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

We've got some really cool news that some people have interpreted as bad news. And this has to do with general motors and their hydrogen fuel cell. This is a very interesting story.

I've always been fascinated with the Hindenburg and what happened there. And I did a lot of investigations. And of course, there was the initial investigation that happened back in 1937. When the Hindenburg actually crashed, I found online, you can buy pieces of the Hindenburg online.

[00:00:35] There's this kind of an auction house. You can get a small square of the fab. Of the Hindenburgs outer shell for 99 bucks. I found them online. I didn't buy any, although I was thinking, that might actually be cool, but what am I going to do with it? Rights to get on a wall then what w what was interesting about it and about the fabric was what the German engineers had.

[00:01:01] Now we know that you can use helium and helium is a great little gas it's inert. It's not going to catch fire. It is also lighter than air. There's a lunch, a lot of others, great properties that has, you can use it for super cooling things that you can't with. Most other gases, helium is much better for super cooling than oxygen is.

[00:01:23] And hydrogen is Excel. Helium is getting hard to find the United States had a strategic reserve of helium. Now, to me, that makes sense because we did at one point need helium. We had dirge bubbles. We still do. We still use helium to send weather balloon. Been various other things, but then the federal government decided ELA.

[00:01:48] We don't need to keep this reserve anymore. So they sold it off. As of next year, there won't be anything left in that strategic reserve. So where do we get helium? We get it from regular old oil mine. So they drill a hole it's created by the breakdown of various elements in the soil, primarily some of the hard rocks.

[00:02:14] And as they break down and decay, they produce helium as one of the byproducts. Now what's been happening in the reason we are in. A helium shortage. Number three in fact, is that we are now fracking. Fracking Lutz is extract a lot more natural gas and a lot more , which is what we're really trying to do and keep some of those costs down.

[00:02:44] But it also does not create as much helium and that's. And it's a really big problem when you get right down to it and you're trying to figure out if we're going to fill up a balloon, that's going to go up. What are we going to do now? Approximately a quarter of all of the helium that's news out there goes into these birthday balloons.

[00:03:09] Okay. So yeah, it's it's kinda cool, but it's not an absolutely necessary thing, frankly, but it is used in all kinds of other things, including experiments. You remember? I said that helium is used to super cool thing. Think of these massive hydraulic colliders, some of the other experiments that are going on, where we have a magnet.

[00:03:37] Now, one of the biggest, most important things we're doing with magnets right now is trying to create a container for nuclear fusion. Now nuclear fusion doesn't have the byproducts of nuclear fusion. Although we've solved most of those vision problems, you don't have this highly radioactive stuff anymore that we used to have in the old reactors.

[00:04:01] Although we haven't been building new ones for what, 40 years now. But those particular types of containers, if you will, are built by these big magnets. So these magnets hold it in place. And in order to get the amount of power we need to, to these magnet, we have to super cool them. We have to super cool, the power supplies, and that is typically using helium.

[00:04:27] So we've had to shut down some of these experiments. Because we don't have enough helium so much for the strategic reserve, that is almost completely depleted. And by the way, the federal government in its infinite wisdom sold that helium off at a fraction of fair market value. That's a problem because it just went crazy.

[00:04:52] People were using it for things that just weren't that important. And now many of our experiments are getting shut down, but in the world war two era and pre-World war II era Germany had a problem trying to get helium itself. Germany doesn't have a whole lot of oil reserves and it had to buy everything.

[00:05:12] And the United States really didn't want to sell here. To Germany. So what Germany did and you guys probably all know this from your history lessons, cause you are the best and brightest hydrogen was used. And because hydrogen was used it was a flammable gas. And when there was a spark, when it was trying to land.

[00:05:36] It went up, it caught fire. Now what's really interesting is if you look at the pictures that were taken of it burning, there were obviously elements other than hydrogen, because hydrogen burns beautifully pure. You can't really even see it. And what would normally happen is you wouldn't have. Poof.

[00:05:58] And the whole thing just burns up. You'd have a hole and that hole be shooting a flame out as it was ignited, right as the hydrogen was ignited and the whole, my discontinue to get a a little bigger until there's no pressurized hydrogen anymore. And the fire's over, but that's not what happened with the Hindenburg.

[00:06:18] She caught fire. Because of that spark and it had that spark because of the weather conditions at the time, they just weren't being cautious enough. In fact, that was the very last large dirigible Airship. Ever made, frankly it's crazy, yeah. We got the Goodyear blimp, we got some of these others and they need the helium to fill them up.

[00:06:43] And then over time it was kinda like a swimming pool. You filled it up and you, all you have to do is just add a little bit more now, and then you don't have to, because of leakage, you don't have to completely refill it all of the time. So what ended up happening is they had hydrogen on board.

[00:07:02] Had the spark started a flame and then the cloth material that coated this massive container holding all of the hydrogen caught fire, but it didn't just catch fire. What happened was it caught fire and. It burned very quickly because effectively the entire outside surface of the Hindenburg was coated with rocket fuel.

[00:07:30] Some of the same components that go into gunpowder aluminum powder, which gave it that kind of silver shine. They really messed up. So people are looking at what is happening now with general motors. Tech fuel cell technology and other a little bit worried because this technology was developed for cars.

[00:07:51] It is being used in some parts of the world, in some parts of the country. I know California has some hydrogen cars on the road with a fuel cell. Now they're not burning hydrogen. In order to transport the car, they're actually allowing a chemical process to occur. So the hydrogen atom is attracted to the oxygen atom and they use a membrane so that they're trying to get together.

[00:08:18] And that's what produces electricity. And then what is the result when you have two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom and they combine H two O so the only. Final end product here coming out of that car is pure. Which is cool. So GM says wait a minute. Now we have this technology, why don't we try and make airplanes a little bit more efficient?

[00:08:45] And so they're saying you don't, you're taking off with two tons of water on board. How about we put a hydrogen fuel cell in there. You will be well to generate electricity. Now that's a very big deal because now that electricity doesn't have to be generated by the turbines of the gas engine. And on top of it all, you don't have to take off with two tons of water on board because we can generate water as your.

[00:09:16] And of course, they're not going to coat it with a rocket fuel. They are going to put it in one of these really cool containers that is considered to be very safe. So it's very cool. So the litmus test, according to our friends over at general motors, he this is a GM executive. Director Charlie frees.

[00:09:36] He says our technology can address customer needs in a wide range of uses on land, sea, air, or rail. And this collaboration we could open up new possibilities for aircraft transitioning to alternative energy, power sources. Now I don't expect a plane to be actually flying on this any time soon.

[00:09:58]Hydrogen is a great little fuel, but it doesn't provide enough energy to get that jet off the ground at all, but it does provide enough energy to supplement it so good for them. I think this is a good use frankly, of the hydrogen fuel cells, as long as we can avoid it leaking and causing other major problems.

[00:10:21] But I think that can be solved. Look at what we've been able to do now. These containers for the pretty much everything that can be hit by a train at full speed and not. So I think we got this covered. All right, everybody stick around. We'll be right back. And we're going to talk about it. A new type of vigilante that you may not have heard of before.

[00:10:46] Of course, you're listening to Craig Peterson. Check me out online. CraigPeterson.com.

[ As heard on WGIR, WQSO, and WKXL on 2021-06-28]

Privacy is gone.

We started talking this morning with Mr. Christopher Ryan, and we got into our privacy. There's a great article that I'll have this weekend in my newsletter from the Daily Mail about about this whole thing.

And it's titled "Read This and You Won't Click 'I Agree' Ever Again". So we got into that and also into this new bill here, it's called the ending platform monopoly, please act, can we split up these huge companies, these social media companies, et cetera, that are providing various platforms. Should we split them up?

[00:00:37] This is a real interesting topic and one that's going to affect every last one of us. And of course, Chris and I both had opinions.

[00:00:46] Chris Ryan: [00:00:46] I am Chris Ryan. Craig Peterson is the host tech talk on news radio six, 10 and 96. 7 Saturdays and Sundays at 11:30 AM.

[00:00:54] One of the more fascinating things about the tech environment is how. Either we don't care or it's unbeknownst to us that we allow for tech companies to spy on us and to have an inner track basically to our minds and to our souls were for many years, we always wondered why other people were thinking, right?

[00:01:19] Like what does that person thinking? And there was no way to ever really. But now there are ways to know, because we look into things on Google. We look into things via searches and we like certain things. We agree on certain things. And as a result of that we at some points in time are just giving the money, the giving information to tech companies, but at other points in time, We're actually showing via social media, who we are in ways that we never would have done in the past and employers, friends, everybody get a completely different view of a person's true inner feelings and how their mind works via social media that we never had before.

[00:02:02] Craig Peterson: [00:02:02] It is potentially a huge problem. We've got these busy bodies, if you will, that are listening to basically all of the signals we're sending out. We tell them where we live. You may not have given them your address, but if you have apps on your phone that you guaranteed that smartphone now who stays in the same house every night, they know where you.

[00:02:26] They know what you're like because of what you're searching for online, the website you're going to, they know what you say with some of these devices. My son I had was over his girlfriend's house and had a conversation with her about getting a hammock in front of one of these little portals from our friends at Facebook.

[00:02:46]Immediately ad started showing up for all of us. So we're telling these tech companies, everything that we're doing, we have microphones in our rooms, our television visions, Vizio, which is one of the major manufacturers was caught watching us. Who is looking at the TV when they're looking at it so they can get better ratings.

[00:03:09] Microphones are being used. The spy agencies worldwide now have direct access to us. It's a real problem. And it's a problem for you and me, not just for someone that's a high tech. High value target. It's a problem for you and me because now all of this information is also available to the regular bad guys.

[00:03:30] That's what they're using for fishing. They're getting you to do things on marketers are getting you to do things. Obviously the PI getting all this information and showing you the right information at the right time, the bad guys are getting you to do things by clicking on it. So links going to websites that are actually going to cause you harm.

[00:03:51] And we're seeing huge increases in all of this, Chris. Right?

[00:03:56] Chris Ryan: [00:03:56] And it's the, those types of things are happening behind the scenes, but it's also a lot of the outward things. What do you post about, what do you say? How do you interact with other people? All of these types of things are accessible to the public at times, and also accessible, behind the scenes as well.

[00:04:13] And it allows for a catalog to be built on you as an individual. And we are. Insight into our inner thinkings and our process that we would never have thought about that our parents would have never thought about doing before. And as a result of that there is a lot of things that take place out in society that, may we may not understand, or we may not completely comprehend, but a lot of it has to do with.

[00:04:46] Behavior on social media and our inability to know when to say things and when not to say things, and that is a huge problem.

[00:04:56] Craig Peterson: [00:04:56] It is knowing when to shut up. It's right there in politics as well. The Obama campaign was the first to mine. Incredible amounts of data from Facebook. Incredible.

[00:05:09] Far more access than anyone had ever had before Facebook just literally gave it to them. And then you had the Trump campaign come along and the higher, the Cambridge Analytica guys who had access to much less data than the Obama campaign had. But in both cases you were saying. Ads that were so tightly targeted at people and individuals that you really were being manipulated because they know what you're saying.

[00:05:37] They know what you're doing, they know who your friends are, and they put it all together now to lead you down that Primrose path, whatever. See, that's where I really get concerned. We are absolutely being manipulated. And as you pointed out, Chris we're being manipulated voluntarily. We're telling them everything we possibly can about us when we're posting on these various sites.

[00:06:04] Chris Ryan: [00:06:04] That's a really good point. How's judiciary committee approved antitrust legislation that could prohibit platform operators like Amazon, apple, Google, and Facebook from favoring, their own products and services. And the legislation could even break up industry giants by forcing them to eliminate or sell certain divisions.

[00:06:21] I don't see any way shape or form that this becomes law. That being said there is a public desire. For law to come to fruition that creates a more even playing field breaks up big tech breaks up these corporate giants and creates an environment where there is more shared prosperity. And. I'm curious as to what your thoughts are on this and what direction this goes and does do these companies need to be broken up in your view, a and B given how tightly they're able to control political figures via donations and power and things of that nature.

[00:07:06] Is there any way that these big tech companies get back?

[00:07:10]Craig Peterson: [00:07:10] It's a great question. And I would love to say that let the marketplace take care of it, but these companies are so incredibly profitable. The odds of them going under are very slim. Look at how long now we've had Facebook and Google out there.

[00:07:27] I'm sure their predecessors died. Their predecessors, trying to have went that way. My space out, et cetera. But these people have had so much control, so much money, so much profit that the opposite they are going to be corrected by the marketplace are slim. Because part of the problem, Chris, with these huge guys is they keep everybody else out of the market.

[00:07:52] Get Instagram, a company that was worth maybe $50 million. Facebook has been out there paying a billion dollars to buy their perspective competition. And they've done it multiple times. Google has done it multiple times. We're talking about a hundred times what the company is worth, just so they don't have to face competition.

[00:08:16] So now that brings in this ending platform monopolies, right? That you just mentioned will that help? Yeah, but yeah, I don't know. How do you break them up? There's obvious ways you can slice them up, but is there the stomach for the federal government to get involved in this? And we're just giving it all to these companies with margins, proper margins that are insane.

[00:08:41]Chris Ryan: [00:08:41] As always.

[00:08:41] Craig, thank you so much. Appreciate your time. Hey, take care. Craig Peterson, joining us here on Hampshire day. Host of tech talk on news radio 610 and 96.7 Saturdays and Sundays at 11:30.

[Weekly Show #1119 2021-06-26]

We've got some really cool news that some people have interpreted as bad news. And this has to do with general motors and their hydrogen fuel cell. This is a very interesting story.

[00:00:13] I've always been fascinated with the Hindenburg and what happened there. And I did a lot of investigations. And of course the, there was the initial investigation that happened back in 1937. When the Hindenburg actually crash, I found online, you can buy pieces of the Hindenburg online.

[00:00:35] There's this kind of an auction house. You can get a small square of the fab. Of the Hindenburgs outer shell for 99 bucks. I found them online. I didn't buy any, although I was thinking, that might actually be cool, but what am I going to do with it? Rights to get on a wall then what w what was interesting about it and about the fabric was what the German engineers had.

[00:01:01] Now we know that you can use helium and helium is a great little gas it's inert. It's not going to catch fire. It is also lighter than air. There's a lunch, a lot of others, great properties that has, you can use it for super cooling things that you can't with. Most other gases, helium is much better for super cooling than oxygen is.

[00:01:23] And hydrogen is Excel. Helium is getting hard to find the United States had a strategic reserve of helium. Now, to me, that makes sense because we did at one point need helium. We had dirge bubbles. We still do. We still use helium to send weather balloon. Been various other things, but then the federal government decided ELA.

[00:01:48] We don't need to keep this reserve anymore. So they sold it off. As of next year, there won't be anything left in that strategic reserve. So where do we get helium? We get it from regular old oil mine. So they drill a hole it's created by the breakdown of various elements in the soil, primarily some of the hard rocks.

[00:02:14] And as they break down and decay, they produce helium as one of the byproducts. Now what's been happening in the reason we are in. A helium shortage. Number three in fact, is that we are now fracking. Fracking Lutz is extract a lot more natural gas and a lot more , which is what we're really trying to do and keep some of those costs down.

[00:02:44] But it also does not create as much helium and that's. And it's a really big problem when you get right down to it and you're trying to figure out if we're going to fill up a balloon, that's going to go up. What are we going to do now? Approximately a quarter of all of the helium that's news out there goes into these birthday balloons.

[00:03:09] Okay. So yeah, it's it's kinda cool, but it's not an absolutely necessary thing, frankly, but it is used in all kinds of other things, including experiments. You remember? I said that helium is used to super cool thing. Think of these massive hydraulic colliders, some of the other experiments that are going on, where we have a magnet.

[00:03:37] Now, one of the biggest, most important things we're doing with magnets right now is trying to create a container for nuclear fusion. Now nuclear fusion doesn't have the byproducts of nuclear fusion. Although we've solved most of those vision problems, you don't have this highly radioactive stuff anymore that we used to have in the old reactors.

[00:04:01] Although we haven't been building new ones for what, 40 years now. But those particular types of containers, if you will, are built by these big magnets. So these magnets hold it in place. And in order to get the amount of power we need to, to these magnet, we have to super cool them. We have to super cool, the power supplies, and that is typically using helium.

[00:04:27] So we've had to shut down some of these experiments. Because we don't have enough helium so much for the strategic reserve, that is almost completely depleted. And by the way, the federal government in its infinite wisdom sold that helium off at a fraction of fair market value. That's a problem because it just went crazy.

[00:04:52] People were using it for things that just weren't that important. And now many of our experiments are getting shut down, but in the world war two era and pre-World war II era Germany had a problem trying to get helium itself. Germany doesn't have a whole lot of oil reserves and it had to buy everything.

[00:05:12] And the United States really didn't want to sell here. To Germany. So what Germany did and you guys probably all know this from your history lessons, cause you are the best and brightest hydrogen was used. And because hydrogen was used it was a flammable gas. And when there was a spark, when it was trying to land.

[00:05:36] It went up, it caught fire. Now what's really interesting is if you look at the pictures that were taken of it burning, there were obviously elements other than hydrogen, because hydrogen burns beautifully pure. You can't really even see it. And what would normally happen is you wouldn't have. Poof.

[00:05:58] And the whole thing just burns up. You'd have a hole and that hole be shooting a flame out as it was ignited, right as the hydrogen was ignited and the whole, my discontinue to get a a little bigger until there's no pressurized hydrogen anymore. And the fire's over, but that's not what happened with the Hindenburg.

[00:06:18] She caught fire. Because of that spark and it had that spark because of the weather conditions at the time, they just weren't being cautious enough. In fact, that was the very last large dirigible Airship. Ever made, frankly it's crazy, yeah. We got the Goodyear blimp, we got some of these others and they need the helium to fill them up.

[00:06:43] And then over time it was kinda like a swimming pool. You filled it up and you, all you have to do is just add a little bit more now, and then you don't have to, because of leakage, you don't have to completely refill it all of the time. So what ended up happening is they had hydrogen on board.

[00:07:02] Had the spark started a flame and then the cloth material that coated this massive container holding all of the hydrogen caught fire, but it didn't just catch fire. What happened was it caught fire and. It burned very quickly because effectively the entire outside surface of the Hindenburg was coated with rocket fuel.

[00:07:30] Some of the same components that go into gunpowder aluminum powder, which gave it that kind of silver shine. They really messed up. So people are looking at what is happening now with general motors. Tech fuel cell technology and other a little bit worried because this technology was developed for cars.

[00:07:51] It is being used in some parts of the world, in some parts of the country. I know California has some hydrogen cars on the road with a fuel cell. Now they're not burning hydrogen. In order to transport the car, they're actually allowing a chemical process to occur. So the hydrogen atom is attracted to the oxygen atom and they use a membrane so that they're trying to get together.

[00:08:18] And that's what produces electricity. And then what is the result when you have two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom and they combine H two O so the only. Final end product here coming out of that car is pure. Which is cool. So GM says wait a minute. Now we have this technology, why don't we try and make airplanes a little bit more efficient?

[00:08:45] And so they're saying you don't, you're taking off with two tons of water on board. How about we put a hydrogen fuel cell in there. You will be well to generate electricity. Now that's a very big deal because now that electricity doesn't have to be generated by the turbines of the gas engine. And on top of it all, you don't have to take off with two tons of water on board because we can generate water as your.

[00:09:16] And of course, they're not going to coat it with a rocket fuel. They are going to put it in one of these really cool containers that is considered to be very safe. So it's very cool. So the litmus test, according to our friends over at general motors, he this is a GM executive. Director Charlie frees.

[00:09:36] He says our technology can address customer needs in a wide range of uses on land, sea, air, or rail. And this collaboration we could open up new possibilities for aircraft transitioning to alternative energy, power sources. Now I don't expect a plane to be actually flying on this any time soon.

[00:09:58]Hydrogen is a great little fuel, but it doesn't provide enough energy to get that jet off the ground at all, but it does provide enough energy to supplement it so good for them. I think this is a good use frankly, of the hydrogen fuel cells, as long as we can avoid it leaking and causing other major problems.

[00:10:21] But I think that can be solved. Look at what we've been able to do now. These containers for the pretty much everything that can be hit by a train at full speed and not. So I think we got this covered. All right, everybody stick around. We'll be right back. And we're going to talk about it. A new type of vigilante that you may not have heard of before.

[00:10:46] Of course, you're listening to Craig Peterson. Check me out online. CraigPeterson.com.

[00:10:52]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.

[00:11:10]Well, vigilantes have throughout history decided that they were going to take the launch of their own hands.

[00:11:16] 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.

[00:11:53] 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.

[00:12:19] 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.

[00:12:40] 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.

[00:13:06] 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.

[00:13:29] 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.

[00:14:00] 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.

[00:14:28] 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.

[00:14:53] 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.

[00:15:16] 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.

[00:15:40] 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.

[00:16:18] 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.

[00:16:45] 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.

[00:17:15] 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.

[00:17:43] 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.

[00:18:11] 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.

[00:18:44] 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.

[00:19:16]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.

[00:19:41] 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.

[00:20:03] 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.

[00:20:18]We've been worrying about what is happening with ransomware with a cyber attacks and where is it coming from? We've got a new study out, did showing that one in five manufacturing companies are not only targeted by cyber attacks, but are getting nailed and getting nailed back.

[00:20:38]This is a bigger problem, and 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.

[00:21:08] 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.

[00:21:37] 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.

[00:22:05] 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.

[00:22:34] 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.

[00:23:12]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.

[00:23:37] 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.

[00:23:58] 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?

[00:24:25] 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.

[00:24:52] 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.

[00:25:26] 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.

[00:25:56] 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.

[00:26:31] 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.

[00:26:49] 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.

[00:27:19] 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.

[00:27:48] 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.

[00:28:09] 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.

[00:28:37] 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.

[00:28:58] 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.

[00:29:23] CraigPeterson.com. You'll find all of this all on my podcast and much more.

[00:29:28]We've had some good news this year about the bad guys and law enforcement. That's why it's good news because we've been shutting a bunch of them down. They're still out there and there's more and more, and it's getting more expensive, but I'm going to share some other good news.

[00:29:45] Ukraine has had a lot of cybersecurity problems.

[00:29:49] You might remember this tax program. That was the number one program used in the Ukraine, or I guess they just say Ukraine now. And it had a major piece of malware. And near, as we can tell, it was designed to attack the Ukrainian users of this tax software. Now, not just because, why would someone outside of Ukraine use the tax software?

[00:30:19]No. What happened was the software gets onto a computer and so much Maltz in the militia software game. It goes and tries to infect other computers and then other computers, it goes on and on. So what happened here was it looked like the we're trying to really wreck havoc with Ukraine and with the government's money supply coming from TAC.

[00:30:47] Remember this whole thing where you crane was invaded and we didn't do anything right. And Russia took it over that portion of trying to get down to some more, again, see access using Ukraine. So it an X part of Ukraine on it was, Hey, it isn't does it. It is nothing yet. It was Russian special forces. You had that airplane that went.

[00:31:11] Down apparently also by Russian special forces. So Ukraine has had. Enough and the Ukrainian police now have arrested members of this noon Torrijos ransomware gang that also has targeted American universities and other businesses here in the United States. This is a very big deal because it's bigger than it might appear.

[00:31:37] At first. This was the last Wednesday. The Ukrainian national police made an announcement that they were working with Interpol and the U S and south Korean authorities. Now why all of those different places? Obviously they might want to use a little bit of expertise, maybe. BI, maybe from some of these others, but as it turned out, the most of the damages were in the us and South Korea and the bad guys were there as well.

[00:32:13] This is also because they're having trouble, these ransomware people and people that are trying to spread other types of malware, their hands. Trouble finding the right employees. Yeah. Yeah. Employees sometimes their gig. And they'll hire people to launder money, unbeknownst to them many times, it says, Hey, I don't have a PayPal account.

[00:32:37] Can you I'll transfer some money to you on PayPal and I'll let you keep 50 bucks or whatever it is. And if you could just wire it into this bank account. So those are called mules and they're part of the money laundering. If you've done that you might've been involved in something illegal, some of those people were here in the U S cause that's again, they're trying to get the money out nowadays.

[00:33:01] They are also courts using Bitcoin primarily, but other cryptocurrencies as well. But these guys were, it was called Klopp. They had, or depending how we went. They had stolen a half a billion dollars. Basically half a billion dollars in damages. So everybody really wanted them. But this is the first time that a national law enforcement agency has carried out mass arrest of a ransomware game.

[00:33:34] That is a very big deal. So Ukraine is now doing more basically than Russia has. Russia is a hub for ransomware gangs. We know that right? Whether Putin has control over them as directed them or not, that is up to debate, but there are a lot of ransomware gangs over and run. And you think about Russia and how big it is you realize its economy is about the same as New York state.

[00:34:02]Yeah, it's a decent sized economy, but it's nothing compared to the other major economies in the world. They have Russia been blamed for harboring cyber criminals because they have not been prosecuting them and they don't extradite them. Remember president Biden was going to ask for extraditions and they're trying to figure out a deal and.

[00:34:28] President Putin said sure. We'll extradite them. If you extradite people, we want to, which of course isn't going to happen. So who have they been going after and what have they been doing? This group is one of several ransomware. Cartels is what the call-in on. Now that sees the target state. And then encrypted and demand a ransom to release it.

[00:34:55] And then they also do the double extortion where they say, Hey, if you don't pay the ransom to decrypt your files, we are going to leak sensitive information on it. So the targets they've included shell oil company, the international law firm Jones day. You might've heard of that one as well as several us universities, including Stanford in the university of California.

[00:35:25] Think of how big that is. I'd be shocked if university of California, wasn't the biggest. In the country. So in most cases, these hackers used a vulnerability in this file transfer product by company called a . So if you're using that's ACC E L I O N S in your business or to connect to your business or file transfers, double check it and make sure it's up to date because that's how they compromise their Vixen.

[00:35:55] But they're a victim. Obviously ransomware is in the spotlight right now. There've been a lot of these huge attacks hitting our critical infrastructure. We've got the colonial pipeline. We've also got a course them, big meat processing plant. We've seen them hit some of these water filtration, plant electric grid.

[00:36:19] All over the place. So governments, not just the us, but worldwide now are under a lot of pressure to try and stop these cyber criminals. So we'll see what happens, a small country like Ukraine. It is it's just amazing to me that they are taking the lead. It's a, it's just incredible. So let's look them up right now.

[00:36:46]Ukraine size financial see what it has to say here on duck. Duck go their economy. So they rank per capita GDP, gross domestic product, a hundred and 19th, not so good. And their GDP rank is 56. So in other words, most of their people are on the very poor side. And a number one looks like sector is agriculture.

[00:37:13] So they are a head of Russia. They are ahead of most countries except really Eastern European and the United States. So congratulations to Ukraine on that one. Very big. I'm trying to find out here how many people there were. Okay. So part of this take down Ukrainian police on Wednesday, and this is an article from ARS.

[00:37:38] Technica said that it had conducted 21 searches in the. Kiev, I guess it's pronounced region of homes and cars of those arrested seasoning equipment, 5 million Ukrainian here, Venus, which is around 200 grand and property video footage shared by the police shot officers ready in homes and what appeared to be wealthy neighborhoods and towing luxury cars, including Tesla.

[00:38:06] The police said, had managed to shut down some of the group's digital infrastructure. And it's unclear whether those arrested were core members of the group or affiliates. And the defendants here face eight years in Ukrainian prison does not sound like a fun time for you. That's for sure. I want to encourage everybody to take a few minutes if you haven't already and get my newsletter.

[00:38:31] Now, when you sign up for it, I'm going to send you a few special report talking about some of the things you can do. Right now in order to secure your computer, whether it's a home computer just one office, computer, or a whole office, I go through some of the most important things. Also you'll find on my home page, a video on how.

[00:38:57] To thwart most of the Russian ransomware. And it's really simple. So it's like a five minute, not even video shows you exactly what to do, and you are going to be ahead of those Russian hackers. So how's that for really good news. Now you can get my newsletter, which comes out every week and I try and keep you up to date on the goings on by going to Craig Peter sohn.com/subscribe.

[00:39:25] Now that's where you're going to find links to my podcast, which you can also find right there on my website. You can find all of the interviews or people are interviewing me. You can find this radio show, all two hours worth of my weekly podcast. You can find it all or right there on the [email protected].

[00:39:46] Now, if I could ask a favor. The way to get a podcast out into more and more hand is to get the subscription numbers up, not just the downloads, those are important, but the subscription numbers and to have people obviously listening to it or watching it did, by the way I post this up on YouTube as well.

[00:40:10] So you can watch it there. Listen, really. I am not posting much video right now. Do post some. But I, if I could encourage you to go to the 800 pound gorilla or even your favorite podcasting platform, go to Craig peterson.com/itunes. That will then take you directly to my iTunes podcast. Page Craig Peterson, that's Craig Peterson, P E T E R S O n.com.

[00:40:40] And. Put a slash and then I tuned ITU NES, and that. Get you to my iTunes podcast page. I hope I've earned five star review from you. So if you would leave a review and give me the five stars, hopefully, as I said, I've earned it. I'm also on a whole bunch of others. You can go to Craig peterson.com/spotify and many others.

[00:41:07] So check it out. Please do subscribe to the podcast, whatever your favorite podcast app is, and that will help. The word out, we can get a few more listeners here. I really do want to help these people out, help you out. Particularly Craig peterson.com. You'll find everything you need to get started right on the homepage.

[00:41:31] All right, everybody take care.

[00:41:32]Apple and Google are changing the way they are delivering privacy in a very big way. Have you ever spoken to your device and giving it a command? Yeah, the smartphones, et cetera. That's all changing for the better.

[00:41:48]Apple and Google have for very long time now been trying to do something that just fascinates me way back when in college, in the seventies, I was working on some software that did handwriting recognition and.

[00:42:05]It was just beyond, incredibly hard to do back then. And so we narrowed it down the scope down and just signature recognition. Is this the same person signature? And, we got somewhere, but it wasn't like very good, frankly. Today we have come a very long way. I am still amazed at how well computers can speak to us, but it isn't just them speaking.

[00:42:31] Now, of course our computers, our smartphones, or our watches can go ahead and listen. To what you're saying. Absolutely. Listen and listen closely and understand it. But the big question is how, what are they understanding? And from a privacy standpoint, where are they doing the understand? No. I wrote some software that takes meetings or other things like my radio shows and sends it on abit, packages it up and it sends it on up to Google are not Google.

[00:43:10] I should say Amazon. And has Amazon transcribe it for me. Now that software didn't take me very long to write because Amazon has these services that you can use using what are called API APIs, application programming interfaces. So I was able to write some software. That transcribed radio shows and transcribed meetings in the matter of Wembley, less than an hour, including all of the debugging and testing and everything else, to make sure everything was going to work and it wasn't going to fail. And it didn't keep stuff up in Amazon longer than it needed to and tied into my right accounts, everything. And. And our, I remember in the early eighties, trying to come up with a system that could take a phone call inbound and walk people through a menu and let them hit a button.

[00:44:03] So they, press one for this two for that, et cetera. And this was on an apple too. I was writing it in assembler and in basic, oh my gosh, bringing back all kinds of memories. We now have these great, incredibly smart devices. And since the Dawn of the iPhone, a decade plus ago, many of the smarts in our smartphone in our computers have come from somewhere else.

[00:44:28] Just like I have transcriptions done by Amazon. That's up in the cloud. They have all of their data centers in some amazing software that can trend transcribe almost anything even with kind of batteries. So the mobile apps and our phones, or sending our user data in this case, our voices that were recorded up to the cloud, and that would transcribe speech, or maybe giving you some ideas of what the next word is, you're trying to type.

[00:45:01] So you only have to hit one. Where it's changing now is where it's being processed. Apple has for quite a while done processing as much as possible in the local phone set the handset. So you wake it up. That processing is done locally. Same. Thing's true for Amazon. Google has been doing much the same thing and apple has added to its devices machine learning.

[00:45:28] That's designed to be able to do this more and more so that your question. So you might say, Hey Siri, what time is it can be processed locally in the device. That's exactly what Google is doing as well, because these smart phones, even the ones without machine learning, like a lot of these Android phones are smart enough.

[00:45:52] To do some real crucial and frankly sensitive machine learning tasks, like asking very simple questions or even doing the speech transcription. So at Apple's big event this month, apple said that its virtual assistant is going to be able to transcribe speech without using any cloud resources. Ella depends on the language.

[00:46:19] Obviously English is where they're probably are going to focus. And maybe a few other European languages. Future iPhones and iPads are going to be doing all of that locally. And if you pay close attention to the releases of Mac OOS, you'll see that future, like the next release of Mac iOS, that's already embedded.

[00:46:42] Is using special processing. That's only available using the apple chips because apple again is embedding machine learning into some of these. It's just amazing what they're doing. And Google is following suit. Google said the latest version of Android has a feature dedicated to secure on device processing of sensitive data.

[00:47:09] So they're calling that the private compute core that's Google's name for it. And initially it's going to be used to keep the smart reply feature. The Android has built into its mobile keyboard that can suggest responses to incoming messages, keep it local on the phone. So that's a good thing, right?

[00:47:30] This wizardry is going to give you more privacy because even though apple and anonymize. Anything that's going up to the cloud. Anything. If it is being, if your voice, for instance has been sent up so that it can be processed and it happens, like fad, it's just amazing how quickly it all happened.

[00:47:50]Google is doing much the same thing. They're just going to say we're just going to process it locally. So you might not notice a difference because of how fast both companies are able to process your voice, but on-device machine learning offers more privacy and even faster apps. Just really, again, using the old snap trick here a much snappier than they ever were before.

[00:48:20] And by not transmitting your personal data, it's cutting the risk of exposure. It's also saving time, because right now, again, it has to record it. It's often streaming it live so listens for its wake up word, which might be, Hey Siri or hello, Google or whatever you've got to set up to be. And my phone just woke up and it sends started streaming it up to the cloud.

[00:48:49] So you have to wait for the data to be sent then processed and then sent back. But it's amazing how fast it is. So this is very. Apple has always had your privacy and your security is one of their main focuses. But when it comes to our friends over at Google prying on your spine, on you, Brian eyes is really the name of their game.

[00:49:15] They want to know everything about everyone. My mom, one of my sons was over at his girlfriends and she has these face book. Devices, which I've always argued against people getting, cause there's nobody worse than Facebook. Even Google isn't as bad as Facebook and they were talking, he and his girlfriend about a hammer.

[00:49:41] And then within minutes they started getting advertisements for hammocks. Now they weren't talking through this Facebook portal, which is kinda like an the Alexa or the Google home with the camera and a screen on it. They weren't talking through it. They were just talking. Around it and they weren't looking it up on Facebook or anything.

[00:50:03] So they have their strong suspicions. They were being spied on. And frankly, I do too. Cause my son, this particular son knows tech extremely well. Okay. So Google started gathering data on the Chrome browser. And how much are we using it? What you're using it for through a technique, they call differential privacy, which adds what's called noise to harvest the data.

[00:50:28] Now you can get plugins for your browser, that issues randomly. Queries searches. So Google thinks, okay, so you just searched for size 13 socks, but you didn't, your browser did that in the background on purpose to basically poison Google's harvesting of your data, because they can't really tell the difference.

[00:50:52] So that Google has started doing this themselves in 2014 a little bit. So that the information about you. Really wasn't that accurate? Google's now trying to put you into a box. So rather than gathering all the information they can about you specifically about you just long-tailed about you, what they're doing.

[00:51:16] Is putting you in a box. So you are a 40 year old, white guy from new England who likes cars, right? So you'll be in that box as opposed to specifics about you. And that part of the reason for that is because they keep getting nailed by all kinds of lawsuits. Apple has a technical. On data gathered from phone phones to inform them well, what emojis people are using and type in predictions and apple completely.

[00:51:43] Anonymizes it. So it's interesting to see. I am glad to see both apple and Google out there in the forefront. Now, trying to anonymize stuff, trying to keep the processing on your device, which is going to save you a lot of time. And. Provide a little bit of privacy. So there you go. Major update to privacy coming first from apple, and then it looks like Google is going to follow suit.

[00:52:14] Hey, have you visited me online? You can get my newsletter for free. I have a free one. Go to Craig peterson.com/subscribe.

[00:52:26]I came across this article in Fox businesses week that I knew I had to talk about. And this is about ransomware and how a ransomware attack can really begin in some pretty simple ways. So we're going to talk about that, right now.

[00:52:43]You I'm sure heard of the colonial hack. You guys really are the best and brightest. If you're listening to this show and you are a regular, you are among the top 5%. Let me tell you, so you know about the colonial hack and colonial pipeline, of course. Down. We didn't really get nailed by up here in the Northeast, because the way of the way the pipeline works to see the pipeline sends fuel and stuff, sends all kinds of things. For all the way from down in the Gulf coast, the basically all the way up through new England and they ship different types of fuel and they can't ship them all at once and they don't ship to all areas at once. So let's say new England need some home heating oil. They will schedule a time and they'll say, okay.

[00:53:35] So from 8:00 AM on Monday until five, a 5:00 PM on Thursday. The pipelines are going to be full of home heating oil, headed up to noon. And all of those big oil tanks that you see, particularly in like north Western or Northeastern New Jersey, those our holding tank. So our friends at colonial pipeline will ship at op we'll, hold it.

[00:54:00] And then from there, it gets distributed by a trucks, to our homes and et cetera, et cetera. So they do the same thing for jet fuel, car fuel, gasoline, diesel, et cetera. Here in the Northeast, we had just been delivered a whole load of fuel and then the ransomware attack hit and colonial pipeline decided to.

[00:54:26] Down the whole pipeline. Now there's people who say they shut it down because they didn't want to lose money because their billing systems were offline and they didn't know who was getting, which fuel, et cetera. That might be part of it. But it's not a bad idea at all. If you're getting ransomware to shut the machine off.

[00:54:47] Just shut it off. So it doesn't spread to other machines and shut off the other machines as well. So they don't pick it up. Now we have some automated systems. So we had a client who they, one of their employees. In fact, it was one of the C level people, which of course they always demand exceptions to their security protocols.

[00:55:07]They managed to pull in some ransomware, bring it in. And we're looking at it, they're on their computer and it started to install itself and immediately our systems cut them off from the rest of the night. So they weren't able to the bad guys who are able to spread it all. It was on that one machine and we stopped it before it started doing anything really bad.

[00:55:33] Even on my max, I'm running some software. No, I should do a training on this, some free software that keeps an eye out for apps that are opening a lot of files and doing something that might be encrypting them. Sometimes it's hard to tell if your program, if something's being encrypted or not.

[00:55:50] So it tracks all of that and tries to, stop it. And it does a good job. Sometimes it stops legitimate software too. But when it stops at a pop has a little pop up, Hey, us, this program, it gives you the names doing this. Tells you the folders. And he said, okay that's fine. Just let it go. And in the, in Microsoft are not Microsoft in the Mac world, just like in the Unix world, you can suspend a process that's running.

[00:56:15] So it just sends a suspend signal to it until such time, as you either say, no, it's bad, kill it or let it continue. So they did the right things by shutting it all down and then trying to figure out, okay, so what's happened, where is it? What do we have to do? And they ended up paying the ransom. Do you remember that as well?

[00:56:35]We also had this problem with JBS and JBS of course, was that massive meat processor. It's actually a foreign company, but it had a huge. Us meat plant. And we've got a wonder, is this a real war? Is this a war we're starting to fight online? We're not at a kinetic war right now, but is China behind?

[00:57:00] This is Russia behind us. And I got to say it sometimes. It's really hard to tell they might be using. Russian tools, but it could be Chinese hackers. There are so many questions here. It's just hard to know. So how do these guys get it in? With my client, they brought it in thinking, oh, okay I'm going to put this on my thumb drive.

[00:57:21] I'll bring it in to look at it in the morning. And it was an email and it was supposedly from the better business bureau and they needed to do some follow-ups. So he brought it. That is referred to as social engineering. It is a kind of a phishing attack where they know, okay this company is obviously going to be concerned about a better business bureau thing and complaint, and they're going to want to respond because they want to keep the reputation up.

[00:57:47] Cause they were a retail operation. Makes sense. That's what social engineering is all about. Just looking for cracks in the human shielded organizations is the human shield, really doing what they should be doing. Have they been trained and it's so easy to get tricked. I don't like some of these companies that go ahead and send out emails that are phishing emails, seeing if they can get an one of their own employees to click on it.

[00:58:23] And then what they do is they reprimand. No initially might be okay. We got to go through another training and you, so you sit through the training. Okay, great. Great. Okay. I get it. Yeah. Yeah. Bad boy. Slap on the wrist. All so it might be that it might be something much more critical, much nastier where some of these businesses are in fact firing.

[00:58:47] You do it two times you're fired. Okay. Or three times that I've seen that more in Europe than in the us, but some of the companies are doing that. I could totally disagree with it. And anybody can be fooled, which is why you've got to have a multi-layer set of protection. Okay. But what this is doing is letting the attackers in the door.

[00:59:12] Once they're in the door, they try and get higher privileges, which is basically more security access so that they can start going into various files and machines and start spreading. We call it east west, right? Spreading laterally within your neck. And that's a key to carry out a ransomware attack. He can be that simple.

[00:59:36] Now most cyber attacks about 70% are related to email phishing. So phishing emails, which appear to come from a trusted source are very simple but effective. For them to conduct social engineering, ransomware virus attacks on a computer. They are all tied together and we're not going to get into a lot of depth here.

[01:00:00] I certainly do some webinars and some other trainings on this. In fact, my thinking of releasing my improving windows security training again, for people that want it where. Through. Okay. Here are the main configuration things you need to do on your windows, computer or did to help secure it. There's no perfect security, but improving it. So I've got that course out there. A lot of you guys have already taken. And I appreciate you and your support. Let me tell you because it helps to cover some of my costs, but I think I might do that again. Send a little thing to everybody letting them know about the improving windows security, the course.

[01:00:39] All right. So I want to invite you again, go to Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Now you may not know. So I'm going to explain right now what my newsletter is. Every week, I find six to 10 articles that I think are very important and I'm reviewing literally thousands of articles every week. Some of it's automated review and the rest is me sitting there looking at them, trying to find what are the ones I think you'll be interested in.

[01:01:12] Those from me every weekend, ish. I emailed this, go to Craig peterson.com/subscribe. CraigPeterson.com/subscribe. Stick around.

[01:01:25]A lot of us have been complaining about cookies and tracking for a long time and Google who has finally heard us. I'm I'm not sure I heard about this, but we're going to talk about third party cookies right now.

[01:01:40] Third party cookies are where you go to a website and that web browser kind of squeals on you. Shall we say. And what happens is Google, for instance, is trying to track you. Would you go online as you go between websites, they're calling this kind of an advertising surveillance industry on the web.

[01:02:07] And frankly, this third party cookie has really been an important part. Of this whole surveillance industry. What it does now is it allows a website to have a look at where you have been online. And when I say it allows a website, it's really Google, that's doing the tracking. Obviously you're going to a website, Google doesn't own every website out there.

[01:02:36] And in fact it barely owns any. When you look at the number of websites that are out there, Internet. So Google has this whole concept of if you're visiting this site and you have visited this site and this other site, I know something about them. And so it sells that information. So because it's seen the pattern, right?

[01:03:03] That's the whole idea behind the advertising. Phasing out these tracking cookies and these other persistent third party identifiers has been something people have been trying to get rid of for a very long time in the electronic frontier. The foundation you'll find them [email protected] has been jumping up and down, trying to get everybody to pull up their socks.

[01:03:28] If you will. One of the first players to really jump into this as apple and apple has pretty much told the whole industry. Got to stop doing some of this tracking, some of the tracking is okay. Again, how many times have I said, if I'm looking for a Ford F-150 then I don't mind seeing ads for the Ford F.

[01:03:53] D, but why would I want to see ads for a motor scooter when I'm looking for a pickup truck and frankly, if I'm looking for an F-150, I expect to see ads maybe for a Chevy Silverado or a Dodge truck. Does that make sense to you? Because I'm looking for something and that's what I'm interested in seeing.

[01:04:17] While Google is now jumping onto this bandwagon, because apple has said we are going to be doing a couple of things. We are going to be forcing you app developers to tell everybody exactly what you are doing with their information, what you're tracking, who you're selling it to, what it's being used for.

[01:04:40] That's a very big deal. And it's got the whole advertising industry. Very. Worried and Google is coming along saying, okay, apple will do you a little bit of one better. And of course the biggest complaint, or, from Facebook who ironically has been buying newspaper ads, if you can believe that, google has been destroying the newspaper industry. Now it's going to newspapers to try and get people to stop apple from destroying Facebook's industry, right by blocking some of the advertising tracking that Facebook has been doing. Now, what they are doing is what Google is doing is looking to replace these third party cookies.

[01:05:30] And how were they going to do that? They are already doing a few rather sneaky things. For instance, they fingerprint your brow. Now your browser has a fingerprint because you have certain extensions on your browser that you've added. You have your computer, that which has an operating system that has a certain version.

[01:05:54] It has a certain amount of memory. It has a certain amount of disc storage, a lot of the private information, the personal information about, so your computer can be gleaned by a website. So one of the things they've been doing this, you okay, you're blocking cookies. No problem. I can still figure out who you are and they do now.

[01:06:17] They don't necessarily know exactly who you are, but they have a very good idea. One of the proposals the Google has come out with is called the federated learning of cohorts, which is very ambitious. Could be the replacement. If you will, for these third party cookies, that could be the most harmful. And what it is a way to make your browser do the profile.

[01:06:49] Itself. So historically they've been able to track your browser as you go around and then they have to pull all of that information together. They pull it together and they come up with a picture of you and who you are. Yeah. You're interested in buying a pickup truck, particularly a man. Okay. Is an example that picture gets a cat gets a detailed about you, but it's something that the advertisers have to put together.

[01:07:20] What this flock or federated learning of cohorts is doing is it's boiling down your recent browsing activity into a category. They're calling this a behavioral and behavioral label, and then they're sharing it with websites and advertisers. So the idea is basically your web browser. It self is going to put you in one or more buckets and the websites that you're visiting and the advertisers that are advertising on those websites will be able to get that label that your browser has put on.

[01:08:06] You. Yeah, you like that. So what eff is saying is that this could exacerbate many of the worst non privacy problems with behavioral ads, including discrimination and predatory targeting. You can guess what those things mean. So they're calling this a privacy sandbox, right? It's always the opposite. If Congress is passing a bill, that is a COVID relief bill, you can bet that there's very little to do with COVID relief in the bill. Wait a minute, actually. That's true. There's only 9% of the money in this almost $2 trillion spending plan. The night last 9%. That actually goes to COVID relief, instant COVID relief bill.

[01:08:53] Same thing here with Google. Privacy sandbox and it's going to be better. So Google says in the world we have today where data brokers and ad tech giant track and profile everybody with complete impunity, just like Equifax has just like cat. Kofax lost our personal identity. Bio level information, our social security numbers, or addresses or names or date of birth, et cetera, et cetera.

[01:09:20] Yeah. Yeah. Okay. We pay a small fine. Yet. We go on, I, are they out of business? Have they lost business? In fact, they gained business because people have been paying that Kofax too. Monitor their credit. Oh my gosh. But that framing and the Google is talking about is based on a false premise that you have to choose between old tracking and new tracking.

[01:09:45] Does that sound familiar? Yeah. So it's not an either or. We really should be rejecting this whole new federated learning of cohorts proposal. The Google has come out with, you can bet that apple is going to reject this outright because it's really rather terrible. If you care about your privacy on the other hand again, I look at it and say, I want an F-150.

[01:10:14] I don't mind ads for pickup trucks, so what's wrong with that? Okay. There's two sides to this. I just don't like them calling me by name. When I walked past a billboard.

[01:10:25]We really, aren't going to talk about Bitcoin in this segment. So stick around. I had to talk about Russia this last time around, but Bitcoin, the prices are surging. People are mining. What does that mean? And why are they using more electricity than the country of Argentina? Bitcoin has been around for a while. And I don't think anybody out there has not heard about Bitcoin. It is a power in and of itself. We don't know who actually came up with this whole concept. There's a concept behind Bitcoin called blockchain technology and blockchain technology is based on. The concept of ledgers, where you have ledgers, just like a bank ledger that keeps track of every transaction.

[01:11:16] And there are hundreds of thousands. There's just so many ledgers in the world. And in order to verify transactions, half of those ledger entries have to agree. Pretty basic on that level, but what is the Bitcoin itself, which sits on top of this blockchain technology? If you want to look at it, simply take a look at prime numbers.

[01:11:42] Hopefully you can name the first five prime numbers, right? 1 3, 5, 7 11. There you go. Ta-da those are the first five of I think I got those right prime numbers and applying numbers and number that is only divisible by itself. And why. Which is why one is a prime number and we use prime numbers a lot.

[01:12:06] Nowadays, most of the encryption that you're using is based on prime numbers. If you go to a secure website, you're using something called SSL, which is the secure socket layer. And that's what shows up in your browser, in that URL line as a little lock, if you see that lock, that you have.

[01:12:27] Effectively a VPN, a virtual private network between your browser and that remote server. Yeah. Guess what? You already have a VPN, right? Why use one of these VPNs that spies on you? So that is encrypted data and it's very difficult to encrypt in between. How does it do that? It's using something known as public key technology, the RSA algorithm.

[01:12:55] We're not going to go any further down that, but basically it's a allows someone to have a public. And use that public key to encrypt a message. And then you, the person who's receiving the message whose private key was used to do the encryption can decrypt it using their private key. So the public key side, the private keys side, it allows the encryption from end to end.

[01:13:24] That's what the SSL is. Okay. When we're talking about Bitcoin, we are talking about something that goes and uses some of the similar technology, because what it's doing is using the. Prime numbers. That's what the RSA algorithm is using this encryption algorithm, using these very large, very complicated prime numbers because you get past 11 and see 12.

[01:13:50] That's not a prime, right? Because it's divisible by two and six and three and four, and then let's see 13. Okay. That's a prime 14, no 15, no 16. No. Okay. It gets more difficult. I remember way back when writing a little program that just found prime numbers and it looked for prime numbers and the easiest way to do it was I would start.

[01:14:22] First of all, you take a number. Divide it into, there's no reason to go any higher than that when you're trying to figure out if it's prime or not. And then I would start looking at some of the base numbers to try and figure it out. And then of course, real mathematicians were able to figure out better ways to find primes.

[01:14:39]When we're talking about Bitcoin and some of these other cryptocurrencies, they are also using these very large prime numbers, just like you're being used for this public key encryption. And they also have some other parameters around some of these prime numbers. So to have a Bitcoin is to have this digital number that represents a unique prime number.

[01:15:06] If you want to mind what you're doing is you are trying to find a prime number that no one has ever found before, just to oversimplify things a little bit. So you find that pine number and Tonna. Now you have a Bitcoin sounds easy enough sounds quick enough. It is not easy and it is not quick. And it's not just the based on the prime number algorithm, but we're keeping this simple here.

[01:15:33]We have found millions now of these Bitcoins. I should look that up and find out exactly how many, but there are many Bitcoins. The whole algorithm, the whole system is set. To do some restrictions here. There's only a certain number of these Bitcoins that will ever be mined. It's estimated that something like 20% of the Bitcoins that were found have been lost because the encryption was Jews to keep the keys.

[01:16:08]People forgot it. You probably heard about this guy that has. A quarter of a billion dollars in Bitcoin in this wallet. And he only gets eight tries before it auto destructs, and he hasn't found them yet. So there's a quarter of a billion dollars that's unreachable, but that's what we're talking about here.

[01:16:27] Bitcoin. In this day and age, Bitcoin mining is so hard and it takes so much computing power that it is using up a couple of things. First of all, the thing that bothers me the most is it's using up these GPU's these graphical processing units, because GPU's, which we typically use for graphics processing are set up so that we have are hundreds, thousands.

[01:16:58] Processes that can be happening on that card simultaneously, various small little tiny processes that can be set up to somewhat be optimized for Bitcoin mining or mining, any of these other cryptocurrencies. And then the people who really want to make money on money. And these cryptocurrencies have machines that are special machines.

[01:17:22] They are designed specifically to mine, one type of coin, one of these crypto coins. So we're talking about Bitcoin. So there are machines that are designed to mine. Bitcoins, go to eBay and look for Bitcoin miner. They used to have all my on Amazon. I haven't checked in a while, but you'll find them in both places.

[01:17:45] At least you used to be able to, you can certainly still find the money. And you'll find some that are old, that are used and some brand new ones. It is expensive to mine them. One of my sons and I, we decided years ago to try and do a little mining. We probably should have tried harder. But we gave up because it was a, who knows what's going to happen with Bitcoin.

[01:18:08] There are so many cryptocurrencies. Then today, there are people introducing new cryptocurrencies all of the time. And I avoid those like the plague, because you never know what's going to happen. Bitcoin is definitely the 800 pound gorilla out there. We were able to mine, I guess my son, he mind a couple of other little currencies, they're worth a penny or two, not a very big.

[01:18:33] We have now so many people in China, for instance, that were doing Bitcoin mining, the China could not produce enough electricity to mine, the Bitcoins. So China went around and shut down anybody that was mining Bitcoin, and we have something called the Cambridge Bitcoin electricity consumption. Index. So this is an index it's designed to figure out how much electricity is being used in order to mine, Bitcoin.

[01:19:07] And this is course in, over in England, the university of Cambridge, the judge business school. I'm looking at a graphic right now that they have, and this is showing the electricity and Bitcoin. They actually have all of the data for downloading if he ever wanted to do some serious analysis, but it's showing there was hardly anything.

[01:19:30] And this, anything back in 20 16, 20 17, it was summer 2017 when it started to jump up. And that's of course, when the price of Bitcoin started to go up and it started to go up. Why? Mainly because of ransomware people having to pay ransomware and buy. Bitcoin in order to pay that ransom, but in terawatt.

[01:19:52] So now we are showing at about, okay, so this is I'm looking at Wednesday, February ten, twenty, twenty one, two hundred and eighty eight terawatts of electricity. On that one day isn't that something and the amount of electricity that's being used has been surging because of course the price of Bitcoin has been going up and just been going up.

[01:20:17]Crazy rate it, the amount of mining going on has doubled almost doubled since October last year. And we're talking about using more electricity than the entire country of Argentina. The Netherlands and the United Arab Emirates. It is absolutely amazing. Amazing how much we're using people are alarmed by this countries are having major problems in trying to figure this out.

[01:20:51] And what else is funny about it? They talk about Bitcoin being. One of the green technology? It turns out that Bitcoin because of the electricity that it's using for people to mine, new Bitcoin, it now has a carbon footprint comparable to the entire. Country island of New Zealand, it's producing about 37 mega tons of carbon dioxide per year.

[01:21:19] I think that's funny, frankly, because they call it green. It's like green cars that are electric GLAAD. Guess what? They, aren't green in so many ways. They're coolest hacked. Don't get me wrong, but they're just, don't think they're green because they're not. A lot of reasons for that. And I've talked about it many times in the past, on my radio show.

[01:21:39] And if you go to my website, you can just look that up and you can find out why, and I've got hard numbers there and everything else. All right, everybody make sure you visit me online. We have started some new stuff. If you are a frequent reader of mine. Now Sunday newsletter, which has my show notes. You are getting also one or two weather newsletters during the week.

[01:22:04] Just short trainings. I'm trying to help you out, but if you're not opening that newsletter, if you don't download the images and that's how I tell the joke opened it, then you're not going to get all of this supplemental material, including some audio programming that you can't get anywhere else. So make sure.

[01:22:22] To CraigPeterson.com and sign up for the newsletter and open the silly things. So you get all of this free training and more. CraigPeterson.com

[As heard on WGAN 2021-06-23]

You getting annoyed with these multi-factor authentication things where they're sending you a text, et cetera? So is Matt. We talked about what is coming pretty soon, frankly, that we'll get. Not only the multi-factor authentication being needed, but also even the passwords. We also got into this whole Senate debate about a 25% tax credit for semiconductor manufacturing.

[00:00:28] Why do they think it's needed and what are we going to do? So here we go with Mr. Matt. And of course me, Craig Peterson

[00:00:36] Matt Gagnon: [00:00:36] Well, you hear his voice here every Wednesday. You also hear it on Saturdays at one o'clock. Craig Peterson, our tech guru joins us. Now, once again, Craig, how are you?

[00:00:46] Craig Peterson: [00:00:46] Hey, I'm doing great, Matt.

[00:00:48] Matt Gagnon: [00:00:48] Good to have you as always. So I'm going to start off with a simple question for you, Craig, unrelated to any of the topics we're going to get to. But this morning I had to log into something using two factor identification. Can we do something else that's better than the. Is it, is there a less annoying way of being Uber secure in LA talking into stuff then having to like, like you go on Facebook, you try to log in with a password.

[00:01:10] Then it says you have to get a two factor identification. It has to send a text message to my phone. I've got to pick up my phone. I got to log into my phone, check the text message. See what the number is, use that number, type it into the thing on the, I can't take it anymore. Is there a better way? Probably not, right?

[00:01:30] Craig Peterson: [00:01:30] Yeah. There, there are better ways that are under testing right now. Really. They're a universal log-in sort of a thing. There are of course, password managers, which don't make that much easier. W frankly, if you're concerned really concerned about your security should never use text messages for two factor authentication, but Microsoft, Google, and apple have actually gotten together over the last year and come up with a standard.

[00:01:58] So there is a new standard in place, but sites like Facebook and many others still have not adopted it. We're actually heading to. Passwordless future where there is not even a password, let alone the two factor thing, and it's all handled locally by your browser. So those days are coming, Matt, they're just not here yet.

[00:02:19] Someday

[00:02:20] Matt Gagnon: [00:02:20] I can, man, can dream. Craig Peterson joins us on Wednesdays to talk over whatever it is. That's stuck in my crock today. Let me start off with one of the stories that we are prepared to talk about here a little bit, which is about the semiconductor shortage, right? There's a lot of ideas on how to do something about that.

[00:02:37]And right now in the Congress, our betters in in government are debating and talking about the idea of proposing some 25% tax credit for semiconductor manufacturing, obviously in response. To the ridiculous shortage that we have in these particular items. Tell me about this proposal.

[00:02:55] Is it something that might solve the problem?

[00:02:58]Craig Peterson: [00:02:58] That is, I love that statement there, Matt, by the way, just an hour. Better

[00:03:05] Matt Gagnon: [00:03:05] dripping with sarcasm.

[00:03:06] Craig Peterson: [00:03:06] Yeah. Yeah. That's exactly. Yeah. There, they're trying to get manufacturing back to the U S and in fact, it's already happening because businesses because of free market.

[00:03:18] Somewhat free market forces are deciding they cannot rely necessarily on having most of our chips made in Taiwan, frankly, as are, most of them are. And so we've now got Congress in the form of the Senate who are trying to figure out a way, how can we incentivize these companies to get back. So they went ahead and approve 52 billion.

[00:03:44] Dollars of course from their pocket change, right? It's from their staff for producing and research scenes, semiconductors and telecommunications equipment and figuring out what should be done. They even earmarked another $2 billion dedicated to trying to get ships that are used by automakers to be manufactured here in the U S now, is it going to.

[00:04:10]Probably, but we see some major drops here in manufacturing, in the us all across the board. Semiconductor microelectronics productions fallen to 12% of all of our production is made here in the us. The rest is overseas and that's down from almost 40% made here in the us in 1990s. So we'll see. It is a big problem, but I got to tell you, Matt, I don't think if this, because it's a big problem, that means it's the federal government.

[00:04:44] Matt Gagnon: [00:04:44] So do you have any other ideas on solutions then? If I, cause I agree with you. Generally speaking, anytime Congress attempts to try to manipulate markets. I get queasy and it's because there's always unintended consequences when they do that. And it's usually it perverts markets and never everything about it is bad.

[00:04:59]So is there a better way of trying to, fix the problem a, because clearly there's shortages of a lot of things, but then B this notion of security, you don't want all of the very critical infrastructure that you need production. Things, the products that make us go in our society produced somewhere that makes us vulnerable.

[00:05:17]Taiwan were to be blown up by China, that would present a problem for us. So what do you do instead?

[00:05:24] Craig Peterson: [00:05:24] It would absolutely would I, again, I think free market forces can work. They do work. But I also looked at this and say, our we're our whole country is dependent on having these as you pointed out.

[00:05:38] And therefore, frankly, this should be treated as a national defense emergency. We need to be doing it here in the U S we already have it. We're still a war, we never declared the end over the last war. So we still have this, our arms production laws in place and can force businesses to make things.

[00:05:58] I don't know that's the best idea, particularly with this, but we. To treat it differently. We cannot get chips for some of our fighter jets. In fact, we bought chips from China, inadvertently for our fighters that had malware built into the chips that were going into some of our military hearts. So I think the federal government is looking at this all wrong.

[00:06:26] They're also looking at this Taiwan, semiconductor manufacturing company, TSMC, which is the big guy in Taiwan. They're building the $12 billion semiconductor factory in Arizona. We've also got a jet Dutch chip maker. That's moving here to the us. We have other companies that are reactivating these old semiconductor plants, so it's happening.

[00:06:51] But I think we've got to look at this as a national defense. It's the same thing with our steel production, our aluminum production, much of this that we've allowed to go to other countries, as you said, might get blown up. Might not like this in the future. I will, we've got to take a much different approach as businesses and as the government.

[00:07:13] Matt Gagnon: [00:07:13] Hey, Craig Peterson, our tech guru joins us at this time every Wednesday, Craig, before I let you go, I also want to ask you about the general motors decision to start developing hydrogen fuel cells. This stuff is catnip for me. I love stories like this developing technology. Very interesting. What you say.

[00:07:29]Craig Peterson: [00:07:29] Of course people you're coming to mind, hydrogen and that little incidents in New Jersey in 1937, we've come a long way since the Hindenburg and GM came up with these hydrogen fuel cells for cars. Love the idea of hydrogen. There is one ultimate by-product and that is pure water. GM is saying we haven't had that much luck in the automotive industry.

[00:07:57] Where else can we use it? And they're looking at airplanes saying these planes take off with two tons of water on board, just to him. The toilets and the hand washing your hands, et cetera. And they also of course, are burning jet fuel in order to create electricity. So if we put a little hydrogen fuel cell on board, first of all, we can make these things.

[00:08:19] So they're intrinsically safe, but we're also now able to generate. On board, pure water has we're fly and any excess, or you can just dump overboard basically. And so we're saving two tons on takeoff weight and we're generating electricity. I think this is a very cool idea. And these fuel cells are going to be flying a little later this year in some test markets.

[00:08:44]Matt Gagnon: [00:08:44] If I, if they're saving all this weight on takeoff and I expect to be able to take it. Bag onto the onto the airplane. Right?

[00:08:51] Craig Peterson: [00:08:51] So they're not compensating for us getting a little heavier.

[00:08:57] Matt Gagnon: [00:08:57] All right. Craig Peterson, our tech guru joins us at this time every Wednesday. It's good luck on Saturday, Craig.

[00:09:02] Thanks so much for joining us as always. And we'll talk to you again next week.

[As heard on WTAG, WHYN, WHJJ on 2021-06-22 with Mr. Jim Polito]

We had more discussion today with Mr. Jim Polito about this fuel cell. Jim isn't as happy about it as I am. I think it's just a cool technology for airplanes for a few reasons, but we really got into that. And then we started talking about hydrogen, how do you make the hydrogen? How do you make electricity?

[00:00:19] So that product is into what we're looking at really now with nuclear. These new, what is it? Fifth or sixth generation plans. And that is probably what we should be doing. And yet there's so much pushback. Anyways, here we go with Mr. Jim Polito.

[00:00:39] Jim Polito: [00:00:39] You all know the story of the Hindenburg, right? Hydrogen, the Nazis.

[00:00:44]Dirigible the blimp. . It got its ability to rise through hydrogen. We wouldn't give the Nazis helium, which has the same properties, but is safe. Hydrogen is not safe. Wow. It looks like general motors is thinking about or working on a hydrogen fuel cell for airplanes. Joining us out to talk about this, but just briefly and some more important things is our good friends in tech talk guru.

[00:01:17] Craig Peterson. Good morning.

[00:01:19] Craig Peterson: [00:01:19] Hey, good morning. And today we have a shortage of helium as well. For birthday parties, I would have gotten more expensive. Maybe. Yeah, maybe there's something there. Maybe.

[00:01:30] Jim Polito: [00:01:30] I don't know, I hate to put you on this one, but you shared the story with me. And I said generally the motors developing a hydrogen fuel cell for airplanes.

[00:01:40] All I can say is, oh, the humanity. Oh, the humanity. So jealous my good friend. What? This is all about.

[00:01:51] Craig Peterson: [00:01:51] Sure. I'm really actually excited about this. I think an interesting idea. Yeah. First of all, the Hindenburg, there were some serious design clots, not the least of which the Hindenburg itself.

[00:02:05] Coated with rocket fuel fuel. The whole outside was coated with a blend of nitrate, and nitrate is used to make gunpowder. So they had the leak, they had a spark, and it went up like that because the whole thing was coated in rocket fuel. So it's not that hydrogen is not dangerous, cause it is.

[00:02:27] You've got to keep it under control. Yeah, but you have to weigh everything out. So what general motors is saying here is we're going to take some technology we developed for cars. Now there are hydrogen powered cars in California. There are hydrogen fill stations, frankly. Hydrogen is what excites me the most about all of these alternative fuels.

[00:02:52] Because what you do in a hydrogen fuel cell is you have some compressed hydrogen on board, many cities, run buses, trucks, and other things on compressor, liquid for LPG, you look at petroleum gas. We know how to contain it even in the event of a really bad accident, but the beautiful thing about hydrogen.

[00:03:15] Is there is only one byproduct when you're making electricity from hydrogen, with a fuel cell and that by-product is pure water.

[00:03:25]Jim Polito: [00:03:25] I've looked at it, no for like cars and things. Even 20 years ago, they were discussing it. This would be a great thing for cars, but to produce the hydrogen don't you expend an awful lot of fossil fuels to make that actual hydrogen.

[00:03:43] Craig Peterson: [00:03:43] You do, you need a lot of electricity to do it. And there's, and it's difficult to transport and lodge, large quantities, which you'd need for in for instance, driving a lot of cars around. And so there's been research into we can suspend it in ammonia. Ammonia happens to be pretty darn dangerous.

[00:04:00] Oh my God.

[00:04:04] Jim Polito: [00:04:04] Return in this thing. It isn't

[00:04:07] Craig Peterson: [00:04:07] itself. And but here's the cool thing. What GM saying is, Hey, we put all of this money, your taxpayer dollars, right? I seem to remember some sort of a quote to bail out on code for GM into developing the fuels. If the advantage in an airplane, if you've looked beyond the potential explosion, I see the advantage in airplane is when a plane takes off Jim.

[00:04:30] Yeah. It has two tons of water on board and your plane takes a lot of fuels to get that plan. And that's just two tons of water for drinking water, flushing, toilets, washing hands. We hope. Yeah. Yeah. There's the normal stuff. And they're also of course, as a need for electricity. So the electricity is being generated by a takeoff from the turbines, which means it's burning up the jet fuel to make electricity, the water, of course, entering two tons of launching that into the year takes a lot of fuel.

[00:05:02] If you can get a fuel cell that is considered to be intrinsically safe. Now you don't have to bring water with you because the by-product of generating electricity to power, like the cabin lights and other basic things. The power is going to create pure water. Years form. And so now you're saving fuel right?

[00:05:27] Left and center. Now, of course, how did you make the hydrogen? You brought that up. That's a great point and potential safety issues. And I don't think they'll make the same mistake as the German scientists.

[00:05:43] Jim Polito: [00:05:43] You're right. We're talking with Craig Peterson, our tech talk guru, Greg guy, about this possibility of general motors, developing hydrogen fuel cells. Now. We've talked about nuclear power before, so you need a lot of electricity to produce this hydrogen that you're going to use. Okay. In order to produce that electricity, you use fossil fuels, coal oil, mostly natural gas.

[00:06:11] Okay. We can talk about wind farms and all that, but please. What if we were to produce it with nuclear power? And the advancements that have been made in nuclear Prine. I know you're a big advocate.

[00:06:25] Craig Peterson: [00:06:25] Yay. Fantastic idea. We've got the generation. Nuclear plants. My son could tell you everything about them front back, but these things are inherently safe.

[00:06:39] They are the only real green fuel. Your solar cells pollute like crazy when they're made the same thing with the batteries and the lithium mines. There is a real big discussion now because we're looking to mine, lithium here in the us and an area of the desert that has those roots. Plant that only grows where there's high lithium in the ground.

[00:07:03] And so they don't want us to mind that lithium, but we want it for our batteries so we can get our electric cars so we can feel good about ourselves, but these new generations of basically thermal nuclear plants, but they're much different than the old ones are. Set up in such a way that they can not melt down.

[00:07:22] It's absolutely amazing. You can make a nuclear plan for cheap money. A million dollar range that will power a town. And it needs to be replaced every 20 years. They put it underground. They get up and off you go again, and it all recycled. And yet we are now still governing our nuclear power plants based on rules and regulations created in the 1950s.

[00:07:50] And people just don't want to pay attention to it. And so I'm so glad you brought it up. I know

[00:07:55] Jim Polito: [00:07:55] because of the advances, Hey Kathy and I. Flew from Milan to Paris two years ago, flew over the Alps, look down. I'm looking down because I want to see the Alps. But as I look down, I see nuclear power plants to, to nuclear power plant.

[00:08:12] You can't miss them because of the big towers cooling the steam. And these are the older nuclear power plants, but France, what is it? 70 to 80% of their electric. They produce through nuclear power and nobody seems to discuss that at all.

[00:08:29] Craig Peterson: [00:08:29] Yeah most of the European countries do, frankly it, it just makes sense.

[00:08:33] You, it's compact. You can turn a lot of electricity, you can drive your electric cars and everything else is designed to have central points for electrical generation, not to have a generator in all of our homes and things. And one of my sons is now been flying around the country. In fact, he just went up to Canada, just north of lake Charles.

[00:08:54] For a few days and they got special dispensation from Lauren Fowchee

[00:08:59] Jim Polito: [00:08:59] and oh, it's Pope Fowchee. We prefer to say Cole Fowchee.

[00:09:04] Craig Peterson: [00:09:04] Yeah, but it's a Canadian version. Oh, the

[00:09:06] Jim Polito: [00:09:06] Canadian guy, right? Yeah. And the Lord and the

[00:09:10] Craig Peterson: [00:09:10] Lord. Yes. And he went up there and they Ontario generates 30% of its electricity from these massive wind farms.

[00:09:19] But at any one time, so much of it is just out of production is not working. He's having to go service things. Other people are as well, nuclear. Whether the sun's shiny, whether it's a middle of winter, like in Texas or in nuclear works when it's

[00:09:36] Jim Polito: [00:09:36] dark. Yeah. Yeah. And why aren't we doing it? I just don't.

[00:09:40] I think too many people have seen the China syndrome and the Silkwood, those two old movies about, about meltdowns. Now, if you had seen the mini series Chernobyl, which I did see, which was fantastic you would realize okay. That's because that's what happens when you have a socialist communist country rushing to get power and and doing it in a way that's not safe.

[00:10:06] And yet people will see that and say, oh God, we can't have that. And that's not what we're talking about.

[00:10:12]Craig Peterson: [00:10:12] And with NIMBY, of course not in my backyard. Look at the cake, look at the windmills off of the Cape there. The Kennedy. It used to be the Kennedy compound. They donated it to charity because they care about the

[00:10:23] Jim Polito: [00:10:23] people.

[00:10:23]Hold on a second. Let's just make this clear. They donated it to their own charity. Okay. They all know that Victoria, Reggie now controls a Ted's widow. So she controls who can go in there, who can come? Yeah, yeah, they donated it to her charity. Sure. Very good. You know what? You're quite the comedian there.

[00:10:47]Craig, not only are you our tech talk guru, you are, you do good comedy bits.

[00:10:55] Craig Peterson: [00:10:55] Yeah. I'm feeling a little spicy this morning, I think is what I

[00:10:58] Jim Polito: [00:10:58] think. So I think so. Oh my God. Yeah, the windmills are not reliable and they're not that good when you get right down to it.

[00:11:07] Craig Peterson: [00:11:07] No, they're costly. They're obviously dependent on the wind. No, one's come up with a great solution.

[00:11:14] For this yet there's stuff where in Europe with the tides, I don't know if you've seen that, but they basically put up the dams that move and the use the tie to generate electricity and energy. But still today, the new generation of nuclear is a hundred percent. What I would suggest nothing's a hundred percent safe as we already know.

[00:11:36] I just saw a release or not a release, but a an update for fire departments. I'm putting up Tesla fires and because of the battery pack

[00:11:46] Jim Polito: [00:11:46] when they start on fire.

[00:11:48] Craig Peterson: [00:11:48] Exactly. So they're saying dump a lot of water on it. And so the fire departments would say what does that mean? There's somewhere around.

[00:11:53] I can't remember the exact number I'm going to get this wrong, but it was over 3000 gallons and the fire department came back and said w wait a minute, our fire truck only holds 500 yeah.

[00:12:05] Jim Polito: [00:12:05] Thousand gallons of water to stop this reaction, this fire.

[00:12:10] Craig Peterson: [00:12:10] Yeah. And it's all these batteries lithium-ion batteries and they are dangerous.

[00:12:16] So you've seen a phone. They get banned. Just catch on fire, laptop tape. If your laptop, I noticed this was one of mine. I had an apple laptop and I had it down on a flat surface. I noticed it was teetering pivoting a little bit from its middle. Cause the battery was swollen. Took it back to apple.

[00:12:34] They replaced it. But Keep an eye out on that because it can start a house fire people's people have had their phones charging by their head at night and thank goodness it was by their head because of the smell of the fire will come up because these are dangerous and it's always a balance, right?

[00:12:51] Should I code it? Yeah. Rocket fuel or shouldn't I

[00:12:55] Jim Polito: [00:12:55] go on that note? No, Craig, this has been very helpful as usual Craig Peters on our tech Docker or crank you folks want to get more information from you like I do every week. What do they do?

[00:13:09]Craig Peterson: [00:13:09] You can go to Craigpeterson.com. And you can subscribe right there.

[00:13:14] I'd like why now, too. Of course, I'm on the weekend here as well, but I have even more stuff that I brought every week and you can listen to that on your iHeart radio laugh. Just like you can listen to it down in New York city. Yeah, any way you can do that by just going anywhere, just go to Craig peterson.com/iheart, and that'll take you right to the iHeart radio lab and you can listen to my whole show and all my ramblings for the week.

[00:13:42] Nice

[00:13:43] Jim Polito: [00:13:43] Craig Peterson, everybody a great guy, a very smart guy, Craig. Thanks so much. We'll talk with you next week.

[2021-06-19 Week #1118]

The Columbia lawsuit. This is just amazing. I've been telling businesses for a long time that insurance companies just are not paying out on many of these claims, the insurance companies come back to you after you've been hacked, or you had ransomware and you try and file a claim and say, okay, so no problem.

[00:00:20] Now you met all of these qualifications, right? And they have this big checklist. Everything. And I bet you most companies, if you have not seen this list would be totally surprised by what the insurance companies are requiring of you now, the same thing's true of home users. If you look in your home policy homeowner's policy, you probably see something in there that says ransomware or computer failures, et cetera.

[00:00:53] And they will cover dependent on your policy. Some amount of money, maybe it's 10 grand, five grand could be a lot of different things and it's not terribly expensive. Now you got to ask yourself, why is it so cheap, particularly when there are so many viruses, ransomware, Trojans, fishing, all of these things out there in the wild.

[00:01:15] And from a business standpoint, it costs a lot more. I know my business is paying a lot of money for the insurance. But we go through in detail, everything that's right there in the policy. And we even ask for a list of everything kind of separate list, so that we know what exactly they want. So we've got to check the list and I can send it to, if you want, just go ahead and email me.

[00:01:40] So if you have a a hack, if you have ransomware and you have insurance, you're probably going to file against the insurance, right? Because looking at all of these numbers, a medium, a small, medium business is going to be. But not a pocket about one and a half million dollars. And that's, if they're not paying the ransom, it's really expensive is difficult.

[00:02:04] And if you're a home user, oh my, you are, will never get your information back. You have maybe a 50% chance if you pay the ransom of getting. Your stuff back. Think about all the photos you have on your hard desk, all of the letters, all of the emails, same trick for business and to business. It's not just all of the emails, it's your contracts, it's your plans, your intellectual property, everything that you can think of that's out there.

[00:02:33]Getting it back. So this is interesting when we look at this. Company it's called cottage healthcare systems. They filed a claim of more than $4 million against a breach. Now that is a fair amount of money, but it is not unreasonable for a medium-sized company. The SBA, the small business administration says that if you're under 10 million in revenue, then you are a small business under 200 employees, right?

[00:03:05] It has those levels. So think of it that way, right? A small business is not necessarily just some home users. You can have some serious money involved in a small business. So they had claimed here this again, cottage health care systems that they had been just totally protected. At least not from the cybersecurity standpoint, but from the insurance standpoint.

[00:03:32] And for years, software vendors have assume that they can take that security risk and push it on to their customers. We're seeing this a lot in the medical business with doctor's offices. They've got these HIPAA regulations and they've got all kinds of private information. Plus they have payment card industry regulations that they have to fall under or agreement because they have credit card and other billing information.

[00:04:00] And of course the billing information that's going to the insurance company has to be protected as well. And these doctor's offices are making a very bad assumption that somehow they don't have to worry about it. And the reason they don't have to worry about it is it's quite simple because I'm using a cloud service.

[00:04:20]Have you heard that before? Do you know anybody that said that? So I'm using the cloud thing now. Yeah. Yeah. I'm using salesforce.com for a regular business for your customer relationship management or all of these patient management systems that are out there. Now there's some, I'm just shocked that.

[00:04:37] Won't charge the doctor's office, anything. And yet they'll keep all of the client records for the doctor and supposedly keep it safe. Maybe they will, maybe they won't. And then also on top of all of that, they'll do the billing and that's how they make their money because they shave a percentage off of every bill that they issue to the health insurance carriers.

[00:05:03]So these doctors are sitting there saying I'm using these online services. I've got Microsoft office email. I've got whatever it might be. Google has of course their professional emails too. And when those guys get hacked on fine, because they had my data. Reality is no, that is absolutely not true.

[00:05:26] And we've seen software companies, ship products. We've seen these cloud services deliver services with known vulnerabilities and expect the customer using the service or using the software to absorb all of the risk. And then the vendor of the services or software is protected from loss by. It's insurer.

[00:05:50] So this is called shifting risk and the software companies can delay fixing vulnerabilities in their code and maintain their release schedules because they're sitting there pretty thinking, oh, I'm fine. There's no problem here. I got my insurance and it's fine that the customer, that shrink wrap agreement, or maybe even it's a contract that was signed, which is more true for doctors, offices and regular businesses.

[00:06:16] Says that the doctor's office has a liability. I'm afraid to have to inform everybody here that you cannot shift that liability. The insurance company is not on hook for covering the damage. And this is a very big deal. And what I'm talking about is this insurance company called Columbia casualty, their division of this industry giant called CNA, which is a course in the insurance business.

[00:06:47] Oh, that's what they do. So they had paid out. This four mill Morton for a million dollar claim and their suit that was filed by the insurance company against cottage healthcare systems said that they hadn't kept their security controls up to date. And. When a breach occurred, they tried to put the insurance company on the hook to cover all of the damages.

[00:07:15] I've got a copy up on my screen right now from health it security.com. Talking about this. This is a, an older articles is in 2015, but even then we knew that you cannot fall back on your insurance. And that's why, again, that's why the rates are so cheap, right? They're just not paying out. So the suit is still underway and it's something we've got to pay close attention to because the court case documents are saying that Columbia quote, six declaration, that it has no duty to defend our identity and indemnify cottage in the underlying action.

[00:07:55] Or the department of justice proceedings. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. They're DOJs in on this as well. So they had to end their practice of what they were doing and frankly, keeping systems up to date, having the minimum required practices, including yep. Replacing just basic stuff. Default settings in their it environment, checking for vendor supplied security patches, implementing the patches within, 30 days, something reasonable.

[00:08:25] Most of us delay putting patches in place for least a week. You guys you're the best and brightest, if you put a patch in. The Jess came out, it might make things a little unstable, right? So a lot of us wait for, I think good reason, frankly. So the bottom line is this is again, over the course of seven years here, insurers understand that not all breaches are inevitable.

[00:08:52] And that the companies here, the healthcare companies, the software vendors, the cloud vendors have to do more to protect their clients. But from what I'm seeing, it just is not happening. It's not happening at all. We are getting people who are looking at an equation differently than you or I do. Look at what happened with the colonial pipeline.

[00:09:17] What do you think was happening in the board of directors meetings before the security breach? The same thing with TJX, same thing with home Depot, same thing with that, that meat packer, all of these guys. What do you think they were saying? They were saying, okay, Mr. It direct director. How much is it going to cost us to have good cyber security?

[00:09:37] And the it director is going to say, okay we need some really great hardware. We need also software. We needed on all of the workstations. We need smart switches so we can trace things when they're inside the network. We need 24 hour manned security operation center with at least one person.

[00:09:57] So that means four people, right? Because three people, plus people have to have vacations people go on training. I know my people spend at least a quarter of their time in training. Let me see that, over the course of a year, it's probably going to be five to $10 million minimum. And so the board of directors says five to 10 million.

[00:10:17] Oh, okay. How much is it going to cost us? We get breached, oh, maybe 5 million. Forget it then we're not going to secure our systems. And I'm not saying that this is the conversation colonial had. I'm saying this is the type of conversations businesses are having and they should not be having, because frankly.

[00:10:37] It is not only illegal because you are supporting terrorists by paying these ransoms, but you're hurting yourself and your customers stick around.

[00:10:48]Craig Peterson: Tesla has a number of cars out. And these things I think are just totally cool.

[00:10:53] My daughter ended up buying one she's over Norway. So of course it was heavily subsidized by the Norwegian government. They get a 25% discount. Yeah. That actually is Tax. Yeah, so they don't have to pay the sales tax, which is 25%. Okay. No way is not as social as nation, but they sure tax the living daylights out of everybody, but they allow business to do what it needs to do and move with far fewer regulations.

[00:11:26] But anyway, so this isn't a political discussion. She loves her model. Absolutely loves it. They just drove it from Norway all the way back down to Belgium, which is where her husband's from. And they own I guess a condo bought an apartment down there, right on the sea coast in Belgium. It's really a beautiful area, but they love it.

[00:11:48] They had to stop twice to charge it up while they were on their way. You might've heard that the Tesla model S long range just got a rating of 405 miles of total range with a combined city highway MPG, E of one 20. So there's some things I need to explain here. First of all, this 405 miles and total range, it is not going to get that up in the Northern part of the United States when it's cold outside.

[00:12:23] You will be getting above 200 miles may be 300 miles out of it, because again, you're running the electricity through resistors in order to keep yourself warm and then you're not going to get it when you have the air conditioning on high. If you're living in the desert Southwest, for instance, or in Florida, trying to keep that humidity down.

[00:12:44] But the EPA came up with this MPG rating so that you could compare cars and how efficient they are. It's not going to give you any information about how much it's going to cost to run the car. It's just looking at these different cars and coming up with an idea of how much how efficient they might be, how much electricity they're going to use.

[00:13:06] So I'm looking right now at a chart. That's comparing side-by-side. These Tesla models. So the model asks long range is rated at 120. MPG. So that's miles per gallon electric. They have a really weird way of figuring this thing out. Let me tell you very strange. They're trying to figure out well, what is the amount of energy available in one gallon of gasoline?

[00:13:38] And then once the electrical leak. of that one gallon of gasoline, considering the gasoline goes from the tank out to the wheels versus an electric motor where it's right there at the wheel running that electric motor, they are not necessarily right at the wheel. Sometimes there's a drive train involved.

[00:13:57] Okay. So I don't want to get too technical on it. The model ain't. As long range plus is rated at 117. So it's pretty good, but you can use that now. Number to compare electric cars. It's not a comparison with a gasoline car, and it's not really telling you how much it's going to cost to drive because the EPA is using.

[00:14:20] Average costs of fuel across the United States is not what you are necessarily going to pay. All right. So you've got to pull all of that in. So very cool. Congratulations. If they really are getting 400, 500 miles on a charge, that's wonderful, but I know the way I drive, I w I will go down. For instance, we drove to Florida, not too long ago.

[00:14:46] And the drive to Florida took a couple of days in my car and, we stop and fill it up. A fill up, takes about 10 minutes. My daughter was saying her model three they didn't run the battery all the way down and they didn't fill it up all the way. And it was about 20 minutes stops. Now this is in Europe.

[00:15:06] And in Europe, they have a lot of recharging stations and these recharging stations can provide a lot of electricity. You're not just taking the car and plug it in into a wall socket. So when I'm driving down to Florida, I got, I have to stop at one of these rappers. But in charging stations in order to stand a chance of being able to get it to charge, but I'm going to a hotel.

[00:15:31] We stayed at a hotel at night that most of these hotels do not have the rapid charging stations at them. And if I'm lucky, I have some way to plug it in. I remember I was driving my Mercedes diesel. I was down in Connecticut and middle of winter. It was very cold out. And I couldn't find this was a big brand named hotel.

[00:15:54] I could not find a place to plug my old Benzin because remember I have 19 Haiti, Mercedes-Benz diesel, and I knew that if I didn't keep it plugged in, I'd never get it started the next day. So of course I wasn't able to get it started the next day. And I had the hotel, they found a 200 foot extension cord for me and they ran it out of a conference room over the hill, down to my car.

[00:16:17] We plugged it in and got the engine warmed up. So we're not as ready for it as they are over in Europe, but we have to start thinking about it. And one of the things that Tesla does is they charge you for pretty much every feature it's not. What you might call a menu list of options. Yeah. There are some options that you can get on it.

[00:16:42] And one of them is the autonomous mode and Tesla has continually cranked up the cost of this autonomous mode. I think it was like two grand initially. And now it's up to four or $5,000 for it. So the Tesla thinks while you will pay for it and we'll get the money from you all at once. Of course there's financing and stuff involved, but that's a different part of the transaction.

[00:17:07] To me, it makes sense. Tesla is a company that he is sitting now a little cash, but they're trying to be cash positive and they would rather have your money today for an option that isn't even really available yet. Then wait and get the money from you later. So that's, what's Tesla's strategy is on the opposite.

[00:17:29] End of that. Spectrum is Volkswagen. Of course the people's car it's been around for quite a while and it is made in Germany and they had a great meeting of their board very recently. And they're looking at how do we charge for things like autonomous mode? What do we do? If you look at what the computer industry has been doing for a very long time, I remember this one, our IBM 360 back in the early seventies.

[00:18:00] And. If you needed an upgrade, this wasn't just true of IBM. This is true of controlled data of everybody. If you wanted an upgrade, you want it to be faster or basic upgrades without rolling in more memory. Yeah. They used to roll it in on pallets to get another, a 64 K of memory. It was just crazy. Anyhow.

[00:18:24] If they were going to give you an upgrade. They would have a technician come in and effectively turn what we call affectionately in the industry. The golden key and digital equipment did the same thing. You could get a speed improvement by just having the technician come in and turn the golden key. In some cases it was actually located and it was a key hole right behind the main console on the front of the computer and other cases, it was a little bit of software that they.

[00:18:54] Installed and Volkswagen is saying maybe what we should do instead of yeah. What Tesla does and have an extremely expensive car that people can't afford. Not everyone can afford, we're talking 120 grand for that Tesla. I was just talking about it. The high end, maybe what we should do is give this golden key concept.

[00:19:13] I'll run. So they're saying maybe just like you would have an Uber driver drive you somewhere. Maybe the way to do this is charge you $8 and 50 cents per hour for you to use a Volkswagen's fully autonomous mode. I think that's a great idea personally, because you're going to be driving the autonomous car yourself.

[00:19:40] When you're in the city, most of the time, that's where I'm driving. It's just those trips to Florida. I'd love to have that autonomous mode stick

[00:19:48]Craig Peterson: Bitcoin has been around now for quite a while.

[00:19:53] I explained this week too, in my newsletter a little bit about what happens with Bitcoin. Oh, speak to the newsletter, make sure that you caught my newsletter this week. If you didn't send me an email [email protected], I can send it to you. But I sent out that video. I've been promising of how. To block this Russian malware ransomware by installing the rushing keyboard.

[00:20:21] And it's it's online. In fact, it's on my website. You can just find [email protected]. If you don't have the newsletter, it's in there as well. But Bitcoin has been seized last year. There was this whole seizure of more than a billion dollars in Bitcoin. Yeah. A billion dollars. And again, wow. You can tie, you can't find out who has what or where it is.

[00:20:50] You can't. So you said, obviously that's wrong. This billion dollars last year was seized from something called silk. Road. This was a dark net marketplace and they specialized in mail order narcotics. They had all kinds of different things that they were selling. Basically, if it was illegal and shippable or viewable online, you could get it on the silk road.

[00:21:17] It was really that simple. They arrested this Ross Albridge guy. He was called dread pirate Roberts. And this was when he was working at Glen park branch library in San Francisco. They did that, so he couldn't shut down his computer. So they were able to maneuver some of the evidence that they found that allowed the FBI to seize 174,000 Bitcoins from him.

[00:21:43] It was worth about $105 million at the time. And they later sold the cryptocurrency at auction and he was sentenced to life in federal prison. Very big deal. And then now what we're looking at is something a little bit different. We're considering what happened with the colonial pipeline. And there have been some leaks, some people who are saying they've got some inside information, so we'll be talking about that as well.

[00:22:11] But apparently what happened at colonial is the one of these international police organizations, probably one of these Interpol countries or Euro poll had been tracking some of the bad guys who had been running this ransomware operation. And while they were tracking them, they seized some information, apparently unbeknownst to the hacker, they seized information about the Bitcoin wallet that this hacker was using.

[00:22:48] Oh, a Bitcoin wallet is something that has a password on it. It keeps your Bitcoin account numbers and these huge. They're not random numbers, but there are some random numbers for the passwords and your digital wallet number, but these huge numbers that are prime numbers that are used as part of the whole Bitcoin blockchain thing.

[00:23:11]Yeah. One of these international police organizations had the key to this guy's wallet. So when dark side was paid that four and a half million dollar ransom, the FBI was able to track what wallet it was. Cause remember the whole idea behind Bitcoin and blockchain. Is that not that it's secret. At all.

[00:23:37] In fact, there are hundreds of copies around the world about the transactions that are being conducted in Bitcoin. And that's why you have to use some of these clearing houses. But just trying to keep this simple, these ledgers are everywhere. So the FBI was able to track the money. It apparently moved three times the day after colonial pipeline paid the ransom.

[00:24:02] And they were able to see which wallets it went into as it was moving around. And then when it ended up in a wallet that they knew about, and in fact even had the password for, they were able to grab that money. And that's exactly what they did. So again the bad guys, aren't the smartest cookies out there.

[00:24:25] And apparently the other thing the FBI has been doing is watching the transactions when people are converting Bitcoin. Into hard currency, like us dollars or euros, whatever it is. So they're watching those transactions so they know, oh, okay. This wallet now took a half a Bitcoin out and converted it into cash.

[00:24:51] They're tracking this. And so they know who had the cash, what bank that cash went into, because oftentimes it's just your bank account number that's associated with it. And so the cash goes right there into the bank account and the FBI knows it. So later on, if you use your wallet for some transaction, they know you use the wallet it's in the ledgers that everybody that has part of that blockchain has access to.

[00:25:19] And they can now track you. So they've been a lot smarter about this when you are either converting your hard currency into one of these cryptocurrencies or you're converting your cryptocurrency into hard currencies. So they have been doing that as well. And it was the FBI office in, I think it was San Francisco, Northern California that kind of figured this all out law enforcement.

[00:25:46] The FBI have been really. Really good about some of his stuff lately. So the assistant director of the FBI's criminal investigative division, his name is Calvin shivers. Talked about an operation. They called Trojan shield at a press conference about a week ago in the Netherlands, in the hog. This is just amazing because what they were able to do is cry, criminals, encrypted communications.

[00:26:18] Now here's what they did. They came up with some software that they called a nom. A N O M. And in order to use this Anom software, you had to get as special phone and that phone had their cell leader disabled to have the GPS disabled. And then you could run this Anom on your phone. And so the bad guys were just totally in love with this, because it's everything that they'd want.

[00:26:50] It's a coconut dagger thing. Oh, I've got to get one of these special phones where cellular is turned off. So I can't be tracked by cellular GPS turned off. So I can't be tracked by GPS and run this special Anom software. And they were able to trick the bad guys into recommending this software to their friends.

[00:27:13] Guess what? It was software that the FBI had. They use it as a honeypot and they worked with a global network of different law enforcement agencies and they monitored every message written, every image, video that was sent across the service. So they decided, okay, we're going to do this the swoop now.

[00:27:38] And it's crazy because they knew everything that was going on. And the bad guys thought they had no idea. This is the large scale series of police operations, 16 countries, more than. 800 arrests, the seizure of more than eight tons of cocaine, 22 tons of cannabis and cannabis resin, two tons of synthetic drugs, six tons of synthetic drug precursors, 250 firearms.

[00:28:08] 55 luxury vehicles over $48 million in various worldwide currencies. And cryptocurrencies says zero pole. Wow. Hey, this is amazing led by Australian federal police and the FBI, as well as the Dutch national police and sweetest Swedish police. Absolutely amazing. Hey, you bad guys out there pay attention because the law enforcement may have been behind, but boy, are they catching up?

[00:28:40] They're going to get all of these scoffed laws.

[00:28:42]There are some amazing things, out there that's happening with self-driving cars.

[00:28:47] I am so excited about it. The future holds we're not that many years off considering what is it now? 140 years really since the automobile hit the road. And what's really funny is some of those very. First automobiles were electric. I was looking at some pictures this week of a show where they had all of these old vehicles.

[00:29:12] Like some of them, they called ancient and they initially looked like just a regular carriage minus the horse. And frankly, that's probably what they were a number of these companies are making them use to make carriages. And so they look funny and they had in them batteries. Lead acid batteries.

[00:29:33] So you'd charge these things out. They probably take you a few miles before the batteries ran out. They didn't go very fast. The first one was, I think it was like one in a quarter horsepower on the electric motor that was driving the vehicle. But that is pretty darn cool. Of course. It fell off of favor because it's so much more efficient and effective to just burn more fuel.

[00:29:59] And one of the very first engines ever made was a diesel engine, and they're just amazing technology fast forward to today. And we're going. Back to that. There are some real advantages to electric vehicles. Hey, you're not really reducing anybody's carbon footprint, but what you are doing is having a very clean vehicle going down the highway, that vehicle not considering as manufacturing.

[00:30:25] Not considering that they used coal or natural gas or even wood products to generate that electricity. All of that, aside that car going down the highway, it's nice and quiet. It's pretty darn safe. Tesla broke the testing equipment when they first were being tested for the crash impacts. And they're also.

[00:30:49] Oh, very clean. I don't mind following the electric car, Ryan. I'm not getting all those nasty odors. Did you get from like a Harley? That's been detuned by somebody that fought that allowed motorcycle made them even cooler than they were before. Yeah. Yeah. I have opinions about those types of writers.

[00:31:07] Anyhow. We have a big announcement this week. In fact, two of them from Waymo, Waymo started as Google's self-driving car project back in 2009, and then it was spun off. And that has had some amazing rounds of funding. They had a three and a quarter billion dollar fundraiser in 2020. Isn't that amazing. So that was the first time Waymo had turned to investors beyond Google and the round was over subscribed.

[00:31:43] If you know what that means. And then in other words, it was very popular and there are number of. Big names that really backed what Waymo was doing and were part of that three and a quarter billion dollar fundraising. They include Andreason AutoNation Canada's pension plan, fidelity, Magna Perry, crude Capitol, silver lake T Rowe price and others.

[00:32:09] It was just absolutely amazing. Now that was beyond the five and three quarters. Billion dollars raised from the two weeks journal round. Isn't that? Isn't that something? Just, they just announced this last week that they raised another. Two and a half billion dollars in the second external funding round, the Google's parent company alphabet says that shows investors are patient when it comes to commercializing autonomous technology.

[00:32:40]What is happening with Waymo? Waymo still is using LIDAR, which is phenomenal technology. We've had the LIDAR people on my radio show before where we talked about what the tech was and LIDAR. Now they've. Got it down to the size of a hockey puck, but it's different than what has been used by Tesla.

[00:33:02] Tesla's using cameras, a lot of them on the cars, and then it has to process it, try and figure out what they're seeing. And of course they have to be able to see it or in order to even process it. However, with LIDAR, you do have potentially cameras on the vehicle, but it's using a radar. Basically, and these lasers to have a complete map of everything down to in some cases, millimeters, but most of the time it's centimeters and resolution.

[00:33:34] So the car can see, they can dry everything out. That's on the road. They know that's a pedestrian or a cyclist or a car, et cetera. So it's very cool. And I'm looking at a picture right now. That's in the newsletter this week of. A truck. This is a Waymo truck. It's one of their test vehicles looks like it's a Peterbilt and they have the LIDAR on the truck as well.

[00:34:00] They've got two LIDAR units, typically on a car. You only have a single. I had our unit and they're very expensive to, at least for now, we'll see where this ends up going. So that's all well and good, but what is absolutely going to put the nail in the coffin of many competitors, frankly, at least for these massive amounts of fundraising is the announcement with JB hunt.

[00:34:24] If you've driven on our highways, you have seen trucks and trailers with the JB hunt logo on them. These guys haul cargo and a lot of it here in the United state and Waymo nouns that it's working with this trucking company, JB hunt to autonomously haul cargo loads in Texas. Now they're not completely autonomous.

[00:34:51] We'll get into that in a second, but these are the big Griggs. These are class eight trucks. They're really quick with this whole autonomous driving software and the hardware systems, Waymo calls, there's Waymo driver, and it's going to be running on I 45 in Texas. If don't know where that is.

[00:35:11] They're going to be hauling cargo between Houston and Fort worth. That is going pretty much all the way up the state, at least up to the neck of the state, not including the panhandle of Texas all the way on down, to of course the Gulf coast. That's where Houston is. So the trucks are going to have all of this new software they're going to have.

[00:35:34] Also cameras on them so they can record exactly what's happening. So that's part of the hardware package and they're going to have a train truck driver and Waymo technicians on board. And the idea is they're going to supervise it. They'll probably, log things as they're going, Hey, this didn't happen quite right.

[00:35:55] That didn't happen quite right. And there we'll be sending that information back to Waymo who will be making modified case into the software. So this is going to be an intuitive process, but Waymo has been testing these trucks in the Atlanta area since 2018. So that's phenomenal. And what is really making this week's news now?

[00:36:18] Announcement. Most noticeable is because they now have a partnership with a major truck operator, which is just phenomenal. So here is a statement from Craig Harper. He's the chief sustainability. Officer over at JB hunt. This will be one of the first opportunities for JB hunt to receive data and feedback on customer freight, moved with a class, a tractor operating at this level of autonomy.

[00:36:48] While we believe there will be a need for highly skilled professional drivers. For many years to come. It is important for JB hunt as an industry leader, to be involved in early involved in the development of advanced autonomous technologies and driving systems. I know this is just amazing. This is in an article from arts Technica, because I think JB Hunter's right about this.

[00:37:14] This is the future. Now how long will it be before these various autonomous vehicles are out there driving? How long will the truck drivers be able to have the types of jobs they've had for so long? I don't know, obviously JB hunt doesn't know whey Mo doesn't know, but we're suspecting that the first step here is going to be the long haul portion of the truck's journey is going to be autonomous.

[00:37:45] So you're going to be able to be driving down major freeways here in the us. And there will be truck after truck driving pretty darn close together, which is gonna make it tough for you on a two lane road to to pass them and going between them. Although they will make some space, but they will make our roads much less jammed by traffic because all of these autonomous trucks.

[00:38:12] Are going to move in or whatever the speed limit is. They're going to have minimal spacing between them, which is going to be really good as well. And they're not going to be doing stupid things like pulling out in front of you that causes you to hit the brakes. And when people hit the brakes, it causes the traffic jams, which cause accidents, which cause more traffic jams.

[00:38:33] So they're just going to stay in their lanes. They're going to be going the speed limit and our roads are going to be safer just because of that. But that last mile and that first mile or aware of things in me, different. So you're going to see staging areas, what we have in so many parts of the country where you are carpooling into a big city.

[00:38:55] So the truck will have a regular driver. Who's a short haul driver now and is going to drive that truck up to the staging area. Maybe he'll drop. The load, maybe he'll get out of the truck and take your Uber back to the the next assignment. And then that truck is going to get out on the highway.

[00:39:15] Obviously it needs to be inspected. And so there'll be inspection safety lists, and ultimately that'll be done by robots as well. And then the truck gets on the highway down. It goes. And it gets to its destination area again, the last mile, which might not be a mile, it might be 10, 20, 30 miles. Depends on how dense the population area is.

[00:39:38] And that's one of the interesting things about Houston. There's a lot of people in Houston and also frankly, in Fort worth more in Dallas, but in Fort worth as well. So that driver will then pick up. The truck right there outside Houston and we'll drive at that last mile to deliver their load to wherever it might be.

[00:39:59] This is going to be incredible when it actually happens is going to cut down the costs of driving on the highways. Taking all of our supplies that way, I'm a big fan of rail. I think rail makes a lot of sense, certainly for the route from Fort worth down to Houston. Cause there's already major rail lines, but we subsidized trucking so heavily here in the U S with our roads that I don't know that they'll ever come back.

[00:40:27]

[00:40:27]This whole cyber warfare thing has been really something, frankly, we are in a war and I've said that before it's a cold war.

[00:40:36] Hopefully it will never become a hot war, but we are being attacked like crazy now. We have attacked other people as well in the cyber realm. We certainly attacked Iran along with Israel, the two of us working together, and we've probably been involved in some other things. There's one or two attacks that happened in Russia.

[00:40:59] That were probably us, but we never really took credit for unlike the Uranian attack. We are being attacked by criminals and by government. So it includes governments like North Korea that really are attacking to get hard currency. It is one of the major ways they generate money in North Korea is by attacking either people and then not holding things rant.

[00:41:27] Doing various other things. They get the Sony breach, which was just absolutely amazing. And they hold it over your head. What are we going to do about it though? That's a big question. We all know we're constantly under attack and I'm going to by way of full disclosure here mentioned that I am working on something right along these lines for the small business and home user, but primarily the small business, very small business.

[00:41:55] 10 people or more, but let's talk about what I think the answer is. And of course, I think it's the answer. So that's what I'm going to do. But th these cyber attacks are constant. They're everything from annoying to devastating. I look at the logs on our machines and our clients' machines, and we're seeing hundreds of attacks, sometimes hundreds of attacks a minute.

[00:42:17] It's just insane. And these devastating attacks down. Parts of our infrastructure are really big deal. So what does president Biden do this week? When he's meeting with president Putin, president Biden gives him a list of what we consider to be our critical infrastructure. Yeah. Yeah. He said don't attack these please.

[00:42:41] Now of course, what's he going to do? He's going to attack those because they are a part of the critical infrastructure. Thank you, president Biden for giving me Mr. Putin, president Putin, a list of targets. I should go after. I I think that was just absolutely ridiculous, but he also seems to have been drawing a line in the sand, right?

[00:43:02] This red line. President Obama did that before and he kept shifting the line and president Obama, wasn't the first president to shift the line, but our message to Russia is not clear. There's nothing behind it. And it's bended knee time. And the same, thing's true with China because they're coming after us.

[00:43:21] They know so many of our military secrets look at their latest jets. Look at their ships. They are based on us designs. Engines on them are based on us designed because bottom line, we are not secure. So let's get into this. What have we been using for our cybersecurity? And the answer to that is for decades, what we call.

[00:43:50] A signature analysis. So basically think about the SARS cov two virus SARS. COVID two hit us and hit us fairly hard. No question about it. People died and that's not a good thing, but it did hit us pretty hard. Why did people. Why did we need to have some sort of a shot in order to help protect us from the SARS cov two?

[00:44:18]The answer is we did not have natural immunity. Now you could argue about the shots, right? But we didn't have natural immunity. If you've had a specific virus. The odds are very good that you have T cells, the T cells remember the old viruses that have attacked us in the past, and we can quickly Mount a defense.

[00:44:41] So those T-cells recognize it and say, okay, I know how to deal with this. This is a bad thing. It's got this Corona head on it and it's all. Yeah, this is SARS cov two. So it then starts to generate the right antibodies and off we go. That's what we have been using for decades. Now, these rules based systems, and they've been applied in cybersecurity to detect malware signatures.

[00:45:10] You got a virus. They would look at that virus. They'd find strings inside. No, but the strings could be, that could be a name, that's certainly happened before. It could just be instructions that are part of it, but some sort of a signature. Sometimes you can just check some something and then compare that check some as a signature against known malware that's out there.

[00:45:34] That's what your Norton does. That's what your McAfee does. That's what pretty much all of the antivirus software. Dies. And frankly, that's also what we see happening with our firewalls that we're using and all of the security equipment. It's very basic. Those signatures are designed to look for known insider threat pattern.

[00:46:00] So they look and they say, oh, okay, I've seen this before. I know how to respond to it. I'm going to cut it off. Hopefully that's at the firewall. Most of the time, we're not running next generation firewalls. So the firewall doesn't detect it. It gets onto the network gets onto a computer and hopefully the computer recognizes it.

[00:46:20] But the problem there is the one word known it's looking for known insider threat patterns. That's a real problem because what we're seeing now are unknown threats. The unknown, insider threat, someone who is working for you and is trying to exfiltrate some of your data. Maybe it's a salesperson who's thinking about leaving and wants all your client list.

[00:46:48] Maybe it's an engineer, man. Would have we seen that before? Just ask Tesla or many of these other big companies about it, someone sinking to leaving. So they might as all put a few things in their pocket, besides the pencil on the way out the door. Those are insider threats. How do you recognize them? And I've been working on that for years.

[00:47:09] I had a product that would look at all of the access to a file server, a windows file server, and would try and do some comparisons on it. And you know what, it did a half decent job, but that was years ago. I again, was looking for known patterns. So in other words, how they're pulling out data and they're not supposed to, why is that sales guy into the payroll?

[00:47:34] Those sorts of things. We need to move into AI, artificial intelligence, machine learning, whatever you might want to call it. We're not talking about Skynet here. We're talking about something that's really rather basic, just some form of an AI that looks for patterns. And that's what I'm working on right now at the low end, because we've got some of these, the very high end, but AI has the ability to do some self-love.

[00:48:03] And that's the big deal. They can learn more about malicious activity, about patterns that they're seeing. These insider threat patterns, external threat patterns, and these AI methods now can even learn based on data that could already have the threat activity. In it and it learns from that. And then it is it out to others.

[00:48:28] That's part of the reason we use the high end Cisco stuff for our clients that want real security because it learns, it, figures it out and it shares it with thousands of other of these high end, Cisco firepower firewalls with all of the other software that's in behind. This is a very big deal because AI can synthesize the difference between normal router outages, for instance, or it's a botnet attack.

[00:48:57] It's an attack from a Russian. Who might be trying to do distributed denial of service, which has been way up in the last year. So in, in this cyber cold war, we really have to assume that our defenses have been breached and our adversaries are already in our systems. The great article here, I just quoted that from dark reading, by Nancy Grady.

[00:49:23] She's the chief data scientist and solution architect. But here's the real big. She's a data scientist. That's where it's moving. That's why I'm putting together the software using other people's software. So these, this, for instance, advanced malware protection stuff, information that's coming out of an active directory server and feeding it into an artificial intelligence engine that I have already done some training on, and then have it look for things that I think is where we need to.

[00:49:59] We have to search for unknown patterns of malicious activity. Artificial intelligence really is the arms race. And China has said that by 2030, it will be the world leader in artificial intelligence. Remember Google you've heard of them. Alphabet, which is the parent company to Google decided it would move its artificial intelligence lab to China.

[00:50:22] Thanks, Google for giving away all of our advantage in the AI. Absolutely where we will end up with this cold war. Arms race is having artificial intelligence, trying to defend against artificial intelligence, trying to attack. Now, it's really interesting looking at how AI has been used in other fields.

[00:50:44]And in fact, w they've had AI generating fakes and AI trying to detect the fake. So going back and forth, improving both of them will survive. But right now we have to change our approach and change it in a very big way because our resiliency in our businesses and as individuals, we can't you, this is a costly option anymore.

[00:51:09] We can view this as just a mathematical equation. Hey, it's cheaper to pay the fines than it is to keep our data safe. We have to make it apart in a central part of doing business.

[00:51:22]There are some really interesting bills that are trying to pass through Congress right now that are designed to help protect us. And it's interesting because we're seeing these brick and mortar retailers, including home Depot, Walgreens, JC penny would support these bills versus the online retailers like Amazon.

[00:51:46] At C E eBay Poshmark and others who are arguing that this new legislation is going to hurt small sellers, particularly home sellers, great article from ours, technical by Tim to chant this week. And I've got it in my newsletter. So I'll make sure you double check the news. But these bills have come out now as brick and mortar retailers have lost ground to online retailers through the lockdown in 2020, 20% of consumer retail purchases were made online.

[00:52:22] Compared with 14% in 2019, but the legislation is also being proposed in response to this slew of counterfeit stolen and dangerous items that have shown up on these various online retailer websites. Now we know that there are problems with some of these. For instance, there are all kinds of fake reviews.

[00:52:48] And a while back, I talked about them here on the show, what you can do in order to tell if it's a fake review or not, you can just do a search for Craig Peterson, fake Amazon reviews, and you can listen to that segment that I did. It is usually not that hard to tell, but that's how we're valuing things.

[00:53:10]We go online. We're trying to evaluate most of the time when you're looking to get something you're not looking for all of these things that you want. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. There's that. But you're primarily looking to eliminate things. So you can I'll kill that one. It's not going to work for me. That was not gonna work for him.

[00:53:28] That was my coworker. Okay, good. So I only have this one thing left, so you're not really having to make a decision that when you go to Amazon, people are looking at that rating. How many people have rated it and how high is the rating? And you'll probably read a few of the reviews and Amazon will usually mix in some lower star reviews.

[00:53:52] Just to make it seem a little bit more legitimate, but many of these vendors are doing some frankly unethical things. For instance, they will go and say in your product when they're shipped to you, if you go ahead and give us a review and send us a copy of the review, we will. Shippy another one or the next one we'll give you a discount on or a lot of different things.

[00:54:16] And so people are incentivized to give reviews, which I guess isn't bad, but unfortunately, a lot of people are, have been incentivized to give bad reviews because. Even companies out there that you can hire to have people do reviews. So one of the ways to tell if a review is fake is read some of those reviews.

[00:54:37] Let's say that the review was for some I lash mascara or something. Okay. So it's for mascara and you're reading the reviews and it says yeah, this supports far more weight than I thought it would, or, yeah. Th this has been running really well for me. Do those sound like they're talking about mascara or something out because oftentimes these fake reviews are just generic ones that have they've hired people to go ahead and post them online.

[00:55:08] When we're talking about these bills, though, where we're really worried about is, or who is really the second. If you buy something from Amazon, you may not actually be buying it from Amazon. Amazon's become much more clear lately. If you look at something you can see it's actually shipped from company X or Y whatever it might be.

[00:55:35] And it's not really well, maybe it's shipped by Amazon, but it's provided by company X and the way Amazon's business model generally works is. You have a product that you want Amazon to sell. So you ship a certain amount of that product to Amazon. And usually Amazon dictate how many they want to have on hand.

[00:55:56] And now it's an Amazon's warehouses and that way they can ship it out in a day or two, depending on the product, et cetera, et cetera, they don't want to have unavailable. So that is handy for you, but it's coming in an Amazon box. It's coming from an Amazon web or not website but from an Amazon delivery center and warehouse.

[00:56:21] But if that product is counterfeit, if it hadn't been stolen, if there are dangerous items in it, we've seen that again. And again. I remember I did a television segment. These are cases that people were buying for their phones, the glitter cases, and how the fluid that the glitter was suspended. And, so you can turn it around and the glitter moves around.

[00:56:43] Isn't that cool. That fluid was actually burning people. If it leaked out. That's how bad it was. So who do you Sue? Who do you go after? If you need to recover the damages we get, you had to go and see the dermatologist maybe even had to have a skin graph just because you bought online from Amazon, who seems to be a reputable retailer online.

[00:57:09] And they certainly are just cause you bought a case for you. Many people have found out while it isn't Amazon and Amazon says they have no liability. Now here's the second part of this problem that anonymity. Provides cover for all kinds of fraudsters and criminals. It's really not uncommon to find uncommon, to find counterfeit and potential harmful things on these various online retailer sites.

[00:57:39] Back in 2018, the government accountability office ordered 47 items, including shoes. Travel mugs cosmetics phone charges from third party sellers on quote, popular consumer websites. So of the 47 20 of them were counterfeit. That's almost half that's what? 40% ish. That's crazy. They were counterfeit even non counterfeit items that are bought from these third-party sellers.

[00:58:09] Through these big websites have been implicated in consumer. Again, 2018 and 19 month old in Texas was injured after ingesting a battery that fell out of a loose battery compartment in the third party, apple TV remote. So the parents in that case in Texas, asked Amazon to stop selling this product that was obviously defective and requested the contact information for the seller.

[00:58:36] Somebody named who's EG. Who ran the Amazon store USA shopping 76 93. So that's the guy that actually sold the remode Amazon stock did in the warehouse, shipped it when the people paid Amazon. Hugely. Never responded. And Amazon said that they were never able to locate that person. So the parents sued Amazon in Texas state court, arguing the retailers liable for the dual factor product.

[00:59:07] Amazon. The other hand says, Hey, I'm just a middleman. I have no liability. That's the argument. And that's why we've got these brick and mortar retailers push. Back for changes. So consumer product laws, those, they hold businesses liable for injuries. If the stores don't take the sufficient measures to help keep these defective products from reaching consumers online, marketplaces have not had those types of rules in place.

[00:59:37] And they say we don't control third-party resellers. So we'll see what happens. We have a couple of different groups out there, some fighting against the bill. Some fighting for them. Keep an eye on this. You might want to contact your Congress critter and let them know. How will you feel about this?

[00:59:55] Because it is a problem. Absolutely problematic. No fewer, by the way than 17 states have proposed legislation about this

[01:00:05]let's talk about trick bot and this investigation, because it has now revealed the details of a massive crime organization. And when we think of these I often think of Tony soprano.

[01:00:20] Where you've got this one guy or gal as the head of the whole thing, and it's a mafia organization and you've got your lieutenants and everybody else in place. It's well organized and you know who you can trust and who you can't trust. And you bring in people slowly. That apparently is not how trick bot ran and is narrow.

[01:00:46] As we can tell, not how most of these criminal cyber crime operations actually work. It turned out that nearly a score of cybercriminals. This is from dark reading, allegedly worked together to create this trick bot mouse. And they were able to get it on computers and effected more than a million users.

[01:01:13] Now this is from an indictment that was just unsealed. This group that was behind it. It is fascinating, absolutely fascinating. They were able to infect this million systems in nearly a dozen countries, but how do you do that? Normally you use a zero day attack when we've talked about those before you might also be using an old attack that should be patched already, but people haven't bothered.

[01:01:41] Patching. But that's conceptual. When you get right down to it, you've got to have malware expert. You've got to have software developers, you got to have technical support people. You've got to have your money mules that can take the money and clean it up for you. That's called that's modern money laundering and they've got to have other people involved in all of it.

[01:02:06] And that's what this indictment against one developer said, this guy is a Latvian national, all a witty, I assume it's a guy, but a national from Latvia. And he's charged with being a developer with this group. That's fascinating because the indictment shows this, the sprawling, frankly. Ad hoc organization that expanded its operations to include 20 different people.

[01:02:42] And probably more think about that for a minute. This is not Tony soprano. These groups need to move and move fast. So it looks like what's been happening is someone has a bright idea of let's use the zero day attack and let's go make some. But how you do that because you need all of these people.

[01:03:03] I just described. How do you make it all work for you? Cause the group gave programming problems to potential developers. They discussed, which programmers suited their needs and used a variety of crime services to improve their operations. That's how they work. Can you believe it? It was just absolutely amazing.

[01:03:23] Apparently they could not find enough developers internally. So that's where they went over to Russia and Latvia and some of these other countries to try and find people and they would ask them these kinds of leading questions to see how they felt about being involved in cyber crime. And what's fascinating to me is a lot of these guys obviously had no problem with it.

[01:03:48] Now, some of them might not have known, they might have had a task to do this, make an installer for us, a basic task, or even make this software. Yeah. Easily find it on the computer. Guess what that's exactly what some of this antivirus software does it hides itself so that it makes it harder to find.

[01:04:09] So there's legitimate reasons for all of the different parts of what this malware does. No question about that. This here's a quote from this guy at Malwarebytes, his name's Adam Quad-A. And he's a director of the labs over there, Malwarebytes. He says, there is the group that compiles them out where then they pass it to the group that encrypts a malware, and then they pass it to the person who distributes the malware.

[01:04:40] The fact that these folks were reaching out via Russian job sites for developers means that their operation grew too large for the talent pool of the cyber crime world. Isn't that something. So not only are we having trouble in the U S hiring people, they're having trouble overseas as well. Now the operators of this trick bought malware, had some serious success and they got the attention.

[01:05:10] You, you can't do it. Yeah. In fact, a million computers in a dozen countries and not get attention. And so that us investigators were able to gain access to communications between a lot of the people behind the operation. Does that sound familiar? The FBI and others have been doing that successfully. And we talked earlier in the show about some ways they've been doing that.

[01:05:35] So they had some of these communications, they knew what was happening and they were able to combine the government agencies and industry to crack down on it. Now you've heard me talk about the FBI's InfraGuard program. And I'm a proud member of InfraGuard. I was involved with Intercar. InfraGuard pretty seriously for quite a while.

[01:05:59] I ran all of the webinars, all of the training stuff for a couple of years. And so I know those guys, this is. InfraGuard is about, it's about knowing what's going on out there, knowing what to defend against. It's not just computers, by the way. In fact, it's mostly not computers which annoys me, but it goes everything from terrorists, for physical security, all the way through various healthcare warnings and things that are going on to protect every part of our infrastructure, even lawyers are allowed to get into this law firms.

[01:06:34] Okay. But the whole idea behind InfraGuard is to get the government and industry working together. It's been around a long time. And I only found out about it myself within the last, I don't know, five or 10 years, but combined the government and industry were able to take down this malware group in October.

[01:06:57] This is absolutely amazing because the operators were able to recover really quickly as well. So there's this indictment a little bit redacted, so we don't know all of the details, but because they have. Access communications. They started to put the screws down on a couple of these people who were involved and the, by the way, two of these participants were talking about using a server based in the United States as a way to hide where they're coming from.

[01:07:29] And I've talked about that before, how they can hop from machine to machine and make it look like it's coming from someplace. It's not, which makes me wonder about some of this Russian invasion as whether or not it's really from Russia or perhaps it's from China, just pretending. To be Russian isn't that America just amazing.

[01:07:48] One of these guys in their email said, they should say, thank you to us that we are stealing money from the Americans. We should get the medal of valor, just chest. Absolutely incredible. These people, I, we got to understand what I think what they're doing in order to really be able to. Frankly.

[01:08:10] Okay. My by the way, it looks like we were able to recover money from these trick, bought guys so much for cryptocurrencies being absolutely safe for the bad guys.

[01:08:21]Again, I really appreciate you guys. And take a minute. If you would visit me online, Craig peterson.com.

[01:08:28] You'll find all of my newsletters. Not the newsletters, but all of our podcasts, everything we're doing every week up there, the newsletters, however, you will find the way to sign up there. And once you're signed up for the newsletter, I'll send you a few of my special report. You learn about passwords.

[01:08:46] Password managers the right way to handle it and which ones are available, which ones I recommend and a whole lot more. Plus you'll get my newsletter in email every week. I don't usually post them up on the website. Maybe I should. Anyhow, this is a story from Fox business. Daniella is Jenna surveys, Genevieve.

[01:09:07] Genevieve's yeah, there you go. It's probably hard to pronounce in English. This is really scary. Because it's showing that the private login information belonging to tens of millions of people was compromised after malware infiltrated over 3.2 million windows based computers during a two year span.

[01:09:34] Are you kidding? 3.2 million Windows-based computers over two years span. What are people doing with their windows computers? Or maybe the better question is what are they not doing with their windows computers? Or they're not applying the patches what's going on here? How can you have something like that happen?

[01:09:56] That should never happen. But it did. So there's a report out by Nord lock. That a custom Trojan type malware infiltrated the computers between 2018 and 2020 and stole 1.2 terabyte of personal information. So as a result, these hackers were able to get their hands on nearly 26 million log-in credentials, including emails, usernames, and passwords from almost a million websites, according to this absolutely crazy, isn't it?

[01:10:36] So the targeted websites include major companies like Amazon, Walmart, eBay, Facebook, Twitter, apple, Dropbox, and LinkedIn. You've heard of all of them. This is why I really stress everybody. You need to go to have I been poned.com. This is a free website. Have I been poned spelled P w N E D. Have I been poned.com.

[01:11:02] Check your email address. Now you can even put in your phone number and see if your personal information has been stolen. Now, if you've had an email address for any period of time, and if you've used it in the online world, I can pretty much guarantee it is out there. So double check, because what that's going to do now is let you know which passwords you're going to have to change.

[01:11:31] So if you had a user account at a site that was hacked and they did steal your personal information, obviously you can't get a new social security number. They will not give you one, but you can change your password because so many of these breaches nowadays are using brute force technique. So they'll look up these massive databases of all of the stolen credentials.

[01:11:57] And then they will try these email addresses along with the stolen passwords to see if they can get in. Okay. Now here's the software. This is particularly interesting. Many of us say I use, I'm not going to really say it. I use a windows cracking tool. Or, oh yeah, I don't have to pay for the Adobe software because I've got this cracking tool and yeah.

[01:12:23] Same thing with these games I'm playing. Yeah. They're all cracked. Okay. Guess what? That illegal well software, which included a pirated version of Adobe Photoshop, 2018 there's windows cracking tool and several cracked games had within it. This malware. So in order to steal the personal information, this malware was reported is reported to be able to take screenshots of a person's information and also their photograph.

[01:12:54] Okay. If the device had a webcam and among the stolen database, where two brilliant, 2 billion browser cookies and 6.6 million files. Now with those browser cookies that they've stolen, they can. Effectively log into websites because a lot of websites will set a cookie saying, yeah, this is a legitimate session.

[01:13:18] So all they have to do is use that cookie it's that easy, it's that easy. And so 2 billion browser cookies, 6.6 million files, including a million images. I wonder what some of those images were and more than 650,000 word and PDF files. All right. So even if they don't try and use the cookies to log into a website, they can use them to figure out the habits of people because the cookies are associated with a particular URL.

[01:13:48] So they know where you go online. They know that you use bank of America or whatever bank it is you're using. And now they can use that for fishing. Okay, this is just crazy. Don't use pirated slash cracked software. It's bad enough to use it software. Okay. Making up the bulk of the stolen database got into Fox business was 3 million text files, 900,000 image files and 600,000 plus word files.

[01:14:23] Some people, by the way, this is a, I just had a question about it this week from a listener saying, Hey, listen. And I put all of my password and then encrypted Excel spreadsheet. Is that okay? According to node or Nord locker, they said that the most concerning thing was that they found people even use notepad to keep their passwords personal notes and other sensitive information.

[01:14:49] So when we're talking. 3 million text files. Some of those text files had people's social security, numbers, names, bank, account numbers, passwords, everything. And I know some of you guys are saying, yeah, that's me. Maybe I'm like my man, I'm in trouble now. Yeah, you are sign up for my newsletter.

[01:15:10] Now, and I'm going to send you this report. It's about 10 pages long. It goes through some details you can skim over and also tells you what I recommend and how to. Okay, so you got to do it. Craig peterson.com. That's Peterson, S O n.com. And you'll see right there on any page. In fact, if you scroll up or down a bit, you'll see a sign up for my newsletter, or you can go straight to Greg peterson.com/subscribe and also.

[01:15:43] Make sure you go to have a been poned.com. That's have I been B E N P w N E d.com. Now, if you missed any of that, you can just email [email protected]. That might be easier to remember. And remember, my wife had a horrible accident and my emergency surgery, and so I'm helping to take care of her so much.

[01:16:08] Normal a little bit delayed responses have been very delayed for about the last month and probably will be for another month or so. So keep that in mind, but you can email me [email protected] and ask me any questions that you might have be glad to answer. And give you those URLs as well, but just go to Craig peterson.com, sign up for the newsletter.

[01:16:30] And then when you get the newsletter, you can just hit reply and it will go to me. So you can always ask a question that way to Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Now we're going to finish the show off with something else that is eyeopening. It was eye opening to me. It's gotta be to you too. This is again from dark reading.

[01:16:52] This is a new study by Symantec and they found in looking at iOS and Android apps that were released on apple and Google's app stores over the last five years that many of these apps are breaking. The protections that Google and apple have specified specifically breaking the encryption protection. If you go to a website like HDP ads, You by just doing HTTPS colon slash Craig peterson.com for instance.

[01:17:32]So going to my website, HTTPS colon slash Craig peterson.com. Do you realize that you have now set up a VPN between your computer and my cell? Yeah, you don't need a VPN from one of these companies out there, which is actually going to make you less safe. You don't need any of that at all.

[01:17:49] It's going to go all of your traffic's going to be encrypted back and forth. And the mobile apps are supposed to use the same type of encryption whenever they need to talk to a database or talk to one, one of those sources that the app might need, that's out there on the web. And it turns out as they were looking at this un-encrypted traffic coming to, and from these apps that it's transferring sensitive data that is completely open to interception and compromised by attackers.

[01:18:24] Now I know some of you guys just saying I would listen to the ad for the VPN software and it says it's keeping my data. Probably nine. So I'm safe. Even if the app is sending it in the clear, no, you're not. In fact, you are less safe. And if I did a webinar on this about a year ago, if you want a copy of it, I'll be glad to drop one to your links.

[01:18:49] You can watch it, but it was like an hour long just explaining what's happening and why and how and when it's appropriate to use a VPN, none of these commercial VPNs, the G here advertise really, you shouldn't be using those. So there's other things you should be doing. Symantec reasoning recently analyzed hundreds of thousands of these things, and it showed that 7% of iOS apps and three and a half percent of Android apps intentionally break in the encryption requirements from the app store.

[01:19:27] It's absolutely incredible. We'll see what happens in the future. Apple is cracking down right now. More and more. Google has been doing some crackdowns as well, but apple has a tighter infrastructure. They can lock down a little better than Google can. All right, everybody. That's it for today.

[01:19:48] Thanks for listening. Thanks for tuning in. Of course, you can find me online. Craig Peterson.com. Make sure you sign up for the newsletter. You'll get some free, special reports along with that. And if you have any questions, email me [email protected].

[As heard on WGAN on 2021-06-16-wgan]

Did you notice on your IRS tax forum this year? The very first question. Yes. The government is starting to crack down on cryptocurrency transactions. We just found out about what the FBI did. There's a whole lot there. And then also this morning, Tesla versus Volkswagen, completely different ideas and methodologies for your next autonomous and even electric car. How might things turn out for us? So here we go.

[00:00:35] Aaron Chadborn: [00:00:35] This is Aaron Chadbourne in for Matt on the WGAN morning news, and we are excited to be joined now as we are every week by Craig Peterson. Craig. Good morning.

[00:00:45] Craig Peterson: [00:00:45] Hey, good morning.

[00:00:45] Aaron Chadborn: [00:00:45] Sure. So with Biden meeting with Putin, obviously we've been dealing with the Russian hackers.

[00:00:51]One thing that I've always understood about cryptocurrency and why it's become so popular is because these payments are untraceable. And we've seen that these ransomware attacks they've asked for payment in Bitcoin, but now they're turning up and investigations with the announcement by the FBI that they've reclaimed the cryptocurrency that was paid.

[00:01:10] What's going on, Craig.

[00:01:11] Craig Peterson: [00:01:11] Yeah, this is a very interesting problem because initially Bitcoin value came because of a bunch of illegal maneuvers. These guys were trading Bitcoin back and forth to each other and would pay a little bit more every time. They were pulling money from the same pot, manipulating the value of bitcoin to try and get it to be worth something right? When you're paying thousands of Bitcoin for a pizza, it tells you something. So next up, what we had is the next major momentum for Bitcoin was ransomware. In fact, if you look at the value of Bitcoin and compare it to the amount of ransomware that's out there and how much people are paying in ransom, they go hand in hand because of what you just said, Aaron.

[00:02:02] People look at it and think, oh wow, it's "crypto" currency, it cannot be traced. Now I've sat in briefings with the secret service, where they went through exactly how they trace Bitcoin. And this time with the whole colonial pipeline hack, the FBI has actually come out and told us how they have tracked it.

[00:02:25] Bitcoin is moderately anonymous. It's like cash, frankly. It can be traced. It was traced. The Bitcoin from the colonial pipeline hack was found in California of all places. And the, these guys are not safe. So as soon as the FBI announced that they had gotten back more than half of what colonial pipeline had paid, the value of Bitcoin dropped, but then Bitcoin went back up again. Why?

[00:02:56] While the meat packing company that we've all heard about getting hacked and maybe losing our meat, we had a little bit of a rush. They paid $11 million Bitcoin, and we have businesses now who are putting in their public filings with the securities and exchange commissions indications.

[00:03:15] In fact, the absolute declaration. They have been buying Bitcoin in case they get hacked. There's a counter for, oh my gosh. Who got hack. Okay. We've already got the Bitcoin. All of this drives up the price and it is not secure in that you don't really know. Who has it forget about it? They can track it depending right there.

[00:03:39] There's some dependencies here

[00:03:41] Aaron Chadborn: [00:03:41] I wondered, though weather. There was this drop, obviously because it, the mystique and the idea that it couldn't be traced, but part of the hesitancy. Of, reputable finance authorities to, to acknowledge Bitcoin and say that they're going to accept cryptocurrencies was this idea that it could be used for these purposes, but this idea that it is traceable, maybe it speeds up the broader scale adoption of cryptocurrency.

[00:04:00]Craig Peterson: [00:04:00] It might absolutely. It has no inherent value. It's just the value people place on it, but you know what. I just described our U S currency. You can turn it in for silver anymore. You certainly can't do it. And for gold anymore, the value in it is what we place in it. And the whole idea behind cryptocurrency and the way the blockchain works behind it is to build trust in it.

[00:04:24] We trust it. We know about it. Governments are taxing it. In fact, this year, first question on your IRS. Forum was about Bitcoin, frankly. And have you had any of these transactions? The government is now going after all of these trading institutions that are dealing in it. And now these institutions are providing the IRS with information about any transactions, more than $10,000, in cryptocurrencies, not just Bitcoin, but any of them. So they are cracking down. China sees this as a huge opportunity and has been pushing their own cryptocurrency and they've been pushing it very hard. To become the international standard in trade of oil instead of the us dollar. So we're going to get something you saw on Facebook.

[00:05:13] They were going to do their own thing with a cryptocurrency that kind of fell by the wayside. Other companies have as well, but it is something that desktops and governments worldwide really want to do because it makes everything entirely traceable allows them to print money. Like that just by adding a little bit more into their crypto pipeline,

[00:05:35] Aaron Chadborn: [00:05:35] you're listening to the WGA and morning news.

[00:05:38] This is Aaron infer, Matt chatting with Craig Peterson, who you can catch every Saturday from one to three right here on WGAN Craig, another topic I know you wanted to dive into, has to do with. Automakers trying to figure out these advanced features for autonomous driving, how they can capitalize office and whether they can charge kind of software as a service type payments.

[00:05:57] What are you seeing with this announcement from Volkswagen?

[00:06:00] Craig Peterson: [00:06:00] Yeah, this is an interesting one because many people know about Tesla. There are other electric cars out there and there are regular. Cars, let go. A Cadillac did a few years ago with their high-end cars driving down the freeway.

[00:06:14] Basically it was a cruise control using radar to keep the proper distance Virginia and the cars in front of you. There was a lot of them out there and Tesla charges you for the autonomous driving. They said that from the beginning an extra fee. Do you want that feed? Do you want to pay for the Tesla?

[00:06:34] And that's what Volkswagen has been trying to figure out. And they just had a board meeting and the board they were discussing. Do we want to have a $50,000 of. Bill or check out underneath the hood of the car, if you will for features people don't want. And so they're saying instead of having this this new plaid version of the Tesla model S which is totally cool, by the way, at 120 grand, what should we do?

[00:07:01] Because we're the people's car. Volkswagen's looking at putting all of the features into their new cars, all these auto driving features and the fancy cruise controls and things, and then having a golden key. They're all there, but you can't use them until you pay for them, but they're taking an even different tact than Tesla is using.

[00:07:22] They're saying. How about if we charge by the hour for the fees, if you're driving your car around town, you're not going to be using the autonomous mode. It just doesn't work yet. Some estimates are it's going to be 20 years before it's entirely reliable around town, but when you're on the highway, Would you pay $8 and 50 cents per hour to have the car drive you somewhere?

[00:07:48] It's like an

[00:07:48] Aaron Chadborn: [00:07:48] Uber driver, right? Do you value your automatic driver at the same way? You would an Uber driver?

[00:07:53] Craig Peterson: [00:07:53] Exactly. You're right on

[00:07:55] Aaron Chadborn: [00:07:55] Aaron Craig. If our listeners want to hear more, they can catch you every Saturday. One to three right here on WGAN for a tech talk. This is Aaron Chad. We're on for Matt on the WGAN morning news.

[As heard on WTAG, WHYN, WHJJ 2021-06-15]

Hey, we've got this meeting between Presidents Biden and Putin, and I have some serious words for our President. I've got some opinions about our federal bureaucracy when it comes to cybersecurity and Mr. Jim Polito pulled them out of me this morning.

[00:00:18] Jim Polito: [00:00:18] So here we go. Hey, every week on Tuesday, we have the honor of my next guest.

[00:00:26] And he is the tech talk guru, as far as I'm concerned, Craig Peterson an all around great guy here, just in time, Craig to save Joe Biden, you're going to be the advisor to Joe Biden. How do you like that?

[00:00:44] Craig Peterson: [00:00:44] I already have a good job. I don't want to work.

[00:00:48] Jim Polito: [00:00:48] Listen. I know that Canada day is just two weeks away and you're preparing, you're stocking up on Molson and Labatt's and moose head.

[00:00:57] I know you're stocking up on all of that, and I know you've got a lot going on, but you could give Joe Biden some advice. He's going to sit across. And look into the eyes of Latta mere Putin. And as far as I'm concerned, Vladimir Putin knows exactly what the cyber hackers in his country are doing. So what does Joe Biden say to the man who's at the top of the cyber hacking, uh, pyramid.

[00:01:33] Craig Peterson: [00:01:33] By the way I am sending out an email today, I put together a little video training for everyone. Who's on my email list on how to stop these Russian hackers. It's 95%. Effective. Okay. But the here's the advice I would give him. First of all, he needs to pull back what he said to the bladder, because just a couple of days ago where president Putin came out and said, Hey, listen, you know, we'd be more than glad to extradite these people to the U S you just need to extradite terminals back to Russia as well.

[00:02:06] And Joe Biden seems to have given us tacit approval for that. The reason I say that is if you look at what we've done here in the us, We have indicted Chinese military officials for hacking into our computer systems. So when you hear president Putin say things like that, you are sure he has in the back of his mind.

[00:02:31] The same thing that we did, which is I'm going to ask you to extradite your military hackers, because we do have them, every branch of service had Packers. Absolutely. So I think what the president Biden should do when he's talking with gluten is say, Hey, listen, I'm going to reopen the Keystone pipeline over all the guy who was doing it says I've given up now.

[00:02:58] It's ridiculous. And I am going to continue to put pressure on Merkel and others to not allow oil. From Russia into their countries because it is war. We are at war we can continue or continue to just capitulate to these people. No,

[00:03:17] Jim Polito: [00:03:17] we're talking with Craig Peterson, a tech talk guru. And, um, while I said it in a joking way, I knew he would take it seriously.

[00:03:24] Yeah. Um, This trade of, I, I brought it up earlier, a trade of prisoners. I mean, Biden is running circles around him by, by bringing

[00:03:35] Craig Peterson: [00:03:35] that up. Yeah. Putin has really, really out of played a president Biden. It's very, very unfortunate. And when you look at a war, for instance, there's skirmishes, you have battles here and there and.

[00:03:51] People die. You are really trying to hurt the economy. Uh, I, I hate to say it, but that's why you shoot someone with a small caliber weapon. You want to wound the, the opponent so that they now have to have three to five people behind the lines to get that opponent back to help that soldier. Well, what happens here in the us, we lost, we were colonial pipeline for a week and say, goodness, near in the Northeast, we didn't really feel it because we had just, I mean, just had all of our tanks filled up by colonial.

[00:04:28] Down in New Jersey. Cause the way they do it, as they staged deliveries, the south didn't do that. So how much did they hurt us and our economy by doing that? I would say they heard us more than many of the skirmishes we've had over the years. Not in depth in lives loss, which of course is just completely incalculable, but certainly the damaged door.

[00:04:53] Yeah.

[00:04:54] Jim Polito: [00:04:54] I mean, it's been, it's been terrible. And so you see the thing is that, you know, and I know I'm asking you to step out of the tactical world into the world of international diplomacy, but you've got a guy sitting there who you and I both know has. Control over these individuals who Putin wanted them to stop.

[00:05:17] He could make them disappear, like, like, like that could make them disappear. So how do you, how do we just quietly? Behind the scenes continue to strengthen our offensive abilities as cyber attackers, and that we encourage all of our private industry to harden themselves to cyber attacks.

[00:05:46] Craig Peterson: [00:05:46] All right, here we go.

[00:05:48] Hopefully you're still sitting down Jaya.

[00:05:54] Here's the, here's the really big issue as I see it, I strongly suspect cause I've been watching what our government does and you know, I have a little bit of an insight track, not my battle. And that, that helps me to understand a little bit about what's going on. Is he, if the Biden administration can continue to literally approve of some of these hacks, let's just play this game through a little bit, a war games.

[00:06:26] If we are all worried that we're going to be attacked. And we're not seeing the software that does not protect you. People like, you know, the McAfee and the Norton antivirus, et cetera. It's not going to protect you enough. We've got Microsoft conditioned us now to the point where we don't want to install up.

[00:06:49] Because it's finished mess up her computer and we're going to be down for a week or two or three or four while we try and figure it out. Right. So if they can get us to the point where we're saying, this is a huge problem, and we've already been conditioned that if it's a big problem, it must be a federal government problem.

[00:07:07] Because it's a big problem. Yeah. So now we need this federal government to step in and take over all of our networks, take over all of our security monitor. Exactly what's going on because here's what I do. I write these, you know, I do cybersecurity and I am tied in with Cisco. That's, who we use. They are the best out there for so many things.

[00:07:31] And Cisco's looking at almost a trillion. Transactions a day. We're talking about emails, website visits, et cetera, et cetera. And the reason they're so effective is because they can take all of this data that they're gathering from their customers. Now, Cisco doesn't send any of your data, just sends what are called check sums up, but it's looking at what's going on across all of these networks.

[00:07:56] And it says, okay, Here's what's up right now. And it immediately tells all of the equipment, the Cisco equipment all over the country. Okay. Block this. Now, if you have the right system come in and it's blocked. So what would happen is if we get to the point where we're on bended knee and, and asking you, please president Biden protect us and they now decide, okay, well, we're going to propose.

[00:08:20] Correct. You quote unquote, they're going to have to provide robes that live on our computers, Jim, that computer there in your studio, the computer that's in front of everyone out there right now, even people listening on the iHeart radio app or whatever app or whatever website, those mobile devices are going to have federal government software on them.

[00:08:44] Wow. Where do you think that leaves us?

[00:08:48] Jim Polito: [00:08:48] Yeah, it leads us to more vulnerability.

[00:08:53] Craig Peterson: [00:08:53] More vulnerability. Yes, exactly. From maybe, maybe you trust president and Biden, but how about the next administration or the next illustration? Right. It's win, win. And I hate to bring up the national socialists in Germany, but when the national socialists took over, there were already lists of people who would have been prepared by the prior government that had guns that could defend themselves that were trained and they were rounded up.

[00:09:19] First, right? Yep. So the officials put into place. It makes it, so now we have a potential real big problem. So let's look at what's happened with China and Russia when it comes to very valuable information. For instance, wouldn't you, if you were a foreign adversary like China, what didn't you love to have all of the information from all of the background checks of every federal employee.

[00:09:46] Wouldn't you love to know who works for who, where they are, their family situation, everything, uh, China stole it from us already. Yeah, they have it. Okay. And, and that's the sort of thing that the bad guys go for. So if we don't pull up our socks ourselves, yeah. It's not going to change. So let's look at colonial.

[00:10:09] How long you were paid, how much ransom

[00:10:11] Jim Polito: [00:10:11] was it? 5 million, I think where you're talking about in Bitcoin. Yeah,

[00:10:16] Craig Peterson: [00:10:16] absolutely. It was like a four and a half give or take $5 million. Absolutely. Right. Yeah. And the meat Packers, you know, they paid about 11 million. Yeah. I read

[00:10:25] Jim Polito: [00:10:25] that. I read that. Yup. And which is, as you have said, that's the worst thing you can do cause you just painted a, a, um, a bullseye

[00:10:35] Craig Peterson: [00:10:35] on your back.

[00:10:36] And the Trump administration said, you pay ransoms, you are supporting terrorism, and we're going to come after you with the justice department. The byte administration says

[00:10:48] what's 5 million. Yeah. Look at an equation that of that of a perverted person would have in their heads. Uh, the equation is okay. So cost colonial, let's say $5 million plus obviously time and materials to get everything back in order. So that's call it 10 million. Okay. Uh, and if they were to put. The proper stuff in place.

[00:11:13] I'm not just talking about hardware and software for cybersecurity. I'm talking about the people to monitor, keep it up to date, keep the desktop up to et cetera. It would cost them easily, 20 to $30 million a year, cheaper to pay a ransom, keep your fingers crossed or to do cybersecurity properly. That's the same equation, the same equation we're seeing again and again, and again, look at the Equifax breach.

[00:11:44] Look at TJX to all of these big breaches in every one of them. There's been fingers pointed at C-level bean counters that said, well, it's just, it's cheaper. To pay the price when we're hacked the not to. And at the same time, we, as a people, our information is being stolen. We're being cheated. Our retirements are being stolen and we're seeing this.

[00:12:07] We've seen operating accounts and small businesses completely emptied, and we are starting to beg the federal government. To come in and fix this. This is a real problem. So I think Biden should tell Putin to take a hike a long one off a short pier and make sure he realizes we're taking this very seriously and do what the federal government was instituted for, which has helped to ensure our common defense.

[00:12:44] Jim Polito: [00:12:44] I just was waiting for the perfect moment. I think it's perfect. I think what you said today is spot on. And of course this will be podcasted because I hope that somebody. From the administration here is, it says you should listen to what Craig Peterson said on the Jim Polito show. And, um, you're absolutely right.

[00:13:07] It has to be done. And, uh, Craig, I know you said you're getting out that information about how to protect yourself from a Russian hack, which involves that virtual Russian keyboard. So how can folks get more information from Craig

[00:13:22] Craig Peterson: [00:13:22] Peterson? All right. If you sign up before this afternoon, they'll set up by noon today.

[00:13:28] Right now, go to Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Craig peterson.com/subscribe. I'm planning on sending it out when probably early the afternoon today. And it tells you exactly what you need to do and shows you how to do it for installing that keyboard. That's going to keep these Russian hackers out 99% of the time.

[00:13:51] And of course I have my weekly newsletter and everything else too, but this is critical.

[00:13:56] Jim Polito: [00:13:56] Right, right. Craig, excellent segment as usual. And I know you'll be watching the next 24 hours and maybe we'll be talking about this again next week or sooner. Great. Thank you, Craig. Craig Peterson. Everybody was a great asset to the show.

There is a simple way to stop most Russian Ransomware. I'm going to show you why it works and how to do it.

Ransomware is a bigger problem than we've seen in years. We're talking about triple the number of ransomware payouts this last year. And the cost of ransomware has doubled when we include what's your pain, as well as the loss of business. And the loss of reputation. It is absolutely huge, but you know what?

There is a quick and easy trick that I'm going to show you right now that will stop most of the ransomware. Hey, we know the ransomware's primarily coming from Russia. China has obviously some attempts to get into our networks. We've seen that before personally, but Russia is really the source of much of this ransomware.

And what's happening with the Russian ransomware is these guys just don't want to go to jail. They don't want to go to jail. So they don't attack any Russian countries or any of the affiliates to the Russian countries in order to do that, they have to make sure that when that ransomware gets onto your machine, there is no way for that ransomware to.

In fact of the machine, if you're in Russia, because they don't want to end up in Russian jails, but it's not just Russia. It's the OIC, it's all of these countries that used to be part of the Soviet union. So the quick and easy trick that they're using in order to keep themselves out of Russian prisons is to check to see if there is a keyboard that support Russian or any of these other.

Oh, I see. Languages. We're just going to stick with Russian. Cause that's the simplest. If you look right now on your screen, you'll see how you can do this. With windows and windows 10. So you're going to want to bring up your settings. You can see I've got them pulled up here on the screen. You're going to just select region and language, which is right under date and time.

And now you're going to look at the right side of that screen because what we want to do now is select a language. We're going to add a new language you can see on here. I've already got a U S English and Canadian English. Yes. There is a difference. And what you're going to do now is click on, add a language and you're going to select the language from any of these countries.

So it could be Bela Reuss. It could be obviously Russia. There could be Estonia Armenia. You need to have one of these languages on there. Now you might already have Spanish for instance, installed on your computer. That might mean, you know how to do it already, but just go right here. You're going to go ahead once you're there.

And select the Bosnian Serbian Azerbaijani. I would select Russian just because it's the simplest. What will happen now is if this Russian malware gets over onto your computer, the first thing it does is check. Is there, uh, an OAC keyboard? And is there a Russian, are there any of these other languages, if there is.

It immediately exits and it does not install the ransomware at all. Talk it about a cheap and easy to do, do this. And you're safe from probably 90% of all, all of that malware that's out there. Certainly almost all of the Russian malware. To find out more, just visit me online Craig peterson.com. And if you subscribe to my newsletter there, you'll be able to get my weekly newsletter that has all kinds of tips and tricks.

And what's in the news this week. Again, Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Thanks for being with me. Bye. Bye .

[As Heard On WGIR WQSO WKXL on 2021-06-14]

Hey, we just found out that Bitcoin is very traceable. So I talked about that this morning, as well as what's happening with autonomous vehicles -- big announcement from Waymo and JB Hunt with Mr. Chris, Ryan, just this morning. Here we go.

[00:00:16] Chris Ryan: [00:00:16] Joining us right now is Craig Peterson. He is the host of tech talk on news radio,610 and 96.7, 11:30 on Saturday and Sundays.

[00:00:27] Craig, how are you?

[00:00:28] Craig Peterson: [00:00:28] Hey, I am doing great this morning.

[00:00:30] Chris Ryan: [00:00:30] So we've been teasing Bitcoin with your appearance today. And one of the major attractions to Bitcoin was that it was viewed by many as being untraceable, right? You couldn't tell where the money went. And it was used to as a method of payment that was not traceable by governments, not traceable by individuals or entities, but.

[00:00:52] In the reporting that we saw on the colonial pipeline hacking Bitcoin was traceable. And a lot of that money, millions of dollars in fact, was retrieved from dark side. So how was it traced by the FBI? And is this something that signals to you that Bitcoin is in fact traceable and will be traced moving forward?

[00:01:17] Craig Peterson: [00:01:17] I had a really interesting briefing that was given by the secret service. And this was a couple of years ago and they talked about how they went ahead and did trace Bitcoin. So we've been able to do it for a while. It's been a little difficult, but we've been working on it. What really surprised me this.

[00:01:36] Time is the FBI has come out and given some serious detail on exactly what they did in order to track this Bitcoin. And in fact, a Bitcoin, wasn't a wallet in California. Not some foreign country and it's just fascinating to look at all the details, but yes, these cryptocurrencies are not completely untraceable.

[00:02:04] If you want to use the money that's in your wallet, then you have a problem because the basic concept behind it and the technology behind it is something called blockchain. And these blockchains require basically a ledger. It's like just like a book. He would have a ledger of all of the monies that he's owed or perhaps that he owes to somebody else that ledger isn't just in that piece, safe, hidden, underground somewhere when it comes to Bitcoin, that ledger is everywhere.

[00:02:34] There are multiple like a hundreds of copies of it. And that is how you can validate Bitcoin itself. You have to have this ledger. It has to be in a lot of hands. And now the FBI has figured out some very clever ways to reverse engineer that ledger to find out where the money is.

[00:02:55] Chris Ryan: [00:02:55] Another couple of things.

[00:02:56] I want to talk a little bit about self-driving trucks and self-driving cars. And, one of the main reasons that in my view, the technology has existed that self-driving cars and trucks have not been overly utilized to this point is that there is a fear that they're not going to be 100% effective.

[00:03:18] In other words, one may crash. And if one crash is particularly at the beginning and causes a problem, then that's going to create a ripple effect afterwards. And we're starting to see self-driving trucks. In fact, there's going to be a self-driving car. A truck we're going to be hauling loads in Texas D company J B hunt has announced that they're gonna be working with Waymo and they're going to have a driverless truck, which is going to operate on I 45 in Texas, taking cargo between Houston and Fort worth trucks is still going to have.

[00:03:52] Humans onboard a truck driver as well as technicians. So this in my view is the precursor to the future. And we're going to see driverless vehicles, which will still have the driver in it, but it's going to basically operate like a plane would where you can put the plane on autopilot. Cars will be put on.

[00:04:13] Autopilot, but we're going to have a individual who is going to be there. The driver's gonna be encouraged not to go to sleep, et cetera, but they are going to be able to do quote unquote distracted driving and have the vehicle, on autopilot and even think about the technology that exists.

[00:04:28] Today, just in terms of the cameras that allow for you to back up into the, a particular space or the sensors that let you know that there's a vehicle to your left or to your right, the technology exists within the vehicle for this to take place. Right now, the concern has always been. Would it be, 100% factive and would there be problems with the cameras?

[00:04:52] What if you lose your GPS signal? And the vehicle, it is in a state where it can no longer be driven and there's connectivity problems. But to me, we're there and this is an interesting experiment.

[00:05:03] Craig Peterson: [00:05:03] It's really interesting. And these autonomous vehicles have already driven millions of miles.

[00:05:10] So this is what we've always predicted to be the first step towards having really fully autonomous vehicles for all of us staff. Of course, we've got Elon Musk out there promising that. They're going to have fully autonomous. You can just have a nap, hypotonic Amos for his Tesla vehicles by the end of the year.

[00:05:29] And then the, his main technology guy poo-pooed it pretty quickly and pushed it out a couple of years with this, that the trucks and tying it all together, going between Houston Fort worth, which has quite a ways to go. We're seeing the very first industry that's likely to be completely automated.

[00:05:50] Now, Waymo, we know you've heard about this before has been operating a taxi service just outside of Phoenix. You might remember the car accident that happened, and the lady that was killed by one of these autonomous vehicles with a human driver behind it. But what we're looking at now is going to be phenomenal.

[00:06:10] This is pretty much a straight road. If there's any road in the U S it's a road between those two cities, Houston Fort worth and Texas. That is a great one to try. We're thinking that we will be seeing a long haul trucks. Driving themselves, except for the last mile, of course, being the tougher part.

[00:06:31] In other words, they would go to just like you might commute to Boston. For instance, they would go to a community area. They parked themselves, a local driver would get in and start driving. But this is huge and is completely different than for instance, what Volks and is predicting or hoping might happen do with the autonomous vehicles.

[00:06:53] Chris Ryan: [00:06:53] Craig. Thank you so much. All right. Take care. Craig Peterson joining us here on New Hampshire today.