then in the notes section, make up answers to the questions.

So it asks you, what was your mother's maiden name? And say something different insecurity, where, what is your high school? It was named [00:40:30] movie elementary school, make something up a stream. Okay. Use random answers. Record them in one password. You're going to have to look them up. If you ever on the phone with the bank or whomever, because you're not going to remember them, but that's good because they don't appear in your.

Social media anywhere and they don't appear anywhere else other than your secured encrypted one password fault. [00:41:00] Thanks for being with us. I appreciate you guys listening, and you can find all of this. I'm going to turn all of these and did a little mini-courses here over the next few weeks, and there's only one way you're going to get it.

And that is by being on my email list. Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Go there right now. Craig peterson.com/subscribe.

As if this year and last year haven't been enough weirdness, [00:41:30] it looks like George Orwell is kind of lending some help here. You won't believe what the us department of Homeland security is planning on doing well, maybe it will.

If you missed the last hour, it is absolutely must-listen radio.

And so what I'm going to be doing is I will put it up online for you guys. You can get it by going to Craig [00:42:00] peterson.com/podcast. Hopefully, I'll get it up soon after the show today, but I went through and explained ways. That you can protect your privacy online. Absolutely protect it. So you don't get that kind of advice or most people, most people are trying to sell you a product that just doesn't really work that well.

I I'm telling you what does work, what the experts do, what Edward Snowden would do. What I [00:42:30] have been doing for more than 30 years personally, in order to help keep my identity safe. So check it out again. Craig peterson.com/podcast. Now I want to point out too, that if it's not upon you, look, make sure you refresh your browser.

So you're going to want to do what's called a cache clear refresh. So. And the browser by that URL bar, you'll see a little, it's usually a little circle [00:43:00] with an arrow on the end. That's your refresh, but you need to also reflect, refresh your cache. So you're going to hold down the shift. And hit that little circle with the arrow on the end, and then you'll be able to listen to all of that.

And I'm thinking right now, I'm probably going to try and turn that into a series of emails so that you guys can just read. Through it over the course of a few weeks. Cause man, did I cover a [00:43:30] lot? And you can get that when those come out in. And even if I don't get around to this, I do do emails with training in them.

And with of course the latest news. And you get that by subscribing again, Craig peterson.com. We've got to help you guys out. You need to know this. Okay. Absolutely. You, you personally need to know that. Well, this whole or wellbeing thing is scary, frankly. [00:44:00] I just finished going through reading George Orwell's 1984 again, and it was just so eyeopening.

I read it many moons ago, and I learned a lot from it then, but now I see it out in the streets. I see it with what's been happening with government and even businesses. And we've complained about them many times here on the show. Haven't we, some of the deep [00:44:30] state, big tech ties that go between each other.

It's no longer really the military-industrial complex. We're talking about the deep sea. High tech complex. It's a bad thing. It's a scary thing. Well, what they're doing right now, and this is a great article from news busters.org is they've got this Alliance between the department of Homeland security and private [00:45:00] companies that they're trying to put together.

Now, news semesters, isn't saying. That it's already in place. They're saying this is what they're planning on, putting them place. However, I know what they have in place, and they're already doing a bunch of this. Again, it goes back to that app. Isn't really free that app that supposedly is free, is doing something it's gathering information, data on you, and then it's selling it.

And the people that are buying it are data. Aggregators is what they're called. [00:45:30] 20 years ago, I had some of the top data aggregators on the show and I sat down with them and I said, well, let's look me up because they have information, public records, some private stuff, like obviously buying it from these app developers.

And I said, let's look me up, find out what you have on me. So we looked me up, and I would say about three quarters of it was wrong. Which was really kind of interesting. And this is [00:46:00] data that was used back then, mainly for what's called skip tracing. So you have a bill to pay. You don't pay it. You move out of town.

That's the process to find do is called skip tracing. And that's what they would do nowadays. It turns out that local. Federal police departments and other agencies are buying this data from the data brokers so that they can now track you. Now they're not allowed to, by [00:46:30] law track you, you know that, right.

But the government is doing what one might call lawyering. That's what we called it in robotics. I was part of a us robotics team with kids, and they would always look at the rules, and they would get reprimanded. The teams would if they lawyered the rules. In other words, if they met the exact definition of what it was in the rules, but they didn't meet the spirit of the rule.[00:47:00]

They would get reprimanded. They might even get kicked out. And that did happen a few times. However, if you're the government and you get to say which laws you want to follow, which court rulings you want to follow, think of what's been happening lately, right? We're not going to, yeah, I know. I know I can't do this.

I can't do this. I can't do this. I can't do this. I have a pen and a phone. I'm going to do it anyway. Or just reverse all of the actions of the prior administration. [00:47:30] And even though the Supreme court says, Hey, you cannot do this, but we're not going to rule on it because the this policy is only in place for a couple more weeks.

And then you do it again. Anyways, the government isn't, isn't even obeying the rules. Th the strict letter of the law. They're not even obeying, let alone the spirit of the law just drives me crazy. The wall street journal just reported, uh, about a week [00:48:00] ago here last Sunday that the department of Homeland security is considering hiring private companies to analyze public social media for warning signs of extremist violence, spurring debate within the agency over how to monitor for such threat while protecting American civil liberties.

Now I'm glad they're at least giving you. Lip service to protecting our civil civil liberties, right. That I think is a very good [00:48:30] thing. They should be protecting them, but this just has the tendency to continue to inch forward again and again and again. So this effort has not received approval and has not been.

But it's going to involve. According to the wall street journal is sifting through large flows of internet traffic to help identify online narratives that might provide leads on developing tax weather from home [00:49:00] or. Eh, this is, this is just amazing. Now I mentioned on the radio, uh, previously that I have personal experience with one of these large federal law enforcement agencies that has been doing what I considered to be completely unreasonable things with people's information and also completely unreasonable things [00:49:30] in defining.

Where the thread is. You've probably heard it all over the news that, that it's all these conservative groups that are the real threat. Well, it's not the conservative groups that have been out there, burning down cities, demonstrating, beating people with clubs, pulling people out of cars, and BD. No, it's not.

So where, where are these people coming from, and how do they define these [00:50:00] extremist actions? How do they define it? Right. Well, you can tell that there's obviously some extremism involved when there's a riot, but they will respond to a riot in Washington, DC after Trump rally, but they don't respond to riots all over the country and major cities.

And in many cases they don't even do arrests. Oh, it's absolutely amazing what's going on. So I'm very, [00:50:30] very worried about this fusion of big tech and deep state government, because it's become really kind of a hallmark of the Biden administration. Senator Josh Holly's Republican from Missouri really went after the Biden administration for pressuring private companies to help spy on the techs of American citizens.

This is back in July and he said that the big government, big corporation [00:51:00] Alliance is the real danger here. And. Absolutely have to agree. This is going to be a problem. And giving the government access to more personal data is going to be an even bigger problem in months and years to come. Particularly if we just let them do.

Willy nilly and that's kinda what's happening. What kind of oversight is there really think about the Pfizer courts that are [00:51:30] supposed to be providing oversight for monitoring, uh, people who are not citizens. And yet it looks like. Our law enforcement agencies. We're targeting citizens specifically through the Pfizer courts who are playing games.

So I absolutely don't want this to happen. I don't want any administration, Republican-Democrat, you name it. I don't want any of them to have access to [00:52:00] this type of deal. And I go right back on this and a, here's a great quote to explain why I'm going to use a quote from lever inti barrier. He was the most ruthless and longest-serving secret police chief in Joseph Stalin's reign of terror.

He said, show me the man and I'll show you the crime. That should scare all of us, because even though the administration today, isn't doing that [00:52:30] types of things Stalin was doing, obviously we don't know what's going to happen in the future and we cannot let the hackers gain access to this information because believe me, they're going to be going after it as well.

So don't collect it in the first place.

Let's do think that surveillance on citizens, criminal and otherwise, is a rarity. We're going to talk about the New York police department [00:53:00] and their secret funds used for surveillance tools alone.

Here we go. This is from wired magazine, you know, definitely not a right wing entity.

They have been reporting on a number of situations where the government has really overreached when it comes to our information and our privacy. And they have this report now that has been [00:53:30] released. And. Yeah, that and some other documents and Sydney fossil wrote this article, and he's saying that the documents are showing that police bot facial rec recognition, software vans, equipped with x-ray machines and stingers.

Cell site simulators with no public oversight. And I'm going to explain what each one of these things is and what they are typically used [00:54:00] for. But this is amazing. No problem. Oversight now that's according to documents released last Tuesday. So when all these documents are showing that the New York police department spent at least $159 million over the last 15 or so years through this little known special expenses fund, the did not require [00:54:30] approval by the city council or any other municipal official.

Frankly. I think one PP has something to answer for here. We'll have to ask Tom Selleck about it. Right? The documents are made public by two civil rights groups, the legal aid society and their surveillance technology oversight project would says that what the N Y P D was doing amounted to our surveillance slash fund.

[00:55:00] It's just crazy, um, stops director, which is again, the, uh, surveillance technology oversight project stop. Their executive director said that the police are still blocking other records needed by the public to understand the way New York is being policed. This is just something out in 2018, the New York police department awarded almost $7 million to the [00:55:30] idea solutions company, which by the way, sells biometric tools, including facial recognition.

So what they have done in essence now is set things up in New York. Kind of like they are over in China where they have cameras located all over the place. And those cameras are capturing pictures of pedestrians. How the only kind of saving grace nowadays is a lot of people are wearing [00:56:00] face mask, although, and because a lot of people were in face masks, there's new software that will recognize people, even if they're aware.

A face mask obviously depends on the type of face mask, but you know, it's still doing that. So they have all of these cameras. They have this facial recognition software. And they can track you as you're walking around the city. In fact, they can do it in reverse, [00:56:30] which frankly is kind of cool that there are also these airplanes in the sky, over many of our big cities.

Now, New York, they're concerned about it. Of course of what happened on nine 11. People get really nervous seeing airplanes over there. So they're using high flying drones that can't really be seen with the naked eye or heard, and they are taking continual video of the entire city [00:57:00] and of all of the streets.

So let's say a bank gets robbed, they can try. Those robbers back in time using these drones or airplanes, along with the surveillance software in the cities, mash of cameras and find out where they came from. Okay. So it looks like this was the staging area for the bank robbers, and then they can go back further in time and see where the bank robbers came from.

What were they [00:57:30] doing? Where did they go? That technology all exists. Now, it's not that good yet, but you know, it ended up, it will end up being that good. But this goes right back to what I was talking about a little earlier with, uh, show me the man, I'll show you the crime. What happens if those cameras pick you up on a street where a drug deal was going down?

Now you've seen it on TV. You've seen it in the movies where they poem money back and forth a POM, [00:58:00] the drugs, you wouldn't even know that a drug deal was happening and now you get pulled into it. How about what happened on January six in Washington, DC? There was a riot. We all know that the Capitol building, but now the FBI and other law enforcement agencies are pulling people in who cell phones pinged in the general area.

In Washington, DC. So if you were down there and you [00:58:30] were part of a school tour that day, and you went to maybe the Trump rally, maybe you didn't maybe just went to the reflection pond down there. They investigated you. If you were in our hotel, they investigated you. If you used a credit card in the area, they investigated.

And that's being alleged right now by some of these people that were investigated and have had minor charges brought [00:59:00] against them that this was a total witch hunt. It was fabricating the crime. Again, show me the man. I'll show you the crime. I mean, under Stalin, the dictator over in the Soviet Union, you know, socialist government for those that aren't familiar with it.

These contracts that were received through kind of a freedom of information request to buy these civil rights groups were heavily [00:59:30] redacted. And so I made it very difficult to understand how many single tool functions were purchased, how they could work together to create a surveillance Dragnet. Over people in New York City, this secrecy also blocks a more complete understanding of the relationship between the New York police department is vendors in the public.

So again, it's a double-edged sword it's yet. You want to catch the bank robber. You [01:00:00] want to catch the murderer, but most of the time, those people know how to. Fool the system, don't they, uh, in 2014, the New York police department signed a five-year $800,000 contract with Elbit Systems, which is Israel's largest defense contractor.

And by the way, they aren't just in Israel. They're also, they have a plant in New England. Uh, kind of all over [01:00:30] and Elbit provides a wide range of surveillance tools used by customs and border patrol on our borders, including cameras and sensors that make up this virtual border Raul wall that we have on our Southern border.

It, this is not good. And I want to add one more thing. I said, I explained what these things are, you know what x-ray is. And some of these trucks are using millimeter-wave stuff and are our x-ray and people [01:01:00] walking down the street, supposedly to see if they have a weapon. Huh? Okay. So just walking past one of these vans expose you to health risks, no warning about that cancer risks from these mobile x-ray vans and these stingray devices are fake cell phone towers.

So they capture your information. Who you're calling where you're calling and your text messages, whether you are a target [01:01:30] of an investigation under court order, or just someone walking around the streets in New York, check me out online. Craig peterson.com.

Investment money is rolling into these high tech startups. That means if you're looking for a new job in high tech, it may be your lucky day, particularly if you want a job with a startup. So here we go.

Jobs in tech have always been [01:02:00] pretty good. Generally speaking, technology is what drives the economy. It is what boosts productivity, and it is right now, a really hot job market there. More small businesses, startups are being funded by angels and venture capitalists than there have been for a few years.

That means we've got money now pouring into [01:02:30] these little startups. There's a great little article in ARS Technica by Ariel pod dress. And she's talking about this company called revenue. This is a startup. They just closed their Series B, which means they had their second investment round. And this is a platform for managing in-app subscriptions.

They just got $40 million in the idea behind this $40 million series [01:03:00] B series B is to grow the company and. To hire more people. And of course, it's hard to grow the company without hiring more people, even if you're in the software business. So we're talking about a 35 person. Startup that's getting $40 million.

That's more than a million dollars per existing employee. They want to get another 50 employees by the end of the year and a hundred by the end of next year. [01:03:30] Now I've got to say, I, I had a startup, it was me and it was me and it was me. Right. I started it. I worked really hard, and I built it up to 50 employees.

I didn't have a dime of investment money, but now this investment money is out there like crazy, but revenue, cat's having a hard time along with most of these other startups, hard time hiring people. So, what they've done now [01:04:00] is they've got a whole bunch of extra perks. Things like unlimited vacations.

Yes, indeed. No more. Two weeks you earn an extra day for every year. You work there or a seven. These other rules that around for a very long time unlimited vacations. They'll give you a stipend. If you have an office at your home that you're working. Plus, they're also providing equity and salaries on par with some of [01:04:30] the big tech companies, regardless of where you live.

Right now, Facebook is, and Google are both looking at saying, Hey, listen, you know, you live a hundred miles outside of Silicon Valley. You don't deserve to be paid as much as an employee that lives right here in San Jose. So now we're going to cut your pay by 10%, 15%, sometimes even more. So these little guys are saying, Hey, listen, you can [01:05:00] work for us.

We don't care where you live. Timbuktu in Northern Africa just doesn't matter. As long as you can work from home, we'll pay you the same as if you're living right here in Silicon Valley in California. And we'll even give you extra money because we know it costs you money to be able to work from home because you're probably going to have to get a better internet line.

You're going to have to have a phone that works so that we can call you. Maybe you have to call customers. [01:05:30] These types of offers really weren't around before the lock. But now we're seeing high-tech salaries, being driven, even higher benefits that are really being massively beached up, uh, beefed up, I should say.

And companies that are offering incredible salaries and flexibility. So there you go. These companies are basically competing with Google, [01:06:00] Facebook, et cetera. So what does that mean? Well, these small startups like revenue cat are getting a lot of money, almost $300 billion invested in these startups worldwide.

And it's really hurting the big guys because they're talking about cutting salaries, even though they don't need to. It's not as though they're suffering. They're these big companies, they're still sitting on [01:06:30] billions of dollars in cash. Isn't that something. And so they are starting to really hurt because the small guys are stealing employees, quote-unquote, from the dice, which is, has this industry career database is saying overall tech job postings are up 16% this year.

We're seeing also, by the way, a whole [01:07:00] bunch cut backs because of the technology in how many people, these companies need to have a look at restaurants. Now they're doing QR codes for the menus QR codes to pay your bills. So there's even fewer people. That have to work in restaurants going forward. We've got meetings that are being held on WebEx or zoom.

You don't go see the doctor anymore. You're using telehealth software programmers. [01:07:30] Engineers are being used more broadly between March and July. There are more than 300,000 openings for software and, uh, other types of computer high-tech engineers. It's 13% higher than even 2016. It is absolutely amazing.

I had one person who responded. And when I offered, maybe it makes sense for me to do kind of a career [01:08:00] webinar on high-tech jobs. Right. What would it take to get into specifically the cyber security industry? Because it's something I know it's something I've been helping to drive the whole industry now for over 30 years.

And I had only had one person respond. Uh, although I know of. I have a few listeners that have actually done that. They went and got themselves qualified in cyber security, but only one person makes me [01:08:30] think that, you know, what does one person represent maybe a hundred listeners. So there are some of you.

I don't think I'm going to end up doing this little thing. Cause I was going to just do a free webinar and what it takes to become a cybersecurity analyst. Uh, but uh, we'll see what happens here kind of going forward, but there's a lot that can happen. There's tech co-workers out there who are leaving some of these high tech firms.

There are also [01:09:00] lawsuits about the golden handcuffs, so that have been put on people, you know, that say, Hey, you can't compete with us or you can't even be in the same industry. Some of those. Contracts are being knocked down in some states. Uh, it's kind of interesting to see what happens. Um, there's a couple more things.

Yeah. Here, different hedge funds, but it's a really great article. It's in ours. Double-check [01:09:30] your newsletter that I sent out or is going out this weekend. If you haven't received it yet, you should get it at some point this weekend. A very interesting one. If you're considering high tech jobs, ARS, Technica, Vicky.

Now, if you want to track technology and cybersecurity, you know, already I go through thousands of articles every week. Now you can talk to my wife about it right in the evenings. And even sometimes you're in the day I'm [01:10:00] sitting there reviewing articles and all these sites, I put them together for you guys.

So, you know, what's happened. And cyber security, what the latest breaches are, what you can do about it. I am going to continue with some of the trainings, pick them up again here within the next couple of weeks so that we can keep you guys up to date, but there's only one way you can find out about them.

There's only one way that you can get involved, and that's, by making [01:10:30] sure you subscribe to my show notes newsletter, and you can get that by going to Craig Peter sohn.com/subscribe. You'll get all of these free trainings. You'll find out about what's going on, what you need to do in your. Small business door also in your home computers and environment, but everything from the CEO on down Craig peterson.com/subscribe.

[01:11:00] I've been complaining about Facebook and what they have been doing to potential competitors for years, the same types of complaints I can make against Microsoft and Google to a lesser degree. While now the federal trade commission's coming out, agreeing with me.

This is something that I think has been a long time coming.

And this is the federal trade commission's lawsuit against Facebook. Now, lest you think that this is a Trump thing. [01:11:30] This is a Biden thing. Trump administration had filed suit, and then the suit was dropped, and now the federal trade commission has refiled the lawsuit against Facebook and has included some additional proof.

That it hopes is going to Boyce bolster its case. The last one was rejected by the court. Great article by ARS Technica as Tim D chant. You'll find that in [01:12:00] my newsletters as well. Craig peterson.com/subscribe. You can get my show notes for absolutely free. Well, this refiling is in response to the federal trade commission's initial case thrown out in June by us district, judge James Boasberg, who didn't think that the agency provided enough information or a real strong definition, what you might call a bright line in [01:12:30] legal terms of Facebook's market in its first five.

This is really kind of an interesting problem here because basically, the federal trade commission is alleging that Facebook lacked the business and human and technical talent to survive the transition to mobile. That's according to Holly Vedova, she's the acting director of the federal trade commission's bureau of [01:13:00] competition.

She also said after failing to compete with the new innovators, Facebook illegally bought or buried them when the popularity became any sense. Or existential, she said threat. Now, this is the same type of thing we've seen Microsoft do for decades and worse, frankly. It's similar things that Google has done to competition.

Although I think Google hasn't been as bad at this as [01:13:30] Microsoft or Facebook have been, but the federal trade commission filed this original lawsuit in December. And that was under Joseph's Simmons, who was appointed by former president Trump, of course. And he cast the Simmons, the deciding vote in the initial filing with the two Republican commissioners voting against it.

Now that to me is surprising because I'm all for free trade. In this [01:14:00] case of Facebook has been doing all kinds of anti competitive things. And it's interesting to see the statement here from the federal trade commission that FAPE spoke, lacked the business acumen and technical talent to survive. So that again tells you that Facebook might have a lot of really great political people in there working and censoring and deleting posts and some great marketing [01:14:30] people, but they sure don't have it.

The technical talent. I love that. I would love to see the judge ultimately rule that way, but here's the problem. Facebook acquired Instagram and WhatsApp. And I've talked about this on the show before. And the other thing that they did and the way they acquired them was a problem. We'll talk about that in a second.

The other thing they did that I haven't talked about before is. The way they blocked [01:15:00] competitors from accessing the API APIs now API APIs or application programming interfaces. It's what all of us programmers use nowadays. So rather than that, developing. For where that does, what Facebook does. I just go ahead and use Facebook's published interfaces.

So the idea is I call an API using some methodology, and I say, I want this post to go. [01:15:30] In my Craig Peterson account or in my tech talk channel, right. Our group is actually what Facebook calls it. And then Facebook says, okay, great. And it publishes it for me. And that saves me from having to have to go to every Website out there that I post my radio show that I post my blog, Kat, my blogs on too.

The podcast. It saves me from having to go to every one of those places online and repost, everything [01:16:00] manually. Those are API APIs. So I actually use a service that does that for me, using API APIs from Facebook and other places. I use it to publish onto YouTube. I use it to publish onto some of the instep platforms, et cetera, et cetera.

But what happened here is Facebook invited developers to start using these APS, the eyes that they had put together, and then later trained the API [01:16:30] policies to actually be an antique competitive weapon. Developers could only access Facebook's platform and its user base. If they agreed to not compete with Facebook or the other thing that they could not do, if they wanted to use API APIs from Facebook is they could not help facilitate.

The growth of rivals. That is absolutely amazing. So the FTC lawsuit [01:17:00] says Facebook recognize that the transition to mobile posed an existential challenge and that Facebook had a brief window of time to stymie emerging. Threats. This is right in the lawsuit. Failing to compete on business talent. Facebook developed a plan to maintain its dominant position by acquiring companies that could emerge as or aid competitive threat by buying up these companies, Facebook [01:17:30] eliminated the possibility that rivals might harness the power of the mobile internet to challenge Facebook's dominance.

So when we look at things like WhatsApp, for instance, here's a small company that they acquired. Okay. So let me see. This is from Investopedia online and the title is WhatsApp. The best Facebook purchase ever. Question mark. Okay. [01:18:00] Facebook acquired WhatsApp in 2014. Now, how much did they acquire for how much was WhatsApp really worth at the time?

It's hard to say, but you can compare it with other companies of similar size and it was probably worth 20 million, maybe 50 million at most. Right. Um, initial bid from Facebook for WhatsApp was $16 [01:18:30] billion for a company that was probably worth $50. Okay. Yeah. Uh, it brought in 10 million in revenue.

WhatsApp did at the time, and it lost 150, $38 million in that same period. So let me see. The company loses $138 million on revenues of $10 million. And Facebook buys it for 16 billion in their initial offering. Well, [01:19:00] that was the, that was the initial purchase price. You can read up all you want on this.

There's lots of information. So why did Facebook do it? Because they wanted to buy it potential competitor to Facebook messenger. And that's exactly what they did. And they've done that again and again, paint far more than what the market would really dictate so that they could get rid of a competitor.

Another one is [01:19:30] an ANOVA, O N a V O. This was a VPN service that tracked users activities that they bought back in 2013 and Facebook called the Novo. Cool. This is a quote from the lawsuit. Again, according Facebook execs that the acquisition of the VPN service would be really cool for identifying acquisition targets.

With our acquisition of a Nova. We now have insight into the most popular apps. We should [01:20:00] use that to help us make strategic acquisition. So in other words, by having a VPN server, so what have I said about VPN. Don't use these public VPN services because no matter what, they're promising you, it's not true.

I did a whole webinar on this. In fact, I did it like two or three times last year. Um, but they buy the VPN service. They get people using the VPN service. They're tracking everything that's going on [01:20:30] on that VPN service. And now they know what's popular out there and anything that's popped. Facebook buys.

Why are they buying it? Well, the allegation here by the federal trade commission and from me for years is that they're buying them so they can stay in business because they can not. Move around. They don't have the talent according to Biden's now federal [01:21:00] trade commission, a T-Mobile. I got to mention this.

I am a T mobile user, and T-Mobile now has been breached and probably about 53 million customers. Personally, identifiable information was breached as part of this. Yeah. So we'll know more. T-Mobile says it's notifying customers whose information was out there as part of the breach. This is part of the reason I don't [01:21:30] like giving my social security number to these people because by the way, If it's stolen, the social security administration will not issue a new social security number.

That's part of the reason I want you to be on my email list. Craig peterson.com/subscribe. I have a bunch of techniques that you can use. To help keep your information safe, your real information safe. That [01:22:00] is by the way, T-Mobile has had six other data breaches in the past four years. How are they still in business?

I'm looking for a new company to move to Waymo has now released information. It's 6.1 million miles of self-driving car data in Phoenix, 6.1 million miles. 18 crashes 29 near miss [01:22:30] collisions during 2019 and the first nine months of 2020. Most of these, by the way, were rear Enders, some vehicles swipes, and even one incident when a Waymo vehicle was T-boned at an intersection by another car at nearly 40 miles an hour.

Nobody's seriously hurt there. So congratulations to Waymo, of course, a Google alphabet related. And it's kind of interesting to see they've actually begun offering rides [01:23:00] in fully driverless vehicles to the general public. So they're way ahead out there. You saw what Musk said this week about their, their autonomous stuff over at Tesla?

Yeah. Not quite ready yet. Hey, thanks for joining me today. Make sure you joined me online. Craig peterson.com/subscribe to get my weekly show notes for free.

Apple is Adding Tech to Look At Your Photos For Child Abuse

This is a tough one. Apple has decided that it will build into the next release of the iPhone and iPad operating systems, which monitors for child porn.

[Automated transcript]

Apple has now explained that they will be looking for child abuse images in specific ones. And I just am so uncomfortable talking about this, but the whole idea behind it is something we need to discuss. Apple said they're going to start scanning for these images and confirmed the plan. In fact, when people said, are you sure you're going to be doing that?

[00:00:44] Here's what. IOS 15, which is the next major release of Apple's operating system for I-phones. And for I pad is going to use a tie to something called the national center for missing and exploited children. And the idea behind this is to help stop some of this child abuse. And some people traffic in children; it's just unimaginable.

[00:01:14] What happens out there really is some people. It's just such evil. I, I just don't get it. Here's what they're going to be doing. There are ways of taking checksums of pictures and videos so that if there is a minor change in something that might occur because it was copied, it does not mess it up.

[00:01:40] It still can give the valid checksum and. Iman, that technology is detailed, but basically, just think of it as a checksum. So if you have a credit card number, there is a checksum digit on that bank accounts have checked some digits. If you mess it up a little bit, okay, it's an invalid checksum, so that number's obviously wrong in this case.

[00:02:04] What we're talking about is a checksum of a pitcher or oven. And these various child safety organizations have pictures of children who are abused or who are being abused, who are being exploited. And they have these checksums, which are also called hashes. So that is now going to be stored on your iOS device.

[00:02:34] And yes, it's going to take some space on the device. I don't think it's going to take an enormous amount of space, considering how much space is on most of our iPhones and iPads that are out there. Apple gave this detection system is called CSam, an absolute thorough technical summary. It is available online, and I've got a to this article in this week's newsletter, but they released this just this month, August of 2021.

[00:03:07] And they're saying that they're using a threshold, that is. Quote set to provide an extremely high level of accuracy and ensures the less than one in 1 trillion chance per year of incorrectly flagging a given account. So now I can say with some certainty in having had a basic look through some of the CSM detection documentation that they're probably right about that, that the odds are excellent.

[00:03:40] Small that someone that might have a picture of their kids in a bathtub, the odds are almost so close to zero. It is zero that it will be flagged as some sort of child abuse because it's not looking at the content of the picture. It's not saying that this picture maybe a picture of child exploitation or a video of her child being exploited.

[00:04:02] If it has not been seen before by the national center for missing exploited. It will not be flagged. So I don't want you guys to get worried that a picture at the beach of your little boy running around and just boxer trunks, but a lot of skin showing is going to get flagged. It's not going to happen.

[00:04:25] However, a pitcher that is known to this national center for missing and exploited children is, in fact, going to be flagged, and your account will be flagged. Now it's hard to say precisely what they're going to do. I haven't seen anything about it, of the apples. Only say. That that they're going to deploy software.

[00:04:51] That will analyze images in the messages application for a new system that will warn children and their parents from receiving or sending sexually explicit photos. So that's different. And that is where again, a child, you put parental settings on their iPhone. If they're taking these. Pictures, selfies, et cetera.

[00:05:14] Girls sending it to a boyfriend, sending it to his girlfriend, whatever it might be. The parents will be warned, as are the children looking for things that might be of sexual content. Okay. It really is. It's really concerning. Now let's move on to the part that I'm concerned about. I think everyone can agree that both of those features are something good that will ultimately be very good, but here's a quote.

[00:05:41] Apple is replacing its industry-standard end-to-end encrypted messaging system with an infrastructure for surveillance and censorship. Now, I should say this guy who's co-director for the center for democracy and technology security and surveillance product project. He's Greg, no, him, no Chaim, is saying this. He said Apple should abandon these changes and restore its users, faith in the security and integrity of apple devices and services.

[00:06:15] And this is from an article over a tech. So this is now where we're getting. Because what are they doing? How far are they going? Are they going to break the end encryption in something like I messages? I don't think they are going to break it there. So they're not setting up, necessarily, an infrastructure for surveillance and censorship. But, still, Apple has been called on, as has every other manufacturer of the software.

[00:06:45] I remember during the Clinton administration, this whole thing with eclipse. The federal government was going to require anyone who had any sort of security to use this chip developed by the federal government. And it turns out, of course, the NSA had a huge backdoor in it, and it was a real problem.

[00:07:04] Look at Jupiter. That was another encryption chip, and it was being used by Saddam Hussein and his family to communicate. And it turns out, yeah, there's a back door there too. This was a British project and chip that was being used. So with apple, having resisted pressure. To break into phones by the US government.

[00:07:28] But some of these other governments worldwide that have been very nasty have been spying on their citizens who torture people who don't do what apple are not happy, what the government wants them to do been trying to pressure Apple into revealing this. So now I have to say, I have been very disappointed in all of these major companies, including Apple. When it comes to China, they're just drooling at the opportunity to be there.

[00:07:57] Apple does sell stuff there. All of these companies do. Yeah, Google moves their artificial intelligence lab to China, which just, I cannot believe they would do something like that. AI machine learning, those or technologies that will give the United States a real leg up technology-wise to our competitors worldwide.

[00:08:18] They move to China, but they have complied with this great firewall of China thing where the Chinese people are being censored. They're being monitored. What's going to happen now because they've had pressure from these governments worldwide to install back doors in the encryption systems.

[00:08:39] And apple said, no, we can't do that because that's going to undermine the security for all users, which is absolutely true. For example, if there is a door with a lock, eventually, that lock will get picked. And in this case, if there's a key, if there's a backdoor of some sort, the bad guys are going to fight. So now Apple has been praised by security experts for saying, Hey, listen, we don't want to undermine security for everybody, but this plan to do ploy, some software that uses the capabilities of your iPhone to scan.

[00:09:16] Your pictures, your photos, videos that you're sharing with other people and sharing selected results with the authorities. Apple is really close to coming across that line to going across it. Apple is dangerously close to acting as a tool for government surveillance. And that's what John Hopkins university cryptography professor Matthew Greene said.

[00:09:47] This is really a key ingredient to adding surveillance to encrypted messages. This is again, according to our professor over John Hopkins, green professor green, he's saying that would be a key in Greece and then adding surveillance, encrypted messaging, the ability to add scanning systems like this to end encrypted messaging systems has been a major ask by law enforcement, the world.

[00:10:15] So they have it for detecting stuff about missing and exploited children. That's totally wonderful. And I'm okay with that. No problem. But that now means that Apple's platform can add other types of scanning. All right. We'll see what ends up happening next, which is warning children and their parents about sexually explicit photos is also a bit of a problem here.

[00:10:47] Apples. Yeah, on this is messages uses on-device machine learning to analyze image attachments and determine if a photo is sexually explicit. The feature is designed so that Apple does not get access to the messages it's saying. If it detects it, they're going to blur the photo. The child will be warned, presented with helpful resources, and reassured it is okay if they do not want to view them.

[00:11:17] And the system will let parents get a message. If children view a flagged photo, similar protections are available for child attempts to send sexually explicit images. Interesting. Isn't it. Interesting world. So I think what they're doing now is, okay, they're really close to that line, going over.

[00:11:39] It could mean the loss of lives in many countries that totally abuse their citizens or subjects, depending on how they look at them. Hey, make sure you check me out online. Craig Peterson.com.

The IRS Has Been Selling Bitcoin - Pay Up!

Bitcoin is all the rage. In fact, many people have considered investing in these cryptocurrencies or something. Of course, many have invested in it. I played around with them about a decade ago, and the IRS seized 1.2 billion worth of it.

[Automated transcript]

You might remember, we talked years ago about the IRS trying to tax things in the virtual world. So if you were in one of these real-life-type things and you owned property, as it were inside this virtual world, they wanted to tax it. So, of course, if you sold something with real hard money and. You sold it inside that real world with real hard cash, you would end up having to pay taxes.

[00:00:43] Just if you sold a hammer to someone, that's the way it works. A lot of people have decided that, for some reason, cryptocurrency is entirely untracked. Now we know about cases. I've talked about them here where some of these coins, in this particular case, are talking about Bitcoin or have been used online.

[00:01:11] And in fact, the government has found out who was using it and really stepped in, in a big way. Silk Road is the most significant example. This was an online black market for everything you can think of, from illegal drugs to firearms, to all kinds of illicit commodities for sale online.

[00:01:36] Back in 2013, they used Bitcoin to buy and sell things in this free trade zone. I think they called themselves, and Silk Road was just thriving. But then, on comes the federal government and federal agents in the United States really cut their teeth in crypto search and seizure. With taking down the silk road, you might remember this was very unprecedented.

[00:02:06] People had no idea. What they could do. How could the federal government monitor this? Can I buy and sell these Bitcoins? All of that sort of thing. And 20 years as the chief of money laundering and asset forfeiture. Yeah, us attorney's office for the Southern District of New York. Sharon Levin said that this whole takedown or silk road was utterly unprecedented, and it was new technology.

[00:02:37] What do you do well because of people. Here cryptocurrency and crypto, of course, being short for cryptography, they figure that okay. While obviously, it is absolutely untraceable, untrackable. Tell that to the people that this year has tried to ransom money out of enough. US corporations, some of the major -- consider Colonial Pipeline and what happened with them and how at least half of their cryptocurrency was returned to them.

[00:03:11] So don't think that this stuff is a way that you can get away with breaking in the law or not paying taxes. It is not the whole. Business, if you will, of crypto seizure and sale is growing incredibly fast. In fact, the federal government just enlisted the help of the private sector to manage and store these crypto tokens that have been seized.

[00:03:43] Now, I mentioned that the IRS has seized about $1.2 billion worth of cryptocurrency this fiscal year. That is a whole lot of cryptocurrency. And what are they doing with it while it's the same thing? Remember the drug dealers back in the day. Miami, what was happening? I used to love the Miami Vice TV show. What happened there while they seized boats, they confiscated cars.

[00:04:09] They seized cash. Obviously, they can just be put back into circulation, but what do they do everything else? Cores, they go ahead, and they sell it at auction. And that's what they've been doing. Then in June, they started auctioning off Litecoin and Bitcoin cash. They had 11 different lots on offer.

[00:04:34] It was a four-day auction, and it included 150.2, 2 5 6 7 1 5 3 Litecoin. You like that. Remember, cryptocurrency is not necessarily a whole coin. It's like having a gold coin. That's worth 500 bucks. How are you going to use that to buy a loaf? But what happens with these cryptocurrencies is you can buy and sell fractions of a coin.

[00:05:00] So that's why you get into the millions of a piece of a coin. So they sold 150 ish Litecoin and about 0.00022 in Bitcoin cash worth more than 21 grand. So that's one of the 11 lots that were out there. And this crypto property is what they're calling. It had been confiscated as part of a tax noncompliance case.

[00:05:30] I'm looking right now at the public auction sale notice. And where it was, where you could go online. It was on https://gsaauctions.gov. Suppose you want to check these things out, as in the general services administration. In that case, auctions.gov, GSA, auctions.gov, and they were selling it, and it was a taxpayer, it tells you all kinds of information about them.

[00:05:52] It's a. Crazy here, but you have to pay by cash to certified cashiers or treasures check drawn on different banks. And it's really cool to look at some of these things, but you can find them online. So if you're interested in buying them might be an excellent way to buy them, these various cryptocurrencies if you want to get into them.

[00:06:15] But a lot can refer to almost anything could be, as I said, boats or cars like it was on Miami vice. It could be some number of crypto coins that are being auctioned. So they're going to be doing more and more of that. So then, apparently, the feds are saying that they have no plans to step back from being basically a crypto broker.

[00:06:41] Here is the bottom line here because they're seizing and selling all of these assets. So keep an eye out for that. Remember what is going on? The silk road site that I mentioned had been shut down or operating on the dark web. It used Bitcoin exclusively nowadays are using various types of coins.

[00:07:04] Most of them are ultimately traceable, and we're not going to get into all of the details behind it, but the bottom line is, so what do they do now? Think about this. Silk road had 30,000 Bitcoin that they were able to identify in CS. And it was probably the most significant Bitcoin seizure ever. And it sold for about $19 million.

[00:07:32] So that was quite a few years ago. Somebody just pulls up a calculator here, say 30,000 times, and what's Bitcoin nowadays. I'm not quite sure. Let's say it's $15,000. So in today's money, it had half a billion dollars. Today's value, a half, a billion dollars worth of Bitcoin in there isn't that something, and that was all seized, and it was all auctioned off.

[00:07:58] So keep an eye on that. They're following the money is the technique they're using. You can find out a lot more at us, marshals.gov, and that is how they found it. If you've got pictures. You're going to have to sell it. You're going to have to transfer. You have to do something with it. And that's where they're getting.

[00:08:19] Bottom line, particularly if you take the Bitcoin and turn it into something else, but this would take a while to explain. And I was thrilled to be able to sit in on a presentation done by the treasury department on how they handle all of this. It's frankly very fascinating. So, hey, make sure you spend a couple of minutes and join me online.

[00:08:44] Craig peterson.com. You can sign up for my newsletter. You can listen to my podcasts, and you can get some free, special reports just for signing up.

The "Great Resignation" in Big Tech - Better Jobs, More Money

There seems to be a worker shortage. And many businesses are finding that, frankly, people involved in technology are resigning; they're calling it a great resignation of workers. We have a lot of problems as business people, filling jobs nowadays.

[Automated transcript]

[00:00:20] And one of the things I've thought about doing is maybe even starting a course for people who want to figure out if this whole cybersecurity thing is right for them. I think that might make a lot of sense for some people. And there are some of you listeners. I know, because I've talked to you who have gone out and.

[00:00:40] Gotten into, is that a word who have changed careers into the cybersecurity realm? So does it make sense for you? I don't know. Do you think it would make sense for me to offer something? A cybersecurity course to give you guys the basics and help you understand it and see if it might be good for you.

[00:01:00] Only, you know that, and if you're interested, make sure you drop me a note just to me, M E Craig peterson.com, and let me know what you think. Still, the big tech is suffering from this great resignation of workers and workers in the technology field right now. So it's a good time to leave. Now, this isn't the same as many workers who, for instance, were in the restaurant business for many years, were in food service.

[00:01:31] You make money. Maybe you don't make money. Who knows those. And, of course, those jobs pretty much disappeared during the lockup. Big tech, it's different from big tech. Most of these people, most of us, frankly, retained our jobs. We were still able to work, still able to do the stuff we'd always been doing. Still, we were doing it from home, and many employees looked at the situation and said, I am not going to leave.

[00:02:05] Because I don't know if I'll be able to get a new job. Does that make sense to you? So we have a bit of pent-up demand in the tech field of people who maybe didn't like the boss, didn't really like what they were doing but kept the job because at least it was a job. It paid some bills. And from the bottom-line standpoint, it didn't make sense to.

[00:02:29] Now we see something else going on; people are leaving like crazy Facebook here. There's a quote in an article in MarketWatch. Lost this guy named Raymond Andres. Who's now the chief technology officer at the air table. Now I've used air table before I was a client of theirs for a while. It's really something.

[00:02:52] If you need to do some essential project management or have a process for doing something. That needs to be tracked, and maybe something handed over to another person when it meets a particular stage. Check it out, air table.com online. Still, he left Facebook, and he said there's been a burst of activity of people leaving.

[00:03:15] If anything. The lockdown delayed decisions. And that's exactly what I was saying. I've been saying that for a very long time, but there's another factor involved when it comes to technology. And that is the funding, which is just amazing. You might remember a couple of years ago we had this. Brakes on IPO's on initial public offerings.

[00:03:40] These tech companies just were not going to go public at all. And because of that, many angel investors and venture capitalists said, forget about it. I'm not going to go ahead and make any sort of investment. So that is when many of these small companies just failed, and of course, incomes the lockdown, and even more of them died.

[00:04:03] But now. But the investors are a spinner spending a lot of money so far this year. There have been 84 initial public offerings in the US alone. Isn't that amazing? 50 plus billion dollars in IPO's. Now that's up from about 38 billion. Last year. So there's obviously money in the IPO world. So that gets the venture capitalists interested.

[00:04:36] So VC money is also at record highs. This year's track is to be the best year yet. According to PitchBook through June. This year 2021, $150 billion has been raised among about 7,000 deals. Now that's ahead of last year's record, a total of $164 billion for the year. So we're looking at some significant money going in.

[00:05:10] And we have many people leaving from Google and Facebook and Amazon and Apple, maybe your company as well, who are saying, wow there's some real opportunity now I could get in on the ground floor. The VC money is a record high, so I can take at least some salary enough to make it heck I haven't had to pay rent for a year.

[00:05:33] So I can afford to do that, to try and. Something with some of my friends, and that's precisely what they're doing. Robert half, a company I've had on my show before Robert half international, did a survey. They found that about one-third of the almost 3000 information technology professionals.

[00:05:57] They surveyed said they planned to look for a new job in the next few months. They're also saying Robert half is that while employers posted more than 365,000 job openings in June alone, they're not getting filled; that's, by the way, the highest monthly. In about since September 2019, according to CompTIA, which is an industry trade group.

[00:06:25] I'm a member of that. My company is a member of comp Tia as well. So there are a lot of things happening that are really driving people to startups. And there's a lot of advantages to that. So here's another guy. This is an engineering manager who left Facebook last year. And he quickly returned.

[00:06:46] He said working at a startup, you have much more connection with employees, and things moved faster. So tiger graph, by the way, also hired ex-Googlers. And they're increasing the workforce this year too, about 300 from 90. So think about what they're doing. So that's not, yeah, technically, it's probably still a startup, but it's 300 employees.

[00:07:10] That's not us. That is a lot of employees, and they've got a lot of money behind them. Here's another guy. And she's saying, I thought I would be a lifer at Amazon. But this was a tremendous opportunity. I can have a far more significant impact and more influence on the company's trajectory, which quite frankly was harder at Amazon.

[00:07:33] And we're seeing more and more of particularly the younger employees looking at that. Her name's Anna fag fabric. Sorry about the names butchering here, but she's now at freshly. Officer. So many people are saying in this survey from Robert half international that having a chance to impact a smaller company was a significant reason for leaving.

[00:08:01] And that's after years of massive growth at big tech companies. So again, IBM in the 1970s. They were the ruler; they were the king. It was impossible. If you work for IBM, man, they're going to be around forever. And, of course, they still are. And they have excellent products, especially the Z series mainframe, but they're not the company they were.

[00:08:24] And I think we now are seeing. The next step in these big high-tech, but is no longer being the companies that they were innovation is going to leave with these employees, and they're going to really be hurt and hurt quite a bit. All right. So coming up, we're going to talk, of course, more about some of the more critical tech stuff you've got to. If you haven't already get on my email list, I'll send you a couple of special reports that we.

[00:08:54] As well as, of course, every week, one or two newsletters, not sales documents, newsletters, Craig peterson.com.

1126-01-windows_11_and_tpm

[00:00:00] Microsoft has had some incredibly successful operating systems and some significant failures. Think of windows millennial edition. While now they're coming up with windows 11, and frankly, things just aren't looking that good.

[00:00:16] If you know me, you know how I have had some issues with Microsoft here over the years; they are a company that has been, in my opinion, very dishonest have been doing all kinds of immoral things for a very long time by destroying.

[00:00:36] Parts of the market that they considered being competitors of theirs, so they have used their position at the top of the market with billions of dollars in cash to really nail anybody that tries to challenge them. And it's incredible to me what has happened over the years. But, of course, you might know Microsoft did.

[00:00:57] Putting an investment into Apple. And many people say that investment that bill gates authorized really saved apple from total collapse. And I can see how is this a reasonable audience or argument? But the bottom line, when we get down to it, is that Microsoft Windows has never been a great operating system.

[00:01:21] It's always had issues. It's always had glitches, and we could go into a lot of reasons for that. But I think one of the main ones is that it has really tried to stay compatible with everything, all of the. When you were a kid, you certainly rode a bicycle. But, still, the bike you might be riding when you're in your thirties or forties will probably not have three wheels.

[00:01:46] And it's probably not going to have a pedal connected to the front wheel. It will be a whole lot different, and Microsoft, over the years, has tried to make their more modern operating systems as time has gone on. Compatible with older operating systems of theirs. And that inevitably leads to problems.

[00:02:06] If you're trying to fix a problem, Einstein said this, right? If you're trying to fix a problem, you cannot use the thinking that created the problem in that first place. So to fix a problem, you have to think at a different level. And when it comes to software and operating systems, you actually. To program at a different level.

[00:02:29] And the entire structure of the programs has to be different than it is when you're starting. Microsoft has been doing that a little bit. And with Windows 11, they are really trying, they've gotten such black eyes over the years for security problems, and I think they deserve them for the most part.

[00:02:50] Now they're forcing you to use what's called a TPM. Now, these TPMS have been around for quite a while. You see them built into your Macs, and they've been built into your apple Macs now for years, built-in frankly to your iOS devices for your iPhone also for years. But this is a trusted platform module TPM.

[00:03:17] And the idea behind a TPM is that your computer hardware is locking. All of this information and the senior TPM. Now there are a lot of complicated implementations of TPMS. The implementation that apple uses stores, all kinds of stuff that makes sure you're booting properly, security, keys, et cetera. What Microsoft is doing now is for windows 11.

[00:03:47] If you're going to. Your machine has to have a TPM and not just an older TPM 2.0. Now there are alpha images available right now for developers of Windows 11. And I have to absolutely encourage you if you are a software developer to get an alpha version of windows so that you can double-check, is my software is still going to be able to run in this.

[00:04:13] And I also want to encourage you if you are relying on particular applications. Maybe they're a little older, perhaps they're not, but if your business requires you to use a piece of software, you really should get windows 11. Right now, get the alpha code, follow it through beta and test your software.

[00:04:36] Make sure it works. If it isn't working, then talk to your software vendors, warn them that it's. Because Windows 11 requiring TPM support, although it doesn't need it right now in this alpha version that they're releasing, it does require it. Supposedly when they finally release Windows 11, the computers you have today probably don't have this chip.

[00:05:07] We have a client who decided they would go out and buy their own server against our judgment. And what we told them they should be doing. So they went out, and they purchased an HP server from HP enterprise, and they did. And it did not have most of the security staff they needed, including it did not have a TPM.

[00:05:27] It did not have one of these trusted platform modules on it. Now, in their case with this HP server, they could buy one after the fact and install it. Although the entire machine had to be destroyed entirely and reloaded, that's a minor price to pay versus purchasing a whole new server.

[00:05:48] The TBM is not necessarily going to be compatible with the new version of windows. In fact, Microsoft surface tablets. I look this up to their highest-end surface tablets, Microsoft branding all over it. Microsoft certified $6,000 almost to buy this top-end surface tablet with all the bells and whistles you can get on it.

[00:06:15] It will not work with windows 11. How's that? So the reason Microsoft is doing this, I think, is a good reason. They really want to lock down this system to no longer have as many security problems. And we're not going to get into all of the different types of security problems that TPM is not going to solve a lot of them, but it's going to solve.

[00:06:40] Some of them, but the program manager over Microsoft, her name is Al area. I guess it is Carly. She said that the hardware floor of TPM 2.0 support will be in place for the final version. We'll see. I think a lot of people are going to push back. However, Microsoft really does and legitimately does want to make sure that everything is safe.

[00:07:07] So keep that in mind. There are a lot of people complaining about it, the alpha version. And that is why you have an alpha version. They're complaining about it because of the TPM, but also because of some of the other things that are going on with windows 11, at least right now, some of the things Microsoft has announced they've got, for instance, group policy will not let you get around hardware enforcement for windows 11.

[00:07:34] Microsoft is still going to block you from upgrading your device. To make sure your devices stay supported and secure. So that's good news, and it's good news because many times in the past, how many of us we've upgraded our machines and a new version of the operating system. And I use "upgrade" with air quotes around it, but we've upgraded our machines, and they won't work with the new version.

[00:08:00] The audience here for her short statement, which was part of this, a Microsoft tech community user questions, was agitated. They did not like the answers that she was giving. And this is according to windows central, the videos, top comment, read, quote, a lot of these answers come off as super Tone Deaf.

[00:08:22] It is looking like Windows 11 will be another problem. So for those of us, that know, yeah. Windows eight was really quite the flop member. They very quickly came out with windows eight one, and Microsoft is the only tone-deaf company out there. I've got to say, I think Apple has been remarkably tone-deaf in many different ways.

[00:08:44] Now they seem to be waking up doing some things a little bit better, so kudos to them for that. But a lot of companies, really. Tone, deaf to what users want. And there's a lot of blog posts here. We'll have to see if what they're saying ultimately ends up in windows 11. If it does, things will be a bit of a problem.

[00:09:08] But part of the reason we don't know. Because Microsoft disabled any more comments on the video, they were getting so many of them. And of course, there are trolls people who hate Microsoft. I'm certainly not one of them. They also, by the way, deleted all existing comments on the video here about windows 11 with their program manager in response to the negativity. The voting is still open on this video, and 2,700 dislikes and only 146 likes as of this last week. It's interesting. Microsofts are really rushing to these new hardware requirements. They're being very aggressive, and I think they're handling it. Sound familiar. We've heard these sorts of things before, but now we'll see here into the legitimacy of this. How much is it going to benefit is limited because where are we solving our biggest problems?

[00:10:09] People cooking, links, things get installed, et cetera, that nothing to TPM will be able to handle. The TPM is going to make sure that you have a secure boot that's it's missing. The goal in life. So how was it? We will help with a lot of this other stuff we will see, and I'll definitely keep you up to date on this?

[00:10:28] It's real. Hey, I want to remind you guys, go to Craig peterson.com. Hopefully, you got my newsletter last week. I gave you a private link to a webinar that I did about VPN because there's a lot of people selling VPNs. Unfortunately, most of them are misrepresenting what they can. And in fact, most of them make you less safe.

[00:10:53] So don't miss another thing. Go to Craig peterson.com right now. And subscribe

[Automated transcript]

Weekly - Microsoft is planning on making you buy a new computer

[00:00:00] Microsoft has had some incredibly successful operating systems and some significant failures. Think of windows millennial edition. While now they're coming up with windows 11, and frankly, things just aren't looking that good.

[00:00:16] If you know me, you know how I have had some issues with Microsoft here over the years. They are a company that has been, in my opinion, very dishonest have been doing all kinds of immoral things for a very long time by destroying.

[00:00:36] Parts of the market that they considered being competitors of theirs, so they have used their position at the top of the market with billions of dollars in cash to really nail anybody that tries to challenge them. And it's incredible to me what has happened over the years. But, of course, you might know Microsoft did.

[00:00:57] Putting investment into Apple. And many people say that investment that bill gates authorized really saved apple from total collapse. And I can see how is this a reasonable audience or argument? But the bottom line is that Microsoft Windows has never been a great operating system when we get down to it.

[00:01:21] It's always had issues. It's always had glitches, and we could go into a lot of reasons for that. But I think one of the main ones is that it has really tried to stay compatible with everything, all of the. When you were a kid, you certainly rode a bicycle. But, still, the bike that you might be riding when you're in your thirties or forties is probably not going to have three wheels.

[00:01:46] And it's probably not going to have a pedal connected to the front wheel. It is going to be a whole lot different, and Microsoft, over the years, has tried to make their more modern operating systems as time has gone on. Compatible with older operating systems of theirs. And that inevitably leads to problems.

[00:02:06] If you're trying to fix a problem, Einstein said this, right? If you're trying to fix a problem, you cannot use the thinking that created the problem in that first place, in order to fix a problem, you have to think at a different level. And when it comes to software and operating systems, you actually. To program at a different level.

[00:02:29] And the entire structure of the programs has to be different than it is when you're starting. Microsoft has been doing that a little bit. And with Windows 11, they are really trying, they've gotten such black eyes over the years for security problems, and I think they deserve them for the most part.

[00:02:50] Now they're forcing you to use, what's called a TPM. Now these TPMS have been around for quite a while. You see them built into your Macs, and they've been built into your apple Macs now for years built-in frankly to your iOS devices for your iPhone also for years. But this is a trusted platform module TPM.

[00:03:17] And the idea behind a TPM is that your computer hardware is locking. All of this information and the senior TPM. Now there are a lot of difficult implementations of TPMS. The implementation that apple uses stores, all kinds of stuff that makes sure you're booting properly security, keys, et cetera. What Microsoft is doing now is for windows 11.

[00:03:47] If you're going to. Your machine has to have a TPM and not just a older TPM 2.0, now there are alpha images available right now for developers of Windows 11. And I have to absolutely encourage you if you are a software developer to get an alpha version of windows so that you can double-check, is my software still going to be able to run in this.

[00:04:13] And I also want to encourage you if you are relying on certain applications and maybe they're a little bit older, maybe they're not, but if your business requires you to use a piece of software, you really should get windows 11. Right now, get the alpha code, follow it through beta and test your software.

[00:04:36] Make sure it works. If it isn't working, then talk to your software vendors, warn them that it's. Because Windows 11 requiring TPM support, although it doesn't require right now in this alpha version that they're releasing, but it does require it. Supposedly when they finally release windows 11, your computers that you have today probably don't have this chip.

[00:05:07] We have a client that decided they were going to go out and buy their own server against our judgment. And what we told them they should be doing. So they went out and they bought we're going to get an HP server from HP enterprise and they did. And it did not have most of the security staff that they needed, including it did not have a TPM.

[00:05:27] It did not have one of these trusted platform modules on it. Now, in their case with this HP server, they could buy one after the fact and install it. Although the entire machine had to be completely destroyed and reloaded, that's a minor price to pay versus buying a whole new server.

[00:05:48] The TBM is not necessarily going to be compatible with the new version of windows. In fact, Microsoft surface tablets. I look this up their highest end surface tablets, Microsoft branding all over it. Microsoft certified $6,000 almost to buy this, or, top end surface tablet with all of the bells and whistles you can get on it.

[00:06:15] It will not work with windows 11. How's that? So the reason Microsoft is doing this, I think is a good reason. They really want to lock down this system so that we're no longer having as many security problems. And we're not going to get into all of the different types of security problems that TPM is not going to solve a lot of them, but it's going to solve.

[00:06:40] Some of them, but the program manager over Microsoft, her name is Al area. I guess it is Carly. She said that the hardware floor of TPM 2.0 support is going to be in place for the final version. We'll see. I think a lot of people are going to push back. However, Microsoft really does and legitimately does want to make sure that everything is safe.

[00:07:07] So keep that in mind. There are a lot of people complaining about it, the alpha version. And that is why you have an alpha version, they're complaining about it because of the TPM, but also because of some of the other things that are going on with windows 11, at least right now, some of the things Microsoft has announced they've got, for instance group policy will not let you get around hardware enforcement for windows 11.

[00:07:34] Microsoft is still going to block you from upgrading your device. To make sure your devices stay supported and secure. So that's good news and it's good news because many times in the past, how many of us we've upgraded our machines and to a new version of the operating system. And I use upgrade with air quotes around it, but we've upgraded our machines and they won't work with the new version of it.

[00:08:00] The audience here for her little statement, which was part of this, a Microsoft tech community user questions was very upset. They did not like the answers that she was giving. And this is according to windows central, the videos, top comment, read, quote, a lot of these answers come off as super tone.

[00:08:22] Deaf is looking like Windows 11 will be another windows. So for those of us that know yeah. Windows eight was really quite the flop member. They very quickly came out with windows eight one and the Microsoft is, and the only tone-deaf company out there, I've got to say, I think Apple has been very tone-deaf in a lot of different ways.

[00:08:44] Now they seem to be waking up doing some things a little bit better, so kudos to them for that. But a lot of companies really. Tone, deaf to what users want. And there's a lot of blog posts here. We'll have to see if what they're saying ultimately ends up in windows 11. If it does, things will be a bit of a problem.

[00:09:08] But part of the reason we don't know. Is because Microsoft disabled, any more comments on the video, they were getting so many of them. And of course there's trolls people who hate Microsoft. I'm certainly not one of them. They also, by the way, deleted all existing comments on the video here about windows 11 with their program manager in response to the negativity, the voting is still upon this video and.

[00:09:37] 2,700 dislikes and only 146 likes as of this last week. It's interesting. Microsofts are really rushing to these new hardware requirements. They're being very aggressive, and I think they're handling it. Sound familiar. We've heard these sorts of things before, but now we'll see here into the legitimacy of this, how much is it going to benefit is limited as well because where are we having our biggest problems?

[00:10:09] People cooking, links, things get installed et cetera, that nothing to TPM is going to be able to handle. The TPM is going to make sure that you have a secure boot that's it's missing. Goal in life. So how was it we're going to help with a lot of this other stuff we will see, and I'll definitely keep you up to date on this.

[00:10:28] It's a real. Hey, I want to remind you guys, go to Craig peterson.com. Hopefully you got my newsletter last week. I gave you a private link to a webinar that I did about VPN, because there's a lot of people selling VPNs. Most of them are misrepresenting what they can. And in fact, most of them make you less safe.

[00:10:53] So don't miss another thing. Go to Craig peterson.com right now. And subscribe

[00:10:59] There seems to be a worker shortage. And a lot of businesses are finding that frankly, people who are involved in technology are resigning, they're calling it a great resignation of workers. We have a lot of problems as business people, filling jobs nowadays.

[00:11:20] And one of the things I've thought about doing is maybe even starting a course for people who want to figure out if this whole cybersecurity thing is right for them. I think that might make a lot of sense for some people. And there are some of you listeners. I know, because I've talked to you who have gone out and.

[00:11:40] Gotten into, is that a word who have changed careers into the cybersecurity realm? So does it make sense for you? I don't know. Do you think it would make sense for me to offer something? A cybersecurity course to give you guys the basics and help you to understand it, to see if it might be good for you.

[00:12:00] Only, you know that, and if you're interested, make sure you drop me a note just to me, M E Craig peterson.com and let me know what you think, but the big tech is suffering from this great resignation of workers and workers in the technology field right now. It's a good time to leave. Now, this isn't the same as many workers who, for instance, were in the restaurant business for many years, were in food service.

[00:12:31] You make money. Maybe you don't make money. Who knows those. And of course, those jobs pretty much disappeared during the lockup. Big tech, it's different in big tech. Most of these people, most of us, frankly, we retained our jobs. We were still able to work, still able to do the stuff we'd always been doing, but we were doing it from home, and many employees looked at the situation and said, I am not going to leave.

[00:13:04] Because I don't know if I'll be able to get a new job. Does that make sense to you? So we have a bit of a pent up demand in the tech field of people who maybe didn't like the boss didn't really like what they were doing, but kept the job because at least it was a job. It paid some bills. And from the bottom-line standpoint, it didn't make sense to.

[00:13:28] Now we see something else going on, people are leaving like crazy Facebook here. There's a quote in an article in MarketWatch. Lost this guy named Raymond Andres. Who's now the chief technology officer at air table. Now I've used air table before I was a client of theirs for a while. It's really something.

[00:13:51] If you need to do some basic project management, or if you have a process for doing something. That needs to be tracked and maybe something handed over to another person when it meets a certain stage, check it out, air table.com online, but he left Facebook and he said, there's been a burst of activity of people leaving.

[00:14:15] If anything. The lockdown delayed decisions. And that's exactly what I was saying. I've been saying that for a very long time, but there's another factor involved when it comes to technology. And that is the funding, which is just amazing. You might remember a couple of years ago we had this. Brakes on IPO's on initial public offerings.

[00:14:40] These tech companies just were not going to go public at all. And because of that, many angel investors and venture capitalists said, forget about it. I'm not going to go ahead and make any sort of investment. That is the time when a lot of these small companies just failed and of course, incomes the lockdown and even more of them failed.

[00:15:03] But now. But the investors are a spinner spending a lot of money so far this year, there have been 84 initial public offerings in the U S alone. Isn't that amazing? 50 plus billion dollars in IPO's. Now that's up from about 38 billion. Last year. So there's obviously money in the IPO world. So that gets the venture capitalists interested.

[00:15:36] So VC money is also a record hives. This year's track to be the best year yet. According to PitchBook through June. This year 2021, $150 billion has been raised among about 7,000 deals. Now that's ahead of last year's record, a total of $164 billion for the year. So we're looking at some major money going in.

[00:16:09] And we're have a lot of people that are leaving from Google and Facebook and Amazon and Apple, maybe your company as well, who are saying, wow there's some real opportunity now I could get in on the ground floor. The VC money is a record high, so I can take at least some salary enough to make it heck I haven't had to pay rent for a year.

[00:16:32] So I can afford to do that, to try and. Something with some of my friends and that's exactly what they're doing. Robert half, which is a company I've had on my show before Robert half international, they did a survey and they found that about one third of the almost 3000 information technology professionals.

[00:16:56] They surveyed said they planned to look for a new job in the next few months. They're also saying Robert half is that while employers posted more than 365,000 job openings in June alone, they're not getting filled that's by the way, the highest monthly. In about since September, 2019, and that's according to comp Tia, which is a, an industry trade group.

[00:17:24] I'm a member of that. My company is a member of comp Tia as well. So there are a lot of things happening that are really driving people to startups. And there's a lot of advantages to that. So here's another guy. This is an engineering manager who left Facebook last year. And he quickly returned.

[00:17:45] He said working at a startup, you have much more connection with employees and things moved faster. So tiger graph, by the way, also hired ex-Googlers. And they're increasing the workforce this year too, about 300 from 90. So think about what they're doing. That's not, yeah, technically it's probably still a startup, but it's 300 employees.

[00:18:10] That's not us. That is a lot of employees, and they've got a lot of money behind them. Here's another guy. And she's saying, I thought I would be a lifer at Amazon. But this was a tremendous opportunity. I can have a far greater impact and more influence on the company's trajectory, which quite frankly was harder at Amazon.

[00:18:32] And we're seeing more and more of particularly the younger employees looking at that. Her name's Anna fag fabric, sorry about the names butchering here, but she's now at freshly she's their chief criminals commercialization. Officer. So a lot of people are saying in this survey from Robert half international that having a chance to have an impact at a smaller company was a major reason for leaving.

[00:19:00] And that's after years of massive growth at big tech companies. So again, IBM in the 1970s. They were the ruler, they were the king. They was impossible. If you work for IBM, man, they're going to be around forever. And of course, they still are. And they have amazing products, especially the Z series mainframe, but they're not the company they were.

[00:19:24] And I think we now are seeing. The next step in these big high-tech, but is no longer being the companies that they were innovation is going to leave with these employees, and they're going to really be hurt and hurt quite a bit. All right. So coming up, we're going to talk, of course, more about some of the more important tech stuff, you've got to, if you haven't already get on my email list, I'll send you a couple of special reports that we.

[00:19:54] As well as of course, every week, one or two newsletters, not sales documents, newsletters, Craig peterson.com.

[00:20:04] Bitcoin is all of the rage. In fact, these cryptocurrencies or something, a lot of people have considered investing in of course, many have invested in it. I played around with them about a decade ago, and the IRS seized 1.2 billion worth of it.

[00:20:19] You might remember, we talked years ago about the IRS trying to tax things in the virtual world. So if you were in one of these real life type things and you owned property, as it were inside this virtual world, they wanted to tax it. Of course, if you sold something with real hard money and. You sold it inside that real world with real hard money, you would end up having to pay taxes.

[00:20:47] Just if you sold a hammer to someone, that's the way it works. A lot of people have decided that, for some reason, cryptocurrency is completely untracked. Now we know about cases. I've talked about them here where some of these coins in this particular case, we're talking about Bitcoin or has been used online.

[00:21:15] And in fact, the government has found out who was using it and really stepped in, in a big way. Silk road is the biggest example. This was an online black market for everything you can think of, from illegal drugs to firearms, to all kinds of illegal commodities that were for sale online.

[00:21:40] This was back in 2013, they were using Bitcoin to buy and sell things on this free trade zone. I think they called themselves and silk growed was just thriving. On comes the federal government and federal agents in the United States really cut their teeth in crypto search and seizure. With taking down the silk road, you might remember this was very unprecedented.

[00:22:10] People had no idea. What they could do. How could the federal government monitor this? Can I buy and sell these Bitcoins? All of that sort of thing. And 20 years as the chief of money laundering and asset forfeiture in. Yeah, us attorney's office for the Southern District of New York. Sharon Levin said that this whole takedown or silk road was completely unprecedented and it was new technology.

[00:22:41] What do you do well because people. Here cryptocurrency and crypto, of course, being short for cryptography, they figure that okay. While obviously it is absolutely untraceable untrackable. Tell that to the people that this year have tried to ransom money out of enough. US corporation, some of the major consider for instance, colonial pipeline and what happened with them and how at least half of their cryptocurrency was returned to them.

[00:23:15] So don't think that this stuff is a way that you can get away with breaking in the law or not paying taxes. It is not the whole. Business, if you will, of crypto seizure and sale is growing incredibly fast. In fact, the federal government just enlisted the help of the private sector to manage and store these crypto tokens that have been seized from.

[00:23:47] Now I mentioned that the IRS has seized about $1.2 billion worth of cryptocurrency this fiscal year. That is a whole lot of cryptocurrency. And what are they doing with it while it's the same thing? Remember the drug dealers back in the day. Miami, what was happening? I used to love Miami vice TV show. What happened there while they seize boats, they seized cars.

[00:24:13] They seized cash. Obviously, they can just put back into circulation, but everything else, what do they do? Cores, they go ahead and they sell it at auction. And that's what they've been doing. Then in June, they started auctioning off light coin and Bitcoin cash. They had 11 different lots on offer.

[00:24:38] It was a four day auction and it included 150.2, 2 5 6 7 1 5 3 light coin. You like that. Remember cryptocurrency is not necessarily a whole coin. It's like having a gold coin. That's worth 500 bucks. How are you going to use that to buy a loaf? But what happens with these cryptocurrencies is you can buy and sell fractions of a coin.

[00:25:04] So that's why you get into the millions of a piece of a coin. So they sold 150 ish like coin and. Above 0.00022 a Bitcoin cash worth more than 21 grand. So that's one of the 11 lots that was out there. And this crypto property is what they're calling. It had been confiscated as part of a tax noncompliance case.

[00:25:34] I'm looking right now at the public auction sale notice. And where it was, where you could go online. It was a GS, a auctions.gov. If you want to check these things out, as in the general services administration, auctions.gov, GSA, auctions.gov, and they were selling it, and it was a taxpayer, it tells you all kinds of information about them.

[00:25:56] It's a. Crazy here, but you have to pay by cash to certified cashiers or treasures check drawn on different whatever banks. And it's really cool to look at some of these things, but you can find them online. If you're interested in buying them might be a good way to buy them, to buy these various cryptocurrencies if you want to get into there.

[00:26:20] But a lot can refer to almost anything could be, as I said, boats or cars like it was on Miami vice. It could be some number of crypto coins that are being auctioned. So they're going to be doing more and more of that. Then, apparently, the feds are saying that they have no plans to step back from being basically a crypto broker.

[00:26:46] Here is the bottom line here because they're seizing and selling all of these assets. So keep an eye out for that. Remember what is going on? The silk road site that I mentioned had been shut down or operating on the dark web. It used Bitcoin exclusively nowadays are using various either types of coins.

[00:27:09] Most of them are ultimately traceable, and we're not going to get into all of the details behind it, but the bottom line is so what do they do now? Think about this. Silk road had 30,000 Bitcoin that they were able to identify in CS. And it was probably the biggest Bitcoin seizure ever. And it sold for about $19 million.

[00:27:37] So that was quite a few years ago. Somebody just pull up a calculator here, say 30,000 times, and what's Bitcoin nowadays. I'm not quite sure. Let's say it's $15,000. So in today's money, it had a half, a billion dollars. Today's value, a half, a billion dollars worth of Bitcoin in there isn't that something, and that was all seized and it was all auctioned off.

[00:28:03] So keep an eye on that. They're following the money is the technique they're using. You can find out a lot more at us, marshals.gov, and that is how they found it. If you've got pictures. You're going to have to sell it. You're going to have to transfer. You have to do something with it. And that's where they're getting.

[00:28:24] Bottom line, particularly if you take the Bitcoin and turn it into something else, but this would take a while to explain. And I was very happy to be able to sit in on a presentation that was done by the treasury department on how they handle all of this. It's frankly very fascinating. Hey, make sure you spend a couple of minutes and join me online.

[00:28:49] Craig peterson.com. You can sign up for my newsletter. You can listen to my podcasts, and you can get some free, special reports just for signing up.

[00:28:59] This is a tough one. Apple has decided that they are going to build in to the next release of the iPhone and iPad operating system. Something that monitors for child porn.

[00:29:12] Apple has now explained that they are going to be looking for child abuse images in specific ones. And I just am so uncomfortable talking about this, but the whole idea behind it is something we need to discuss. Apple said, they're going to start scanning for these images and confirmed the plan. In fact, when people said, are you sure you're going to be doing that?

[00:29:43] Here's what. IOS 15, which is the next major release of Apple's operating system for I-phones. And for I pad is going to use a tie to something called the national center for missing and exploited children. And the idea behind this is to help stop some of this child abuse and there's people who traffic in children, and it's just unimaginable.

[00:30:13] What happens out there really is some people it's just such evil. I, it I just don't get it. Here's what they're going to be doing. There are ways of taking checksums of pictures and videos, so that if there is a minor change in something that might occur, because it was copied that it does not mess it up.

[00:30:39] It still can give the valid checksum and. Iman, that technology is detailed, but basically just think of it as a checksum. So if you have a credit card number, there is a checksum digit on that bank accounts have checked some digits so that if you mess it up a little bit, okay, it's an invalid checksum, so that number's obviously wrong in this case.

[00:31:03] What we're talking about is a checksum of a pitcher or oven. And these various child safety organizations have pictures of children who are abused or who are being abused, who are being exploited. And they have these checksums, which are also called hashes. That is now going to be stored on your iOS device.

[00:31:33] And yes, it's going to take some space on the device. I don't think it's going to take an enormous amount of space considering how much space is on most of our iPhones and iPads that are out there. Apple gave this detection system is called C Sam, a real thorough technical summary. It is available online, and I've got a, to this article in this week's newsletter, but they released this in just this month, August of 2021.

[00:32:06] And they're saying that they're using a threshold that is. Quote set to provide an extremely high level of accuracy and ensures the less than one in 1 trillion chance per year of incorrectly flagging a given account. Now I can say with some certainty in having had a basic look through some of the CSM detection documentation, that they're probably right about that, that the odds are very good.

[00:32:39] Small that someone that might have a picture of their kids in a bathtub, the odds are like almost so close to zero. It is zero that it will be flagged as some sort of child abuse, because it's not looking at the content of the picture. It's not saying that this picture, maybe it is a picture of child exploitation or a video of her child being exploited.

[00:33:01] If it is not one that has been seen before by the national center for missing exploited. It will not be flagged. So I don't want you guys to get worried that a picture at the beach of your little boy running around and just boxer trunks, but a lot of skin showing is going to get flagged. It's not going to happen.

[00:33:24] However, a pitcher that is known to this national center for missing and exploited children is in fact going to be flagged and your account will be flagged. Now it's hard to say exactly what they're going to do. I haven't seen anything about it, of the apples. Only say. That that they're going to deploy software.

[00:33:50] That's going to analyze images in the messages application for new system that will warn children and their parents from receiving or sending sexually explicit photos. So that's different. And that is where again, a child, you put parental settings on their iPhone. If they're taking these. Pictures, selfies, et cetera.

[00:34:13] Girls sending it to a boyfriend, sending it to his girlfriend, whatever it might be. The parents are going to be warned, as are the children that is looking for things that might be of a sexual content. Okay. It really is. It's really concerning. Now let's move on to the part that I'm concerned about, because I think everyone can agree that both of those features are something good that are ultimately going to be very good, but here's a quote.

[00:34:40] Apple is replacing it's industry standard end to end encrypted messaging system with an infrastructure for surveillance and censorship. Now, this is a guy who's co-director for the center for democracy and technology security and surveillance product project, I should say. He's Greg, no, him, no Chaim, is saying this, and he said apple should abandon these changes and restore its users, faith in the security and integrity of their data on apple devices and services.

[00:35:14] And this is from an article over an tech. So this is now where we're getting. Because what are they doing? How far are they going? Are they going to break the end encryption in something like I messages? I don't think they are going to break it there. They're not setting up necessarily an infrastructure for surveillance and censorship, but apple has been called on as has every other manufacturer of software.

[00:35:44] I remember during the Clinton administration, this whole thing with eclipse. Where the federal government was going to require anyone that had any sort of security to use this chip that was developed by the federal government. And it turns out, of course, the NSA had an very big backdoor in it, and it was a real problem.

[00:36:04] Look at the Jupiter. That was another encryption chip and it was being used by Saddam Hussein and his family in order to communicate. And it turns out yeah, there's a back door there too. This was a British project and chip that was being used. So with apple, having resisted pressure. To break into phones by the US government.

[00:36:27] But some of these other governments worldwide that have been very nasty, who've been spying on their citizens who torture people who don't do what apple are not happy, what the government wants them to do have been trying to pressure Apple into revealing this. Now I have to say, I have been very disappointed in all of these major companies, including apple, when it comes to China, they're just drooling at the opportunity to be there.

[00:36:56] Apple does sell stuff there. All of these companies do. Yeah, Google move their artificial intelligence lab to China, which just, I cannot believe they would do something like that. AI machine learning, those or technologies that are going to give the United States a real leg up technology wise to our competitors worldwide.

[00:37:17] And they move to China, but they have complied with this great firewall of China thing where the Chinese people are being censored. They're being monitored. What's going to happen now because they've had pressure from these governments worldwide to install back doors in the encryption systems.

[00:37:38] And apple said, no, we can't do that because that's going to undermine the security for all users, which is absolutely true. If there is a door with a lock, eventually that lock will get picked. And in this case, if there's a key, if there's a backdoor of some sort, the bad guys are going to fight. Now Apple has been praised by security experts for saying, Hey, listen, we don't want to undermine security for everybody, but this plan to do ploy, some software that uses the capabilities of your iPhone to scan.

[00:38:15] Your pictures, your photos, things that videos that you're sharing with other people and sharing selected results with the authorities. Apple is really close to coming across that line to going across it. Apple is dangerously close to acting as a tool for government surveillance. And that's what John Hopkins university cryptography professor Matthew Greene said on.

[00:38:46] This is really a key ingredient to adding surveillance, to encrypted messages. This is again, according to our professor over John Hopkins, green professor green, he's saying that would be a key in Greece and then adding surveillance, encrypted messaging, the ability to add scanning systems like this to end encrypted messaging systems has been a major ask by law enforcement, the world.

[00:39:14] So they have it for detecting stuff about missing and exploited children. That's totally wonderful. And I'm fine with that. No problem. But that now means that Apple's platform has the ability to add other types of scanning. All right. We'll see what ends up happening these the next thing, which is warning children and their parents about sexually explicit photos is also a bit of a problem here.

[00:39:46] Apples. Yeah on this is messages uses on-device machine learning to analyze image attachments, and determine if a photo is sexually explicit. The feature is designed so that Apple does not get access to the messages it's saying, if it detects it, they're going to blur the photo. The child will be warned, presented with helpful resources and reassured it is okay if they do not want to view them.

[00:40:16] And the system will let parents get a message. If children do view a flagged photo and similar protections are available for child attempts to send sexually explicit photos. Interesting. Isn't it. Interesting world. So I think what they're doing now is, okay, they're really close to that line, going over.

[00:40:38] It could mean the loss of lives in many countries that really totally abuse their citizens or subjects, depending on how they look at them. Hey, make sure you check me out online. Craig peterson.com. Hey, sorry about having to talk about this, but man, this isn't.

[00:40:57] It's time for a little bit of good news. We now have satellite internet performance. That's pretty much on par with fixed broadband, and it isn't just in the us. We're going to talk about that right now. What are the options?

[00:41:13] You might remember the whole Sputnik thing and what happened there really drove the space race forward very rapidly, but we're using much fancier satellites than Sputnik, which of course, all it was doing was sending out a beep.

[00:41:30] It was alive. And I remember I went over to a friend's house. I have an advanced class amateur radio license, and I went over to a friend's house, and he had some satellite equipment. He was also a ham, and we were able to tune his satellite in his satellite dish into a couple of the satellites up there.

[00:41:52] Now the amateur radio community has one or more satellites. I'm not sure. We were really impressed with all of the stuff that's up there in the sky. There are satellites, of course, that we don't even know what they're doing because they're top-secret government satellites. And they're probably a decade ahead of the rest of the industry.

[00:42:15] But he was pulling down images from some of these satellites that were open-source of what's happening on the earth and just all kinds of things back before heavy encryption. It was very cool to think that these satellites were miles up in space. No, I'm [email protected].

[00:42:37] I don't know if you've ever tried it. You should try and go to speed. Test one word.net on your web browser. And it'll open up a little window. It's a company called Uber. And that window will allow you to start a test. And the first thing it does is it tries to find, okay, where are you located? And who has the closest reflector that we can use for speed testing?

[00:43:02] Usually there's something not too far away from you. If you are out in the Netherlands and of course, many of you listening, kind of our Netherlands, when it comes to internet access, you have pretty slow internet and speed test dot nettle. I'll put there's three numbers, you, or maybe four, you really have to pay attention to.

[00:43:25] You've got the download number and that's telling you how fast the data comes down to your browser from that particular spot, which is typically, as I said, close to you, although nowadays something that's far away on the internet, isn't going to be that much. So download matters and then probably what matters the most for most people.

[00:43:48] The next thing to look at is upload most of the time. If you have a regular consumer internet link, your upload speed is about 10, maybe as much as 20% of your download speed. So if you're getting megabit down, It's going to be 10% of that megabit down, maybe as much as 20%. So you're going to get about a hundred K up versus the megabit down it again, it varies.

[00:44:21] A lot of places will have 50 megabits down and 10 megabits up so it can vary. Now the up speed, the uplink speed is what's going to affect you when you are trying to upload a file. So maybe you're trying to upload something to work, or you are trying to stream a video cause you're trying to run a webinar.

[00:44:45] That's what that is. The next number that you have to pay attention to is the round trip time. So that's the time it takes from a packet to get from your computer to the server that you're connected to. And then back again. Usually that's measured in milliseconds. And I remember the very first time I was using the ethernet, it was thick wire, ethernet, and 10 megabits.

[00:45:16] And wow. I was just so fast and very expensive to use. And the delay pinging another machine. In other words, sending a packet from my machine to another machine on the network. And then having that packet returned to me was anywhere from if it was like lightning fast, 10 milliseconds, and more likely it was 30, 40, 50, even a hundred milliseconds on the same day.

[00:45:44] Nowadays, if you're [email protected], you are probably seen speeds that just blow away what I was using back then because things have just gotten so much faster. You've probably seen a few milliseconds in speed round trip, speed time again, depending on how good your link is. And then the fourth one you have to pay attention to is.

[00:46:11] And jitter is where you are seeing inconsistent speeds in those round trip times. And that's going to affect live stuff, particularly live audio, which we'll notice a lot to that. Hey, the audio is just terrible. It's dropping out at me. Maybe sounds digitized. Usually. Parts dropout gamers care a lot about the jitter because that's going to affect their game and how they play their game.

[00:46:42] So I just ran it here on my studio computer. Now we have fiber optics. We have a business line that goes directly to Comcast backbone and I'm seeing. From where I am to a server that's about 90 miles away, I would say my ping time round trip is three milliseconds. It's just, I'm still blown away by that.

[00:47:08] Cause I remember using dial up modems that were 110 bits per second, 110. And that was just absolutely amazing. And then 300, can you believers? 300 bod and it's changed a lot, right? So three milliseconds round trip time for me. And I'm trying to brag or make you feel bad. I'm just telling you what it can be.

[00:47:30] My download speed is 720. Megabits per second. And that's because right now we're downloading a few different things and my upload speed is a gigabit per second. So you can see in a commercial link, typically your download and your upload speeds are the same. It is not, it is in 10% obviously is exactly the same.

[00:47:54] So those are the numbers you should look at. I don't see on my results. The jitter, maybe there's not reporting that anymore, or maybe they only reported on bad lines. I'm not sure, but again, speed test.net. So they have released this [email protected], some stats on the satellite companies, because our friends over at startling, that's Elon Musk's company think Tesla and SpaceX, they are showing.

[00:48:28] Amazing download speeds. They're showing 97 megabits a second download. Now that doesn't of course, I really approach the gigabit that I'm seeing, but this is from a satellite. It's just amazing. And they're going to see if more now all fixed all speeds of everyone. One in the United States that has gone to speed test.net and ran speed tests.

[00:48:56] All speeds averaged out in the United States come to 115 megabits. So Starlink is almost as fast as the average broadband connection in the United States. Now here's a little, here's where they really shine to upload speed of about 14 megabits a second. So that's not bad that still fits within our model that we talked about latency.

[00:49:24] 45 milliseconds. Now compare that with what I had, which was what three milliseconds it's slow, but it's again, remember it's a satellite. So it's going from the earth station while it's actually going from your computer to their satellite dish at your location is going up to the satellite is coming back down to an earth station is picking up the signals from the satellite, and then it's going to the server.

[00:49:53] So 45 milliseconds is pretty good. I want to put that in perspective, though. The two biggest competitors right now, satellite internet are Hughes net and ViaSat Hughes net. This is again, according to speed, test.net. Download speed is averaging a little less than 20 megabits a second. So it's 20% of the speed of startling.

[00:50:20] Yeah, pretty bad. A and star links latency. Remember, and this matters a lot. If you're trying to do live video or you're trying to run your phone over it, latency is 724 milliseconds. So that's three quarters of a second. From the time a packet goes out until it comes back. So that will affect any sort of phone calls that you're making on HughesNet and then ViaSat none, much better download speed of 18 megabits a second, which is worse, but the upload is slightly better than HughesNet and their latency is slightly.

[00:50:56] What I'm saying is Starlink is really starting to shine. And Elon Musk is saying they are going to be even better. They're going to be much better. Give them a little bit of time. The reason that Charlene has the faster latency. Much, much faster latency than our friends at HughesNet or ViaSat is that they have low earth orbit satellite.

[00:51:23] So they are sitting up there. They do have some drag from our atmosphere, so they will come down. There's things in place to take care of all of that sort of stuff. But Starlink it's going to be available pretty much everywhere. The country. India is very excited about this because they've had real problems with the internet in some of the rural areas.

[00:51:48] But Hey, if you are out in the middle of nowhere in the United States, there is hope check out, Starlink online, lots of great stuff. Hey, stick around. We will be right back. You're listening to Craig Peterson.

[00:52:05] The hackers are still going after with ransomware, they're still doing just blanket attacks. They're still doing massive fishing, but they have glommed on to something that is being much more effective. That's what we're going to be talking about.

[00:52:21] This is a huge problem. We have seen some very high profile ransomware lately. Think of what happened with colonial pipeline, the whole solar winds attack, and much more the bad guys are trying to figure out a way to more inexpensive. Ransom money from us to more inexpensively, get all of our confidential information.

[00:52:48] I have a client that before he was my client, all of his data was stolen and they run right to the Chinese. I have another client who's operating account was completely emptied. And the problem in both of these cases, Was really the client not doing what they should be doing, but supply chain problems, supply chains, the software, you have the hardware you have that you're relying on it.

[00:53:19] One of the major types of businesses that are being attacked right now are our managed security services, company, security researchers who are trying to do, with all the effort they can maybe keep ourselves safe. But they're not doing what they should be doing. You've heard me complain for many years about programmers.

[00:53:43] I'm saying that in air quotes, people who have learned how to do Microsoft C sharp or visual basic, whatever it might be. At a very high level in share. Yeah, they can put stuff together. It reminds me of when the spreadsheets first started hitting the boardrooms, all of a sudden, business people, managers all the way on up through the board were saying I don't need the it department anymore.

[00:54:09] In order to get these numbers, I can just gather them in myself and put together a spreadsheet. I'll be safe. Everything will be great. I'm going to get that information now instead of having to wait for it, to get some programmers involved and get it done. The problem in all of these cases is exactly this.

[00:54:29] These are non-professionals that are trying to do the job. Those spreadsheets, many of them had bad data on them. They compiled into even worse data because there were in many cases. Problems with the spreadsheet. I remember when I was a professor at Pepperdine University and I was teaching management information systems out there in the west coast and beautiful campus, by the way, if you've never been there out at Pepperdine, right on the coast.

[00:54:59] But when I was working with those students, who were, it was his MIS 4 22 last year undergraduate. I ended up emphasizing spreadsheet. Because I realized most of them didn't really know how to do it. Yeah. Okay. They could go ahead and put a little thing in there that says, add up all of these columns and this row and multiply by that and cut out.

[00:55:25] I've got a number coming out, but is that number correct? It's like a county. And that's why accountants use double entries in the accounting systems to make sure everything zeroes out. Make sure everything is correct. And by having someone who's a manager using this spreadsheet, you might get some great information and might get it quickly.

[00:55:46] It might be absolutely correct, but it's very possible that it won't be. And from my experience and programmers are the worst of the worst, because many of them started when they were kids, very bright kids who were working on stuff and hacking it things. That's where the term hacker comes from.

[00:56:05] Hacker wasn't necessarily a bad thing. They certainly. Bad guys. They were just hacking it. The computer's trying to figure out how to program, and if something went wrong, they would hack at the code a little bit more to try and fix it and figure it out. Non-professional they were just hacking that stuff.

[00:56:23] And that's what we called them hackers. And so it was a derogatory term for someone that didn't really know what they were doing, but they were hacking their programming or hacking it. Some other part of it. Versus having people who are actually trained and experienced Microsoft got sued because of how bad windows millennial edition was and windows Vista.

[00:56:49] And they found that the majority of the code had been written by interns, by kids, right out of school without the experience. What does that mean? Why am I really bashing the younger generations? It has to do with the ability to foresee problems and the best way to be able to foresee a problem is to have seen it before, for instance, that you've gotta be careful when you're allocating right.

[00:57:15] And that it's not necessarily going to be cleared properly, or if at all, and that the return points can be changed in programs. That's one of the things that hackers do most nowadays. So if you have software that's written by people that don't realize all of the implications of what they're doing, you could be in trouble.

[00:57:38] I like to use the analogy of a car. Back in the day, many of us are turned a wrench and we tinkered with the older cars. We had a whole lot of fun with them trying to figure out how can I improve this? And we'll do this to the carb and we'll change this and look at this airflow problem, pretty basic stuff.

[00:57:56] But today, what we're dealing with is a car that is a whole bunch of major components. We went to replace an air intake because of a bad sensor in a Ford Crown Vic. And it was one of the last model years. And back in the day, you could pretty easily fix that. You just buy the little sensor and put it in there.

[00:58:20] And you're all set. We had to buy the whole component, which included the air intake, manifold all the way on back to the sensor and everything that was behind it. It was absolutely crazy and cost a lot of money. So think of someone who is trying to build a car today, we might equate this to you by a transmitter.

[00:58:43] You buy an engine, hopefully they fit together. If all right, have you ever tried to match a transmission to an engine and it's not right. Do you have to get a converter or make a converter that goes in the middle, or do you have to drill it out in order to make it Mount properly? All of those sorts of problems.

[00:59:00] And then you've got all of the other components in the vehicle as well that are mix and match. That's what programmers are doing nowadays. Nowadays, a programmer grabs this library that does something. So, for instance, Apple has a library you can use that identifies faces, but you don't know how it works.

[00:59:22] You don't know that transmission, how it works. Is it really going to work for you? It wasn't smart to combine that 600 horsepower engine with a Vega Chevy Vega transmission. For those of you old enough to remember what that is. But it didn't stop you from doing that either. And that's what we're seeing.

[00:59:42] That's what these supply chain attacks are all based on that. So much software is written by people that have not had the experience to think through the potential problems. And Microsoft is to blame for making it really easy for anyone to write a program, just like you could blame VisiCalc back in the day for making it really easy for anyone to make a spread.

[01:00:07] But those spreadsheets weren't accurate. The software that we're getting from our suppliers, which include Microsoft. This latest, huge hack came right through Microsoft exchange. It was a zero day bug. The same types of problems that we've had with some of the other software that's out there. Think about how we got the solar winds attack.

[01:00:31] Think about some of these other ones that we've had that are just absolutely massive. It can kill us and kill us in a very big, when we're talking of course, about all of our systems and software. Hey, I want to remind you guys, just spend a couple of minutes. If you would go online, Craig peterson.com.

[01:00:51] You're going to get the sort of thing. Last weekend. I sent out a video that I chaired with some friends, and I shared it with anybody on my list. Last weekend, it was just part of the newsletter on VPNs, who you can tell. Who you can't trust and the best ways and times to use a VPN. All right. Stick around.

[01:01:12] We'll be right back. You're listening to Craig Peterson [email protected].

[01:01:20] So now, a little bit about what supply chain attacks are. We're going to get into that a little bit more now, what can you do about it? And this European union-funded study that came in the wake of these two major cyber attacks.

[01:01:36] The European Union has now forecasted that there's going to be four times more software supply chain attacks in 2021 than there were in 2010. That, my friend, is a very big deal. These cybercriminals are now shifting to larger cross border targets.

[01:01:59] This is just an amazing report. You can look at it. It's called threat landscape for supply chain attacks. And they looked at 24 supply chain incidents that have occurred between January 20, 20 and July, 2021. The basics here are a supply chain attack is where a software provider or some sort of a trusted provider is hacked.

[01:02:25] Usually they're are hacked in a way that they don't realize they've been hacked and then they pass off. The hacked software to you. I can remember a Microsoft product back when they used to ship them on DVDs or CDs. And we got that thing. One of the first steps was always to scan it for viruses, and we did.

[01:02:48] And sure enough, Microsoft was shipping out software with a virus on it all. The same sorts of things have been happening with thumb drives some of these ones, particularly cheap ones that you buy online often have built right into them. Malware. Now with some of the reason for the malware is legitimately purposeful.

[01:03:12] Okay. What they're trying to do is get you to have their little ransomware work for them so they can make some money off of you. In other cases, you have a thumb drive that a friend gave to you, and you're now using a little thumb drive and guests. Yeah, you are a little thumb drive has some nastiness on it.

[01:03:32] Same, thing's true with Microsoft word documents that might have macro viruses, if you will, that are built into them. These little Trojans do the same thing with the Excel spreadsheets and on. But what they're finding right now is that these hackers are trying to get to the companies that provide services for the bigger companies.

[01:03:55] And that's where it can hurt you and hurt you in a big way. I was just talking about how many programmers just aren't terribly professional. And some of that has to do with their lack of experience and those programmers might be using a library. So, for instance, get hub, which I use, and it's very common to be used out there online.

[01:04:18] It has all kinds of source code called open-source code. So you can use it. You can model. That some of that software has been infected. And then there are people who are using languages that are nice and simple, like Python and others. And you write in this scripting language and pull in libraries that come from public sources that do things for you.

[01:04:41] So they might do something like display something on this screen. They might go out and grab something from a URL online or connect to a database. And what the bad guys have found out is we're not, double-checking all of the sources of all of this software, and that is causing some huge security holes.

[01:05:04] And what ends up happening is companies like solar wind are using some of this soft. And they then might be including it in the software they're providing you now, in the case of solar winds, it's a little bit different, but it's the same concept. Solar wind software was being used by a large number of companies in the U S.

[01:05:29] Agencies were using solar wind software. And so we're regular old, small businesses because what happens is you hire a managed services provider and they don't have time to look at all of your computers all of the time. So they have software that they're using called a Ryan in this particular case. And I'll Ryan is installed on all of your computers.

[01:05:55] So probably unbeknownst to you there's software on your computers. That is not being written by that managed services provider. But in this case was being written and provided by solar winds. Solar winds got hacked and the hackers put into solar wind software. Code that would eventually end up on your computer and your computer getting hacked.

[01:06:18] So you just see how complicated this gets, right? You guys are the best and brightest, but you've probably got your eyes spinning a little bit here because we're talking about multiple layers of like again, direction, right? So these attacks, which mode, it looks like it began maybe in March 20, 20.

[01:06:38] We're only detected in December last year, and they have been linked to this Russian organization called cozy bear, but we'll see what happens. We've got the more recent ones, which is the reveal. Ransomware got gang, this R E V I L reveal. And they exploited vulnerability. In Casias VSA, which again is another management platform that's used by many of these companies out there that are providing managed services.

[01:07:09] Now I've got to say by means of full exposure here. We had to use both of these pieces of software before. And when we looked into them, we found that they. Insecure. In fact, it sounds like some of these companies had been warned by their own employees, that the entire architecture of their software was insecure.

[01:07:33] Okay. So we ditched them all. We're using Cisco's software, they're advanced malware protection. The real high-end firewalls with special software, the backend that's running. So we're not getting into all of these crazy acronyms and names right now. So just so you know, that's what we use. That's what we use for our customers.

[01:07:56] I even have that at my house. Okay. So a little bit more expensive, but it's a lot cheaper than having to hire a whole bunch of it. People to keep track of everything else now, because say. I had gotten, I had this ransomware that was distributed to Casa, his client. And potentially to kiss his clients, and this reveal gang demanded a $70 million ransomware payment say is denied that it paid it.

[01:08:28] They may or may not have paid it. You might remember in the Trump years, they said, absolutely. Don't pay ransoms, or we may come after you because that is illegal to pay a ransom by. Because you are supporting a terrorist organization. So you gotta be careful with stuff like that. Don't pay ransoms, right?

[01:08:48] Because it also tells them that you are a company that pays ransoms. So guess who they're going to come after again, you, because they know you'll pay. So a lot of incidents, I'm looking at a timeline of the attacks that were studied in this report coming out of the European. Yeah. And it is amazing here.

[01:09:06] The unit max beans. That's one of those libraries. I was talking about the able desktop as Sydney. Was Vera excelling on VC or excuse me, VG, solar winds, big knocks, Mon pass Ukraine, SEI, click studios cast private stock investment manager goes on Fujitsu ledger. So this is a huge problem. And this is the sad part.

[01:09:34] European union's predicting. It'll go up four fold this year. So what do you do? You have to audit your vendors. And that usually means you have to have an agreement plays. They accept the responsibility if you are hacked. So keep it up. Yeah. Let me know if you'd like more help with that. You can always email me M [email protected].

[01:09:59] I think I got a couple of those contracts kicking around these vendor contracts. If you'd, I'll send one to, but you have to reach out to me. M E. At Craig peterson.com. All right, stick around. We've got one more segment today, and I want to make sure you spend a couple of minutes online. Craig peterson.com.

[01:10:20] And go ahead and sign up. Sign up for my weekly newsletter.

[01:10:28] We're going to do a little bit of wrap up right now, including talking about I message some of the changes that have come in Apple's messenger application, that many people are saying it shocking, and you should stop using it right now.

[01:10:44] This is an article in Forbes by Zach Dorfman, where he's talking about why you should stop using iMessage after what he's calling the shock iPhone app.

[01:10:58] Has had a number of major problems here recently that have been in the news. Of course they have about half of the smartphones in the country, right there. But things have become a little worse for apple here recently. And what we're worried about is, for instance, this whole Pegasus that we talked about a couple of weeks ago, where it is, what's called a zero-click piece of metal.

[01:11:25] Where they can send you a text message, even if they're not a friend of yours and take over your phone. And we've seen things like that before. In fact, I think it was in Saudi Arabia, where was it? The crown prince received a video from somebody. He played it, and it exploited some vulnerabilities in the video player and allowed them to have full access to his phone.

[01:11:49] And don't remember all of the details, but that part, I do remember. So the big question is, have all of these major security issues being fixed by apple is I messaged say for not, apple is saying it is encrypted end to end. They don't keep messages. There's some question about that because of a major incident back in 2018, where Apple was going to make sure it encrypted all of your backups and then.

[01:12:18] FBI apparently spoke to apple and got them to change their opinion on the whole thing, which is another interesting problem. Isn't it. So what do you do, what do you do with that? And what do you do? Very good question. Earlier this year we had WhatsApp make a major change. They had course also said we've got end to end encryption with WhatsApp or wonderful.

[01:12:41] And then people really questioned it because it was now owned by our friends over at Facebook. Is there privacy thereon WhatsApp? Is it legitimate? Is it just a bad PR move? What's going on WhatsApp, by the way, with 2 billion users worldwide and WhatsApp Facebook said, Hey, listen, we're gonna start giving you ads.

[01:13:05] And basically people were worried about them examining the content of their messages in order to give them targeted ads, et cetera. So now apples just confirmed what Forbes is calling the most shocking and controversial update in the platforms. History. And here's what's going on. Pegasus, of course, as I mentioned, this click attack, Apple's got his new update now, right?

[01:13:32] That is using machine learning. In order to see if a minor child might be sending a picture pornographic or otherwise they should not be sending or receiving. And we also have built into it. Now, this child sexual abuse. Check some set of people. That looks on your devices to see, do you have any photos that match, just check some part of the problem with this isn't that I'm not worried about these children that are being exploited.

[01:14:06] Cause I am, I'm absolutely against that. But the bigger question here is, okay, so what's next is apple going to capitulate to the government and let them know if you have a certain picture of something rather the government doesn't like, where is this going to end? So in other words, Apple's phones being a lockbox.

[01:14:30] The Apple iPad is being a lockbox is really. No longer going to be true. It is no longer going to be that encrypted lockbox that has been promised to us the electronic frontier foundation. As a little comment here, they say Apple's compromise on end to end encryption may appease government agencies in the U S and abroad, but it is a shocking about phase four users who have relied on the company's leadership in privacy.

[01:15:00] And security, which is absolutely true. Now there's not much controversy, frankly, about limiting the spread of child sexual abuse material, but where we go on from there, that's where it starts getting a little more questioning here. Here's a, this is a Jake Moore over at east set. You said the initial.

[01:15:21] Potential concern is that this new technology could drive CSM further underground. See Sam being this child abuse material, but at least it is likely to catch those at the early stages of their offending. The secondary concern, however, is that it highlights the power in which apple holds with the ability to read what is on devices and match any images to those known on a database.

[01:15:47] This intrusion is grown with intensity and often packaged in a way that is for the greater good, right? Isn't that always the case. So we're doing it for the children. I talked about this extensively earlier. You can find it in my podcast, go to Craig peterson.com/podcast. Right now you can listen to it there.

[01:16:08] Take a look in your emails from the newsletter. Pretty good about trying to send those out the last few weeks. I haven't been that great because of issues here, family issues and others. So it's been a little tough. So I apologize for that, but we all want to see technology develop. That's going to help tackle abuse.

[01:16:27] It's going to stop the real bad guys that are out there. But what happens when China says we want access to this? We want to know when there's any pictures of a weaker symbol, for instance, or something else. What's Apple going to do they get, they can no longer say, oh, that's not taught. We don't have that technology.

[01:16:45] There's nothing we can do. Just like Apple has done with the iPhones in the past, saying we don't have a back door. There is no backdoor key. We can't crack into that. That doesn't stand up when they say, okay, China comes to them or Iran or Saudi Arabia, or you name the country and says, Hey, we don't want people to see these particular messages.

[01:17:08] Absolutely amazing. So timing on this dreadful. Okay. Part of iOS 15, apparently Pegasus raised two serious concerns that Apple's ecosystem, including I message has still got some dangerous vulnerabilities and that Apple's opaque communications in the kind of a black box security really were an unhealthy man.

[01:17:32] Now Apple has in the last few months, opened up that black box, a bit to security researchers, but it's still not that open. Now we add a third, which is what happens on your iPhone. No longer stays on your iPhone. Now I get asked by a lot of people. What should I do? Where should I go? What's a safe place. I still say Apple's your best bet in general, but the next problem is so what's next after that?

[01:18:02] I can still say Android sure is not the platform you want to use. The guidance. Google has snuck stuff in time and time. Again, even going so far as to sneak a microphone. Into the nest thermostats without telling a soul and without it being on any of the datasheets. So Google's definitely not to be trusted.

[01:18:24] There are other distributions for certain phones that are based on various types of Unix. They may be good. That may not be good. One of the companies I really liked a few years ago, discontinued it's secure and it was based on Android, but they were cleaning it up a little bit. So we'll see. These attacks that came against apple to give them some credit.

[01:18:47] They were very sophisticated. They cost millions of dollars to develop. They didn't last long because apple released patches. Once I found out what had happened, and they're typically used to target an individual, think of that journalist. Who went to the Saudi embassy. I'm trying to remember his name.

[01:19:07] Cause saggy, I think was his name, but this is a real problem. Okay. We think by the way that it was fixed in 1471, but these new security child abuse things are being added in the next release. So I'm keeping an eye out. I'll keep an eye on all of this. So keep listening and not I'll let you know how things go.

[01:19:31] Apple is likely done veil the next generation I phones in September. So we've got trend force out there, outlining what it expects for the next iPhone. Now I have an iPhone. And it is about to go out of support. As soon as this new phone comes out, my eight is going to be too old to get support, but it's going to be called the iPhone 13, which is going to be formally announced by apple.

[01:19:59] So the exterior design, I'm looking at a picture of it right now. That little notch is smaller than before. They're also using some smaller silicone smaller chips inside so they can put an even bigger battery. These new iPhones are going to have support for 5g millimeter wave. And that's going to be available for sale in more countries after the release of the iPhone 13, because it's covering more bands, which is a really good thing.

[01:20:30] The circuit boards are moving from the stuff that we've seen for decades. These rigid printed circuit boards to new design that has a flex. Printed circuit board, which is quite nice because if you've ever been to phone before, you know how painful that can end up being, and they're saying this should have the increased battery because of it.

[01:20:53] There's some more stuff that should be in that phone that I've read a few articles about new features that'll be in there. China, by the way, is decreasing in its purchases of iPhone. The revenue went from 19% in 2017, down to 16 in 2020 coming from China, but they still are big players, 16.7% of global smartphone marketplace.

[01:21:20] They're also expecting by the way that these new iPhones are going to have the new processor in them as well, the a 15, and also there's going to be brand new. Mac book's coming out too. That should have some neat stuff in them. By the way, the number one app this last year was Tik TOK. It surged from fourth place to first place, knocking Facebook out of the top spot.

[01:21:48] But the top five is made up of the main Facebook apps. Yeah. WhatsApp, Instagram, and messenger. And then of course would tick talk at the top. And then the next two places go to Snapchat and telegram with another short video app from China in eighth spot. So Pinterest and Twitter, by the way. The top 10.

[01:22:10] Hey everybody. Thanks for being with me today. Make sure you keep up on it. No, the latest you can help your friends. You can help your family. You guys are the best and brightest. You guys are the guys that people rely on for technology. I know it because you tell them. Any questions, comments, just email me M [email protected] and visit the website.

[01:22:34] Listen to the podcast and please subscribe. Take care everybody. Bye-bye.

Are You One of More Than 700,000 On U.S. "Watch-Lists"?

Craig Peterson: You've heard about the no-fly list, right? Yeah. How about the terrorist and other watch lists? It's impossible to get your name off, even when there was no reason to be there in the first place?

Well, I got some news.

The Department of Homeland security has been criticized for many things over the years. One of the things that they have been criticized quite a bit about is this watch list that they maintain. They have a watch list for no-fly. People get put on that watch list. It was initially intended to be, we know this guy's a terrorist, so we're going to put them on, right.

[00:00:45] It's not always the way it goes. It starts out almost innocuous, and before you know it, there are all kinds of people getting caught in this big, big net.

[00:00:55] That's what's been happening lately. But, unfortunately, it's going to worsen because the Department of Homeland security has decided to hire regular old companies to help develop this no-fly list and this terrorist watch list.

[00:01:14]Apparently, these companies will be looking through all kinds of public data, maybe some private data, social media to provide information for this new domestic terror watch list.

[00:01:28] So you look at that and say, okay, I can see that.

[00:01:32] We've talked before the problem, man, 20 years ago. I think I was talking about these data aggregators and the issues they create. They're taking public records; they're putting them all together. They're figuring out how it all meshes together, and they come up with a pretty accurate picture of who you are.

[00:01:53] Now, I've got to say when I've had them on my show here before, I was talking to them and said, okay, I want to look up my own records. So I looked them up on their platforms. I did not see a single one that was more than about 30% correct about me.

This was again, some years ago. I think it's probably been almost a decade since I last spoke with the data aggregators. They really are trying to blend into the background,

[00:02:21] Nowadays, this data that's put together by these artificial intelligence systems is not necessarily that accurate, and that gets to be a real problem.

[00:02:33] So who is DHS gonna hire? Well, from the description reported here by the Conservative Tree House, it is going to be big tech, specifically, Google, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, and more.

[00:02:54] The DHS will put them under contracts to hire and organize internal monitoring teams to assist the government by sending information on citizens they deem dangerous. Again, what could go wrong?

[00:03:10] Our government is not allowed to spy on us. How many times have we talked about this? You have, of course, the five eyes, and then they added more and more. These are governments that spy on each other's citizens for each other.

[00:03:26] So, for instance, the US cannot spy on US citizens. So we have an arrangement with the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia, Canada to spy on the US citizens for us that makes sense to you.

[00:03:44] Can you believe that?

[00:03:46]We spy on their citizens for them, and they spy on our citizens for us. All is good.

[00:03:57]What's happening here is The Department of Homeland security realizes it cannot spy on us directly. This is what they've been doing for a very long time, they go to the data aggregators, and they pull up the data that they want.

[00:04:12]They want to see if this guy is maybe selling illicit drugs, and they pull up public records.

[00:04:19]What cars does he have? How many homes do they own? Who's he dating? Has she all of a sudden been buying diamonds and mink coats? What's going on here?

[00:04:31]Now we're seeing that the US intelligence apparatus. It's really going live quickly to put together lists of Americans who could be potential threats to the government and need to be watched.

[00:04:49] Now it's all well and good. It's just like president Biden this week saying, Oh, we're going to have these red flag laws. We're going to stop the sale of certain types of firearms and things. It all sounds good.

[00:05:04] The reality is we have known about some of these people before, right? So this is all just a red herring that the federal government is doing right now because the real problem is these terrorists, the domestic and otherwise that have shot up schools, have almost always been reported to law enforcement as dangerous people. Some have even been on lists that say they cannot buy firearms, yet they get guns. Bad guys.

[00:05:39] It's like here in the US. Where does our fentanyl come from? We're not making a domestically. Our fentanyl is coming from China often through Mexico. It is killing people here in the US.

[00:05:54]The whole George Floyd incident, and what's happening with fentanyl in his system, right. The question is, did the police operate properly? What killed him? According to the coroner's report? It was the fentanyl that killed him.

[00:06:09]One way or the other that fentanyl got here from China and is being used on the streets, and people are dying from it. Fentanyl's illegal. How could they possibly get it?

[00:06:24] It's illegal for a felon to be in possession of a firearm. So how did a criminal get the gun?

[00:06:32] The police were warned about people in San Bernardino, California. They were warned. The people in that business told the police. We were calling. We're apprehensive about this guy, and nothing happened.

[00:06:48] So now what are we going to do? We're going to cast an even wider net. We cannot take care of the reports that come in right now. We're going to get even more reports, and they're going to be coming from these AI systems. Again, what could possibly go wrong here? It's absolutely incredible.

[00:07:12]They look at these reports. They try and determine these are actionable, the FBI or other law enforcement agencies. They've been deciding no, it's not actionable. They've been right sometimes, and they've been wrong other times. This is a real problem.

[00:07:29]What shocked me is NBC news with Andrea Mitchell, NBC news. Not a centrist news organization, very far left. NBC News is even reporting on this. They realize the consequences. Here's a quote from NBC. "DHS planning to expand relationships with companies that scour public data for intelligent and to better harness the vast trove of data it already collects on Americans." "The department is also contemplating changes to its terrorist. Watch listing process." Absolutely amazing.

[00:08:16] Two senior Biden administrative administration officials told NBC News that Homeland security whose intelligence division did not publish a warning of potential violence before the January sixth Capitol riots are seeking to improve its ability to collect and analyze data about domestic terrorism, including the sorts of public social media posts that threatened a potential attack on the Capitol."

[00:08:44] "DHS is expanding its relationships with other companies that scour public data for intelligence. One of the senior officials said, and also to better harness the vast trove of data it already collects on Americans, including travel and commercial data through customs and border protection, immigration, customs enforcement, the coast guard, secret service, and other DHS components". There you go from NBC news.

[00:09:11] So remind yourself what the FBI contractors with access to the NSA database already did in their quest for political opposition, research, and surveillance, and then get everything we were just talking about.

[00:09:28]The director of national intelligence declassified a FISA judge's ruling. This is judge James Boasberg, 2018 ruling, where the FBI conducted tens of thousands of unauthorized NSA database queries. Do you remember that story? Very, very big deal. This judge is obviously passing these things out like candy and the FBI misusing its power and authority. Again, what could possibly go wrong?

[00:10:00]By the way, President Obama apparently has been telling us that we should use the no-fly list to keep people from owning guns.

[00:10:08]There's already a database maintained by the FBI. So this whole thing is, as I said, a red herring. Things are going to get really bad if law enforcement does this. Frankly, they're going to do it. There are no two ways about it.

[00:10:25]We have to be more careful about keeping our information, our data private.

[00:10:32] That's what my whole course: "Improving Your Windows Privacy and Security," is all about. Locking it down because the way Microsoft ships windows and how it installs and configures itself by default does not keep your data private. That's a problem. So that's what we're going through.

[00:10:54]Remind yourself of this and just keep chanting, "nothing bad could happen here," right? Ah, the joys of all of these computers and databases and the way they work nowadays.

[00:11:07] By the way, if your information is out there at all, even if you use fake names and numbers and addresses and things like I do when it's not required. Right.

[00:11:20] I don't lie to the bank. I don't lie to the IRS. Nobody else needs to know the truth. Even if you have been, trying to keep it private. Good chance that they know who you are and where you are. Crazy. Crazy.

[00:11:36] Hey, visit me online. Craig peterson.com. Make sure you subscribe to my weekly newsletter.