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

Welcome!

Good morning, everybody. I was on WTAG this morning with Jim Polito.  We got into a couple of interesting topics. First was the hack of the FL water plant and how that happened and why. Then we got into NASA and how it plans on propelling the spacecraft to Mars. Here we go with Jim.

For more tech tips, news, and updates, visit - CraigPeterson.com.

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Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] The Russians have been using them for years in space.  We've been concerned about it because of what happens when that Russian bird comes down. There's issues right with all of that. These nuclear propulsion plants really tend to make a whole lot of sense. 

Hi, everybody. Craig Peterson here. I was on this morning with Mr. Jim Pollito. We talked about the NASA space program and I love this thing. You probably know listening for a while that I actually helped just a teeny tiny bit with NASAs program called the space shuttle. That was really cool. I did some engineering way back when.  Also, we talked about this breached water plant, what happened there? Who did it? Why and how can we avoid this sort of thing happening in our lives? So here we go with Jim. 

Jim Polito: [00:00:52] Hey, what's team viewer. Apparently, I guess it's something like Zoom. Guess what? Hackers busted in through it. Almost polluted water in Florida. This is the stuff we were worried about. Joining us now to discuss all of this, our good friend and a very popular guest tech talk guru. Craig Peterson. Good morning, sir. 

Craig Peterson: [00:01:20] Hey, good morning. Yeah, this is a bad thing, Jim. You're right about that.

Jim Polito: [00:01:25] Apparently in Florida hackers broke into the computer system and just a smaller system. A smaller water system in Florida provides water to about 15,000 people, but they were able to, I think, turn up the chlorine in it so that the water coming out of your tap would basically be Clorox. Contaminating the water with the very agent we use to purify it.  It seems that as usual, they're not listening to Craig Peterson down there, the people running this water system. 

Craig Peterson: [00:02:00] Absolutely. You know that I set up the FBI InfraGard webinar program and I ran it. I conducted the webinars for a couple of years and the whole idea behind InfraGuard is that it's infrastructure protection, right? It's everything from heaven forbid lawyers get hacked, all the way to these types of systems. 

 In this particular case, we're talking about a technology called SCADA. These are devices that are everywhere. These are devices that control valves, they'll open and close valves. 

On the electric grid, for instance, right now in Texas, right? They were foolish enough to go to wind power and so all of a sudden now all of the windmills are frozen solid.

 I saw, by the way, a video of this drone that applies D-ICER to these windmills. Anyhow, they're frozen just like an airplane. If it's flying through the sky and it gets ice up and they don't have anything to stop that ice. Of course, in commercial planes the wings will no longer have lift. The same sort of problems happening with those windmills down there, Florida.

What happened, now is they have to shut down parts of the grid. Throughout Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, they are now shutting down parts of the grid doing rolling blackouts. That's all controlled by these SCADA systems. 

Now you mentioned something called team viewer.

Jim Polito: [00:03:29] Yeah. 

Craig Peterson: [00:03:30] Team viewer is something that people have been using as part of this lockdown thing. We're not going in to work. So how do I get to the computers at work? Well pulling all of this together, this water plant, as well as every other water plant in the country uses these computer-controlled mixing valves and on-off valves. They are controlled by computers there in the plant. 

In this case, the computer they figured man, we still got to have people monitor this right. We don't want our water to go offline. We don't want the quality to go down. So some guys sitting there at home and are connected to the computer in the plant using team viewer. 

Now there's a few problems here, obviously. Team viewer isn't necessarily the best thing in the world. There are much more secure ways of even setting up Team Viewer than what they did. 

They were running windows seven cause that's the controller for all of these mixing valves there in the plant. Windows seven, of course, was an unsupported operating system. No firewall. 

They shared the same team viewer password amongst everybody there in the plant. 

They released something called sodium hydroxide. That's lye. That's the stuff that'll burn your hands off. Whoever got on to it, increased the amount of lye in the water by a factor of 100. It could have caused sickness or death. At least the guy who's working from home, who's using team viewer saw, wait a minute, somebody just changed the lye setting to death. I'm going to turn it back down again.

Jim Polito: [00:05:17] Okay. We're talking with our tech talk guru, Craig Peterson, just about the things that we do worry about which is, World War Three will not be fought with conventional weapons. It'll be fought over the internet. We see this in a hack into a water plant in Florida. Craig, do we have any idea where this hack came from? Is it as they say the usual suspects? 

Almost certainly Russians. No, we don't know yet, but I thought I'd throw that in there. 

In fact, there's an advisory out right now from the state of Massachusetts about this. They're talking about what the problem was. We know how they got in.  We aren't sure who it was yet.

The old-style hack. This is not using what we call a zero-day vulnerability or anything else. The people who set it up were, I would say stupid, but I'm not going to say that.  I would have said stupid if I had said something. They should know better if they had attended any of the briefings that I conducted for the FBI InfraGard program, they would have known that.  We don't know it could be anyone, anywhere. It could be another employee at the water plant that just wanted to prove his point that the system's insecure. 

Yeah, not good. Not good. This is not good. Just fix it, so we won't worry anymore. 

Craig, to go to Mars help me out with this, cause you are a smart person. We need nuclear power. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. So you're saying that it's going to be like the starship enterprise. You're going to have, dilithium crystals in there. Scotty's got, "I can't give it no more, Captain". Are we really talking about a nuclear-powered spaceship to go to Mars?

Craig Peterson: [00:07:09] Obviously we've got Elon Musk. He's the guy out front and he has the standard chemical rockets. If you've ever watched the movie Snowpiercer or the TV show, Snowpiercer, which causes global catastrophe. Okay. 

Jim Polito: [00:07:24] Yes, I saw the movie. I don't watch the series. The movie was just not all that great.  I love SciFi, but I don't watch the series, even though one of my favorites, Jennifer Conley is in it. No, I don't watch it. 

Craig Peterson: [00:07:37] Of course, completely fiction the way they've done it. 

Elon Musk is looking at using chemical rockets. NASA is looking at, in fact they're planning on using chemical rockets. In both cases, NASA is can use them to go to the moon. It gets very expensive. 

Our first moonshot, you and I both remember it in the sixties, I can remember watching it live on TV. It was just mind-blowing.  The very first time I had ever seen a color newspaper was the day after. They had a color picture of our men there on the moon. It was just such a great time. 

We were planning on something different. We were planning on having boosters to get the main rocket supplies up into orbit around the earth. Then filling those up with fuel, having fuel there, and then using the rocket that we assemble in orbit around the earth to then go to the moon.

There are plans to potentially do that for Mars missions and other deep space-type missions.  The biggest problem we have is getting out of earth's gravity. When you get right down to it, NASA is expecting its big space launch system to cost around $2 billion for a flight to go on up, to get the fuel up, and other things. It's just very expensive.

 Some technology that we looked at in the sixties was nuclear technology where we have a small nuclear power plant.  We know how to make these things. The Russians have been using them for years in space.  We've been concerned about it because of what happens when that Russian bird comes down. There's issues right with all of that.

 These nuclear propulsion plants really tend to make a whole lot of sense.  We'll cut way back on the cost because the amount of nuclear material we have to haul in space is a tiny fraction of the chemical propellant we'd have to haul in space. NASA is looking at it again. Congress has been funding, nuclear, propulsion experiments, and stuff now for many years.

We'll see where it all goes. It's a different way to do it. We've got a lot of proposals on the table still. I think the first missions to Mars are going to be chemical rockets because Musk is doing a pretty darn good job with that. Our missions to the moon in the near future will be chemical.

We're going to end up with a space station in earth orbit that is going to essentially be a fueling station for our continued missions to Mars, even to the moon. Mars's moons and maybe some deeper space. 

Jim Polito: [00:10:23] That's amazing. We've got to make sure that the death star. We don't have an exhaust portal on the vessel two meters wide that you could get,  some type of a weapon into, and then the whole thing is gone.

We just gotta make sure we  

Craig Peterson: [00:10:39] we found out about that though. Do you remember? What we found out is the guy that designed it, built that flaw into it, on purpose 

Jim Polito: [00:10:46] He did that was great. 

Craig Peterson: [00:10:48] Rebels could. Yeah. Was that a little backstory explanation? 

Jim Polito: [00:10:53] I love that. That was Rogue One. I love that. Love it. Our good friend who knows everything.

Craig Peterson, tech talk guru. Craig, how do folks get in touch with you? 

Craig Peterson: [00:11:03] I am starting up here this next week, in fact, this week, this morning, you'll get an email from you, a little bit of training a whole bunch of training programs just to help you guys understand this, but you've got to be on my email list and that means go to Craig peterson.com slash subscribe. You can subscribe right there. You can listen to my podcasts. 

Of course, they're my articles. You can even get the weekly email, similar to what I sent to Jim, my show notes every week, as well on Sunday mornings, I've actually pulled it together. Jim, just Craig peterson.com. 

Jim Polito: [00:11:37] Nice, nice. That's right. Get everybody informed, Craig. Thank you very much. We'll talk with you next week. 

Craig Peterson: [00:11:44] Take care. Bye-bye.

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More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating:

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome,

Craig Peterson here. I was on with Chris Ryan on NH Today. We talked about some of the misguided legislation being pushed by Amy Klobacher regarding big tech with her regulatory solution to anti-trust. Then we got into Facial recognition and expose.ai. Here we go with Chris.

These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit.

- CraigPeterson.com

---

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] We would be tossed back to 1800 with no electricity, no computers for months and years in some locations.

Hey, another week, another dollar. Hi everybody. We got in this morning to this problem Ford, another car manufacturers' are having it isn't just these video game manufacturers. Like I talked about over the weekend on my show and we also got into the security of our infrastructure and all of that with Mr. Chris, Ryan. So here we go.

Chris Ryan: [00:00:35] I mean, he is Craig Peterson, Craig, how are you?

Craig Peterson: [00:00:38] Hey, good morning. Doing well,

Chris Ryan: [00:00:40] A couple of things we want to get to with you today. I want to talk a little about our grid and the security of our grid and how technology plays into that because this has been one of my major concerns for a period of time. Whether it's the breach, a breach water plant which took place recently in Florida had their computer system potentially exposed to a hazardous breach last week. Whether it's our overall technology infrastructure, our lights, our emergency response, our electricity all tied into the grid. What is your general sense about the safety of our infrastructure?

Craig Peterson: [00:01:19] Well, I'm not very happy with it, frankly, all the way across the board. You might know that I ran for the FBI, their InfraGard program which is for protecting our infrastructure, I ran webinars for about two years. Trying to help businesses, government and organizations, NGOs, et cetera understand the risks involved here.

One of the really big risks we're seeing with some of this infrastructure, including in this case as water plant is that we have these computer-controlled systems are called SCADA systems and they are designed to allow you in the plant to open this valve close, close that valve, spin up the centrifuge, which is how we destroyed a third of the Iranian centrifuges.

These type's of systems security is an afterthought. They've been in now for a few decades. You look at this breached water plant down in Florida, that you mentioned, this was a simple mistake that should never have been made.

What they did is they were using team viewer, because everybody has to work from home now and they did not set everything up properly at all. Nobody really thought it through. There were no security experts because security expertise is a very narrow field that really a regular IT person is not qualified for. They set it up incorrectly. They shared passwords. A third party got onto the control computer, which had again the screen-sharing software so you can work from home and increased the amount of lye going into the system by about a hundredfold.

Okay. Now the good news is. Somebody else at home who was working at the plant, who was also attached to this computer, noticed the change before anyone got sick or died because of what happened to the water treatment plant.

These sorts of things are happening, not just in a smaller city, like what happened in this particular case but our electrical grid. There's a lot of studies out that show that's why we lost power back in 2004 in the Northeast. It was a probe that was being conducted by most likely the Russians. It could have been the Chinese. Chris the bottom line is I'm not happy with the state of cybersecurity with our infrastructure.

We could be in serious trouble. I don't know how far I should go with this, but we look at our electrical grid. We have these super transformers. If you will. There's only about half a dozen of them countrywide. We lose one of those. They have to be manufactured from scratch. Right? Overseas. We can't even make them here anymore.

If we had an electromagnetic pulse or even a massive solar storm like we have had before. We had the Carrington event, about 150 years ago, we would be tossed back to 1800 with no electricity, no computers for months and years in some locations.

Chris Ryan: [00:04:26] Yeah. If you'd asked me five or 10 years ago, what our biggest security concerns were. One would be a pandemic. The second would be our overall grid and technology infrastructure. It was getting built up without the appropriate safeguards. We continue to pile dollars, upon dollars, upon dollars into traditional defense mechanisms and that infrastructure, i.e., aircraft carriers, planes, missile defense, and those types of things. The proportional threat from cyber and from a pandemic has been significant for a period of time and really goes on. We continue to focus dollar after dollar after dollar on a traditional military defense. It's really maddening.

Craig Peterson: [00:05:14] Yeah, I have to agree with that. It's very upsetting. This is not that hard to do but our businesses aren't doing it.

Of course, the government isn't doing it. It has to be done because if you get right down to it, it's simple enough to bring our economy to its knees. If they're able to infiltrate. Look at what happened with Rep. Swallwell out of California. Look at what happened with both of their senior senators. Over the years, in all three cases, they had Chinese plants that were either their body people working with them, maybe doing some other things with the body. Now they had access to information.

What would happen if somebody was involved with, let's say wall street, maybe they had access to some of these things inside of wall street. They got in just like with, this water plant, and they had access to a computer they were able to take it over, bring down just destroy wall street, even if they only knock it out for a few days, it would be a huge impact on our economy.

Chris Ryan: [00:06:20] One more thing, before we let you go. The Biden administration has pledged to take immediate action to address a global shortage of semiconductors that has forced the closure of several us car plants. This is due to a global chip shortage.

They have said, they're gonna take immediate action, but they have made it unclear as to what exactly that action is, other than engaging in conversation about what to do, in regards to the shortage of chips as a result of the amount of demand that there has been for the for these chips.

We are now behind. In being able to address it and be able to provide the chips for these car makers. What's your take on that and how does it get solved?

It goes back to China. It's being reported that as a result of the US sanctions on China that we are unable to get the chips. That kind of also, brokes the question of, do we want to have Chinese chips in all of our vehicles and electronics, et cetera.

Craig Peterson: [00:07:17] That's a big deal. We've got all of the major manufacturers, Ford cutting production at Chicago's facility from three shifts down to one. Cause they can't get the chips. They, of course, blaming it on the Trump administration, makes sense, right. It's the predecessor's fault. Always is. Doesn't matter who you are.

In reality, what happened here is there was a complete miscomputation of our need for chips based on the lockdown worldwide so they stopped making them. There are of course companies out of China that is no longer able to provide chips. To answer your last question there, Chris, I'm really concerned about these Chinese chips.

We had chips delivered to us, for our fighters, for our jet fighters, and we were able to get into those have closer look at the very last minute we found the Chinese had modified those chips they had sold to us.

They looked on the outside like they were the right chip. They ran like they were the right chip, but they had certain vulnerabilities built into them by the Chinese. Our jet fighters.

They're doing this all of the time. Supermicro. Huge, huge story here about a year and a half ago, where one of the major manufacturers of server components found a little chip about the size of a grain of rice hidden on the motherboard. Apparently, it was calling home to China to get instructions and it was installed in thousands of places, including Google, including Apple, many, many regular businesses.

We can't trust it. We need to get more and manufacturing here in the US. I have to say the highest-end manufacturing of chips, Chris is done here in the US and not in China.

We've got a bit of a leg up here going forward.

Chris Ryan: [00:09:13] Well, Craig I always appreciate you joining us here in New Hampshire today.

We encourage folks to check out Craig Peterson's at tech talk, which is on Saturdays from 1130 to noon. Also airs on Sundays as well from 1230 to one. Craig, appreciate your time.

Craig Peterson: [00:09:27] Take care

Who knew that putting together one of these courses would be as much work as it's turned out to be. Oh my gosh, but we want it to be right. We want it to just work for you guys. So we've got 22, short modules as part of this Improving Windows Security course. They are now. All edited already.

We are putting it up on a new site that has some learning management software on it. So it makes it easier for you guys. Then over time, we're going to be continuing to release training, kind of long-tail ones. This one's Improving Windows Security, which covers a lot of topics. But. , do things on VPNs, and other stuff.

We'll see how this all goes. Man. Is this take taking just so much longer than I had hoped initially I'd hoped it would be out in January and now we're looking to hopefully have it out by the beginning of March. Oh my gosh. Once we got it set up the first time, you know how that goes, it's going to be easier for a future time.

So all you guys who asked to be notified about when the Improving Windows Security course is coming out, keep your ears to the ground because it is coming.

I haven't given up and I think it's really quite a good little course.

All right. Take care, everybody. We'll be back tomorrow.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating:

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome,

Craig Peterson here. I was on with Chris Ryan on NH Today. We talked about some of the misguided legislation being pushed by Amy Klobacher regarding big tech with her regulatory solution to anti-trust.  Then we got into Facial recognition and expose.ai. Here we go with Chris. 

These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit.

- CraigPeterson.com

--- 

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] We would be tossed back to 1800 with no electricity, no computers for months and years in some locations. 

Hey, another week, another dollar. Hi everybody.  We got in this morning to this problem Ford, another car manufacturers' are having it isn't just these video game manufacturers. Like I talked about over the weekend on my show and we also got into the security of our infrastructure and all of that with Mr. Chris, Ryan. So here we go.

Chris Ryan: [00:00:35] I mean, he is Craig Peterson, Craig, how are you? 

Craig Peterson: [00:00:38] Hey, good morning. Doing well, 

Chris Ryan: [00:00:40] A couple of things we want to get to with you today.  I want to talk a little about our grid and the security of our grid and how technology plays into that because this has been one of my major concerns for a period of time. Whether it's the breach, a breach water plant which took place recently in Florida had their computer system potentially exposed to a hazardous breach last week. Whether it's our overall technology infrastructure, our lights, our emergency response,  our electricity all tied into the grid. What is your general sense about the safety of our infrastructure? 

Craig Peterson: [00:01:19] Well, I'm not very happy with it, frankly, all the way across the board. You might know that I ran for the FBI, their InfraGard program which is for protecting our infrastructure, I ran webinars for about two years. Trying to help businesses, government and organizations, NGOs, et cetera understand the risks involved here. 

One of the really big risks we're seeing with some of this infrastructure, including in this case as water plant is that we have these computer-controlled systems are called SCADA systems and they are designed to allow you in the plant to open this valve close, close that valve, spin up the centrifuge,  which is how we destroyed a third of the Iranian centrifuges.

These type's of systems security is an afterthought. They've been in now for a few decades. You look at this breached water plant down in Florida, that you mentioned, this was a simple mistake that should never have been made. 

What they did is they were using team viewer, because everybody has to work from home now and they did not set everything up properly at all. Nobody really thought it through. There were no security experts because security expertise is a very narrow field that really a regular IT person is not qualified for. They set it up incorrectly. They shared passwords.  A third party got onto the control computer, which had again the screen-sharing software so you can work from home and increased the amount of lye going into the system by about a hundredfold. 

Okay. Now the good news is. Somebody else at home who was working at the plant, who was also attached to this computer, noticed the change before anyone got sick or died because of what happened to the water treatment plant.

These sorts of things are happening, not just in a smaller city, like what happened in this particular case but our electrical grid. There's a lot of studies out that show that's why we lost power back in 2004 in the Northeast. It was a probe that was being conducted by most likely the Russians. It could have been the Chinese. Chris the bottom line is I'm not happy with the state of cybersecurity with our infrastructure. 

We could be in serious trouble. I don't know how far I should go with this, but we look at our electrical grid. We have these super transformers. If you will. There's only about half a dozen of them countrywide. We lose one of those. They have to be manufactured from scratch. Right? Overseas. We can't even make them here anymore. 

If we had an electromagnetic pulse or even a massive solar storm like we have had before. We had the Carrington event, about 150 years ago, we would be tossed back to 1800 with no electricity, no computers for months and years in some locations.

Chris Ryan: [00:04:26] Yeah. If you'd asked me five or 10 years ago, what our biggest security concerns were. One would be a pandemic. The second would be our overall grid and technology infrastructure. It was getting built up without the appropriate safeguards. We continue to pile dollars, upon dollars, upon dollars into traditional defense mechanisms and that infrastructure, i.e., aircraft carriers, planes, missile defense, and those types of things. The proportional threat from cyber and from a pandemic has been significant for a period of time and really goes on. We continue to focus dollar after dollar after dollar on a traditional military defense. It's really maddening. 

Craig Peterson: [00:05:14] Yeah, I have to agree with that. It's very upsetting. This is not that hard to do but our businesses aren't doing it.

Of course, the government isn't doing it.  It has to be done because if you get right down to it, it's simple enough to bring our economy to its knees. If they're able to infiltrate.  Look at what happened with Rep. Swallwell out of California. Look at what happened with both of their senior senators. Over the years, in all three cases, they had Chinese plants that were either their body people working with them, maybe doing some other things with the body. Now they had access to information. 

What would happen if somebody was involved with, let's say wall street, maybe they had access to some of these things inside of wall street. They got in just like with, this water plant, and they had access to a computer they were able to take it over, bring down just destroy wall street, even if they only knock it out for a few days, it would be a huge impact on our economy. 

Chris Ryan: [00:06:20] One more thing, before we let you go. The Biden administration has pledged to take immediate action to address a global shortage of semiconductors that has forced the closure of several us car plants. This is due to a global chip shortage. 

They have said, they're gonna take immediate action, but they have made it unclear as to what exactly that action is, other than engaging in conversation about what to do, in regards to the shortage of chips as a result of the amount of demand that there has been for the for these chips. 

We are now behind. In being able to address it and be able to provide the chips for these car makers. What's your take on that and how does it get solved? 

 It goes back to China.  It's being reported that as a result of the US sanctions on China that we are unable to get the chips. That kind of also, brokes the question of, do we want to have Chinese chips in all of our vehicles and electronics, et cetera. 

Craig Peterson: [00:07:17] That's a big deal.  We've got all of the major manufacturers, Ford cutting production at Chicago's facility from three shifts down to one. Cause they can't get the chips.  They, of course, blaming it on the Trump administration, makes sense, right. It's the predecessor's fault. Always is. Doesn't matter who you are. 

 In reality, what happened here is there was a complete miscomputation of our need for chips based on the lockdown worldwide so they stopped making them. There are of course companies out of China that is no longer able to provide chips.  To answer your last question there, Chris, I'm really concerned about these Chinese chips. 

We had chips delivered to us, for our fighters, for our jet fighters, and we were able to get into those have closer look at the very last minute we found the Chinese had modified those chips they had sold to us.

They looked on the outside like they were the right chip. They ran like they were the right chip, but they had certain vulnerabilities built into them by the Chinese. Our jet fighters. 

They're doing this all of the time. Supermicro. Huge, huge story here about a year and a half ago, where one of the major manufacturers of server components found a little chip about the size of a grain of rice hidden on the motherboard. Apparently, it was calling home to China to get instructions and it was installed in thousands of places, including Google, including Apple, many, many regular businesses. 

We can't trust it. We need to get more and manufacturing here in the US. I have to say the highest-end manufacturing of chips, Chris is done here in the US and not in China. 

We've got a bit of a leg up here going forward. 

Chris Ryan: [00:09:13] Well, Craig I always appreciate you joining us here in New Hampshire today. 

We encourage folks to check out Craig Peterson's at tech talk, which is on Saturdays from 1130 to noon. Also airs on Sundays as well from 1230 to one. Craig, appreciate your time.

Craig Peterson: [00:09:27] Take care 

Who knew that putting together one of these courses would be as much work as it's turned out to be. Oh my gosh, but we want it to be right. We want it to just work for you guys. So we've got 22, short modules as part of this Improving Windows Security course. They are now. All edited already.

We are putting it up on a new site that has some learning management software on it. So it makes it easier for you guys. Then over time, we're going to be continuing to release training, kind of long-tail ones. This one's Improving Windows Security, which covers a lot of topics. But. , do things on VPNs, and other stuff.

We'll see how this all goes. Man. Is this take taking just so much longer than I had hoped initially I'd hoped it would be out in January and now we're looking to hopefully have it out by the beginning of March. Oh my gosh. Once we got it set up the first time, you know how that goes, it's going to be easier for a future time. 

So all you guys who asked to be notified about when the Improving Windows Security course is coming out, keep your ears to the ground because it is coming. 

I haven't given up and I think it's really quite a good little course. 

All right. Take care, everybody. We'll be back tomorrow.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating:

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome!

It is another busy week on the technology front. We discuss Facial Recognition and some of the problems with false positives and how you can see if your pictures are included in some of these websites. Then we discuss Amy Klobachers anti-trust legislation against big tech. Then we get into Info-Sec Careers and something you might want to know before considering a career move. We also discuss Zero-Trust and why you must be thinking about that if you want to be secure and there is even more, so be sure to Listen in.

For more tech tips, news, and updates, visit - CraigPeterson.com.

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Tech Articles Craig Thinks You Should Read:

Strengthening Zero Trust Architecture

Here's a Way to Learn if Facial Recognition Systems Used Your Photos

Scalpers aren't the main reason you can't find a new console

What I Wish I Knew at the Start of My InfoSec Career

Chrome users have faced 3 security concerns over the past 24 hours

Klobuchar targets Big Tech with biggest antitrust overhaul in 45 years

I Fought the Dark Web and the Dark Web Won

How the United States Lost to Hackers

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Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] We're going to talk a little bit about scalpers. They're not the main reason you can't find a new gaming console. I've had a number of people ask about getting into information security. I'm going to give you some tips about what I wish I knew at the start of my career.

Hello everybody. Craig Peterson here.

I want to start out by talking a little bit about the facial recognition systems and there are a lot of concerns, legitimately, a lot of concerns because now our privacy is getting worse and worse.

I'm going to talk next week a little bit, at least it's on my schedule about what's happening with GPS and pros and cons to it because there are some very concerning things about GPS. Much of our business and private lives is based on GPS, nowadays. You're in a plane, you're in a boat, trains, I guess don't use GPS a whole lot, but we depend on them in our cars, everywhere. We'll talk a little bit about that next week.

When it comes to facial recognition, it has come to the forefront. Now we know that, for instance, London, England was probably the most surveilled city in the world. I don't think that's anywhere near true now, considering what the Chinese have been doing to their citizens. No, I probably shouldn't call them citizens. I'm not sure what the right thing would be to call them, but the people living over there in China are under a constant eye. They're even watching them over there for jaywalking and they use facial recognition systems to automatically send them a ticket. Oh, also this social credit score they have over there where if you do jaywalk or do something else, you get points taken off of your social credit score. If your score reaches a certain point, you can't even take public transportation anymore. That's how they're controlling people. One of the many ways that they're controlling people in China.

These facial recognition systems are used there. We know they've been in use in London where they're trying to track people and reverse engineer crimes, someone commits a crime.

There are sensors that listen for gunshots, for instance, and then they will just backtrack all of the people that were in the area. Okay. Watching them where they work, as you remember, it's being recorded. So you're here now, where did you come from? Some of that same type of technology was used in Washington, DC for what happened on January six, with the riot of well, 80 people. Some riot. We're also now aware of what was done in Oregon and in Washington state and New York City where they were tracking people as well now. Did they get charged? Did they go to jail? They were using facial recognition systems and they were figuring out where they were, where they had been.

They were also looking forward to the fact, because unlike China, where they want to know where everybody is and they've got this whole social credit system. What we were doing is finding people who were committing serious crimes. The police obviously don't want to go into that area because there are so many rioters and they were armed with all kinds of things, the baseball bats, but they had frozen bottles of water.

No, I don't know. I threw a bottle of water at him. You had. That thing, deep, frozen, in a deep freeze, below zero degrees, which is way cold Fahrenheit. You brought it with you and you use that liter bottle to bash someone over the head. We saw this again and again. So you find those people. You don't arrest them right away. You don't send the police in. No reason to put their lives in any more danger than they are everyday, normally. Then what you do is track them as they leave. Now when they were leaving, they were using facial recognition to figure out who was there and where did they go? That facial recognition technology then was able to track them down. Once they got into an area where there weren't a lot of rioters or no rioters about to get in their car, or however it is, they got there, they arrested them. Of course, some of these rioters, real rioters, right? Where there's hundreds of people rioting, not 80.

They were able to track them down. Some of them were arrested, some of them were charged. In a lot of these cases, the mayor said, no, don't do anything. Just let them I was going to set them riot, but that's not how they phrased it. I'm trying to remember how they phrased it.

So we are seeing. Facial recognition used in law enforcement. It's one thing to track them either. What happens over in London where a crime is committed and they now track everybody back to figure out where did they come from? What car did they get into? Did they get out of it initially? Then what was the license plate number and who owns that car? Crime-solving that way, where they don't necessarily recognize your face. They don't know it's you.

However, now we're finding more and more of that happening, where the systems recognize your face and they know it's you, and they know what your social media accounts. They know obviously where you live, it's all tied in. A lot of cases is tied in via your driver's license or now these federally mandated national ID cards that so many people are carrying around.

Apparently, I'll have to carry around to next time I get my license because my state has finally decided they are not going to issue regular driver's licenses anymore, which definitely bothers me.

I'm sure you can figure that out too. How were they identifying people? It's one thing to see a face and okay. There's the face here. Okay. There's a face there. There's okay. Here. Okay. So he just got into this car to leave. That's one thing, right? I think that's pretty legit. You don't have a particular right to privacy when you're in a public place. In fact, you have no right to privacy when you enter a public place. So I don't have a problem with that.

Now we're using artificial intelligence and we've talked about some of them before, Clearview is a great example, clearview.ai. Here's a company that some would argue illegally captured scraped. What kind of her kind of wording you want to use pictures of people all from all over the internet and the police can subscribe to their service and Clearview says, Oh no, we only let police at it, although there's evidence that would suggest otherwise. They're allowing all kinds of third parties access to the database, but you can put a person's picture into their software. Their software, by the way, includes a mobile app, so it can be done on the street and you know who they are.

Now, this is getting RoboCop-ish. If e you've ever seen the movie Robocop. Actually, there's a series of these things with the Ed two Oh nines. What happened is the police officer could go out and he'd be patrolling in the streets and he come across some people in the computer in that kind of the heads up display would figure out, okay, that's this person they've been arrested 20 times a felony, this and that, and okay that person was shoplifting with their names and addresses and things right there in the screen. That's been a theme of science fiction movies for very long time.

I interviewed probably about a decade ago, a guy out at the consumer electronic show who had a very cool device that you could wear. It was designed for policemen and it was like a pair of big goggles back in the day, right? This is before Google glass and some of these other things came out, but they were able to with this the heads-up display put anything you wanted on it. So it's coming, it's not here yet. It's going to be here even more in the future.

If you want to check if your photo is part of all of this stash and there are billions literally of photos that Clearview AI has out there, but you can check at least the basics.

So many of us use this website online that allowed us to upload our photos and share them with friends and relatives and family, and put it together, and have a really great little album that you could share with people. That was on a site called flicker. Today, many of us are uploading our photos to Amazon or to Google. Apple, of course, has many of them. What happened with flicker is they went out of business. They got sold and resold few times. What they ended up doing is selling the pictures online. There's people I talked about this a couple of years ago, this guy driving down the highway and he sees a billboard with his picture on it, not the sort of thing that he was expecting that's for sure. It's probably not something you expected when you uploaded your photos to flicker. So take a minute. Go to a website called exposing.ai.

This particular website is specifically aimed at flicker photos. It'll tell you if it has found your picture. So you can, you put in your flicker username and they'll let you know if your flicker photos have been taken and used for facial recognition by a few different companies.

Dive face, face scrub, mega phase Pippa, VGG face, and many others. You can just put in your username. You can put in a tag that you tagged that photo when you uploaded it, or the URL of a photo. If you have a photo, it is online and it's yours and you want to see if anybody else is using it somewhere on the internet.

The easy way to do this is to go to Google image search. You can upload the image, you can give it the URL of the image, and it'll tell you if it finds matching images or at least images that are close to it online.

Stick around. Visit me online Craig Peterson dot com.

During the lockdown, we've had a lot of things that have become difficult to get your hands on. Turns out that includes various types of games like your PS5's, but it extends a whole lot further than that.

Hi everybody. Craig Peterson here.

Here we go, man, another fallout from the whole lockdown thing. This is a pretty darn big deal because it's affected the entire computer industry. We've heard a lot of complaints about how difficult it's been to get a Sony PlayStation five or a Microsoft X-Box series SX. They both hit store shelves last year, but they have been almost impossible to find at any of the major retailers.

There's a great little article that was in ARS Technica, and they put together a graph based on some data obtained from E-bay. This data was looking at the availability and costs specifically of the PS five. Now, this is a fairly advanced computer, frankly, in order to play these video games, of course, it's got a lot of graphics capability built right into this silly thing. It seems that there were a certain number of consoles sold on certain days at certain prices. You can see this massive price increase. It just jumped right up in November. Pretty much stayed up there in the thousand dollars plus range. Isn't that amazing. It went down in January and is more or less flat right now. You can get them on eBay for about 380 bucks right now. Why is that? What's been going on here. We've got scalpers. Obviously, a thousand dollars is a lot higher than the $380 you can get it for right now.

It turns out that there is a huge problem and the problem we're seeing is affecting the entire computer world. There are certain chips for which there is a shortage. Why is there a shortage? Well, it had to do with the lockdown. Companies were trying to figure out, okay, how many of these devices am I going to sell when everybody's locked down? They miscalculated, frankly.

It wasn't a problem with supply. It was that these companies that had been ordering these components cut their orders back or stopped them entirely.

You've got Sony and others out there, Microsoft's console as well, trying to find the parts. They have had a very hard time. Well, what happens when it's hard to find something? Either the quality is going to go down to keep the price the same or the price is going to go up. There's only a couple of ways that it really can go.

They're estimating right now that these constraints on the supply chain are probably going to last for a few more months. We've seen it big time in the computer world, particularly in the storage space. You may not be aware of it, but there are, of course, hard disks that aren't really disks called SSD, which is a solid-state disk.

Okay. You probably know about that. I wrote up a thing, in fact, Because people were asking me about what to buy, to upgrade their computers. If you have a slower computer, putting an SSD in is usually a very good idea, but there are many grades of SSDs.

In fact, I've got a little document. If you want it to send an email to [email protected]. I'll be glad to send you a copy. I wrote this for one of our clients. It drives me crazy. They need a new computer, in this case, a desktop. So they say, Hey Craig, can you guys go ahead and work us up a quote? So we look at what they're using the computer for. We look at the longevity of that computer so that they get the best bang for their buck and usefulness. How useful is it going to be? Is it going to be offline just five minutes a day, by the way, adds up to over $2,000 a year for just an average salary of a data entry worker. It adds up pretty quickly if it goes down.

We put together this proposal and this was for a customed Dell machine and we specify all of the components that go into it. That's an important thing to remember because these components all have varying levels of quality. We sent them the quote and we've done this before, right? Who's the fool here, them or us. They said no. I went to the Dell site and I got this special going on and then I can get the same computer for 300 bucks.

Not true. It's not true. Now, you guys are the best and brightest, right? This sort of stuff, you can't compare a Yugo to a beautiful Cadillac right there. There's no comparison between the two, but that's what they were doing. They needed an F150 in order to haul stuff but instead of getting the F150, they just got a little hatchback that they can maybe throw a couple of things in the back, but they needed a big bed pickup truck. That just drives me crazy.

So I wrote this probably three or four-page long, a thing explaining why you need to buy the right kind of hardware. Why the stuff that they're selling you at a discount isn't going to work for you and things need to be included, include things like the hardware encryption and SSDs.

Again, I'll send you this report if you want it. Just let me know, call [email protected].

I started this whole thing because we're talking about SSDs. SSDs are not all created equal. Some of these SSDs store one bit per little bubble, if you will. Some of them store two bits on them store three-bit bits. They're all constrained in their lifetime based on how many writes are occurring to that disc.

You've got to look at that as well to figure it out. Now, of course, I got into SSDs because we were talking about the capacity in manufacturing and the shortage that we're seeing right now. If some of these game consoles, there is a shortage in all of these types of disks, there's even a shortage of memory and certain CPUs.

The disc shortage started a few years ago when there was massive flooding in Indonesia. That's where a lot of the hard disks are made. Now, these are the things that spin, right? Now we've got new technology that lets us pack more data into the SSDs.

Whereas we were seeing the hard disk go up in size. I remember my first one was, I think it was five megabytes. It was just, Whoa, how could I have used five Meg and then 10 megabytes? Of course, hard disks, reasonably priced ones tend to 12 terabyte drives and again, multiple different types of drives.

There's the more server-oriented that if there's an error on the disk, the disc stays alive and it repairs itself in real-time in the background. Then there's the stuff you get as consumers where if the disc starts failing, the whole disc goes offline until it fits fixes itself.

Then there's real crap. The ones like these green drives from Western digital, that I do not like. I just had confirmation on that this week that are even cheaper, but all of these are hard to get right now.

We will see eventually all of these supplies back in line. The manufacturers can make them. The whole lockdown hasn't really been a problem for them. The problem has been that people aren't ordering because they're afraid during the lockdown that people wouldn't be buying computers. Of course, we found the opposite to be true. Didn't we. People were buying these consoles to play video games. Buying computers to work from home. Trying to buy network security stuff as well. That's really changed the whole thing.

When we get back, let's get into we'll get into the InfoSec career a little bit later if you miss it. If you're thinking about getting into information security. Make sure you go online to Craig peterson.com. So you can catch that.

We'll talk about that, but let's do something I think that might affect a lot of people and that's Chrome users, three security problems in the last week.

Hey, you guys are the best and brightest. You know what I think about Google and Google Chrome? Just this last week, over one 24 hour period, Chrome had three security problems. We're going to talk about that right now.

Hi, everybody. Craig Peterson here.

Google is evil. I've established that I think, before, the things they do, the things they have been doing to us.

Remember their motto used to be, don't be evil. They removed that from the website a couple of years ago. Now, no longer don't be evil. Nowadays they're doing pretty much everything they can to, maybe be evil is a little strong a word, but they're pretty much-doing everything they can to get as much information about you and sell it.

Do you remember his goal? Larry Page when they were starting it up. The goal was okay, where we are going to get all of the world's information and democratize it. Make it available for everyone, anyone out there who wants to get at it. Frankly, it's been pretty good until fairly recently. At which point I switched over to duck duck go.

Chrome is another one of their products. Microsoft frankly, jumped right onto the Chrome bandwagon. What they ended up doing over Microsoft is taking Google's open-source version of the base of Chrome. They call it chromium. It's the guts, if you will, of the Google Chrome browser and they made it available to anyone that wants to get their hands on it. So Microsoft got their hands on it and messed around with it a little bit. As Microsoft is wont to do. They came up with their Edge browser. The latest Edge is really Google Chrome in disguise.

There are others out there too. You probably know if you've been through one of my courses when I'm talking about browsers. The Epic browser is a pretty good browser. It is designed to be more or less safe. But we go into that a lot more detail. In which cases is it not et cetera.

Some people have used the Tor browser, which ties into the Onion network that provides even more anonymity. So there are options. Of course, Safaris available from Apple for almost every platform now. It is a very fast browser and it does a lot to try and keep your data secure.

The same thing's true with Firefox. In the Improving Windows Security Course, I go into the problems with each one of these, including Firefox and what you have to consider.

This past week we had a bit of an issue. If you attended my webinars last year. This would have been in 2020. I went through some of the privacy plugins that you can use for your browser. You might remember that one of them was something called the Great Suspender. Highly recommended at the time. Got to add that in there because I don't want you to just go grab it. It was recommended. I used it, extensively on a bunch of different browsers, because what the Great Suspender did is save your machine's memory CPU, frankly, even a little bit of disc I/O when you were on a tab on your web browser, your tab would just respond.

Normally everything looks good, but if you're like me, you probably opened another tab or maybe another window and then another tab or another window. You just dig deeper and deeper as you're looking into something, trying to figure something out.

You might have 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 tabs. Open each one of those tabs represents a different thread, a different process, basically on your computer. That means it's using memory, it's using CPU and it might be also hitting your disk, using your disk. The Great Suspenders said wait a minute, now you haven't used this tab in whatever you set it for, I usually had it about 15 minutes. What I'm going to do now, Yes, I'm going to take a snapshot of this page. I am going to just release all of the resources that were associated with the page. If you go back to that tab, all you have now is a snapshot, just a picture of what was on the page. You can see what was on the page and depending on how you configure the Great Suspender, I had it set up so that if I activated a tab again, it would automatically reload that page. You could have had it so that if you got to that picture and you really wanted it, you'd click on it and it would reload the page. Very. Handy. It allowed you to have hundreds of potentially of tabs open quote-unquote, when in fact they weren't open and they weren't using hardly any resources at all.

The Great suspender this last June was sold. The original person who wrote this thing, and it's a great little really great, actually a little piece of software decided that he wanted to make some money off of it. Why not? He sold it. It's unclear as to who actually owns it or controls it right now and who he sold it to because the name of the account, the developer account, is the Great Suspender. So that's not going to help you at all.

It started showing some signs of what Google and what people are calling malice, under this new ownership. There was a thread in GitHub that was published in November and GitHub is where so much of this code is stored, right. It started to show some signs of frankly, of malice under this new ownership. They said that a new version contained malicious code that tracked users and manipulated web requests.

Now the Great Suspender did normally manipulate web requests, in order to keep everything flowing and smooth. So you might go to a website and then it suspends it, and it might use a different URL and the URL is going to cause the Great Suspender inside your browser to be called. Okay.

So I'm not sure what they mean about the manipulation here, but Google removed it. It's gone like that and no warning or anything else just within the last week. They completely removed the Great Suspender, not just from the store, they removed it from your machines where you were using it.

It said this - the extension contains malware, that's the only warning they gave. That is the only background they gave. They really haven't said a whole lot. People, by the way, who were using the Great Suspender were really left in a lurch because any suspended tabs when Google went bye-bye, any suspended tabs you had were a lost. How's that for a terrible thing? Absolutely terrible.

There is a Reddit thread out there that you can see. They talk about how you can get your tabs back. So if you had followed my advice back then and put it on, good for you. However, the problem is that it turned out to ultimately be malicious. So that's a big deal.

Remember I said three security problems in 24 hours, Google on Thursday, released a Chrome update that fixes what it called a zero-day vulnerability in the browser. This is another buffer, overflow problem. If you're programming, you know what that means in version eight, which is Google's open-source Javascript engine, and they rated it as high.

Again, Google didn't say much about what the vulnerability was. Probably didn't want to encourage people to try and use it, but they said it was existing in the wild. That's not very good. Then sync abuse, a security researcher reported on Thursday as well. Hackers were using malware that abused the Chrome sync feature to bypass firewalls so the malware could connect to command and control servers. Not good.

If you are using, if you have Chrome, I have it because I have to, cause I have to test things out.

If you are using it, make sure it is up to date. Most of the time Chrome will update itself, but this week is one where you should double-check Chrome and make sure it really has been updated. Cause these are some pretty nasties. All right.

I'm sure you're familiar with Senator Amy Klobuchar. She ran for President, under of course the Democrat ticket, this last election cycle. She is targeting big tech, at least. That's what she says. We'll talk about the reality.

Hello everybody. Craig Peterson here. Thanks so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it. And I appreciate hearing from you as well. Any questions? I have so much information to give you guys we're starting some training courses, free email training, just everything [email protected]. Any questions as well and visit me online at Craig peterson.com.

Senator Amy Klobuchar, is a Democrat from Minnesota and she has introduced a bill here in Congress and supposedly big tech is in her crosshairs. Now I think that's really funny because it's not in reality. Okay.

Here's an article from ARS Technica a very good website, by the way, on some of the tech. It says not only our major firms, such as Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google under investigation for allegedly breaking existing antitrust law. A newly proposed bill in the Senate would make it harder for these and other firms to become so troublingly large in the first place.

If you've been listening to me for a while, I have friends that have been absolutely destroyed by some of these big tech firms. Where companies have gone ahead and then announced a product because they found, Oh, wait a minute. These guys over here, they're doing pretty darn well with that product. Let's see if we can't figure out if there's really a market forward or not end up, they're competing with us. So here's what we'll do. Let's go ahead and announce. We're going to have a product and it's going to be better than their product, and you can get it from us and you can rely on us. Don't pay attention to that small company over there. They are entirely unreliable.

All of a sudden that small company's sales plummet because people are waiting for big co to come up with their version of whatever it might be. Then they'll compare it to and maybe buy it a bit later on.

That's a way that many of these companies have grown and grown in a very big way.

Senator Klobuchar introduced this bill called Clara. Should have called it Clarice. The competition and anti-trust law enforcement reform act. This would be the largest overhaul to the US antitrust legislation in almost 50 years if it became law. It's interesting because her statement says while the United States once had some of the most effective antitrust laws in the world. Our economy today faces and massive competition problem.

I'm a little confused here. It looks like she is asking for competition. I don't know. I don't understand it. I thought she was one of these far-left ones. I remember the debates quite well. They're looking at expanding resources. In other words, give them more money at the federal trade commission, the department of justice in their antitrust division. They're looking to pursue a review of more mergers, more aggressively.

Now my knee jerk reaction is, these big companies usually we'll fail. They usually just keep getting greedier and bigger. Look at what happened to GM. They went bankrupt and unfortunately, they use tax dollars to bail them out. Chrysler has gone bankrupt twice, and they've used our tax dollars to bail them out. I don't think that's a good idea.

Remember our tax dollars mean our time. We have to put in our time, we can't spend with our families. Time, we cannot spend on vacation. Time we cannot spend relaxing. It takes our time now, where we have to work to make money, to give to the government, to bail out companies that are failures.

What the government decided to do rather than let these bigger companies fail as they ultimately always do. If you're old enough, you'll remember back in the seventies and eighties, IBM, too big to fail. They owned the business, the computer business in the sixties and seventies, and they just fell off the edge. Didn't they? That usually happens.

I'm not sure a hundred percent is going to happen with the social media companies but I suspect they are. Look at what's happening right now. If you have kids that are under 20, do they have a Facebook account? Even in their thirties, under 20-year-olds, they don't use Facebook anymore.

Facebook is likely to die off unless they change in a big way. So what's Facebook do? They buy competitors. They buy WhatsApp. We've talked about WhatsApp before and my thoughts on that. They buy Instagram. They buy competitors and they use competitors too. Change their business model a little bit and move laterally rather than vertically. That's not a bad idea in business. Frankly, most businesses expand their product line, expand their way of doing things by acquiring successful small businesses. So I get that. I think that's wonderful.

But what the Senator is proposing is that we have the government decide if a business should be allowed to acquire another business. There is a line in there where I agree with her. I'm not a hundred percent sure where that line should go.

We've had antitrust laws here in the United States since 1800s, a very long time. The Sherman act short and simple back then it made it illegal to monopolize or attempt to monopolize or conspire to monopolize the market. I liked that one.

How about if you're defining the market? There's two sides to this, one side often overlooked.

You've got the side of the supplier. You've got Facebook or GM or whoever. You say Facebook is the 800-pound gorilla. They own this market. So what should you do about Facebook?

That's what she's trying to figure out here. What should we do? They're saying we should have a government regulator decide if it's a monopoly or not. We know how well that ends up working. You end up with a revolving door, the regulators working for the corporations, and then going back to the regulators right back and forth. It's absolutely crazy. That side of it.

There is another side and this other side is frankly not that new, but it has gotten worse more recently. It's called a monopsony. What this is where you have a lot of suppliers. So you'd have a whole lot of Facebook' for instance, but only one purchaser.

You said, Craig, what are you talking about? We're the best and brightest. I'm not quite sure where you're going with this.

Here's where we're going. Monopsony is typified by Walmart. Walmart is well-known as a company that you do not want to sell to. If you're a small business, you look at it, say, Oh yeah we got Walmart. They're going to sell our product. Okay. Okay. Great for you. It's not wonderful. Walmart took out every rubber hose they had, and they beat the supplier over the head and shoulders and back until they capitulated.

Walmart was routinely criticized for this forcing vendors to lower prices until it became unsustainable. I can think of a few of these products right off the top of my head. Do you remember Rubbermaid, right? It was the. The dominant force for those rubber containers at Walmart. Then all of a sudden it wasn't there anymore. Do you remember that? Because they couldn't sell it to Walmart at the prices Walmart wanted it at. That's one way Walmart keeps the prices low.

With this monopsony problem. We're talking about a lot of companies that make competing products, but there's really one 800 pound gorilla. That's buying it. Walmart has a huge share of the US retail market. Of course, now they've been one-upped by our friends over at Amazon. Amazon is there now in that kind of the same position.

If you're going to sell something, you pretty much have to have it on Amazon. Amazon's basically going to dictate how much you can sell it for. Isn't that interesting. By the way, that word monopsony dates back almost a hundred years as well. Antitrust laws have never addressed the idea of this kind of anti-competitive behavior from the bottom-up direction. It's an interesting way.

So what do I think is the way to go on all of this stuff? First of all, we'll see if it ever becomes law. They tried something similar with a bill back in 2019, and it didn't get very far. With the Democrats controlling the white house, the house of representatives, and the Senate. The idea of reform being passed is more feasible, but there's one other side to this.

This goes back to my friends who have had their businesses effectively stolen by large companies. That is when we're looking at more regulation, which is exactly what she's proposing. More regulators, more money going to the regulators. They're making the entire marketplace harder.

If you're a small company and do you have to comply with all of these new rules, you now have to make all of these regulators happy. What are the odds? You're going to be able to do that compared to the big guys. The big guys can quite easily afford all of the attorneys, all of the regulatory compliance people, everybody that's needed. But you can't.

So the big companies love this sort of thing because the regulations make it easier for them to keep competitors out of the market. They're keeping competitors out of the market. We've already established that they're buying competitors, so they don't have to compete with them.

Now we're going to make matters worse with this Klobuchar bill. By doing what? By increasing regulation, making it harder to compete.

I propose that we'll actually have more monopolies after this. I would much rather just keep it simple and watch out for monopolies. If a company makes mistakes and is going under, let it go under. Any parts of that company that have any value will be sold. That's what bankruptcy laws all about.

If, someone who's thinking about maybe getting into an information security career. Or maybe you're looking at another career because right now there are millions of jobs open in InfoSec. We're going to talk about it. What do I wish I knew?

Hi everybody, Craig Peterson here. Thanks so much for joining me.

You probably know that I have been in information security for a very long time. It started out as I had to protect my own company. When I got nailed 30 years ago with what was called the Morris worm. If you've been on any of my webinars where I do a little background, you heard my story there. It just scared me to death. I almost lost a bunch of clients because of this worm.

The worm is a piece of software that gets onto a computer and then spreads to other computers. Nowadays, we have a lot of things that act like worms. For instance, ransomware gets in and starts to spread. We have all kinds of bad guys that are doing the same thing. They'll get onto a machine in your network. Then they'll manually start looking around and seeing what you have, what file servers you have. Oh, let's connect to the G drive or whatever you call that file server drive or shared drive. They will look through your files and just the rest of the story, right?

You guys are the best and brightest. You really are. So here's where I come down. I think there is a lot of opportunities here and I did a little presentation for a mastermind group. I'm a member of last week. I talked about a guy that became a friend of mine who is in his late fifties is right around 60 years old and decided he needed a new career. His prior career had literally disappeared. They had just been destroyed. He was in retail and he was managing a store and he had a lot of clients. Of course, that job went away and he was looking for, what do I do next? He's been listening to me for a very long time on the radio and decided that maybe he should look into an InfoSe career. So he did.

I used him as a case study with my mastermind group. What should people be looking to do and how can I help them? So I figured let's do this because I saw an article in Dark Reading. That's one of my favorite websites for all of these articles on security. They were talking about exactly that, what should I be doing now, if I want a security career? What are the things I should know and do?

The author of this is Joan Goodchild, an easy name to pronounce. What happened to her? She points out, do you know information security can be really rewarding? I absolutely agree with that. It is a thankless job, you miss one thing and something gets in. Someone brings it from home you don't quite have everything in place or everything up to date.

The biggest problem I've seen and I see with this friend of mine that I talked about in the mastermind is that we don't think we know enough. It's something called imposters syndrome. You've probably heard of it. It exists in a lot of different facets of our lives, not just in careers.

So he has imposter syndrome, as do a lot of people who are in cybersecurity because there's so much to know. That's why I've said forever businesses cannot do cybersecurity.

Antivirus isn't going to work for you. Basic firewalls are not going to work for you. Even if you have the right equipment in place if you don't know how to manage it and set it up. All of this stuff, it's just not possible to do.

Maybe you should look at a security career, cybersecurity.

Let's run through some of the things that she put in there. Of course, I'll add my little side things, but she asked a bunch of people in cybersecurity, specifically what do you wish you would have known when you first started. Here's Gregory Touhill, president of Applegate, federal Brigadier general retired in first, us CSO under president Barack Obama, CSO is the chief information security officer for the federal government.

He said. I love this quote. Cybersecurity is a full-contact team sport. There is no single person who is an expert on all of the various aspects of the area of the discipline. Once I got over myself and recognize that I couldn't do it all, I focused on building the right team of experts to solve issues before they become problems. That revelation triggered great future success. So there you go.

I think that's absolutely phenomenal to remember. You're going to have imposter syndrome if you decide to go into this, but the bottom line is to work with a team. If you can find a vendor like me, that knows what they're doing, that has people that can help you out because you cannot just be out there yourself.

Next point here. This is from Wayne Pruitt, cyber-range, technical trainer in North America. I've seen him before. He's been on one of my webinars where I was teaching about cybersecurity. To be effective in cybersecurity you need to have an understanding of all areas of information technology. Boy, is that true? If an analyst does not understand how a web application communicates with a database on the backend, how will he know if the traffic he's seen is normal or malicious? Without this understanding, analysts are just relying on security tools to make the determination. Hopefully, those tools are configured correctly.

Sometimes you have to learn the basics. Don't understand the more complex. Again, this goes into you've got to have a team. You have to have multiple people who can help out at different levels because frankly, you can't know it all. Going back to that the general Brigadier general, he had such a good point.

Next up is a chief strategist at Point 3 security. Her name is Chloe Messdaghi. I really wish I knew how little diversity and inclusion were practiced. When I first entered the industry, many of us in our current organizations are now working for to improve the situation are gaining ground. But within my first year, I felt like I had entered the 1940s. I personally think this is ridiculous.

Men are attracted to certain things and certain careers, women, the same thing. There are some careers that are dominated by women and some that are men. One of my daughters works with me and she is a cybersecurity analyst and she's just finishing some more training. In fact, our people tend to spend about a third of their time in training and she's very good and it has nothing to do with the fact that my daughter's a girl. So come on, quit seeing sex and seeing the race everywhere. It's just crazy. It's out there and she's right there aren't many women that are in this career.

Next up here, Lakshmi Hanspal. She is CSO of a company called Box whom I have used before. They've got some very good products for file sharing. I switched over to Dropbox. I like some of the stuff a little bit better having come from a traditional stuff background.

It was not until I entered higher leadership roles and began formulating hiring strategies that I realized the more diverse teams solve the toughest challenges, skills, such as critical thinking, how to manage risk trade-offs and cybersecurity not being a zero-sum game are extremely fundamental and understanding and thriving in the security industry. It is obvious she spent some time writing that and trying to put in lots of big words.

She is right. We when we're talking about diversity in this case, what she's talking about are the diversity of skills, critical thinking, managing trade-offs, and understanding that we all have to work together on a team in the cybersecurity field. I thought she had a really great point.

Next up, we have Josh Rickard security research engineer over at Swimlane. I wish I knew and understood that an organization's priorities are guide rails for information security teams, as with most starting in InfoSec. I wanted to solve all the security issues I came across, but this is impossible.

Understanding business priorities while communicating potential risks is critical. Okay. But helping the business with those priorities gives you credibility. Wow.

I'm going to save that one, frankly, because that is something that we all need to remember. I've had people on my team that was just a hundred percent focused on doing the right thing, quote unquote, on the cybersecurity front, and to them, the right thing was to make sure there are no holes. So I can see that from a certain perspective. And again, back to the diversity of thought, having someone like that on your team is a good idea, but it does have to be tempered.

Mary Writz VP product development over at ForgeRock. When I started 20 years ago as a penetration tester at IBM. I wondered how I even got the job because I did not feel qualified in hindsight. No one was truly qualified because it was such a young domain. I was hired because of my technical background, my curiosity, my interest, fast forward, 10 years, I was teaching a technical audience how to build hunt teams and I expect everyone in the audience knew more than me. A gentleman in the audience raised his hand and said, you're assuming we know what we're doing, but we don't. After we all laughed, we shared our notes and learned from each other.

Wow. So insightful here, because again, she's pointing out. The curiosity requirement. I think if you're not curious, you're not going to spend the time it takes to investigate and to learn more.

We're going to cover a few more.

You're listening to Craig Peterson and [email protected].

We're talking right now about InfoSec, information security. Have you thought about maybe taking up a bit of a new career? Well there are some estimated 2 million open jobs in this one.

Of course, this is Craig Peterson.

We were just talking about this article that appeared in dark reading. Now, dark reading is an online magazine, right? It's a website. And they had this article that I absolutely had to read because it reminded me of someone I know. One of our listeners, who decided he needed a new career. He'd lost his job. He'd been out of work for over a year and he had been managing a retail camera shop and they shut it down. He was stuck. What do I do? He'd been listening to the show for a long time. He decided he wanted to go into information security. He took some courses on it and he got himself a job. A full-time job being the chief IT security guy for this company after just a few months.

So that tells you how desperate these companies are. Kind of jerking his chain a little bit, but not right, because he just barely had any background. If you want me to connect you with him, if you are serious about thinking about one of these careers, I'll be glad to forward your request to him, just to see if he's willing to talk to you. Just email me [email protected] and make sure you mentioned what this is all about. So I know what's going on.

Ran Harel, he's a security principal and product manager over at Semperis said, when I was growing up, I was quite an introvert, by the way, that sounds like a lot of us in it. I didn't realize until much later on in my career, just how great the security and tech community are looking back. I realize how quickly I could have solved so many issues, by just asking on an IRC channel or forum.

IRC is an internet relay chat, a bit of a technical thing, but it's an online chat.

I would tell my former self, the problem you are facing now is probably been dealt with multiple times in the past year alone. Don't be afraid to ask the InfoSec community and then learn from them.

That's absolutely true. I found an online IRC channel basically, and they were set up just to talk about CMMC is this new standard that department of defense contractors are having to use.

As you probably know, we have clients that are manufacturers and make things for the Department of Defense and they have to maintain security. It's been interesting going in there answering questions for people and even asking a couple of questions. It is a great resource. This particular kind of IRC is over on discuss.

You can find them all over the place. Reddit has a bunch of subreddits. It's dealing with these things, including, by the way, getting into an InfoSec career. So keep that in mind.

There's lots of people like myself that are more than willing to help because some of the stuff can get pretty confusing.

All right. The next one. Is from Cody Cornell, chief security officer, and co-founder over at swimlane. He said, apply for jobs. You are not qualified for everyone else is.

Man. I have seen that so many times everybody from PhDs all the way on, down throughout a high school and who have sent me applications that they were not even close to qualified for.

Now, you can probably guess with me, I don't care if you have a degree. All I care about is can you do the work. Can you get along with the team are you really going to pull your weight and contribute? I have seen many times that the answer to that is no, but I've seen other times where, wow, this person's really impressive.

So again, apply for jobs you're not qualified for because everybody is. Security changes every day. New skills techniques and the needs of organizations are always shifting. And to be able to check every box from an experience and skills perspective is generally impossible. Looking back at 20 years of jobs in the security space, I don't believe that I was ever a hundred percent qualified for any of them, but felt confident that I could successfully do them.

So keep that in mind. Okay.

Again, imposter syndrome, we're all worried about it. This applies to more than just InfoSec. This applies to every job, every part of life, we all feel as though we're impostors and that we're not really qualified, but the question is, can you figure it out? Can you really do it?

Next up here is Chris Robert, a hacker in residence, he calls himself over at Semperis and he says, overall, the most important lessons that I'd tell my younger self are not tech-based. Rather they focus on the human aspect of working in the cybersecurity industry. I think cybersecurity professionals in general, tend to focus on technology and ignore the human element, which is a mistake and something we need to collectively learn from and improve.

I agree with him on that as well. However, we know humans are going to make mistakes, so make sure you got the technology in place that will help to mitigate those types of problems.

Next up, we've got Marlys Rogers. She's CISO over at the CSAA insurance group that's a lot of four-letter acronyms. You are nothing without data. Data is queen. Coming from an insurance person, right? Without hard data, you can only speak to security in more imagined ways or ways. The board and C-suite are aware of in the media cost-benefit is only achievable with related data points. Demonstrating how much we are fighting off and how the tools, processes, and people make that happen.

Next up we have Edward Frye, he's CSO over at our Aryaka. When I first started out, I was fairly impatient and wanted to get things done right away. While there are some things that need to be done right now, not everything needs to be done. Now have the ability to prioritize and focus on the items that will have the biggest impact.

I think one of the biggest lessons I've learned along the way is while we may need to move quickly, this race is a marathon, not a sprint.

Patience is essential for security pros. I can certainly see that one.

Chris Morgan, senior cyber threat intelligence analyst over at Digital Shadows, despite the way that many in media liked to portray cyber threats, not everything will bring about the end of the world.

For those getting into incident response and threats, try to have a sense of perspective and establish the facts before allowing your colleagues to push too quickly towards remediation mitigation, et cetera.

Expectation management amongst senior colleagues is also something you'll frequently have to do to avoid them breaking down over a mere phishing site. The quote, one of my former colleagues try to avoid chicken, little central.

I've seen that before as well.

The next one is things are changing daily and the last one is the perception of security is still a challenge.

So great little article by Joan Goodchild. You'll see it in my newsletter, which we're trying to get out now Sunday mornings.

You can click through on the link if you'd like to read more.

As you can see. 2 million open jobs while between one and 3 million, depending on whose numbers you're going at in cybersecurity.

You don't have to be an expert. As I said, one of our listeners went from not knowing much about it at all, he can install windows that's it, to having a job in cybersecurity in less than six months.

I'm doing a special presentation coming up next month for the New England Society of Physicians and Psychiatrists. We're going to be talking a little bit about what we will talk about right now. What can you do to keep your patient information safe? What can we do as patients to help make sure our data's safe.

You'll also find me on pretty much every podcast platform out there. Just search for my name, Craig Peterson. I have a podcast and it makes it pretty easy. I've found some of them don't understand if you try and search for Craig Peterson, tech talk, some of them do.

I've been a little inconsistent with my naming over the years, but what the heck you can find me. It's easy enough to do.

I've got this new kind of purple-ish logo that you can look for to make sure it's the right one. And then you can listen to subscribe, please subscribe. It helps all of our numbers.

You can also, of course, by listening online with one of these devices, help our numbers too. Cause it's you guys that are important. The more subscribers we have, the way these algorithms work, the more promotion we'll get. I think that's frankly, a very good thing as well.

What do you do if you need to see a doctor, that question has a different answer today than it did a year ago. I won't be able to say that in about another month, right? Because mid-March is when everything changed last year, 2020, man, what a year?

To see a doctor nowadays, we are typically going online, aren't we? You're going to talk to them. So many doctors have been using some of these platforms that are just not secure things like zoom, for instance, which we know isn't secure.

Now, the fed kind of loosen things up a little bit under the Trump administration saying, Hey. People need to see doctors. The HIPAA PCI rules were loosened up a little bit in order to make things a little bit better. Then there's the whole DSS thing with HIPAA. All of these rules are just across the board are loosened up.

That has caused us to have more of our information stolen. I'm going to be talking a little bit about this FBI, actually multi-agency warning that came out about the whole medical biz and what we need to be doing. Bottom line, Zoom is not something we should be using when we're talking to our doctors.

Now, this really bothers me too. Zoom is bad. We know that it's not secure and it should not be used for medical discussions, but Zoom has been private labeling its services so that you can go out and say, Hey, zoom, I want to use you and I'm going to call it my XYZ medical platform.

People have done that. Businesses have done that. Not really realizing how insecure Zoom is. I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt here. You go and you use the XYZ medical platform and you have no clue of Zoom. Other than man, this looks a lot like Zoom, that's the dead giveaway.

Keep an eye out for that because a lot of these platforms just aren't secure. I do use Zoom for basic webinars because everybody has it. Everybody knows how to use it. I have WebEx and the WebEx version of it is secure. In fact, all the basic versions, even of WebEx are secure and I can have a thousand people on a webinar or which is a great way to go. It's all secure end to end.

Unlike again, what Zoom had been doing, which is it might be secure from your desktop, but it gets to a server where it's no longer secure. That kind of problem that telegram has, frankly.

If you are talking to your doctor, try and use an approved platform. That's how you can keep it safer.

If you're a doctor and you have medical records be really careful. Zoom has done some just terrible things from a security standpoint. For instance, installing a complete web server on a Mac and allowing access to the Mac now via the webserver. Are you nuts? What the heck are you doing? That's just crazy. Just so insecure.

This is all part of a bigger discussion and the discussion has to do with Zero trust architectures. We're seeing this more and more. A couple of you, Danny. I know you reached out to me asking specifically about zero trust architectures. Now Danny owns a chain of. Coffee shops and his family does as well.

He says, Hey, listen, what should I do to become secure? So I helped them out. I got him a little Cisco platform, and second Cisco go that he can use as much more secure than the stuff you buy the big box retailers or your buying at Amazon, et cetera, and got it all configured for him and running.

Then he heard me talk at about zero trust and said, Hey, can I do zero trust with this Cisco go, this Muraki go, is actually what it is and the answer is, well so here's the concept that businesses should be using, not just medical businesses, but businesses in general and zero trust means that you do not trust the devices, even the ones that you own that are on your network. You don't trust them to be secure. You don't trust them to talk to other devices without explicit permission.

Instead of having a switch that allows everything to talk to everything or a wifi network where everything can talk to everything, you have very narrow, very explicit ways that devices can talk to each other. That's what zero trust is all about. That's where the businesses are moving.

There's zero trust architecture, and it doesn't refer to just a specific piece of technology. Obviously, we're talking about the idea that devices, and even on top of that, the users who are using the devices only have the bare minimum access they need in order to perform their job.

Some businesses look at this and say that's a problem. I'm going to get complaints that someone needs access to this and such. You need that because here's what can happen. You've got this data that's sitting out there might be your intellectual property. You might be a doctor in a doctor's office and you've got patient records. You might have the records from your PCI your credit card records that you have. I put on. Those are sitting there on your network that is in fact a little dangerous because now you've got something the bad guys want. It's dangerous if the bad guys find it and they take it, you could lose your business. It's that simple.

They are not allowing you to use the excuse anymore because of COVID. That excuse doesn't work anymore. The same thing's true with the credit card numbers that you have the excuse of I'm just a small business. It's not a big deal. Doesn't work anymore. They are taking away your credit card privileges.

We had an outreach from a client that became a client, that had their ability to take credit cards taken away from them because again, there was a leak.

So we have to be careful when you're talking and you have private information, or if you don't want your machine to be hacked, do not use things like Zoom. I covered this extensively in my Improving Windows Security course. So keep an eye out for that as well. If you're not on my email list, you won't find out about this stuff.

Go right now to Craig peterson.com. If you scroll down to the bottom of that homepage and sign up for that newsletter so you can get all of what I talk about here and more.

Hey, thanks to some hackers out there. Your application for unemployment benefits might've been approved and you didn't apply for it in the first place. Turns out somebody stealing our information again.

Hi everybody. Craig Peterson here.

Hey, this is a big concern of mine and I've often wondered because I have not been receiving these stimulus checks. I did not get the first round. I did not get the second round and I contacted the IRS and the IRS says depends on when you filed for 2019. Oh my gosh. Of course, I was a little late filing that year. They still haven't caught up. I guess that's good news, right? That the IRS data processing centers are terrible.

It goes back to aren't you glad we don't get the government we pay for is the bottom line here, but I've been concerned. Did somebody steal my refund?

Did somebody steal my unemployment benefits, did somebody steal my stimulus checks? It is happening more and more. There is a great little article talking about this, where someone had stolen the author's John personal information again. Now we probably all have had our personal information stolen, whether you're aware of it or not.

As usual, I recommend that you go to have I been poned.com and pwnd is spelled, pwn, D have I been poned.com and find out whether or not your data has been stolen and is out there on the dark web.

They have a really good database of a lot of these major hacks. Many of us have been hacked via these credit bureaus and one in particular Equifax who have all kinds of personal information about us, had it all stolen.

It's easy enough for people to steal our identities file fake tax returns. That's why the IRS is telling you, Hey, file your return as soon as possible. That way when the bad guy's file, we'll know it's the bad guys cause you already filed it. As opposed to you file your tax return and the IRS comes back and says, Oh, you already filed. We already sent you a refund or whatever. You already filed it.

That is a terrible thing to have to happen because now you have to fight and you have to prove it wasn't you. How do you prove a negative? It's almost impossible. At least in this case, hopefully, the check was sent to some state 50 States away, another side of the world. So you can say, Hey, listen, I never been there, then they can hopefully track where it was deposited.

Although now the bad guys are using these websites that have banks behind them, or maybe it's a bank with a website that is designed for people to get a debit card and an account just like that. That, in fact, it's what was used to hack my buddy. My 75-year-old buddy has been out delivering meals and had his paychecks stolen through one of those.

These fraudulent job claims are happening more and more. It's really a rampant scam. We've had warnings coming out from the FBI and they have really accelerated during the lockdown because now we've had these jobless benefits increased, people, making more money staying in their home than they made on the job. Disincentives for working, frankly.

He's saying here the author again, John Wasik, that a third of a million people in his state alone were victims of the scam. This is an Illinois. This is where he lives. A third of the people in the state of Illinois, including several people that he knew.

We've got some national tallies underway. I don't know if you've seen these. I've seen them on TV and read about them, California. It is crazy. People were applying for California unemployment that didn't live in the state at all, would come into the state and once you're there in the state pick up the check, right? Cause that's all they were doing. Some people have been caught with more than a million dollars worth of California unemployment money.

Of course, it wasn't a check, it was actually a debit card. The same basic deal and California is estimating that more than $11 billion was stolen. Can you imagine that tens of millions of people could have been scammed because of this?

This is the third time the author had been a victim of identity theft and fraud. He wanted to know how could they get his information.

Well, I've told you, check it out on, have I been poned. It'll tell you which breaches your information was in. It does it based on your email address. It'll also tell what type of data was stolen in those breaches. So it's important stuff. I think you should definitely have a look at it.

He is very upset and I can understand it. Data breaches last year, more than 737 million data files are ripped off according to act.com. Frankly, that was a digital pandemic, with more and more of us working at home.

I just talked about the last segment. Your doctor's office and you are talking to your doctor. How now? Cause you don't go into the office. There are so many ways they can steal it.

The FBI's recording now a 400% increase in cybercrime reports that we had this mega hack of corporate and government systems.

This whole thing we've talked about before called the SolarWinds hack, although it was really more of a Microsoft hack, and it went out via SolarWinds as well as other things. Be careful everybody out there. If you find yourself in these breach reports on, have I been poned make sure you go to the website. Set yourself up with a new password. At the very least use a password manager.

I just responded to an email before, when it went on the air today, from a listener who was talking about two-factor authentication. He's worried about what to use. I sent him my special report on two-factor authentication, but it is the bottom line, quite a problem.

Again, Use one password, use two-factor authentication with one password. Don't use SMS as that and you'll be relatively safe.

I don't know I can't say do this and you'll be safe. I don't think there's any way to be sure your safe.

Having these organizations, businesses, government agencies hacked all the time that don't seem to care about losing our data, right? Oh, it's a cost of doing business, some of these businesses, and I've talked to them, they'll look at it and say, how much will it cost us in fines if our data is stolen? Versus, how much will it cost us to keep our data relatively safe? For even a larger small company, a hundred employee company, you're talking about something that is going to be costing you about 25 grand a month. That's if it's outsourced.

If you're trying to do it yourself and a hundred person company, you can easily be spending a hundred grand a month. It's expensive to do. They'll look at it and say, okay, this is going to cost us a million dollars a year, odds are, it'll be two years, maybe three before we're hacked. That's this statistic, although you're rolling the dice, it might be tomorrow that you get hacked. $3 million versus our fines are going to be about a million dollars. We'll just take the fine.

That to me is just disgusting. How can these people live with themselves? I don't know. Maybe it's just me. I'm going crazy.

That leads us to this New York Times article I was talking about on the radio this week. The New York Times article talking about how the United States, really, we are losing control of information warfare. Our warriors have been working at the national security agency and the FBI. They leave those agencies and go to work for private contractors. The tools that we've been using to hack other people have been stolen. The tools that we're paying to be developed, we meaning the US taxpayer, the tools that we have paid to develop aren't even being used, and that mega attack I was just talking about. That's an example of one of these attacks that would have been stopped had we been using the tools that the federal government paid for. It's just crazy. What's going on?

So here's the bottom line, everybody you can't trust most of these vendors that are out there. They have a product to sell. They don't have the best solution for you, right? They really don't. If they cared about you they would not be selling you antivirus software because it does not work.

If Microsoft cared about you, they would have come out with their anti-malware stuff. Windows defender, years and years ago. They would have redesigned Microsoft Office and Microsoft Windows, as well, because those were huge security holes.

Look at Adobe. They've been the source of the most security problems of anything out on the market, bar none. Flash was terrible. Java, another example of something that's been a terrible security hole for years. These businesses are trying to get a product to market as quickly and as inexpensively as possible. Quick is usually the number one goal. It has to be inexpensive for them to develop it. That means now they go out and they sell it because they got it. They're going to sell it. It doesn't matter if it's good. It doesn't matter if it even works overall for you.

That's why I'm doing these courses, these classes, these emails, I'm recording special stuff for you each week. I've got special emails that are going out for you each week.

We've got these radio show podcasts. This stuff is all free. All of it.

Now I charge for some courses, but everything else is absolutely free. Now I hope I have some clients that come from some of this stuff and I do get them, but most of the clients I get are by referrals.

I really believe in this. I'm putting my time, my money, my energy where my mouth is. But you have to take a step. You have to go to Craig peterson.com and you have to sign up right there. Craig peterson.com. Scroll down to the bottom of this screen. You'll see a little signup thing and I will start sending you my weekly newsletter.

Some of these little micro training that only take you a few minutes and information on courses and more. Craig peterson.com.

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Welcome!  

It is another busy week on the technology front.  We discuss Facial Recognition and some of the problems with false positives and how you can see if your pictures are included in some of these websites. Then we discuss Amy Klobachers anti-trust legislation against big tech.  Then we get into Info-Sec Careers and something you might want to know before considering a career move. We also discuss Zero-Trust and why you must be thinking about that if you want to be secure and there is even more, so be sure to Listen in.

For more tech tips, news, and updates, visit - CraigPeterson.com.

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Tech Articles Craig Thinks You Should Read:

Strengthening Zero Trust Architecture

Here’s a Way to Learn if Facial Recognition Systems Used Your Photos

Scalpers aren’t the main reason you can’t find a new console

What I Wish I Knew at the Start of My InfoSec Career

Chrome users have faced 3 security concerns over the past 24 hours

Klobuchar targets Big Tech with biggest antitrust overhaul in 45 years

I Fought the Dark Web and the Dark Web Won

How the United States Lost to Hackers

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Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] We're going to talk a little bit about scalpers. They're not the main reason you can't find a new gaming console.  I've had a number of people ask about getting into information security. I'm going to give you some tips about what I wish I knew at the start of my career. 

Hello everybody. Craig Peterson here. 

I want to start out by talking a little bit about the facial recognition systems and there are a lot of concerns, legitimately, a lot of concerns because now our privacy is getting worse and worse.

I'm going to talk next week a little bit, at least it's on my schedule about what's happening with GPS and pros and cons to it because there are some very concerning things about GPS. Much of our business and private lives is based on GPS, nowadays. You're in a plane, you're in a boat, trains, I guess don't use GPS a whole lot, but we depend on them in our cars, everywhere. We'll talk a little bit about that next week.

When it comes to facial recognition, it has come to the forefront. Now we know that, for instance, London, England was probably the most surveilled city in the world. I don't think that's anywhere near true now, considering what the Chinese have been doing to their citizens. No, I probably shouldn't call them citizens. I'm not sure what the right thing would be to call them, but the people living over there in China are under a constant eye. They're even watching them over there for jaywalking and they use facial recognition systems to automatically send them a ticket. Oh, also this social credit score they have over there where if you do jaywalk or do something else, you get points taken off of your social credit score. If your score reaches a certain point, you can't even take public transportation anymore. That's how they're controlling people. One of the many ways that they're controlling people in China.

These facial recognition systems are used there. We know they've been in use in London where they're trying to track people and reverse engineer crimes, someone commits a crime.

There are sensors that listen for gunshots, for instance, and then they will just backtrack all of the people that were in the area. Okay. Watching them where they work, as you remember, it's being recorded. So you're here now, where did you come from? Some of that same type of technology was used in Washington, DC for what happened on January six, with the riot of well, 80 people. Some riot. We're also now aware of what was done in Oregon and in Washington state and New York City where they were tracking people as well now. Did they get charged? Did they go to jail? They were using facial recognition systems and they were figuring out where they were, where they had been.

They were also looking forward to the fact, because unlike China, where they want to know where everybody is and they've got this whole social credit system. What we were doing is finding people who were committing serious crimes. The police obviously don't want to go into that area because there are so many rioters and they were armed with all kinds of things, the baseball bats, but they had frozen bottles of water.

No, I don't know. I threw a bottle of water at him. You had. That thing, deep, frozen, in a deep freeze, below zero degrees, which is way cold Fahrenheit. You brought it with you and you use that liter bottle to bash someone over the head. We saw this again and again. So you find those people. You don't arrest them right away. You don't send the police in. No reason to put their lives in any more danger than they are everyday, normally. Then what you do is track them as they leave. Now when they were leaving, they were using facial recognition to figure out who was there and where did they go? That facial recognition technology then was able to track them down. Once they got into an area where there weren't a lot of rioters or no rioters about to get in their car, or however it is, they got there, they arrested them. Of course, some of these rioters, real rioters, right? Where there's hundreds of people rioting, not 80.

They were able to track them down. Some of them were arrested, some of them were charged. In a lot of these cases, the mayor said, no, don't do anything. Just let them I was going to set them riot, but that's not how they phrased it. I'm trying to remember how they phrased it.

So we are seeing. Facial recognition used in law enforcement. It's one thing to track them either.  What happens over in London where a crime is committed and they now track everybody back to figure out where did they come from? What car did they get into? Did they get out of it initially? Then what was the license plate number and who owns that car? Crime-solving that way, where they don't necessarily recognize your face. They don't know it's you. 

However, now we're finding more and more of that happening, where the systems recognize your face and they know it's you, and they know what your social media accounts. They know obviously where you live, it's all tied in.  A lot of cases is tied in via your driver's license or now these federally mandated national ID cards that so many people are carrying around. 

Apparently, I'll have to carry around to next time I get my license because my state has finally decided they are not going to issue regular driver's licenses anymore, which definitely bothers me.

I'm sure you can figure that out too. How were they identifying people? It's one thing to see a face and okay. There's the face here. Okay. There's a face there. There's okay. Here. Okay. So he just got into this car to leave. That's one thing, right? I think that's pretty legit. You don't have a particular right to privacy when you're in a public place. In fact, you have no right to privacy when you enter a public place. So I don't have a problem with that. 

Now we're using artificial intelligence and we've talked about some of them before, Clearview is a great example, clearview.ai. Here's a company that some would argue illegally captured scraped. What kind of her kind of wording you want to use pictures of people all from all over the internet and the police can subscribe to their service and Clearview says, Oh no, we only let police at it, although there's evidence that would suggest otherwise. They're allowing all kinds of third parties access to the database, but you can put a person's picture into their software.  Their software, by the way, includes a mobile app, so it can be done on the street and you know who they are. 

Now, this is getting RoboCop-ish. If e you've ever seen the movie Robocop. Actually, there's a series of these things with the Ed two Oh nines. What happened is the police officer could go out and he'd be patrolling in the streets and he come across some people in the computer in that kind of the heads up display would figure out, okay, that's this person they've been arrested 20 times a felony, this and that, and okay that person was shoplifting with their names and addresses and things right there in the screen. That's been a theme of science fiction movies for very long time. 

 I interviewed probably about a decade ago, a guy out at the consumer electronic show who had a very cool device that you could wear.  It was designed for policemen and it was like a pair of big goggles back in the day, right? This is before Google glass and some of these other things came out, but they were able to with this the heads-up display put anything you wanted on it. So it's coming, it's not here yet. It's going to be here even more in the future.

 If you want to check if your photo is part of all of this stash and there are billions literally of photos that Clearview AI has out there, but you can check at least the basics. 

So many of us use this website online that allowed us to upload our photos and share them with friends and relatives and family, and put it together, and have a really great little album that you could share with people.  That was on a site called flicker. Today, many of us are uploading our photos to Amazon or to Google. Apple, of course, has many of them. What happened with flicker is they went out of business. They got sold and resold few times.  What they ended up doing is selling the pictures online. There's people I talked about this a couple of years ago, this guy driving down the highway and he sees a billboard with his picture on it, not the sort of thing that he was expecting that's for sure. It's probably not something you expected when you uploaded your photos to flicker. So take a minute.  Go to a website called exposing.ai.

 This particular website is specifically aimed at flicker photos. It'll tell you if it has found your picture. So you can, you put in your flicker username and they'll let you know if your flicker photos have been taken and used for facial recognition by a few different companies. 

Dive face, face scrub, mega phase Pippa, VGG face, and many others. You can just put in your username. You can put in a tag that you tagged that photo when you uploaded it, or the URL of a photo. If you have a photo, it is online and it's yours and you want to see if anybody else is using it somewhere on the internet. 

The easy way to do this is to go to Google image search. You can upload the image, you can give it the URL of the image, and it'll tell you if it finds matching images or at least images that are close to it online. 

Stick around. Visit me online Craig Peterson dot com.

During the lockdown, we've had a lot of things that have become difficult to get your hands on. Turns out that includes various types of games like your PS5's, but it extends a whole lot further than that.

Hi everybody. Craig Peterson here. 

Here we go, man, another fallout from the whole lockdown thing. This is a pretty darn big deal because it's affected the entire computer industry. We've heard a lot of complaints about how difficult it's been to get a Sony PlayStation five or a Microsoft X-Box series SX. They both hit store shelves last year, but they have been almost impossible to find at any of the major retailers. 

There's a great little article that was in ARS Technica, and they put together a graph based on some data obtained from E-bay. This data was looking at the availability and costs specifically of the PS five. Now, this is a fairly advanced computer, frankly, in order to play these video games, of course, it's got a lot of graphics capability built right into this silly thing.  It seems that there were a certain number of consoles sold on certain days at certain prices. You can see this massive price increase. It just jumped right up in November. Pretty much stayed up there in the thousand dollars plus range. Isn't that amazing.  It went down in January and is more or less flat right now. You can get them on eBay for about 380 bucks right now. Why is that? What's been going on here. We've got scalpers. Obviously, a thousand dollars is a lot higher than the $380 you can get it for right now. 

It turns out that there is a huge problem and the problem we're seeing is affecting the entire computer world. There are certain chips for which there is a shortage. Why is there a shortage? Well, it had to do with the lockdown. Companies were trying to figure out, okay, how many of these devices am I going to sell when everybody's locked down?  They miscalculated, frankly.

It wasn't a problem with supply. It was that these companies that had been ordering these components cut their orders back or stopped them entirely. 

You've got Sony and others out there, Microsoft's console as well, trying to find the parts. They have had a very hard time. Well, what happens when it's hard to find something? Either the quality is going to go down to keep the price the same or the price is going to go up. There's only a couple of ways that it really can go. 

They're estimating right now that these constraints on the supply chain are probably going to last for a few more months. We've seen it big time in the computer world, particularly in the storage space. You may not be aware of it, but there are, of course, hard disks that aren't really disks called SSD, which is a solid-state disk.

Okay. You probably know about that. I wrote up a thing, in fact, Because people were asking me about what to buy, to upgrade their computers.  If you have a slower computer, putting an SSD in is usually a very good idea, but there are many grades of SSDs. 

In fact, I've got a little document. If you want it to send an email to [email protected]. I'll be glad to send you a copy. I wrote this for one of our clients. It drives me crazy. They need a new computer, in this case, a desktop. So they say, Hey Craig, can you guys go ahead and work us up a quote? So we look at what they're using the computer for. We look at the longevity of that computer so that they get the best bang for their buck and usefulness. How useful is it going to be? Is it going to be offline just five minutes a day, by the way, adds up to over $2,000 a year for just an average salary of a data entry worker.  It adds up pretty quickly if it goes down. 

 We put together this proposal and this was for a customed Dell machine and we specify all of the components that go into it. That's an important thing to remember because these components all have varying levels of quality.  We sent them the quote and we've done this before, right? Who's the fool here, them or us. They said no. I went to the Dell site and I got this special going on and then I can get the same computer for 300 bucks.

Not true. It's not true. Now, you guys are the best and brightest, right? This sort of stuff, you can't compare a Yugo to a beautiful Cadillac right there. There's no comparison between the two, but that's what they were doing. They needed an F150 in order to haul stuff but instead of getting the F150, they just got a little hatchback that they can maybe throw a couple of things in the back, but they needed a big bed pickup truck. That just drives me crazy.

So I wrote this probably three or four-page long, a thing explaining why you need to buy the right kind of hardware. Why the stuff that they're selling you at a discount isn't going to work for you and things need to be included, include things like the hardware encryption and SSDs. 

Again, I'll send you this report if you want it. Just let me know, call [email protected].

 I started this whole thing because we're talking about SSDs. SSDs are not all created equal. Some of these SSDs store one bit per little bubble, if you will. Some of them store two bits on them store three-bit bits. They're all constrained in their lifetime based on how many writes are occurring to that disc. 

You've got to look at that as well to figure it out. Now, of course, I got into SSDs because we were talking about the capacity in manufacturing and the shortage that we're seeing right now. If some of these game consoles, there is a shortage in all of these types of disks, there's even a shortage of memory and certain CPUs. 

The disc shortage started a few years ago when there was massive flooding in Indonesia. That's where a lot of the hard disks are made. Now, these are the things that spin, right? Now we've got new technology that lets us pack more data into the SSDs. 

Whereas we were seeing the hard disk go up in size. I remember my first one was, I think it was five megabytes. It was just, Whoa, how could I have used five Meg and then 10 megabytes? Of course, hard disks, reasonably priced ones tend to 12 terabyte drives and again, multiple different types of drives. 

There's the more server-oriented that if there's an error on the disk, the disc stays alive and it repairs itself in real-time in the background. Then there's the stuff you get as consumers where if the disc starts failing, the whole disc goes offline until it fits fixes itself.

Then there's real crap. The ones like these green drives from Western digital, that I do not like. I just had confirmation on that this week that are even cheaper, but all of these are hard to get right now. 

We will see eventually all of these supplies back in line. The manufacturers can make them. The whole lockdown hasn't really been a problem for them. The problem has been that people aren't ordering because they're afraid during the lockdown that people wouldn't be buying computers. Of course, we found the opposite to be true. Didn't we.  People were buying these consoles to play video games. Buying computers to work from home. Trying to buy network security stuff as well.  That's really changed the whole thing. 

When we get back, let's get into we'll get into the InfoSec career a little bit later if you miss it. If you're thinking about getting into information security. Make sure you go online to Craig peterson.com. So you can catch that. 

We'll talk about that, but let's do something I think that might affect a lot of people and that's Chrome users, three security problems in the last week.

Hey, you guys are the best and brightest. You know what I think about Google and Google Chrome? Just this last week, over one 24 hour period, Chrome had three security problems. We're going to talk about that right now.

Hi, everybody. Craig Peterson here. 

Google is evil. I've established that I think, before, the things they do, the things they have been doing to us. 

Remember their motto used to be, don't be evil. They removed that from the website a couple of years ago. Now, no longer don't be evil. Nowadays they're doing pretty much everything they can to, maybe be evil is a little strong a word, but they're pretty much-doing everything they can to get as much information about you and sell it. 

Do you remember his goal? Larry Page when they were starting it up. The goal was okay, where we are going to get all of the world's information and democratize it. Make it available for everyone, anyone out there who wants to get at it. Frankly, it's been pretty good until fairly recently. At which point I switched over to duck duck go. 

Chrome is another one of their products. Microsoft frankly, jumped right onto the Chrome bandwagon. What they ended up doing over Microsoft is taking Google's open-source version of the base of Chrome. They call it chromium. It's the guts, if you will, of the Google Chrome browser and they made it available to anyone that wants to get their hands on it. So Microsoft got their hands on it and messed around with it a little bit. As Microsoft is wont to do. They came up with their Edge browser. The latest Edge is really Google Chrome in disguise. 

There are others out there too. You probably know if you've been through one of my courses when I'm talking about browsers. The Epic browser is a pretty good browser. It is designed to be more or less safe. But we go into that a lot more detail. In which cases is it not et cetera.

Some people have used the Tor browser, which ties into the Onion network that provides even more anonymity. So there are options. Of course, Safaris available from Apple for almost every platform now. It is a very fast browser and it does a lot to try and keep your data secure.

The same thing's true with Firefox. In the Improving Windows Security Course, I go into the problems with each one of these, including Firefox and what you have to consider. 

This past week we had a bit of an issue. If you attended my webinars last year. This would have been in 2020.  I went through some of the privacy plugins that you can use for your browser. You might remember that one of them was something called the Great Suspender. Highly recommended at the time. Got to add that in there because I don't want you to just go grab it.  It was recommended. I used it, extensively on a bunch of different browsers, because what the Great Suspender did is save your machine's memory CPU, frankly, even a little bit of disc I/O when you were on a tab on your web browser, your tab would just respond. 

Normally everything looks good, but if you're like me, you probably opened another tab or maybe another window and then another tab or another window. You just dig deeper and deeper as you're looking into something, trying to figure something out. 

You might have 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 tabs. Open each one of those tabs represents a different thread, a different process, basically on your computer. That means it's using memory, it's using CPU and it might be also hitting your disk, using your disk. The Great Suspenders said wait a minute, now you haven't used this tab in whatever you set it for, I usually had it about 15 minutes. What I'm going to do now, Yes, I'm going to take a snapshot of this page.  I am going to just release all of the resources that were associated with the page. If you go back to that tab, all you have now is a snapshot, just a picture of what was on the page.  You can see what was on the page and depending on how you configure the Great Suspender, I had it set up so that if I activated a tab again, it would automatically reload that page. You could have had it so that if you got to that picture and you really wanted it, you'd click on it and it would reload the page. Very. Handy.  It allowed you to have hundreds of potentially of tabs open quote-unquote, when in fact they weren't open and they weren't using hardly any resources at all.

The Great suspender this last June was sold.  The original person who wrote this thing, and it's a great little really great, actually a little piece of software decided that he wanted to make some money off of it. Why not?  He sold it. It's unclear as to who actually owns it or controls it right now and who he sold it to because the name of the account, the developer account, is the Great Suspender. So that's not going to help you at all. 

It started showing some signs of what Google and what people are calling malice, under this new ownership. There was a thread in GitHub that was published in November and GitHub is where so much of this code is stored, right. It started to show some signs of frankly, of malice under this new ownership. They said that a new version contained malicious code that tracked users and manipulated web requests. 

Now the Great Suspender did normally manipulate web requests, in order to keep everything flowing and smooth. So you might go to a website and then it suspends it, and it might use a different URL and the URL is going to cause the Great Suspender inside your browser to be called. Okay. 

So I'm not sure what they mean about the manipulation here, but Google removed it. It's gone like that and no warning or anything else just within the last week. They completely removed the Great Suspender, not just from the store, they removed it from your machines where you were using it. 

It said this - the extension contains malware, that's the only warning they gave. That is the only background they gave. They really haven't said a whole lot. People, by the way, who were using the Great Suspender were really left in a lurch because any suspended tabs when Google went bye-bye, any suspended tabs you had were a lost. How's that for a terrible thing? Absolutely terrible. 

There is a Reddit thread out there that you can see.  They talk about how you can get your tabs back. So if you had followed my advice back then and put it on, good for you.  However, the problem is that it turned out to ultimately be malicious. So that's a big deal.

 Remember I said three security problems in 24 hours, Google on Thursday, released a Chrome update that fixes what it called a zero-day vulnerability in the browser. This is another buffer, overflow problem. If you're programming, you know what that means in version eight, which is Google's open-source Javascript engine, and they rated it as high.

Again, Google didn't say much about what the vulnerability was. Probably didn't want to encourage people to try and use it, but they said it was existing in the wild. That's not very good.  Then sync abuse, a security researcher reported on Thursday as well. Hackers were using malware that abused the Chrome sync feature to bypass firewalls so the malware could connect to command and control servers. Not good. 

 If you are using, if you have Chrome, I have it because I have to, cause I have to test things out. 

If you are using it, make sure it is up to date. Most of the time Chrome will update itself, but this week is one where you should double-check Chrome and make sure it really has been updated. Cause these are some pretty nasties. All right. 

I'm sure you're familiar with Senator Amy Klobuchar. She ran for President, under of course the Democrat ticket, this last election cycle. She is targeting big tech, at least. That's what she says. We'll talk about the reality.

Hello everybody. Craig Peterson here. Thanks so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it. And I appreciate hearing from you as well. Any questions? I have so much information to give you guys we're starting some training courses, free email training, just everything [email protected]. Any questions as well and visit me online at Craig peterson.com. 

Senator Amy Klobuchar, is a Democrat from Minnesota and she has introduced a bill here in Congress and supposedly big tech is in her crosshairs. Now I think that's really funny because it's not in reality. Okay. 

Here's an article from ARS Technica a very good website, by the way, on some of the tech. It says not only our major firms, such as Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google under investigation for allegedly breaking existing antitrust law.  A newly proposed bill in the Senate would make it harder for these and other firms to become so troublingly large in the first place. 

If you've been listening to me for a while, I have friends that have been absolutely destroyed by some of these big tech firms. Where companies have gone ahead and then announced a product because they found, Oh, wait a minute. These guys over here, they're doing pretty darn well with that product. Let's see if we can't figure out if there's really a market forward or not end up, they're competing with us. So here's what we'll do. Let's go ahead and announce. We're going to have a product and it's going to be better than their product, and you can get it from us and you can rely on us. Don't pay attention to that small company over there. They are entirely unreliable. 

All of a sudden that small company's sales plummet because people are waiting for big co to come up with their version of whatever it might be. Then they'll compare it to and maybe buy it a bit later on. 

That's a way that many of these companies have grown and grown in a very big way.

 Senator Klobuchar introduced this bill called Clara. Should have called it Clarice. The competition and anti-trust law enforcement reform act. This would be the largest overhaul to the US antitrust legislation in almost 50 years if it became law. It's interesting because her statement says while the United States once had some of the most effective antitrust laws in the world. Our economy today faces and massive competition problem. 

I'm a little confused here. It looks like she is asking for competition. I don't know. I don't understand it. I thought she was one of these far-left ones. I remember the debates quite well. They're looking at expanding resources. In other words, give them more money at the federal trade commission, the department of justice in their antitrust division. They're looking to pursue a review of more mergers, more aggressively.

Now my knee jerk reaction is, these big companies usually we'll fail. They usually just keep getting greedier and bigger. Look at what happened to GM. They went bankrupt and unfortunately, they use tax dollars to bail them out. Chrysler has gone bankrupt twice, and they've used our tax dollars to bail them out. I don't think that's a good idea.

 Remember our tax dollars mean our time. We have to put in our time, we can't spend with our families. Time, we cannot spend on vacation. Time we cannot spend relaxing. It takes our time now, where we have to work to make money, to give to the government, to bail out companies that are failures.

What the government decided to do rather than let these bigger companies fail as they ultimately always do. If you're old enough, you'll remember back in the seventies and eighties, IBM, too big to fail. They owned the business, the computer business in the sixties and seventies, and they just fell off the edge. Didn't they? That usually happens. 

I'm not sure a hundred percent is going to happen with the social media companies but I suspect they are. Look at what's happening right now. If you have kids that are under 20, do they have a Facebook account? Even in their thirties, under 20-year-olds, they don't use Facebook anymore.

Facebook is likely to die off unless they change in a big way. So what's Facebook do? They buy competitors. They buy WhatsApp. We've talked about WhatsApp before and my thoughts on that. They buy Instagram. They buy competitors and they use competitors too. Change their business model a little bit and move laterally rather than vertically. That's not a bad idea in business.  Frankly, most businesses expand their product line, expand their way of doing things by acquiring successful small businesses. So I get that. I think that's wonderful. 

But what the Senator is proposing is that we have the government decide if a business should be allowed to acquire another business. There is a line in there where I agree with her. I'm not a hundred percent sure where that line should go.

We've had antitrust laws here in the United States since 1800s, a very long time. The Sherman act short and simple back then it made it illegal to monopolize or attempt to monopolize or conspire to monopolize the market. I liked that one.

How about if you're defining the market? There's two sides to this, one side often overlooked. 

You've got the side of the supplier. You've got Facebook or GM or whoever. You say Facebook is the 800-pound gorilla. They own this market. So what should you do about Facebook?

That's what she's trying to figure out here. What should we do? They're saying we should have a government regulator decide if it's a monopoly or not. We know how well that ends up working. You end up with a revolving door, the regulators working for the corporations, and then going back to the regulators right back and forth. It's absolutely crazy. That side of it. 

There is another side and this other side is frankly not that new, but it has gotten worse more recently. It's called a monopsony. What this is where you have a lot of suppliers. So you'd have a whole lot of Facebook' for instance, but only one purchaser.

You said, Craig, what are you talking about? We're the best and brightest. I'm not quite sure where you're going with this. 

Here's where we're going. Monopsony is typified by Walmart. Walmart is well-known as a company that you do not want to sell to.  If you're a small business, you look at it, say, Oh yeah we got Walmart. They're going to sell our product. Okay. Okay. Great for you. It's not wonderful. Walmart took out every rubber hose they had, and they beat the supplier over the head and shoulders and back until they capitulated. 

Walmart was routinely criticized for this forcing vendors to lower prices until it became unsustainable. I can think of a few of these products right off the top of my head. Do you remember Rubbermaid, right? It was the. The dominant force for those rubber containers at Walmart. Then all of a sudden it wasn't there anymore. Do you remember that? Because they couldn't sell it to Walmart at the prices Walmart wanted it at. That's one way Walmart keeps the prices low.

With this monopsony problem. We're talking about a lot of companies that make competing products, but there's really one 800 pound gorilla. That's buying it. Walmart has a huge share of the US retail market.  Of course, now they've been one-upped by our friends over at Amazon. Amazon is there now in that kind of the same position.

If you're going to sell something, you pretty much have to have it on Amazon. Amazon's basically going to dictate how much you can sell it for. Isn't that interesting. By the way, that word monopsony dates back almost a hundred years as well. Antitrust laws have never addressed the idea of this kind of anti-competitive behavior from the bottom-up direction. It's an interesting way. 

So what do I think is the way to go on all of this stuff? First of all, we'll see if it ever becomes law. They tried something similar with a bill back in 2019, and it didn't get very far. With the Democrats controlling the white house, the house of representatives, and the Senate. The idea of reform being passed is more feasible, but there's one other side to this. 

This goes back to my friends who have had their businesses effectively stolen by large companies. That is when we're looking at more regulation, which is exactly what she's proposing. More regulators, more money going to the regulators. They're making the entire marketplace harder. 

 If you're a small company and do you have to comply with all of these new rules, you now have to make all of these regulators happy. What are the odds? You're going to be able to do that compared to the big guys.  The big guys can quite easily afford all of the attorneys, all of the regulatory compliance people, everybody that's needed. But you can't. 

So the big companies love this sort of thing because the regulations make it easier for them to keep competitors out of the market.  They're keeping competitors out of the market. We've already established that they're buying competitors, so they don't have to compete with them.  

Now we're going to make matters worse with this Klobuchar bill. By doing what? By increasing regulation, making it harder to compete. 

I propose that we'll actually have more monopolies after this. I would much rather just keep it simple and watch out for monopolies.  If a company makes mistakes and is going under, let it go under. Any parts of that company that have any value will be sold. That's what bankruptcy laws all about.

If, someone who's thinking about maybe getting into an information security career. Or maybe you're looking at another career because right now there are millions of jobs open in InfoSec. We're going to talk about it. What do I wish I knew?

Hi everybody, Craig Peterson here. Thanks so much for joining me. 

You probably know that I have been in information security for a very long time. It started out as I had to protect my own company. When I got nailed 30 years ago with what was called the Morris worm. If you've been on any of my webinars where I do a little background, you heard my story there. It just scared me to death. I almost lost a bunch of clients because of this worm.

 The worm is a piece of software that gets onto a computer and then spreads to other computers. Nowadays, we have a lot of things that act like worms. For instance, ransomware gets in and starts to spread. We have all kinds of bad guys that are doing the same thing. They'll get onto a machine in your network. Then they'll manually start looking around and seeing what you have, what file servers you have. Oh, let's connect to the G drive or whatever you call that file server drive or shared drive. They will look through your files and just the rest of the story, right? 

You guys are the best and brightest. You really are. So here's where I come down. I think there is a lot of opportunities here and I did a little presentation for a mastermind group. I'm a member of last week.  I talked about a guy that became a friend of mine who is in his late fifties is right around 60 years old and decided he needed a new career. His prior career had literally disappeared. They had just been destroyed. He was in retail and he was managing a store and he had a lot of clients.  Of course, that job went away and he was looking for, what do I do next? He's been listening to me for a very long time on the radio and decided that maybe he should look into an InfoSe career. So he did. 

I used him as a case study with my mastermind group. What should people be looking to do and how can I help them? So I figured let's do this because I saw an article in Dark Reading. That's one of my favorite websites for all of these articles on security. They were talking about exactly that, what should I be doing now, if I want a security career?  What are the things I should know and do? 

The author of this is Joan Goodchild, an easy name to pronounce.  What happened to her? She points out, do you know information security can be really rewarding?  I absolutely agree with that. It is a thankless job, you miss one thing and something gets in. Someone brings it from home you don't quite have everything in place or everything up to date. 

The biggest problem I've seen and I see with this friend of mine that I talked about in the mastermind is that we don't think we know enough. It's something called imposters syndrome. You've probably heard of it. It exists in a lot of different facets of our lives, not just in careers. 

 So he has imposter syndrome, as do a lot of people who are in cybersecurity because there's so much to know.  That's why I've said forever businesses cannot do cybersecurity. 

Antivirus isn't going to work for you. Basic firewalls are not going to work for you. Even if you have the right equipment in place if you don't know how to manage it and set it up. All of this stuff, it's just not possible to do. 

Maybe you should look at a security career, cybersecurity.

 Let's run through some of the things that she put in there. Of course, I'll add my little side things, but she asked a bunch of people in cybersecurity, specifically what do you wish you would have known when you first started. Here's Gregory Touhill, president of Applegate, federal Brigadier general retired in first, us CSO under president Barack Obama, CSO is the chief information security officer for the federal government.

He said. I love this quote. Cybersecurity is a full-contact team sport. There is no single person who is an expert on all of the various aspects of the area of the discipline. Once I got over myself and recognize that I couldn't do it all, I focused on building the right team of experts to solve issues before they become problems. That revelation triggered great future success. So there you go. 

I think that's absolutely phenomenal to remember. You're going to have imposter syndrome if you decide to go into this, but the bottom line is to work with a team. If you can find a vendor like me, that knows what they're doing, that has people that can help you out because you cannot just be out there yourself.

Next point here. This is from Wayne Pruitt, cyber-range, technical trainer in North America.  I've seen him before. He's been on one of my webinars where I was teaching about cybersecurity. To be effective in cybersecurity you need to have an understanding of all areas of information technology. Boy, is that true? If an analyst does not understand how a web application communicates with a database on the backend, how will he know if the traffic he's seen is normal or malicious? Without this understanding, analysts are just relying on security tools to make the determination. Hopefully, those tools are configured correctly.

Sometimes you have to learn the basics. Don't understand the more complex. Again, this goes into you've got to have a team. You have to have multiple people who can help out at different levels because frankly, you can't know it all. Going back to that the general Brigadier general, he had such a good point.

Next up is a chief strategist at Point 3 security.  Her name is Chloe Messdaghi. I really wish I knew how little diversity and inclusion were practiced. When I first entered the industry, many of us in our current organizations are now working for to improve the situation are gaining ground. But within my first year, I felt like I had entered the 1940s. I personally think this is ridiculous. 

Men are attracted to certain things and certain careers, women, the same thing. There are some careers that are dominated by women and some that are men. One of my daughters works with me and she is a cybersecurity analyst and she's just finishing some more training. In fact, our people tend to spend about a third of their time in training and she's very good and it has nothing to do with the fact that my daughter's a girl. So come on, quit seeing sex and seeing the race everywhere. It's just crazy. It's out there and she's right there aren't many women that are in this career.

 Next up here, Lakshmi Hanspal. She is CSO of a company called Box whom I have used before. They've got some very good products for file sharing. I switched over to Dropbox. I like some of the stuff a little bit better having come from a traditional stuff background. 

It was not until I entered higher leadership roles and began formulating hiring strategies that I realized the more diverse teams solve the toughest challenges, skills, such as critical thinking, how to manage risk trade-offs and cybersecurity not being a zero-sum game are extremely fundamental and understanding and thriving in the security industry. It is obvious she spent some time writing that and trying to put in lots of big words.

 She is right. We when we're talking about diversity in this case, what she's talking about are the diversity of skills, critical thinking, managing trade-offs, and understanding that we all have to work together on a team in the cybersecurity field. I thought she had a really great point.

 Next up, we have Josh Rickard security research engineer over at Swimlane. I wish I knew and understood that an organization's priorities are guide rails for information security teams, as with most starting in InfoSec. I wanted to solve all the security issues I came across, but this is impossible.

Understanding business priorities while communicating potential risks is critical. Okay. But helping the business with those priorities gives you credibility. Wow. 

I'm going to save that one, frankly, because that is something that we all need to remember. I've had people on my team that was just a hundred percent focused on doing the right thing, quote unquote, on the cybersecurity front, and to them, the right thing was to make sure there are no holes. So I can see that from a certain perspective. And again, back to the diversity of thought, having someone like that on your team is a good idea, but it does have to be tempered. 

Mary Writz VP product development over at ForgeRock. When I started 20 years ago as a penetration tester at IBM. I wondered how I even got the job because I did not feel qualified in hindsight. No one was truly qualified because it was such a young domain. I was hired because of my technical background, my curiosity, my interest, fast forward, 10 years, I was teaching a technical audience how to build hunt teams and I expect everyone in the audience knew more than me. A gentleman in the audience raised his hand and said, you're assuming we know what we're doing, but we don't. After we all laughed, we shared our notes and learned from each other.

Wow. So insightful here, because again, she's pointing out.  The curiosity requirement. I think if you're not curious, you're not going to spend the time it takes to investigate and to learn more. 

 We're going to cover a few more.

 You're listening to Craig Peterson and [email protected].

We're talking right now about InfoSec, information security. Have you thought about maybe taking up a bit of a new career? Well there are some estimated 2 million open jobs in this one.

 Of course, this is Craig Peterson. 

We were just talking about this article that appeared in dark reading. Now, dark reading is an online magazine, right? It's a website. And they had this article that I absolutely had to read because it reminded me of someone I know. One of our listeners, who decided he needed a new career. He'd lost his job. He'd been out of work for over a year and he had been managing a retail camera shop and they shut it down. He was stuck. What do I do? He'd been listening to the show for a long time. He decided he wanted to go into information security. He took some courses on it and he got himself a job. A full-time job being the chief IT security guy for this company after just a few months.

So that tells you how desperate these companies are. Kind of jerking his chain a little bit, but not right, because he just barely had any background.  If you want me to connect you with him, if you are serious about thinking about one of these careers, I'll be glad to forward your request to him, just to see if he's willing to talk to you. Just email me [email protected] and make sure you mentioned what this is all about. So I know what's going on. 

Ran Harel, he's a security principal and product manager over at Semperis said, when I was growing up, I was quite an introvert, by the way, that sounds like a lot of us in it. I didn't realize until much later on in my career, just how great the security and tech community are looking back. I realize how quickly I could have solved so many issues, by just asking on an IRC channel or forum. 

IRC is an internet relay chat, a bit of a technical thing, but it's an online chat.

I would tell my former self, the problem you are facing now is probably been dealt with multiple times in the past year alone. Don't be afraid to ask the InfoSec community and then learn from them. 

That's absolutely true. I found an online IRC channel basically, and they were set up just to talk about CMMC is this new standard that department of defense contractors are having to use.

As you probably know, we have clients that are manufacturers and make things for the Department of Defense and they have to maintain security.  It's been interesting going in there answering questions for people and even asking a couple of questions. It is a great resource. This particular kind of IRC is over on discuss.

You can find them all over the place. Reddit has a bunch of subreddits. It's dealing with these things, including, by the way, getting into an InfoSec career. So keep that in mind. 

There's lots of people like myself that are more than willing to help because some of the stuff can get pretty confusing.

All right. The next one. Is from Cody Cornell, chief security officer, and co-founder over at swimlane. He said, apply for jobs. You are not qualified for everyone else is.

Man. I have seen that so many times everybody from PhDs all the way on, down throughout a high school and who have sent me applications that they were not even close to qualified for.

Now, you can probably guess with me, I don't care if you have a degree. All I care about is can you do the work. Can you get along with the team are you really going to pull your weight and contribute?  I have seen many times that the answer to that is no, but I've seen other times where, wow, this person's really impressive.

So again, apply for jobs you're not qualified for because everybody is. Security changes every day. New skills techniques and the needs of organizations are always shifting. And to be able to check every box from an experience and skills perspective is generally impossible. Looking back at 20 years of jobs in the security space, I don't believe that I was ever a hundred percent qualified for any of them, but felt confident that I could successfully do them. 

So keep that in mind. Okay. 

Again, imposter syndrome, we're all worried about it. This applies to more than just InfoSec. This applies to every job, every part of life, we all feel as though we're impostors and that we're not really qualified, but the question is, can you figure it out? Can you really do it?

Next up here is Chris Robert, a hacker in residence, he calls himself over at Semperis and he says, overall, the most important lessons that I'd tell my younger self are not tech-based. Rather they focus on the human aspect of working in the cybersecurity industry. I think cybersecurity professionals in general, tend to focus on technology and ignore the human element, which is a mistake and something we need to collectively learn from and improve. 

I agree with him on that as well. However, we know humans are going to make mistakes, so make sure you got the technology in place that will help to mitigate those types of problems. 

Next up, we've got Marlys Rogers. She's CISO over at the CSAA insurance group that's a lot of four-letter acronyms. You are nothing without data. Data is queen. Coming from an insurance person, right? Without hard data, you can only speak to security in more imagined ways or ways. The board and C-suite are aware of in the media cost-benefit is only achievable with related data points. Demonstrating how much we are fighting off and how the tools, processes, and people make that happen.

Next up we have Edward Frye, he's CSO over at our Aryaka. When I first started out, I was fairly impatient and wanted to get things done right away. While there are some things that need to be done right now, not everything needs to be done. Now have the ability to prioritize and focus on the items that will have the biggest impact.

I think one of the biggest lessons I've learned along the way is while we may need to move quickly, this race is a marathon, not a sprint. 

Patience is essential for security pros. I can certainly see that one. 

Chris Morgan, senior cyber threat intelligence analyst over at Digital Shadows, despite the way that many in media liked to portray cyber threats, not everything will bring about the end of the world.

For those getting into incident response and threats, try to have a sense of perspective and establish the facts before allowing your colleagues to push too quickly towards remediation mitigation, et cetera. 

Expectation management amongst senior colleagues is also something you'll frequently have to do to avoid them breaking down over a mere phishing site. The quote, one of my former colleagues try to avoid chicken, little central. 

 I've seen that before as well. 

The next one is things are changing daily and the last one is the perception of security is still a challenge. 

So great little article by Joan Goodchild. You'll see it in my newsletter, which we're trying to get out now Sunday mornings.

You can click through on the link if you'd like to read more. 

As you can see. 2 million open jobs while between one and 3 million, depending on whose numbers you're going at in cybersecurity. 

You don't have to be an expert. As I said, one of our listeners went from not knowing much about it at all, he can install windows that's it, to having a job in cybersecurity in less than six months. 

I'm doing a special presentation coming up next month for the New England Society of Physicians and Psychiatrists. We're going to be talking a little bit about what we will talk about right now. What can you do to keep your patient information safe?  What can we do as patients to help make sure our data's safe.

 You'll also find me on pretty much every podcast platform out there. Just search for my name, Craig Peterson. I have a podcast and it makes it pretty easy. I've found some of them don't understand if you try and search for Craig Peterson, tech talk, some of them do.

I've been a little inconsistent with my naming over the years, but what the heck you can find me. It's easy enough to do. 

 I've got this new kind of purple-ish logo that you can look for to make sure it's the right one. And then you can listen to subscribe, please subscribe. It helps all of our numbers.

You can also, of course, by listening online with one of these devices, help our numbers too. Cause it's you guys that are important.  The more subscribers we have, the way these algorithms work, the more promotion we'll get.  I think that's frankly, a very good thing as well. 

What do you do if you need to see a doctor, that question has a different answer today than it did a year ago. I won't be able to say that in about another month, right? Because mid-March is when everything changed last year, 2020, man, what a year? 

To see a doctor nowadays, we are typically going online, aren't we? You're going to talk to them. So many doctors have been using some of these platforms that are just not secure things like zoom, for instance, which we know isn't secure.

Now, the fed kind of loosen things up a little bit under the Trump administration saying, Hey. People need to see doctors. The HIPAA PCI rules were loosened up a little bit in order to make things a little bit better. Then there's the whole DSS thing with HIPAA. All of these rules are just across the board are loosened up. 

That has caused us to have more of our information stolen.  I'm going to be talking a little bit about this FBI, actually multi-agency warning that came out about the whole medical biz and what we need to be doing. Bottom line, Zoom is not something we should be using when we're talking to our doctors. 

Now, this really bothers me too. Zoom is bad. We know that it's not secure and it should not be used for medical discussions, but Zoom has been private labeling its services so that you can go out and say, Hey, zoom, I want to use you and I'm going to call it my XYZ medical platform. 

People have done that. Businesses have done that. Not really realizing how insecure Zoom is. I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt here. You go and you use the XYZ medical platform and you have no clue of Zoom. Other than man, this looks a lot like Zoom, that's the dead giveaway.

Keep an eye out for that because a lot of these platforms just aren't secure. I do use Zoom for basic webinars because everybody has it. Everybody knows how to use it.  I have WebEx and the WebEx version of it is secure. In fact, all the basic versions, even of WebEx are secure and I can have a thousand people on a webinar or which is a great way to go. It's all secure end to end. 

Unlike again, what Zoom had been doing, which is it might be secure from your desktop, but it gets to a server where it's no longer secure. That kind of problem that telegram has, frankly. 

 If you are talking to your doctor, try and use an approved platform. That's how you can keep it safer.

If you're a doctor and you have medical records be really careful. Zoom has done some just terrible things from a security standpoint. For instance, installing a complete web server on a Mac and allowing access to the Mac now via the webserver. Are you nuts? What the heck are you doing? That's just crazy. Just so insecure. 

This is all part of a bigger discussion and the discussion has to do with Zero trust architectures.  We're seeing this more and more. A couple of you, Danny. I know you reached out to me asking specifically about zero trust architectures. Now Danny owns a chain of. Coffee shops and his family does as well.

He says, Hey, listen, what should I do to become secure? So I helped them out. I got him a little Cisco platform, and second Cisco go that he can use as much more secure than the stuff you buy the big box retailers or your buying at Amazon, et cetera, and got it all configured for him and running.

Then he heard me talk at about zero trust and said, Hey, can I do zero trust with this Cisco go, this Muraki go, is actually what it is and the answer is, well so here's the concept that businesses should be using, not just medical businesses, but businesses in general and zero trust means that you do not trust the devices, even the ones that you own that are on your network. You don't trust them to be secure. You don't trust them to talk to other devices without explicit permission. 

Instead of having a switch that allows everything to talk to everything or a wifi network where everything can talk to everything, you have very narrow, very explicit ways that devices can talk to each other. That's what zero trust is all about.  That's where the businesses are moving. 

There's zero trust architecture, and it doesn't refer to just a specific piece of technology. Obviously, we're talking about the idea that devices, and even on top of that, the users who are using the devices only have the bare minimum access they need in order to perform their job.

Some businesses look at this and say that's a problem. I'm going to get complaints that someone needs access to this and such. You need that because here's what can happen. You've got this data that's sitting out there might be your intellectual property. You might be a doctor in a doctor's office and you've got patient records. You might have the records from your PCI your credit card records that you have. I put on. Those are sitting there on your network that is in fact a little dangerous because now you've got something the bad guys want.  It's dangerous if the bad guys find it and they take it, you could lose your business. It's that simple. 

They are not allowing you to use the excuse anymore because of COVID. That excuse doesn't work anymore. The same thing's true with the credit card numbers that you have the excuse of I'm just a small business. It's not a big deal. Doesn't work anymore. They are taking away your credit card privileges. 

We had an outreach from a client that became a client, that had their ability to take credit cards taken away from them because again, there was a leak.

So we have to be careful when you're talking and you have private information, or if you don't want your machine to be hacked, do not use things like Zoom. I covered this extensively in my Improving Windows Security course. So keep an eye out for that as well. If you're not on my email list, you won't find out about this stuff.

Go right now to Craig peterson.com. If you scroll down to the bottom of that homepage and sign up for that newsletter so you can get all of what I talk about here and more.

Hey, thanks to some hackers out there. Your application for unemployment benefits might've been approved and you didn't apply for it in the first place. Turns out somebody stealing our information again.

Hi everybody. Craig Peterson here. 

Hey, this is a big concern of mine and I've often wondered because I have not been receiving these stimulus checks. I did not get the first round. I did not get the second round and I contacted the IRS and the IRS says depends on when you filed for 2019. Oh my gosh. Of course, I was a little late filing that year. They still haven't caught up. I guess that's good news, right? That the IRS data processing centers are terrible.

 It goes back to aren't you glad we don't get the government we pay for is the bottom line here, but I've been concerned. Did somebody steal my refund? 

Did somebody steal my unemployment benefits, did somebody steal my stimulus checks? It is happening more and more. There is a great little article talking about this, where someone had stolen the author's John personal information again. Now we probably all have had our personal information stolen, whether you're aware of it or not.

As usual, I recommend that you go to have I been poned.com and pwnd is spelled, pwn, D have I been poned.com and find out whether or not your data has been stolen and is out there on the dark web. 

They have a really good database of a lot of these major hacks.  Many of us have been hacked via these credit bureaus and one in particular Equifax who have all kinds of personal information about us, had it all stolen.

 It's easy enough for people to steal our identities file fake tax returns. That's why the IRS is telling you, Hey, file your return as soon as possible. That way when the bad guy's file, we'll know it's the bad guys cause you already filed it. As opposed to you file your tax return and the IRS comes back and says, Oh, you already filed. We already sent you a refund or whatever. You already filed it. 

That is a terrible thing to have to happen because now you have to fight and you have to prove it wasn't you. How do you prove a negative? It's almost impossible. At least in this case, hopefully, the check was sent to some state 50 States away, another side of the world. So you can say, Hey, listen, I never been there, then they can hopefully track where it was deposited. 

Although now the bad guys are using these websites that have banks behind them, or maybe it's a bank with a website that is designed for people to get a debit card and an account just like that. That, in fact, it's what was used to hack my buddy. My 75-year-old buddy has been out delivering meals and had his paychecks stolen through one of those. 

These fraudulent job claims are happening more and more. It's really a rampant scam. We've had warnings coming out from the FBI and they have really accelerated during the lockdown because now we've had these jobless benefits increased, people, making more money staying in their home than they made on the job. Disincentives for working, frankly.

He's saying here the author again, John Wasik, that a third of a million people in his state alone were victims of the scam. This is an Illinois. This is where he lives. A third of the people in the state of Illinois, including several people that he knew. 

We've got some national tallies underway. I don't know if you've seen these. I've seen them on TV and read about them, California. It is crazy. People were applying for California unemployment that didn't live in the state at all, would come into the state and once you're there in the state pick up the check, right? Cause that's all they were doing. Some people have been caught with more than a million dollars worth of California unemployment money. 

Of course, it wasn't a check, it was actually a debit card. The same basic deal and California is estimating that more than $11 billion was stolen. Can you imagine that tens of millions of people could have been scammed because of this?

This is the third time the author had been a victim of identity theft and fraud.  He wanted to know how could they get his information.

Well, I've told you, check it out on, have I been poned. It'll tell you which breaches your information was in. It does it based on your email address.  It'll also tell what type of data was stolen in those breaches. So it's important stuff. I think you should definitely have a look at it.

 He is very upset and I can understand it. Data breaches last year, more than 737 million data files are ripped off according to act.com.  Frankly, that was a digital pandemic, with more and more of us working at home.

I just talked about the last segment. Your doctor's office and you are talking to your doctor. How now? Cause you don't go into the office. There are so many ways they can steal it. 

 The FBI's recording now a 400% increase in cybercrime reports that we had this mega hack of corporate and government systems.

This whole thing we've talked about before called the SolarWinds hack, although it was really more of a Microsoft hack, and it went out via SolarWinds as well as other things. Be careful everybody out there. If you find yourself in these breach reports on, have I been poned make sure you go to the website. Set yourself up with a new password. At the very least use a password manager. 

I just responded to an email before, when it went on the air today, from a listener who was talking about two-factor authentication.  He's worried about what to use. I sent him my special report on two-factor authentication, but it is the bottom line, quite a problem. 

Again, Use one password, use two-factor authentication with one password. Don't use SMS as that and you'll be relatively safe. 

I don't know I can't say do this and you'll be safe. I don't think there's any way to be sure your safe. 

Having these organizations, businesses, government agencies hacked all the time that don't seem to care about losing our data, right? Oh, it's a cost of doing business, some of these businesses, and I've talked to them, they'll look at it and say, how much will it cost us in fines if our data is stolen? Versus, how much will it cost us to keep our data relatively safe?  For even a larger small company, a hundred employee company, you're talking about something that is going to be costing you about 25 grand a month.  That's if it's outsourced.

 If you're trying to do it yourself and a hundred person company, you can easily be spending a hundred grand a month. It's expensive to do.  They'll look at it and say, okay, this is going to cost us a million dollars a year, odds are, it'll be two years, maybe three before we're hacked. That's this statistic, although you're rolling the dice, it might be tomorrow that you get hacked. $3 million versus our fines are going to be about a million dollars. We'll just take the fine. 

That to me is just disgusting. How can these people live with themselves? I don't know. Maybe it's just me. I'm going crazy. 

That leads us to this New York Times article I was talking about on the radio this week. The New York Times article talking about how the United States, really, we are losing control of information warfare. Our warriors have been working at the national security agency and the FBI. They leave those agencies and go to work for private contractors. The tools that we've been using to hack other people have been stolen.  The tools that we're paying to be developed, we meaning the US taxpayer, the tools that we have paid to develop aren't even being used, and that mega attack I was just talking about. That's an example of one of these attacks that would have been stopped had we been using the tools that the federal government paid for.  It's just crazy. What's going on? 

So here's the bottom line, everybody you can't trust most of these vendors that are out there. They have a product to sell. They don't have the best solution for you, right? They really don't. If they cared about you they would not be selling you antivirus software because it does not work. 

If Microsoft cared about you, they would have come out with their anti-malware stuff. Windows defender, years and years ago. They would have redesigned Microsoft Office and Microsoft Windows, as well, because those were huge security holes. 

 Look at Adobe. They've been the source of the most security problems of anything out on the market, bar none. Flash was terrible. Java, another example of something that's been a terrible security hole for years. These businesses are trying to get a product to market as quickly and as inexpensively as possible. Quick is usually the number one goal.  It has to be inexpensive for them to develop it. That means now they go out and they sell it because they got it. They're going to sell it. It doesn't matter if it's good. It doesn't matter if it even works overall for you. 

That's why I'm doing these courses, these classes, these emails, I'm recording special stuff for you each week. I've got special emails that are going out for you each week.

We've got these radio show podcasts. This stuff is all free. All of it. 

Now I charge for some courses, but everything else is absolutely free. Now I hope I have some clients that come from some of this stuff and I do get them, but most of the clients I get are by referrals. 

I really believe in this. I'm putting my time, my money, my energy where my mouth is. But you have to take a step. You have to go to Craig peterson.com and you have to sign up right there. Craig peterson.com. Scroll down to the bottom of this screen. You'll see a little signup thing and I will start sending you my weekly newsletter.

Some of these little micro training that only take you a few minutes and information on courses and more. Craig peterson.com. 

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Good morning everybody!

I was on WGAN this morning with Matt Gagnon. We began talking about Facial Recognition and some of the drawbacks and the rush to use it when it has not been thoroughly tested and vetted. Then we talked about the reasons for the shortage of Gaming Consoles and other computing equipment. Finally, we got to how we are losing the war against hackers and why. Here we go with Matt.

And more tech tips, news, and updates, visit - CraigPeterson.com.

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Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Good morning, Mr. Matt Gagnon and I got into a few things, including why you just can't find some of these game computers out there anymore. Facial recognition, some more warnings about the future here, frankly. Also, what the United States is doing to help protect itself, and the short answer is not much. So here we go with Mr. Matt Gagnon.

Matt Gagnon: [00:00:26] It's Wednesday morning. Thanks so much for listening. We've got Craig Peterson with us right now, as he always is at this time on Wednesdays. He's given us all the technology news we could possibly dream of. Thanks a lot for coming on. Craig, and how are you this morning, sir.

Craig Peterson: [00:00:39] Hey, Oui c'est un bon matin

Matt Gagnon: [00:00:42] Oh God, don't speak French to me. We're going to lose people if we do that.

Craig Peterson: [00:00:46] Going well, my schooling was all in French schools entirely. I didn't, which as a second language, not too bad today.

Matt Gagnon: [00:00:53] Yeah. I was reasonably fluent back in high school and 20 years later, not so much anymore, unfortunately.

Craig Peterson: [00:01:03] Yeah.

Matt Gagnon: [00:01:03] Craig getting into the actual topics of the day, though. One of the interesting things that we have seen in the last 10 years or so in the world is the development of this facial recognition software.

I remember back in the day when Facebook actually came out with their first algorithm that started doing this. I don't know if you remember this where they would even start to like auto-tag your pictures. This must have been like six or seven years ago. It started to do that. That was my first. I think that was my first indication that, Oh, the future's coming.

They're just going to start doing facial recognition. And they know who I am at pretty much at all times. Anyway, a lot of people got creeped out by that. And now, many, I think, are wondering whether or not there's your facial recognition. Your photos are being used out there for this type of software here. So if people are a little bit interested in, shall we say whether or not. They've been exposed to the world like this. What do they do?

Craig Peterson: [00:01:53] Yeah, this is a difficult thing, frankly, but the easiest thing to do to find out if some of your pictures have been taken online, if you have a picture you're specifically wondering about, you can just go to Google images and upload your picture or give it a link to your picture, and it'll tell you where it can find it online.

There've been people who've been driving down the highway and saw their picture on a billboard. It's gotten that bad. Of course, now we know Clearview AI and other companies have been harvesting pictures, quite literally stealing them on websites. Then using that information out to sell your location and who you are just based on your face. It's like minority report, right? Pass that billboard and say hello, Mr. That's where we're going. So that's one way you can do it. There's also a really cool site called exposing.ai.

exposing.ai. You can go online.

Flicker, which is a site that we use to upload pictures to. A lot of people did. It's a great place to share your photos, right? And they have, of course, now being sold two or three times, maybe more over the years and millions of their photos are now online, are now being used by who knows who to promote, who knows what, or to track you down.

China and Russia are apparently are using these photos as well. So if you go to exposing.ai, you can just type in your flicker user name, and it'll do a search and tell you where your photos are found. Now, of course, flicker was very popular at one point because it would help organize the photos, as you talked about here? Probably about six, eight years ago. They started doing recognition of photos.

Think about what we're doing today. We're giving our photos to Amazon photos. But we're putting them in Apple I photo. We're putting them still up on all of these websites. What's going to happen in a few years when those companies decide to do more with them?

Now we know Apple has a commitment to keeping them private, but we also know Google has a commitment to making money off of anything they can get from us. So these AIs' artificial intelligence are learning more and more. The tags we already put onto photos are being used by Google to make their programs better as they try and track as more and more.

Matt Gagnon: [00:04:29] Talking to Craig Peterson, you hear him on this very station on Saturdays at one o'clock going over all these topics and so much more. He joins us now, of course, to go over technology topics.

Craig, my son, asked me for a PlayStation five for Christmas, and I laughed at him and told him that was not going to happen. Although I did make one attempt. I will admit. I made one attempt to maybe try to see if I could snag one. I think a Walmart or something had opened up an online thing, like at 8:00 PM. I got on at 7:59 PM and tried, but the site crashed. I had no chance of getting one then. That was when I basically said, we'll just get one later, if at all.

But a lot of people are blaming scalpers. Like people who ended up picking them up, they found some way of winning the lottery, and they got one, and now we're selling them for Three grand or something. A lot of people are blaming them for the supply problem because you still can't get one right now. That's not really the real reason why you can't get one. What is?

Craig Peterson: [00:05:22] The real reason is who needs anything more than Donkey Kong on your original Nintendo 64.

Matt Gagnon: [00:05:29] Absolutely.

Craig Peterson: [00:05:30] Yeah. Exactly.

Matt Gagnon: [00:05:31] See some of the things that I bought on both my PlayStation and the old WiiU and everything else. I got a ton of nostalgic games from back in the day.

Craig Peterson: [00:05:39] It is really quite an industry, and you can play so many of them now on your phones and other devices. But the real reason actually is industry-wide in the computer industry. Right now, we're having trouble getting our hands on some of these chips that are major components for computers and gaming systems.

That's what happened here around Christmas time. If you wanted to buy one of these things, it was almost impossible, and it isn't just the PlayStation. Of course, it's the X-Box and, as I said, computers like laptops, et cetera.

I'm looking at a graph right now from eBay and prices that these Xboxes were selling for and the PlayStations. There's just a huge jump. Of course, the main reason for the shortage of the chips has to do with the lockdown.

Many companies decided we're probably not going to sell as much inventory as we expected, so they cut back their orders. Remember, these orders are made months in advance. Of course, the opposite was true. People were locked down, and they played more video games. They needed more computers to work from home. Those two waves hit together, and we got this huge tsunami of prices on them. All kinds of computer equipment. That's what's happened. It's not permanent. They are ramping up. The orders are back up. I suspect they'll have a bit of a glut here in a couple of months.

Matt Gagnon: [00:07:08] And Craig, before I let you go, I have one final question to ask you. It's perhaps the question of the hour. The question of the day, the question of the century. Has the United States lost the battle against hackers?

Craig Peterson: [00:07:18] Oh my gosh. Yeah. I'm going to talk about that this weekend on Saturday at one. I'm going to talk about it next weekend too. This is a very deep subject because we see now major warfare going on. There is an article in the New York Times that I'll be putting in my newsletter this week. That talks about what happens.

We've got ISIS out there. They've laid siege and back to Mosel, Tikrit, and many other places. We had a Michelle Obama. Her team over there going into the middle East. We have just all kinds of people from our secretary of state, through the president that's gone over there. We've been very concerned about them physically. That makes a ton of sense.

The other side of this has to do with computer security. We are not taking it seriously enough. Look what happened this week. We had a water treatment plant in Florida that was hacked remotely, and the hackers increased dramatically the amount of lye that was being added to the water. Now that is something that should never be able to happen, but it's because we just don't seem to care.

Even this massive SolarWinds attack that happened, Matt. We spent, the United States taxpayer, millions of dollars to have the software developed to help protect these systems that would have been protected if we had been using the software.

Our government agencies have been hacked. Our businesses have been hacked. We're getting hacked. Our power plants, our water plants are getting hacked.

You know what. We're hardly doing anything about it.

Matt Gagnon: [00:09:09] That's been Craig Peterson, our tech guru, as he mentioned, Saturday one, o'clock tune in for more information on what you just heard and so much more.

Craig, appreciate it as always. We will talk to you again next week, sir.

Craig Peterson: [00:09:20] Take care, Mr. Matt.

Cut them off there. By the way, I am editing right now, the final edits on the last five or six. I think it is videos as part of our Improving Windows Security course. Yay.

Finally, gonna have that done. It is phenomenal. I think anyway, and we've been doing a lot to try and help you guys out.

So keep your eye on your email box, and we will talk again.

We'll be back, of course, for our weekend podcasts. Oh, and by the way, I have six or eight stations now on the weekend that I am carrying my radio show, which is really cool. We are getting the word out it's because of you guys, you recommending people pay attention to all of these points I'm bringing up and having them sign up for email list and listening on podcasts and, of course, also on these radio stations.

So thank you. Very much everybody. We are going to stop those bad guys, and we're going to do it together.

Take care. Bye-bye.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating:

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

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For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Good morning everybody! 

I was on WGAN this morning with Matt Gagnon. We began talking about Facial Recognition and some of the drawbacks and the rush to use it when it has not been thoroughly tested and vetted.   Then we talked about the reasons for the shortage of Gaming Consoles and other computing equipment.  Finally, we got to how we are losing the war against hackers and why.  Here we go with Matt.

And more tech tips, news, and updates, visit - CraigPeterson.com.

---

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Good morning, Mr. Matt Gagnon and I got into a few things, including why you just can't find some of these game computers out there anymore. Facial recognition, some more warnings about the future here, frankly. Also, what the United States is doing to help protect itself, and the short answer is not much. So here we go with Mr. Matt Gagnon.

Matt Gagnon: [00:00:26] It's Wednesday morning. Thanks so much for listening. We've got Craig Peterson with us right now, as he always is at this time on Wednesdays. He's given us all the technology news we could possibly dream of. Thanks a lot for coming on.  Craig, and how are you this morning, sir.

Craig Peterson: [00:00:39] Hey, Oui c'est un bon matin

Matt Gagnon: [00:00:42] Oh God, don't speak French to me. We're going to lose people if we do that.

Craig Peterson: [00:00:46] Going well, my schooling was all in French schools entirely. I didn't, which as a second language, not too bad today.

Matt Gagnon: [00:00:53] Yeah. I was reasonably fluent back in high school and 20 years later, not so much anymore, unfortunately.

Craig Peterson: [00:01:03] Yeah.

Matt Gagnon: [00:01:03] Craig getting into the actual topics of the day, though. One of the interesting things that we have seen in the last 10 years or so in the world is the development of this facial recognition software.

I remember back in the day when Facebook actually came out with their first algorithm that started doing this. I don't know if you remember this where they would even start to like auto-tag your pictures. This must have been like six or seven years ago. It started to do that. That was my first. I think that was my first indication that, Oh, the future's coming.

They're just going to start doing facial recognition. And they know who I am at pretty much at all times. Anyway, a lot of people got creeped out by that. And now, many, I think, are wondering whether or not there's your facial recognition. Your photos are being used out there for this type of software here. So if people are a little bit interested in, shall we say whether or not. They've been exposed to the world like this. What do they do?

Craig Peterson: [00:01:53] Yeah, this is a difficult thing, frankly, but the easiest thing to do to find out if some of your pictures have been taken online, if you have a picture you're specifically wondering about, you can just go to Google images and upload your picture or give it a link to your picture, and it'll tell you where it can find it online.

There've been people who've been driving down the highway and saw their picture on a billboard. It's gotten that bad.  Of course, now we know Clearview AI and other companies have been harvesting pictures, quite literally stealing them on websites. Then using that information out to sell your location and who you are just based on your face. It's like minority report, right? Pass that billboard and say hello, Mr. That's where we're going. So that's one way you can do it. There's also a really cool site called exposing.ai.

exposing.ai. You can go online.

Flicker, which is a site that we use to upload pictures to. A lot of people did. It's a great place to share your photos, right? And they have, of course, now being sold two or three times, maybe more over the years and millions of their photos are now online, are now being used by who knows who to promote, who knows what, or to track you down.

China and Russia are apparently are using these photos as well. So if you go to exposing.ai, you can just type in your flicker user name, and it'll do a search and tell you where your photos are found. Now, of course, flicker was very popular at one point because it would help organize the photos, as you talked about here? Probably about six, eight years ago. They started doing recognition of photos.

Think about what we're doing today. We're giving our photos to Amazon photos. But we're putting them in Apple I photo. We're putting them still up on all of these websites. What's going to happen in a few years when those companies decide to do more with them?

Now we know Apple has a commitment to keeping them private, but we also know Google has a commitment to making money off of anything they can get from us. So these AIs' artificial intelligence are learning more and more. The tags we already put onto photos are being used by Google to make their programs better as they try and track as more and more.

Matt Gagnon: [00:04:29] Talking to Craig Peterson, you hear him on this very station on Saturdays at one o'clock going over all these topics and so much more. He joins us now, of course, to go over technology topics.

Craig, my son, asked me for a PlayStation five for Christmas, and I laughed at him and told him that was not going to happen. Although I did make one attempt. I will admit. I made one attempt to maybe try to see if I could snag one. I think a Walmart or something had opened up an online thing, like at 8:00 PM.  I got on at 7:59 PM and tried, but the site crashed. I had no chance of getting one then. That was when I basically said, we'll just get one later, if at all.

But a lot of people are blaming scalpers. Like people who ended up picking them up, they found some way of winning the lottery, and they got one, and now we're selling them for Three grand or something. A lot of people are blaming them for the supply problem because you still can't get one right now.  That's not really the real reason why you can't get one. What is?

Craig Peterson: [00:05:22] The real reason is who needs anything more than Donkey Kong on your original Nintendo 64.

Matt Gagnon: [00:05:29] Absolutely.

Craig Peterson: [00:05:30] Yeah. Exactly.

Matt Gagnon: [00:05:31] See some of the things that I bought on both my PlayStation and the old WiiU and everything else. I got a ton of nostalgic games from back in the day.

Craig Peterson: [00:05:39] It is really quite an industry, and you can play so many of them now on your phones and other devices. But the real reason actually is industry-wide in the computer industry. Right now, we're having trouble getting our hands on some of these chips that are major components for computers and gaming systems.

That's what happened here around Christmas time. If you wanted to buy one of these things, it was almost impossible, and it isn't just the PlayStation. Of course, it's the X-Box and, as I said, computers like laptops, et cetera.

I'm looking at a graph right now from eBay and prices that these Xboxes were selling for and the PlayStations. There's just a huge jump. Of course, the main reason for the shortage of the chips has to do with the lockdown.

Many companies decided we're probably not going to sell as much inventory as we expected, so they cut back their orders. Remember, these orders are made months in advance. Of course, the opposite was true. People were locked down, and they played more video games. They needed more computers to work from home.  Those two waves hit together, and we got this huge tsunami of prices on them. All kinds of computer equipment.  That's what's happened. It's not permanent. They are ramping up. The orders are back up.  I suspect they'll have a bit of a glut here in a couple of months.

Matt Gagnon: [00:07:08] And Craig, before I let you go, I have one final question to ask you.  It's perhaps the question of the hour. The question of the day, the question of the century. Has the United States lost the battle against hackers?

Craig Peterson: [00:07:18] Oh my gosh. Yeah. I'm going to talk about that this weekend on Saturday at one. I'm going to talk about it next weekend too. This is a very deep subject because we see now major warfare going on. There is an article in the New York Times that I'll be putting in my newsletter this week. That talks about what happens.

We've got ISIS out there. They've laid siege and back to Mosel, Tikrit, and many other places. We had a Michelle Obama. Her team over there going into the middle East. We have just all kinds of people from our secretary of state, through the president that's gone over there. We've been very concerned about them physically. That makes a ton of sense.

The other side of this has to do with computer security. We are not taking it seriously enough. Look what happened this week.  We had a water treatment plant in Florida that was hacked remotely, and the hackers increased dramatically the amount of lye that was being added to the water. Now that is something that should never be able to happen, but it's because we just don't seem to care.

Even this massive SolarWinds attack that happened, Matt. We spent, the United States taxpayer, millions of dollars to have the software developed to help protect these systems that would have been protected if we had been using the software.

Our government agencies have been hacked. Our businesses have been hacked. We're getting hacked. Our power plants, our water plants are getting hacked. 

You know what. We're hardly doing anything about it.

Matt Gagnon: [00:09:09] That's been Craig Peterson, our tech guru, as he mentioned, Saturday one, o'clock tune in for more information on what you just heard and so much more.

Craig, appreciate it as always. We will talk to you again next week, sir.

Craig Peterson: [00:09:20] Take care, Mr. Matt.

Cut them off there. By the way, I am editing right now, the final edits on the last five or six. I think it is videos as part of our Improving Windows Security course. Yay.

Finally, gonna have that done. It is phenomenal. I think anyway, and we've been doing a lot to try and help you guys out.

So keep your eye on your email box, and we will talk again.

We'll be back, of course, for our weekend podcasts. Oh, and by the way, I have six or eight stations now on the weekend that I am carrying my radio show, which is really cool. We are getting the word out it's because of you guys, you recommending people pay attention to all of these points I'm bringing up and having them sign up for email list and listening on podcasts and, of course, also on these radio stations.

So thank you. Very much everybody. We are going to stop those bad guys, and we're going to do it together.

Take care. Bye-bye.

--- 

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating:

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome!

Good morning, everybody. I was on WTAG this morning with Jim Polito. We got into a couple of interesting topics, but we started off with the new James Bond movie and why they are re-shooting some of the scenes. We talked about our arrogance and why we may lose the war against hacking. Then we discussed an infrastructure hack against a water plant here in the US. Then we talked about how President Biden has responded to the SolarWinds hack and why that response may create a huge problem. Here we go with Jim.

For more tech tips, news, and updates, visit - CraigPeterson.com.

---

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] All of those tools went online. Now all of a sudden, we're getting hacked by our own tools that were developed by us to hack them. They're them in this are getting smarter and smarter.

Good morning, everybody on with Mr. Polito this morning, we talked a little bit about movies and the new Daniel Craig, James Bond that might come out sometime within the next five years.

But we also went into this really interesting article over in the New York Times. It's titled how the United States lost to hackers. We get into that, and what can you do? What should you be doing in order to help prevent them from getting you as well? So here we go with Mr. Polito.

Jim Polito: [00:00:46] Welcome back. Here he is. It's just one of our most popular guests. He is the Tech-Talk guru, and he's just a wealth of information. For our new listeners in Rhode Island, Craig Peterson actually wrote code for the internet that is still in use today. Unlike Al Gore, he has proof that he invented the internet. Joining us now the Superman of the internet because he's also fighting for truth, justice, and the American way.

Craig Peterson. Good morning, sir.

Craig Peterson: [00:01:22] Morning, did you notice you must-have? They removed and the American way from his last movie so that it would play well in China.

Jim Polito: [00:01:30] Come on, doc, Craig, please. I know you listened to the show, please. Don't get me started on China again.

I just want to talk right now. They do all of that, Disney, all of them, and they all, except for Fox, every major news organization in this country, has an affiliation with an entertainment organization that wants to sell products in China. Yes,

Craig Peterson: [00:01:57] Look at the newest Mulan. Not only filmed in China, but went through Chinese editors, and they had to change things in it.

Oh, Bond, the new Bond movie. Did you hear about this one? First of all, I'm so excited about it. I didn't think I'd like Daniel Craig, but I ended up liking Daniel Craig. They are reshooting parts of that movie right now.

Jim Polito: [00:02:17] What? Because it's so, they can sell it in China because it's offending the Chinese censors.

Craig Peterson: [00:02:22] You got one word, right? Sell. Do you know product placement is how these movie guys make a lot of their money? They shot this thing. What now? Two years, three years ago. And the problem they found is the sponsors were all upset because they delayed it again. It was going to come up like May, and now it's going to come out in the fall. So they are reshooting scenes for product placement for the newest versions of the products because the ones that are in the movie are like old hat now.

Jim Polito: [00:02:55] Yeah, look, here's the thing. I thought Sean Connery was the best, and I still think he is the best, but Daniel Craig is close. From the very beginning, this is one of my few luxury indulgences. I have a Rolex watch. It is the Oh God, and I can't even think of the this is COVID brain. It's the, no, not a submariner. Thank you, Danny. It's the submariner black-faced one. Oh, I do have it. The black-faced submariner. That is the one that Sean Connery wore cause I always loved that watch.

I've had it for over 20 years. Anyway, they switched to Omega, remember. You know Rolex didn't need the sponsorship. Omega said we want to be the official watch of James Bond. There you go, Omega is now the watch.

When people see a movie, did you ever notice when somebody takes a drink? That the label is perfectly pointed toward the camera. Like all that stuff, bologna. Listen, I make my money off of advertising, too, so I can't complain.

I can't believe they're doing all that for product placement. So you have the latest version of the product.

Craig Peterson: [00:04:04] Yeah. It's not like you're listening to Jim Polito and Jim says, Hey, listen, I have these guys out and do this for me, and I love this product, and then you run advertisements versus let's have a cold one and the out come's the latest famous beer or something anyways.

Jim Polito: [00:04:21] Yeah. Suppose James Bond is drinking spiked seltzer. It's over for me with Bond. If he's drinking, if they're reshooting this so that he can, I have a bud light spiked lemonade. It's done. It is over.

It's shaken, not stirred. Hey, while I got you. Tech Talk guru and see, as I said, folks, Craig Peterson is a plethora of this kind of information.

Talk to me about we are really losing the hacking war? You sent me some material. As I read through it, it made me nervous because the stuff that you sent me is implying that we're losing the hacking war. I don't want to hear that's like losing the space race. That's like losing the nuclear weapons race or like having a missile gap, as John F. Kennedy said. Is that true?

Craig Peterson: [00:05:14] Yeah, it is actually. Now that November 6th as the path of the New York times is coming out and talking about this, in a different way. But what they're saying, and this is just, I love this article by Nicole peroxide and what she's talking about is how we as a nation now, and particularly as a government, really have too much hubris over cyber warfare. That's what it really is. We've talked before about how we are already in world war three. It is a cyberwar where they're sending things out.

Just this last week, we had a water plant here in the United States. It was taken control of by a remote hacker. Now you think about water purification plants, and there's nasty stuff in there. For instance, in this case, basically lye, right? Think of lye and how nasty that is, but all of the chemicals compounds are involved. Yeah.

The hackers got in and dramatically increased the amount of lye going into the water supply in that water plant that fed the whole town.

Now the good news here is that somebody noticed, how come we're using so much lye? They shut it down almost immediately, which is really good. Enemies are out there. You mentioned China already. And, of course, we've got North Korea involved. Vietnam's now involved. Russia is involved, but they want to be able to control the US to hold us hostage, just much the same way. Ransomware is holding businesses hostage.

We've been so busy over the years, hacking them that we haven't paid enough attention in the US to protecting ourselves.

In this article, she goes into a discussion she had with a former NSA contractor, many of these guys and gals like the blackwaters' of the world. These third-party companies will do hacking on behalf of the government. She was talking to some of these people and what they were doing.

We only recently found out about the hacking of the American citizens that was going on when all of these tools that the national security agency was using to hack foreign powers and apparently hack us to, and at least in some cases, all of those tools went online. Now all of a sudden, we're getting hacked by our own tools that were developed by us to hack them.

The them in this are getting smarter, and we're just sitting there. That's why I am so adamant that people get on my email list because we're doing training. I've got brand new emails we're putting together now. It's literally a year-long series where every week you get a little bit of training on different parts of this because our businesses are not taking this seriously.

That's the hubris. Our government's not taking this seriously. The Solarwinds attack that happened. We already, as US taxpayers, funded the development of a system, millions of dollars that would have stopped this problem, and it wasn't in use. Okay.

We're not taking it seriously on any level. The same thing's true with us as individuals. Now I understand individuals, right? This stuff is confusing. What should I get? What should I buy? We've had discussions about what kind of firewalls should you have? Don't use these paid VPN's.

I've done all kinds of free training on that for people, but we're not. Taking it seriously. And I'm looking at what the Biden administration is doing and planning on doing right now. I don't think any of it's going to make it any better. And yes, right now, we have pretty much lost this battle in this war, but I think we can pull up our socks as time goes forward.

But again, there's just no real incentive.

Jim Polito: [00:09:29] I was glad to hear you end on that note because already I had crawled under the table while you were going on. I kept my headphones on so I could still hear.

So is there any difference now, or is it too early to tell in the way that the previous administration under Trump and now the current administration under Biden is dealing with this?

Craig Peterson: [00:09:52] It's still a little bit too early. There's been a ton of saber-rattling by our President. Who's been out there saying we got hacked, the Solarwinds hack. We're gonna attack back. This is basically asymmetric warfare. This is not something where you can easily identify who it was and then drop a missile down their chimney as we did with Kadafi. This is much more complicated, much more difficult.

I'm afraid having a President like Joe Biden when he's saying we're going to attack back. We're going to retaliate, I think were his actual words. It really worries me because that's the sort of thing that could get us into a full-scale cyberwar and maybe even a hot war.

Jim Polito: [00:10:38] Oh boy. I think we're going to wrap it up right about there.

Craig, it was much better when we were talking about the upcoming Bond movie, which I, too, like you, am looking forward to. I'm a big Daniel Craig fan. I think he does a great job with Bond.

Craig, you were talking earlier about why it's so important, and folks should get on board with you.

How do folks get on board with you?

Craig Peterson: [00:11:02] Yeah, absolutely. I am not a big marketer at all. In fact, that's probably one of my biggest failings. I've done work, as we've mentioned for NASA, the FBI, you name it in pretty much every Fortune 100 companies, right?

But it's the individuals that are having problems at the small office, home office, the small businesses. Those are whom I'm helping.

Make sure you go right now to Craig peterson.com/subscribe because we're probably starting this next week. I'm thinking more training. More stuff. Just some simple stuff that you can do in a matter of a few minutes. The only way you'll be able to get that is if I had the email and you got to sign up, Craig peterson.com/subscribe.

Jim Polito: [00:11:47] All right, Craig is usual. Excellent work. Always a pleasure. And we'll catch up with you next week.

Craig Peterson: [00:11:54] Hey, thanks. Take care, Jim.

Jim Polito: [00:11:55] You too, Craig Peterson, great guy, and if you want to hear that again, we likely will podcast it, and you can get to that podcast on the website of the station. You're listening to now just go to the Jim Polito show. A final word, actually, a web poll and a final word when we return. You're listening to the Jim Polito show your safe space.

The Jim Polito show feels free to laugh, cry, or simply enjoy by screaming out. We don't want to tell you how to do it.

Craig Peterson: [00:12:22] I had to play that last part because what are you kidding me? Anyhow. Thanks for being with me today. I am dead serious. We are doing a whole bunch of training. That's going to be really phenomenal. I think. I think for pretty much everybody, it covers a bunch of different things, but I assume since you're on my podcast, you're already on my email list.

If you're not, you now know how to get on.

Take care, everybody. Bye-bye.

---

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www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

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Welcome!

Good morning, everybody. I was on WTAG this morning with Jim Polito.  We got into a couple of interesting topics, but we started off with the new James Bond movie and why they are re-shooting some of the scenes. We talked about our arrogance and why we may lose the war against hacking.  Then we discussed an infrastructure hack against a water plant here in the US. Then we talked about how President Biden has responded to the SolarWinds hack and why that response may create a huge problem.  Here we go with Jim.

For more tech tips, news, and updates, visit - CraigPeterson.com.

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Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] All of those tools went online. Now all of a sudden, we're getting hacked by our own tools that were developed by us to hack them.  They're them in this are getting smarter and smarter.

Good morning, everybody on with Mr. Polito this morning, we talked a little bit about movies and the new Daniel Craig, James Bond that might come out sometime within the next five years.

But we also went into this really interesting article over in the New York Times. It's titled how the United States lost to hackers. We get into that, and what can you do? What should you be doing in order to help prevent them from getting you as well? So here we go with Mr. Polito.

Jim Polito: [00:00:46] Welcome back. Here he is. It's just one of our most popular guests. He is the Tech-Talk guru, and he's just a wealth of information. For our new listeners in Rhode Island, Craig Peterson actually wrote code for the internet that is still in use today. Unlike Al Gore, he has proof that he invented the internet. Joining us now the Superman of the internet because he's also fighting for truth, justice, and the American way.

Craig Peterson. Good morning, sir.

Craig Peterson: [00:01:22] Morning, did you notice you must-have? They removed and the American way from his last movie so that it would play well in China.

Jim Polito: [00:01:30] Come on, doc, Craig, please. I know you listened to the show, please. Don't get me started on China again.

I just want to talk right now. They do all of that, Disney, all of them, and they all, except for Fox, every major news organization in this country, has an affiliation with an entertainment organization that wants to sell products in China. Yes,

Craig Peterson: [00:01:57] Look at the newest Mulan. Not only filmed in China, but went through Chinese editors, and they had to change things in it.

Oh, Bond, the new Bond movie. Did you hear about this one?  First of all, I'm so excited about it. I didn't think I'd like Daniel Craig, but I ended up liking Daniel Craig. They are reshooting parts of that movie right now.

Jim Polito: [00:02:17] What? Because it's so, they can sell it in China because it's offending the Chinese censors.

Craig Peterson: [00:02:22] You got one word, right? Sell. Do you know product placement is how these movie guys make a lot of their money?  They shot this thing. What now? Two years, three years ago. And the problem they found is the sponsors were all upset because they delayed it again. It was going to come up like May, and now it's going to come out in the fall. So they are reshooting scenes for product placement for the newest versions of the products because the ones that are in the movie are like old hat now.

Jim Polito: [00:02:55] Yeah, look, here's the thing. I thought Sean Connery was the best, and I still think he is the best, but Daniel Craig is close. From the very beginning, this is one of my few luxury indulgences. I have a Rolex watch. It is the Oh God, and I can't even think of the this is COVID brain. It's the, no, not a submariner. Thank you, Danny. It's the submariner black-faced one.  Oh, I do have it. The black-faced submariner. That is the one that Sean Connery wore cause I always loved that watch.

I've had it for over 20 years. Anyway, they switched to Omega, remember. You know Rolex didn't need the sponsorship. Omega said we want to be the official watch of James Bond. There you go, Omega is now the watch.

When people see a movie, did you ever notice when somebody takes a drink? That the label is perfectly pointed toward the camera. Like all that stuff, bologna. Listen, I make my money off of advertising, too, so I can't complain.

I can't believe they're doing all that for product placement. So you have the latest version of the product.

Craig Peterson: [00:04:04] Yeah. It's not like you're listening to Jim Polito and Jim says, Hey, listen, I have these guys out and do this for me, and I love this product, and then you run advertisements versus let's have a cold one and the out come's the latest famous beer or something anyways.

Jim Polito: [00:04:21] Yeah. Suppose James Bond is drinking spiked seltzer. It's over for me with Bond. If he's drinking, if they're reshooting this so that he can, I have a bud light spiked lemonade. It's done. It is over.

It's shaken, not stirred. Hey, while I got you. Tech Talk guru and see, as I said, folks, Craig Peterson is a plethora of this kind of information.

Talk to me about we are really losing the hacking war? You sent me some material. As I read through it, it made me nervous because the stuff that you sent me is implying that we're losing the hacking war. I don't want to hear that's like losing the space race. That's like losing the nuclear weapons race or like having a missile gap, as John F. Kennedy said.  Is that true?

Craig Peterson: [00:05:14] Yeah, it is actually. Now that November 6th as the path of the New York times is coming out and talking about this, in a different way. But what they're saying, and this is just, I love this article by Nicole peroxide and what she's talking about is how we as a nation now, and particularly as a government, really have too much hubris over cyber warfare. That's what it really is. We've talked before about how we are already in world war three.  It is a cyberwar where they're sending things out.

Just this last week, we had a water plant here in the United States. It was taken control of by a remote hacker. Now you think about water purification plants, and there's nasty stuff in there. For instance, in this case, basically lye, right? Think of lye and how nasty that is, but all of the chemicals compounds are involved. Yeah.

The hackers got in and dramatically increased the amount of lye going into the water supply in that water plant that fed the whole town.

Now the good news here is that somebody noticed, how come we're using so much lye? They shut it down almost immediately, which is really good. Enemies are out there.  You mentioned China already. And, of course, we've got North Korea involved. Vietnam's now involved. Russia is involved, but they want to be able to control the US to hold us hostage, just much the same way. Ransomware is holding businesses hostage.

We've been so busy over the years, hacking them that we haven't paid enough attention in the US to protecting ourselves.

In this article, she goes into a discussion she had with a former NSA contractor, many of these guys and gals like the blackwaters' of the world. These third-party companies will do hacking on behalf of the government. She was talking to some of these people and what they were doing.

We only recently found out about the hacking of the American citizens that was going on when all of these tools that the national security agency was using to hack foreign powers and apparently hack us to, and at least in some cases, all of those tools went online. Now all of a sudden, we're getting hacked by our own tools that were developed by us to hack them.

The them in this are getting smarter, and we're just sitting there. That's why I am  so adamant that people get on my email list because we're doing training. I've got brand new emails we're putting together now. It's literally a year-long series where every week you get a little bit of training on different parts of this because our businesses are not taking this seriously.

That's the hubris. Our government's not taking this seriously. The Solarwinds attack that happened. We already, as US taxpayers, funded the development of a system, millions of dollars that would have stopped this problem, and it wasn't in use. Okay.

We're not taking it seriously on any level. The same thing's true with us as individuals. Now I understand individuals, right? This stuff is confusing. What should I get? What should I buy? We've had discussions about what kind of firewalls should you have? Don't use these paid VPN's.

I've done all kinds of free training on that for people, but we're not. Taking it seriously. And I'm looking at what the Biden administration is doing and planning on doing right now. I don't think any of it's going to make it any better. And yes, right now, we have pretty much lost this battle in this war, but I think we can pull up our socks as time goes forward.

But again, there's just no real incentive.

Jim Polito: [00:09:29] I was glad to hear you end on that note because already I had crawled under the table while you were going on. I kept my headphones on so I could still hear.

So is there any difference now, or is it too early to tell in the way that the previous administration under Trump and now the current administration under Biden is dealing with this?

Craig Peterson: [00:09:52] It's still a little bit too early. There's been a ton of saber-rattling by our President. Who's been out there saying we got hacked, the Solarwinds hack. We're gonna attack back. This is basically asymmetric warfare. This is not something where you can easily identify who it was and then drop a missile down their chimney as we did with Kadafi. This is much more complicated, much more difficult.

I'm afraid having a President like Joe Biden when he's saying we're going to attack back. We're going to retaliate, I think were his actual words. It really worries me because that's the sort of thing that could get us into a full-scale cyberwar and maybe even a hot war.

Jim Polito: [00:10:38] Oh boy. I think we're going to wrap it up right about there.

Craig, it was much better when we were talking about the upcoming Bond movie, which I, too, like you, am looking forward to.  I'm a big Daniel Craig fan. I think he does a great job with Bond.

Craig, you were talking earlier about why it's so important, and folks should get on board with you.

How do folks get on board with you?

Craig Peterson: [00:11:02] Yeah, absolutely. I am not a big marketer at all. In fact, that's probably one of my biggest failings. I've done work, as we've mentioned for NASA, the FBI, you name it in pretty much every Fortune 100 companies, right?

But it's the individuals that are having problems at the small office, home office, the small businesses. Those are whom I'm helping.

Make sure you go right now to Craig peterson.com/subscribe because we're probably starting this next week. I'm thinking more training. More stuff.  Just some simple stuff that you can do in a matter of a few minutes. The only way you'll be able to get that is if I had the email and you got to sign up, Craig peterson.com/subscribe.

Jim Polito: [00:11:47] All right, Craig is usual. Excellent work. Always a pleasure. And we'll catch up with you next week.

Craig Peterson: [00:11:54] Hey, thanks. Take care, Jim.

Jim Polito: [00:11:55] You too, Craig Peterson, great guy, and  if you want to hear that again, we likely will podcast it, and you can get to that podcast on the website of the station. You're listening to now just go to the Jim Polito show. A final word, actually, a web poll and a final word when we return. You're listening to the Jim Polito show your safe space.

The Jim Polito show feels free to laugh, cry, or simply enjoy by screaming out. We don't want to tell you how to do it.

Craig Peterson: [00:12:22] I had to play that last part because what are you kidding me? Anyhow. Thanks for being with me today. I am dead serious. We are doing a whole bunch of training. That's going to be really phenomenal. I think. I think for pretty much everybody, it covers a bunch of different things, but I assume since you're on my podcast, you're already on my email list.

If you're not, you now know how to get on.

Take care, everybody. Bye-bye.

--- 

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating:

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome,

Craig Peterson here. I was on with Chris Ryan on NH Today. We talked about some of the misguided legislation being pushed by Amy Klobacher regarding big tech with her regulatory solution to anti-trust. Then we got into Facial recognition and expose.ai. Here we go with Chris.

These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit.

- CraigPeterson.com

---

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Now we also see that many other companies have entered into that marketplace without our permission to use our faces. So if you want to check right now, this is a great thing that the New York Times did. They have exposed this a little bit, but go to exposing.ai. Senator Amy Klobuchar has introduced some legislation to try and hold big tech a little bit more accountable.

I'm afraid I have to disagree with her approach. Also, we talked about an article in New York about facial recognition and some of the things we're doing that we probably shouldn't be doing. So here we go with Mr. Chris Ryan.

Chris Ryan: [00:00:44] Joining us right now in the program is Craig Peterson from Tech Talk you hear on Saturdays at 11:30 AM. Craig, how are you?

Craig Peterson: [00:00:52] Hey, good morning. Doing well

Chris Ryan: [00:00:54] Appreciate you joining us for the show.

I want to talk to you a little about some of the legislation I was reading from Amy Klobuchar, as she looks to get anti-trust legislation to take away some of the security of entities like Facebook and other large tech companies. It doesn't appear there's a tremendous amount of appetite for this type of antitrust legislation at this point. In your view, does there need to be a look at this?

Craig Peterson: [00:01:22] Yeah, there's two different sides to this whole anti-trust activity. Of course, it had started way back in the 18 hundreds. Then you had all of these massive barrons, and they wanted to stop them from controlling the economy effectively is what they were doing at the time.

Now we're looking at these almost oligarchs. We've got these people running these huge corporations like Facebook and Google, and Amazon, although there's been a bit of a shakeup at Amazon. Those guys and gals have an incredible amount of market power. That's one side of it. We understand that because if there's no competition, we're not going to be able to get a good value for our dollar.

The other side of that is how about if there's really only one buyer for your goods? You've got the one side where there's only one seller of particular interest, but what if there's one buyer. We see that more and more, particularly with companies like Amazon.

People complained about Walmart with that years ago. When Walmart just had such a monopoly and frankly still does in many cases. Walmart beats their suppliers over the head and shoulders to get the price down to a point where the supplier basically can't support it anymore.

What we're looking at now is a situation we haven't had in a long time. She's looking at having more and more regulations, adding more regulators to the various entities and the federal government that regulate business.

I look at this as saying I've had so many friends who have been destroyed their businesses that are destroyed by these big tech companies and their market manipulation to drive competitors out of business. That really bothers me.

I see a real big problem here because we do not allow the big guys to fail anymore. There's this concept of too big to fail. When we're talking about a free market, the idea is, if you want to buy some other companies, knock yourself out, but you're going to reach a point where you are not going to be able to afford to survive anymore. We've seen that many times look at the car industry.

We've seen bailouts now twice of Chrysler in my life as well as GM. There are serious problems with having more and more regulations because it will make it difficult for more competition to enter the market. That could potentially drive these big guys out of business. That's where I really start getting concerned.

Chris Ryan: [00:03:59] We focus a lot here in this segment about how, whether it's Facebook or other social media mechanisms and the usage of our phones as well, that we're spying on ourselves. It's a fascinating article in the New York Times last week. Actually, I think it was the weekend before, about facial recognition systems being used on our phones. What are they, and how are they used?

Craig Peterson: [00:04:21] There are a few companies out there you've probably heard of. I've talked about Clearview before, which is this clearview.ai company. This computer vision for a safer world. I love the way they put this. Actually couldn't have written it any better.

Clearview has raped all of our pictures on the internet. What that means is any publicly available picture, Clearview downloaded and started to look at. We also see that many other companies have entered into that marketplace without our permission to use our faces.

If you want to check right now, and this is a great thing that the New York times did, they've exposed this a little bit, but go to exposing.ai. Online, exposing.ai as artificial intelligence. It'll let you check to see if the photos you uploaded to flicker are now being sold and used online.

Our faces. We are uploading our Pictures. We're getting these free photo services, but all your photos on flicker, back in the day, nowadays upload them to Amazon photos or Google photos or Apple photos.

We know Apple does not make money off of our personal information. Google sure does and so do some of these others. If you go to exposing.ai, you can type in your flicker username or a photo URL that it'll compare. It'll show you if they're using the pictures that you posted for facial recognition systems.

This is where we're starting to see arrests coming out of Washington, DC. Where they are scanning the internet for photos or using companies like Clearview and others. We even have had the FBI issue, a legal document here. I don't remember exactly how far I got along the line. The FBI using a big photo that they found online that had been doctored.

Is your face online? Are they using it for nefarious purposes? Like this guy who ended up getting charged by the FBI for this January in Washington, DC, and he had nothing to do with it.

Chris Ryan: [00:06:39] Craig, as always appreciate you joining us for the show. I look forward to chatting again next week.

Craig Peterson: [00:06:43] All right. Take care. Chris.

Chris Ryan: [00:06:44] Craig Peterson, joining us here in New Hampshire today from Tech Talk. You hear at Saturday's on news radio 610 and 96.7 at 11:30 AM.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating:

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553