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

[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.

A Whole Class of "Free" Apps Found Exposing You -- and Our Nuclear Secrets

As heard on 2021-06-09 on WGAN

Using some of these free apps can be a very bad way to try and keep your information private. So much of it ends up out on the internet where anyone can get their hands on it. And that's what we just found now about the military. Again. Now we've got nuclear secrets out. There. And apparently some of them have been out there now for almost a decade, just because some people were trying to use a free app to memorize things.

[00:00:29]I got into that this morning with Mr. Matt,

[00:00:31] Matt Gagnon: [00:00:31] 7:36 on WGAN morning news on Wednesday morning. Thanks for listening friends. It's time to talk to Craig Peterson who joins us at this time every week. And. You can always hear him on Saturdays at one o'clock for his own show on this ferry station, where he talks about these topics in more depth of detail.

[00:00:48] Craig, how are you this morning?

[00:00:49]Craig Peterson: [00:00:49] I am doing great. Matt,

[00:00:51] Matt Gagnon: [00:00:51] Craig, explain something to me please. On Monday, I was sitting here doing my job, trying to read the news. Going around the internet. And I came across a couple of things I wanted to read, clicked on them. CNN article MSNBC, article a few others. And I got this error message.

[00:01:10] I'm sorry, the internet doesn't work anymore. And I got it for about 10 different places. I was trying to go for a couple hours actually. So it was a pretty big outage. What happened? Why did it happen and how do we not have this happen again?

[00:01:23]Craig Peterson: [00:01:23] Frankly, I'm a little surprised it doesn't happen more often.

[00:01:26] Yeah. If you lived in the UK, the entire UK government websites went down, all of them, uk.gov or kind, I should say at one downer as well as gov is absolutely amazing. Actually, I got those backwards. It was anyways. What happened was one of the major providers of web hosting had a major problem, and this was not a hack.

[00:01:54] It wasn't ransomware, et cetera, by the looks of it at this point. But what happens when you go to a website is you're connecting to a server somewhere. Now, normally let's say you've got your local soccer club and they have a website that is hosted. Maybe it's on Amazon. Maybe it's just hosted locally.

[00:02:14] Somebody right here in Maine and they've got it in their little data center. So if someone in the UK or South Africa or California wants to go to the soccer club website, they're going to Maine in order to get at it because that's where the servers hosted. So the problem is that means you now have all kinds of delays because the data has to travel through much of the internet.

[00:02:40]What we've come up with is something called content delivery networks, and there's a number of them out there. Some are bigger, some are smaller. And what w what companies do is they put major portions of the website. So for instance, if you go to Craig peterson.com, that site, we hosted here locally, and.

[00:02:59] All of the graphics and all of the videos that are on that website are actually delivered to you over a content delivery network. So your in Portland, for instance, you will get those pictures from my website, those videos from my website, all of that large content from a, hopefully a data center really close to where you're at and someone in California is going to get it from a data center, close to where they're at.

[00:03:26] It really speeds things up. So the problem was all of these sites that weren't up and online were having problems because the content delivery network they were using, which consists of 80 servers centers all over the world, it had a bug probably from distributing a new release of software and it stopped working.

[00:03:50] So it was down for a little more than an hour. This was just a normal situation. I'm not going to use that acronym. And it's something that happens and happened before. It'll probably happen again. So this was not one of those attacks from Russia or China or anybody else.

[00:04:08]Matt Gagnon: [00:04:08] Speaking of attacks from Russia, that's maybe a nice little segue into the second question I had for you, Craig, because obviously we're seeing cyber attacks happen more frequently.

[00:04:17] And right now us intelligence is probing. Whether or not the Russians Vladimir Putin, et cetera, are testing the Biden administration. Of course, not even a year old yet. With a lot of these cyber attacks to see what's going to happen to see how they're going to react to it. And you're going to have a meeting coming up between Biden and Putin here.

[00:04:33]This is all part of a larger geopolitical context. Don't need you to comment on that, but I would love to get your thoughts on what exactly. Nation to nation, cyber warfare looks like these days and exactly what's going on here? What are they up to?

[00:04:46]Craig Peterson: [00:04:46] It really looks in fact, we are in a war, right?

[00:04:49] We've said that before the first shots of world war three have already been fired and it's online and we had energy secretary, Jennifer Granholm on Sunday. Warning us all that the us power grid is vulnerable to attack. So CNN is Jake Tapper and say to the union said, are we safe? Can our adversaries shut it down?

[00:05:13] And grand said, yes, they, they can. And in fact, They do. The first one I remember was back in 2004, I was down in Connecticut. Hadn't done in New York city and the power grid went offline. And apparently that was a task based on all of the research that was done after the fact they were seeing, can we get into the power grid?

[00:05:35] They actually didn't mean to shut it down, but they didn't really know what they were doing. And they brought it down so fast forward to today from 2000. Four. And we are seeing a whole lot of hacking going on against all kinds of infrastructure. We've got the meat packing plants, right? We've had the power, we've had water purification plants.

[00:05:57] We've had of course colonial pipeline. And in fact it's difficult to defend against now whether or not. Putin is testing us is a very good question. I suspect he is, we talked to him on my show and talked last week about using Russian keyboards to stop the ransomware attacks because.

[00:06:18] The ransomware, first thing it does is check to see, is there a Russian or Russia affiliated keyboard? If there is a short circuits, in other words, they don't want to attack Russian systems. They are definitely attacking our systems. And the attacks that I just mentioned were very directed attacks. These weren't the normal ones.

[00:06:39] These weren't the ones where they're casting a wide net. Pulling anything up they can, and then taking advantage of it. These were direct attacks against various parts of our infrastructure. They were coordinated. They were thought through very carefully. So I think the answer to that is, yeah they are testing us.

[00:07:00]The question is why.

[00:07:01]Matt Gagnon: [00:07:01] Good question. Finally, Greg, before I let you go, I want to ask you about the flashcard thing here. The U S soldiers were exposing nuclear weapons, secrets via flashcard apps. I saw this story a little while ago. And I meant to click on it to learn more, but I didn't.

[00:07:19] So you're going to educate me here a little bit on this and tell me a little bit about what happened. What is the deal here

[00:07:23] Craig Peterson: [00:07:23] about this? We have military personnel who have to memorize things and particularly those personnel who are around the nuclear. And so they've got to memorize it.

[00:07:34] And how do you memorize? You use flashcards, works really well. That's what I used in college as well. So this is all about rote learning. And the problem that we're seeing here is something we've seen before with the military. They're using standard apps for flashcards and those apps they've loaded in all of these questions about the locations of our nuclear weapons the disbursement patterns of them, everything you can think of about our weapon.

[00:08:05] This sounds like a great idea, by the way. That's a great idea. So there's something called open source intelligence, and I've worked with them quite extensively in doing my. BI InfraGuard webinars that have been running, but these researchers go and see what they can find online. They found stashes of these cards with our nuclear secrets in them.

[00:08:29] So it is a problem. It's a very big problem in the remind you of what happened with these these tracker watches that many people wear. That we're exposing where our secret bases were because these guys were jogging around the base, keeping track of all of that, to where they ran, how fast they ran, competing with their buddies, maybe on different bases or the same basis.

[00:08:53] And all of that was being posted online. So even though there's no official base there, for some reason, there's a lot of people who are running a pattern that really looks a lot like a landing strip.

[00:09:05]Matt Gagnon: [00:09:05] That's Craig Peterson, my friends. Thanks so much for joining us, Craig, as always, we appreciate you joining us and of course, make sure you listen to him on Saturdays as well.

[00:09:12] Craig, talk to you next week.

[00:09:14] Craig Peterson: [00:09:14] Absolutely. Take care.

[As Heard 2021-06-08 on WTAG, WHYN, WHJJ. Fastly CDN failure]

Hi, so glad you are joining me today. I was speaking with Mr. Polito about a couple of different things. One, this problem you might have noticed with all of these major websites, CNN, all the way through the government of the United Kingdom going offline. So I explain how sites work on the larger scale site. And I also got into what happened here. What was the problem?

[00:00:28] And then we got a little bit more into the question about Putin he's meeting with president Biden. As he been testing, president Biden. Some people really think that he has mean that Putin is trying to see how far he can go. So we get into that and I think I disprove the absolute certainty.

[00:00:51] Some people have been expressing.

[00:00:54] Jim Polito: [00:00:54] Right now, I want to get this guy on board. He is our good friend and tech talk guru, Craig Peterson. I think it was just recently the birthday of the man who's credited with inventing the internet. No, not Al gore. And I just want to remind you that if you're on the internet, you may be using, or part of your search on the internet may have.

[00:01:16] Some code that was written by the great Craig Peterson and he joins us now. Good morning, sir.

[00:01:24] Craig Peterson: [00:01:24] Good morning. Yeah. Back in the day. I remember when,

[00:01:29] Jim Polito: [00:01:29] so let's get to this. Yeah, let's get to this. I want to get to Putin Biden and cyber attacks. And your take on that. But first we just had a, some kind of a crash of of a cloud, what out on the west coast.

[00:01:47] But obviously when something like that happens, that affects all of these, right?

[00:01:53] Craig Peterson: [00:01:53] Yeah. Yeah. It's something that Trump of Aqua knows a lot about. And

[00:01:58]Jim Polito: [00:01:58] Please don't bring Tommy we'll be into this. It's certainly even, I know it's a different type of cloud.

[00:02:06] Craig Peterson: [00:02:06] Oh, okay. Yeah. Here's what the happened to have here.

[00:02:10]Let's talk about what happens with normal websites when things are working properly, there are distributed servers all over the world and this company, Fastly has 80 data centers located everywhere. And the idea is you go to one of these bigger websites and that website has a quick look at you saying, where are you?

[00:02:31] Oh, okay. You're in Western mass. So we have a data center close to you. So now it's feeding the website, which is, the pictures and the texts and everything. It's feeding that website to you from Western mass. Does that make sense to have it come from California? It's going to slow it down and it's just going to be annoying.

[00:02:54] Or if you're in Europe or South Africa, right? So these are all distributed data centers and they're called a content delivery network. And there's a few of them out there. I use one that Amazon provides Fastly has their own content delivery network, so that all of this content, particularly the big content, like if you're watching a video on CNN, that's going to be delivered.

[00:03:19] Through Fastly is content delivery network somewhere close to you. That's the whole idea behind it. And apparently what happened this morning is just tons of major sites like Reddit, Spotify, Twitch, the UK government, Hulu HBO for a PayPal Vineo goes on and on CNN, New York times, BBC Bloomberg financial times all went offline.

[00:03:43] And that was due to a problem with this content delivery network at Astley. And it looks like right now, according to everything I've seen out of Fastly this morning and researching it, that they had a bug and it wasn't a hack that they weren't hit with ransomware, but they had a bug in their content delivery network.

[00:04:05] They were able to get it up and running in about an hour. It wasn't a big, long outage, and these are the types of things that happen with these very complex networks nowadays. It's amazing. It doesn't happen more often.

[00:04:18] Jim Polito: [00:04:18] I'm glad to hear that from you that it's amazing to hear it doesn't happen more often.

[00:04:22] I'm glad to hear that. Now let's get to something that is happening more often. More and more attacks out of Russia. And which Putin

[00:04:31] Craig Peterson: [00:04:31] says, I don't know what they're all about. I have no

[00:04:35] Jim Polito: [00:04:35] idea ask squirrel, is protect, pretending he doesn't know anything about it. And but in fact he does is, and Putin and bind are gonna meet in the next few days is, the whole G seven summit is going on.

[00:04:50] Is this Putin testing Biden? Like how much can I get away with. This guy pops my dog, does he will test the limits? Like how much can I get away with until they say, Hey, No sit or whatever.

[00:05:06] Craig Peterson: [00:05:06] Yeah, this is this is a problem. W every time a president's coming to offer Obama was this way.

[00:05:14]It happened to a lesser degree with Bush and others, and it did not happen at all with Trump. The Russians, the Chinese and others have tested the president of North Korea. If you look at China right now, flying over Taiwan. And in their air space, threatening our country by taking over Taiwan.

[00:05:36] And we've talked about it before. That's where our major production of chips is when you're talking about this whole cyber security thing. And again, it smells like Russia. And the main reason that smells like Russia is this ransomware has killed switches in it. Let's say, if you have a Russian or one of a dozen other keyboards, then we will immediately stop and it doesn't install the software.

[00:06:06] So there's two, two reasons. And I'm sending out an email about that with a little video training on how to put a virtual fresher keyboard on your computer to everyone that's on my email list. So if you're on my list, You're going to find out how to do it. It's very easy. And it's going to stop almost all of this Russian malware, but here's the big question.

[00:06:28] Is it in fact, a the reason for this, because it's gluten and he doesn't want to mess around with all of these former Soviet states or is it bad guys saying I don't want to go to a Russian Gulag. We don't really know, but what we do know is what's your word just leading towards, which is we've had taxed against all of our major infrastructure.

[00:06:54] Yeah, every piece of it. And we're seeing releases from the FBI that none of the infrastructure is safe. We've in fact had some statements about that. Look at the statement on CNN did last Sunday, two days ago, where one of the secretaries of the byte administration I forget her name now said that we are not safe.

[00:07:16] Our infrastructure is not safe. And we've got rep Michael McCall from Texas saying that the cyber incursions absolutely are Poutine's way of testing, president Biden. How are we going to respond? Yeah. And it's a big, it's a big question, Jim, because if there's a missile that launches from Russian territory, we know where it launched from.

[00:07:40] We can send something in and blow up that missile silo or whatever it might be. If there is a hack. And if it's a somewhat indiscriminant hack, which many of these are, but maybe even more directed hack, all we know is the tools they were using. Look like they were Russian. What is China? It's trying to convince us that it's Russia and is using these tricks and Russian tools.

[00:08:08] Yes. You're getting it from

[00:08:09] Jim Polito: [00:08:09] China, James Bond on me right now. Like specter would always like in, from Russia with love, make the free world think it was the right, the Soviets and make the Soviet thing. It's the free world. When, in fact, right in the middle. It's specter. Yeah.

[00:08:25] It's it's right out of it's right out of the James Bond novels.

[00:08:29]Craig Peterson: [00:08:29] Then how about Carver? Where he, tomorrow never dies. He's launching his own metals, trying to get both sides to fight. And we were warned decades ago about the military industrial complex. Yeah, exactly. That this is going to be a problem.

[00:08:48] So let's throw that into the mix. Who's to say some nefarious guy, like the car for character from James Bond, isn't manipulated. We just don't know we can see fingerprints, but as we know for mission impossible, those can be faked

[00:09:07] Jim Polito: [00:09:07] as well. Yeah. We're talking with correct. Greg Peterson, our tech talk guru and all around great guy.

[00:09:12] And it is interesting. I know last week it was fascinating when you told us one of the ways to protect yourself from Russian hacking is to have this virtual rushing keyboard. And most of their hacking will ignore you because, okay. We don't want to go after one of our own, but you're saying, yeah, how do we know?

[00:09:30] That's not the Chinese making it look like it's the Russians, you can't trust anybody. In this and my fear is, and we step out of tech now and we go into politics. My fear is that Biden is not considered a someone who's going to be tough on Right nations for doing this, that he's going to be weak and they just want to know to what extent can we get away with it?

[00:09:55] And if they get away with it with this, then that's going to embolden them, say the Chinese oh, we're going to take time one. We're going to take Taiwan. What's she going to do? During the Obama Biden administration Putin took the Crimea. Boom just grabbed right now. This is ours, not yours. And we let it happen.

[00:10:14]Craig Peterson: [00:10:14] They did respond, Jim president Obama said that he told them to

[00:10:18] Jim Polito: [00:10:18] stop it. That was over the hacking of the election. Like I told them to stop it now. That's great.

[00:10:26] Craig Peterson: [00:10:26] That's great.

[00:10:28] Jim Polito: [00:10:28] Yeah. Yeah. We do know there's a response. Yeah, exactly. So

[00:10:33] Craig Peterson: [00:10:33] there's only one thing we can do here, Jim. And that is we have to protect ourselves.

[00:10:38]You were talking to earlier today. About the training that you're doing there. And other companies are doing that is ultimately important. However, the problem is it's never a hundred percent, nothing's ever 100% and there are. I hate to say this, the industry I'm in is I'm trying to protect businesses, right?

[00:11:00] And government agencies, counties, cities, everything from hackers. And the thing I hate to say is. It is full of charlatans. It's full of them. All of these people's shell

[00:11:14] Jim Polito: [00:11:14] oil. We can

[00:11:15] Craig Peterson: [00:11:15] help ya. Yeah. Yeah. We can help you get in. We got there.

[00:11:19] Jim Polito: [00:11:19] I got Charlie working on you, Ray, on your server over there. He's got it all hooked up.

[00:11:24] You're going to be fine. Nobody's going to be able to get in tight as a group.

[00:11:28] Craig Peterson: [00:11:28] Yeah. And includes the big names, you've got McAfee out there. John McAfee saying McAfee. Antivirus is useless. Yeah, he's on video saying that. Okay. Yeah. The Norton software, same problem. One of their senior executives admitted that their software's useless.

[00:11:46]You've got to have a full stack. None of this is good enough to protect you. I hate to say this, but Microsoft. And they're lying to you that you have been lied to and that's why you got hacked. Yeah. So Microsoft has some great tools. Now they're finally pulling up their socks. You can use Microsoft windows defender, make sure you have it.

[00:12:09] Make sure your software is up to date. This sounds like a broken record, shorty. Yeah, the majority of computers are not up to date and get a good next generation firewall. Cisco has the best at the high end, these firepower firewalls with the FMCs and stuff. No doubt. But the fact that major companies like colonial don't have these things in place blows my mind.

[00:12:37] But again, it goes right back to you don't know what you don't know. Yeah, you

[00:12:42] Jim Polito: [00:12:42] don't, you don't well, so how can folks get in touch with you? How do they do it? Okay.

[00:12:50] Craig Peterson: [00:12:50] It out this thing on how to do the Russian keyboard, I've got it recorded. I got to edit it, but how to put it onto your computer, the right ways to do that.

[00:12:58] And that's going to be in the newsletter and you can get that and stay in Todd fight, just going to Craig peterson.com/subscribe. That's Craig Peterson with an o.com/subscribe. And you'll get my weekly newsletter. I have these little three minute trainings that I'm putting together and you'll get all of it and that's all free.

[00:13:20]If you want to hire me, that's fine. But this is all free because we've got to stop these bad guys. All right,

[00:13:27] Jim Polito: [00:13:27] Craig, thank you as usual, always a pleasure. And we'll talk to you next week.

[00:13:32] Craig Peterson: [00:13:32] Thanks again, Jim.

[00:13:32] Jim Polito: [00:13:32] Thank you. Bye-bye.

[2021-06-07-WGIR-WQSO]

Apparently, I was a bit of a ratings Bonanza, yours truly? Yes, indeed. A couple of weeks ago when I was on the air and I told my story about my alien encounter with UFO. And the, we talked more this morning about UFO's and a little bit more also about the apparent this last weekend on CNN of energy, secretary, Jennifer Granholm, who talked about how our businesses are constantly under attack and our grid is in danger.

[00:00:36] She even admitted that our grid electrical grid could be shut down by a foreign adversary. So here we go with Mr. Chris Ryan

[00:00:47] Chris Ryan: [00:00:47] It's uh, Craig Peterson. The host of tech talk on news radio 610AM and 96.7FM Saturdays and Sundays at 11:30. Craig, how are you?

[00:00:54] Craig Peterson: [00:00:54] Hey, I am doing well.

[00:00:56] Chris Ryan: [00:00:56] Appreciate joining us. So let's start with this.

[00:00:59] I don't want to do aliens each time with you, but given the fact that the second to last time you were on it was a ratings Bonanza. When you talked about the fact that you had experienced a an encounter with a UFO and we Scott the report or the leaking of what's potentially in the report from the New York times, we're all waiting this congressional report and indicates that we still don't know.

[00:01:19]Is that problematic for you as somebody that has experienced a encounter and you have the documented visual evidence and the testimony of individuals in the Navy, or is it not? Because we can't make any clear determinations based upon the fact that we have. At least reportedly not have any evidence to indicate that there is extraterrestrial life on earth.

[00:01:46]Craig Peterson: [00:01:46] It depends on what you define as evidence, right? There's the Roswell theory that somehow we were able to capture a crashed UFO with potentially aliens on board. That would be hard evidence. These types of videos that we're seeing are all in fact not just a visual videos, but they also include various other frequencies like ultraviolet, infrared.

[00:02:12] They have really done some amazing things in the military in order to track potential enemy targets. So it's one thing to say that was a cloud. Formation or maybe it was the sun reflecting off of something that might be true in the visual spectrum, Chris. But when we're talking about all these other frequencies that we're also monitoring and we see things, and that includes like radar, for instance, which is not affected by any of these visual things that we might see in the sky ourselves.

[00:02:42] Chris Ryan: [00:02:42] And the personal testimony as well. There was the there was the individual that was captain of the Naval ship that said there's basically daily occurrences that they would, or I shouldn't say daily currency. It was regular that they would see these types of phenomena and the pilots and everybody else.

[00:02:58]In my view, the report is going to indicate that yes, these things are seen, but we can't clearly say who is responsible for it because we don't have the, that much evidence. I think that's the direction that the report is going. Your thoughts on that before we move on.

[00:03:14] Yeah. We'd have to have our hands on it.

[00:03:16] It's just like when I had the encounter I wasn't taking anything away from it. If all you're doing is observing it. Through multiple frequencies. Again, we know something was there. We know it could move in ways that we just can't imagine. Yes, absolutely. It's I obviously, I believe in these things, I saw them or I've seen them before.

[00:03:39] My mother has seen them before. I know people personally who have had muddle encounters. I know people who say they can summon UFO's. And have them come down and I've seen the videos that they've taken it. This is a very interesting topic, but I agree with you again, Chris. I don't think anything totally earth shattering is going to come out of this.

[00:04:01] It's going to be, yeah. We're seeing something, we have hard evidence that something was there, but there's no way to tell exactly what it

[00:04:08] was Beth. And I'm jealous of the people that can summon UFO's. Cause I don't feel like you have any real power until you can summon a UFO Avenger. Yeah. Yeah. I got you.

[00:04:17] You can do whatever you want. Like I could discuss policy with anybody go to any sporting event, but unless you can some on a UFO, I feel like I'm a failure in life.

[00:04:26] Craig Peterson: [00:04:26] Yeah, it's interesting the way they do it too. In, it's a mental thing. They feel that as well, they have a mental bridge with these people.

[00:04:34]The law of one people. I'm not sure if you're familiar with them or not, but some of the things that they've been doing and then they use lasers in order to help the UFO's kind of pick what exactly where they are and call them up. And. And I've seen videos of entire smaller, modest, if you will, of these lights in the sky coming down and various types of light patterns and movements and just disappear again with.

[00:05:02] With 50 witnesses, who all say it absolutely happened.

[00:05:06] Chris Ryan: [00:05:06] Let's move on to Russia and the most recent cyber hack involving a major meat producer Brazilian based JBS. So just the latest on that in your view. As we heard early on that the Biden administration was pushing the Kremlin as to whether they were responsible for this attack.

[00:05:26] We haven't seen a lot of reporting basically on the circumstance surrounding JBS. They're able to regain control of that. There wasn't any it would appear major supply chain issues at this point in regard to beef production and distribution. What are your thoughts on this?

[00:05:43]Craig Peterson: [00:05:43] JBS is a pretty standard case nowadays.

[00:05:47] And I talked over the weekend here on my show about something I'm going to be releasing. Hopefully I'll get it finished today, but it gives some real evidence. Again, evidence-based that this major set of attacks, including what we saw from colonial is in fact, coming from Russia and that is. That when the ransomware first gets onto your computer system, it checks to see if you have one of, about a dozen different keyboards.

[00:06:15] Now, those keyboards are keyboards of countries that are part of the OIC, these independent states, if you will. That used to be part of the Soviet union. So the way the ransomware works and I went into some detail, I'm going to send out some videos today or tomorrow to all of my subscribers. You can see how to do it yourself.

[00:06:36] But when most ransomware gets on your computer, Chris, the first thing it does is say, do you have a Russian keyboard or Belarus or Armenian a number of different keyboards that looks for, if you have a Russian keyboard immediately? It goes ahead and doesn't install itself just exits immediately. And the theory behind this, and by the way, it can be just a virtual keyboard.

[00:07:01] Doesn't have to be a real keyboard. The theory really now comes forward. Why would they do that? Is it because these bad guys are based in an area where the Russians. Have enough control that they could grab them and throw them into a Gulag somewhere. And that seems to be what we in the security community are thinking is happening.

[00:07:22] So yeah, it really looks like it's coming from Russia. And we just had the energy secretary yesterday on CNN, Jennifer Granholm, say that. Yeah, they're happening all the time. I see them all the time. My customers are getting attacked multiple times a second. Even they're getting scanned and.

[00:07:42] President Biden came out with two executive orders now that are mandating that the federal government and its suppliers start really locking things down. And we've been working with a lot of companies in order to do that, but it smells a lot of that. This was really a Russian thing. And as again, secretary Granholm said over the weekend, we cannot pay ransoms.

[00:08:07] All it's doing is encouraging them and to see colonial pipeline, give them four and a half million dollars. Just absolutely blows my mind. I agree.

[00:08:17]Chris Ryan: [00:08:17] It's one of the basic principles and basically, cyber attackers are terrorists. You don't pay the terrorists, you don't pay them. Because when you do the next time, they want more money.

[00:08:28] It also in create creates environment of like-minded individuals are going to start to perpetrate these crimes and it's pretty easy for them to do and it seems like a lot of government entities and businesses are running blind. Craig, we got to run. Thank you so much. Take care. Craig Peterson, host of tech talk. You're on news radio 610 and 96.7 Saturdays and Sundays at 1130.

2021-06-05 1116

Craig Peterson: This is a concerning report. At least it is concerning to me and it should be to everyone, frankly, but despite Colonial Pipeline to attack the likelihood of utility sector hacks has increased as was evidenced just this week.

[00:00:15] I wish I had thought of this one because it's just so simple and those are always the best, right? The simple ways to really work around a problem. And I've brought you a few before where we talked about some of the VPN stuff. We've talked about different types of security, this particular one, though, I think takes the cake.

[00:00:36] It's absolutely amazing. If you get right down to it and think about Russian hackers, real Russian hackers, not the fake ones, not just the white house saying that's Russia and it's really China. And then it sometimes frankly, between you and me, it's hard to tell because. The Russians can easily use

[00:00:57] chinese

[00:00:57] tools.

[00:00:58] They're available to almost any hacker out there that bothers to go out of their way to grab them. And the Russian tools are much the same way. So the way you figure out whether or not it might've been China or Russia, Or a particular hacking group or another is to look how they behaved when you're there in yeah.

[00:01:17] Your computer system. So let's say you think your computer got hacked. You might look for different pieces of software or names of files or where they went, how long they were there and what kind of ransomware might they've used on yours, computer, all of those types of things. Give you a serious clue as to who it was and where they came from.

[00:01:42] You can't really tell where they came from. You can look at the IP address and a lot of people say that. Why don't you just look at the IP address? The reason you can't obviously you can look at the IP address, but the reason you can't depend on that in order to determine where someone's coming from is just like they showed in the movies where.

[00:02:02] They're trying to back trace a phone call or back trace something, and it shows up on this big world map on this huge screen. That's bigger than. A 20 foot wall and it's showing a little dot. Okay. Here's OS and oh, and came in from Des Moines. Okay. Okay. Before that they were in London. Okay.

[00:02:22] Before that they're in South Africa, they were in Russia and they were in Vancouver. You've seen that. And it shows the dots popping up and the lines being drawn between them. That is not possible. Certainly not in real time, but it's really not possible at all. Because all you have to do is have a hacker take control of a few dozen computers around the world and use them to hack you.

[00:02:51] So that bad guy is now using dozens of people's home computers, which have no real logging. No, one's really paying attention to them. You're using it for gaming or maybe a little bit of work, email, web browsing, all of that basic stuff. So you're using it for all of those things, but you're not securing that computer tightly.

[00:03:16] So they'll just use it. If they want to attack from North Korea, they can easily hop through a few different computers and then end up on a computer in Russia. And now it was like, it's coming from Russia. It's really that simple. And they have these botnets to do that. Very thing. Yeah. That's why I keep telling everybody, make sure your computer is up to date that it is in fact patched up and the bad guys are less likely to be able to use it because your computer can be used to hack somebody else.

[00:03:51] It can be used to bring a denial of service attack against someone. The distributed denial of service attacks are way up this last year. It can do a lot of things that frankly, it should not be doing. So that's why I'm always warning you guys. Cause you don't want your computer to be used in a crime. So we can't tell where these hackers are necessarily coming from, but what Brian Krebs revealed this week, I thought was absolutely brilliant.

[00:04:24] Apparently many of these ransomware guys are in fact in the Commonwealth of independent states. And that includes a few different countries, Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan all of these stands over there. And some others

[00:04:39] basically

[00:04:40] Craig Peterson: it's the former Soviet union countries. So they're part of this Commonwealth of independent states.

[00:04:46] And if you're living in there, let's say you're in Russia and you're in Moscow. And you're using computers. You're sending out ransomware and you wanna make some bucks off of it by charging people a ransom. You need to be darn careful that you do not ransom any Russian computers or in fact, any of these Russian affiliate computers.

[00:05:11] Because if you do, you're going to have the gremlin coming down on top of you. They do not take kindly to it. And I don't know if you've seen any of these Russian. Prisons jails doesn't seem like place. Most people would want to end up at some pretty bad places and you don't stand a chance.

[00:05:29] Okay. So the bad guys are trying to be careful. So if you're sending them ransomware, that's indiscriminate, I'm not talking about a dark side going after colonial pipeline where they're aiming at colonial pipeline. There. Aiming at one specific business. Cause they know that business has money to pay. And you got to ask yourself, why did they aim at colonial?

[00:05:54] Was it just because of the money? Because they knew they could pay. Because we've had water plants, ransomed police departments, Ranson. We just had meat, the largest meat processor in the world. Branson is this a pattern where they're checking our critical infrastructure, the ability to put fuel in our vehicles.

[00:06:17] The ability to have electricity. I have food. Is that what's going on? I really don't know, but I can tell you almost all of the ransoms that are out there are indiscriminate. So you can't just sit there and say I'm not going to get ransom because I'm not colonial pipeline or I'm not a meeting.

[00:06:33] Packer, et cetera, et cetera. It's not gonna affect me. I'm too small. No one cares about me and I can get my business back online in a day, a week at the most. And you may be able to, okay, but you are still the target because almost all of this ransomware is random. Basically it's distributed in emails, sent out to millions of people that have no idea where it's gonna end up at.

[00:06:59] So let's say that you get this ransomware and you open it up and it's a business and all of a sudden you get ransomed. How does the ransomware know if you are in the Commonwealth of independent states? How does it know that your businesses in Russia or Kazakhstan or Armenia or one of these other countries.

[00:07:23]Basically it, it doesn't. And I'm I know I'm going to get, let me just double check Armenia here, because I know I'm going to get all kinds of flack from people. Yeah. All camera and yet Armenia is part of it. It doesn't know. Or at least it doesn't know if it doesn't check and that's the beauty of this, but Brian Krebs did Brian Krebs came out and said, and I think he got it from someone else too, but he's the one that really populated it, our populated popularized it.

[00:07:56] What this ransomware software parently does is it looks at your computer for something very simple. Now what could you look at if you were writing ransomware? What might you want to just check real quick? That's a real quick check. You can see if you are probably within the Commonwealth of independent states or maybe you're on a computer in a Russian embassy in the United States, which you also don't want to hack while why don't you just look at the keyboard?

[00:08:27] Apparently, that's what they're doing. They look at the keyboard of the computer when it gains control of the computer. And I'm not talking about the physical keyboard because many people worldwide use a us standard keyboard, but. What they're looking for is a keyboard. And when I'm saying a keyboard in this case, I'm talking about a virtual keyboard in one of a few languages, including Russian isn't that something.

[00:09:02] So they looked at this dark side, ransomware and cyber reason did some reverse engineering on it and he found. Which languages you can have virtual languages on your keyboard. Now you might already have them. I've got French on mine, as well as English. You might have Spanish. I don't know.

[00:09:23] There's the Chinese, there's a lot of the Mandarin. If you have Russian Ukrainian, Armenian, or a number of these others, Romanian, any of those languages that are part of, again, this Commonwealth of independent states as former Soviet union on your computer as a virtual keyboard. Yeah, it doesn't have to be a real keyboard, just a virtual keyboard.

[00:09:49] This particular piece of nastiness, this ransomware from dark side will immediately shut itself down. Isn't that amazing? So simply put, there are countless versions types, strains of malware that check to see if you have one of these languages installed on your system. And if they're detected, the malware will immediately exit and will not even install itself.

[00:10:20] Isn't that something. Yeah. So whether or not we can absolutely tell if something's from Russia or China or North Korea or someone somewhere else. We do know that having one of these Russian keyboards or again, one of the stands, et cetera, keyboards on your computer. Will short circuit, the ransomware and a won't even install itself.

[00:10:47] Isn't that just amazing. So look in your newsletter. That's coming out this weekend and have a look and I've put together a whole thing about this, a little video. You have to watch Craig peterson.com.

[00:11:02]This particular app is called citizen and we've seen apps. There's millions of them out there nowadays. The do almost anything. Absolutely. Anything, and this particular app, you can find online. I'm going right now to their website. It's called citizen.com and it looks like their initial idea was that they would have an app that would allow kind of citizen reporters.

[00:11:31] So you could just go and you could be like a journalist and take videos and post them up. And other people could go and look at what's happening with the house fire or, yeah. Fire hydrant that got crashed into rescues, all kinds of stuff. It's really cool. I liked that idea, but they're saying that they want you to connect and to be able to live more safely.

[00:11:58] This is a personal safety network that empowers you to protect yourself and the people and places you care about. It's really cool. They added into it. Some COVID-19 contact tracing real-time nine 11 alert, instant help from crisis to reap crisis reporters and safety tracking for friends and families.

[00:12:19] Now we use a, an app as well for safety tracking called life 360. And it'll know if you're in a car accident. And in fact my wife and I, we were out driving and we had a carb or our car broke down the. Whole front assembly of the car, the electronics, and it stopped working for some reason. So the fan wasn't blowing and it was fine though.

[00:12:47] We didn't notice anything all winter long, and then here comes summer and we're stopped in traffic and all of a sudden the car overheats. That's why. And so we called. Had got a hold of a tow truck who came and told us. And ultimately we got that whole thing fixed, but what amazed me was that this life 360 app sent a text to the family, letting everybody know that we were okay.

[00:13:15] The car's being towed. I'm not even sure how it knew the car was being towed, because we did not use the life 360 app in order to get a tow. It was really quite surprising because it's included, towing's included with this app. So there's all kinds of cool ones. There's lots of them out there that do this sort of thing.

[00:13:35] Of course, if you have apple gear or your family, you can automatically track them, see where they're at and what's going on. And. This particular app can do some of those same things, but they're really focusing in on safety. They have a cool site. If you go and check it out [email protected] and on their site, they're talking about you real time safety alerts for your neighborhood.

[00:14:03] So there's a Burr burglar that's just broken in and they're showing a picture of New York city, which I think it makes a lot more sense there than it does in Podunk new England. Okay, where we're yeah, things can happen, but they're very rare. And it's not as though you're going to try and avoid it because you're not in that area anyways.

[00:14:24] Anyways, they know it and they are saying, Hey know, the whole story faster. So that's the basics of this particular app. But. Here's where it has crossed that line with mission creep. Apparently they want to be in the police business. And this is from a website called tech dirt. They've got all kinds of great technology articles, Tim Cushing put it together, but he's saying that the app developers have purchased at least one fake police patrol vehicle.

[00:14:58]They're out in LA. They co-branded it with Los Angeles professionals security and they've been driving it around Los Angeles, California. Now take a [email protected]. I don't know if it's. If it's a blogs to those citizen guides, it's a nice site. So it might, they very heavy graphical site and showing their services.

[00:15:23] So I'm guessing it's not, I think this is a third party, so that they've co-branded it with them. But the question is how far should private companies be able to go in the business of enforcing the law? Because in most cases, I think most people would say, no, that's really not something private businesses should be getting into.

[00:15:47] Law enforcement is something a little tricky. And we know that now because of all of this stuff has been going on with law enforcement, should we, do you fund the police? Where should we put in our money? All that sort of other stuff? These guys are citizens. Apparently citizen apparently have always been willing to blur the lines between government employees police department and their app because it debuted as vigilante.

[00:16:18] That's where it started. It was an app developed by this American technology incubator back in 2015. And they changed it from vigilante to citizen. But apparently some of the motivation behind this just hasn't changed, which is scary when you get right into it. They are also one of these. Bug companies that is trying to have kind of an on-demand security force.

[00:16:49] Now, I don't know how much history you guys know, particularly in this case, I'm thinking about fire departments and in many cases, in many areas of the us, the government did not run the fire department. So for instance, we're talking about the You know your town, right? Nowadays your town probably runs the VAR department.

[00:17:11] You may have private or contracted ambulance services. But these guys are doing something that was done in New York city around the turn of the last century, where and before, where you would contract with a private organization that. You paid and they would provide you with fire department type services.

[00:17:37] So you'd put a medallion there on your front door or a door jam. And that medallion was for the fire department that you signed up with. Now, in some cases that fire department might be at the scene of a fire, but the place that's burning. Was not contracted with them, so they didn't bother doing anything.

[00:18:01] And the whole place burned to the ground. Interesting. Isn't it? Because you, you have to ask, what are the motivations behind it? If it's a public fire department that your town is running, they have one would assume an obligation towards all of the citizens of their town, but they would certainly go and help mutual aid.

[00:18:23] Another town. Same. Thing's true with ambulance services. Cause I was involved with it. So a little bit about it, but leaked emails. This is according to vice.com are showing that this crime app citizen is testing on demand security force. What could happen is you're using the app and you decide you want some security to show up just like he might rent private security, for an event that you're holding at your home, you could say, ah, here's an incident.

[00:18:57] Now think about the incidents that the police respond to. It's everything from his dog took a Wu on my lawn all the way through she's beating her husband. Okay. All kinds of things could be happening, but. We'll see what happens. I think that this is mission creep. I think it's gone a little too far.

[00:19:19] I don't think our police departments are getting the support they need from some areas of our communities. And thank goodness we don't live in the big cities or some of us live in the big cities that are listening, but most of us are in much more rural settings where we don't have the same problems.

[00:19:39]We've got fact checkers that are more like opinion enforcers and Florida has had enough of it. Florida has just passed a law, a ban on band. We're going to talk about that right now. And does it cross the line?

[00:19:55]Florida is pretty upset with what happened in this last election. And more importantly, they're upset. At least the lawmakers with these bands that have been going on. Of course by now Facebook and Twitter and others have decided that they, and they alone are the arbitrators of what is right.

[00:20:20] What is wrong? What is true? What is false? What is fake news? What is not fake news? And they have appointed a number of people. Most of them pretty darn young, who get to decide whether it's true now. They don't have to these truth moderators, if you will, don't have. To bother researching something.

[00:20:43] Oh, heaven, bad. Why would they want to research something that president Trump or some other conservative or libertarian would say? No, of course not. So they don't even bother doing a basic duck. Duck, go search little on a Google search to try and figure out whether or not something is. True. These fact-finders aren't finding fact and many people have had enough of it.

[00:21:15] So Florida had a Senate bill, 70, 72 that they passed and it provides several new checks. And balances on technology and social media companies. So I want to go through the top ones here. This is an article over on tech crunch, but they're saying number one, among other things, platforms cannot ban or de prioritize candidates for state office.

[00:21:46] Now that's a big one because they have been somewhat. Some of these districts, not just in Florida, but nationwide where it looked like the conservative was going to win all of a sudden a week or even a few days before the election. That's when they usually do most of their ad buying and spending.

[00:22:05] When people are finally paying attention in those last few days of a campaign, they get banned. So they are say explicitly saying you cannot ban state office candidates. Number two platforms. And remember mark Zuckerberg said that he was never going to do that. I remember that quite clearly, as long as my memory is still working, platforms cannot ban or de prioritize any news outlet, meeting certain size requirements.

[00:22:37] In other words, Hey, you don't have to report everything from Joe's media, but you sure as heck have to from AP or Fox news or any of these others. Platforms number three must be transparent about moderation processes and give users notice of moderation acts actions. Now this is a very big deal. Because the moderation processes are anything but transparent.

[00:23:07] As I said, near, as we can tell, it's a bunch of teenagers who don't bother doing any actual research on the facts or the science, they just go for it and band people in band things. One of my daughters last week. Posted a little article w actually, I guess it was a repost of an article and she made a comment on it and it disappeared from her timeline.

[00:23:34] Now I asked her what it was about and she said then this is what it was dad. And not a big deal. I don't know why they would ban it, but they did. And they did not notify her at all. So they didn't tell her. And apparently they're not telling, as we've heard from so many people, they're not telling anybody who is in political office, why they're being banned or that something was banned or quote unquote moderated.

[00:23:59] They, this is just getting crazy again. It has to do with companies getting to. Darn big. Now we'll get into that in just a minute. And then the fourth thing is users and the state will have the right to Sue companies that violate the law. Statutory fines could be as high as $250,000 per day for some offenses.

[00:24:22] I think that part of it, frankly, is probably a pretty darn good idea. So I'm I just said they get too big. They've gotten too big and I've been complaining about a number of companies for a long time. Most of these companies got started using nefarious techniques. They really did, and it's easily arguable.

[00:24:45] It has been argued in court and these bigger companies, they were talking about these tech companies, social media companies, they have lost their cases in court. Not every case, obviously, but they have lost in court. They do some pretty nasty things to get started. And then once they've got the momentum, they use the money in order to keep everybody else out of the business.

[00:25:13] It's crazy. We've talked about that before these multi-billion dollar valuations for companies that are starting to threaten Facebook's dominance. Now a company that should be worth maybe 10 or $20 million, Facebook pays over 1,000,000,004, just so that they can make sure they get their hands on it. So how do we deal with this?

[00:25:34]I don't think government regulators usually help a lot here because all the regulations they put in place just to make it better for the big guys, is he, it goes back to a barber's license. I want to go all the way back down to a barber's license. If someone knows how to cut a hair, why do they need a barber's license?

[00:25:53]Really, buyer beware, but a barber's license only does one thing. It's like a medallion for a taxi in the city. It allows. The group, the union of taxi drivers or the barbers who are in a state to say, we don't want any more barbers because that's going to drive the price down. So we are going to make sure the state limits the number of barber licenses.

[00:26:20] So it isn't really about we want to make sure that your taxi ride is safe in New York city. No, it's about. That medallion, that license, that taxi driver has to drive a taxi in New York city. It's about that medallion being worth $1.2 million. $1.2 million to have one cab in New York city. Tell me there isn't corruption there.

[00:26:44] So I don't like the idea of the government trying to regulate these huge tech companies, because the big companies can handle the regulation. It's Amazon's been out saying yeah, we need to tax the internet tax internet. And there are almost 10,000. Unique taxing entities in the United States of America.

[00:27:04] So how can you as an individual worry about all of these rules and regulations and withhold the right taxes and send them to the right people and fill out the right forms. You can't. That's why you have a store in Etsy, but Amazon can, and it keeps everybody else out of the market. A small company cannot compete because of the regulations that were put in place that Amazon supported and got put in place to keep all of the competitors out of the market.

[00:27:37] Absolutely. Very big deal. And so now we've got Florida saying. Hey guys, we've got to do something about this, but there are obviously some first amendment issues here. Although the first amendment is primarily for government. We do have a general right to free speech. I think a lot of conservatives get it wrong.

[00:27:59] It isn't, the corporations don't have to honor the first amendment because I think that is integral to everything we do

[00:28:08]Boy, Arizona has been in the news a lot. And I'm going to talk about another lawsuit that Arizona's involved in, and this has to do with Google tracking you, even when you turn off tracking.

[00:28:22]Amazon has all kinds of great devices. I talk about them. Quite frequently, I have a couple of echos in my home and I tend to use Apple's home kit based devices. When they're available. Siri has a completely different. Approach to how to process languages than Amazon or Google do. So for instance, what apple does with Siri is it tries to process what it's hearing locally.

[00:28:50] So when you're talking, when you're asking questions, et cetera, it's really running right there on your apple watch or phone or pad, tablet, or computer, whatever it is, they try and do the processing locally on your device. And

[00:29:04] that

[00:29:05] Craig Peterson: helps keep it private. Amazon and Google are quite the opposite. They want to know everything that's going on.

[00:29:13] So when you say Alexa, or Hey, Google, they both start listening. They record the audio and they send it on up. To the internet and once it's there and their servers, it turns it into of course text. And then it uses a kind of a machine language machine learning thing to figure out what it is you mean, and then give you the answer.

[00:29:37] And that's why many times the answers you'll get from either Google home or the Amazon Alexa family. Those answers tend to be a little better, much of the time than what you get from apple. Apple is continually improving their technology. But again, remember apple tries to keep our data private, which I think is very important to you.

[00:30:02] And to me, no question about it. So what is happening right now is Amazon says You've got a, an echo or whatever might be like one of those ring doorbells at Amazon now owns. And we've talked before about those being tied into police departments, thousands of them now across the country, where they can look at the video, coming from your doorbell to try and figure out who might be committing a crime in the neighborhood.

[00:30:31] And there's good and there's bad tobacco, just like most other things. So that doorbell. A ring doorbell has built into it, some wifi connectivity. So it will connect to the wifi in your home. So does obviously the echo device, we guess it doesn't even have anything net port on it. You have to connect it via wifi.

[00:30:55] So if you're connecting it via wifi, Amazon's thinking maybe what we should do is share your wifi with other people. Now, this concept is called a mesh concept and it's pretty common. It's pretty popular.

[00:31:13] There

[00:31:13] Craig Peterson: are many people who are thinking that the mesh is going to help ultimately with these automated cars driving around.

[00:31:20] But in reality, the whole mesh thing in this case is without your direct consent sharing, the data you have, not just with your own devices, but with anyone's. Amazon devices. Amazon's calling this Amazon sidewalk and this whole new mash network and service is going to share, a fairly small slice of your internet bandwidth with nearby neighbors who don't have connectivity.

[00:31:53] Don't have the connectivity you have. So obviously this is going to affect people more in dense. Urban areas or at least denser areas where there's a lot of people around and you want to have your Amazon echo, but you don't have internet service. No problem. You can just piggyback on somebody else's internet service.

[00:32:14]I'm not sure I like that very much. So I went in and turned it off and I'll tell you how to do that here in just a minute. So the other quest side of this is well, How helpful should you be? Could you be right? Aren't we all socialists now is not the idea. You've got the AOC driving her high-end Tesla, the one with the extended range.

[00:32:38] And yet at the same time, she's complaining about her mother in Puerto Rico who didn't get government funding because of what Trump did. So instead of selling her Tesla, in other words, instead of helping her mother out nano, she's just going to complain that the government didn't right. I guess that's your typical AOC, maybe your typical socialist, but here's what we're talking about here.

[00:33:00] All of the Amazon devices that includes the Alexa, the echo, the ring there's security cameras, outdoor lights, motion, sensors, and tile trackers are going to enroll. Into this Amazon sidewalk system. And since very few people, I mean like a handful actually take the time to walk through the default settings.

[00:33:25] That means millions of people are going

[00:33:27] to

[00:33:28] Craig Peterson: be automatically in this program, whether they know about it or not. It's I guess it's concerning, right? I think if it's informed consent, that's one thing. But I don't know on the other side now let's talk about the service itself here for a minute before we get into whether or not you should turn it off, but it is a shared network.

[00:33:51] And it does help. The various Amazon devices work better. Amazon's not charging customers for it, but other people, Amazon customers might use your bandwidth and Amazon is not paying you or compensating you new in any way for that bandwidth that you are paying for. It's going to extend the low bandwidth working range of all of these Amazon devices to help find pets, for instance, tile trackers, which is an interesting thing in and of itself because Amazon came out with the competitor to tile.

[00:34:26] That's going to be much, much more successful than tile ever was. I think this might be the main reason. Yeah. Behind this. It might be spurned it along. I have a friend who's a video videographer professionally. So what he does it for news networks and he was heading over to Israel to be stationed over there for one of these networks for number of years.

[00:34:51] Yeah. And he asked me about Tyler. He says, oh, I don't want to lose anything while I'm over there. So I get tile. The way tile works is it uses low power Bluetooth, and you attach this little device, it looks like a little tile. It's a small rectangle. You attach it to something you don't want to lose. And so the low powered Bluetooth.

[00:35:12] Is now used to connect to other devices that can talk to tiles. So if you have an iPhone and Android, whatever it might be, and you have the tile app on it and you walk by someone else's tile, it will go ahead and inform the owner of the towel. We found it's over here. That's cool, isn't it? But the problem is someone else with the tile app needs to walk by the tile that has been lost.

[00:35:45] Now, most of the time, we're just looking for our keys in our houses, but in his case, he was thinking I'm going to be in Israel, who knows where I'm going to end up leaving stuff because I'm a videographer and I might drop things as I'm going. And it could be a bit of a. Problem while it's not going to do you any good, unless someone that also uses tile walks by closely to your loss device.

[00:36:12] And that's the same way that it works with apple, with their new little tile type devices, but in the apple case, it works because every iPhone in the world participates in this little network to find your lost devices. That's a big plus tile doesn't have that. So now with Amazon sidewalk, Being able to now detect tile devices from many millions of devices more than they could have before.

[00:36:44] I think it's going to be a very big deal. So if you have a tile tracker, it's going to be good. And a lot of people use them also to find their pets that might take off every once in a while. It's going to help. Devices stay online, even if they're outside the range of the home. Why fi they're talking about having special sidewalk, enabled devices, like smart security and lighting and diagnostics, appliances and tools.

[00:37:11] So the biggest question I had when it came to sidewalk and whether or not I should turn it off really was is it secure and how much bandwidth is it going to use? The maximum bandwidth of a sidewalk bridge to the sidewalk server is 80 kilobits a second. So that's hardly anything, frankly. That's about a 40th of the bandwidth that you choose to stream a high Def television video.

[00:37:38] But remember too, that this bandwidth might be down. It also might be up and et cetera, but it's still, it's a very small amount. They also are capping the amount of bandwidth that's used by sidewalk per account per month at 500 megabytes. So that's streaming again, about 10 minutes of high definition video.

[00:38:00] It isn't too bad. We'll see. Now, as far as the security goes, that's where it gets interesting. It doesn't make things worse either. Amazon's published this white paper that details that technical innards of this. The sidewalk service and it looks like it is designed to protect the privacy and security of Amazon sidewalk.

[00:38:26] So the paper's pretty comprehensive. No, I haven't seen anybody. I did some searching for it. I haven't seen anybody complaining about encryption or other safeguards that may be were overlooked, but there's enough theoretical risk to really give. Me pause. So that's what I did. If you open your Alexa app on your mobile device, you can go into the settings and you'll find sidewalk in there.

[00:38:55] So you're going to go to the Alexa app. You're going to open more and select settings and then your account settings and then Amazon sidewalk. And you're going to be able to turn it off. That's what I did. I think maybe that's what you should do as well. And I've got that in this week's newsletter. Make sure you sign up.

[00:39:15] Craig peterson.com/subscribe.

[00:39:21]This is amazing to me. I can't resist these types of articles where we're using technology to substantially help people. And we've talked about people who are locked in and what we've done, that we being the technology community to help them in various ways.

[00:39:39] Of course, you're probably familiar with Stephen Hawking, just a great intellect in the science field. It doesn't sound like he was such a great person otherwise, but that's another story entirely. And what's been done for him. We've been doing a whole lot of research on brains brainwave patterns.

[00:39:58] How can we interfere? What can we do? So for instance, it's something you're probably familiar with rush Limbaugh before he passed. You might remember he was losing his hearing. And that caused his voice to change because he no longer had the ability to hear himself speak. In fact, right now I'm sitting here talking into a microphone and I have headphones on so I can hear myself as well.

[00:40:26] I actually don't feel comfortable not hearing myself. Isn't that something right. Oh way back. When I first started doing video stuff back in college, I didn't want to hear myself. And now I have to, so I can keep quality control right on volumes and home speaking, making sure I'm not popping the microphone.

[00:40:46] Okay. And you notice that it didn't pop very well. That's good. Or a hissing NASA's and other things. So he had a harder time. Being understood because of this. And he got a cochlear implant. Now I've been paying a lot of attention to the inner ear lately because I've been having some issues with my inner ear.

[00:41:07] I even got one of those huge charts. Like you might seem the doctor's office, naughty ologist office showing all of the working parts inside the ear. It's fascinating. What happened with him? I'm not entirely sure, but I do know how a cochlear implant works and that is you have, in his case, I've surgically implanted behind his ear, actually behind and above his ear, a little receiver.

[00:41:37] And that receiver then sends electrical signals into ultimately the brain. So it does it through the cochlea, just like the normal world, but he had to learn how to hear again. He had to learn how to speak again, but he already knew how obviously, and so having that cochlear implant made a huge difference to him.

[00:42:01] And then what he did is he would hook up externally. On this receiver on, that was in his skull embedded in his skull a magnetic interface that tied into some external equipment that had the microphones and things. So he could hear very cool. I'm looking right now at an article from ARS Technica, John Timmer about this gentleman who was blind.

[00:42:27] Kind of still lives, but he was absolutely blind. He could tell that there was a little bit of light, but that's all he could tell. He couldn't make out anything. And they did a whole bunch of tests before. And after that, I'll share with you that are just phenomenal, but they were able to do all of this using an engineered virus and some external equipment here.

[00:42:53] So looking again at how our nerves work throughout the body, you might remember you've got these electrical impulses that are created through these ion channels, which let the ions flow in and out of the cells, but controlling the flow of these ions can really give us some more opportunity to do things.

[00:43:14] We couldn't do any other way. There's some channels by the way, that are made by bacteria and other organisms that don't have nerves, but that's not what we're going to worry about right now, but they've discovered the channels that only allow ions to flow after being triggered. By light of specific wavelengths.

[00:43:35] What that means when we're talking about light and wavelengths, we are talking about yellow or blue or red, right? Each color has its own frequency. It's own wavelength. So when you're talking about late wave length, you might be talking about meters. If you're in the ham world all the way on, down through nanometers, if you're in the computer world, but every light, every shade has a specific frequency.

[00:44:05] So finding these ions that were sensitive to specific frequencies was a huge win and light activated nerve activity. Of course is part of everybody's normal biology and it's being done in our eyes. And then it goes through the optic nerve to the center in the brain that processes all of that stuff.

[00:44:27] In fact, some of it's even processed in that nerve and then the eyes itself, but they have used a life light, sensitive channel and some specialized goggles that allows someone who is otherwise blind to be able to locate objects. So we're not talking about yeah, that is a yellow lab, but. As in an, a dog they're talking about being able to.

[00:44:53] Identify where objects are and they did some tests on it, which is very cool. So this research team in France engineered a virus to carry this light sensitive channel and they marked the virus with a fluorescent protein. So researchers could figure out which cells the viruses were actually infected.

[00:45:13] Dean and they injected it into the volunteers. I of course, completely blind. So he didn't mind were there. Some of these infected cells included the nerve cells that carried the information through the optic nerve and into the brain. So you see what's happening here now. So basically what he's doing is infecting some of these nerves so that they can become sensitive to this light where they weren't sensitive before.

[00:45:43] Which again, just very cool what they're doing. So these aren't the same as these fancy cells, the rods and cones and things that we have in the back of our eyes to sense light, but it did convert these cells and delight sensitive nerve cells. And this particular channel, not too sensitive, too much light it's primarily yellowish colors.

[00:46:06] So what they did then is they hooked up the computer to it. They compensated for it. So think about old movies, black and white movies, or maybe SEPA movies. And. They're really, there's very few colors involved in various shades of gray or various shades of way back when, so they use the computer to process the visual information from the goggles through the goggles to match the frequencies that he could see.

[00:46:38]Very cool. So when they were, when they sat this guy down and I'm looking at a picture of him with a one of those hats on, that measures all of your brain waves about when they sat him down, after some of his visual perception was restored. He was able to reach out and grab objects with a 92% success rate.

[00:47:03] Now, when there were multiple objects on the table, he was able to count them correctly over 60% of the time, which is phenomenal because you remember all they could do before was see, yeah, there is light out or there is no light out or it's a very bright light, right? Or there's no light. So it's very cool.

[00:47:23] And the authors of this study are suggesting using the viruses fluorescent tag to really help explore this more. What other cells could they in fact, do they need to use a different type of virus? What are they doing? So even though I'm not into virus and manipulation and gain of function research, I think this is absolutely amazing.

[00:47:47]So speaking of technology, speaking about some of the problems that we have a very big reliant on electricity. Most of us don't have big generators. I think frankly, most of us don't have generators at all. I do. I've had generators since I moved back to new England.

[00:48:10] 35 years ago or so 30 plus years ago, because we do lose power here. We get these winter storms that get nasty, even in the summertime with these big thunderstorms, the big wind. Sometimes they'll blow over trees they'll cause nothing but headache for all of us. So it gets to be a real problem. Texas had a real bout of that.

[00:48:33] You might remember they had major problems with wind generation and even some of their other plants. Nuclear dropped a whole bunch of megawatt generation and they. Really we're in a tough spot, but it's now come out that they were in a tougher spot than any of us really fought their days long power outages during February or deep freeze, it could have easily stretched out into weeks or even months.

[00:49:07] Thanks to a failure of what's called black start. Generators now, you and I, we have a generator. If we cut over to it, we're obviously disconnecting ourselves from the street power. And now we are switching over to our generator and most of the time the generators are big enough to handle a few circuits in the house.

[00:49:29] So maybe it's providing power to the pumps in your, and fans and your furnace. Maybe it's providing power to a few light switches or TV or things. Most people don't have huge generators. Like I do. I've got a hundred kilowatt, three phase generator here set up for the house, but I also have a lot of equipment at the house, a lot of equipment, but we won't go into all the details, but I can run the whole house on the generator, which to me is an important thing to be able to do.

[00:50:04] How about when the grid loses power? How about when a plant goes down, whether it's burning things like wood waste products nuclear or gas turbines. Even of course we lose power from water generation plants. And what happens if those go out? What happens if the power? Cause we get a lot of power down from the LG projects up in Quebec.

[00:50:33] What happens if that power goes away? How do we turn it back on it? Isn't as simple as what we do in the house, because remember in the house, we're actually interrupting the power as we switch back and forth. And if much about electricity, That there is this sign wave, right? That goes up and down.

[00:50:50] And that side sine wave runs at 60 cycles per second, 60 Hertz. And that 60 Hertz signal gets interrupted when we switched from our generator to the street, because those frequencies don't line up. It has to be interrupted. There's other reasons as well, but for the home stuff, but it has to be interrupted because we are not.

[00:51:14] Synchronous with the power grid. Think about the power grid itself. All of the places we're getting power. We're getting them now from people's rooves, we're getting them from small windmills to large windmills were getting them from Canada in the form of DC that we have to then change over to AC and sync up with our power grids.

[00:51:38] There's still nuclear power coming from right out in the Portsmouth area, New Hampshire. We've got it all from a bunch of different sources and they all have to be. Absolutely in sync. If they're not, you're going to end up burning out some of these power generation systems and that's really a bad thing, right?

[00:52:01] You could melt wires. You're going to completely blow breakers and blow them in such a way that it's going to have to be replaced. Not just you blew it. And a trip Texas, who was in a position where they were just minutes away from losing the grid. Minutes five minutes or less. That's how close it came.

[00:52:24] Then their power. They were able to get some of it back and keep things going. But what happens when the grid fails and it does fail. Look at what happened in 2004 here in the Northeast, primarily affected New York city and New York state, but it did affect Connecticut as well as Rhode Island, parts of mass.

[00:52:46] We lost the grid. In order to get that grid back online, we have to synchronize everything. And that's what these black start generators are. And we have them in new England, ISO new England is the name of the grid that covers all of new England and they have all kinds of. Plans in place, you can get approved to be a black star generator.

[00:53:11] No, you and I aren't going to be approved. I'm pretty sure that cause the costs started about a million and a half and go up to about $30 million. But the idea here is these black start generators are extremely big generators and they are used to start synchronizing the grid. If the good word to go down, if it were to fail, we would start by having a black star generator that now is giving that 60 Hertz frequency that the next plant can start coming online and synchronize itself with that.

[00:53:49] And then the next one. And then the next one, that's why Texas is saying if we were to actually lose the grid, it would take weeks, right? Maybe even months to come back online. And that's because more than half of Texas is a 28 black start generators more than half of them. Which are absolutely crucial to bring a failed collapsed grid back online, more than half of them expected outage or experienced outages themselves.

[00:54:21] That's according to a new report by the wall street journal. So of the 13 primary generators, nine encountered trouble as did six of the 15 secondary generators acting as backups in case the primary backups failed. Now, why did they have problems while some had trouble getting fuel to run? Think about diesel, right?

[00:54:44] It gels up in cold temperatures. I don't know if they're using number one or number two down there, but they had problems getting fuel to the generator. Others were damaged by the cold weather. Think about the cooling systems for these big honkin generators. And they really had some serious problems.

[00:55:05]Very big problems. Here's a quote from Evan Wilner. He served as Delaware's public advocate for utility customers. He said having had experience for almost two decades with utilities, it's genuinely inconceivable to me, even in today's re massively deregulated environment. I cannot imagine how any oversight got itself into this position.

[00:55:31] And I have to agree with that. It would be absolutely terrible. Think even about the utilities now they're not generating money now. Of course they don't really care because most of the time, these public utilities get to keep it percentage of their costs. So the higher the cost, the happier they are because they get to charge you.

[00:55:51] More. So just before 2:00 AM is a frequency drop to 59.4 Hertz where we're supposed to be 60. And then to 59.3 Hertz grid operators began shedding load. In other words, they were cutting off power to portions of the grid, which reduced demand and brought the frequency back to the target. Of 60 Hertz. So if they've been unable to bring a back up power plants would have been forced offline to avoid damage to their equipment.

[00:56:21] As I had just mentioned, and I was speaking with someone who has some knowledge of this and new England, and apparently we are not much better off than Texas. We could have a massive failure of our grid.

[00:56:37]This is a concerning report. At least it is concerning to me and it should be to everyone, frankly, but despite colonial pipeline to attack the likelihood of utility sector hacks has increased as was evidenced just this week.

[00:56:53]Colonial pipeline was a huge wake up call to some companies. Now I got to say, most companies still aren't doing enough. They don't think it's going. You're going to hit them, not going to affect them. It's just going to be too expensive to do it. We have one client who we have had now for more than 30 years and a big company.

[00:57:17] And we were protecting one of their divisions and their division here in the. U S was pretty profitable. In fact, it was one of their few profitable divisions for many years, and we had installed some really good cybersecurity equipment and software, and it worked so well that when the entire company worldwide got hit with ransomware, there was only one division.

[00:57:50] That was able to stay up and stay online. The rest of it, then they lost hundreds of millions of dollars because of it. The rest of the company went dark. They had to shut everything off. They had to try and recover just a total nightmare. And it's a nightmare we've seen again and again and again, and remember.

[00:58:09] These bad guys. Yeah. They may target some specific businesses or industries, but the majority of the bad guys that are sending out ransomware are just doing it in a haphazard fashion. And according to the statistics here about a third of businesses can expect to get hit with ransomware this year. It's really that bad, we're just sitting here, crossing our fingers, saying, oh, backups are going to cover it for us.

[00:58:39] And they might. But you've got to detect these things early and you've got to be able to do something about it. Our friends at colonial were hacked by a group called dark side and they have since gone dark, their main control systems for their web server. We're over on the dark web are apparently the seized by law enforcement, their money that was in their account and they made over $30 million is gone.

[00:59:11] It's hard to say. Was it taken by law enforcement as well? Which they do using cryptocurrency doesn't mean that no one knows what you're doing because they do. So it might've been seized by the government. We've seen that happen before. We've seen the secret service seize funds before, or it might have been taken by the bad guys and put into other accounts, but.

[00:59:36] I think it's almost needless to say those people from dark side may have shut down dark side, but they came from somewhere. All of them were expert ransomware people and they went somewhere. Just because they shut down dark side doesn't mean that they're not still out there trying to hack us. And I saw a 300% increase in ransomware last year and we saw about a doubling in payouts by businesses.

[01:00:04] It's real people. It's real. Yeah. And the same, thing's true for you as an individual. I want to remind everyone that if you look in this week's newsletter, I have instructions on what to do. This will stop almost all Russian malware. It's just incredible. It's fairly simple to do. And by doing it, it's 15 minutes max worth of work.

[01:00:30] Any ransomware that gets onto your computer. Will not install. It's really that simple. All right. So the key metrics that we're looking at when we're talking about cyber attacks have to do with the window of exposure, and that is a key metric that indicates. The exposure to cyber breaches for software applications, and specifically, they were looking in this white hat security, you report at the utilities sector.

[01:01:04] And they're showing that the utilities sector, the window of exposure increased since the start of the year. What does that all mean? Bottom line, it said that the colonial pipeline ransomware attack also expose the risks for vulnerable software and quick quote here from white hat application.

[01:01:27] Specific attacks are equally, if not more likely than ransomware. What they're talking about here is people attacking a specific application. One of the ones that we've seen a lot that Microsoft keeps warning people about is Microsoft's very own remote desktop. That's an application. It has had a lot of security problems and they are continuing to release patches and people aren't paying attention to it.

[01:01:54] And we, we see that all the time where there's. Patches that are out there. And yet companies aren't installing them. I get it. I, this week I took my own medicine. I have a Macintosh. That is my main computers from 2013. Yeah. It's that old it's coming up on. What we won't be long. It's going to be a decade old and I have not upgraded the software on that Mac now to the latest release.

[01:02:23]Apple came up with big Sur and I hadn't upgraded it. So I bit the bullet. Cause I've been complaining about Microsoft. You might've seen it if he listened to my podcast, which you can get by going to Craig peterson.com/itunes or. Craig peterson.com/podcast. So I posted a podcast this week, where I was blaming Microsoft for these hacks and the reason I'm blaming Microsoft, isn't so much that they have bugs in their software that bad guys use.

[01:02:56] Consistently use. That's not why I was blaming Microsoft. Although I'd love to see them pull up their socks, spend some of those billions of dollars in cash that they have spend it on tightening things up a little more than they have been, but they have been doing some tightening up. Kudos to them for trying to do the right thing at last.

[01:03:16] So they've been trying to tighten it up, but here's why blame them. People are afraid to do upgrades and updates. And I can't blame people for being afraid of it. When you get right down to it, you look at it and say, wow, if I upgrade my windows machine, is it going to break my machine? In other words, will my computer become useless and I'm going to have to re-install and re-install all my software, right?

[01:03:44] That's always a pain or hopefully I have a backup and try and re-install from the backup. And that's why, when we're doing backups for businesses, And we actually have a backup that we can spin up in a virtual environment. So it's part of that ultimate business recovery that you need to be able to do to be able to survive something like a fire in the business or a major hack, et cetera.

[01:04:11] So that's part of what you have to be looking at. And people are looking at it saying, oh my gosh, the last time I did an upgrade, everything just went to pot and I can't blame them. Cause that happens. So I said, forget it. Big Sur is a big guy grade for the Mac. I'm going to do it. And I did it and I've got one problem.

[01:04:33] I just finished doing, I got one problem and got her resolve after the show today. But I ate. What does that make my own advice there? Go and did an upgrade. But I understand why you don't want to do an upgrade when they're talking about here, these white hat guys, application specific attacks.

[01:04:54] Think about it. How many of us, I'm sure. Every one of us, you could raise your hand right now and say, yeah, I don't want to upgrade windows because I'm using this program I've been using for years. And if I upgrade that program's no longer going to work. Who couldn't raise their hands. To that.

[01:05:13] And I can't blame you for that. And in many cases, if you're going to do an upgrade to new version of windows, you have to buy a new version of that software. You've been using whatever it is, right? Yeah. We have a customer who just this week we had to come in emergency do upgrade. So QuickBooks because their QuickBooks license was up and they could no longer licensed this older version of QuickBooks.

[01:05:41] So we had to come in and do emergency upgrades on their desktop machines and on their QuickBooks server to get it all done in time because somebody had been sitting on the license and all the information about it, but that's the truth. Isn't it. And the problem that Microsoft has created is we're all afraid to do updates or upgrades.

[01:06:05] And Microsoft of course, has been charging for them. At least apple hasn't been, some of them it's been charging for Microsoft has been judged for some of them. They haven't, but it's a real problem. So again, this report saying at least 67% of utility sector software has at least one.

[01:06:24] Serious exploitable vulnerability. That's up from 55% of the beginning of 2021. Solid. See that's five months. And the last five months. That is crazy. Yeah, two thirds of utilities. Software is vulnerable, serious exploitable vulnerability. So I really want to encourage everybody, whether you're a home user or utility, we fear public sector, private sector.

[01:06:56] Do what I did this week. Bite the bullet. And get a good backup of your computer and upgraded to the latest version of everything, of the operating system of all of the software that you typically use. And please go to the next step. Upgrade your firewall, upgrade your switches, but at the very least the firewall get something that's truly next generation.

[01:07:25] Get a top of the line as much money as you can afford and keep it up to date. I like the Cisco stuff, but there's some other pretty good stuff out there. Some people use Aruba networks. I'm not a huge fan, but they're okay. Some people on the low end. And we'll use a number of different just cheap firewalls, but get the ones that will keep themselves up to date.

[01:07:48] I'd like the Muraki go. I made an offer on that last year. It was a thousand bucks for a firewall. That did segmentation a switch that could do the segmentation and wifi that gave you guests networks and segmentation, everything for grant. And I can figure the whole thing for them and help them get it installed.

[01:08:09] So something to consider. Get it done by somebody or do it yourself. This is the week to leave vulnerabilities behind. At least the vulnerabilities you can afford to miss, which is do the upgrades, do them right away and visit me online. Sign up for the newsletters you get all of the latest in technology, security, tips and tricks, et cetera.

[01:08:35] Craigpeterson.com/subscribe. Take care, everybody. Bye-bye.

[As heard on WGAN 2021-06-02-wgan. The following is an automated transcript.]

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Good morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. Thanks for joining me this morning. I was talking more about this Commonwealth of independent states. In case you're not aware of it, these are the countries that were part of the Soviet Union. Now not all of them are in it, but the majority of them are. And why are the hackers going out of their way to avoid hacking?

[00:00:25] It might be a red herring, frankly, but it also might be because there could be some severe penalties for them and how you can use that in order to help save you from getting hacked. So all of that here this morning, as well as a little bit more about the meatpacking plant that had to close down here throughout.

[00:00:49] North America. So here we go with Mr. Matt, Gagnan

[00:00:54] Matt Gagnon: [00:00:54] 7:36 on WGAN morning news. A good time to talk to Craig Peterson, our tech guru, who joins us at this time every Wednesday. Of course, you also hear him on Saturdays at one. When he talks about all these topics and more in more depth, Craig, how are you this morning?

[00:01:12] Craig Peterson: [00:01:12] Oh, WGAN is always a good time. Not just when I'm on, I'd do a little something extra,

[00:01:17] Matt Gagnon: [00:01:17] a little something extra. Thanks so much for joining us here. Of course, for that little something extra right now, Craig Peterson, I do have to ask you first about. Meat hacking. I've been plugging it all morning here.

[00:01:30] Obviously, we had the oil pipeline hack. Now we have beef plants forced to shut down because of a cyber attack here. So these cyber attacks are happening with increased frequency. And are a problem. Tell me, sir, what's happening here and what it means for us?

[00:01:45]Craig Peterson: [00:01:45] We have a whole crew of people internationally.

[00:01:49] Some are in Russia, some are in China. Of course, we've talked about North Korea and others before who are trying to make money. And the way they can make money is by going after targets that are particularly rich that have the money to pay the ransom. And that's why they're going after these guys. It's like Sutton. Why did he Rob banks, supposedly? Because that's where the money was. And in this case, that's really what they're doing, Matt.

[00:02:20] Matt Gagnon: [00:02:20] It certainly is where the money is, and they're happening with, it seems like greater frequency or at the very least greater visibility because they're going after big stuff here.

[00:02:28]Do you expect this to continue? I know that there's been some talk hereafter the pipeline attack that we're going to reinforce our infrastructure and make sure things like this don't happen again. Any truth to that.

[00:02:37]Craig Peterson: [00:02:37] Yeah, there is there, there's a number of things that are going on right now to try and tighten things up.

[00:02:43] But I've got to say this JBS, which is the company that was attacked here, this meatpacking company, that basically a quarter of all of our beef and a fifth of all of our poultry is packed to there. They responded pretty darn well. They didn't, obviously, keep the hackers out, but nothing is a hundred percent.

[00:03:05] They immediately did something thing that solar winds took a not soldier cringe, but were a colonial pipeline, took a little bit longer to do. And that is, they shutting me down very quickly. Yeah. They started to look, see what was going on. They immediately brought in a team of people. This is what they do.

[00:03:25] They help bring companies back from a ransomware attack. They brought in a lot of people, so they could start restoring all of the systems. It looks like from backups and then starts turning things back on one at a time. I imagine they'll tighten up some of their security operations, which we. All need to do, which goes right into your question of are we going to do more?

[00:03:49] Is there more we can do? And the answer to that is absolute. Yes. Every one of us, that most of the time the bad guys are using what is called zero-day attacks initially, which means there is a vulnerability in something very often in Microsoft windows or in a firewall. And the bad guys know about it, but it hasn't been patched yet.

[00:04:15] But I got to tell ya that is only really used against these very big operators where there's a whole lot of money involved. Most of the time, we're getting hacked. Because we haven't patched. Now I know how painful it could be the patch. Okay. Especially when we're talking about Microsoft, you can apply their patches and then brick to your machine.

[00:04:38] In other words, turn your machine into something that's almost useless, and it's going to take you days to recover. So people are weighing that back and forth. Is it worth, potentially knocking myself off the air for a day or two or three? Because the patch was bad from Microsoft or from another vendor, or should I do the patch and take the risk of it not working very well or may be causing harm and then going further, I blame Microsoft budget.

[00:05:09] You blame

[00:05:09] Matt Gagnon: [00:05:09] Microsoft for a lot of things.

[00:05:11] Craig Peterson: [00:05:11] Greg terrible company. They really are. They're the things they've done to the industry, but the reason I'm blaming Microsoft here is, are you kidding me? They're sitting on billions of dollars in cash, and they released patches for their buggy software. Okay. I get that.

[00:05:27] Everybody releases patches, and the patches break systems. So people don't trust it anymore. So that's how I'm looking at it. Here. I read an article this morning from the New York times, and they were looking at this hack from a again, probably, maybe Russia, maybe China. And they're quoting, they're saying.

[00:05:50] President Biden says it's from Russia reading between the lines. Microsoft said their hack, which was the major part of the whole SolarWind attack was actually from China and the Biden administration went quiet on this, but it's hard to say we know Russia has been hacking a lot. We know China's been hacking a lot of little China's more behind the scenes.

[00:06:12] We don't really know where they come from, but Matt, we can do something about it. Keep your software up to date. If you can, don't use windows and switch over to a Mac, their patches work, and they have for years and be more security conscious. So

[00:06:30] Matt Gagnon: [00:06:30] speaking of Russian hackers, Craig, I do have to ask you whether or not there is something we can do a one weird trick, if you will.

[00:06:37] One of those eternal click baity items area, right? If there is one weird trick to stop these Russian hackers right there, out there, how do you do it?

[00:06:46] Craig Peterson: [00:06:46] This is the coolest thing ever. It's absolutely true. This comes from Brian Krebs and a few other people out there right now. There is something you can do right now.

[00:06:56] It only take you 10 minutes, maybe 15, and we're here. Here's what it is. We know that the Russian hackers are not. Attacking former Soviet territories. And the reason from that it, for that is if they are hacking from Russian territory and they hack a Russian company or another one of these companies that are part of the Commonwealth of independent state, which is again the former Soviet union for the most part if they hack a Russian company, they, and they get caught, they get to go to a Russian prison, which doesn't sound like much fun to me.

[00:07:35] And so what they've done is they've built into almost all of this soft, where a kill switch. We're talking about ransomware software, hacker software. If you install a virtual. Russian keyboard on your computer, just like a, you may have a Spanish keyboard or a French keyboard on your computer, install, a Russian or one of a few other languages keyboard on your computer.

[00:08:01] You don't have to use it. You don't have to type in rush and you don't have to learn Cyrillic. None of that when the software starts to run in your computer, almost all of it. The first thing it does is says, is there a Russian keyboard? And if the answer's yes, it's short circuits at shelf, and this is what we're thinking.

[00:08:21] And I think this is right. This is the way the Russian hackers are avoiding attacking Russian or Russian Commonwealth states is Commonwealth of independent states. It's a way they're stopping the inadvertent hack of a nation of a company that might end them up in Siberia because they still do have some fun stuff going on up there.

[00:08:43]Matt Gagnon: [00:08:43] Greg Peterson, our tech guru joins us at this time every week to go over the world of technology. Thanks Greg, as always good luck on Saturday. And we'll talk to you next week, sir. Hey, you're

[00:08:52] Craig Peterson: [00:08:52] welcome. And I'm going to put instructions on how to do this in this week's newsletter. So make sure you're signed [email protected] and we'll talk a little bit more about it as well on Saturday.

[As Heard on WTAG, WHJJ, and WHYN 2021-06-01. Automated transcript follows.]

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Good morning, everybody doing well this morning course, Craig Peterson here, and I was talking this morning about two different things. One, and this sounds like one of these marketing things in part of these ads, right? One weird trick while I got one. This is amazing. This is from Brian Krebs and it is a trick that will stop most, if not all, frankly, Russian based.

[00:00:28] Ransomware and even hackers. So we went into that. I'm going to put more about that in my newsletter this weekend. So make sure you are on that list. Craig peterson.com/subscribe.

[00:00:42] And we also talked a little bit about this newest hack against the largest meat company. In the world, if you can believe that.

[00:00:53] Absolutely huge. So both of those of this morning with Mr. Jim Polito, here we go.

[00:01:01] Jim Polito: [00:01:01] Hey, this guy is on top of it all. I'm talking about our tech talk guru, Craig Peterson, and nobody. Smarter than this man. And he joins us now. Good morning, Craig. Hey, good morning. It's Jimmy P how you doing? I'm good, Greg. Thank you.

[00:01:20] Hey, can I just, I want to ask you about this simple trick that will stop most Russian hackers. And it's not hiding a bottle of vodka somewhere. No, the it's about Microsoft. I want to ask you about now that now what ransomware and a meat packing facility. So they went after power grids. They went after water.

[00:01:43] Now they want to go after our food. They're there, they went after the oil pipeline. They want meet what's this all about. They really are what we're talking about right now. The major organized hackers. So the guys that have gotten together that are working together that really want to go after targets that have money.

[00:02:06] Yeah. And even though those say things like we don't, I want to really affect the us economy. We really don't want to hurt people. That's what it tends to do in this case. This is a big company. It headquarters in Greeley, Colorado. At least the us headquarters are, they are both. They have operations in new, excuse me, new north America and Australia.

[00:02:30] And they noticed it. Now this. Is a beautiful example, right? There is nothing, 100% effective against a determined hacker. However, they noticed that what these hackers were doing. So they took the name of it is JBS USA. So world's largest meat supplier. They took immediate. Action. They automatically suspended all of these it systems and other systems that might be effected.

[00:03:02] They immediately notified the authorities, the FBI. That's what we do. Bri, bring them in as well. They brought in all of their it professionals that got them all together and they brought in some good third party experts like yours, truly. I tend to try and figure out what the situation was and how do we resolve it now it looks like it probably spread quite a ways inside this meat packing plant, because the company is saying that their backup servers were not affected.

[00:03:35] And they're working with an incident response firm to get the operations back as soon as possible. I think they're going to be back very quickly. But these bad guys are not gone. I mentioned dark side. These are the hackers that went after the colonial pipeline, probably part of the solar winds attack on and on.

[00:03:56] And they shut down that one operation, the dark side operation, but it also looks like. We may have been able to shut them down. We won't get it, all the details right now, but here's here's another side to all of this. We need to know when it's happening. So kudos to JBS USA. They knew when it was happening, they knew you and that's something by the way I'm working on, I'm actually starting a business.

[00:04:22] That's what it's going to do. I decided that's the most important thing, because people are not willing to spend real money on the right types of hardware, types of software, but let's look at what's happening on the network anyway, separate issue entirely. But the Biden administration.

[00:04:39] Refuses now to say that these dark side attacks and the the, what ultimately led to the solar winds and potentially colonial pipeline, they've been saying all along Russia, and now Microsoft came out and Microsoft is a company that the whole attack vector went through solar winds, which affected every American.

[00:05:04] Every one of us that attack because of the companies we deal with solar winds, I attack according to the byte administration came from Russia, or Russia. However Microsoft said we have confirmed it's China. And Microsoft has been saying that now for weeks. And we men president Biden was asked about this as was at a press conference.

[00:05:29]Jean, what Sakhi. And they say now nothing about it. They won't say that it's Russia. They won't say that it's China. If we don't know who's attacking, that's where it's coming from. And frankly, retaliate against them. We're never going to stop this. We're talking with Craig Peterson, our tech talk girl.

[00:05:51]I'm glad you're sounding the alarm and all this, and buying is going to meet with Putin. He's got a summit with Putin coming up within the next two weeks. It'd be nice if he would be on top of this. And say, just cut it out. Remember Barack Obama, when it went through the election hacking, he was telling a, but remember he said, I told Putin to cut it out.

[00:06:15]Yeah, exactly. But it's not potent. It looks like it's absolutely China. Yeah. All right. Great, lovely. Speaking of let's go back to Putin. A simple trick can lock out Russian hackers. You sent me this information. What is this? Yeah, I'm going to put this in the newsletter coming up on Saturday this week.

[00:06:38] So if you miss the details to make sure you get the newsletter, you can just get it on my website. This is absolutely true. You and I have talked Jim before about where the hacks are coming from and how we think some of these hacked are definitely Russian because. They're not attacking cause Dr. Stan Ukraine, all of these former Soviet countries, right?

[00:07:03]Yeah. They're there. They're taking care of their own. Yeah, they absolutely are. And they don't want to get in trouble either. Russia. Doesn't exactly take hacking lightly. If you have them or you hack one of their all-in guard buddies, they will come after you and you don't want to end up in a rush Russian prison.

[00:07:24] So that's the theory behind this. So here's the, this is simple, everybody. This is simple and I'll send you some links to it. All you have to do is install what are called a virtual keyboard on your windows machine. So for instance, I'm, multi-lingual I speak English and I speak French. Yeah. So I, cause I, my, my schooling was in print schools, so I have installed on my computer, a virtual French keyboard, so I can say, okay, now I'm going to be typing a note off to my friend over in Paris.

[00:07:55] And so I am going to now do an overlay on my keyboard. And so now I can use all those funny accents as things are French, too. So here's what the trick is. They look this nasty where most of it, most of the ransomware goes ahead and look to see if you have a. Russian virtual keyboard installed.

[00:08:19] Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. So it looks for some other languages to Ukrainian Belarusian, to jock and Armenian and some others, but Russian keyboard is the easy one. So here is a work around from getting hacked by some of this ransomware installed. A virtual Russian keyboard on your computer and what'll happen is if it gets the ransomware on it, the first thing it does is it looks to see, is this potentially someone in the Commonwealth of independent states, which of course are the former Soviet territories.

[00:08:57] And it's also, if you have a Russian keyboard, it will immediately stop what it's doing. Wow. That's simple. Yeah, that is cool. I'm sure they'll find a workaround, but in the meantime, that's pretty cool. How do you, no, it won't stop at all right. But yeah, go ahead and no, how do you do it? How do you install the virtual keyboard?

[00:09:21]You can actually do a duck, go search on it and it will show you there. One of articles, but it's just, it's a virtual keyboard, right? So if you've, if you speak Spanish, you've probably got an English and a Spanish keyboard on your computer. You probably already know how to do it. It's really rather simple.

[00:09:38] You can go into the settings, you can load the Russian keyboard in your, and you're off and running. But apparently is according to the research I'm looking at right now done by mandate act and a couple of others. This will help you against almost all of them. So just a Cyrillic keyboard. You can also, there's a specific registry edits you can do.

[00:09:58]We won't get into that just to keyboards. All you have to do it. Duck, go by the way I have been using it considerably. And there is such a difference between searching on duck, go versus searching with Google. I should do a podcast and do a side by side and yeah. In the blog, put the pictures of just putting in, one, two words and seeing what you get for results in Google and then seeing what you get for results in duck, go doesn't use politics, which is great.

[00:10:32] No, yeah, it's it is very good. There's another one you might want to look at. It's called Quan, Q w a N T. But I prefer dark.co. Wow. Greg, this has been as usual. Illuminating. Fascinating. How goes the recuperation of your lovely bride? It's going quite well. She's very frustrated. I would be right.

[00:10:55] And she can't do anything, and she's just sitting there, but thank goodness we have one of these chairs that even injects you, which helped initially. But now she's starting to get a little itchy and I'm wanting to get up and go around and do things, which is a really good sign. So my fingers are crossed.

[00:11:13] Yeah, I think she'll do well. It was the femur, right? Even though humorous funny bone, the big bone in your arm, how much fall. Yeah. Yeah, because there's a ball on top while her ball was split completely into two pieces, it was looking at attached scan. It's just incredible. It was such a mass for the top of her arm, ended up in, down in her armpit and it was very painful.

[00:11:43] Yeah. I thought it was the leg. I'm sorry, but I'm glad to hear she's doing better. I'm sure she's going to have trouble going through a metal detector for the rest of her life. Yeah. So anyway, we'll give her our best and Craig, how do folks get in touch with you? Okay. So I'm going to send out information on this keyboard trick and it's simple trick, right?

[00:12:06] Just like a marketing line. Correct. But it really is. I'm going to send it out on this weekend as part of my newsletter, like I do every week. You get that by going to Craig peterson.com/subscribe, Craig Peterson, S O N. Excellent Craig, thank you as usual. And we look forward to talking with you next week.

[00:12:28] All right, take care. Thanks. Hey, when we return a final word, you're listening to the Jim Palito show your safe space.