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

Being Green Now Includes New Nuclear Plants - It's The Only Solution

Whether or not, you believe there is a climate crisis or this man caused the only thing that's been constant here on earth has been change. And particularly the weather it's been much hotter and much colder than it is right now.

I do believe that we have climate crises from time to time.

[00:00:24]We know that there were cavemen and women living during the ice age. And I think they might call that a crisis. We've also had times where people. We're going and having a great life, the garden of Eden, you might think where the carbon dioxide levels were much higher than they are today. And that means the plants were greener.

[00:00:49] They grew more verdun to everything else. Okay. So there is a whole lot of change and it's been going on for. Now the statistics I've seen that make a lot of sense to me, show that there is warming going on. Now that doesn't mean that we're not going to about to drop into an ice age or mini ice age. Heck we had one of those back in the day.

[00:01:14]In the 18 hundreds or 17 hundreds over in England, a little mini ice age. So it happens and it swings both ways, but I remember very well back in the seventies, everyone was saying, oh, we're about to go into an ice age. We've got to do something about it. And we had science telling us that we needed to spread oil on the polar ice caps and on the Sahara desert in order to.

[00:01:42] Get more heat to stay here on the earth. Or we were about to enter a major ice age. Look it up. It's there. You might not want to use the Google because they do sensors stuff pretty heavily that they don't want you to see. So use duck go, but even Google. Has articles on this. I guess they're not all bad.

[00:02:04] So we've got to be very careful when we're looking at solutions that maybe are less than 1% our fault. In fact, it looks like it's far less than 1%. Our fault global warming is usually from the sun and the sun goes through cycles. So you have to be careful about those cycles and what you know, what's going on.

[00:02:29] So what I don't want to see us do is severely hurt ourselves. Hurting our economy is hurting people. People end up just struggling and in major depression and committing suicide. Look at what happened with the lockdowns that we just had and the year 2020. It was a bad thing. So do we really want to need jerk and cause serious harm to a lot of people.

[00:02:58] Now I am an environmentalist, the original type of environmentalist, right? Duck hunters were probably the most original of all of them and hunters in general, where duck hunters bought thousands of acres of land and put it into production. So that it could be left in its pristine state. So I'm really into all of that stuff.

[00:03:22] I'm think that makes sense. I don't think it makes sense for government to do it, but I think it makes sense. So here's what I'm struggling with right now. We've got people who used to drive Prius's who are now driving electric cars. Electric cars are highly toxic. They're using minerals that are mined in toxic places.

[00:03:48] They're using processes to process those minerals that are toxic as well. And it's been done in countries that are not controlling their toxic waste. No, even the plastic in the oceans, it's coming from seven rivers, none of them in the United States, but all of them, India, China, those are the primary ones.

[00:04:13] So what are we supposed to do with these cars? It's not only toxic in manufacturing, the cars and their batteries. It's toxic to dispose of them. We have no good way to dispose of the Carter, the batteries from your test. No good way to do it. Highly toxic, much, much worse, much, much worse than a diesel Humvee.

[00:04:37] So if we want electric cars and I can see why, I love the idea of electric cars. Absolutely love them. They're faster. They're comfortable. They're quiet. And they don't have tailpipe emissions. Now, remember that it's tail pipe emissions. It's not they're green because they're anything but green don't let anyone fool you into thinking that they are.

[00:05:01] How do we make the electricity? We've got a lot of people running around, out there who are saying when it comes to electricity and electrical generation, nuclear is terrible. It's going to kill us all. And they're thinking about Jane Fonda running around there, the China syndrome movie from the seventies, and they think of Chernobyl.

[00:05:20] That is technology in both of those cases. That's 50 to 70 years old. The new nuclear technology can no more have a meltdown than a ball that set at the bottom of a mountain is going to roll uphill. The new nuclear technology that we have today is not in widespread use because the regulations that are in place from the federal government still require 1950s to 1970s technology.

[00:05:55] They don't take into account this new technology, six generation nuclear. They cannot melt down because they use basic physics to keep control. Of the nuclear reactions and what happens afterwards? Look at Chernobyl. Look at the China syndrome stuff. Look at what happened at three mile island and all of those cases, they had systems that had to be active systems.

[00:06:20] They had pumps to pump cooling water in. What happens then when you don't have power like Fukushima, they have their generators so low that any sort of a flood. Would make those diesel generators shut down and then you have the meltdown, like they had it Fukushima, reactor. None of that is possible with the modern reactor.

[00:06:45] On April 30th, the Indian point nuclear plant in New York. This is an article from a Yahoo news was shut down 30 miles north of New York city. So it had provided electricity. The in fact, the overwhelming majority of New York city's carbon free electricity for decades, union jobs for a thousand people, federal regulators said the plant was perfectly safe, but Andrew Cuomo.

[00:07:14] The brilliant man running the state of New York is a key figure behind this. He said that the shuttering of this nuclear plan brought us a big step closer to achieving our aggressive, clean energy goals. These new nuclear plants, aren't going to melt down. And by the way, these new nuclear plants generate almost no way.

[00:07:38] After 20 years, the nuclear material is replaced and recycled. It is recycled back into other nuclear power generators. It, this stuff is absolutely amazing. So what happened after Cuomo shut down the Indian point nuclear power plant? The first full month, according to again, AP associated press the full and they are no conservative.

[00:08:06] The first full month without the plant has seen a 46% increase in the average carbon intensity of statewide electric and generation Y while they had to switch over to natural gas, they burning natural gas. They had to switch over to coal in some cases, right? What are they going to do? New York generated 9.3 terawatt hours, electricity and average carbon intensity of 174 kilograms per megawatt hour may was the first month after two year process of shutting down Indian points to one gigawatt reactor.

[00:08:47] Okay. So one gigawatt out of 9.3 terawatts okay. That's 9,300 gigawatts. Okay. So it's a small percentage of the actual electricity that was generated. And yet it accounted for so much clean energy that it ended up changing the amount and the amount of carbon emissions by 46%. When you look at it from a clean energy generation standpoint, it's absolutely amazing nightmares should have seen coming and German nuclear power.

[00:09:21] In Germany provided about a third of the country's power in 2000, and then they had this green party thing, it says, oh, we're all against, this is terrible. And so they can get a lot good. And they managed to close plans, citing health and safety concerns. So they went from a third of their electrical power coming from nuclear to 11%.

[00:09:45] We have two. Smart, not people we absolutely do. There's a recent paper that showed over the last two decades where we've been closing nuclear plants slowly but surely led to our carbon dioxide increase of 36 mega tons a year with increased air pollution predicted to kill 1100 people annually. Does that make sense to you guys?

[00:10:11] What's going on. So giving the stakes of global warming that these same people are constantly talking about why are we doing what we are doing? Why is there so much hostility to it? I've found a really interesting quote in here and it's from someone you might've heard. Yeah. Alexandria, Ocasio, Cortez.

[00:10:38] Remember her green new deal that would end up costing every American family, $120,000 plus after some initial hesitation now AP is reporting that AOC has said her green new deal leaves the door open for nuclear power. Jeremy Corbyn over in the UK. You've heard of him, his labor party and the former Brazilian president Luis de Salva.

[00:11:02] And Bolivia's ecosocialist former president evil. Miralis have all said that nuclear is an idea whose time may well have. So let's pay attention here. Let's wake up. Okay. We've got to make sure that we are doing the right thing. Oh, and the writer of this AP story. Yeah. He's the author of the socialist manifesto, the case for radical politics in an era of extreme inequality.

[00:11:35] So I have some hope. This guy is a radical socialist slash communist, frankly, fascist. And even he thinks we need to give the new nuclear another chance.

[00:11:48] Hey, check me out online. Subscribe right now to my newsletter. Get it every week. Doesn't cost you a dime. I have a free newsletter. Craig peterson.com/subscribe.

We've talked about a lot of the cybersecurity problems. I'm going to talk now about what Microsoft is doing with Windows 11, a lot of hardware out there right now, anyways, will not run windows 11. So what is Microsoft doing to solve this problem?

Microsoft has been blamed for many of the problems we've had with computers and computer security for a long time.

And between us, they're doing these things that caused security problems because of us, because of the users of windows. Microsoft seems to continually try and support the older software and older hardware till very recently, you could still run windows XP 95, 98 programs on your windows machine, on your new windows.

[00:01:05] Back then Microsoft. I had shoe horned in the internet protocols and tried to, make it secure. They ended up buying. I'm trying to remember now, cause I worked on this code. Way back when I think it was the spider implementation of TCPI P out of Ireland, that Microsoft ended up using as a base.

[00:01:25] And I fixed quite a few bugs in that, and there were many more to come, but I wasn't focused on cybersecurity back then on the software. And frankly, most people weren't Microsoft just wanted. Out and they wanted to make sure they were compatible with the older software. So where we, you and I are part of the problem.

[00:01:47] We complain when Microsoft comes up with something that's not compatible. And as a programmer, I complain every time. But not just Microsoft, but apple or Linux or whatever it is, comes up with a new interface, a new quote, better way of doing things unquote with their systems, whatever it might be. And, I guess it's nice to bellyache, but in most of these cases, they're making changes to help make the systems better and often better means more secure.

[00:02:23] And that's what they're doing right now with Microsoft windows 11. So they had an announcement here this last week, talking about. A requirement for a TPM chip. Now TPM means trusted platform module, and the basics of a trusted platform module are to have on the chip and most. So the case is the modern Intel chips.

[00:02:53] So ones that have been out for four years or so, as well as some of them more modern AMD chips have this TPM built in. And what the TPM is as trusted platform module is a small amount of storage that gives you the ability to store keys and to do basic cryptography. Now they're requiring the TPM 2.0 implementation for windows 11, which makes sense.

[00:03:27] It has a little bit stronger encryption in it, but in the windows world, what this is going to do is make sure that the brute force attacks that can happen at boot time don't work. So they're trying to brute force the way into that trusted platform module and to make sure that the rest of the boot is not interfered.

[00:03:54] So that's all Microsoft is going to be doing with it. It that's a good thing, frankly. I think it's a very good thing for them to start using this. Many of us have computers already that have TPMS built in and the TPM 2.0, and with MTPM sitting there, it isn't doing us any good. So Microsoft is going to take care of that.

[00:04:16] So I'm happy about that. It's going to help with secure. But it's not very good, frankly. That is only a small part of the security problem you and I have because our security problem extends to all kinds of things. So let's talk about what apple has done because. Yeah. You know what I'm about to say, right?

[00:04:39] I'm about to say that apple has done it correctly. The TPMS wish they could be. They dream of being an apple T2 because this T2 processor that apple has had for awhile has a lot more functionality. It has what apple calls, their secure enclave processor. So if you have an iPhone, for instance, that does face ID or fingerprint ID.

[00:05:06] All of that information is stored in this secure enclave. That means it is not sending your face up to apple. It is not sending your fingerprint up to apple is not sending it anywhere. It keeps it locally on the desk. In fact, this apple T2 chip also processes all of your disc activity. So your solid state storage that's on your device.

[00:05:34] Goes through this T2 chip audio, video image, signal processing, SSD controller, the secure enclave, AEs cryptography engine and the system management controller all live inside this T2 chip. Okay. So a TPM, like what Microsoft is going to be using is kindergarten compared to what apple is. Which doesn't mean there aren't bugs or haven't been bugs in the T2 chip, but it is designed for security and it's a really cool, and it has this other function that the enclave micro with the Encore, the microphone is always disabled.

[00:06:16] Whenever the lid is shut on that laptop. Because again, it goes through this T two chip. So it's helping to preserve your privacy. Even if the phone were to be hacked, it couldn't get at it because the electrical signals for again, audio video the disc controller, all go through the apple T2 chip, and apple has tried very hard to try and make sure that they are secure.

[00:06:47] So maybe Apple's slipped a little bit recently, but their T2 chip is absolutely. I'm going to quote here professor Buchanan he calls it a work of art compared with this loan. TPM chip is what he says. Oh, absolutely amazing. It is a problem. In fact, do you remember this whole list, Sonya and hack?

[00:07:11] A couple of years back where Estonia had issued ID cards to everybody and they could be used for financial transactions, et cetera. And about half of them were completely hackable. Again, it was a T2 chip flaw because they were not generating proper random keys when they were making these codes. So it's interesting.

[00:07:37] We could really get into that and the history of it and the NSA and what they did, blah, blah, blah. But it's really a good thing to follow. This is the TPM chip. Thank goodness. Microsoft is raising the bar again, and that means that the leader. Microsoft surface tablet, the high-end one, the $5,000 tablet.

[00:07:59] Which does not have a TPM 2.0 chip will not work with windows 11. So keep an eye on this. I'll keep an eye on it for you as well. The, this means basically that app, that not apple, that Microsoft is going to have to change up his game a little bit, and they might decide to not require TPM 2.0 because even hardware Microsoft has been selling does not support this very baseline.

[00:08:28] Primitive cybersecurity that basically only protects your booting. Okay. So again, apple wins whole hands down now. You're I think you're starting to get the idea of why I recommend apple over anything, Microsoft and now apple making their own chips makes me really happy. They'll be able to be even more secure.

[00:08:50] I'm using an M1 based apple mini right now, and I am just amazed at how good. This little device is very fast and quite secure. All right, everybody stick around. There's a whole lot more to talk about and we're going to get into it in some detail all here, but if we really want to fight the climate crisis, we've absolutely got to embrace nuclear power.

[00:09:19] Hey, make sure you are on my newsletter list. I have a free newsletter. Go to Craig peterson.com/subscribe and get that every week.

You might've heard me talk about this already, or you heard about it elsewhere. This US technology firm is called Kaseya. They're headquartered in Miami and they are used by businesses and governments around the world. And they're spreading ransom.

A week ago on Friday, a flood of ransomware hit hundreds of companies around the world.

[00:00:25] We're thinking now it may have been thousands. We don't have good numbers yet, but we're talking about grocery stores, public broadcasting schools, national railway system. They were all here. With ransomware. Now this is the modern ransomware, we think which encrypts your files, but also poles your data. So that later on, it can extort money from you.

[00:00:55] Okay. Very bad stuff. It really caused disruption in Sweden. They was incredible and forced hundreds of businesses to close. Now, every one of these victims had something in common. They had network management and remote controls, software developed by casinos. Now cause say it is used by, I think their their counters like a hundred thousand customers.

[00:01:25] So it's used by a lot of companies worldwide and they make software that allows other companies. So a third party there's yet another company here allows them to monitor that third party companies computer. So let me just lay this out for you. Here's how this works. You're a small business. You have it people, but they're busy just trying to keep windows up to date.

[00:01:55] And they're also trying to help your people understand how best to use computers, evaluate new software. Doing things, the, it, people should be doing, cyber security is a major specialty nowadays. It's something that you have to focus heavily on. And as you focus, you're still getting behind.

[00:02:16] So as that small business with a couple of people, maybe there's one person that has to deal with computers, right? It's often the office manager, that person. Now needs help when it comes to cyber security. In fact, that person needs help when it comes to keeping these computers up to date, because there's patches from Microsoft, for the operating system, for all of the Microsoft 365 stuff, there's patches for all of the Adobe software there's patches for you.

[00:02:49] You've probably gotten QuickBooks or some other accounting software that needs patches. It's just difficult. If not impossible, to keep up with all of this. And then, your users are probably using Google Chrome. They might be using safari or some other browser, those off to be kept up to date. So one that small business person does is they go to a managed services provider and they say, Mr managed services provider would you take care of all of my computer problems for me?

[00:03:20]And off they go, right? The managed services provider, maybe they have a few different ways of working, but maybe they go ahead and they say here's what we'll do for a fixed amount per month per computer or per employee. We will take care of your computers for you. So we'll go ahead and patch them, keep them up to date.

[00:03:40] If they fail, we'll fix them. We'll replace parts in them, all of that sort of stuff. That makes sense to you. So they contact this managed services provider who takes over their network. How does that manage services provider? Run the network. They don't do it the same way that small business used to do it.

[00:04:01] They can't afford to, if they're going to charge you cheap money, they are using what's called an RMS. And the RMM in this case, we'll go ahead and it will remotely manage all of these computers for the managed services provider for that it outsourcing company. So it'll check the releases of software to let them know, okay, here's what we need to upgrade, et cetera.

[00:04:31] In fact, it'll even do the upgrades most of the time. And then when you call in or you file a ticket, that also goes into the RMM. So they have a full history of what's happened. What's going on over there and they can hire cheap people that don't understand computers. And for most businesses, they think that's just fine, by the way, this is my nemesis.

[00:04:52]We don't use Kaseya, but that MSP is using cassette. It might be using solar winds for some of this stuff. It might be using some of these other products. Now, the reason we don't use them is because all of them have failed our security test. So my company is called mainstream and we. Are a managed services provider, a managed security services provider to be more exact.

[00:05:22] And we've been doing managed services work since the early 1990s for other companies. And so we've tried every major player in the game out there. We've used them. We tried them. We tried to figure out, okay, is this going to work? And we've looked for flaws in their design, major flaws, major security flaws.

[00:05:44] And every one that we have found major flaws with, obviously we canceled. So we done basically a 30 day trial and we canceled them. Connect wise you name it. Okay. Major flaws and this company, cause also has major flaws, but you, the small business owner, you, the small business office manager, you did not choose.

[00:06:10] You had nothing to do that you hired an it outsourcing firm and, seemed to make sense at the time. And it probably does make sense, but that it outsourcing firm is in what we in the industry call a race to the bottom. They have to get their costs down to a couple of bucks a month per person.

[00:06:30] That works for you. Do you think they can really do a good job for a couple of bucks a month? No, obviously they can't. So you get companies like mine that we use people that are well-educated that all have. All of our people have major cybersecurity training. All of our people know. How to fix the problems.

[00:06:53] And we run scans daily on all of our customers to check and see what's up, what needs to be upgraded or what needs to be fixed, what needs to be changed. Does that make sense to you guys? So that's what we do. And that's why there are nemesis, right? It costs us. Or what we charge basically is $125 a month per.

[00:07:15] Person and we'll keep the computers secure. Nothing's perfect. But we have yet to be breached in those 30 years. So we'll keep them up-to-date and we'll have the special advanced malware protection stuff on them and every yeah. Thing else. But these other guys that are out there, our nemesis, they're not charging 125 bucks per person.

[00:07:37] Or per computer or it's more for server? No. They're charging 25 bucks or 50 bucks a person there. And they can do that because they can afford to do that. They don't have what's necessary in the backend to keep their customers secure. So these probably thousands of companies we know of at least hundreds have been hacked.

[00:08:05] With ransomware because of a decision they made about a company, this it outsource provider that they just didn't know enough about to be able to even evaluate that in a nutshell is the problem with cyber security today. Even if you were to try and hire people to work for you and build out your cyber security infrastructure at your business and running it.

[00:08:35] How could you evaluate those people or the tools they use in 10 real quick. And Casia told all of their direct customers to immediately turn off all of the systems that had anything to do with Kaseya. Okay. This is going to happen again, people, and it's going to happen again and again, and I get it.

[00:08:58] A lot of small businesses can't afford people like me. I don't know what the best answer is, but we're going to talk about Microsoft and their answer.

Hey, do you trust that all of the information you share with the IRS is being kept safe? As a general rule, it probably has been, but what we're finding right now is maybe it hasn't, maybe there's been a leak. There is a lot to talk about when we're talking about the IRS.

[00:00:19] They of course have all of the information that they can get their hands on. They're already overloaded and we've got the Biden administration now looking for even more data to go to the IRS. You probably already know that if you do a transaction at a bank above $10,000, that it gets reported to the IRS and probably the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, and any other three-letter agency that you can think of course, that doesn't include the BATF.

[00:00:52] Because they're not a three-letter agency as much as they want to meet, but the IRS has records on everything, already that they know what your social security number is, what your name is, what your address is. They also have information about. The business you work for or businesses you work for, they know what you do for a living.

[00:01:13] They know that you have debt and what that debt is. They know your business relationships, your family status, who you're married to, who your children are, if you have disabilities, because of course you put that on your tax forms and. Bunch of other personal data. Why do the bad guys, Rob banks, or at least they used to because that's where the money is.

[00:01:38]So where are the bad guys going right now? We're going to talk more about that a little bit later on today. And if you miss it, you can catch my podcast as well at Craig peterson.com/podcast. But they're going after businesses that take care of cybersecurity. Businesses. So this is a very big deal, but nearly every American has complied voluntarily with paying our taxes, that there's a whole idea behind this system and with the Biden administration now looking at all of this and saying what we want to do now is not the $10,000 limit. That's for wimps. We want to know. Any money that goes into, or out of all taxpayers savings checking or any other accounts or the value of more than just $500.

[00:02:31] So what the Biden administration is looking to do is turn every financial institution into a full-time IRS agent, basically providing them with all of this additional data. And then there's also plans that have been drawn up in Washington, DC. To move us away from the dollar and move us to a virtual dollar.

[00:02:55] And there's even planned. This is just unbelievable. If I had said this stuff a few years back, no one would have believed me. There's also plans to say if you have more than a certain amount of money in your bank, we're only going to give you like a 0.6 equivalent. So they're going to take away 40% of the value of your.

[00:03:13] And if you don't have much money heck we'll just go ahead and give you one and a half to two times as much money as you have in your account. It is incredible here. And with the privacy breaches we have seen in the federal government announced. This really isn't something we can put up with. We can't have them going after everything all of the time, because it just becomes too big, a target.

[00:03:40] And I'm not just talking about a target for the typical bad guys. I'm talking about a target as well for. Bureaucrats that have gone out of control. That used to be that if you were going to be prosecuted, they would have heard a story from someone. So it's yeah. Janie just cared. Jenny just killed her husband.

[00:04:03] So the police hear about it because there's a rumor floating around town. They go to talk to Janie, trying to look for her husband and they don't find her. Huh? And so now suspicion rises and they start investigating, they'll pull Jamie's credit card records. Look at what told booze she drove through.

[00:04:23] They'll look at anything that they can to try and put it together. Who did Jamie call her phone records and talk to those people, try and put together a picture of what happened. But if we devolve into one of these just terrible socialist state that have popped up and failed every time around the world, then what can happen.

[00:04:46] And what always happens is yeah. Yeah. The laws are there, but they're only enforced against people that they don't like. And that's a bad thing. So people that they don't like, I don't know, political people is usually what happened. Here in this country, think of what happened with Al Capone. They went after him under tax laws.

[00:05:08]And in both cases, they're trying to go after a person or people, not crime. So Al Capone. Okay. You could argue, he was doing all of these crimes, getting money through extortion and murder and everything else. So they're investigating that and they found out, oh, he didn't pay his taxes.

[00:05:27] Let's go after him for that. Okay. You could argue that. But what we can see with the government, having all of this information, think about all of our smartphones and our Alexa's and our Google homes and our cars. They all. Everything all of the time. And if the government wants to come after you, they can.

[00:05:48] I remember 30 years ago reading an article saying before he get out of bed in the morning, you've probably broken about 20 law. It nowadays, it's probably more like 50 laws. There's so many of them. There's 20,000 laws. At least there was back then 30 years ago, there were 20,000 laws just on gun control.

[00:06:09] Okay. It's insane. You cannot live your day without breaking a law. So what did they do while they selectively enforce? They selectively prosecute. So what happens here while the IRS. Perhaps selectively leaked information. Yeah. This is a story I'm looking at right now that came from Fox news.

[00:06:30] And they're saying that ProPublica published a story that this is just incredible. Okay. That had information in it. That was apparently from the IRS. Now, this is bad because this is information that wasn't available anywhere else than the IRS. This is information that was private. The IRS, none of this information is supposed to get out, they, you can go after president Donald Trump for tax evasion. Come on guys. First of all, that you can't Sue the president. It's crazy. Everybody would be suing the president that they didn't like a president Biden would have thousands of lawsuits against him right now. And he'd never be able to get a thing done that he was elected to do because he'd have to constantly be responding to lawsuits.

[00:07:21] That's how things were established initially here in this country. And I made a lot of. Pretty close to initially in this country, it made a whole lot of sense. If the IRS has given all this information, that's a real big problem. So the IRS security systems or procedures might've been severely compromised and all those data stolen, right?

[00:07:41] You might've had one or more IRS employees committing felonies by providing what is legally protected, private, taxpayer information to outside. Or a ProPublica could have just made it up entirely. Who knows this story and ProPublica, I don't really want you guys to go there. You can, if you want to do a little research, obviously, but I don't want them to get the hits and clicks and everything else, but these apparently are trolls.

[00:08:11] I've never before seen taxpayer information. June 8th that published this protected taxpayer data in a highly partisan yeah. Surprises, ProPublica, centralized, and misleading. Our article targeting people by name. This is all from this Fox news story. We don't know the scale of this was obviously a breach of some sort.

[00:08:36] Was it a cybersecurity breach or not? I don't like any government agency having any information that absolutely doesn't have to have. And on the case of the IRS, they are, it's easy to argue. They need access to. Records, at least the ones we send them. If they think there's a discrepancy, we'll then have a look at the discrepancy, figure out what went wrong, but they don't need to have everything.

[00:09:06] This reminds me of what happened with the national security agency. Just sucking in all of the data. It could possibly find it. Denying it and then ultimately saying we're just collecting general information. No one's identified in any of this and think of what happened, Mike Flynn, think of what happened with some of these other people in government, where they were identified and there's games that they're playing.

[00:09:34] No, we just don't have time to talk about this today but basically what happens is they can monitor communications that go outside of the country. So apparently they are purposely routing, targeted it data out of the United States. And then back in, so you could sending an email to someone in Washington, DC, or making a phone call and you.

[00:10:00] Phone call your email is purposely being routed by government out of the country. And there's some evidence that this is happening. There's certainly a lot of accusations. I get it. Okay. We need to crack down on people who are evading paying taxes that are owed under the law, but forcing these financial institutions to provide the IRS even more private financial information is going to embolden IRS P.

[00:10:28] To do what just happened with ProPublica. It's going to also in Bolden the hackers, and we've got a story coming up too, about the value of Bitcoin going up and the hacks, ransomware hacks going up along with it because of the value. So we'll be talking about all of this stuff today. There's a whole lot to talk about, I want to make sure you are on my email list.

[00:10:51] CraigPeterson.com. You can subscribe right there and you can get all of these articles I had talked about and more every week. Stick around. I'll be right back.

[As heard on WGAN 2021-07-07]

Good morning, everybody. We've got this massive attack underway. It's hitting businesses, and they're using supply chain attacks just like they did with Solar Winds. However, this one might actually be a little more fatal. A lot of businesses out there. So we talked about that this morning—this Kaseya hack.

[00:00:21] We also talked about selling your smart device. Is it a good thing? I got a report from a listener about a whole bunch of Amazon orders that they had not made. So I'll tell you a little bit about that. And also, IRS looks like there might've been a data breach of what's going on. And frankly, what is the Biden administration proposing?

[00:00:47] That's going to make things way worse when it comes to data breaches at the I R S in the future. So here we go with Mr. Matt Gagnon.

[00:00:57] Matt Gagnon: And we're back 7:36 WGAN morning news. A pleasure to have you on this fine Wednesday morning. Thanks for listening. Craig Peterson, our tech guru joins us every Wednesday at this time.

[00:01:07] And of course you also hear them on this very station on Saturdays at one o'clock Craig, Welcome back to the program. Good to talk to you as well.

[00:01:14] Craig Peterson: [00:01:14] Hey, thanks. Glad to be here. Have a great independence day with the family. They all came in from literally all over the world. So it was cool. Yes, indeed.

[00:01:24]Matt Gagnon: [00:01:24] I hope you had a good one and and thanks for joining us now on this July 7th. So Craig, I know that we have, obviously every week we have a, some, topics that we want to chat about, but I did want to bring up this big gigantic. That happened as well. If you don't mind going off script a little bit here and talking about what what what we're learning about this stuff.

[00:01:41] I was just checking out some stuff this morning about how it still remains unclear how many businesses were actually hit by this gigantic ransomware attack. And and of course now, Demands for $70 million and everything else. It's all very reminiscent of earlier tax in the year where we paid ransom.

[00:01:59] And then you got, keys to decode things and it didn't even really work. And then they had to do it their own way. It's just part of this evolving story that is ransomware attacks. It seems to be getting worse and worse. And I just wanted to maybe get your thoughts on the effect of this.

[00:02:12] And is it getting worse? Is, are we going to see more? Yeah.

[00:02:15]What we're looking at is called a supply chain attack. So think of maybe a company that makes boxes for instance, and they, of course they need stuff from the supply chain. They're going to have glue. They're going to have staples are going to have various other things.

[00:02:31] And they trust the, the incoming staples and glue, et cetera, are going to hold the boxes together. That's what we're seeing here. We're seeing a company in this case, it's a technology firm called they're based down in Florida that provides services for businesses and governments, world wide.

[00:02:52] And the beautiful thinking about this from the hacker standpoint is they don't have to hack a hundred thousand companies. All they have to do is hack. Company and that's cause say, yeah. So cause they provide services for managed services providers. These are the, it shops, the businesses that you're using to manage your computers, your networks, your security, and the software.

[00:03:22] This can say a thought. Has full administrative rights to these networks. So if you can compromise one piece of software, you now have the ability to compromise a hundred thousand businesses and install ransomware steal information. Ever you want to do so we're still not sure as you pointed out what the actual ultimate problems are going to be for businesses because not only managed services providers use cause say, but so do government agencies, we.

[00:04:00] Major problems in Sweden were major. Portions of their economy were completely shut down, including mass transit. We've seen these problems before. And what happened really is people are putting their trust in these managed services provider, which I'm one, that's what we do for businesses. We do it for everything from doctor's office.

[00:04:25] All the way through government contractors, DOD contractors, but we do not use these tools because they are not safe. We have some of our own that are completely isolated. We've got to really change what we're doing because. Is absolutely huge. And we really just don't know what the ultimate problem or, the results of this damage is going to be.

[00:04:54] It's very scary stuff. Obviously a brave new world. We live in Craig Peterson, our tech guru joins us on Wednesdays at this time. Craig, moving on to other stories here. Been frustrating for me to wait for the tax man, the IRS to actually get me back my refund. I still don't have it. I'm one of, one of those people that still has been a Saturday sitting here waiting and delaying and blah, blah, blah, et cetera.

[00:05:16]But our tax system, really works on trust, right? Trust that your data and information will be more or less secure with the IRS trust that the IRS is actually going to give you back the money you deserve when you file your taxes correctly, lots of trust involved in the system. But what happens then when the IRS itself has a data breach, all that information, all that stuff, I keep handing them every year is now basically open it's open season on that.

[00:05:40]That's not a good thing.

[00:05:42] Craig Peterson: [00:05:42] No, it's not, they know your family status. You're filing joint married or separate, whatever might be of what businesses you do business with, because that has to be disclosed. When you're saying this is where the income comes from, what debt you have. Medical or disability status and just a whole bunch of other things this year, including whether or not you have been toying and you've made money off of Bitcoin.

[00:06:07] So all of that goes into databases and we're really concerned right now because president Biden has said that he is going to have the IRS. Force disclosure of even more sensitive information on almost every American taxpayer. So this is part of the government gathering, everything going in and out of our accounts.

[00:06:34] In fact, the Biden administration is now trying to get the banks to report any transaction that anyone makes a more than $600. Which is turning our banks and financial institutions into full time, basically IRS agents, which is a real problem. So ProPublica published a story that had information that was only a bit.

[00:07:00] Through the tax records and named a number of people and some private information. So we're not exactly sure what's happened here. Obviously, if the IRS might have been breached, it might be some insiders that are releasing information to her political opponents, which is not what the IRS is supposed to be doing, but we have all of this data.

[00:07:26] You can. The IRS is a major target of Russia and China already has all of the background checks for secret clearance and above of every federal government employee and military member as of a couple of years ago. So it's a huge target. I don't like the idea of the government requiring even more information going to them because it's going to become a huge or.

[00:07:54] Matt Gagnon: [00:07:54] And finally, Greg, I also want to ask about this this story that I was reading about selling your Amazon echo, your Google home any sort of device like this. I know a lot of people have privacy concerns, you go to sell it, right? Does your information go with it?

[00:08:10]Should you be. Doing something special factory wipes or something beyond that, maybe hitting it with a sledgehammer. What should I be doing in order to make sure that my information is not handed on to the next group of people that have my stuff?

[00:08:22]Craig Peterson: [00:08:22] There was a little bit of a study that was just done where this group went online and bought a number of these devices.

[00:08:29] The Amazon echo was, you mentioned. Google home devices and a few others. This is at Northeastern university and they got almost a hundred of them from E-bay and the flea market. And then they started to have a look at them. The first thing you should do, if you are going to resell them is do a factory reset.

[00:08:50] And that makes it a lot harder for people to get information off of them. But it is frankly, between you and me. It's very easy. Even after a factory reset to pull off information like the wifi information, the location that the device was used at the, even the account information of the person that had the.

[00:09:15] Device. And I have actually had a listener that contacted me saying my Amazon account now has been hacked and has been used to order stuff. And so they worked with the fraud department at Amazon to figure out what had happened. And according to this listener, the front department reported back that they had ordered things from their Amazon echo device.

[00:09:39] They had sold online app. A factory wipe. So you mentioned the sledgehammer trick and that is very effective at that, but I'm worried about these. I don't think I would resell mine. I think I would destroy them. But the big thing that you have to worry about are the hard desks and storage devices that are on our computers.

[00:10:07] Take a drink. Drill three holes safely into the disc area, the round area on a desk, and pretty much anywhere in the center, if it's an SSD, if it's one of these solid state desks and make some nice big holes in it and throw it out in the trash, we actually remove the platters from the desk and we melt them down.

[00:10:30] We have a furnace, we melt them in for our client. That's the only thing. That's a hundred percent, but the. Put a nice drill through those hard disks or SSDs and a sledgehammer to these smart drives are not smart. Drive smart devices and you'll feel much better as long as you do it safely. Get a little aggression out too.

[00:10:51] Matt Gagnon: [00:10:51] Indeed. All right. Craig Peterson never have aggressive feelings when you joined the program. Always good to talk to you and get the lowdown on technological stories. Appreciate it. Good luck on Saturday, of course. And we'll talk to you again next week, sir.

[As heard on WTAG, WHJJ, WHYN on 2021-07-06]

Good morning, everybody. This morning, I got to talk about this IRS data breach. We're supposed to trust them what happened here. We're actually not quite sure. And apparently, neither does the IRS. We also got into a climate battle. Should we be doing something more with nuclear power? So we got into that in some detail as well.

[00:00:24] So here we go.

[00:00:25] Pat Desmarais: [00:00:25] Craig Peterson joins us. Craig is the Jim Polito show tech expert and has some great stories to talk about Craig. Good morning.

[00:00:34] Craig Peterson: [00:00:34] Hey, good morning Pat.

[00:00:36] Pat Desmarais: [00:00:36] Sorry, we can't meet in person, my friend, but it is what it is. The phone will have to do. Hey, you got some great stuff for us to go back and forth about one of these stories I have now.

[00:00:47] Part of, and it has to do with our tax system and sensitive information that you and I give these people, the IRS, and you're referencing a story that published sensitive information from people. And they got it from the IRS information that people file because they were filing their taxes.

[00:01:09]Craig, what's up.

[00:01:10] Craig Peterson: [00:01:10] Yeah, that's exactly what's happened. We have so much information at the federal government level, including people who have had secret background clearances, top-secret clearances, any clearances, and all of this data has been stolen, at least from the office of management and budget.

[00:01:31] They've lost. Data the guys that control all of the information about all of the employees, all of that was stolen by China. And now we're finding that the IRS something happened there, it was either hacked, or there were some major leaks from the IRS. Now what we have to do as citizens.

[00:01:53] Isn't file our taxes. It's called a voluntary system, but that doesn't mean that they won't come after you if you don't pay. But it's voluntary in that. We have to give them that information. Now, this is two-sided. We have private information, princess things like our social security numbers that have gotten out.

[00:02:13] Probably every person in the country's social security number, at least almost everybody's has already gotten into that habit of the bad guys, but can we trust the IRS? Can we trust the feds with handling some of our most sensitive information? And because, as you pointed out, some of this information was given to the IRS.

[00:02:36] Has it been published online? Pro Publica has a story that puts this information out there. And we can only assume one of a few things they've been hacked or maybe one or more IRS employees committed felonies by putting this information out there. And by the way, it's legally protected. They're not allowed to do that.

[00:02:57] Maybe within pro-public Publica story is false and alleged information's manufactured. We're not sure exactly what's happened here, pat; I don't hold out a lot of hope. I think that maybe they're yet another victim of the hat. And

[00:03:13] Pat Desmarais: [00:03:13] Craig, correct me if I'm wrong, but this is something that has been reported now for a few days.

[00:03:18] I know that smaller companies, many had been reported being hacked. Is that true? And what is going on technologically here? It seems like it increasingly is not wise. Like I hate it, Craig, when I'm asked to give my social security number online, I hate it. I hate it. I hate it. I don't like doing that.

[00:03:40]This is the stuff secure or not.

[00:03:43] Craig Peterson: [00:03:43] Yeah. Yeah. W one of the bad things worse is if your social security number is stolen and is misused, it can take you up to 300 hours to recover your information, your good credit, et cetera. And that 300 hours is usually during working hours because you've got to call the banks.

[00:04:02] You've maybe have to call a car manufacturer, finance agents, whatever it might be. It's crazy. And the IRS. Will the social security administration will not give you a new social security number. Now, what you're talking about is this, Kasaya hack. We had solar winds hack here just a few months ago, which was devastating to many federal agencies and businesses nationwide.

[00:04:29] And now we've got you. Say it is a company that provides tools that are used by many what are called managed services providers. So these MSPs will want to keep their prices down their costs down. So they have this automated system that kind of takes care of everything. But what we see now is, again, a supply chain hack.

[00:04:54] In other words, you are a business and you would like a little bit of security and you'd like your machines to be updated. So you hire a managed services provider that MSP uses another service provider in this case, to actually do the grunt work for them. So that is the supply chain to you as a small business.

[00:05:16] But this hat now is showing that it's been pretty darn deep. We don't even know how far it goes yet. Sweden basically got shut down their banks their transit systems here in the U S there are hundreds of companies that have now received ransomware. And it's in place. And by the way, also that leads to extortions after the fact.

[00:05:42] But they have this in place because of their supply chain, because their managed services provider was using software that as it turns out was not safe. And now they're in trouble. As a regular businesses. So to answer your question, pat, where we are not safe, we can not push off our responsibility to keep our businesses safe or to keep us as individuals safe.

[00:06:11] We can't push it off to someone else and we certainly can't push it off to the federal government. We're in a tight spot here. And Microsoft is responding in much the same way. Apple responded almost 10 years ago. And Microsoft is tightening up things dramatically in windows 11. They're using special chips that are going to be on boards and computers that now will.

[00:06:35] Down your secrets, your passwords and things, which is a good thing, but we're still looking at ply chain attacks. You as a business are trying to trust someone else to take care of your computers and pat, they're just not taking care of them. Yeah.

[00:06:51] Pat Desmarais: [00:06:51] Good information. And it's almost like we're being victimized by modern day.

[00:06:55]Technological, Bonnie and Clyde's correct. All right. Correct. Craig Peterson joins us here. The Jim Polito show tech expert. Let's switch gears. I'm a big nuclear power proponent. I know it's not the in thing people seem to want to decommission them. More than anything else. I don't even know if we build any new nuclear power plants, but you had a story up there about the nuclear power plant in New York.

[00:07:19] And there's evidence that, Hey, look at, you want to reduce the carbon footprint. You took this nuclear power plant offline, and you actually increased carbon emissions at the same time. Talk to us about that.

[00:07:33] Craig Peterson: [00:07:33] Yeah, 46 per cent increase in the average carbon intensity of electrical generation, because nuclear is safe, particularly the new nuclear plants.

[00:07:46] Now we're still regulating our nuclear plants as though it's 92. This deed, if you can believe that 70 year old regulations in place, we now are up to about the seventh generation of nuclear power and the way these are set up, don't think Jane. Don't think of the China syndrome, right? Where are you going to have this meltdown?

[00:08:08] And everyone's going to die. That is impossible. Now these nuclear designs, and there are designs that are being put in place. Pat. They're not all out there yet. A lot of people haven't really. There's 70 years behind up to date, but these nuclear plants are designed that if there is a failure of part of a system, the basic physics of it will not allow it to get out of control.

[00:08:38] So you can consider these nuclear plants like a ball. You have a big ball. It's nice and round. And you've got a flat hill. That ball is not about to roll up there. Tell because of physics and that's what they've done with these new designs and when people, so they didn't, they just, him. Down the physics of them, it cannot happen.

[00:09:01] And people have been worried about, oh my gosh, all this nuclear waste is just terrible. That was 70 years ago. People that newest designs, if we can change these regulations are such that the nuclear waste is crazy. Minimally. And it's nowhere near as concentrated, and it can be recycled back into these newest generations of nuclear plants.

[00:09:25] So the

[00:09:25] Pat Desmarais: [00:09:25] story that you have, Craig. The story that you have is the Indian point nuclear power plant, which is 30 miles north of New York city. Are there any in America at all? Craig knew these technologically advanced ones that you're referencing is any new nuclear plants being built in a way.

[00:09:46] Craig Peterson: [00:09:46] Only very small scale ones.

[00:09:48] The us military now is taking some of these designs and they've got in fact right now, a bunch of bids out because they want small nuclear plants that fit into the back of a trailer from just a regular tractor trailer that they can bring out to different areas to provide power for them. So on that, Gail, the answer's.

[00:10:10] Yes. There are a couple of companies that are making them on a similar scale where they will run a small town from a nuclear plant that is buried in the ground. And doesn't have to be touched for 20 years. So yes, but the large-scale ones. No, they it's just, it's crazy. If he asked me, they're just shutting them down.

[00:10:32] They're not building the new ones, even though the new tech pat is amazing.

[00:10:36] Pat Desmarais: [00:10:36] Yeah, that my criticism is not, I live on Cape Cod, so they shut the one down in Plymouth. Craig, as you probably know, I didn't have a problem with that, but my thing was, are you going to build a new one? Oh God. No, but it's but the technology is so improved.

[00:10:50] No no. So I think you're right. A lot of this is, your horse and buggy thinking on nuclear power. You're thinking of technology from 50, 70 years.

[00:10:58]Craig Peterson: [00:10:58] Yeah. You're absolutely right. Dan, so many people got scared by that China's syndrome movie, and they're just not understanding what's happening out there,

[00:11:07] Pat Desmarais: [00:11:07] It's like mirror in a crate, people saw reefer madness and they think that's what pot is all about. You know what I'm saying? People see movies and it screws them all up. I've always thought that. All right, I enjoyed this. I don't know what made me think of that. Craig, Peter son,

[00:11:24] Craig Peterson: [00:11:24] very much Alexandria Ocassio Cortez is onboard with you and me. She said her green new deal leaves the door open for this new nuclear power.

[00:11:35] Pat Desmarais: [00:11:35] Yeah. There's no carbon print or you still have the the radioactive stuff you have to deal with. You still have to, you have to take care of that and store it. I'm a big proponent of you spend all this money on Yucca mountain. Use Yucca mountain.

[00:11:47]It's controversial and I realize that, but I love what you're saying and it makes perfect sense that we ought to, we want to deal with global warming, carbon footprint.

[00:11:57] Let's embrace nuclear power. It's clean other countries do it. Craig Peterson. I wish I had a little bit more time with you. I've very much enjoyed this conversation and I can see why they they bring you around. Great information. I appreciate it, sir. I hope that we do. Thanks now, Craig Peterson, the tech expert on the Jim Pollito show.

[00:12:17] Great information there wholeheartedly agree about what he was saying about nuclear power. And we ought to expand our minds a little bit folks on the new technology, the new type of nuclear power plant, just sayin'.

We've got a new study out, and its showing that one in five manufacturing companies are not only targeted by cyber attacks, but are getting nailed and getting nailed badly.

[00:00:19]This is a bigger problem, than I think most of us realize, and I have a few manufacturing clients who have been nailed badly by cyber attacks. Very badly. There is a new study out that looked at this it's called the manufacturing cybersecurity. Index. And this is a report that has the results of surveys of 567 manufacturing employees.

[00:00:50] Now that is quite a few and most of these people were in fact, in the it side of things, some of them were specifically in the cyber securities. That one was most interesting about this. Isn't the fact that just that one out of five manufacturing companies is targeted by cyber attacks, but what the response, what the thoughts of these people that run the companies are.

[00:01:18] And I say that because I am just constantly amazed at how businesses just are not paying attention to this, and this is proof again, and here's what it is. Information stealing malware makes up about a third of attacks, but companies are worried about what ransomware, the worried about ransomware shutting down production.

[00:01:46] That is a very big deal because of course it does, but what is going to hurt you more? And that's what you got to figure out. That's what companies have to really look. These numbers that we're looking at are according to this article I'm reading at a dark reading, which is a great site. If you haven't been there before, and you'd like to follow some of these things in the cybersecurity world, definitely check it out.

[00:02:15] Dark reading, very easy to very easy to look at lots of good stuff. But Robert limos is a contributing writer over there. And he's the guy that wrote that. And so he is saying that more than one third of all manufacturing firms are attacked every month. That's absolutely amazing. Now, of course not all manufacturing employees really know when a company is being attacked, but ransomware attacks that they know, because usually that means much of the company is shut down when it happens.

[00:02:54]Because ransomware attacks have this major impact on the business and the other types of attacks. information most of the time companies never find out unless it's too late again, it's usually ransom or extortion. They're two sides of the same coin. So an extortion attack might be where they get onto a network.

[00:03:19] Exfiltrate data. And then they say, Hey, listen, we've got all of this data. Do you want us to post your bank, account numbers, customer information, your intellectual property, your plans, whatever it is, you want us to post them online? Huh? And if not pay out. Okay. So this is, I think a very big problem.

[00:03:39] There are major blocks between it information technology and security teams. And I also have to point out that most it decisions nowadays most what would normally be an information technology decision is actually being handled by a line of business matters. Who chose the software you're using to track your customers?

[00:04:06] It was probably the sales guy, right? There's the, it's not, the CEO is not the it director. It's the director of sales or marketing or the accounting people who decided to use QuickBooks online as opposed to using something else. All of these types of decisions are out of the hands of it and are way out of the hands of the cybersecurity.

[00:04:34] That's because of this massive changing landscape out there. It's absolutely huge. Now there's a survey also of 250 information technology workers, and they found that 61% of the companies experienced a cybersecurity incident affecting their factories. 61%. Of manufacturers had a cybersecurity incident that affected the factories and three quarters of those incidences took production offline.

[00:05:07] That's according to another report that came out in March, just mindblowing. Isn't it. So ransomware accounts for only 13% of these attempted attacks on devices. But the information thieves account for 31% of the attacks and file us attacks account for 28%. So here's a quote from morphous sec. These are the guys that produced the first report.

[00:05:37] I mentioned, although these sobering threats are certainly not limited to the manufacturing industry, cyber attackers are acutely aware of the data manufacturing facilities have on hand, right? Think about all of that data, think about all of the intellectual property. So it goes on. In fact, some cyber crime groups have even been using ransomware as a smoke screen for cyber attacks, designed to steal intellectual property, increasing the damage they can inflict in the long run as they bully victims.

[00:06:12] By threatening to leak data if they don't pay. Now, I've warned about that before. If you've got something that looks like a ransomware attack happening, pops up on your screen, it's got that classic red screen ransomware page. That may just be a smoke screen. You may not have ransomware.

[00:06:31] Your files may not be encrypted because what most of these guys nowadays are doing is making additional money offers, stealing your files solid. It depends on the group and this isn't what dark side does, but some other groups do and they can really socket. Ever since the authorities disrupted the emo tech network in January, we've seen attacks split into and smaller groups are increasingly working together in new ways.

[00:07:00] And these highly targeted groups are very dangerous because they can execute multi-faceted attacks, giving the collective expertise. Again, it's just like business. If you're trying to sell something, you need to narrow down and you need to get as narrow as possible. And that means the cyber groups are specializing in a specific industry and they're specializing in a specific way.

[00:07:29] To attack. This is really fascinating. And there's a few reports that come out every year. Verizon has a very good one on cyber attacks. Statistics. IBM has one gardener of course always does their little thing on the side. Those tend to be, and more narrowly focused, but this is the first time we've seen this report.

[00:07:51] So we don't have any sort of comparative data from prior years. But what the, what these guys are saying is that in that the pandemic has shifted attack trends and ransomware has grown from single digit percentages to 13%. As I mentioned already, almost two thirds of surveyed employees believe that the chance of a breach increased because of remote work.

[00:08:19] And we know that's true. BI has been warning about that. We've seen it again and again. So be very careful. Okay. Most of these manufacturing companies have had people working from home during the lockdown, nearly two thirds said that it has increased the risk of a breach. And let me tell you, it really has.

[00:08:40] And so keep all of that in mind, if you are in manufacturing or if you're concerned about our manufacturing base here in the us man, is there something to be worried about? And that's a shame. How do we conduct business? How do we keep our economy going? If our manufacturers are getting knocked down or getting knocked out of the game, Hey, visit me online.

[00:09:04] CraigPeterson.com. You'll find all of this all on my podcast and much more.

Well, you probably know again here, because you're the best and brightest, what a vigilante is. Well, I bet you haven't really heard about this type of vigilante before, and it is causing havoc for as many as 40% of computers.

[00:00:17]Well, vigilantes have throughout history decided that they were going to take the launch of their own hands.

[00:00:24] Now, way back when there wasn't law enforcement, et cetera, that's just what you did. And then we ended up with the tribes and our tribes would decide, okay, what's going to happen to this person. And you know, one of the worst things that could possibly happen way back. Caveman days. And after frankly, the worst thing that could happen to you is getting banished because having a group of people who are living together, cooperating together, working together makes all of the difference when it comes to survive.

[00:01:00] And being kicked out of that tribe out of that group meant you had a very low chance of long-term survival. And if you went into another group, they'd really be suspicious about you because where did you come from? Did somebody kick you out because you did something really, really bad? You know, I kind of wonder if that's not deeply ingrained inside of us from all of those.

[00:01:26] Centuries millennia with that whole type of process in place where we see someone that's different than us. And we kind of wonder, right. If you think that's where that might've come from. Interesting thought. I don't know that I've ever seen any studies about that. So vigilantes, nowadays are people who they're not going to the chieftain.

[00:01:47] They're not going to the local police department or the prosecutor who a, whoever it might be. They are taking the law as it were into their own hands. Now it's not necessarily even the law, they just decide that they want something to happen in a particular way. And by having that happen in that particular way, they now have control.

[00:02:13] Right. They're making the law as it were not just enforcing it. We have a lot of malware out there and there's a lot of different types. You might remember what Sony did, Sony. Decided they didn't like people ripping their CDs. And so they went ahead and installed an automatic installer for windows computers.

[00:02:36] So if you tried to play your favorite Sony CD, right. Audio CD, listen to some music, it would automatically install some what. You and I would call malware on your computer and it would look at everything you were doing on your computer. To try and make sure that you were not trying to make a copy of the desk, not just a copy, but what we call ripping it.

[00:03:07] In other words, you have a CD and you have an MP3 player. How do you get the CD on the MP3 player? Cause you can't just stick it into an MP3 player, so you have to rip it and that converts it from the CD format into an MP3 format. So it's all digital. You can take it away. And I have really griped about the music industry before, because they make way more money off of CDs than they ever did off of records.

[00:03:36] Just because of how cheap it is. It costs them like 10 cents, not even to make a CD. And it costs them a couple of bucks to make a record back in the. So they decided they would do digital without thinking twice about while digital means you can a perfect copy, perfect coffee copy of that desk. And so it's only, he said, I'll go, well, here's what we're going to do.

[00:04:00] We're going to make this. And so it installed itself. Way down deep inside the operating system. It watched as you loaded up desks and watched what you did that is malware. And that was Sony being frankly, a vigilant. Yeah. They said, Hey, it's for copyright protection, but there was no encryption on CDs.

[00:04:24] There still isn't on compact discs. When we're talking about music desks, there is encryption on DVDs and that's what they did in order to say, well, you can't rip it because it's an encryption. Past the digital communications millennial act. And then from that act, they were able to now have controls. Hey, listen, if it's something's encrypted, you can't even try to dig.

[00:04:47] Okay. Pretty, pretty big deal. So there's a whole lot to this whole vigilante thing. And someone is added again, in this case, we found a researcher who has found something you just don't really see very often, you know, outside that sone thing, but it's booby trapped file. Yeah, there's these files that are out there on the internet on a bunch of torrent sites and others that are pirated software and they have a booby trap inside.

[00:05:25] Now the pirated software is typically things like a Microsoft windows or all of their different software, right word. And you name it all the way across the line. They also, by the way, have put some of this malware into games because there's a lot of people that run games and they grabbed these cracked games from the inside.

[00:05:52] So we're talking about boob bootleg talk. And so what this person or people, or whoever it is, is doing according to Sofos labs, principal researcher, his name is Andrew Brandt is get getting these people to install this software that has. A booby trap and that what it does is you think you're just installing the game or whatever it might be.

[00:06:22] But in reality, you're installing software that sends. The file name that was executed to an attacker controlled server. So it knows, oh, you're trying to run Microsoft word and it sends along your IP address of your computers. And then what it does is this vigilante software. It tries to modify the victim's computers so they can no longer.

[00:06:50] Access some, 1000 other pirate sites, like the pirate bay.com, which is a very popular site out. Oh, out there. So this is obviously not your typical malware, not at all. And they are doing this same type of thing. That's so needed way back in the day, modifying your computer so that you can not do something that may be illegal.

[00:07:19] It may be mostly, most of the time, he illegal, hard to say, but in reality, they're modifying it without you knowing. It's a very, very big deal. So people are using software, kind of like this vigilante software to steal stuff. Usually it's passwords, or maybe your keystrokes or cookies or your intellectual property access Eve, the people are even using ad networks, advertising networks to deliver software.

[00:07:51] But that will mind cryptocurrency for them. Okay. But those are all theft. That's what the motive is, but not in this case. These samples really only did a few things and none of them follow the motive for malware criminals. It's fascinating. He had a thing that he posted over there on Twitter, kind of talking about it, but once the victims executed this Trojan file, it gets sent out to a server and I'm sure the FBI is tracking down this server.

[00:08:24]It's one flourish. She drew.com in pronounceable. And it's it's not the one fee share, which is the name of a Cod storage provider, but it's pretty close to it. And it sends it out. I'm looking at the list of all of these websites that it tries to block by going into your hosts file. But it's an interesting way to approach it.

[00:08:48] Isn't it, frankly, by mapping the domains for all of these torrent sites and pirate site. To your local host, the malware is making sure that your computer, I can't access those websites. Okay. Anyways, if it happens to you just go in and edit the host file. It's really quite that simple. All right. Stick around everybody.

[00:09:10] But while you're waiting, go ahead, go online, go to CraigPeterson.com. Once you're there. You can easily subscribe to my newsletter and keep up-to-date on everything. CraigPeterson.com.

[As heard on WGAN 2021-06-30]

From man-caused like hackers through the environmental causes, like the sun, we could lose power. We've got a heat waves. We've got cold weather. We've got everything in between. What happens if we lose power, what do we need to do? That's what I discussed this morning with Mr. Matt Gagnon

[00:00:24] Matt Gagnon: [00:00:24] Craig Peterson joins us every Wednesday at this time to go over what's happening in the world of technology.

[00:00:29] He also joins this very station on Saturday. And talks about many of these very same issues in more depth of detail. Craig, welcome back to the program. Nice to have you as always, sir.

[00:00:39]Craig Peterson: [00:00:39] Hey, thanks. Glad to be here in such a nice or arm day, you said this tongue in his cheek.

[00:00:45] Matt Gagnon: [00:00:45] I believe oppressive heat is the word you press.

[00:00:47]Craig Peterson: [00:00:47] I grew up in in Canada and part of it was Northern Canada and the 70 degree day was like summertime. So my blood, I don't know my hips historically. I did the whole thing with the, the DNA in tracing ancestry. It's all from Northern. But you've Norwegian, et cetera. I think I am one of those minorities that is really heavily oppressed and should probably be getting free air conditioning.

[00:01:17] Cause my blood is just too, I don't know, sick, I guess for this.

[00:01:20] Matt Gagnon: [00:01:20] Yeah. I'm very sympathetic to you, Greg. And I think it does. I would say dovetail nicely into the question I was planning to ask you about. During heat waves here, that we've had so many different infrastructure attacks, hackers are getting into our energy.

[00:01:33] Great. And whatnot. That could be a bit of a deadly combination in the middle of a heat wave. Could it not? I would be concerned. I learned about that if I had your stick blood. So what should we all be concerned about as it relates to our security, as in, in terms of our energy grid end.

[00:01:47]Craig Peterson: [00:01:47] We need to spend some serious money.

[00:01:50] Think of that collapse that has happened down in Florida of that condo building. And the fact is that they had to spend millions to fix that building. In fact, it was like $120,000 per rev. Our grid, our electric grid, our water stations need the same type of investment. We have to tighten this stuff up because as you pointed out, we're seeing people dying right now because of the heat and the lack of air conditioning.

[00:02:23] Look at our grid. How many times has been attacked? And the problems that have come from it. Plus of course the whole nature thing which could destroy our grid would just one nasty solar flare. And we really have a combination of things that could cause serious damage. So if our enemies decide what they want to do is just.

[00:02:46] All kinds of confusion, people dying from the heat and in the wintertime, of course, also from the cold, they have the ability to shut down our grids. We really need to focus in on this. The price of electricity is going to go up even more if they do this, but it's an absolute necessity. Cause remember.

[00:03:09] Harrington event, which happened in the mid 18 hundreds, where there was a massive solar flare and it hit us here in the United States in a very bad way. But back then, it was just the, the Telegraph machines, one of those events, like the Harrington event happening now would put us back in the 18 hundreds for months and possibly years for some parts of this country, because we can't.

[00:03:36] Protect ourselves adequately from even that let alone the hackers out. There

[00:03:41] Matt Gagnon: [00:03:41] it is. Craig Peterson who joins us, he's our tech guru. And we hear from him every single Wednesday at this very time to talk over the world of technology. Another thing I've noticed too, spinning off into a totally different direction.

[00:03:53] Craig has obviously the criticism of, and hatred of. The big tech companies continues to grow. I think, and what's interesting about it is that there's a lot of distrust and dislike of them in a bipartisan way, right? There's a there's Republicans that don't like them, obviously because of the free speech issue.

[00:04:09] And there's a lot of left wing folks who also don't like them for entirely unrelated issues and reasons. But now there's a house committee which has approved a bill that could potentially break up Amazon, apple, Google, et cetera. What is

[00:04:22] Craig Peterson: [00:04:22] this all about? Yeah, this is a very big deal because these big tech companies keep getting bigger and they use techniques.

[00:04:31] The key competitors out of the marketplace and the techniques include buying companies that are worth tens of millions of dollars for a billion dollars, just so they don't have any competition. So we have this bill that was approved called the ending platform. Monopolies. Which came out with true bipartisan support came out of that committee.

[00:04:56] And the question is, what do you do, Matt? These companies are really doing things that are not technically against the antitrust act, so that we have act here in the S. But in reality, are it certainly by the spirit of that law because they are keeping competition out. Now, I would like to say that the free market would take care of this, but again, we don't really have a free market.

[00:05:26] And also the amount of control these people have is such that their profit margins are insane. Every one of these. Tech companies we're talking about. And then I include apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon. Every one of them has billions of dollars in cash sitting there in the bank to keep them. In that position.

[00:05:50] So it reminds me of the robber barons way back when the late 18 hundreds, early 19 hundreds, the controlled so many of our industries here in the United States, they cause the antitrust laws to be put into place. Something has to be done. And yeah. I just don't know, Matt I'm not somebody who really trusts government any more than I trust to any of these big tech companies.

[00:06:15]Matt Gagnon: [00:06:15] It's a question of who do you hate more right in the end of the day. All right. Final question for you, Greg. I'd like to go in this direction because we heard about John McAfee, recently passed away under not at all suspicious circumstances. Epstein didn't kill himself by the way.

[00:06:29]McAfee of course is the Titan nor was the Titan, the originator of a big antivirus software company, which many of us have had installed on our computers against our will and had to deal with in some way. Antivirus software is in and of itself interesting. Cause I was just reading somewhere that a lot of antivirus software actually misses.

[00:06:48] A gigantic amount of malware that ends up being on computers. Is this a problem? And if it is what do you do about this? There's just going to have to make your peace with the fact that your computer is infested with malware now or are there other options?

[00:07:01] Craig Peterson: [00:07:01] Yeah, McAfee of course had tattooed on his body.

[00:07:05] Find me dead. I did not kill myself. We know that he was not suicide. In Spain, the Spanish jail, your questions are really good. One because we're seeing as 70%. Mentoree antivirus software this year has missed 77 0% of the attacks that have been coming this year and McAfee himself came out and said that the McAfee antivirus software is useless against today's threats.

[00:07:39] One of the senior executives at Symantec, which of course has Norton and other antivirus products, all. Came out and said our software's useless against modern threats. So to answer your question, there are some things you can do. And I'm going to go into this in more detail this weekend. I think it's an important thing here on our July 4th weekend independence day.

[00:08:03] The bottom line is antivirus software no longer can protect you is using outdated technology. It's using signatures. So what happens is you can just like with a virus, you can get the virus and the body now knows those. T-cells remember how to fight that virus in the future. Antivirus software is much the same.

[00:08:30] It's looking for. Things that have been seen before. That's not what's happening anymore. We're seeing all new threats, just constantly. We're seeing phishing attacks and the, it gets around the antivirus software. There are some solutions or some things you can do. And frankly, if you're running windows, There's some pre things you can do.

[00:08:53] And I'm going to also, it's part of the series I've been doing. I'm going to be releasing this to people on my newsletter. I made a video last week, in fact about some things you can do. All right. But you have to sign up. You have to go to Craig peterson.com/subscribe. And you have to listen on Saturday from one till three, because we will be talking more about this as well.

[00:09:15] Matt Gagnon: [00:09:15] And there you go. Promoting the show on the weekend. I love doing it. Craig Peterson, our tech guru always joins us on Wednesdays at this time. I appreciate it, Craig. Thanks so much. And we'll talk to you again very soon, sir.

[00:09:24] Craig Peterson: [00:09:24] Take care, Matt.

[As heard on WTAG, WHYN, WHJJ on 2021-06]

You might have an idea of how much privacy has been lost. I went through a lot of the details today. The idea is to help you understand what you're doing to yourself by using all of these different new technologies and what can you do right now to start getting your privacy under control? So here we go with Mr. Polito.

[00:00:29] Jim Polito: Our good friend tech talk guru Craig Peterson has talked about this before. When you click that, "I accept" in the terms and conditions for something online, he is always explained what's going on there. And how, in many instances, as you are the product for that app, the app is in the product.

[00:00:48]Now there are more concerns about just clicking "I accept." Joining us now. We accept our good friend here every week at this time, Craig Peterson the tech talk guru. Good morning, sir.

[00:01:02] Craig Peterson: [00:01:02] Hey, good morning. Click away. It's quite a thing. Isn't it. Where does this article come from? We're talking about, did you notice this?

[00:01:10] The daily mail came out of the UK, not in America.

[00:01:15] Jim Polito: [00:01:15] Yeah, I know. Very interesting. And I just happened to have the daily mail app on my phone because it's one of the stops I make in show prep. So there's a warning. And of course, Greg, this doesn't come as any surprise probably to regular listeners because you've been talking about all the things that are included in there.

[00:01:36] And but what's the latest concern.

[00:01:38]Craig Peterson: [00:01:38] What they did is they put it all together and it's rare that you see this. So they started Dawn. What's the first thing you do while you check at your phone, I would actually put it back even a few hours. What do you do at night with your smartphone? You plug it in and it's sitting right there next to you.

[00:01:57]So now you've got all of these busy bodies that the tech companies cause remember. Apps, many of these are tracking use. They're not free. They're gathering information about you. So they know every night Jim puts his phone here and oh, buys the ways. So does this woman and this guy. Oh, okay. That's where Jim Pollito lives, right?

[00:02:21] So it's your smartphone manufacturer, particularly if it's Google, but it's true for apple app developers or mobile phone company, intelligence agencies. If they're watching you, which happens all the time. But all they're doing is collecting metadata.

[00:02:43] Yeah. That's exactly what it's used for, what time you're waking up where, who you're sharing your Baird bed with? Where are you going when you go to work? If you're speeding, when you're going to work, right? It's anybody's guess where all of this stuff is ending up at now. We're adding ring doorbells that we have on the front of our home.

[00:03:04] Please more than I think it's 1500 right now. Police departments are taking these feeds from ring. So now they have cameras in all of the neighborhoods. We have facial recognition from those ring cameras and from all the other cameras are putting around our home. So they know where we are, who we are.

[00:03:23] Vizio. A TV manufacturer has been caught. Watching us through a camera, hidden camera and the TV, listening to what we're saying. And even if the company isn't doing now, like your Samsung TV, they are tracking exactly what you're watching, where it's going. Facebook has been accused with. They're a wonderful little portal device, which is a, something that allows you to talk to someone.

[00:03:50] Face time. They've been accused of listening in on everything you're saying, because people including my son last week, he was at his girlfriend's house. She has the two of these Facebook portals. They started talking about maybe getting a hammock. Talking about it, not on a conversation on the portal at all.

[00:04:09] And all of a sudden what starts happening, their feeds are showing ads for hammocks, even though they hadn't looked for them before. So our cars are logging the places we're going. They're tracking how fast we're going. We have legislators right here in mass who are looking at it saying these electric cars, oh my gosh, we're not getting our gas taxes, which we don't bother using to fix the roads.

[00:04:34] That would be a terrible. It was electric cars. Aren't paying gas taxes. We want the cars to report on you and tell them how many miles you drove in math. And from that, they will send you a bill every year. If you want to, re-register your electric car. We were doing DNA testing kits for health reasons.

[00:04:55] Maybe we were trying to find out if we truly are Italian or. That genetic information is up for grabs anybody who's willing to pay for it. This is a surveillance state at something even the Staci weren't able to do. They only had files on about a third of the population of east Germany intelligence agencies today here in the us.

[00:05:17] Remember. Our information that was being kept by the federal government, including all the background check information for people that have secret top secret and other clearances, all of that information was stolen by China. We're giving this away. We are not keeping it safe. We're on top of all of this, Jim, we're telling people we're going on social media.

[00:05:40] Oh yeah. I'm going away for a week. We're going to a w wherever on vacation, it's going to be a great time. So now even the bad guys know this is amazing. We have right now started to enter the days of artificial intelligence. Yeah. And it's not like you and I, the way we think it's putting pieces of a puzzle together, that's what computer artificial intelligence is all about.

[00:06:06] And all of this stuff that we're allowing to be tracked from the national health service all the way on down in the UK and in the UK. This is really something we've got to start pulling our wings. And we're talking

[00:06:20] Jim Polito: [00:06:20] with our good friend tech talk guru, Craig Peterson, Craig here's the thing.

[00:06:25] So the reason that Facebook and these other places can offer all these services for free is because we are the customer and then they sell that information. You've just laid out the scenario about how those things get stolen, but they sell that information. Is this something where the government steps in with better regulation?

[00:06:47] Or is this something where the marketplace says, Hey, do you want something like Facebook? Okay. Pay me $5 a month and you can have it, and then we won't try to do all this stuff, you've got to pay you to have this service.

[00:07:01]Craig Peterson: [00:07:01] Facebook did try that at one point they were floating the idea.

[00:07:05] But I want you to consider one other thing here, Jim, when you're talking about this, when has government ever decided they needed less information about the people?

[00:07:21] Jim Polito: [00:07:21] Yeah. Yeah. You're rife. They don't, they want to know everything. Cause then they want to tax it. They want to regulate it. They want to, whatever. And here I am just bringing up regulation, but yeah.

[00:07:33] Craig Peterson: [00:07:33] That's exactly what they're going to do. That's what they do. The job of a bureaucrat data.

[00:07:38] I have Ribeiro grad in this country, whether they're working for the town of pod talk at Rhode Island, or they're working for the federal government, every bureaucrat in the country has one job don't get fired. And then the second job is grow my faith. Yeah. And that means that even if they were to pass laws, you remember, we already had laws about the federal government not watching us.

[00:08:04] And then we found out, oh, wait a minute, eight T and T had been feeding the federal government, all of the information about all of the phone calls in the country since 1950. Yeah, there were laws against it. Okay. It, even if they say, okay, you can't use this information, you're gathering from marketing is what I'm more at about, frankly, because if I'm looking to buy an F-150 truck, I'd love to see offers on F150 trucks.

[00:08:32] Okay. So being able to track me in my searches make sense. I'm extremely worried about. Everything else. And I'm very worried about this artificial intelligence being used, frankly, for evil. And it already is with some of these phishing attacks. It's this is just something it's something Facebook, by the way, even teams shadow profiles on people who don't even have accounts, because when you join Facebook, Facebook says, Hey, you want me to find your friends so you can link into them?

[00:09:05] Yeah. Just upload your contacts to. Who did

[00:09:11] Jim Polito: [00:09:11] so Craig, in the short time we have left what do you do? What do you do.

[00:09:16] Craig Peterson: [00:09:16] I'm having a meeting about that today. In fact, there's some friends, I have a couple of attorney friends, and some other friends who are looking at this and saying, this is nuts.

[00:09:25] What do we do? Apple is the only one. So you've found manufacturers out there that really does have your privacy in mind to a large degree. They have mostly been keeping us safe. That is generally speaking the best thing that you can do, but don't volunteer information, post himself up on Facebook.

[00:09:47] You're posting pictures that have the GPS coordinates of where it was taken. Facebook has based. So recognition don't do that. Get away from doing that sort of thing. Also be careful with the information that you're sharing with any other company out there, Google some of these free photo services, et cetera, et cetera, that pulling it all together.

[00:10:10] Facebook's given Microsoft search engine, the ability to see Facebook friends without their consent. It gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read and even delete Facebook users. Private messages. Don't use these companies, mark Zuckerberg, the allegations are all out there that Facebook was started using illegal methods.

[00:10:32]Crazy illegal methods scraping the the horrible. Book, if you will, of students and having people rate how good looking that woman is. Okay. All well and good, I guess if you were a teenager, but come on, this is not an ethical company. Google is not, they've even removed this slope.

[00:10:52] Don't be evil from their website, stop using them things like duck, go for your searches posted up there. Don't make sure you turn off GPS tracking on everything you can paying attention. Apple now has this new feature that will tell you every app. Exactly what that app is supposedly doing in collecting data and doing with your data and make intelligent choices.

[00:11:19] Jim Polito: [00:11:19] I got it. Craig, how do folks get more information?

[00:11:23]Craig Peterson: [00:11:23] The easiest way is just go to Craig peterson.com. That's Frank Peterson with an o.com and you can subscribe to my newsletter. You'll get all of this stuff. You'll get also links to all of them like podcasts and nerves about I do about a dozen a week.

[00:11:39] Believe it or not. Wow. And you'll be able to listen to those and you can listen to them on the iHeart radio app. Just go to Craig peterson.com/iheart or click on the iHeart logo. On my homepage,

[00:11:51] Jim Polito: [00:11:51] Craig Peterson, everybody. He's the man, Craig. Thanks so much. We'll talk with you next week.