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

Welcome!

Craig explains why Hackers have found a new target that they love and why it might put you in jeopardy.

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

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Read More:

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Why online voting is harder than online banking

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Ransomware Has Gone Corporate—and Gotten More Cruel

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Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Welcome everybody. Hey, if you think that your IT being outsourced is going to somehow protect you from the bad guys. Unless they are a security service provider, I've got some news for you.

Hello everybody. Craig Peterson here. A welcome and glad you joined us here on news radio 98.5 And AM 560. I also want to remind everybody that you can find me online. You can listen to this as you are a hold of radio range, even just go ahead and. Ask your favorite platform, whether it's Google or Alexa to play, WGAN we'll give you some more or details a little bit later on in the show today, but let's start with our top story of the day today.

 That has to do with managed IT providers. Now, a lot of businesses are trying to do the whole information technology thing themselves. You've probably heard different ads. In fact, there's one group that advertises frequently here on WGAN, and this is kind of a big deal when you get right down to it. Are you better off taking care of your IT yourself? Or are you better off having someone else do it?

Then when you really dig into it, the bigger question I think is, does it make sense to just use a regular IT company to outsource everything? Or should you again have specialties? No, it's like you've got a department inside your business that might do the finance stuff. You've got another department that obviously handles IT. You got sales, you got marketing. They're all fine-tuned. It is very difficult to find a third party that's fine-tuned, if you will, to cover everything that you might need from an IT side.

Well, we have been finding out some very interesting numbers lately. There's a great article I have up on my website from DarkReading. That's talking about this.

Basically, most of these MSPs or managed IT providers managed services providers. Have become a major gateway for the bad guys to break into small and medium businesses. I mean major gateway.

We've seen this ourselves just as recently as last week. We've been working with some managed service providers now to provide them with managed service security services because it's impossible for them to do the best job.

I just saw a mailing I got today from a company called SonicWall. They make firewalls, which are just fine for businesses that aren't heavily regulated, but they do not meet the requirements for more heavily regulated businesses. SonicWall's out there sending out these mailings saying, We've got it all. All you need is us.

That also reminds me of a mailing I got from Microsoft and I saved it. I just could not believe this. This must have been 20 years ago now maybe a little longer, actually, when I think of it, we're saying, Hey, listen, security is a real problem, but if you have Windows XP and Microsoft office, rest assured that your security is virtually guaranteed. I shook my head at that, decades ago in this sort of stuff still happening today. So many companies are out there lying and misrepresenting.

Now. I get it, you guys, this is not your forte. It's not the forte, cybersecurity of most managed services providers. Frankly, I think the vast majority of these companies that are trying to help you out with the IT, just don't realize what they should be doing and what's required of you, right?

You go to them because they are the experts. They tell you what you need, right. Isn't that the reason to write the checks.  I've found the same thing being true inside a lot of companies where you have your own IT people and those IT people are trying to keep things straight.

And man, I've been working on this cybersecurity quiz thing. What are the main activators behind cybersecurity and where are you at? It's a self-evaluation thing that you can do as a business. Right now I've got the technical ones all done, and I'm working on one for the business owner C-level to understand where they're at and where they might need to go with it.

For years, cybersecurity has really been the area that big businesses, enterprises, what we used to call them here. And the enterprise was like a big business, a publicly-traded company. Nowadays we're adopting more of the European definition of enterprise, which is any business out there, but cybersecurity is been really the area that large businesses don't have to worry about.

What the bad guys have found that small and midsize businesses have also been the target of attacks, but historically those attacks have been the broad-based phishing attacks, or they're trying to run a worm around the internet. It's just a target of opportunity. From small business and medium business standpoint, the number of times they might be hacked or the damages caused were probably reasonable, you could get insurance for it.

But that has all changed now. The insurance companies and we've talked about a couple of these on the show before, are not paying out the policies. If you have a cyber insurance rider, for instance, as a regular end user,  just a home user, many home policies now come with a cyber insurance rider. So if your identity is stolen, they will help you to recover the damage that was done, right. You can never really recover identity. You're not going to get it. Back. It's not gonna all of a sudden become safe, but they all help you with the damage. So anything that was bought in your name it'll,  they'll back it out, any bad credit report backs them out. The same thing was available for the small, medium, and, even the large business markets where you pay a rider, and then if you do get attacked then okay, the insurance will pay for it.

When you look at the numbers, I think you might come to a different realization. Where right now about a year, a quarter of all businesses are hacked per year. There is some security event that occurs in about a quarter of all, all businesses. That's a lot. What was the fee for your premium as a small business? Was that fee just an add on, an extra 25 bucks a year, a quarter a month, whatever is, I, I know biggie. Well, what's happened is the insurance companies have realized that they can put requirements on you. That's one of the things we do. We have special scanning software that allows us to scan a network and look for standard insurance requirements. You know, the stuff the insurance companies usually want. No, we're not the only ones, I'm not the lone ranger out here.

There are other companies that have these tools. There are some free checklists you can find online. I would encourage you to use them. Nowadays, if your information is stolen, if you are hacked, they're going to go through that list and say, did you comply with this? Did you comply with that? Did you comply with the other thing? If not, they're going to fight you.

That's true for the mega-breaches like Equifax has been fighting their insurance company in the courts. We've seen everything all the way down to little companies that are fighting it in the courts. Then on top of it, not only is a cyber insurance stuff, a threat, and a problem. It goes to the next level. And the next level, when it comes to all of this is. Is your business going to survive?

You got hacked and you have to fight with the insurance company.  If the regulators find out, if your business is regulated, which nowadays is pretty much every business out there, what is it 300 million? Oh, it, you won't get into that right now. All of the people here in the US plus the businesses and all of the hundreds of thousands of regulations anyways.

What's going to happen when the regulators find out you were hacked? That's when the real problems come up. The regulators are going to come in and there is a checklist, whether it's a NIST checklist, the CMMC, the HIPAA/HITECH, whatever it is, you are going to be held responsible.

So. What are the bad guys found? It's kind of like going back to the Willie Sutton misquote, right? Which is why did he Rob banks all that's where the money was. Turns out that isn't a legitimate quote, but you know, that's okay. He, he robbed the banks or bank robbers, Rob banks, because they keep cash there. They keep gold. They keep silver, back in the day. So they'd go in and Rob them.

Well, where are all of the keys to the kingdom when it comes to your computers? Well, they live in the IT department. Don't they, IT can get on, can give you access to stuff. They can take away access from staff, right? That's what it does. And they can be pissed off and leave your employ. If they leave your employment, what happens? Do you have automated systems that remove access for the IT people?

Cybercriminals have now figured out that these low-end small businesses that are out there calling themselves managed services providers, managed IT providers are a great way.  If they break into one of those, we've seen major security holes for the tools almost all of these companies are using. If they break into one, those, they now have the keys to the kingdom for 50-100 companies out there. So be very, very, very careful.

Cybercriminals understand the average managed services provider cannot keep your data safe internally inside their own networks or in yours. So just like that Pandora's box is open.

Hey, you're listening to Craig Peterson. If you're going to hop in the car, the truck, and drive, hopefully, you've got Siri with you, maybe Google, maybe Alexa can listen to us there.

Just say, Hey, Alexa, play WGAN stick around. Cause we'll be right back.

You're listening to Craig Peterson.

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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 puts into perspective cybersecurity spending and how much you should be looking to spend based on certain criteria.

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

---

Read More:

Managed IT Providers: The Cyber-Threat Actors' Gateway to SMBs

Think You're Spending Enough on Security?

DHS Braces For 'Potential EMP Attack' As Presidential Election Nears

US Sanctions Russian Attackers for 2020 Election Interference

Cyber-Risks Explode With Move to Telehealth Services

Why online voting is harder than online banking

Price gouging and defective products rampant on Amazon, reports find

Ransomware Has Gone Corporate—and Gotten More Cruel

---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] This talk of MSP outsourced IT providers. Brings up a really great question. How much should you be spending on security in a business or at home?

Hey, you're listening to Craig Peterson here on WGAN 98.5 FM and AM 560. You can also hear me every Wednesday morning with Mr. Matt Gagnon and, he and I always talk about the latest in the news. Sometimes he surprises me as well with questions out of left-field. it's fun chatting with him, bright guy, and he knows enough about technology, but he hasn't stumped me yet.

If you wanna follow me, by all means, make sure you get my emails. We've got some new training. That's started this week that's coming out. I have these three-minute emails. That I'm sending out and we'll be doing more of those. So if you miss the first one, make sure you sign up Craig peterson.com/subscribe.

Now IT is a problem for most businesses, but I've got to point out something that many people haven't really thought through that is in fact, every business nowadays, is it computer business bar none. Because every business nowadays has computers at its core. I look at it and say, I doubt very many businesses, frankly, almost if any, are spending enough money on IT.

If they're paying enough attention to it. We still walk into businesses that don't have the proper licenses for the software they're using. They don't have the proper licenses for some of the cloud services they're using. They're not complying with regulations. They get a letter from one of their customers saying, we need to make sure you complying with this, that, and the other thing and they pull out the pencil and pencil whip the form. They just check yes, yes, yes, yes, and they may or may not even know what that form is talking about. Let alone, if they really are compliant. So it's a big deal. It's very concerning.

Now in this world where more and more people are working from home, some of these figures have changed. So I think it's important to talk about it.

Now on the very low end, if you are a home user, I strongly advise you to use prosumer technology, make sure your firewall and your router automatically updates, make sure that it automatically uses something like Umbrella for DNS that blocks DNS requests that might be going to bad sites that are out there, so that it's all taken care of for you automatically.

Make sure you're using Wi-Fi that has multiple networks. So that network has split up so that the devices aren't talking into each other. We've got, clients that are really all over the Northeast United States, that are using prosumer gear in very small businesses, and in many cases, that's okay.

It really depends and when we'd have to talk to really get into it, but basically, if you have a credit card machine on your network, it needs to be separated from the computers, the rest of the machines on your network. You need to segment. Even in my home network, I have my network segmented because again, Many of us are working from home. I work from home, so I have separate networks.

One is for guests that come over, it's completely separate. It has no access to anything else in my home network. I have a network for my business at the house. In fact, I have three, I think it is networks for the business at the house. I've got that all segmented. Again, if you are just a regular consumer, you're a retiree or you are working and doing some work from home. These pieces of prosumer hardware are what are going to get your network split up in such a way that the bad guys cannot move laterally and get into computers that they shouldn't be getting into.

So think about it for instance. If you have one of these Google or Amazon devices. If you have one of these Nest thermostats or Ring doorbells. None of those should be on the same network as your computers in your house. None of them. They're all considered what we call the internet of things. And as such, they probably are not getting updates. They are probably not being monitored from a security standpoint. The way they really should be monitored and that's going to cause nothing but problems for you. Frankly.

We've seen that before in small businesses where they've got everything on one network. They've got security cameras and there are these cheap ones that came in from China. As an example of some of those are like Hikvision, which cannot be used now in DOD contracted facilities. Those types of devices that never get updates. Some of them have built-in back doors and now they're on your network. They break into your cash registers, your point of sale equipment, et cetera, or in your home, they get onto your computer.

Now, how many of you guys have your account information on your computer? I know my dad. Keeps it still to this day on a spreadsheet, all of his bank accounts, all of his passwords, his usernames. If he has something on his network that gets compromised, he can lose all of that and they can break-in. In fact, that's already happened to him and we had to come in after the fact and do a little bit of cleanup and investigative work. So dad got it for free, but he also got nailed, which is really bad.

How much should you be spending? If again, the very low end, super small business with no regulation or a home user, you should be expecting to spend five to $600 on prosumer hardware. And then companies like mine. We have a thousand dollar package where we make sure it's the right stuff. We pre-configure it, we test it, we ship it out and we support you. Okay. So let's say a grand on the high side.

Now, if you start moving up and you have some regulations, so let's say you're a small doctor's office. So you have some HIPAA requirements or you're a business that has employees. So you have HIPAA requirements, but you don't have the real tough ones that come with the department of defense contractors. Then you should be spending. Oh, I'm just going to give the, basically a cash price here. You should be spending about $3,000 on your hardware.

This is just your network stuff. Your firewall that can examine stuff tear apart packets and reassemble them, look at everything in context and just do it all. One of these next-gen firewalls has intrusion detection, intrusion prevention built right in there. Really nice.

Then if you are a larger business that has real requirements, such as DOD requirement you're in the 50 to $150,000 range. On top of that, you're gonna have to spend monthly money as well. To have someone watch it and monitor it.

Now, the Gartner Group has reported that the average spending on cybersecurity was it's about five to 8% of the overall technology budgets in most businesses. But in reality that it should be closer to 20% to 25% of the IT budget.

Now, this is for bigger businesses that were the IT budget includes programmers and everything else. So how much is enough? there's no real magic dollar amount, but the number is definitely not zero. I think I gave you a few little ideas here of what you can look at.

You've got to be careful. You've got to pay attention. The big number is until you reach 500 employees, most businesses cannot afford to have internally the type of cybersecurity teams that they need. Yes, teams. So under 500 employees, it's cheaper to find a managed security services provider.

Depending, again, if you're on the DOD side, all in you should be spending about $320 per month per employee, and that'll get you all the cybersecurity you should need. You're not going to need employees worried about cybersecurity and trying to keep up on it. There are some real rough numbers out there. $50 a month, all the way up through 350 at the high end. There are your numbers.

All right. You listening to Craig Peterson here on WGAN stick around because we'll be right back talking about EMPs.

---

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 puts into perspective cybersecurity spending and how much you should be looking to spend based on certain criteria.

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

---

Read More:

Managed IT Providers: The Cyber-Threat Actors' Gateway to SMBs

Think You're Spending Enough on Security?

DHS Braces For 'Potential EMP Attack' As Presidential Election Nears

US Sanctions Russian Attackers for 2020 Election Interference

Cyber-Risks Explode With Move to Telehealth Services

Why online voting is harder than online banking

Price gouging and defective products rampant on Amazon, reports find

Ransomware Has Gone Corporate—and Gotten More Cruel

---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] This talk of MSP outsourced IT providers.  Brings up a really great question. How much should you be spending on security in a business or at home?

Hey, you're listening to Craig Peterson here on WGAN 98.5 FM and AM 560. You can also hear me every Wednesday morning with Mr. Matt Gagnon and, he and I always talk about the latest in the news. Sometimes he surprises me as well with questions out of left-field. it's fun chatting with him, bright guy, and he knows enough about technology, but he hasn't stumped me yet.

If you wanna follow me, by all means, make sure you get my emails. We've got some new training. That's started this week that's coming out. I have these three-minute emails. That I'm sending out and we'll be doing more of those. So if you miss the first one, make sure you sign up Craig peterson.com/subscribe.

Now IT is a problem for most businesses, but I've got to point out something that many people haven't really thought through that is in fact, every business nowadays, is it computer business bar none. Because every business nowadays has computers at its core.  I look at it and say, I doubt very many businesses, frankly, almost if any, are spending enough money on IT.

If they're paying enough attention to it. We still walk into businesses that don't have the proper licenses for the software they're using. They don't have the proper licenses for some of the cloud services they're using. They're not complying with regulations. They get a letter from one of their customers saying, we need to make sure you complying with this, that, and the other thing and they pull out the pencil and pencil whip the form. They just check yes, yes, yes, yes, and they may or may not even know what that form is talking about. Let alone, if they really are compliant. So it's a big deal. It's very concerning.

Now in this world where more and more people are working from home, some of these figures have changed. So I think it's important to talk about it.

Now on the very low end, if you are a home user, I strongly advise you to use prosumer technology, make sure your firewall and your router automatically updates, make sure that it automatically uses something like Umbrella for DNS that blocks DNS requests that might be going to bad sites that are out there, so that it's all taken care of for you automatically.

Make sure you're using Wi-Fi that has multiple networks. So that network has split up so that the devices aren't talking into each other. We've got, clients that are really all over the Northeast United States, that are using prosumer gear in very small businesses, and in many cases, that's okay.

It really depends and when we'd have to talk to really get into it, but basically, if you have a credit card machine on your network, it needs to be separated from the computers, the rest of the machines on your network. You need to segment. Even in my home network, I have my network segmented because again, Many of us are working from home. I work from home, so I have separate networks.

One is for guests that come over, it's completely separate. It has no access to anything else in my home network. I have a network for my business at the house. In fact, I have three, I think it is networks for the business at the house. I've got that all segmented. Again, if you are just a regular consumer, you're a retiree or you are working and doing some work from home. These pieces of prosumer hardware are what are going to get your network split up in such a way that the bad guys cannot move laterally and get into computers that they shouldn't be getting into.

So think about it for instance. If you have one of these Google or Amazon devices. If you have one of these Nest thermostats or Ring doorbells. None of those should be on the same network as your computers in your house. None of them. They're all considered what we call the internet of things. And as such, they probably are not getting updates. They are probably not being monitored from a security standpoint. The way they really should be monitored and that's going to cause nothing but problems for you. Frankly.

We've seen that before in small businesses where they've got everything on one network. They've got security cameras and there are these cheap ones that came in from China. As an example of some of those are like Hikvision, which cannot be used now in DOD contracted facilities. Those types of devices that never get updates. Some of them have built-in back doors and now they're on your network. They break into your cash registers, your point of sale equipment, et cetera, or in your home, they get onto your computer.

Now, how many of you guys have your account information on your computer? I know my dad. Keeps it still to this day on a spreadsheet, all of his bank accounts, all of his passwords, his usernames. If he has something on his network that gets compromised, he can lose all of that and they can break-in. In fact, that's already happened to him and we had to come in after the fact and do a little bit of cleanup and investigative work. So dad got it for free, but he also got nailed, which is really bad.

How much should you be spending? If again, the very low end, super small business with no regulation or a home user, you should be expecting to spend five to $600 on prosumer hardware. And then companies like mine. We have a thousand dollar package where we make sure it's the right stuff. We pre-configure it, we test it, we ship it out and we support you. Okay. So let's say a grand on the high side.

Now, if you start moving up and you have some regulations, so let's say you're a small doctor's office. So you have some HIPAA requirements or you're a business that has employees. So you have HIPAA requirements, but you don't have the real tough ones that come with the department of defense contractors. Then you should be spending. Oh, I'm just going to give the, basically a cash price here. You should be spending about $3,000 on your hardware.

This is just your network stuff. Your firewall that can examine stuff tear apart packets and reassemble them,  look at everything in context and just do it all. One of these next-gen firewalls has intrusion detection, intrusion prevention built right in there. Really nice.

 Then if you are a larger business that has real requirements, such as DOD requirement you're in the 50 to $150,000 range. On top of that, you're gonna have to spend monthly money as well. To have someone watch it and monitor it.

Now, the Gartner Group has reported that the average spending on cybersecurity was it's about five to 8% of the overall technology budgets in most businesses. But in reality that it should be closer to 20% to 25% of the IT budget.

Now, this is for bigger businesses that were the IT budget includes programmers and everything else. So how much is enough? there's no real magic dollar amount, but the number is definitely not zero. I think I gave you a few little ideas here of what you can look at.

You've got to be careful. You've got to pay attention. The big number is until you reach 500 employees, most businesses cannot afford to have internally the type of cybersecurity teams that they need. Yes, teams. So under 500 employees, it's cheaper to find a managed security services provider.

Depending, again, if you're on the DOD side, all in you should be spending about $320 per month per employee, and that'll get you all the cybersecurity you should need. You're not going to need employees worried about cybersecurity and trying to keep up on it. There are some real rough numbers out there. $50 a month, all the way up through 350 at the high end. There are your numbers.

All right. You listening to Craig Peterson here on WGAN stick around because we'll be right back talking about EMPs.

---

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 discusses Electromagnetic Pulse as it relates to the DHS warning that China might be planning something around our election. What would it mean? How would we deal with it?

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

---

Read More:

Managed IT Providers: The Cyber-Threat Actors' Gateway to SMBs

Think You're Spending Enough on Security?

DHS Braces For 'Potential EMP Attack' As Presidential Election Nears

US Sanctions Russian Attackers for 2020 Election Interference

Cyber-Risks Explode With Move to Telehealth Services

Why online voting is harder than online banking

Price gouging and defective products rampant on Amazon, reports find

Ransomware Has Gone Corporate—and Gotten More Cruel

---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] If you're not familiar with the Carrington event, stick around because the odds are great we're going to have to live through another one of these. Even though it's been more than a hundred years, we're going to talk about EMP attacks and a real warning about it.

Hi everybody. Craig Peterson here. Thanks for listening.

Hey, if you have your Google smart speaker, Google Home, just say, Hey, Google play. WGAN and you can listen to us any time. I probably just turned on your Google speakers. Sorry about that. But it is really handy. That's what I use when I'm up in the shower, et cetera, these smart devices.

Now let's get into this. Very interesting article that just came out this week from Zero Hedge. Tyler Durden is the one that brought this up. We have in fact been given some really great information about this as part of the FBI's InfraGard program.

Now, if you are responsible for IT and more particularly responsible for security, you really should join the FBI's Infragard program. I N F R A G A R D.org is where you'll find them online. This is a channel that the FBI uses to let civilians, as well as military contractors and frankly, even various government employees of the federal and state level. It lets them disseminate all of this type of information.

It's absolutely fascinating. Some of them, the stuff I can share with you, some of the stuff is on a need to know basis. Obviously I can't share all of it with you, but I do try and bring some of these things up like this one.

The US Department of Homeland security has released a new report that's warning about a potential electromagnetic pulse. Now, specifically, this is talking about an electromagnetic pulse as part of an attack against the United States. I mentioned at the very beginning, something called the Carrington event. It's fascinating and this is something that we've talked about on the training for the FBI's InfraGard program that I conducted and you probably know I did that for a couple of years. It's a volunteer position and I did a whole bunch of different pieces of training.

This particular event occurred in September 1859. Now think back to 1859, there was not much going on from the electrical side, 1859. They didn't have too many computers, right? Obviously they didn't have any of them, but back then they did have a couple of things they did have Telegraph for one. What they found happened was that these Telegraph machines were getting burned out by this event. They weren't quite sure what it was, what was going on. They even had Telegraph operators that were injured from it.

There is something called a solar coronal mass ejection. This is a sunspot back in 1859, for those of us, like I ham, you know that right? I have an advanced class ham license. Yeah, totally. Am I funny? But I have a license from the federal communications commission. This is called solar cycle number 10, which one from 1855 to 1867 and us hams keep close tabs on the solar cycles because they affected the weather. They affect the temperature on earth and solar cycles also affect the propagation of radio waves. Why do they affect it? It's because these ejections from the sun come, they hit the Earth's atmosphere and they charge it.

If you've ever seen the Northern lights, that's an example of solar radiation hitting our Earth's atmosphere for lack of a better term. It's really hitting our Magnetosphere, but I don't want to get too detailed here.

This is very fascinating because back then they called it a white light flare. That is a British astronomer Richard Carrington, as well as co-astronomer here, Richard Hodson. It was named after Carrington though. It basically burned out telegraph systems.

Now you think about a mass ejection from the sun. Think about it being very kind of limited in scope, right? How big is it? You probably have seen pictures, videos of these injections coming up from the sun's surface. Well, what ends up happening is our entire earth's upper atmosphere and the Magnetosphere ends up getting charged by these. So it doesn't just affect one area. Like it's aimed like a, like a laser beam down in Missouri and hits the center of the country and that's the only problem.

Now what happens here is that will affect us worldwide. It will affect some areas more than others, certainly. But it'll affect us worldwide. It will knock out our satellites that are up there right now. It will cause blackouts. We saw that already some extended outages of the electrical grid here in the Northeast. This particular storm I'm thinking of was when was that? I think it might've been 84, the storm up in Quebec that knocked out the power to the province of Quebec from a solar storm.

So we could be in a whole lot of trouble. It could also damage all of our, or some of our major transformers. We do not keep those in inventory. These kinds of super transformers, if you will, there's a number of them located across the country. And knock out grids across the country. It could take from many months to years to get back all of our electrical infrastructures depending on what happens.

Here's what Homeland security is also worried about. It. Isn't just a solar flare and they are worried about that and I can tell you, I have had people on the webinars. I ran for the FBI that are telling us that indeed they have been working with the power companies, et cetera, to put in some controls, it would stop the problems from one of these coronal mass ejections these solar flares. So we're pretty much already set for those or we will be within the next couple of years.

What we're worried about is what the Chinese I've been up to. Apparently the Chinese government has been working for the last 25 years on plans to defeat the United States and kind of their lead plan appears to be an EMP.

Basically what they're looking at is a cyber Pearl Harbor attack and they've been looking at that because it's easy to do. All they have to do is set off a nuclear bomb up in the atmosphere above the United State s and it could cover the US coast to coast 1500 miles. If it was set off at 300 miles above the surface of the earth and conditions were right. Could be very, very bad.

We ve gotta be careful. China has been exploiting some of our weaknesses. I remember 2004, you might remember the power grid outage, we had up here in the Northeast and it started up in upstate New York and various rumors about it actually, surely having been an attack attempt. Just kind of testing things out and it went awry.

There are other reports so that things happen and hard to say, but we do know. That China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, as well as international terrorists have hacked some of our key infrastructures out there. Something like this could be very, very bad there. DHS Homeland security is field testing, a more resilient, critical infrastructure, which is really good. They've got a number of demonstration and pilot projects planned and others underway. So, we'll see what happens here with the EMP vulnerabilities that we have. President Trump back in 2019, signed in an executive order that is really trying to speed things up here. They delegated power to the White House for EMP preparedness.

Hey, stick around. We'll be right back. And we're going to be talking about the 2020 election interference and what is the US doing here when it comes to Russia?

You're listening to Craig Peterson online, as well as on news radio 98.5 FM and AM 560.

Stick around, because we'll be right back.

---

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 discusses Electromagnetic Pulse as it relates to the DHS warning that China might be planning something around our election. What would it mean? How would we deal with it? 

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

---

Read More:

Managed IT Providers: The Cyber-Threat Actors' Gateway to SMBs

Think You're Spending Enough on Security?

DHS Braces For 'Potential EMP Attack' As Presidential Election Nears

US Sanctions Russian Attackers for 2020 Election Interference

Cyber-Risks Explode With Move to Telehealth Services

Why online voting is harder than online banking

Price gouging and defective products rampant on Amazon, reports find

Ransomware Has Gone Corporate—and Gotten More Cruel

---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] If you're not familiar with the Carrington event, stick around because the odds are great we're going to have to live through another one of these. Even though it's been more than a hundred years, we're going to talk about EMP attacks and a real warning about it.

Hi everybody. Craig Peterson here. Thanks for listening.

Hey, if you have your Google smart speaker, Google Home, just say, Hey, Google play. WGAN and you can listen to us any time. I probably just turned on your Google speakers. Sorry about that. But it is really handy. That's what I use when I'm up in the shower, et cetera, these smart devices.

Now let's get into this. Very interesting article that just came out this week from Zero Hedge. Tyler Durden is the one that brought this up. We have in fact been given some really great information about this as part of the FBI's InfraGard program.

Now, if you are responsible for IT and more particularly responsible for security, you really should join the FBI's Infragard program. I N F R A G A R D.org is where you'll find them online. This is a channel that the FBI uses to let civilians, as well as military contractors and frankly, even various government employees of the federal and state level. It lets them disseminate all of this type of information.

It's absolutely fascinating. Some of them, the stuff I can share with you, some of the stuff is on a need to know basis. Obviously I can't share all of it with you, but I do try and bring some of these things up like this one.

The US Department of Homeland security has released a new report that's warning about a potential electromagnetic pulse. Now, specifically, this is talking about an electromagnetic pulse as part of an attack against the United States. I mentioned at the very beginning, something called the Carrington event. It's fascinating and this is something that we've talked about on the training for the FBI's InfraGard program that I conducted and you probably know I did that for a couple of years. It's a volunteer position and I did a whole bunch of different pieces of training.

This particular event occurred in September 1859. Now think back to 1859, there was not much going on from the electrical side, 1859. They didn't have too many computers, right? Obviously they didn't have any of them, but back then they did have a couple of things they did have Telegraph for one. What they found happened was that these Telegraph machines were getting burned out by this event. They weren't quite sure what it was, what was going on. They even had Telegraph operators that were injured from it.

There is something called a solar coronal mass ejection. This is a sunspot back in 1859, for those of us, like I ham, you know that right? I have an advanced class ham license. Yeah, totally. Am I funny? But I have a license from the federal communications commission. This is called solar cycle number 10, which one from 1855 to 1867 and us hams keep close tabs on the solar cycles because they affected the weather. They affect the temperature on earth and solar cycles also affect the propagation of radio waves. Why do they affect it? It's because these ejections from the sun come, they hit the Earth's atmosphere and they charge it.

If you've ever seen the Northern lights, that's an example of solar radiation hitting our Earth's atmosphere for lack of a better term. It's really hitting our Magnetosphere, but I don't want to get too detailed here.

This is very fascinating because back then they called it a white light flare. That is a British astronomer Richard Carrington, as well as co-astronomer here, Richard Hodson. It was named after Carrington though. It basically burned out telegraph systems.

Now you think about a mass ejection from the sun. Think about it being very kind of limited in scope, right? How big is it? You probably have seen pictures, videos of these injections coming up from the sun's surface. Well, what ends up happening is our entire earth's upper atmosphere and the Magnetosphere ends up getting charged by these. So it doesn't just affect one area. Like it's aimed like a, like a laser beam down in Missouri and hits the center of the country and that's the only problem.

Now what happens here is that will affect us worldwide. It will affect some areas more than others, certainly. But it'll affect us worldwide. It will knock out our satellites that are up there right now. It will cause blackouts. We saw that already some extended outages of the electrical grid here in the Northeast. This particular storm I'm thinking of was when was that?  I think it might've been 84, the storm up in Quebec that knocked out the power to the province of Quebec from a solar storm.

So we could be in a whole lot of trouble. It could also damage all of our, or some of our major transformers. We do not keep those in inventory. These kinds of super transformers, if you will, there's a number of them located across the country. And knock out grids across the country. It could take from many months to years to get back all of our electrical infrastructures depending on what happens.

Here's what Homeland security is also worried about. It. Isn't just a solar flare and they are worried about that and I can tell you, I have had people on the webinars. I ran for the FBI that are telling us that indeed they have been working with the power companies, et cetera, to put in some controls, it would stop the problems from one of these coronal mass ejections these solar flares. So we're pretty much already set for those or we will be within the next couple of years.

What we're worried about is what the Chinese I've been up to. Apparently the Chinese government has been working for the last 25 years on plans to defeat the United States and kind of their lead plan appears to be an EMP.

Basically what they're looking at is a cyber Pearl Harbor attack and they've been looking at that because it's easy to do. All they have to do is set off a nuclear bomb up in the atmosphere above the United State s and it could cover the US coast to coast 1500 miles. If it was set off at 300 miles above the surface of the earth and conditions were right. Could be very, very bad.

We ve gotta be careful. China has been exploiting some of our weaknesses. I remember 2004, you might remember the power grid outage, we had up here in the Northeast and it started up in upstate New York and various rumors about it actually, surely having been an attack attempt. Just kind of testing things out and it went awry.

There are other reports so that things happen and hard to say, but we do know. That China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, as well as international terrorists have hacked some of our key infrastructures out there. Something like this could be very, very bad there. DHS Homeland security is field testing, a more resilient, critical infrastructure, which is really good. They've got a number of demonstration and pilot projects planned and others underway. So, we'll see what happens here with the EMP vulnerabilities that we have. President Trump back in 2019, signed in an executive order that is really trying to speed things up here. They delegated power to the White House for EMP preparedness.

Hey, stick around. We'll be right back. And we're going to be talking about the 2020 election interference and what is the US doing here when it comes to Russia?

You're listening to Craig Peterson online, as well as on news radio 98.5 FM and AM 560.

 Stick around, because we'll be right back.

---

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 explains Nation-state Election interference and what is more likely just spreading Chaos and distrust.

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

---

Read More:

Managed IT Providers: The Cyber-Threat Actors' Gateway to SMBs

Think You're Spending Enough on Security?

DHS Braces For 'Potential EMP Attack' As Presidential Election Nears

US Sanctions Russian Attackers for 2020 Election Interference

Cyber-Risks Explode With Move to Telehealth Services

Why online voting is harder than online banking

Price gouging and defective products rampant on Amazon, reports find

Ransomware Has Gone Corporate—and Gotten More Cruel

---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Of course, we talk a lot about Russian hackers, Chinese. Iranian, and it goes on and on North Korean, we're going to talk right now about our elections. 2020 a very big year. What's Russia up to, and what's the US doing about it.

You're listening to Craig Peterson here on News Radio 98.5FM and AM 560.

You can also listen to me online. If you have a smart speaker, let's say you have an Amazon. You can just say, Hey Alexa, play WGAN. And Tada it'll happen automatically. You can even program your smart speaker to turn it on automatically. So you can listen to Matt Gagnon every morning, Monday through Friday, that is as a, he gives you the latest news and keeps everybody up to date.

So let's get into these US sanctions here, man, against the Russian hackers. We now know what happened in the 2016 election. In the 2016 election. You might remember. We had emails stolen from the DNC, the Democrat national committee. In fact, it's known as the DNC email leak. These are emails that were stolen by some hackers running under the pseudonym of Guccifer 2.0, and it's been alleged that the Russian. Intelligence agency hackers, according to indictments carried out by the Mueller investigation. Some of the very few minutes, they cost us tens of millions of dollars with all Mueller investigation.

Nowadays, the thinking is actually more along the lines of China. It was China that might have done those DNC hacks. China also hacked our national HR department for federal employees, where we lost all of these federal employee records, including background checks for people who had Secret, top-secret clearance, et cetera. Just terrible stuff. Our government has not been keeping good tabs on our information in many cases.

So now we're looking at 2020, I don't know, in my lifetime, if there has been a more contentious election cycle, in the sixties, you certainly had some bad ones. 1968 was a rough year. For our country, rough year. In fact, for many countries back in 68 out on the West coast. it really was a bad time.

A lot of people had a lot of the same sentiments that they have today. Well, many of those same people are now in government offices, elected offices, et cetera. They still seem to have some of the same thoughts and they are causing as much disruption as they possibly can. But at least those people are Americans, right?

You can criticize the news, media, or Facebook for not properly censoring things or not reporting on the story, the whole story, and nothing but the story. Many of these news outlets now tend to be editorial outlets.

Whereas right here, when you listening to me or anyone else on the stations you are getting, I think the truth. Obviously, when it's editorial, it's obviously editorial, but they're not running headlines.

Like this last week. I was just shocked and amazed. President Trump has these countries over these Arab countries over in the middle East signing peace agreements with Israel. What is the headline that CNN runs? That the white house has a mass of people out front that are not social distancing and not wearing masks. These were people who came to the White House who were invited for some of these signing ceremonies. There were representatives there from Israel, from these Arab countries. Did they bother mentioning that? Was that their headline? No, it wasn't their headline. There was a lack of social media, just unseen was their headline.

How's that news. I just don't get it. So very contentious and now we're hearing people like Hillary Clinton, secretary of state, former secretary of state saying, it doesn't matter whether Joe Biden wins or not, he cannot, should not, will not concede the race even if trump wins clearly.

Really? I thought you said Trump, wasn't going to leave Office. Here you are calling for people not to leave Office. It couldn't be more contentious. It's absolutely insane. What's going on right now. Some people. Really dislike our president. it's absolutely nuts.

So what are the foreign countries going to do? Because I, frankly, I don't know. I don't think most foreign countries hate President Trump as much as some people in our country hate President Trump. I'm not just saying, Democrats. I know there are many Republicans that really hate President Trump. And I don't like using that word because hate is such a strong word. But these foreign countries are going to do whatever they can to really mess things up.

Now in 2016, Russia kind of mess themselves up. They were promoting Hillary Clinton in some ads or. Promoting president Trump in some ads. In fact, the numbers I saw showed that they spent more money promoting Hillary Clinton and her becoming President on Facebook than they spent money promoting Donald Trump. So I don't know how the Russians helped President Trump. They were actually helping Hillary more. And then to top it off, the Russians were spending money on ads and running ads after the election, it occurred. So they really messed it up. Don't expect them to mess it up as badly this time.

The US Department of the treasury's office of foreign assets control has sanctioned for Russia linked individuals for their efforts to interfere with the 2020 presidential election. So this came out of, or at least it was aligned with Microsoft. Microsoft had published some details on groups that were targeting both campaigns coming out of Russia. The campaigns are out of Russia. Both the Democrat and the Republican campaigns were both being attacked and Microsoft noticed it.

Now don't expect Microsoft to notice that your company is being attacked. I want to emphasize that. Microsoft, if you have office 365, doesn't have any guarantees of security. In fact, their anti-spam measures are actually pretty poor and to get into much higher levels.

We tend to run our customer's emails through as special anti-spam anti-malware filters that we have from Cisco and then we send that email off to Microsoft. Even though they have the enterprise, higher-level enterprise accounts.

So one of these people that was sanctioned is a member of the Ukrainian parliament has been an active Russian agent for over a decade and apparently is close to Russian intelligence. He is a coordinator coordinated. This indictment here directly or indirectly engaged in sponsoring concealed or otherwise been complicit in foreign meddling in the 2020 election.

The Treasury's alleging that between May and July, this year, he ran an influence campaign focused on creating narratives around us officials in the upcoming election. He released edited audio tapes as well as other unsupported information with the goal of discrediting US officials and spreading false allegations against the US and international political figures.

This is from an article over at dark reading, you'll find up on my website @craigpeterson.com and apparently these narratives were designed to get some corruption investigations going. Like the fake Russian dossier that got investigations going against the Trump campaign under the Obama administration, which has now been proven, fake, including all of the testimonies that the chairman Schiffs committee reviewed. But now that they've been released, we can see what was true and of course, chairman Schiff out just saying the exact opposite of the testimony that was given to him in committee closed-door committees. They were in a skiff, but anyways. So they were using press conference coverage, other news events, interviews, and statements as well.

Now I have some software that if you listen to my podcast, for instance, and you can find it on most major podcasting platforms. But if you listened to my podcast, you might've noticed that last week I used an artificial intelligence program to first of all have a female narrator say about four or five words in one spot.

And then also I used one to change some of the words I was saying, I did not get a single email from anybody. I don't know that of the hundreds or thousands of people that listened to the podcast. How many people picked up on that? Because no one said anything. So your host, me, Craig Peterson, has been inserting some of this fake technology that allows me to pretend I said something that didn't actually say.

So think of what the Russians or any of these other countries have available to them. Going forward this is going to be very concerning to me cause you're not going to know what's real, what's fake. I think it was Hillary Clinton's campaign that coined the term fake news and then President Trump's campaign picked it up. Of course, he's been screaming, fake news forever. Secretary Clinton lost control of the fake news narrative.

There's one thing when it's fake news because they're not giving you the whole story or they're not giving you the story in context. It's a completely different thing when the fake news is quite literally fake.

And if you want to go online, go to youtube.com and search for fake and then Mark Zuckerberg. There's one for him out there. Bill Gates, fake bill Gates. And you'll see, not just video with the audio behind it. Where he's saying something he never said, but you'll see. It looks like a video of him saying something he never said. It's absolutely amazing.

I can bet the Russians are going to be involved in that. And in fact, that is part of the sanctions against these Russian attackers. They are meddling. And their, meddling with our news media, who seems very hungry for anything that might be salacious.

Hey, if you missed anything today, make sure you check it out [email protected].

We talked about how managed IT providers are a major security threat, what you shouldn't be spending on cybersecurity, a home or a business and DHS, Homeland security warning about an electromagnetic attack potential here as well as natural causes. That sun thing that's up in the sky.

You're listening. Craig Peterson on news radio 98.5 FM and AM 560 stick around because we'll be right back after the top of the hour.

---

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 explains Nation-state Election interference and what is more likely just spreading Chaos and distrust.

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

---

Read More:

Managed IT Providers: The Cyber-Threat Actors' Gateway to SMBs

Think You're Spending Enough on Security?

DHS Braces For 'Potential EMP Attack' As Presidential Election Nears

US Sanctions Russian Attackers for 2020 Election Interference

Cyber-Risks Explode With Move to Telehealth Services

Why online voting is harder than online banking

Price gouging and defective products rampant on Amazon, reports find

Ransomware Has Gone Corporate—and Gotten More Cruel

---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Of course, we talk a lot about Russian hackers, Chinese. Iranian, and it goes on and on North Korean, we're going to talk right now about our elections. 2020 a very big year. What's Russia up to, and what's the US doing about it.

You're listening to Craig Peterson here on News Radio 98.5FM and AM 560.

You can also listen to me online. If you have a smart speaker, let's say you have an Amazon. You can just say, Hey Alexa, play WGAN. And Tada it'll happen automatically. You can even program your smart speaker to turn it on automatically. So you can listen to Matt Gagnon every morning, Monday through Friday, that is as a, he gives you the latest news and keeps everybody up to date.

So let's get into these US sanctions here, man, against the Russian hackers. We now know what happened in the 2016 election. In the 2016 election. You might remember. We had emails stolen from the DNC, the Democrat national committee. In fact, it's known as the DNC email leak. These are emails that were stolen by some hackers running under the pseudonym of Guccifer 2.0, and it's been alleged that the Russian. Intelligence agency hackers, according to indictments carried out by the Mueller investigation. Some of the very few minutes, they cost us tens of millions of dollars with all Mueller investigation.

Nowadays, the thinking is actually more along the lines of China. It was China that might have done those DNC hacks. China also hacked our national HR department for federal employees, where we lost all of these federal employee records, including background checks for people who had Secret, top-secret clearance, et cetera. Just terrible stuff. Our government has not been keeping good tabs on our information in many cases.

So now we're looking at 2020, I don't know, in my lifetime, if there has been a more contentious election cycle, in the sixties, you certainly had some bad ones. 1968 was a rough year. For our country, rough year. In fact, for many countries back in 68 out on the West coast. it really was a bad time.

 A lot of people had a lot of the same sentiments that they have today. Well, many of those same people are now in government offices, elected offices, et cetera. They still seem to have some of the same thoughts and they are causing as much disruption as they possibly can. But at least those people are Americans, right?

You can criticize the news, media, or Facebook for not properly censoring things or not reporting on the story, the whole story, and nothing but the story. Many of these news outlets now tend to be editorial outlets.

Whereas right here, when you listening to me or anyone else on the stations you are getting, I think the truth. Obviously, when it's editorial, it's obviously editorial, but they're not running headlines.

Like this last week. I was just shocked and amazed. President Trump has these countries over these Arab countries over in the middle East signing peace agreements with Israel. What is the headline that CNN runs? That the white house has a mass of people out front that are not social distancing and not wearing masks. These were people who came to the White House who were invited for some of these signing ceremonies. There were representatives there from Israel, from these Arab countries. Did they bother mentioning that? Was that their headline? No, it wasn't their headline. There was a lack of social media, just unseen was their headline.

How's that news. I just don't get it. So very contentious and now we're hearing people like Hillary Clinton, secretary of state, former secretary of state saying, it doesn't matter whether Joe Biden wins or not, he cannot, should not, will not concede the race even if trump wins clearly.

Really? I thought you said Trump, wasn't going to leave Office. Here you are calling for people not to leave Office. It couldn't be more contentious. It's absolutely insane. What's going on right now. Some people. Really dislike our president. it's absolutely nuts.

So what are the foreign countries going to do? Because I, frankly, I don't know. I don't think most foreign countries hate President Trump as much as some people in our country hate President Trump.  I'm not just saying, Democrats. I know there are many Republicans that really hate President Trump. And I don't like using that word because hate is such a strong word. But these foreign countries are going to do whatever they can to really mess things up.

Now in 2016, Russia kind of mess themselves up. They were promoting Hillary Clinton in some ads or. Promoting president Trump in some ads. In fact, the numbers I saw showed that they spent more money promoting Hillary Clinton and her becoming President on Facebook than they spent money promoting Donald Trump. So I don't know how the Russians helped President Trump. They were actually helping Hillary more. And then to top it off, the Russians were spending money on ads and running ads after the election, it occurred. So they really messed it up. Don't expect them to mess it up as badly this time.

The US Department of the treasury's office of foreign assets control has sanctioned for Russia linked individuals for their efforts to interfere with the 2020 presidential election. So this came out of, or at least it was aligned with Microsoft. Microsoft had published some details on groups that were targeting both campaigns coming out of Russia. The campaigns are out of Russia. Both the Democrat and the Republican campaigns were both being attacked and Microsoft noticed it.

Now don't expect Microsoft to notice that your company is being attacked. I want to emphasize that. Microsoft, if you have office 365,  doesn't have any guarantees of security. In fact, their anti-spam measures are actually pretty poor and to get into much higher levels.

We tend to run our customer's emails through as special anti-spam anti-malware filters that we have from Cisco and then we send that email off to Microsoft. Even though they have the enterprise, higher-level enterprise accounts.

So one of these people that was sanctioned is a member of the Ukrainian parliament has been an active Russian agent for over a decade and apparently is close to Russian intelligence. He is a coordinator coordinated. This indictment here directly or indirectly engaged in sponsoring concealed or otherwise been complicit in foreign meddling in the 2020 election.

The Treasury's alleging that between May and July, this year, he ran an influence campaign focused on creating narratives around us officials in the upcoming election. He released edited audio tapes as well as other unsupported information with the goal of discrediting US officials and spreading false allegations against the US and international political figures.

This is from an article over at dark reading, you'll find up on my website @craigpeterson.com and apparently these narratives were designed to get some corruption investigations going. Like the fake Russian dossier that got investigations going against the Trump campaign under the Obama administration, which has now been proven, fake, including all of the testimonies that the chairman Schiffs committee reviewed. But now that they've been released, we can see what was true and of course, chairman Schiff out just saying the exact opposite of the testimony that was given to him in committee closed-door committees. They were in a skiff, but anyways. So they were using press conference coverage, other news events, interviews, and statements as well.

Now I have some software that if you listen to my podcast, for instance, and you can find it on most major podcasting platforms. But if you listened to my podcast, you might've noticed that last week I used an artificial intelligence program to first of all have a female narrator say about four or five words in one spot.

And then also I used one to change some of the words I was saying, I did not get a single email from anybody. I don't know that of the hundreds or thousands of people that listened to the podcast. How many people picked up on that? Because no one said anything. So your host, me, Craig Peterson, has been inserting some of this fake technology that allows me to pretend I said something that didn't actually say.

So think of what the Russians or any of these other countries have available to them. Going forward this is going to be very concerning to me cause you're not going to know what's real, what's fake. I think it was Hillary Clinton's campaign that coined the term fake news and then President Trump's campaign picked it up. Of course, he's been screaming, fake news forever. Secretary Clinton lost control of the fake news narrative.

There's one thing when it's fake news because they're not giving you the whole story or they're not giving you the story in context. It's a completely different thing when the fake news is quite literally fake.

And if you want to go online, go to youtube.com and search for fake and then Mark Zuckerberg. There's one for him out there. Bill Gates, fake bill Gates. And you'll see, not just video with the audio behind it. Where he's saying something he never said, but you'll see. It looks like a video of him saying something he never said. It's absolutely amazing.

I can bet the Russians are going to be involved in that. And in fact, that is part of the sanctions against these Russian attackers. They are meddling. And their, meddling with our news media, who seems very hungry for anything that might be salacious.

Hey, if you missed anything today, make sure you check it out [email protected].

We talked about how managed IT providers are a major security threat, what you shouldn't be spending on cybersecurity, a home or a business and DHS, Homeland security warning about an electromagnetic attack potential here as well as natural causes. That sun thing that's up in the sky.

You're listening. Craig Peterson on news radio 98.5 FM and AM 560 stick around because we'll be right back after the top of the hour.

---

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 explains Why you should be concerned about your private health information when using a Telehealth application.

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

---

Read More:

Managed IT Providers: The Cyber-Threat Actors' Gateway to SMBs

Think You're Spending Enough on Security?

DHS Braces For 'Potential EMP Attack' As Presidential Election Nears

US Sanctions Russian Attackers for 2020 Election Interference

Cyber-Risks Explode With Move to Telehealth Services

Why online voting is harder than online banking

Price gouging and defective products rampant on Amazon, reports find

Ransomware Has Gone Corporate—and Gotten More Cruel

---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Coming up in this hour, we're going to be talking about some of these cyber risks that are really exploded because of the telehealth services. We'll tell you about that. And online voting. Price gouging and defective products rampant on Amazon.

Hey, listening to Craig Peterson on news radio 98.5 FM and AM 560. Want to remind everybody, if you have one of those smart speakers, All you have to do is ask it to play WGAN, and you'll catch me right there on your smart device, as well as everybody else. All the other great programming that we have here.

Let's get right into it. And I talked, at least I wanted to talk a little bit about this with Matt Gagnon on Wednesday morning, where I am every Wednesday at about seven 34. And this has to do with, of course, the whole COVID thing.

So many of us now are afraid to go out. We're afraid to go to the doctors. There's been some interesting statistics looking at some of the hospitals who are saying, Whoa, wait a minute. Heart attack patients. We're just not seeing the number of heart attack patients what's going on, is COVID making people his heart's function better. Having fewer heart attacks. What is it? When they delved into it, what they were finding is that there were people still having heart attacks, probably at about the same rate as always. And of course, we know that certain people have a response to the COVID-19 part of the Wuhan virus that includes death damage to cardiac tissue.

So how could it be? What's going on? They were just afraid to go to the hospital. So many of us are free to go out. So many of us are afraid to go to the hospitals, even when we're sick.

So first off everybody, I know I say all of the time, the hospital, is the worst place to be when you're sick? Because it is. There are diseases you can catch there that you just can't catch anywhere else. But the hospital also has the ability to save your life. They can go in, they can look at problems. They can fix problems. Maybe you need an adjustment as simple as your diet, but maybe what you need is some surgeries, stint who knows what you might need. So don't put off going to the hospital.

Now, when it comes to the doctor's office, you women out there know that men don't like to go to the doctor. We never go, I don't need to go. And once our arms and twisted enough, sometimes we will go. But now you're no one, you're just not going to the doctor.

Most of the time. I do know some people that do go to the doctor all of the time, maybe more than they probably should. And I probably fall into the category of, I don't go as often as maybe I should, but we're now doing these doctor visits online. I'm not sure that's the best idea. It's also not the worst idea, but we've seen this massive adoption of people using apps on their phones and on their computers to talk to a doctor most of the time, not even their doctor.

Depending on what kind of consultation you need. You can get a doctor for 40 bucks all the way on up through I, when I looked last, it was like $150 for a bit more of a specialist and they can only prescribe certain things. They can't prescribe other things and goes back and forth.

But what we have seen that's definitive. When it comes to these remote docs is that there has been an increase in the risks and compromises within the healthcare industry. There's a new piece of research out. I have it up on my website and it was posted here on Dark Reading as well, this last week by security scorecard, Dark Owl. And they found that the rapid onboarding of these technologies that we've been talking about on the show forever, right? Zoom. Don't use Zoom. Zoom's, not safe, right? It's not credible. It hasn't been analyzed. It's not HIPAA compliant, et cetera.

So the rapid onboarding of all of this stuff has not only hurt businesses who have lost information. Zoom is trying to pull up its socks here, as far as security goes. Also true in the medical field where they've started using them now to really let them talk to you. Deliver services to a minor degree. They can call in a prescription for instance, to a pharmacy for you.

It is significantly broadened this attack surface of many of the healthcare organizations out there. When we're talking about our broad attack surface. What we mean is instead of just having to break into one computer at one location, they actually going to have to break in, or at least have the opportunity to break-in at a whole bunch of locations.

That means your home. They could come in through your home computer. Potentially, in fact, a remote computer that you're connected to, depending on how you're connected.

We're also now as a doctor exposing your home computer, maybe your office, this network to hackers because now you're on your home network. You are using a VPN into the office so you can look at your patient record, so you can add things onto your patient tracking system and your electronic medical records.

Those EMR systems might be in your office and might be online but now you're using them from computers that aren't very well protected. That's part of the reason I keep reminding everybody that your home networks need to be just as protected as those networks that are at the office. So if you are a doctor and you have HIPAA regulations while. Any of the computers you're using as part of your doctor's office need to so comply with the HIPAA regulations.

If you are a government contractor subcontractor, you're going to have to make sure that the computers are CMMC or maybe they meet the NIST standards, et cetera.

So security card and dark owl analyzed the data related to the use of telehealth, these remote doc programs here from 148 vendors. They looked at healthcare providers around the country, as they're looking at it. Now we have seen a massive change in the way we do business. There's no question that we've really seen a business reboot here.

We've seen some serious problems. I was on a call earlier this week, part of, one of my masterminds. One of the members of the mastermind has a business that provides some marketing services for gyms, gymnasiums. When was the last time you went to a gym? They are struggling. He's wondering why his marketing, isn't working anymore? I thought the answer to that was pretty darn obvious. People just aren't using gyms anymore.

But the same thing's true with office space. Saw an article this week that I did not include because I didn't think it reached that level, but it was talking about a business that paid $60 million to buy it's way out of a contract for leasing space. We're going to be seeing more and more of that as time goes on.

Now a lot of it, frankly, and the same, thing are going to be true for, I think doctors and doctor's offices, because when you're looking at it, if the doctor is using Tele-docs. Why do they need to have as much physical office spaces as they used to have?

So prior to the pandemic, these Teladoc services were in news by about 1% of the overall. Health care provider visits, if you will. Is it a visit really when you're on one of these Teladoc apps, but it was used less than 1% of the time. Now we've got this big blown up public health emergency due to them and it has resulted in primary care visits, dropping like a rock after mid-March that's a surprise. At the same time, the Teladoc apps soared 350%. That is absolutely huge. That's from a report that I'm looking at here from the US department of health and human services.

Now what really concerns me about all that, isn't, that we're going online. I'm concerned about these docs using insecure apps, like Zoom. I'm concerned about docs using VPNs incorrectly, like every other business out there that are not using them correctly. The speed that they transitioned, businesses and doctors, and in this case, here to these online health services, has really not let healthcare providers properly vet any of these teledoc products for security issues or to ensure they're safe to use. I absolutely agree with that. That's the conclusion that Security Scorecard came to as well.

So here's a quote from. The chief R and D officer over at Security Scorecard, we examined the 148 most popular telehealth apps from a number of angles. There are concerns across the board from the development deployment and configuration of the app, patients themselves, as well as a digital supply chain that supports them.

So think about that for a minute, right? These apps themselves are not written properly. They're not implemented properly. The docs have not installed them properly and are not using them properly. What could possibly go wrong?

Now? I know some of you are out there saying right now, Hey, Craig, it's my medical record. So I really don't care that people know I have type one diabetes or whatever your condition might be.

In reality. A lot of people want to know that information, right? So for instance, let's say a scammer knows that you're a type one diabetic. They can now use that to fine-tune yes, the messages to you these phishing messages they've been sending out.

So be very careful, a lot of different alerts, a lot of, by the way, increase chatter out on the dark web. So keep an eye out for that two mentions of telehealth vendors, products like Teladoc, Careclicks, MeMD jumped dramatically on the dark web after the pandemic began. No big surprise there,.

All right. Stick around. When we come back, we're going to talk about online voting and we're going to compare a little bit to banking. You can do banking online. Why can't I vote online? What's going on here?

Hey, stick around. You're listening to the Craig Peterson show here on WGAN.

We'll be right back with a whole lot more and make sure you tune in as well on Wednesday mornings. You can, of course, hear me at about seven 30 with Mr. Matt Gagnon as he goes through some of the news of the week.

So we'll be right back.

---

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 explains Why you should be concerned about your private health information when using a Telehealth application. 

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

---

Read More:

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Think You're Spending Enough on Security?

DHS Braces For 'Potential EMP Attack' As Presidential Election Nears

US Sanctions Russian Attackers for 2020 Election Interference

Cyber-Risks Explode With Move to Telehealth Services

Why online voting is harder than online banking

Price gouging and defective products rampant on Amazon, reports find

Ransomware Has Gone Corporate—and Gotten More Cruel

---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Coming up in this hour, we're going to be talking about some of these cyber risks that are really exploded because of the telehealth services. We'll tell you about that. And online voting. Price gouging and defective products rampant on Amazon.

Hey, listening to Craig Peterson on news radio 98.5 FM and AM 560. Want to remind everybody, if you have one of those smart speakers, All you have to do is ask it to play WGAN, and you'll catch me right there on your smart device, as well as everybody else. All the other great programming that we have here.

Let's get right into it. And I talked, at least I wanted to talk a little bit about this with Matt Gagnon on Wednesday morning, where I am every Wednesday at about seven 34. And this has to do with, of course, the whole COVID thing.

So many of us now are afraid to go out. We're afraid to go to the doctors. There's been some interesting statistics looking at some of the hospitals who are saying, Whoa, wait a minute. Heart attack patients. We're just not seeing the number of heart attack patients what's going on, is COVID making people his heart's function better. Having fewer heart attacks. What is it? When they delved into it, what they were finding is that there were people still having heart attacks, probably at about the same rate as always. And of course, we know that certain people have a response to the COVID-19 part of the Wuhan virus that includes death damage to cardiac tissue.

So how could it be? What's going on? They were just afraid to go to the hospital. So many of us are free to go out. So many of us are afraid to go to the hospitals, even when we're sick.

So first off everybody, I know I say all of the time, the hospital, is the worst place to be when you're sick? Because it is. There are diseases you can catch there that you just can't catch anywhere else. But the hospital also has the ability to save your life. They can go in, they can look at problems. They can fix problems. Maybe you need an adjustment as simple as your diet, but maybe what you need is some surgeries, stint who knows what you might need. So don't put off going to the hospital.

Now, when it comes to the doctor's office, you women out there know that men don't like to go to the doctor. We never go, I don't need to go. And once our arms and twisted enough, sometimes we will go. But now you're no one, you're just not going to the doctor.

Most of the time. I do know some people that do go to the doctor all of the time, maybe more than they probably should. And I probably fall into the category of, I don't go as often as maybe I should, but we're now doing these doctor visits online. I'm not sure that's the best idea. It's also not the worst idea, but we've seen this massive adoption of people using apps on their phones and on their computers to talk to a doctor most of the time, not even their doctor.

Depending on what kind of consultation you need. You can get a doctor for 40 bucks all the way on up through I, when I looked last, it was like $150 for a bit more of a specialist and they can only prescribe certain things. They can't prescribe other things and goes back and forth.

But what we have seen that's definitive. When it comes to these remote docs is that there has been an increase in the risks and compromises within the healthcare industry. There's a new piece of research out. I have it up on my website and it was posted here on Dark Reading as well, this last week by security scorecard, Dark Owl. And they found that the rapid onboarding of these technologies that we've been talking about on the show forever, right? Zoom. Don't use Zoom. Zoom's, not safe, right? It's not credible. It hasn't been analyzed. It's not HIPAA compliant, et cetera.

So the rapid onboarding of all of this stuff has not only hurt businesses who have lost information. Zoom is trying to pull up its socks here, as far as security goes. Also true in the medical field where they've started using them now to really let them talk to you. Deliver services to a minor degree. They can call in a prescription for instance, to a pharmacy for you.

It is significantly broadened this attack surface of many of the healthcare organizations out there. When we're talking about our broad attack surface. What we mean is instead of just having to break into one computer at one location, they actually going to have to break in, or at least have the opportunity to break-in at a whole bunch of locations.

That means your home. They could come in through your home computer. Potentially, in fact, a remote computer that you're connected to, depending on how you're connected.

We're also now as a doctor exposing your home computer, maybe your office, this network to hackers because now you're on your home network. You are using a VPN into the office so you can look at your patient record, so you can add things onto your patient tracking system and your electronic medical records.

Those EMR systems might be in your office and might be online but now you're using them from computers that aren't very well protected. That's part of the reason I keep reminding everybody that your home networks need to be just as protected as those networks that are at the office. So if you are a doctor and you have HIPAA regulations while. Any of the computers you're using as part of your doctor's office need to so comply with the HIPAA regulations.

 If you are a government contractor subcontractor, you're going to have to make sure that the computers are CMMC or maybe they meet the NIST standards, et cetera.

So security card and dark owl analyzed the data related to the use of telehealth, these remote doc programs here from 148 vendors. They looked at healthcare providers around the country, as they're looking at it. Now we have seen a massive change in the way we do business. There's no question that we've really seen a business reboot here.

We've seen some serious problems. I was on a call earlier this week, part of, one of my masterminds. One of the members of the mastermind has a business that provides some marketing services for gyms, gymnasiums. When was the last time you went to a gym? They are struggling. He's wondering why his marketing, isn't working anymore? I thought the answer to that was pretty darn obvious. People just aren't using gyms anymore.

But the same thing's true with office space. Saw an article this week that I did not include because I didn't think it reached that level, but it was talking about a business that paid $60 million to buy it's way out of a contract for leasing space. We're going to be seeing more and more of that as time goes on.

Now a lot of it, frankly, and the same, thing are going to be true for, I think doctors and doctor's offices, because when you're looking at it, if the doctor is using Tele-docs. Why do they need to have as much physical office spaces as they used to have?

So prior to the pandemic, these Teladoc services were in news by about 1% of the overall. Health care provider visits, if you will. Is it a visit really when you're on one of these Teladoc apps, but it was used less than 1% of the time. Now we've got this big blown up public health emergency due to them and it has resulted in primary care visits, dropping like a rock after mid-March that's a surprise. At the same time, the Teladoc apps soared 350%. That is absolutely huge. That's from a report that I'm looking at here from the US department of health and human services.

Now what really concerns me about all that, isn't, that we're going online. I'm concerned about these docs using insecure apps, like Zoom. I'm concerned about docs using VPNs incorrectly, like every other business out there that are not using them correctly. The speed that they transitioned, businesses and doctors, and in this case, here to these online health services, has really not let healthcare providers properly vet any of these teledoc products for security issues or to ensure they're safe to use. I absolutely agree with that. That's the conclusion that Security Scorecard came to as well.

So here's a quote from. The chief R and D officer over at Security Scorecard, we examined the 148 most popular telehealth apps from a number of angles. There are concerns across the board from the development deployment and configuration of the app, patients themselves, as well as a digital supply chain that supports them.

So think about that for a minute, right? These apps themselves are not written properly. They're not implemented properly. The docs have not installed them properly and are not using them properly. What could possibly go wrong?

Now? I know some of you are out there saying right now, Hey, Craig, it's my medical record. So I really don't care that people know I have type one diabetes or whatever your condition might be.

In reality. A lot of people want to know that information, right? So for instance, let's say a scammer knows that you're a type one diabetic. They can now use that to fine-tune yes, the messages to you these phishing messages they've been sending out.

So be very careful, a lot of different alerts, a lot of, by the way, increase chatter out on the dark web. So keep an eye out for that two mentions of telehealth vendors, products like Teladoc, Careclicks, MeMD jumped dramatically on the dark web after the pandemic began. No big surprise there,.

 All right. Stick around. When we come back, we're going to talk about online voting and we're going to compare a little bit to banking. You can do banking online. Why can't I vote online? What's going on here?

Hey, stick around. You're listening to the Craig Peterson show here on WGAN.

We'll be right back with a whole lot more and make sure you tune in as well on Wednesday mornings. You can, of course, hear me at about seven 30 with Mr. Matt Gagnon as he goes through some of the news of the week.

So we'll be right back.

---

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 explains Voting secrecy and privacy and why online-voting is not ready for prime time and how Mail-in voting is ripe for fraud.

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

---

Read More:

Managed IT Providers: The Cyber-Threat Actors' Gateway to SMBs

Think You're Spending Enough on Security?

DHS Braces For 'Potential EMP Attack' As Presidential Election Nears

US Sanctions Russian Attackers for 2020 Election Interference

Cyber-Risks Explode With Move to Telehealth Services

Why online voting is harder than online banking

Price gouging and defective products rampant on Amazon, reports find

Ransomware Has Gone Corporate—and Gotten More Cruel

---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] We're about to talk about online voting. I know you've heard a lot about the Mail-in voting, right? Both sides of that, as well as the regular voting booths and stuff. But we're going to talk about on-line.

Hey, of course, you're listening to Craig Peterson here on news radio 98.5 AM and AM 560 thanks for joining us today. Make sure you join me on Wednesday mornings as well. With Mr. Matt Gagnon in fact, you can listen to him every morning, Monday to Friday, as he covers all the latest in news here throughout the country, as well as right here in Maine. It's about the only place you can get. The good UpToDate news for Maine is right here. So I'm so glad you have decided to spend a little time with me here on Saturday afternoon.

We're worried about our elections this year and I think for very good reason. Frankly, I'm not that worried about the Russians or the Chinese, because they could certainly sway votes, but how many they're going to sway?

I am worried about some of these big tech companies. I'm very worried about Google. I saw a study that was done on Google, comparing elections here over the last two presidential cycles and how Google seems to have been manipulating the results. We know right now, Google. Is blocking certain conservative speech.

There was a great article that came up this week, that I don't think I shared it with most people. I did send it out to a few people. It might be of interest to most of you on the list, but the article was talking about how conservative media if you can believe this right, conservative media is dominating the social media sites right now.

And we're seeing out of the top 10 pages over on Facebook are on the conservative slash liberal, but classic, liberal side libertarian side of things. So you've got people that are right up on the top, and I'm glad to see that Facebook's top 10 is devoted to calculating who's on which Facebook page.

How many people are talking, what kind of engagement is there? But I'm looking right now of Franklin Graham, Donald Trump, 2020 voters, Ben Shapiro twice. He must have two pages. David Harris, Fox News, Sarah Pailin, Ben Shapiro.

I know Dan Bongino pops in there and some of the others as well. So there is a lot going on in the online space that is conservative. People are talking about finally, some of the real issues that are out there. Not just, quoting the socialist mantras that we've been hearing for. so long. Not that I have an opinion on the matter, frankly.

Let's talk about what's happening with the elections here from the computer side because I was asked by Matt this past Wednesday morning about online banking. Saying, how can we do online banking? Matt asked why can't we do online voting. That is actually a very good question and what it all boils down to frankly, is secrecy and privacy.

We count on our ballots being secret, no one can coerce us into voting a certain way. Now, maybe somebody can see, Oh, you took a blue card or a red card. That means you are a Democrat or Republican or whatever it might be. So they might go that far, but they don't know who you voted for.

Then in the general election, everybody gets the same card to vote with. They all get the same slate of candidates and then historically, anyways, you go into the voting booth. You close the curtain behind you, and now you spend a few minutes voting.

That is the reason why it's illegal in most jurisdictions for you to take a picture of your ballot. And people have complained about that. There've been court cases saying, Hey, this is my right to free speech look, guy. I voted for the XYZ candidate. The problem with that and the reason it's illegal is that you could be coerced. You might be taking that picture and someone can coerce you and say, you didn't vote for the right people. So I'm going to beat you. Shoot you. Bat you over the head. Burndown your business. The kind of things that demonstrators do. Not rioters, they're not rioters, the demonstrators do. Then you could also have somebody who's saying, okay, great. You voted the right way. Here's your pack of cigarettes, which has happened. A lot in major cities as they have people into the voting booth, or maybe there's some other method of payment, but that's all about secrecy. That's all about privacy.

The banks count on you and me reviewing our bank statements every once in a while, making sure that what we are saying that we are paying is right or it's wrong. The banks even realize that there is a lot of fraud and wast. Even in the system that they have with the checks and balances banks have, they're saying right now, according to the Nielsen report, that credit card fraud costs the world almost $28 billion in 2018. That's real money, that is fraud.

Now, remember that there are credit cards nowadays are coming with those chips in them, finally. I first actually saw them in use when I was over in Europe. It was really strange because everybody just stuck their card in. In Europe, not only have the smart card with the little chip on it, but they have a pin that you have to enter in. So you buy a beer for instance. You put your card in the reader, which they bring to you, they don't take your card away. Then you put it into the reader and you punch in your pin and now it's paid for, and the bank knows that shoe. They saved themselves some money because they, it wasn't just taken into the back and that magstripe duplicated, and now the bad guys can sell your credit card.

That happened in Merrimack, New Hampshire. I saw some charges that were filed. So I'm not sure if they were convicted or these were certainly the allegations involved, but apparently one of these chain restaurants had the manager and some of the employees doing the naughty. They were duplicating the credit cards.

So banking isn't the same. With banking, it's the opposite. In many ways of confidentiality, the bank knows the transactions you have made. The merchants, know the transactions you have made. You've probably gotten emails from your bank saying, Hey, did you buy this here? There? Did you mean to buy this twice? You got charged twice for the exact same amount, like five minutes apart from each other, is that correct? Or tips, Hey, you left this amount in the tip, was that right or not? So that's the big deal.

The secret ballot once you've dropped that paper ballot into a ballot box. It's mixed together with all the other ballots. It cannot be identified as you, it's very hard for anyone to link a ballot to a specific voter and I think that is a wonderful thing.

There are some secure digital voting systems and they are designed to track a ballot from beginning to end but I think that actually defeats part of the purpose of voting.

I know, I can think of one occasion where I said that I voted one way, but in reality, I've voted in another way and I just didn't want people to know, which way I voted, because I thought I would be pummeled and quite literally. But yeah, if you don't have a secret ballot, that's just not going to happen.

Be very careful with this. Because even the bank systems with all of the encryption they're doing, all of the security they have in place, all of this crypto-technology they're using to track it all. Even all of that isn't safe. So you already know. I don't like mail-in ballots being sent out to a whole of the voters. It's ripe for fraud and we are a long way away before we can count on online voting, being safe.

Hey, you're listening to Craig Peterson here on WGAN stick around when we get back, we're going to talk about price gouging and defective products from an online store whose name I think might surprise you.

Stick around. We'll be right back on WGAN.

---

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