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

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.

[Following is an automated transcript of Week 1115 podcast aired 2021-05-29]

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] We've got these semiconductor shortages. What that means is various types of chips are just not available and it's been hurting us all the way across our economy. And that's where we're going to start the day with today. Semiconductors.

[00:00:15] Man, this has been so bad, these semiconductor shortages, because what it means is we just cannot get the types of devices that we want because those raw components just aren't available. I was talking with a gentleman earlier this week and he was telling me how he has a special little app that tells him when there is a Sony PS five available for sale anywhere online.

[00:00:45] It's gotten that bad. First of all, Why does he want a PS five so bad? I've never owned one or an X-Box or any of those gaming consoles? Since the original Nintendo, we had a we as well. Cause we had all the exercise stuff that went along with the week. But anyways, that's a different story entirely.

[00:01:04] I'm sure a lot of you guys play a lot of video games, but. There really are not Sony available. And we're finding much the same problem in even the car industry where some of these major manufacturers here in the U S have had to shut down lines. They've had, gone from three shifts down to a single shift every day.

[00:01:30] And in some cases it's gotten even worse where vehicle manufacturers are only. Making vehicles of few times a week. It is incredible. What's been happening and there a number of reasons for it. This isn't just one reason, but it does bring up the real problem we could have with our critical infrastructure.

[00:01:53] How critical is it that we have computers that can run our businesses, drive our cars, and fly our airplanes. I think it's pretty darn critical when you get right down to it. Yeah. You can probably get an extra year out of that computer, if you really need to many times that computer's just plain broken, you just can't use it.

[00:02:15] So you do need to replace it. But in reality, we've gotten a little bit soft. We are not making most of the chips here in the U S anymore. Yes, it's us technology. But most of this is in Southeast Asia, particularly in Taiwan. And do you remember what's happening with Taiwan with the threats from China?

[00:02:38] China is flying over Taiwan right now with military jets in Taiwanese air space, because China has never officially recognized that Taiwan is independent from the people's Republic of China. And do you know how socialists are? They're just going to go ahead and take that land. What would happen if they did.

[00:03:00] Remember China really wants to get their hands on our top chip technology because that helps them in the military. It helps them with all of these facial recognition systems they have in China, the social credit systems that they have in China, by the way, all built primarily by us companies and sold to China to track their people.

[00:03:23] Including the nasty things have been happening with the Wiggers over there. It's just absolutely incredible as well as Christian communities and others in China. So all of this tech has stuff they want to get their hands on. If they were to invade Taiwan, what would happen? The Biden administration.

[00:03:40] There they've been a little soft on this. Unlike president Trump, who said, yeah, the Trump administration, we're not going to tolerate any of this. And the Trump administration shipped all kinds of military systems to Taiwan, so they could potentially defend themselves because we don't really want to get drawn into a hot war, but.

[00:04:00] Oh, if they had taken over Taiwan, they would now have access to the U S technology on chip making. Now let me explain what that means from a technology standpoint, the chips that we have are. into a wafer of silicone. I'm going to try and keep this pretty simple. And then, and that silicone is grown. Cause you think of a crystal or maybe think of a still-life tight or it's like titers to leg might that you'd find in a cave.

[00:04:34] Those crystals are grown. They're humanly grown, and obviously you don't want any defects in them. So it's very hard to do to grow them. And we need those crystals for all kinds of things, including these solar panels that some people are so hot to trot about. I, Hey, I love the idea. Don't get me wrong.

[00:04:52] It's just right now, again, with solar panels, like so many other things, don't think you're green because you. Are or putting up solar panels. You're not right. There's certainly other advantages to it, but you're not being green by doing that. But what really matters is how much power does that chip use in order to do a certain number of computations?

[00:05:17] And how much heat is given off by the chip. Think again about the old Edison light bulbs that we've had and still have in some places and those Edison light bulbs, by the way, one of the original ones still burning in New York city and the fire department after over a hundred years, that one light bulb just incredible.

[00:05:37] But think about that Edison light bulb, it gives off light. Sure. But it also gives off heat. And the same thing is true with. Anything electronic the movement of the electricity through that conductor or semiconductor create heat. Heat is a waste. That's part of the problem with Edison bulbs. It'd be one thing if they were giving off just straight light, the, but so much of that energy is used to generate heat that we don't want.

[00:06:06] And then we have to dissipate that heat somehow, but that's another story. The same thing is true. When we're talking about these chips, the chips have a resistance to them. In fact, that's what a semiconductor does. It provide some resistance, so that resistance is going to. Do what create heat. So you feel your laptop when you're running it and so hot to get over time, the laptops have gotten faster and have actually created less heat, certainly poorer computational unit.

[00:06:44] They created a lot less heat. What we're looking at now is if we can make these chips even smaller. We can decrease the amount of electricity they need, because it doesn't have electricity. It doesn't have to flow as far through the conductors or semiconductors inside these chips. So that's what the race has been over the years.

[00:07:09] The race has been how small can we make them? And by making them smaller, You're doing a couple of things. You're making them faster because electricity has to travel less distance. Even though electricity is really fast. When you're talking about a billion transistors inside one of these chips or more, you are traveling through a whole lot of conductor and semiconductor.

[00:07:32] So you can make that chip faster by making it smaller and you can reduce the amount of power it needs, because you're not going to be giving off as much power via heat and heat generation. And that's important for everything, but particularly important for our mobile devices. Look at your apple watch or your iPhone or your laptop or your desktop.

[00:07:56] All of them need to consume less and less electricity as time goes on. So what we're talking about now are just teeny tiny measurement. We're talking about nanometers. So if you go online, you look up nano meter. Which is a foul. Yeah, there you go. 10 to the negative nine meters. It's a billionth of a meter.

[00:08:21] Isn't that something looking it up right now, sell it a 1E-9.000000000. Give or take, and it's a unit of measurement that is being used now in chips and chip designs. And we're seeing these faster and faster chips getting down into the five nanometer process that is incredibly small, incredibly.

[00:08:49] Fast potentially, but likely incredibly fast and uses a lot less electricity right now. We're seeing seven nanometers out of Taiwan and we're working on five nanometer, but we have such a shortage of chips right now that they're bringing some of these old 15 nanometer. Chip fabs online, even 22 nanometer.

[00:09:14] I'm looking right now online at some of these old chip fabricators that are being brought online and China really wants to get their hands on some of this technology, because at this point anyways, they really can't get to the seven nanoliter chips. China right now. I think is pretty much limited to 14 nanometer.

[00:09:39] So we're still, I had in that race, but because they're being made in Taiwan, these chips that we're using here in the us using us technology, and because we had the lockdown in Taiwan and pretty much worldwide, the whole supply chain got interrupted and these big car manufacturers just. Shut off the orders.

[00:10:01] So there's no reason for the manufacturers to continue to make these things are a little reason for them to make them for the car industry in the current street, he thought we can just turn it back on and we'll have the chips. And of course they didn't, but it's also been compounded by the conditions in Taiwan right now.

[00:10:19] Because the Taiwanese centers for disease control this week raised it's epidemic warning level and is strengthening their containment measures and making things even worse. Taiwan is in the midst of a severe drought. So they are. Rationing water in Taiwan. They're looking at cutoffs of two days a week.

[00:10:42] And water reduction plans are expected to decrease supply to all major manufacturers by as much as 15%. So there you go. In a nutshell, that's why we care. Nanometers and we're talking about chips. That's why we need to start making them back here in the U S. And the good news, apple and others are doing exactly that.

[00:11:03] Starting to bring some of this technology back from Taiwan, into the U S and I think that's going to help keep us safer in the long run

[00:11:12]All electric vehicles are I think very cool. And some people give me a hard time because I am not a fan of it.

[00:11:20] If you think you're being green, because you're not. And I went through the whole science behind that the life cycle of an electric vehicle is much more. Dangerous and hazardous and polluting in the environment. Then even a diesel truck is just to give you an idea of small truck. So that's, let's put that aside, but in reality, these things I think are potentially the future.

[00:11:50] Now there's a lot of things we've got to take care of, for instance. Our electric grid is not set up for electric cars. Our electric grid is not set up for us to have windmills in our backyard or to have solar panels on our roofs. It's set up to have a main power station of some sort, whether it's nuclear, which by the way is green or whether it might be.

[00:12:17] Be coal or natural gas or wood or trash. That's what the grid is set up for. So we have some problems there and there's another big problem. And that has to do with how much power one of these vehicles can hold, because I don't know about you, but having a, what is it? The brand new car that came out a Fiat or somebody and his electric vehicle and its range is 78 miles.

[00:12:46]In some places that might be okay, but progress. The problem is I'll write, let's say I'll put up with stopping every hour to recharge these cars, unless it's a rapid recharger, you're going to be there for an hour and a half or more. And even with the rapid recharger, you're going to be there for a least 20 minutes.

[00:13:07] Now Tesla had some innovative ideas on how to deal with that. Like the, I don't know if you ever saw it a battery pack, so you'd pull into the station and it would just trade battery packs for you. The idea was it's right in the center. GM has this concept of the roller skate, where the entire car really is built into this frame.

[00:13:29] That kind of looks like roller skate. And then on top of that, Goes your car and there's some thinking maybe we can make it so that you can just swap out your rollerskate. Make it nice and simple and hopefully relatively inexpensive, but we still don't see the range on the vehicles. And as of yet, we haven't seen any huge forays by any of the big auto makers.

[00:13:54] Of course, Nissan had it to leaf, which. Pretty well accepted GM had their entry. And I chuckled because it was in a lot of ways. It was a joke. And of course they're up with better stuff here in the future, but I want to play a little bit here. I'm going to play about 25 seconds worth of an ad.

[00:14:12] And then we're going to talk about it a bit.

[00:14:16] Unknown: [00:14:16] It's got a targeted 775 pound feet of torque. It's targeted to go from zero to 60 in the mid four second range. It's a driving experience. That's pure unfiltered exhilaration from the moment you hit the accelerator. Oh, and it's an F-150 introducing the all electric F-150

[00:14:40] Craig Peterson: [00:14:40] lightning.

[00:14:41] So you noticed there were no mentions in there of no birds were harmed in January generating electricity here. And of course, a little tongue in cheek because of course birds are harmed in generate electricity, particularly windmill, but anyways, they're not going for the eco greeny. They're not going for the Prius driver.

[00:15:01] You remember the stats on the Prius where they surveyed the drivers of Prius's. This was probably five. Maybe a little more years ago. And the number one reason they found people drove a Prius. 70% of the time in fact, was they drove a Prius because of what they thought other people would think of them.

[00:15:23] So there they are driving this car that they're driving it for one reason, because they, I think it's going to make other people think that they're just fantastic people. I obviously I disagree with that. I think that's little bit of a problem, but what is what they're doing here with that Ford commercial is they are working on mainstreaming.

[00:15:46] Yes. Electric vehicles. Can you imagine this a 700 plus foot point foot pound torque in a sub $40,000 truck? It's just amazing. And you can even use the batteries that are in this truck. Of course, there's a lot of batteries in that truck to run power tools while you're out at a work site. Which I think is a great idea.

[00:16:12] And you can even use it to power your house. They have a special adapter you can use to hook up to your house so that you can get up to three days. They say of electricity in your house. If the power goes out, No mention in here of, any of these greeny things, right? Oh, none of oases talking points are in that ad.

[00:16:37] At least I didn't hear him on, did you guys hear them, but this is going to be amazing. This of course is Ford's best-selling vehicle, the F-150 and I drove one for years. It was very handy with the horses and chickens and everything here. And I'm looking forward to this thing coming out. I don't think I'm going to buy one, by the way.

[00:16:58] They've also got this Mustang mark II, which is this electric Mustang thingy. And then they have an electric transit van. And the reason I don't think I'm going to buy one is it just doesn't have the range. Now you can get better equipped lightening trucks in that sub $40,000 one. You can also go ahead and get bigger batteries.

[00:17:22] You can do a whole bunch of things, but this range is a combined output here, a 426 horsepower estimated range of 230 miles. And the extended range of this F-150 lightning is going to get an even. Bigger horsepower rating, 563 horsepower and an estimated range of 300 miles. And 775 foot pounds of torque, which is just stump polling.

[00:17:56] It's absolutely amazing. So I don't know about you. I'm not in the mode for pain, 60 ish grand for an electric truck that is only going to take me 230 miles. That, but maybe that's me. And then looking further into the stats on this thing, it can do a bunch of towing. It can have a 77, a hundred pounds of towing.

[00:18:22] You can get Reduce cargo, excuse me, reduce cargo course. If you're getting the bigger battery and looking at an illustration of the F-150 lightening, what they're doing is similar to what GM had proposed way back with the roller skate. The entire drive train is underneath the truck. And it's just like an old frame.

[00:18:44] You remember, trucks used to have frames now? The F-150 is, I think still do have frames underneath, but the whole bottom of the truck is one piece. If you will, obviously there's little pieces to it, but one major component and then the cab and bed and everything else just sits right on top of it.

[00:19:03] It's amazing. Now with this truck, if you connected to 150 kilowatt fast charger, you're going to get 41 miles in 10 minutes. So how long does it take you fill up with gas? Probably about 10 minutes. How long is it good for? It was my car 400, 500 miles in this case that 10 minute stop. At the fuel station is going to get you 41 miles.

[00:19:29] And if you can find the, just the 50 kilowatt fast charger, it's going to take you 91 minutes to get 41 miles of range. It's not there yet, but it's very obvious that Ford is aiming for the truck driver. And more particularly if I was a construction guy and I was taking my truck out and I needed to plug in tools and I don't have to drive very far.

[00:19:56] I look seriously at that new F-150 lightning.

[00:20:00]President Biden . I've got an article in my newsletter this week about what he's been doing when it comes to the hackers, China, is it Russia? What's going on? He's been blaming. It looks like. Russia for some of the hacks that China has actually been carrying out, but no matter what the bottom line is, we are getting hacked and this is a very big problem.

[00:20:28] We have to modernize our technology strategy. Because this ideological divide between these authoritan or authoritarians, whether it's a dictatorship like the socialists have in China, where you have chairman Mao, who is chairman for life now, or Putin. President Putin, who is president for life over in Russia.

[00:20:53]It's absolutely amazing. They are coming after us. And so is North Korea, of course, again, socialist dictator for life over there as well, Iran not so socialist, but a very fascist in many ways, which is typically a form of socialism anyways. We need to be able to protect ourselves. It's a real problem, frankly.

[00:21:18] 1947 world war two was over and George Kennan, R yeah. Kennan introduced this concept of containment and that containment concept was used throughout the entire cold war. And of course you probably know what that is. At least, excuse me. I hope you do. But today we don't have that cold war anymore.

[00:21:45] What is it that we have? Why would China be attacking this? We know, for instance, a China comes after our intellectual property and they w they come after it because it helps them militarily. If they know what we're doing, what we're ordering. What's going on that we know they come after us as well, because they want to cause some havoc.

[00:22:11] There's no question about that. Some of these other smaller countries come after us because they need the hard currency. Ultimately they want to trade in those Bitcoin for us dollars, which of course can be spent here. But. This whole system that we have right now is really on the brink of a new economy.

[00:22:34] Look at the technology we've been using. Look at the number of people that have been working from home. We're sitting on the edge of three simultaneous bubbles. Right now we have the housing bubble. We have the stock market bubble and we have the cryptocurrency bubble and we've seen downs in all of those just over the last week or so.

[00:22:56]We'll see what happens, but there's no denying that they're bubbles are home values adjusted for inflation, have not been higher than the last 100 years as an example. So there's a lot for us to look at. And when these bad guys are under the same types of financial pressures we are under, because, collapses tend to be worldwide.

[00:23:21] What are they going to do? What's ultimately going to happen? Here is what president Biden thinks should happen with these two executive orders that came out really It, it has to do with federal government supply chains. And that is people who obviously are selling to the feds. And I want you to think mostly about department of defense here, and we deal with the department of defense contractors and tightening them up.

[00:23:50] But in getting them to the point they should be at. And there's a lot to be concerned about it from that standpoint, but they have been releasing some details over the last few months, really. They started in April this year, and they're saying that because of the supply chain problem that we had with solar winds, they are now.

[00:24:15] Pushing out some rules that require the people who sell to the federal government to keep a certain level of cybersecurity. We've talked a little bit before about CMMC, which is. Again, it's a cyber security maturity model that's out there and they are requiring certain federal contractors to meet that.

[00:24:40] We've also talked about some of the NIST standards, which is the national Institute of science and technology. In fact, we talked about their password standard and how a year and a half or so ago, they changed the way we need to do passwords. And if you don't know what that is, have a look at my. A special report on passwords.

[00:25:02] And I go through that in some detail, but there's an executive order on American supply chains that came out in February and it's leaning pretty heavily on these newer emerging technologies, including secure access to semiconductors. And we talked about them earlier in the show today, the high capacity batteries.

[00:25:24] Because again, if we're not innovating. In the, you name it. But in end in the automotive field, we're going to fall behind what's important automotive. We just talked about it. Last segment here. Batteries. So it's covering batteries and materials that are used to create them. So they both of these orders address the need for us to really work closely together with our allies economically, as well as national security.

[00:25:55] But that's exactly what we've been doing. Isn't it? What it really boils down to in my mind is democracy versus authoritarianism. It was so funny that they called president Trump and authoritarian a decade, her right. He was liking to Hitler constantly. I thought if you brought him up, you automatically lost the argument.

[00:26:18] But in reality, now we're seeing more of a hands-on from the federal government more authoritarianism. And I got a question whether or not that's what we really want. Do we need a digital politic. This guiding doctrine, that places digital considerations at the forefront of our national strategy. Is this something that should be handled by the state or the businesses involved?

[00:26:47]We've seen all kinds of mixed. Pros and cons to each one of those strategies over the years, we know government controls, centralized government control, ultimately causes serious problems serious as in the deaths of over a hundred million people in the last century alone. So I'm not sure that's the best idea.

[00:27:09] And I have to say work. I With defense contractors, even not really a defense contractor, someone that makes something that's sold to a defense contractor. Having a one size fits all cybersecurity policy, a cybersecurity czar, and these executive orders pushing everything down does not make sense. It doesn't make sense for a real small company that makes a wiring harness to have to meet the same.

[00:27:38]Cyber security requirements as a big BAE systems, they don't have the time. They don't have the money. It can cost a million dollars over the course of three years for even a small company to meet these federal standards that are required. If you take a contract from the federal government or from one of these contractors.

[00:28:04] So you are a subcontractor, all of those requirements that are put on that huge military contractor, all of those requirements get pushed down to you. So this just doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. I'm very concerned about it. There's a bipartisan bill. That's moving right now called the democracy technology partnership act.

[00:28:26] And they're trying to get some collaboration and innovation amongst democracies. I think it's good now that there are rules in place that have changed, that allows competitors to talk with each other when it comes to cyber security.

[00:28:43]Internet Explorer was Microsoft's first major foray into the internet browsing world internet browsing didn't really take off until almost the mid nineties. And it was really cool. I remember when I first started using. Web browsing and websites and building them with NCSA mosaic. Oh my gosh. Those were the days heady days back then.

[00:29:09] And we were just thinking about everything that could happen, how great it would be. And there were no hackers to speak of online. You didn't have to worry about drive by downloads or so many of the other problems that we have today. And Microsoft took that NCSA mosaic browser code base and created something.

[00:29:33] They called internet Explorer. Now the history of internet Explorer, frankly. Is rather interesting when you get right down to it. Internet Explorer. Yeah. It's been around for a long time, but in genetics, Explorer was one of the worst browsers out there for a very long time. It was just terrible.

[00:29:57] And one of the things that Microsoft did that really got. With the whole internet community upset with them is they built it right into their operating system. Absolutely. They used the code here from again, mosaic, which was this early commercial web browser back in 2003. It, the whole project started in 1994.

[00:30:25]I'm looking right now, Wikipedia. I remember these things happening. It's just nuts to think about how far it's gone, but they took internet Explorer and they bolted it into the operating system. So the operating system now supposedly was dependent on internet Explorer. Now it's an interesting concept to think about if all they have to do is maintain a user interface.

[00:30:51] That's web based for the operating system. That's really cool. Microsoft internet Explorer is some 5 million lines of code that is a lot of programming to maintain. And then on top of that, of course you have all of the user interface code that's sitting there in the operating system. So I think this is my suspicion.

[00:31:12] What Microsoft is trying to do is make their life a little bit easier. But by doing that by hard wiring in internet Explorer, into the operating system, they ended up making it so that other companies like the Firefox guys, Mozilla, they could not run independently on inch, on a windows. And a third party, like Dell could not decide, Hey, I don't want to use internet Explorer because Google's paying me to install Google Chrome.

[00:31:43] So I want to put Chrome on windows. So you just couldn't do any of that. So they got a whole bunch of flack. The industry came after them and because of that, so did the department of justice. And the United States versus Microsoft case, very fundamental. And it was absolutely, it was essential, I think because Microsoft never would have done anything about this, but they developed Microsoft this thing called ActiveX technology, which is a security nightmare and remains one to this very day where you could effectively as a website.

[00:32:25] Tell the internet Explorer to do almost anything you wanted to do. And there were bugs after bugs. I don't have a count. It might be interesting to see what the actual count would be, but it was, it had to be in the thousands of bugs that were fixed security bugs that were fixed and internet Explorer because of active X and because of some of these other things.

[00:32:48] So it's just been absolutely terrible. One of the questions I get asked most often to this day. What do we do when we don't want to use internet Explorer or more commonly, what is the best browser to use while I'm online? And the answer to that kind of varies. It depends, right? That's the answer, but as a general rule using Firefox is a good idea.

[00:33:20] Now, one of the things I like about Firefox for an individual or for a, an extremely small business, like a small office home office, where you're not tying into a corporate network at all. One of the things that's really good is Firefox. Uses a version of DNS, which is the main name, service. It's what your computer uses in order to find websites online, Firefox uses a version of DNS that is.

[00:33:50] Encrypted and protected so that your internet service provider cannot see the website names you're looking up and cannot intercept it. And that's the bigger thing. You don't want it to be intercepted because one of the major hacks, and this is affected millions of people. Homed and businesses.

[00:34:10] One of the major hacks is let's just go in. We can hack the router and then we'll change the router DNS settings so that it uses our DNS and our DNS by the way is great because it redirects you. If you think you want to go to bank of America, it takes you to bank of America dot China. Okay. A fake site, not a real site.

[00:34:31] And you may not even know. You may not even be able to tell unless you look really closely. So that is a big plus for Firefox as well as it has all kinds of anti-trafficking technology. Anti-malware technology built right in, they've just done a bang up job. The reason I do not like it for bigger businesses is that same.

[00:34:54] Feature that DNS feature because what we do when we go into a business, and one of the things we do is we change their DNS servers to use some commercial DNS servers that we have from Cisco that get updated minute by minute for the sole purpose of trying to stop the bad guys. And they're very good at it.

[00:35:16] It stopped being ransomware just by DNS. If you're using Firefox inside one of these networks, the problem is Firefox is going to try and hide the DNS request. So it was not so much as I care that they're being hidden, except that might be going to a malicious site. It said, I can't see any of them.

[00:35:36] And I cannot tell your web browser or your computer not to go to that website because that particular site or that particular internet server is actually malicious. So there's the two sides for Firefox. So if you're a regular little home user, get Firefox, it's free. It's a great little browser. If you are a business, you can still use Firefox with things like Cisco's umbrella.

[00:36:04] But what you need to do is turn off the DNS over HTTPS or TLS in which gets a little advanced. You can probably find it. If you'd duck, duck, go search it online. And that'll get you the answers you need. So turn that off so that all of your DNS requests are going through the filter, whatever it might be.

[00:36:24] A Barracuda has a DNS filter. I don't like Barracuda. Don't think I'm endorsing them, but it's better to use the Barracuda DNS filter. If that's all you have, then nothing. Let me tell ya. And then there are also free DNS servers that are going to be fantastic for you to check them out. I talked about them this last week.

[00:36:44] I got a lot of emails, open dns.com open ope, N D N S the letters, DNS domain name service, or. Dynamic name server or whatever you want. How are you going to remember it? Open dns.com and there it's easy enough. You just set it up on your ad drought or, and you're off and running. So that's my general favorite.

[00:37:10] If you want something that's more secure, you can take a look at our friend, the epic browser, epi C. It has been very good in the past, and I assume it's going to continue to be pretty good in the future. Microsoft's newest ed edge browser. I think there's been three different browsers. They call ed just under what Microsoft, they call them all the same thing, even though it's entirely different code basis. And what were there? Seven different versions of windows that were entirely different? I was just, ah, drives me crazy. The current version of the edge browser from Microsoft is based on Google's Chrome browser. So keep that in mind, if you're using edge, Microsoft is looking over your shoulder.

[00:37:55] Google may be looking over your shoulder as well. A little bit. The edge browser also uses Google chromium base, but they've gone through and Labatt itemized it pretty seriously. If you're on a Mac, you can even do this on a windows computer. The fastest browser, generally speaking is safari, which is an apple product and it's available for free S a F a R.

[00:38:18] I. And it also like most apple products doesn't like you being tracked. And so it has a lot of anti-trafficking stuff. Built-in. And it also not this too. The safari browser has a whole bunch of anti-malware stuff built in. So whether you're using iOS on your iPhone or I panned or Mac iOS or windows, you can get safari.

[00:38:46] And I had recommended that. So Fari frankly, is the browser I use for a little bit more secure stuff. And then I also use opera, the opera O P E R a browser. You might want to have a look at it as well, but if you're looking for ease of use and compatibility, I think you're probably about right. Sticking with the Firefox browser.

[00:39:09] I do use that. So I actually use all of these browsers in different circumstances. I also use the brave browser and others. I just don't want to confuse you guys. Firefox stick with Firefox and you're probably going to be pretty well off on rare occasions. Firefox is not going to work for you. And in that case, you might consider a Google Chrome or the edge browser.

[00:39:34] If you're using a cloud-based to service a website that is obviously a website for something you're doing. And it does not work with Firefox. It might not even work with the default on the Microsoft edge browser. And that's because that website might've been poorly coded, had not written right. And requires the old Microsoft engineer Explorer.

[00:40:04] If so you can turn on compatibility mode so that the edge browser will act just like the insecure bug ridden internet Explorer, but try and force the vendor to upgrade their site so that it works with modern browsers rather than having to stick with that old piece of software. That's dangerous as can be internet Explorer.

[00:40:29]I have always been fascinated by it ever since I saw people who were communicating, using computers and it, I always thought it just. It would be so wonderful if we could help people out, particularly people who are locked in who have a brain that's functioning fully, and yet their body isn't cooperating, they can't communicate, or they can't communicate well.

[00:40:54] And of course, that comes to mind. Of course, one of the greatest scientific minds of our generation, Stephen Hawkins, who was in a wheelchair, he was unable to move. And later in life, other than just a little bit with his face and mouth, and he used that to communicate. And it's just an incredible thing. I can't imagine being in a position like that.

[00:41:19] So when I see these technological advances that help people out, even in a minor way, I am just overjoyed, really overjoyed. So we've got to, I want to talk about right now. One is a brain implant that ARS Technica is John Timmer was talking about here about a week ago. And he was talking about robotic arms.

[00:41:42] Now you might've seen them before. There's various types of robotic arms and they have different types of functionality depending. Right. Well, one of the problems that we've had with robotic arms is how much force can you put on them? I, again, I remember the first time I saw someone who had lost, uh, the forearm and of course the hand and he had on one of those kind of captain hook things, appliances with a rubber band on it to close it.

[00:42:13] And he was able to pull one of the muscles in his arms in order to open it and close it. I thought, well, that's really cool. Those have advanced now, and there are projects with 3d printers. I forget the name of the company. I had them on my radio show. Maybe a decade ago now been awhile and they were selling 3d printers.

[00:42:34] And when you bought their printer, they would give you the plans to make a specific artificial prosthesis for. Child that couldn't afford one. So it might be for a leg or an arm or so I guess something else. And you bought the printer, they would provide you with the material that you needed as well as the design specifically for that person.

[00:43:01] And that you could print it up. It might take a couple of days and you ship it off. And many of these kids were in Africa. There are some here in the us, and of course in Russia, and this was, I thought an amazing project. It was just so cool again, because they're helping these kids get a little bit of mobility.

[00:43:21] Then we came out with some of these robotic arms that can be controlled through your brain. I don't know if you've seen these. Arms, there's been also some major advancement in just thinking about moving a cursor on a computer screen and the computer can track your brain enough to be able to move that cursor around.

[00:43:46] And basically what you're doing is you've lost a limb or you've lost mobility. You think about moving your hand or a leg, and usually it's your arm and your hand. And that can be picked up. Of course, that's per person, that's programmable per person. Then they figure out what the pattern is in your brain.

[00:44:06] And then they tie it all in so that now you can control a cursor on a computer, which means you can communicate. Robotic arms a little bit different because what you have now is something that can reach out. These things have all of the joint and the flexibility and functionality of a regular hand, except for.

[00:44:30] The feedback loop and that's been really important. How do you know if you are actually touching something? How do you know if you're squeezing it too hard? Like that egg and early robotic arms? It was very visual. So you watch that arm and you'd see, okay. It now has a grip on that ball or that pencil or whatever you pick it up and you all visual.

[00:44:58] And so you're able to pick it up and you know that you've got it. Maybe you don't know how hard you're holding it, but that's okay. You had to track the arm visually as you moved it around and estimate really when you had that grip, that was strong enough on the object by looking at it. And obviously that's just an incredible improvement over a missing limb or potentially paralysis, but it's not very intuitive.

[00:45:25] And the question is how do you make things intuitive for the brain when they're obviously foreign? We're going to talk about an extra thumb here in a minute too, but this is just absolutely phenomenal. It's called propyl. Yeah. Prope re O ception proprioception. And it's a sense that we have, this has been difficult to reconstruct that ties the sense of touch and pressure and.

[00:45:55] Knowing where something is. So you can close your eyes. And on the side of the road, when the police offers is there and close your eyes, hold your arm out and touch your nose. Right. Hopefully you can do that. I'm doing that right now, here in the studio. I'm touching my notes with my eyes closed with my arm, starting out fully extended.

[00:46:16] That's the sense we're talking about. That's very, very difficult. How do you build that in? Because we've been able to build in a little bit of sense of touch feedback for these arms, a little bit of pressure feedback, but we haven't been able to really understand how the brain processes, all this information that's sent by these sensory nerve cells in the hand, in order to let you know where it is.

[00:46:42] And what it's doing. So for this new research at team and planted two electrode arrays into the part of the brain that specifically handles information coming from the skin, and they're able to activate these electrode and produce the sensation of something, interacting with the Palm of the hand, as well as the finger.

[00:47:04] So they've made a whole lot of progress here, and this is very cool. They were able to tie it into a robotic arm. They got a study together, got some funding for it. And they got a participant who had been paralyzed from the neck down. And this doesn't save as male or female, but. Default gender right in English.

[00:47:29] As he sold, say, he'd been controlling this robotic arm for about two years by using brain implant in the motor control region of the brain. And he could successfully use the arm even without sensation. He'd gotten pretty good at it. Uh, so for these experiments, they had some different tests because they wanted additional, tactile feedback.

[00:47:53] They wanted to be able to somehow tie into this perception that your body has, of where your body parts are. Have you ever tried to tickle yourself? Usually it doesn't work. Right. But a third person or a second person tickling you may, it's definitely going to work. That's all party, these same systems. So they come up with a whole bunch of tests.

[00:48:16] I'm not going to go into a lot of detail on the tests, but they did say that having a sense of. Touch and the ability to understand where that arm and hand were in space, dramatically improve performance. And that makes sense. Hold on a sense to me, it w it really increased or decreased actually the time it took to pick up something to move something, to drop it in every case.

[00:48:43] So. I am pretty darn excited about this, and I hope it's going to be able to help a lot of people very, very soon. This is the university of Pittsburgh medical center, by the way, that's been conducting these experiments. Now there's another one I want to talk about. And I thought this was really cool. I saw this about a couple of weeks ago.

[00:49:02] I think it was, and this is a robotic extra thumb. What they did is they placed a robotic thumb on a hand underneath the little finger. So if you're looking at your hand right now, I got my left hand out in front of me. I've got my thumb here on the far left side. I've got my four fingers pointing up and on the right hand side opposite where your real thumb is, they put.

[00:49:30] An extra thumb, like a robotic thumb that can, can bend up and down and a little other lateral movements. This study, I think was phenomenal. And there were 36 people that were part of the experiment. This was at Danielle Clode, university, college, London, and her colleagues. Uh, and it's, it's phenomenal. So when we get back, I'm going to play a little bit of audio.

[00:49:57] That is from a story over there in the UK about this. I'm going to tell you a little bit more about this thumb and the. Impact to the hat on the brain. One of the things I think it was fascinating to me anyways, was it did change the brain in unexpected ways, basically the brains of these people. And this was determined by cat scans and watching the activity when they were moving their hand, the brains were changed.

[00:50:27] Two, if you will, uh, look at the hands and as more of a single unit than individual units. I thought that was really fascinating and that extra thumb became part of the brains understanding of the hand. So this is the kind of thing we can be looking forward to. Now, this one is it's kind of cool. It's kind of fun.

[00:50:53] We're going to find a lot of different uses for, and it's part of what's fun is what they did in the experiments. So we'll talk about that as well. Hey, I want to point out if you have questions about cyber security, I might have the answers for you and you'll get those answers in the form of some stuff.

[00:51:13] Special reports. I wrote, if you subscribed to my email list, just go to Craig peterson.com/subscribe, and I'll make sure I send them all to you and get you on the right track.

[00:51:25]this is augmenting a human and I think this is the future. We are going to be augmented. And how many movies have been made about that movies where they're saying model? Yeah, we'll just tie basically Google into your brain and have Google site into your brain.

[00:51:41] That have as a thought. And you'll get a response from Google, which I think is scary. Look at Google now and how they're tracking you. Imagine if they get a copy of every one of your thoughts, but things like this that make us super human. I think are going to become more mainstream. So Google, for instance, had the Google glass, you might remember that these glasses type things that you wore, Apple's done some work on something similar.

[00:52:11] And the idea is they can project in front of you an artificial reality. Maybe that our official reality is just telling you to turn left, to get to grandma's house or where the best food in town is. Or maybe you're playing a game. All of which are cool. This that's going to happen. This is really something that is going to happen.

[00:52:30] And it's going to talk to you with a set of speakers that are right on those glasses. And it's going to be, I think, potentially amazing not reading your brain, but helping you to navigate a, read an audio book to you, do all kinds of things, and you can already get Alexa. Which is, of course Amazon's digital assistant in a lot of different configurations from your car all the way on out through these little mobile devices.

[00:52:59] In this case, we're talking about a third thumb and that third or second thumb, I should say, it's really a third one because you have two hands, right? Two thumbs, but a second thumb on one hand. And the pictures I'm looking at from the experiment had it on the right hand. I don't think it really matters, but it's opposite your normal thumb.

[00:53:20] It's not a fancy thing. It doesn't look human. It's close to the wrist. W on your hand, but it still is on your hand and you control this thumb and how it moves based on why our wireless sensors that are on your big toes. So you wiggle the toe and you can move the thumb in different directions and also have it clench the grip.

[00:53:49] And these experimenters gave the thumb to people for about five days and the participants were. Told to use the thumb in regular, old things in the world. So they use it in the labs, of course, and they wanted the participants to really push the envelope about what was possible. And they didn't want the lab to just think of all of the different experiments they wanted the participants to think of things.

[00:54:17] Maybe they hadn't thought of. So I'm looking at a video that's really cool people think of this guys. You can hold a cup of coffee and stir it all with the same hand, because you use that third thumb to grab onto the coffee and then your right thumb and forefinger. In order to stir the coffee. I think that's cool.

[00:54:42] There were other people did things like bloom bubbles, right? You hold the little bottle of the bubble soap, water. And in the fake thumb. And then again, use your fingers to hold the little thing that you are blowing into. So it's really cool. And it did change the brain. What this showed us, I think more than anything else was our brains are capable of controlling limbs and dependence pended, GS dependencies.

[00:55:14] Yeah, appendages. There you go. That, that you don't normally have, and it leads him into think about cats here in the Northeast. I don't know if you've ever noticed cats with a thumb. Have you ever noticed that it's really a Northeast phenomenon? And apparently the captains of these old boats loved these cats because they could go on the ship and chase the rats and kill the rat and hold on really well in the heavy weather and even climb up on the ropes because I had a thumb, we had a cat like that.

[00:55:52] And it wasn't the brightest cat one, a Fox caught it when it was in our yard one time, but that cat could pick things up off the floor and using the thumb. Now, cats don't normally have a thumb, but some of these cats here in the Northeast, they have a thumb. It's a real thumb. They really can pick things up.

[00:56:12] So they, this experiment proved that we can, as humans control an appendage, like an extra thumb. So let's play a little bit here about what happened a little bit of the report. The

[00:56:26] Unknown: [00:56:26] additional thumb could cradle a cup of coffee while the same hands, four fingers held a spoon to stare in milk. While some participants use the thumb to peel a banana, blow bubbles, or even play the guitar to understand how the extra thumb effected people's brains.

[00:56:40] The researchers gave them an MRI scan before and after the experiments.

[00:56:45] Craig Peterson: [00:56:45] Is that cool or what. And you can find more online. I duck goat it, you can just duck, duck go a robotic extra thumb, and you'll be able to find the video and more reports on it, but we will see what ends up happening. With our appendages what are we going to be attaching to our bodies in the future?

[00:57:07] We know we are going to be using those glasses like Google glass. We'll see what it ends up looking is it going to project right? Enjoy your eyes. What's going to happen here. We're seeing heads up displays in our cars where the speed you're going, the maps, et cetera, are projected right on.

[00:57:25] The windshield. So you don't have to move your head a big direction, in order to see what's going on. So lots of stuff. And we're starting to understand the brain a little bit better when it comes to some of this stuff, dark side. My gosh a little bit of, a little bit about the dark web, because you guys are the best and brightest, right?

[00:57:47] So the dark web of course, is that part of the internet that was created to keep things secret. No, not totally secret, but the identities of people posting things on the dark web are hard to determine. And it is in fact, something that is maintained by our military and was developed in order to allow people in other countries to communicate effectively with the CIA, with the military, et cetera, without.

[00:58:19] Being caught by their government. So the dark web is a pretty secure place, but because of that, it's a place where people go to conduct illicit transactions. This is the place where the. The major site that was out there that it's called silk road was man, I can't remember how many billions of dollars they say went through the silk road website, but they were selling everything you can think of for drugs or drug running, a gun running some of these military weapons.

[00:58:58] you name it? I don't even want to talk about some of the stuff that was being sold there on that website. Now there's other websites and taken over, but we caught that guy by the way. And all the transactions were in between. Coin. So those people that think that Bitcoin is somehow impossible to track you are wrong.

[00:59:19] And those who think that the dark web is a place where you can go and really be anonymous. Again, you are wrong. More technically we're talking about something called the onion network, the Tor browser, and it is an interesting thing. So when we get back. We're going to talk about a court case, a really weird court case involving the dark web.

[00:59:47] You've heard before about trust amongst thieves, this kind of throws it entirely out the window, shall we say

[00:59:56]You might've heard of DarkSide. I mentioned them here on the show before. DarkSide is a bad guy, right? It's a group of people that got together who had been experts at ransomware. And so what they ended up doing is deciding, Hey, we want to make a business. We're going to do ransomware. And because we're so good at it, we're going to sell ransomware as a service.

[01:00:28] And this ransomware is a service. All they did was they would take a cut of what you made off of their ransomware. They do things like provide tech support. So you ran some poor guy, some poor, small business, and that small business now is, a really hurting and you say Pay up sucker.

[01:00:50] It's going to be whatever it is. I think most of the time for very small businesses, about $40,000 and you need to buy Bitcoin and you can't how to have a lot. I don't know. Why do I buy Bitcoin? So you contact. To the DarkSide, a webs support site, and guess what they do at that point? They can help you.

[01:01:13] Okay. So go to this site. This is what you're going to see. Click on this. They have little user guides. They will help you when you're encrypted. Do you just give them the key and they'll tell you, okay. So use this key and this software to decrypt it. Just like a real business bottom line. They disappeared.

[01:01:32] You might've heard about this. Of course, DarkSide attacked the colonial pipeline. And if you live in the Southeast United States, you were hit perk too. Darn hard by this, because that shut down over a thousand gas stations, they ran out of gasoline because it was not getting shipped via the pipeline. So off they went and a DarkSide said there, I think there's a little too much heat here.

[01:02:03] At least that's what we were thinking. Initially DarkSide was trying to avoid prosecution. And so they shut down their website. Where was the website? Obviously? Wasn't out there for you on DarkSide.com. No, it was on the dark web while they shut down. And apparently they were not paying out these people that they were providing ransomware services to.

[01:02:32] Isn't that kind of interesting. So Russian speaking person, you use the handle darks up for DarkSide support had XSS dot IIS. Guess what that is. Yeah, a recruiting site for these bad guys. Now, you're not going to be able to get there. If you're not on the dark web, you shouldn't be able to get there just in general, but he was trying to recruit him affiliates for DarkSide and DarkSide was the new ransomware as a service kid in town.

[01:03:05]And it was looking for business partners until a partner could come along and say I have a hundred million email addresses or. I'm going to go after a company X like colonial pipeline. And so they become an affiliate of DarkSide. And as an affiliate, now they can send out the ransomware, try and get somebody at colonial to click on it.

[01:03:29] And then once inside then DarkSide takes over and they go ahead and download important files from the machines that are compromised. That's part of the one-two punch that they were doing. And the punch that we saw that happened on Metro PD down in Washington, DC, where the bad guys got in down there and threatened to not decrypt stuff unless a paid up.

[01:03:57]And then secondarily, you said. Since you're not paying that ransom, pay us this ransom and you have so many days, or we're going to start releasing information from the private police records. And they actually did end up releasing some of that information. All of that sort of stuff is part of the ransomware as a service.

[01:04:16]This is interesting and DarkSide has made a bunch of money. There's some newly released figures from a company called chain analysis and they track cryptocurrency. Trading. Yeah. Guess what? It's not completely private. So chain analysis said the DarkSide netted at least $60 million in its first seven months.

[01:04:44] That's a small fortune. Actually that's a pretty big fortune 46 million of it. Came in the first three months of 2021 and Darkseid made another $10 million this month with about 5 million coming from colonial pipeline. You probably heard about that. Colonial paid the ransom. And I saw an interview with the CEO of colonial, who said we didn't know if we'd be able to recover.

[01:05:13] And it's basically, it's a small business, my words, small price to pay to know we can get back in business. So they made the 5 million from colonial and 4.4 million from the chemical distribution company known as Brenntag. And then last week, DarkSide went dark. And I mentioned that on the show as well.

[01:05:37] And this guy, dark sub said that his group had lost control of the infrastructure and it Bitcoin. Does that mean that maybe Interpol the S somebody shut them down because. We have verified that there was a huge transaction where all of the money was taken out of their bit coin account. Okay, so the servers can the access to anymore the hosting panels to see panels been blocked and the hosting support service isn't providing any information, except quote, you ready for this at the request of law enforcement authorities.

[01:06:25] Okay. Yeah. And within a couple hours of the seizure funds from the payment server were withdrawn to an unknown account. And Darkseid hasn't been heard from since now DarkSide is supposed to be paying affiliates 75% of ransoms that are less than $500,000. And that cut rises to 90% for ransoms higher than $5 million.

[01:06:55] So DarkSide gets the money, right? Cause they're doing this whole thing. It's a service it's service provided to the bad guys out there, but apparently these affiliates have not been paid. Apparently the ransomware as a service provider of did not honor its commitment and the affiliates, these bad guys, I feel so sorry for them.

[01:07:22] Not they've been asking to be reimbursed from a deposit about a million dollars. The DarkSide was required to make with this website X access, which is one of these sites on the dark web, where they are setting up these deals. Okay. So there's three posts on the site. Where there are plaintiffs who have filed charges against the defendant against DarkSide.

[01:07:53] So here you go, honor. Amongst thieves, DarkSide did not honor its financial commitments. It did not pay the bad guys. The ransomed people. Like they were supposed to they've disappeared and apparently their servers have been seized and all have DarkSides, holdings have been taken. All right. Interesting.

[01:08:19] That's what you get DarkSide disrupted gasoline supply for the huge swaths of the U S about two weeks ago. And no doubt, the FBI brought full force of its might onto DarkSide. And I also know personally that historically the secret service has gotten involved too.

[01:08:40]Electric vehicles. We've talked about a lot. I had a lot of fun talking about, of course, that great Ford electric vehicle in the first hour of today's show.

[01:08:52] And they've got some cool looking cars, but they're coming out of everywhere. Now. You've got Italy with a few manufacturers that are now right. Pushing out the cars GM of course has had them for quite a while. The volt Nissan has had theirs. Ford has a couple, including the Mustang, the new electronic Mustang.

[01:09:14] There is some good things to say about them. I love the technology myself. I prefer to have something that can go a long distance. I can't really have two or three cars right now. And they might make a nice little car. If I was commuting just a few miles or maybe if it was cheap enough, I would use it to run to the grocery store.

[01:09:37] But looking at the cost of these vehicles like that, that Ford pickup truck fully maxed out, fully loaded. I looked it up. During the break it's $90,000. That's crazy money. And even though it starts at 40,000, well $39,999 95 cents. Even though it's a $40,000 start. That's a lot of money to pay for a car is especially with these batteries, there's next generation stuff coming out.

[01:10:09] That's going to be just phenomenal. That's what I'm waiting for, but here's part of the problem. We're looking at electric vehicles and there's so many things to talk about, but electric vehicles do not pay the taxes that are used to construct our roads and maintain our bridges and our roads.

[01:10:30] There is a per mile tax that is added on by the federal government and by the state governments. But it isn't computed as a per mile tax. It's computed as an add on to the price of gasoline and the price of diesel. What they're doing is they figure okay your fuel mileage may vary. And they had a big hit, of course, when fuel injectors came into cars, because they basically doubled the fuel mileage, but they say, okay, so the average car is getting 20 or maybe 25 miles a gallon and his pain anywhere from about 50 cents to a buck, a gallon in.

[01:11:14] Road taxes and those road taxes are supposed to be used to build new roads, maintain existing roads and bridges by the states and by the feds. And again, that's a topic for another conversation. So how about electric cars? They're not buying gasoline, they're not buying diesel. So those vehicles are really putting a major dent in the road budget for the feds and the state government.

[01:11:46] We've got states like California, Massachusetts, and New York who want to completely phase out any fossil fuel vehicles by 2035 and Washington state plans to follow the California rules and phase out sale of gas powered cars by 2035. But there's a huge hitch in those plans. How do you have these electric vehicles, including that Ford F-150 lightning hit the road?

[01:12:18] Because gas sales will continue to decline along with the revenue from taxing them. It's a very big deal. So what do you do while there are some bills that have been moving in? All of those states had just named, including Massachusetts, where they're saying we need to charge people. Per mile when they're driving within our state, how do you do that?

[01:12:48] Charging per mile means, how many miles they're traveling? You could certainly set up something like easy pass that covers the major highways, but the major highways are not where everyone's always driving. Think of the state routes we're on all of the time that have no toll ability. And of course, all of the side roads, how do you tax it while there are things that say maybe we use an easy pass type thing only on the bigger roads and we're charging by the mile.

[01:13:21] That's just going to drive people off of those bigger roads that are meant for traffic onto the side streets. I've seen that happen before in my own town. There are other things that are being proposed that include having the car report on miles driven within a state. So the car would have to have GPS information would know when it has crossed state lines and then keep.

[01:13:51] Tabs on how many miles it drove in the state and

[01:13:55] then

[01:13:56] Craig Peterson: [01:13:56] report that to the tax authority for you to be charged. How would that be to have at the end of the year, right? This additional tax burden based on how many miles you drove. Yeah, that would be a lot of fun. And then there are other proposals while we'll just look at all of the vehicles that are registered in our state.

[01:14:16] So again, in mass it would be when you go in for that mandatory vehicle check every year at your birthday, we will read. Your car's mileage every year and we'll discharge you by the mile. They don't care if you drove up and down to Florida most of the year or out to Texas, or most of the year back and forth to California from mass.

[01:14:40]All of that would be charged against you. So there are a lot of debates going on to try and figure it out. How can we make this work? The feds have a gas tax that hasn't changed since 1993. So the federal gas tax is 18. 0.40 cents per gallon. And then you have the state taxes and most states have increased their fuel taxes since 2010 to beginning to, to bring in more money and fix the roads.

[01:15:15] But this is going to be difficult. Some states, including California, Hawaii, Minnesota, Oregon, Utah, and Virginia have implemented road, user fees. A lot of questions there. It's so easy to collect a gas tax. It's hidden away in the price of the gasoline. Are they just going to put an extra tax on electricity and say, the average home is using so many kilowatts for their cars and do it that way.

[01:15:43] We really don't know. We just don't know. And our roads I think, are going to suffer until we figure that whole thing out. We've talked about some of these big hacks. And I was talking with a client this week about the whole solar winds hack. And where did it come from and what did they do? The solar winds hack.

[01:16:07] It looks like came in through Microsoft exchange server. There are a lot of patches out there for exchange server. If you don't have it. Pay close attention, try and figure that whole thing out. Okay. It this is a very big deal, but these reasons, cyber security instances in incident are really a reminder to all of us that public and private sector entities are being attacked from nation state actors and these big cybercriminals, like what we were just talking about.

[01:16:44] Here's our big question, who was behind the solar winds hack. Remember we talked about it here. The reports coming out of the federal government in the U S were, that was Russian intelligence was to be hunted it's Poot and blame Puente. Oh no. It's a Russian. Hacker gang, nothing to do with Putin.

[01:17:06]Maybe Putin was, giving them a little bit of a nod, it was a Russian hacker guy, gang. Things have changed a little bit. They announced here, but Microsoft being there. Microsoft announced in March that a detected multiple zero day exploits being used to attack the exchange server and a hacker group that they dug half a numb, which operates primarily from least virtual private servers in the U S so think about that.

[01:17:37] And what does that mean least. Virtual private servers. That's everybody from GoDaddy through Amazon all the way on out. Everybody now has these virtual private servers and they also installed additional malware so they could get long-term access to these victims networks. Where do they come from?

[01:18:00]Microsoft wrote in March that half of them operates from China. And this is the first time we're discussing its activity. And he called the Chinese hacker group, Microsoft here, a highly skilled and sophisticated actor that primarily targets entities in the United States. For the purpose of exfiltrating information from a number of industry sectors, including infectious disease, law firms, higher education institutions, defense contractors, policy think tanks and NGOs non-government organizations.

[01:18:37] Now, cause I've talked about it before that we've been called into organizations and D found indications of compromise that were coming from China. And that's what it looks like. It came from a huge attack. It, it hit pretty much every one of our lives in one way or another through the companies we deal with.

[01:18:59] But the Biden administration has been silent on attributing the attack to China. They won't say the China was doing this at all. And they are completely blowing it off. Yeah. All of the questions about it. So it looks like it was China that did this. The Biden administration is unwilling to say it was China for whatever reason.

[01:19:25] They are very willing to attribute it to Russia. And I don't know, maybe this is another, yeah. Russia, like we've seen before. Hey, everybody, I want to invite you. Make sure you get my newsletter. When you sign up, I'm going to be sending you some special reports on passwords and what to do with your cybersecurity.

[As heard on WTAG, WHYN, WHJJ 2021-05-25 - Automated Transcript]

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] On with Mr. Polito this morning, and we gave a little bit of a eulogy to Microsoft internet Explorer. Finally, almost gone. And I don't know if it will ever be completely gone. So here we go with Mr. Polito,

[00:00:17] Jim Polito: [00:00:17] Our good friend, Craig Peterson, nothing like a little rage against the machine. To introduce our tech talk guru, the master of all machines, right?

[00:00:33] He is our tech talk guru here to talk about the death of Microsoft Explorer. What is that? Joining us now? Craig Peterson. Good morning, Craig.

[00:00:48] Craig Peterson: [00:00:48] Hey, good morning. Microsoft Explorer of course had been used for years by Microsoft in order to let you go online. And it was the source of a major lawsuit against Microsoft.

[00:01:02]Right now you're talking about what's happening with this whole apple lawsuit and what directions is going to go what's happening? Microsoft had this major problem years ago, and that is. It did not have anything to do with the internet at all. Microsoft was a very much a late comer to the internet and to all of the connectivity that comes from it.

[00:01:26] And so what they did is they stole, borrowed some software from NCSA, this lab over in Europe. And use that as a basis to create a web browser. And since of course, Microsoft didn't really care so much about the internet as they never put much thought or work into it. However, Many of these kids that are doing programming thought internet Explorer is the way to go.

[00:01:54] And the people who were running the businesses who had windows on their desks, they looked at it and said in genetics blowers, what we need to do. So a large percentage of businesses over 50% of businesses designed their website. To work with internet Explorer and never bothered checking any other web browsers out there to see if they were compatible.

[00:02:19] Yeah. So Microsoft got even more and more into this and Microsoft added things to internet Explorer made it the most dangerous browser on the internet. It allows a website to take control of your computer. It allowed websites to download malicious software and start running with it. It might be Microsoft.

[00:02:41] It just sometimes drives me crazy.

[00:02:44] Jim Polito: [00:02:44] Let's roll it. You've just put a lot out there. So let's just go back and take a look at it. First of all, Dan and I were laughing earlier and you just said it. Oh, Microsoft didn't think this internet was going to be a big deal. Yeah. So bill gates is our real genius.

[00:02:59]Something comes along like the internet. Eh, so Netscape was really the big browser in the beginning. Am I correct?

[00:03:07] Craig Peterson: [00:03:07] It was one of the early Browns. Yeah, very popular one. The internet didn't really start really going anywhere until the browsers came out. NCSA mosaic was really the first one.

[00:03:22] Wow. I used that one extensively way back when and yeah. Firefox has been around. Yeah, Microsoft. Yeah. As part of an incredible internal arrogance decided that it would wire internet Explorer into the operating system, for lack of a better term, you could argue that Microsoft has never had a true operating system until the latest ones, but it hardwired the men.

[00:03:51] So now. You had places like Firefox Mozilla project and some of these other like Google, et cetera. Say, wait a minute wait. We have browsers. And there is no way to delete internet Exploder off of your computer. Oh, I forgot about

[00:04:09] Jim Polito: [00:04:09] that. Nickname, internet Exploder. Greg you're, we're talking with our tech dog guru, Craig Peterson.

[00:04:15] We're having a little bit of a way care. He's performing the eulogy for internet Explorer. So they get rid of it. Does that mean that Microsoft is out of the browsing business?

[00:04:27] Craig Peterson: [00:04:27] Oh, I never very big way. See Microsoft decided that people fought that Microsoft was it, they're the go-to people.

[00:04:35] And so they said we've got to get rid of, first of all, we've got to get out of the operating system because the courts ordered it. And so they finally did. And so now there's some competition in the browser space and then they came up with. The edge browser, you could still use internet Explorer on your windows, computer, and still came with it because so many websites were so poorly programmed.

[00:05:02] They would only ever work with this one browser. So they came up with the edge browser, which was their answer to everything. And of course it didn't work so good and it didn't work with most websites that had any complexity to them. And so they came up with another edge. Browser and they called it an edge because it was a completely different browser.

[00:05:23] And then they went and said, okay this just isn't working so well. So nowadays Microsoft edge browser is, do you have a drum roll? Oh yeah. Hold on. Hold on a second. I got it. Ready. Alright. Here Microsoft edge is actually Google Chrome. Are you kidding? There you go. No it's based on what Microsoft did is Google had open source.

[00:05:55] In other words, it made available the source code, the program, and they call the chromium and chromium is the base for for the Chrome web browser, Google Chrome web browser. Wow. So now Microsoft edge, the latest versions of edge, they have completely benched all of them. Terrible software or web browsers anyway, still got plenty left.

[00:06:19]And they are now, if you're running Microsoft edge, you are actually running Google Chrome and Microsoft of course has made changes to it and is tracking you in different ways. And Jen number one question I have from listeners really is. What browser should I use? And

[00:06:38]Jim Polito: [00:06:38] Your answer to the question?

[00:06:41] Craig Peterson: [00:06:41] Sure. It depends but Firefox. Wow.

[00:06:47] Jim Polito: [00:06:47] I haven't been I haven't been using it. Here at work, I use Chrome. I didn't use it on my home laptop Firefox. But I hardly use my laptop at home. Anymore, because I use my smartphone or my tablet to do most things when I'm at home. So that's all very interesting now let's move on to something that came up earlier and you made the recommendation, is that Jim start using duck go.

[00:07:20] For your searching because they don't track you and they have a better rhythms. They don't get political with their algorithms. You said, Jim, if you're going shopping, yes, Google is still the best place to go. But if you want information, it's duck go. This came up earlier because we've been discussing the power.

[00:07:44] That Google exerts in politics. And, there's real evidence that if you search for a liberal candidate for office versus a conservative, you're going to get. Better results of the liberal or the liberals results are going to be at the top of results, as opposed to a conservative and Google will say it's the algorithm, it's based on hits and bologna, people make out algorithms.

[00:08:12] The algorithms don't drop from the sky, right?

[00:08:15] Craig Peterson: [00:08:15] Yeah. You're absolutely right. Yeah. And there is no such thing as artificial intelligence, at least not in this day and age, but here's the, I, I mentioned this to you before I think, but here's that quote from a study that was done in a top on this is student news daily.

[00:08:32] But he was talking about a study that I read. We found significant pro liberal bias on Google enough, quite easily to have flipped all three congressional districts in orange county, California for Republican to Democrat. Okay. Very big deal. And that the study looked at the 2016 looked at 2018 as well.

[00:08:57] I haven't seen any good studies out yet about 2020, but Google and in you. And I saw this Google goes in and. Purposely makes changes to the recommendations, their search results. So you can look for a story and hardly find any evidence of it. And yet that story was covered by all of the major news agencies, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, CNN, you name it, they all discuss it.

[00:09:28] And yet you look forward on Google and it just doesn't show up. So you're right. And now the rhythm of a computer program is written by a person. Computers are not writing the code and there are biases in everything you and I would agree. We're bias, right? Thousands of articles, of course, thousands of articles.

[00:09:51] And I put together six to 10 of them every week that I think are important. That's showing some bias why you thought they were important. And that's the reason you're talking about things today, George foil, and then other things, right? Because you think they're important. And so that bias leaks out.

[00:10:09] And when it comes to Google and almost all of these big tech, not only does it leaked out, they enforce their bias on. You, which is why I recommend duck go. And then for browsers, Firefox Mozilla Firefox is a good general browser. There are some reasons not to use it. And I still recommend epic API C if you want very private browsing, if not, quite as good as it used to be, but it's also okay.

[00:10:39] Based on chromium. It's basically Google Chrome that they ripped. All of the tracking code out of epic browser.com is where you can find it online. Oh, this has been

[00:10:49] Jim Polito: [00:10:49] fantastic. Very helpful as usual and Firefox and duck go. And that is Craig's opinion, his well-educated opinion, but that's his opinion.

[00:11:02] Look. Greg, I've got an example for you, and then I've got to let you go, Kathy and I went to a museum. With the boys in New York city this past weekend and the museum, the it's called the Frick museum. It's right near the met and their location is undergoing renovations. They're actually in an old mansion.

[00:11:23] And so they're in a temporary location where they couldn't show their entire collection. So they picked from their collection. What they thought was best, the curator. Came up with what they thought was best in their opinion, in their collection. And that's exactly what Google people are doing, except it involves politics, not art.

[00:11:51] Yeah. Politics. And that's the issue I have with it. I'll take the opinion of a curator who will say, this is what we think is the finest in our collection, but not Google. No, not it comes to politics.

[00:12:06] Craig Peterson: [00:12:06] Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And you're right, doing that doctor go by the way, you can set it as your default search engine on your Android device, on your iOS device, on your computers.

[00:12:18] You can, it's integrated everywhere. It's just not the default. Yeah. I think

[00:12:22] Jim Polito: [00:12:22] it's great. Craig, how is your lovely wife doing? How is her recovery going from her fall?

[00:12:27]Craig Peterson: [00:12:27] I am totally amazing. You saw the doctor yesterday. And she is only three weeks now, post-op emergency surgery and she's doing better than most of the patients had six months.

[00:12:40] Wow. So amazing. Yeah. She's, I'm doing amazing. That's great.

[00:12:45]Jim Polito: [00:12:45] The center. Our best. And then how do people get in touch with you so that you can send them while your best?

[00:12:52]Craig Peterson: [00:12:52] If you'd go to Craig peterson.com/subscribe, you can subscribe, get the newsletter. I'm going to send you a bunch of little special reports there, five to 10 pages telling you what to do to help make your life safer. All it's all free. Okay. I'm going to try to squeeze you for anything, but you do have to sign up and I'll send those to you all automatically. You'll get my, not quite weekly with Karen down newsletter as well. And you can also get links right there to the podcast, so you can listen to my whole shows on the weekend.

[00:13:27] Great.

[00:13:27] Jim Polito: [00:13:27] Craig Peterson everybody, our tech talk guru, Craig, I look forward to it talking with you next week.

[00:13:33] Craig Peterson: [00:13:33] You too, Jim. Take care. Thanks.

[Following is an automated transcript of show #1114 aired on weekend of 2021-05-22]

Craig Peterson: Hi everybody.Craig Peterson here. We're going to start out with a couple of Tesla articles in the news this week. These things are really not self-driving. I don't care what Tesla calls them and some problems people got themselves into.

[00:00:21]Tesla has had all kinds of news. And sometimes I wonder what is happening here?

[00:00:28] Is this Elon Musk, just trying to get a little bit more notoriety? I don't think so. Because there have been so many negative articles out there. One of the reasons I would be extremely hesitant to buy a Tesla has to do with the door handles. Something as simple as the door handles, you probably know for a decade, I was a volunteer in our emergency medical squad here and was doing paramedic work for anybody that needed it.

[00:00:59]No charge. I wasn't charging the town wise, but. It was something where I got to see a lot of accidents and sometimes I was first on the scene, beat the fire department there sometimes even beat the police department there, although there were normally their first because they're out on the road and I'm at home in bed asleep in the middle of the night.

[00:01:19]I saw, as you can imagine some horrific things and all of you guys that are first responders listening, you've seen some just terrible things as well. And one of the things that really bothers me about the Tesla are the handles. The door handles the outside. Door handles to be a little more specific.

[00:01:38] Tesla has had some amazing crash tests. I don't know if you've seen them, but these Tesla cars broke the testing gear over the national highway transportation safety board. They had to come up with new tests because these Tesla cars just. Took those crashes and did extremely well. And seeing what Elon Musk's company space X has been able to do with these rocket ships, they have mastered the art of having a computer kind of predicted.

[00:02:10] What is going to happen in various circumstances. So it wasn't a huge surprise for me to see that they said, Hey, yeah, you're in a car accident. One of these things that these cars were scoring at 11, a 12 out of 10, they were just that good. But the problem I have with that handle is exemplified by an attorney.

[00:02:33] I think he was out in Los Angeles, who was in an accident. And I remember in the Tesla cars and all of these electric cars, there are batteries. And the batteries are typically some form of lithium ion, and there's a lithium glass. That's under development, all kinds of cool stuff going on with those batteries.

[00:02:51] But the reason they're using them is that they hold a huge charge because you don't want to just go 79 miles on a charge. Most of the time you don't. One of the reasons I'm not real fond of electric cars is when I'm going for a drive, I'm going for a drive, right? We'll drive to Florida.

[00:03:10] We'll drive to the middle of the country. We'll go up to Montana to British Columbia. So a lot of people are saying, okay, so you just go ahead and you get a gas powered vehicle for that type of driving, and then you can use an electric car for most of your driving. So if most of the driving that they're talking about is the number of times I get into the car.

[00:03:31]Then that would work, cause most of the time or money into the grocery store or running an errand here or there. So an electric car probably would be okay for that now. I have gotten many times before into the science behind electric cars and how they are nowhere near as green as even diesel vehicles are nowhere near.

[00:03:53] When you consider the entire life cycle, the manufacturing all the way through how many miles you can get out of these things. But the concern with this attorneys' crash was that the batteries were damaged in the crash. And you can imagine what that means, right? You get rear-ended, you get hit in a certain way that battery pack is impacted.

[00:04:17] Things can happen. And our friends over at MythBusters back when they were still on TV, did a little test on this. They built a rig in the back of a garbage truck, because there were stories about these garbage trucks getting caught on fire and catching on fire. And the theory was while it's lithium batteries.

[00:04:39] And we're talking about small ones, they're the type that you have in a small cell phone. So they built a rig in the back of the truck, the garbage truck. And the strapped a lithium-ion battery to the front of this rig, which was a wedge, right? Cause they wanted to make sure that it bent and bending that battery now, cause day short, remember these batteries are designed to hold as much power as they possibly can.

[00:05:07]If you have a short circuit inside of battery, what's going to happen. Think about a, an old light bulb, the Edison bulbs that we had for over a hundred years, and those bulbs had a filament inside. And that filament, when it was heated up, what did it do? It. God gave us light and it also gave us heat.

[00:05:28] The heat is the problem here because our MythBusters friends were able to get that battery to ignite in that rig. And of course it ignites inside a trash truck. Remember trash trucks are always compacting everything. If it goes ahead and ignites inside that maybe you catch the trash on fire. In fact, they were able to get it.

[00:05:49] To catch on fire. And this attorney's Tesla caught on fire in the accident. Now, when you have passers by who see an accident, usually they'll stop and they'll try and help. We're that kind of thing. People were all good Samaritans, at least almost all of us. And I have no remember remembrance at all of it, a single car accident where I got there.

[00:06:13] And there was no one there. Sometimes it was just the police officer, but there's always someone who tries to stop. So these people who stopped to try and help this guy who was in his Tesla could not open the doors. And the reason was that the Tesla has these recessed handles. Yeah. They look cool. GM.

[00:06:34] A lot of the GM vehicles have had those handles over the years. And again, it's not something I would drive because of that. There's nothing to grab onto because sometimes in an accident you need to pry that door open and by prying it open, grab a handle a good solid handle and pull hard on that handle.

[00:06:57] And if you can pull hard on that handle, you can open that door sometimes if it's just that the frame's bent a little bit and you can get that person out. And in this case, that attorney was not able to get out of that car. That battery was damaged and the battery heated up and caught on fire. And we'll leave it at that.

[00:07:19] You can imagine what happened. So the Teslas have done very well in crash tests, but. They have not done well when the batteries are damaged in a certain way. And that's why I have a bit of an issue with it. But we got two articles in the news this week. This first one's from Reuters and that'll be in the newsletter that comes out on Saturday, but a Tesla driver was killed in an accident out in California.

[00:07:46] And this guy was one of these tick tock people, tick tock, that's that website where you can put up these short videos. And oftentimes there's a theme. There's a whole series of themes. People, post videos using the same music or whatever it might be. And he had posted videos on what a beard to be his Tik TOK account in which he was driving with this hand off the route, the wheel.

[00:08:14] Now you can obviously take your hands off for a second or two and almost any car. And I don't know that I would consider that safe, it, it happens and it's happened before, but he was posting these pictures and praising Tesla's self driving. In fact, he said full self-driving features. May 5th and Tesla model three crashed into an overturned truck on a highway in Fontana, California, if Southern California, nowhere Fontana is there.

[00:08:46] You might anyways. And that crash, of course, as I mentioned, killed the Tesla driver, injured the truck driver and a motorist who had stopped to help him. So again, we're seeing the problem with these self-driving features. And you might remember a few months ago, I was talking about a little study that was done.

[00:09:09] They made police cars out of a balloon. It was just a big blow up car. That was a balloon. And they put it part way in a lane, just like a police officer might stop someone and being partially in the lane. And then they had different self-driving cars or cars that had, the autonomous semi-autonomous mode the follow behind mode, et cetera, go down that road and see what happens.

[00:09:34] And they kept hitting the cop. In this case, we're talking about an overturned truck on a highway. And apparently Tesla got it wrong. The associated press was citing. The police saying preliminary investigation determined that the Tesla's driver assistance system autopilot was engaged prior to the crash.

[00:09:58] And. I've got a problem with them calling it an autopilot because it isn't, it's not like an airplane where you engage the autopilot and then you just keep a basic eye on things. People are treating it like it's an autopilot as in you can go to sleep. And when we come back here in just a minute, I'm going to talk about something just like that with another Tesla driver.

[00:10:21] So there's no final determination as to what driving mode the Tesla was in. But there's a couple of videos of him driving with his hands off the wheel, posted on his alleged Tik TOK account, 35 year old, Stephen Hendrickson running Springs in California, and a couple of quotes from him. What would I do without my cell driving?

[00:10:43] Excuse me, full self-driving tests. After a long day at work, he said, I messaged them. One of them coming home from LA after work. Thank God. Self-drive best car ever. So when we get back, we're going to talk about this a little bit more. What are people doing with Teslas and what should we be doing? Where are we going?

[00:11:05]Frankly, I think we're jumping the gun here. Hey, you're listening to Craig Peterson. You'll find me [email protected].

[00:11:13]And we were just talking about Tesla, my biggest fear with Tesla, the biggest problem as I see it, the reason number one reason I won't buy a Tesla. Which has to do with the door handles and not being able to use them to easily pry out a door and occupant of the vehicle because yeah, they're supposed to pop open.

[00:11:38] Yeah. They're supposed to open, but in this particular case I'm talking about, they just did not do it, which is a real problem. Very problem. The national highway traffic safety administration has been investigating. This is according again to Reuters, more than two dozen crashes of Tesla vehicles, including this Fontana crash and a high profile crash in Texas last month that killed two men.

[00:12:06] Since 2016, at least three Tesla vehicles operating on autopilot have been in fatal crashes. Two involving a Tesla car driving beneath a semi-truck in Florida. The U S transport safety board said Tesla's autopilot system failed to properly detect a truck as it crossed the car's path, contributing to the accident.

[00:12:29] Also caused by a lack of driver attention and an adequate driver monitoring system. Now you can't say three or four crashes of a Tesla where there was a death involved represent much without knowing how many miles are being driven. It's like people saying yeah, it's way safer to fly in an airplane than it is for you to drive your car.

[00:12:57] And yeah, if you're talking about miles driven, that's very true. The airplane is safer than the car and yeah, at this point it actually looks like these Tesla cars might well be safe for then a car operated by human. It is borderline. You could argue some of the statistics I've seen them argued both ways, but it's not a bad vehicle from, from the general safety standpoint.

[00:13:27] But as I said, we've got another Tesla story this week, and this is from a guy his name's param Sharma 25 years old lives out in middle California and in the Bay area. And he has been arrested twice and he was booked into the Santa Rita jail on counts of reckless driving and disobeying an officer. So what was happening?

[00:13:55] What was he doing? He apparently was driving his Tesla the back seat. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. It's absolutely incredible. So this is an interesting one, too. This is a KTV you Fox two reporting. You said perineum Sharma met KTV use Jesse Gary in San Francisco, Wednesday afternoon. Not far from his mother's high rise apartment.

[00:14:24] After getting out of jail on two counts of reckless driving, he pulled up sitting in the back seat of a Tesla with no one. In the driver's seat when asked to be purchased a new Tesla after the previous one was impounded, he said, yeah, I'm rich as beep. I'm very rich. I feel safer back here than I do up there.

[00:14:46] And that was him sitting in the right rear passenger seat of his Tesla being interviewed by the Fox affiliate TV station there in San Francisco. It's absolutely amazing to me. And he's saying how he's been brake checked before, which of course is something way more in California than you would out here in Northeast where I live.

[00:15:11] And that's where somebody slams on their brakes. Who's in front of you. Cause they don't like what you're doing. And he says, Oh, my Tesla came to a complete stop. Tesla's CEO really knows what he's doing. I think people are tripping and they're scared. It's incredible. The police officer that had arrested him said that he was sitting in the rear seat driving quote unquote, the Tesla. And when the police officer pulled him over, he climbed up into the driver's seat in order to stop the car, the guy even posted a video. Saying, I just got out of jail already got another Tesla. You feel me? I'm rich like that. It came out of the pandemic, a beeping millionaire and some more swear words that I won't repeat here.

[00:16:01] So the CHP California highway patrol spokesman told Vice's motherboard. It's just a website covers a lot of tech. That it's recommending charges to the district's attorney's office and conducted a thorough investigation that will consider the possibility of previous incidents and pop, obviously his social media.

[00:16:21] So here's your problem. According to Tesla, autopilot is a hand on driver assistance system. It's intended to be used only with a fully attentive driver. And I mentioned some of the problems that Tesla has been known to have consumer reports has also reported. This is just last month that Tesla's driver monitoring system not only failed to make sure the driver was paying attention, but it also couldn't tell if there was a driver there at all.

[00:16:57] Obviously if it could tell there is a driver there, it wouldn't have been able to be driven, quote unquote from the back seat. Tesla's full self-driving system has more capabilities, but again, this is from Tesla, both autopilot and full self-driving capability are intended for use with a fully attentive driver who has their hands on the wheel and is prepared to take over at any moment.

[00:17:24] Cadillac came out with a system. I liked this idea where it vibrates. If it notices that you're not paying attention, it'll vibrate, your seat. Some of these vehicles will vibrate your steering wheel. Just wake you up. Hey, wake up. There's various levels of autonomy.

[00:17:42] Level five is. You don't need a driver at all. And Elon Musk says that he expects Teslas will be available at the end of this year, perhaps in 2022, that we'll have full what's called level five automation, which means they can drive without any human attention. The California DMV says the Tesla's director of autopilot software told regulators that Musk's predict and timeline does not match engineering reality.

[00:18:16] Okay. So again, the it's somebody on the marketing side, that's overselling things a little bit, or maybe a lot a bit. I don't, I really don't know, but. They do have permits in California to operate these vehicles in full autonomous mode, as long as there's human backup drivers. And I think it's good.

[00:18:36] I think we're moving forward and the investigations into these crashes are going to make us, I think, ultimately a lot safer. So let's say that there's a crash where the human at a wheel of a normal car they'll then investigate, they'll say it was at a human's fault. And then insurance companies kick in and payments are made maybe a driver's license is suspended or removed from that.

[00:19:03] Person, but when we're talking about an autonomous vehicle, like a Tesla, when they do the investigation and they find a flaw in the assumptions made by the programmers, their software, that's in the computer, that flaw. Is probably fixable, which means that type of accident will probably not happen again.

[00:19:27] And that's where I'm looking at it and saying these ultimately are going to make our roads safer. Cause hairy men make a mistake and Harry May not make that mistake again. But Mary May make that mistake when she's out driving. But if the slow car has an accident, they fix the problem. Teslas are probably not going to have that accent again.

[00:19:50] So I'm looking forward to this in the future on not sure it's going to be this year, maybe next. Make sure you're on my newsletter. Craig peterson.com/subscribe.

[00:20:01]I've been talking about this Tesla driver, and I just absolutely loved this. Cause I, I did a little searching on him. I went to duck, go and poked around a little bit to find out who is the sky, this Sharma guy who's driving from the back seat. And remember he says, he's rich as bleep.

[00:20:20] And so he doesn't care that his car was impounded. He just went out and bought another one. His money apparently comes from his parents who apparently were in the banking business. And then he Rose to fame during the whole lockdown because he was posting videos of him driving his Tesla. From the back seat and making all kinds of outlandish statements.

[00:20:48] That's how he got rich. And the rest of us, what are we doing? We're busting ourselves, trying to get everything done that we can possibly get done and hoping people notice, oh man. I guess frustrating. Sometimes every year. Verizon publishes some cybersecurity stats. And I absolutely love these.

[00:21:09] I pay attention to them. I read them from cover to cover because they are absolutely. Correct. This is their 2021 data breach investigations report. And it helps me to understand what's happening out there in the world. And of course I follow the news stories every week and it also lets me know information about the surveys that they have done with business owners and it executives and everything else.

[00:21:41] So they came out with some new stats I would expect. That there was a change because so many people were working from home. And to me it would seem obvious that with people working from home on computers, that probably are not properly secured, they're probably in properly using VPNs that we would see an increase in ransoms.

[00:22:08] Now we know that we did right. 300% increase last year because of people working from home and businesses, just not having things set up properly. And that makes sense. Cause most businesses, they, it's not their business to do cybersecurity. They're just trying to stay in business. I had a meeting this week with one of my clients, a longterm client he's been climbed for, I don't know, 25, 30 years.

[00:22:34] And it was interesting to me to get his perspective. In fact, it was very informative because I live and breathe this cyber security stuff. He doesn't, and he has. Concern about cybersecurity. It would be inconvenient to have ransomware in his mind because he has a lot of stuff on paper and I could maybe use the backups.

[00:23:01] Now we were keeping reminding him, Hey, you're doing the backups yourself. You don't have us doing them where we automatically, at least once them once a month. We start your systems from backups. We do that in the cloud. We have our own little cloud. We don't do this up on like Amazon or anything, but we do it locally.

[00:23:22] And that way we know the backups. Good. Because if we can start your machines up in our little cloud, we know that we got a good backup. He has never tested his backup. We had, we had another client like that. And when we picked them up as a client, we went in and they were taking home hard desks every day, religiously, just like this guy is.

[00:23:45] And so he they would take the desks, bring in Monday's desk, plug it in Monday morning and leave it plugged in all day. So the backup would go on to that desk. And then Monday night he would take that disc home and then Tuesday he'd bring in Tuesday's desk. Now there's a lot of problems here. One is they never tested it ever.

[00:24:12] And they'd been doing this for least 18 months prior to us getting there, because that was the advice or somebody, somebody said, yeah, all you have to do install the backup software and. Plug in your disc every week. So number one, it had never been tested, right? You got to test these things end to end.

[00:24:29] You have to do full restores, which they weren't doing. The other thing that is a problem with these USB drives is you plug them in. Are they really working? How many errors are on that drive? Are you even checking the logs from the backup software? So they had a server, in fact, in both cases and all that, I think of it, they had a server and it had a raid array.

[00:24:54] It had three drives and a raid five configuration. For those of you who know what that means. And basically what that means is you could lose one drive and you'd still be okay. So the idea is that drive goes bad. You replace that drive, you re silver the whole thing and then you're off and running again, so you can lose another drive and you'd be okay.

[00:25:18] But in both cases, both of these businesses had a bad drive in the raid array. And they didn't notice it. They didn't know. And at least in this other customer they had never ever checked to see if their backup was working and in the second customer. So in both of them, they never checked.

[00:25:39]And they said, so how much would you charge us to. Verify it. And we said we'd want to spin it up. And that means you have to copy everything. We'd have a bunch of bench time, so it'd be 500 bucks and we'll make sure your backups are working. Oh no, we can't. We can't do that. We can't pay them 500 bucks, so who knows still, we don't know if the backups working. They think that they could recover from paper, that ransomware isn't going to be so bad and extortion doesn't matter. My head just spins with this stuff. It really does. It just spins. So looking at the variety doesn't report that comes out the data breach investigations report, they are seeing that ransomware, phishing and web application attacks all increased during this last year.

[00:26:27] And they also found that 85% of the data breaches involved. Human interaction. So what that means is you and I doing some stuff that maybe we shouldn't be doing, and some of this human interaction is installing malware, right? From fishing activity, where they're sending out these emails. A day, doesn't go by where I don't get an email every day.

[00:26:56] I get emails that are saying what's the biggest one right now. I've been getting Oh, it has to do with some signature software. I'm not going to name them because I don't want them to get in trouble. Cause I got a decent software, but it's a big deal. Okay. A very big deal. So they're saying that the median financial impact or so do you know what median is mean?

[00:27:18] Median and mode? Median and financial income pact of a breach last year was about $21,000 95% of the incidences incident. Costs the businesses somewhere between $826 and $653,000. Okay. So many breaches they say did not cause losses. And those that did cause losses. This is where it really gets big.

[00:27:50] Okay. 95% of the computer data breaches led to losses as much of 1.6 million. So it's getting expensive. So what do we do? How do we deal with this? I talked about this before you need to improve your windows, privacy and security. You need to harden your windows. You need to get good firewalls. And I talked about it this week.

[00:28:14] Again, you need to use something like open DNS, which is, it has a free version. There are paid versions, but this is going to get you. A long way towards being safe, open dns.com. That's where you find them online. If you can't remember you can't run it down. Just email me M [email protected]. Ask your question and I'll be glad to point you in the right direction.

[00:28:41]I was just talking a little bit about the Verizon data breach, their incident incidents report. And I wanted to just bring up one other bit of data. And that is that the attacks that are going on are actually simpler. They're not as complex as the old ones and phishing attacks are now going hand in hand with the use of stolen credentials.

[00:29:09] What are stolen credentials while it is information that has been stolen from another website, typically? Now might be as stolen from your business. And so they know what your password is because they have all of the passwords in the business you're working for. But more often they're doing something called credential stuffing.

[00:29:32] So they're going to the dark web and let's say they want to attack colonial pipeline, which of course just happened. And colonial pipeline has their URL that all of their email is sent to. What they end up doing is they go to the dark web and they find. Credentials for people that have a colonial pipeline, email address, and those credentials are going to include things like your password on that website.

[00:30:04] Now, what happens is. They stuff that username and that password in as many sites as they can. So let's say they found that you're using Microsoft remote desktop, and maybe there's a zero day bug as there are many bugs in that software that people haven't patched yet. So they'll just use that to get on, but if they can, let's say you patched it and they found your email address and use over on website X.

[00:30:35] That has nothing to do with colonial pipeline. What they can then do is take that username, which is that email address and that password and try it at colonial pipeline. And guess what? It works more than 60% of the breaches involved, credentialed data. And 95% of organizations that we're experiencing this credential stuffing attack had to between 637 and 3.3 billion malicious login attempts throughout the past year.

[00:31:14] We see them all the time. We have a couple of internet facing servers and those servers we log when someone tries to log in and if they try and log in more than four times immediately, they are blocked at the firewall. So they can't even connect to the server anymore, period at all. And that stops this type of attack.

[00:31:39] So I'm sitting here. I'm actually, I was literally scratching my head because I cannot figure out how can you have 3.3 billion malicious log in attempts at one business over the course of a year and not do something about it. Not have them automatically blocked. This is just crazy because credentials are the key that the bad guys can use to get into the network.

[00:32:13] And they're not just using them to do ransomware into somewhere like colonial pipeline. They're using those credentials to go to your bank account. Yeah. So you, most people are using the same email I'll address as a credentials, which is ridiculous. I can't believe businesses are letting people use an email address as their login username, but most people using that same email address and those same passwords at multiple websites.

[00:32:46] So I want you to do something now, and I've asked you guys to do it before on the show. You may not have had a chance before you may not have known about it, but I want you to go. If you're not in front of your computer, go there right now, or grab something. You can write this down with, or send me an email just [email protected].

[00:33:06] What I want you to do is go to have I been poned.com. So that's like it sound have HIV. E I, the letter I been B E N P w N E d.com and put in your email address right there. And that will tell you what information of yours is widely available on the dark web. Now it doesn't have everything that's on the dark web.

[00:33:37] By any stretch, but it has all of the major stuff. And I can guarantee you if you've had an email address for any time at all, that email address is going to show up. It's going to show up all a lot. Okay. So check it out. Have I been poned.com and then trend, according to Verizon is towards simplicity.

[00:33:59] They're using passwords stuffing. They're using social engineering fifth. Dean X spike in misrepresentation, which is a type of integrity, breach business, email compromised, doubled last year, and a gain this year. It doubled again, 60% of business, email compromise attacks that successfully stole money. It's crazy here.

[00:34:27] Median lost $30,000. That's email coming in, pretending to be someone that they're not. And again, I've helped companies that this has happened to and help them tighten things up. That is the problem. Okay. There's huge medium was 30,000. And 95% of them cost somewhere between $250 and a million dollars.

[00:34:53]It's just amazing. So we've got to pull up our socks. We have to be careful. I have some free info that you'll get. If you sign up from an email newsletter, you're automatically going to get a few of the special reports that I put together. You're going to get my weekly emails. It's all for free.

[00:35:12] This newsletter. Most people can't believe they don't have to pay. I had someone just this last week say. Are you sure I'm not supposed to pay for this because a lot of newsletters out there, of course you have to pay for, but I send out all of this type of information for free and I have free little trainings and free guides, and I'm more than glad to offer them all to you guys.

[00:35:37] So check them out. Go right now. Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Now have I been poned is again a website juke should go to, but the other thing you need to do is make sure you're using a password manager. Now a password manager is something like one password. I wouldn't no longer use the last pass. I have pulled that off of my list of recommended password managers because of a major problem that they had.

[00:36:07] And it showed, they really didn't know what they were doing. Everybody makes mistakes. Nothing's a hundred percent secure. Believe me. I know that, but they really lost all. Of my trust with this huge hack that they had. So one password is the only one I'm recommending nowadays. That's a digit one in the word password.

[00:36:28] Use that. If you can use something other than your email address to log in. Do that change your account name to something out, something completely unrelated call it the human element or something. Use a login. That's not your name. That is not your email address in is not something that's easily guessed.

[00:36:50] And then use a fairly randomly generated password. Now, what I'm recommending now is the latest NIST guidance, and this does the national institutes of standards and technology, and the latest NIST guidance says. You do use some random stuff, but I'm not talking about random letters, numbers, special characters.

[00:37:13] I'm talking about taking three or four randomly chosen words, or even a phrase that are separated using maybe a digit or a special character, making sure there's a little bit of upper lowercase stuff going on, but it's something that can be remembered if you need to. And one password will generate these for you automatically, which is absolutely amazing.

[00:37:41] Okay. It's such a godsend. I was surprised when I looked the other day, I have 1400 different accounts in my one password. Yeah. That's how many I have that's a lot. And it'll also keep your notes in there. So you can put in bank account information, et cetera. It keeps it encrypted. It keeps it in their own little secure cloud.

[00:38:05] So knock on wood should be pretty darn safe. Now want to point out one more thing about these statistics here? Nearly all email servers, 96%. 96% of email servers that were compromised in these attacks or cloud-based once they've gotten into your email. They have control of you. I just got a call again.

[00:38:36] This is a friend of a friend who called me up because their email account had been compromised almost certainly because again, credential, stuffing there's password information out on the dark web, et cetera. Cause I ha I looked it up for him and sent him the link. Here's what have I been poned says. But once they have control of that email address, they probably have something that you're using for password recovery.

[00:39:05] So you go to the bank. So the right way to do this for the bad guys is they go to like bank of America. They try and put in your email address and say, I forgot my password. So where are they going to send your password? They're going to send it to your compromised email account. If they're, they'll try all of the major banks and they'll see what they can find.

[00:39:27] 96%. So it's just crazy. And people are using this. They, the cloud is just the name for someone else's computer and you don't know how all protected it is. And you still have ability if it's broken into, and in this case, Verizon saying that this led to the compromise of personal information, internal business information.

[00:39:54] Medical information, bank, account information. This is part of the challenge of moving a business to the cloud. It's incredible. All right. And not flip that make sure you do get all this info. You'll get all of my free, special reports by signing up. If you're not already on the list. If you have any questions, Craig peterson.com.

[00:40:17] Feel free to reach out me at CraigPeterson.com. That's my meal at that's my email address, and I don't use it to log into anything [email protected].

[The following is an automated transcript.]

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] The lies and misinformation that are going on right now over in Israel, between Hamas and of course the Israeli government. This Tesla owner got bulled over sent to jail because he was driving the Tesla from a back seat. And a little bit more about the colonial pipeline with Mr. Matt Gagnon. We joined him of course, this morning.

[00:00:27] Here we go.

[00:00:28] Matt Gagnon: [00:00:28] Good to have you with us. 7:36 on a Wednesday means it's time to talk to Craig Peterson, our tech guru. He joins us at this time every single week. Craig, how are you this week?

[00:00:38]Craig Peterson: [00:00:38] Hey, I am doing quite well. I had a couple of my hives swarm. It's just been such a great day; over winter and a great spring.

[00:00:47] And so I was able to capture them. So I'm up two more hives. I cut two swarms.

[00:00:53] Matt Gagnon: [00:00:53] So I'm what are you talking about? Are you a bee person?

[00:00:56] Craig Peterson: [00:00:56] My honey bees. Yeah. You didn't know that?

[00:00:58] Matt Gagnon: [00:00:58] Well, yeah. Okay. I sort of remember that a little bit, but you wouldn't mean you caught a swarm. I mean, they like you, you go out there with a net, I mean, yeah,

[00:01:06] Craig Peterson: [00:01:06] Well,, the way it works is bees multiply by dividing. So if they're, if they're really, really healthy, they will go ahead and make some new Queens. And then when that queen emerges, the old queen will take about half of the workers and we'll go to try and find a new hive. So she'll go out and she'll just sit on a branch.

[00:01:28] And of course, all of these other workers that had 10 to 15,000 bees will swarm right around her. So they'll all be resting on this poor branch, which is almost always just sagging. So if you can touch them. So what you do is if you can get that queen particularly, and get her into another little hive or a box to begin with, then now you've got a whole new hive. So that's how they have new colonies. That's how the honeybees is started expanding. And I, I often just let them go because it helps with the whole diversity thing and they become wild honey bees, which we need because this year, about half of all of the colonies in the U S died. So that's how it works.

[00:02:14] There's a bigger than a football, but kind of shaped like it. And if you see one call a beekeeper in your area, so they can either go and grab them and help them make sure they're healthy because unfortunately our wild bees are dying at very high rates, but they can make sure they're healthy. They can capture them and they'll be happy.

[00:02:34] And hopefully they won't end up in somebody's Eve's over there that they then have to try and get those beat colony out of.

[00:02:43] Matt Gagnon: [00:02:43] Well, I learned something about bees today. Ladies and gentlemen, Craig Peterson joins us at this time. He also joins the program where we're joins the station, excuse me, on Saturdays at one o'clock where he hosts the show where he goes into many of these topics in more detail.

[00:02:54] I don't know if you're going to hear about bees, but I guess you're probably going to hear about the colonial pipeline. I know that we talked a little bit about this last week, but Craig, they paid a $5 million ransom. And from what I understand, they basically, I mean, what they got back for a key, they didn't even really use any way.

[00:03:09] And they ended up like using a, sort of a backup, uh, uh, of theirs to restore things. Anyway. I mean, first of all, tell me about what actually happened with that payment ransom. And second of all, what's the impact of this? I mean, does this not just incentivize more of this garbage happening? Yeah,

[00:03:24] Craig Peterson: [00:03:24] it really does.

[00:03:25] And that not only incentivizes it generally, but it incentivizes them to go after colonial dam, just like they've done with the city of Atlanta, where they paid a ransom. And of course they got hit again just weeks later. Another ransom. Right? They got hit again. So this is really bad. Under the Trump administration, the department of justice said you are supporting terrorism.

[00:03:51] If you pay ransoms. And we consider that to be a legal. Now under the Biden administration, they said, no, you know, whatever, do whatever you want. It's kind of, you know, up to you. Uh, they paid $5 million. The bad guys gave them the decryption key. And, and in fact, tried to help them decrypt to their data that wasn't successful.

[00:04:14] What colonial ended up doing is two things. One, they switched their pipeline over to manual. Control away from computer control. So they actually had to have people all the way up and down the coast. How long does that? It's like two, 3000 mile pipeline and all of the valves turn them on and off. That's how they had to deal with it.

[00:04:36] But pain, your ransom is a bad thing to do. Having a backup is a good thing to do, but you gotta remember. And I cover this in my backup. Of course that when we're talking about backups, something that's attached to your machine is also going to be encrypted as part of the ransom. So make sure your backups are remote and the bad guys can't get it them, but that's the easiest way to get them.

[00:05:01] Pass that first part of the ransom. The second part is what's going to be interesting here mind, because what they will do this group is they'll steal your data and then they will threaten to release the data. And, uh, when Zach shoe going to drop, and then also there are claims out there that the reason they shut the pipeline down, Matt was because their billing systems were offline.

[00:05:28] That was the part of their network that was attached, attacked by ransomware. And they wanted to be paid for the fuel. So they shut it down because they didn't want it to deliver fuel that they couldn't bill for.

[00:05:45] Matt Gagnon: [00:05:45] It's quite a mess, obviously, correct. Peter Sohn joins us at this time, uh, every Wednesday to go over what's happening in the world of technology or the big story besides this colonial pipeline issue, which is really more of a last week thing is what's going on in Israel with, uh, you know, obviously the, uh, the, the rockets being watched back and forth, the potential of a ground invasion, the conflict.

[00:06:04] At its worst point for the last probably eight years or so. Uh, social media has been a part of this story here. And one of the things that's interesting about that is that misinformation lies a bunch of garbage has been skewed around on social media. And there seems to be no stopping it. Craig Peterson.

[00:06:21] Craig Peterson: [00:06:21] Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And what we're finding now is really something that's been going on for a long time, all over the world. And that is, they are showing at official press conferences on basically on both sides of this conflict. There's showing videos. Of other past conflicts and representing it as it's happening right now.

[00:06:48] So this is a real big problem, frankly, these, this is a different world. Many of our news organizations are not investigating. They find a video, they use the video, even though it misrepresents it. And of course, a lot of people are familiar. With that at our U S border where they were showing pictures of kids in cages, when they were, those bridges are taken cherry, the Obama administration.

[00:07:15] And yet it is the Trump administration. They're complaining about same thing here. So we are able to do research online, please do the research, and it's disgusting to see the state of Israel. Using videos that are not particularly relevant and misrepresenting them in the same thing on the other side with

[00:07:37] Matt Gagnon: [00:07:37] Tomas.

[00:07:38] Yeah. That's not the first time that's ever happened. We're talking with Craig Peterson, our tech guru who joins us this time every single week. Lastly, just want to ask a little bit about Tesla. Uh, a Tesla owner who drives from the back seat got arrested recently.

[00:07:53] Craig Peterson: [00:07:53] Yeah. You said he apparently told the police officer that, uh, and this was in California highway patrol that he felt safer in the back seat.

[00:08:05] Matt Gagnon: [00:08:05] This is, this is the self-driving car revolution about to happen to us. Right? Do we are going to get a lot more stories like this

[00:08:11] Craig Peterson: [00:08:11] happening soon? It absolutely is traveling eastbound on the IAT or across the San Francisco Oakland Bay bridge. Uh, if you're familiar with it.

[00:08:21] Matt Gagnon: [00:08:21] Oh my God. He drove on that bridge.

[00:08:24] Seriously. Yeah, I know I've spent an awful lot of time out there and I've driven on that bridge more than once. And that's the last place I would be in the backseat, not driving my car. I guess. It's just my I'm terrified of Heights, but now that's insane. Yeah.

[00:08:37] Craig Peterson: [00:08:37] So people were reporting it to the police.

[00:08:40] The police pulled him over. You apparently climbed into the front seat and in order to stop the car and he actually got arrested, put in jail. He was released as is the norm in California. And so what does he do? He does it again. And he's caught again and arrested again. He says, I just feel safer back here than I do.

[00:09:02] Uh, there, uh, this is, yeah, this is what we're in for here. Remember, even though Tesla calls it full self-driving, it is not with autonomous,

[00:09:14] Matt Gagnon: [00:09:14] right. It's meant to be an autopilot while you're sitting there. Behind the wheel, just in case and, and directing things still really. I mean, it's not a full self-driving for real right now, Craig Peterson.

[00:09:25] Thanks for joining us as always good luck on Saturday on this very program one, o'clock make sure you tune in for that. And we'll talk again next week. Hey, take care. All right, we're going to take a quick break here. When we come back.