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

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

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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] 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.

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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 explains third-party sellers on Amazon and why it is not all it is being made up to be and why?

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] You've probably been shopping online and some of these retailers include some of the biggest ones out there have been price, gouging, us, and shipping defective products. We'll talk about who and why and what you can do.

Hey, welcome back everybody. Craig Peterson here, he listening to news radio 98.5 FM and AM 560 thanks for joining us today. You might also be listening [email protected] and you can find me on most major podcasting platforms out there.

So welcome. Welcome. So glad to have y'all here.

Online shopping, right? It's a pretty big deal. It has been growing a lot. I'm looking at some stats here, statistics and in 2014 online shopping accounted for about 1.3. trillion dollars in sales. That's a lot of money, isn't it, online? So that was six years ago. Last year, it more about tripled to $3.5 trillion. And 2020 is expected to be $4.2 trillion. So, up about what, 20% from last year, it might even be higher than that. I think just because so many of us are shopping online, and it's probably going to hit about 7 trillion within the next three or four years. It's absolutely amazing.

We're talking about 2 billion online shoppers. There are roughly almost 8 billion people in the world and just over a quarter of them are online shoppers, almost 5% of people shop online at least once per month. Some great stats here, put together on sleek note.com, I am running through. 63.3% of shopping journeys start online. We've known that for a long time. So no matter whether or not you have a hard goods store or not, most people, 63% are starting online, and then they're going into the stores.

About half of eCommerce sales are made through mobile devices this year, about half 49.2%. 54% of eCommerce sales are going to be made through mobile devices as of next year. Mobile devices are at, by the way. It's why, if you have a business website, you need to make sure you are mobile-first in this day and age, not desktop first. But look at who's going to your site, like my site at Craig Peterson.com. My statistics show me that most people, 60 to 70% are going to Craig peterson.com from their desktops, not from mobile devices. I'm still a desktop-first kind of website, but you have to account for those mobile users.

Amazon accounts for almost half of all US eCommerce sales this year, 47% and it's going by next year. It's going to account for about half of all of us sales. 80% of online shoppers and 63% of mobile shoppers think that new technologies and innovations will improve their experience. Online shopping, I don't think anyone can deny is a very big thing. If you're a business and you don't have a great online presence, you got to pull up your socks.

I've got to say, I do not have a great online presence and I am in the process of pulling up my socks. Okay. I have been working pretty hard on redoing it and I had hoped I have the new site up by last weekend, but it wasn't.

I'm not going to promise it'll be up this weekend either. Everything takes longer. We just had some of the other things going on. We've got a new customer out there right now, and we're busy with them. Multiple installations and multiple sites here. Try and tighten up their security. So cobbler's kids.

What we're going to talk about right now are price gouging and defective products.

Did you know that about half of the products that are being shipped out right now through Amazon are from what's called Amazon Marketplace? The Amazon marketplace is third party companies that are selling using Amazon's technology. So Amazon will charge them a percentage. Amazon will stock their product and charge them for the inventory, the space in the racks, et cetera. Then Amazon will try and sell it to you and then ship it to you. You may not be aware of that, but the problem that we're seeing right now is that many of these third-party marketplace companies are bad actors, is what Amazon calls them. And that's true.

They are bad actors, according to Amazon. In a corporate blog post, they said we have suspended more than 3,900 selling accounts in our US store alone for violating our fair pricing policies. We've been partnering directly with law enforcement agencies to combat price gougers and hold them accountable.

Between May and August, Public Citizen found that ordinary antibacterial hand soap, which usually sells for around a buck and a half was going for $7. That's how almost a 500% pricing increase for antibacterial hand soap. They also found instances of markups of a thousand percent or more on things like disposable face masks, they were selling for $40 instead of $4.

Cornstarch selling for $9 instead of 90 cents. So it's a big deal here, but the report is also saying something interesting. It's troubling that so much effort was put into blaming third-party sellers, but so little effort was made to stop the price increases including on the product sold by Amazon directly.

Amazon is not merely a victim in the price gouging on its marketplace, it is a perpetrator. Interesting report.

There are other reports. There's one that was released this week by US PIR G found that erratic pricing for staples, things like paper towels, Kleenex, flour, bleach is still persisting over there on Amazon. So you'll find [email protected]. I'm not actually sure what that stands for, but they are watching consumer pricing and trying to protect consumers according to their website. So it's really interesting what's going on.

Now, personally, I don't have as much of a problem with what they're calling price gouging as other people do. If the demand goes up, the price goes up. If the price goes up, the profit goes up over the profit goes up. More people are going to get into that business, which is going to drive the price down. That's just the way it has always worked. Now they call it capitalism, but it's been the way that people have interacted with other people since the Dawn of time, when someone traded a rock for another rock, or a leg off of a lamb for a few chickens. It's just the way it has worked and always worked.

So I would rather, for instance, these guys and gals and have generators. If I've been storing generators for two or three years, and I have them and they're not being sold very quickly because nobody needs them. But now there is a massive power outage. I have these generators, but it's cost me money to store them. Or let's say I have to ship them up from Florida. So now I have to pay the trucking costs. Plus the higher cost of the generators in Florida. Why should I not be able to pass that along to the consumer? If I can't pass along to consumers, guess what? I'm not shipping generators up from Florida or water down to Florida after a hurricane, from New England, because I can't recoup my costs. This is a difficult thing. So keep an eye out when you're shopping online. Even at Amazon, compare it with Walmart.com.

They're trying to make a huge hit against our friends over at Amazon and they're doing a good job.

All right, we're going to talk about ransomware.

You're listening to Craig Peterson right here on WGAN.

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 third-party sellers on Amazon and why it is not all it is being made up to be and why?

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] You've probably been shopping online and some of these retailers include some of the biggest ones out there have been price, gouging, us, and shipping defective products. We'll talk about who and why and what you can do.

Hey, welcome back everybody. Craig Peterson here, he listening to news radio 98.5 FM and AM 560 thanks for joining us today. You might also be listening [email protected] and you can find me on most major podcasting platforms out there.

So welcome. Welcome. So glad to have y'all here.

Online shopping, right? It's a pretty big deal.  It has been growing a lot. I'm looking at some stats here, statistics and in 2014 online shopping accounted for about 1.3. trillion dollars in sales. That's a lot of money, isn't it, online? So that was six years ago. Last year, it more about tripled to $3.5 trillion. And 2020 is expected to be $4.2 trillion. So, up about what, 20% from last year, it might even be higher than that. I think just because so many of us are shopping online, and it's probably going to hit about 7 trillion within the next three or four years. It's absolutely amazing.

We're talking about 2 billion online shoppers. There are roughly almost 8 billion people in the world and just over a quarter of them are online shoppers, almost 5% of people shop online at least once per month. Some great stats here, put together on sleek note.com, I am running through. 63.3% of shopping journeys start online. We've known that for a long time. So no matter whether or not you have a hard goods store or not, most people, 63% are starting online, and then they're going into the stores.

About half of eCommerce sales are made through mobile devices this year, about half 49.2%. 54% of eCommerce sales are going to be made through mobile devices as of next year. Mobile devices are at, by the way. It's why, if you have a business website, you need to make sure you are mobile-first in this day and age, not desktop first. But look at who's going to your site, like my site at Craig Peterson.com. My statistics show me that most people, 60 to 70% are going to Craig peterson.com from their desktops, not from mobile devices.  I'm still a desktop-first kind of website, but you have to account for those mobile users.

Amazon accounts for almost half of all US eCommerce sales this year, 47% and it's going by next year. It's going to account for about half of all of us sales. 80% of online shoppers and 63% of mobile shoppers think that new technologies and innovations will improve their experience. Online shopping, I don't think anyone can deny is a very big thing. If you're a business and you don't have a great online presence, you got to pull up your socks.

 I've got to say, I do not have a great online presence and I am in the process of pulling up my socks. Okay. I have been working pretty hard on redoing it and I had hoped I have the new site up by last weekend, but it wasn't.

I'm not going to promise it'll be up this weekend either. Everything takes longer. We just had some of the other things going on. We've got a new customer out there right now, and we're busy with them. Multiple installations and multiple sites here. Try and tighten up their security. So cobbler's kids.

What we're going to talk about right now are price gouging and defective products.

Did you know that about half of the products that are being shipped out right now through Amazon are from what's called Amazon Marketplace? The Amazon marketplace is third party companies that are selling using Amazon's technology. So Amazon will charge them a percentage. Amazon will stock their product and charge them for the inventory, the space in the racks, et cetera. Then Amazon will try and sell it to you and then ship it to you. You may not be aware of that, but the problem that we're seeing right now is that many of these third-party marketplace companies are bad actors, is what Amazon calls them. And that's true.

They are bad actors, according to Amazon. In a corporate blog post, they said we have suspended more than 3,900 selling accounts in our US store alone for violating our fair pricing policies.  We've been partnering directly with law enforcement agencies to combat price gougers and hold them accountable.

Between May and August, Public Citizen found that ordinary antibacterial hand soap, which usually sells for around a buck and a half was going for $7. That's how almost a 500% pricing increase for antibacterial hand soap. They also found instances of markups of a thousand percent or more on things like disposable face masks, they were selling for $40 instead of $4.

Cornstarch selling for $9 instead of 90 cents. So it's a big deal here, but the report is also saying something interesting. It's troubling that so much effort was put into blaming third-party sellers, but so little effort was made to stop the price increases including on the product sold by Amazon directly.

Amazon is not merely a victim in the price gouging on its marketplace, it is a perpetrator. Interesting report.

There are other reports. There's one that was released this week by US PIR G found that erratic pricing for staples, things like paper towels, Kleenex, flour, bleach is still persisting over there on Amazon. So you'll find [email protected]. I'm not actually sure what that stands for, but they are watching consumer pricing and trying to protect consumers according to their website. So it's really interesting what's going on.

Now, personally, I don't have as much of a problem with what they're calling price gouging as other people do. If the demand goes up, the price goes up. If the price goes up, the profit goes up over the profit goes up. More people are going to get into that business, which is going to drive the price down. That's just the way it has always worked. Now they call it capitalism, but it's been the way that people have interacted with other people since the Dawn of time, when someone traded a rock for another rock, or a leg off of a lamb for a few chickens. It's just the way it has worked and always worked.

So I would rather, for instance, these guys and gals and have generators. If I've been storing generators for two or three years, and I have them and they're not being sold very quickly because nobody needs them. But now there is a massive power outage. I have these generators, but it's cost me money to store them. Or let's say I have to ship them up from Florida. So now I have to pay the trucking costs. Plus the higher cost of the generators in Florida. Why should I not be able to pass that along to the consumer? If I can't pass along to consumers, guess what? I'm not shipping generators up from Florida or water down to Florida after a hurricane, from New England, because I can't recoup my costs. This is a difficult thing. So keep an eye out when you're shopping online. Even at Amazon, compare it with Walmart.com.

They're trying to make a huge hit against our friends over at Amazon and they're doing a good job.

All right, we're going to talk about ransomware.

You're listening to Craig Peterson right here on WGAN.

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 the new Corporate face of Ransomware called Ransomware-as-a-Service or RaaS. How it works and what it means for you the small business owner.

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] Odds are pretty good, actually that you've already been hit with ransomware. Raise your arm if it's happened to you, put your hand up. Yep. Yep. I see you. it has gotten a lot worse lately.

You're listening to Craig Peterson right here on news radio 98.5 FM, AM 560, and of course, [email protected]. Thanks for joining me today. And of course, during the week, every morning, Matt Gagnon is on Monday through Friday. You can listen to him during your morning drives and I'm on with him on Wednesdays as well at seven 34.

We've talked about a lot today and if you missed any of it, you can find it online at my website. You can also subscribe to my podcasts if you would like. Can just go to Craig peterson.com/itunes. Hopefully, I have earned a five-star rating from you. And if that's the case by all means go, if not, then don't. Hopefully, I have, we put a lot of work into this every week. I do certainly. My wife helps out with it. She does a lot of editing of the podcasts and putting everything together. Of course, we put it up on the radio stations. Appreciate all of the work Danny does there and just getting it all together. It is a lot of work and I'd love to hear from you if you have any comments or questions, by all means, let me know. Or, if you're interested in attending some of these training that I'm scheduling over the next few weeks. Drop me a note. Just email me M E @craigpetersawn.com. I'd love to hear from you. And if you'd like to get my weekly newsletter and find out a little bit more about what's going on through the three-minute emails. So then I'm going to be sending out and I call them three minutes because you're going to get a tip, in just about three minutes, as well as some action items that you can do. So you can get that by going to Craig peterson.com/subscribe, pretty easy. And I am not, I'm going to nail you. I'm not one of those people that just chugs away trying to sell you something. Just to ask anybody who has subscribed to that email list. I send those things out and I do respond to emails. Might take me a few days. Sometimes depends on where I am and what's going on. But just me, ME @craigpeterson.com.

Ransomware has taken a turn for the worse. And there's a great article by Brian Barrett up on Wired, this week. And I've got it up on my website as well @craigpeterson.com. But ransomware has gone corporate now. It's gotten a lot crueler. These operators, just the latest groups here to adopt what really looks like a professional attitude. This group is called Dark Side. Now, in case you don't know how this works you probably have misconceptions about how the whole ransomware business runs.

It's a business now, and you can make money, millions of dollars running a ransomware business. Now you might think that you have to go out and you have to hire a programmer and, maybe a few programmers and write some software that goes out and first of all, of course, you got to find a hack that works. What have people not yet patched on their windows boxes or maybe what have they not changed on their firewalls they haven't patched them up, so right. That would be step one, right? A logical step one. So you've got to find this.

Then of course, if people start patching that, then you've got to find the next one and you got to have, so you've got the hackers upfront, right? So you've gotta have a team of hackers.

Then what do you have to have? Let me see you need some programmers who can now program to use those hacks to your best benefit. It's going to crawl the internet. It's going to find these systems that are vulnerable. Then what you're going to have to do is have another team of programmers that are going to have to write code, to infect those machines, using the hack that was found by your hacker team.

Once that hacker team has found that, and you now have a hack that works. You now have to get it out in people's hands. So you have to have somebody that writes some emails that are phishing style. That's how most of it's spread, nowadays and that fishing style has to get people to click on it. It's not like the Nigerian Prince scams. Those are, those were so 1990s. No, we're talking about some professional email. So let me see how many people do we have. We've got the hackers and that's a few people, right? And so they're probably going to be mostly full time because hacks don't work forever and then you gotta have the programmers that can program to find machines that are vulnerable. Then you have to have the programmers that take that hack into those vulnerable machines and can now encrypt all of their data. Then you've got to send the information back from the machines that have been encrypted to let you know, Hey, this machine has been encrypted here, so how much money do we want out of these people, We need Bitcoin? So we have to have somebody that manages the Bitcoin account, make sure the money's coming in and then we have to have other people that send it back. Doesn't that make sense to you? As that's the way it would have to work.

You would be wrong. Yes. All you need nowadays to become a ransomware corporation is anywhere from 20 to a hundred dollars. You go onto the dark web, which is very easy to get on to. I've given you guys instructions on that before here on the radio show because there are legitimate reasons to go out onto the dark web, but you go on the dark web and you pay.

In fact, did you realize that you don't even have to buy the ransomware software anymore? Yeah. You could pay 20 bucks for some ransomware software, but now there are companies that provide ransomware as a service, and these ransomware-as-a-service companies like DarkSide, which is what I'm talking about right now, they'll do it all for you. They'll just take a percentage of the profits if you will, the money that you're swindling out of all of these companies that are out there. Yeah.

So these people, this is amazing, they've got a venture capitalist friendly pitch deck that they use. They're obviously not as strict and they say in this pitch deck that we created DarkSide because we didn't find the perfect product for us. This is the latest in a strain of ransomware. That's built to shake down big game targets for millions of years dollars with attacks that have this air of professionalism.

They've got tech support people. They've got real-time live chat software so that the victims of your ransomware can call. They don't know what's going on. They didn't patch their systems. They weren't patched up to date. Usually, you have a few weeks between the time that a patch is released and the bad guys really start going after it. Right now, you might even have a month or two.

Heck, it took the huge hugest attack, right where over 200 million people stolen from Equifax, all of your personal information, it took them about six months. So no, after a new hack comes out, you might have a few.

But these guys, they just take care of it for you.

If you haven't patched because you don't know how to patch or you don't want to patch, it's not your core business. I haven't hired a good Managed Services Provider (MSP). No one's going to come after me. These guys come after you.

Now they'd love to get their ransomware paws on to a city government computer, or they'd love to get them on to Equifax, again, but they just as soon get them on you and your personal computer.

How do the bad guys know that you have millions of dollars to pay in ransom? Because if it's on your computer, you're a 70, 80, 90-year-old retiree. You don't have a whole lot of cash sitting around, at least a pretty unlikely. If you're a very small business, you're not going to have a lot of cash sitting around. If you're a big business if you're a hospital, a school, a nonprofit, government target you do. So how do they find out?

Ransomware today isn't the ransomware of yesteryear. The ransomware of today gets onto your computer. It starts spreading laterally inside your network, unbeknownst to you because you didn't bother investing in the right kind of hardware or software to track any of this stuff.

So now it's on a bunch of your business machines and it gives the bad guys a back door now. Where they go onto your machines and poke around. Their software is even automated. It looks for word documents, Excel spreadsheets, all kinds of documents, even PDFs that might be of interest to them. Then they'd start poking around and say, Whoa, wait a minute.

Here we're into a police department. I wonder what they would pay to keep all of their records, to get them all back or to keep them secure. Or I wonder what this business would pay to us to not release all of their documents. So they download all these documents from you. And the now they've got it figured out. So they actually do have a team that sits there and analyzes it and says, okay, I think we can get. $2 million out of this business or this government agency. They have all of your documents in hand and so they will now present you with a ransom. They will encrypt your machines, just like yesteryear, just like the good old days, they'll encrypt your machines. Then they will say, Hey, listen here. Now you pay up.

It's only $2 million who can afford it. You can afford it. If you pay up, we'll give you a key. We even have tech support people. In fact, you probably are on a real-time chat right now and those tech support people are going to give you a hug and they are going to take care of you. They're going to decrypt your files.

Odds are, by the way, only about 50% that even if you pay the ransom, you get all your files back. Then they'll say here's the other edge of that sword. Hey, by the way, if you don't pay. By the way, the price is going up in three days, but if you don't pay, we're going to release all of your files to the dark web. We're going to post them up there and they're going to be in the hands of your competitors, or whoever wants to get their hands on it.

By the way, depending on the industry you're in, that's only a 10-year federal prison sentence and how many hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines, nothing to worry about.

They have turned ransomware into a corporate entity. It is very scary.

Make sure you are on my email list. So you can get those three-minute pieces of training. You can attend my free training everything. Especially if you are a C-level within a corporation, if you're just an individual you're going to get some great stuff. You're going to learn stuff.

Really I am trying to train business people on what they should be doing with their systems and with their personnel.

All right. Have a great weekend, everybody.

I'll be back Wednesday morning with Mr. Matt. Gagnon at about seven 34. We'll talk to you then.

You've been listening to Craig Peterson on news radio 98.5, and AM 560.

Have a great week, everybody.

---

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 the new Corporate face of Ransomware called Ransomware-as-a-Service or RaaS.  How it works and what it means for you the small business owner.

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] Odds are pretty good, actually that you've already been hit with ransomware. Raise your arm if it's happened to you, put your hand up. Yep. Yep. I see you. it has gotten a lot worse lately.

You're listening to Craig Peterson right here on news radio 98.5 FM, AM 560, and of course, [email protected]. Thanks for joining me today. And of course, during the week, every morning, Matt Gagnon is on Monday through Friday. You can listen to him during your morning drives and I'm on with him on Wednesdays as well at seven 34.

We've talked about a lot today and if you missed any of it, you can find it online at my website. You can also subscribe to my podcasts if you would like. Can just go to Craig peterson.com/itunes. Hopefully, I have earned a five-star rating from you. And if that's the case by all means go, if not, then don't. Hopefully, I have, we put a lot of work into this every week. I do certainly. My wife helps out with it. She does a lot of editing of the podcasts and putting everything together. Of course, we put it up on the radio stations. Appreciate all of the work Danny does there and just getting it all together. It is a lot of work and I'd love to hear from you if you have any comments or questions, by all means, let me know. Or, if you're interested in attending some of these training that I'm scheduling over the next few weeks. Drop me a note. Just email me M E @craigpetersawn.com. I'd love to hear from you. And if you'd like to get my weekly newsletter and find out a little bit more about what's going on through the three-minute emails. So then I'm going to be sending out and I call them three minutes because you're going to get a tip, in just about three minutes, as well as some action items that you can do. So you can get that by going to Craig peterson.com/subscribe, pretty easy. And I am not, I'm going to nail you. I'm not one of those people that just chugs away trying to sell you something. Just to ask anybody who has subscribed to that email list.  I send those things out and I do respond to emails. Might take me a few days. Sometimes depends on where I am and what's going on. But just me, ME @craigpeterson.com.

Ransomware has taken a turn for the worse. And there's a great article by Brian Barrett up on Wired, this week. And I've got it up on my website as well @craigpeterson.com. But ransomware has gone corporate now. It's gotten a lot crueler. These operators, just the latest groups here to adopt what really looks like a professional attitude. This group is called Dark Side. Now, in case you don't know how this works you probably have misconceptions about how the whole ransomware business runs.

It's a business now, and you can make money, millions of dollars running a ransomware business. Now you might think that you have to go out and you have to hire a programmer and, maybe a few programmers and write some software that goes out and first of all, of course, you got to find a hack that works. What have people not yet patched on their windows boxes or maybe what have they not changed on their firewalls they haven't patched them up, so right. That would be step one, right? A logical step one. So you've got to find this.

 Then of course, if people start patching that, then you've got to find the next one and you got to have, so you've got the hackers upfront, right? So you've gotta have a team of hackers.

Then what do you have to have? Let me see you need some programmers who can now program to use those hacks to your best benefit. It's going to crawl the internet. It's going to find these systems that are vulnerable. Then what you're going to have to do is have another team of programmers that are going to have to write code, to infect those machines, using the hack that was found by your hacker team.

Once that hacker team has found that, and you now have a hack that works. You now have to get it out in people's hands. So you have to have somebody that writes some emails that are phishing style. That's how most of it's spread, nowadays and that fishing style has to get people to click on it. It's not like the Nigerian Prince scams. Those are, those were so 1990s. No, we're talking about some professional email. So let me see how many people do we have. We've got the hackers and that's a few people, right? And so they're probably going to be mostly full time because hacks don't work forever and then you gotta have the programmers that can program to find machines that are vulnerable. Then you have to have the programmers that take that hack into those vulnerable machines and can now encrypt all of their data. Then you've got to send the information back from the machines that have been encrypted to let you know, Hey, this machine has been encrypted here, so how much money do we want out of these people, We need Bitcoin? So we have to have somebody that manages the Bitcoin account, make sure the money's coming in and then we have to have other people that send it back. Doesn't that make sense to you? As that's the way it would have to work.

You would be wrong. Yes. All you need nowadays to become a ransomware corporation is anywhere from 20 to a hundred dollars. You go onto the dark web, which is very easy to get on to. I've given you guys instructions on that before here on the radio show because there are legitimate reasons to go out onto the dark web, but you go on the dark web and you pay.

 In fact, did you realize that you don't even have to buy the ransomware software anymore? Yeah. You could pay 20 bucks for some ransomware software, but now there are companies that provide ransomware as a service, and these ransomware-as-a-service companies like DarkSide, which is what I'm talking about right now, they'll do it all for you. They'll just take a percentage of the profits if you will, the money that you're swindling out of all of these companies that are out there. Yeah.

So these people, this is amazing, they've got a venture capitalist friendly pitch deck that they use. They're obviously not as strict and they say in this pitch deck that we created DarkSide because we didn't find the perfect product for us. This is the latest in a strain of ransomware. That's built to shake down big game targets for millions of years dollars with attacks that have this air of professionalism.

They've got tech support people. They've got real-time live chat software so that the victims of your ransomware can call.  They don't know what's going on. They didn't patch their systems.  They weren't patched up to date. Usually, you have a few weeks between the time that a patch is released and the bad guys really start going after it. Right now, you might even have a month or two.

Heck, it took the huge hugest attack, right where over 200 million people stolen from Equifax, all of your personal information, it took them about six months. So no, after a new hack comes out, you might have a few.

But these guys, they just take care of it for you.

If you haven't patched because you don't know how to patch or you don't want to patch, it's not your core business. I haven't hired a good Managed Services Provider (MSP). No one's going to come after me. These guys come after you.

Now they'd love to get their ransomware paws on to a city government computer, or they'd love to get them on to Equifax, again, but they just as soon get them on you and your personal computer.

How do the bad guys know that you have millions of dollars to pay in ransom? Because if it's on your computer, you're a 70, 80, 90-year-old retiree. You don't have a whole lot of cash sitting around, at least a pretty unlikely. If you're a very small business, you're not going to have a lot of cash sitting around. If you're a big business if you're a hospital, a school, a nonprofit, government target you do. So how do they find out?

Ransomware today isn't the ransomware of yesteryear. The ransomware of today gets onto your computer. It starts spreading laterally inside your network, unbeknownst to you because you didn't bother investing in the right kind of hardware or software to track any of this stuff.

So now it's on a bunch of your business machines and it gives the bad guys a back door now. Where they go onto your machines and poke around. Their software is even automated. It looks for word documents, Excel spreadsheets, all kinds of documents, even PDFs that might be of interest to them. Then they'd start poking around and say, Whoa, wait a minute.

Here we're into a police department. I wonder what they would pay to keep all of their records, to get them all back or to keep them secure. Or I wonder what this business would pay to us to not release all of their documents. So they download all these documents from you. And the now they've got it figured out. So they actually do have a team that sits there and analyzes it and says, okay, I think we can get. $2 million out of this business or this government agency. They have all of your documents in hand and so they will now present you with a ransom. They will encrypt your machines, just like yesteryear, just like the good old days, they'll encrypt your machines. Then they will say, Hey, listen here. Now you pay up.

 It's only $2 million who can afford it. You can afford it. If you pay up, we'll give you a key. We even have tech support people. In fact, you probably are on a real-time chat right now and those tech support people are going to give you a hug and they are going to take care of you. They're going to decrypt your files.

Odds are, by the way, only about 50% that even if you pay the ransom, you get all your files back. Then they'll say here's the other edge of that sword. Hey, by the way, if you don't pay.  By the way, the price is going up in three days, but if you don't pay, we're going to release all of your files to the dark web. We're going to post them up there and they're going to be in the hands of your competitors, or whoever wants to get their hands on it.

By the way, depending on the industry you're in, that's only a 10-year federal prison sentence and how many hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines, nothing to worry about.

They have turned ransomware into a corporate entity. It is very scary.

Make sure you are on my email list. So you can get those three-minute pieces of training. You can attend my free training everything. Especially if you are a C-level within a corporation, if you're just an individual you're going to get some great stuff. You're going to learn stuff.

Really I am trying to train business people on what they should be doing with their systems and with their personnel.

All right. Have a great weekend, everybody.

I'll be back Wednesday morning with Mr. Matt. Gagnon at about seven 34. We'll talk to you then.

You've been listening to Craig Peterson on news radio 98.5, and AM 560.

Have a great week, everybody.

---

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 the new Corporate face of Ransomware called Ransomware-as-a-Service or RaaS.  How it works and what it means for you the small business owner.

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] Odds are pretty good, actually that you've already been hit with ransomware. Raise your arm if it's happened to you, put your hand up. Yep. Yep. I see you. it has gotten a lot worse lately.

You're listening to Craig Peterson right here on news radio 98.5 FM, AM 560, and of course, [email protected]. Thanks for joining me today. And of course, during the week, every morning, Matt Gagnon is on Monday through Friday. You can listen to him during your morning drives and I'm on with him on Wednesdays as well at seven 34.

We've talked about a lot today and if you missed any of it, you can find it online at my website. You can also subscribe to my podcasts if you would like. Can just go to Craig peterson.com/itunes. Hopefully, I have earned a five-star rating from you. And if that's the case by all means go, if not, then don't. Hopefully, I have, we put a lot of work into this every week. I do certainly. My wife helps out with it. She does a lot of editing of the podcasts and putting everything together. Of course, we put it up on the radio stations. Appreciate all of the work Danny does there and just getting it all together. It is a lot of work and I'd love to hear from you if you have any comments or questions, by all means, let me know. Or, if you're interested in attending some of these training that I'm scheduling over the next few weeks. Drop me a note. Just email me M E @craigpetersawn.com. I'd love to hear from you. And if you'd like to get my weekly newsletter and find out a little bit more about what's going on through the three-minute emails. So then I'm going to be sending out and I call them three minutes because you're going to get a tip, in just about three minutes, as well as some action items that you can do. So you can get that by going to Craig peterson.com/subscribe, pretty easy. And I am not, I'm going to nail you. I'm not one of those people that just chugs away trying to sell you something. Just to ask anybody who has subscribed to that email list.  I send those things out and I do respond to emails. Might take me a few days. Sometimes depends on where I am and what's going on. But just me, ME @craigpeterson.com.

Ransomware has taken a turn for the worse. And there's a great article by Brian Barrett up on Wired, this week. And I've got it up on my website as well @craigpeterson.com. But ransomware has gone corporate now. It's gotten a lot crueler. These operators, just the latest groups here to adopt what really looks like a professional attitude. This group is called Dark Side. Now, in case you don't know how this works you probably have misconceptions about how the whole ransomware business runs.

It's a business now, and you can make money, millions of dollars running a ransomware business. Now you might think that you have to go out and you have to hire a programmer and, maybe a few programmers and write some software that goes out and first of all, of course, you got to find a hack that works. What have people not yet patched on their windows boxes or maybe what have they not changed on their firewalls they haven't patched them up, so right. That would be step one, right? A logical step one. So you've got to find this.

 Then of course, if people start patching that, then you've got to find the next one and you got to have, so you've got the hackers upfront, right? So you've gotta have a team of hackers.

Then what do you have to have? Let me see you need some programmers who can now program to use those hacks to your best benefit. It's going to crawl the internet. It's going to find these systems that are vulnerable. Then what you're going to have to do is have another team of programmers that are going to have to write code, to infect those machines, using the hack that was found by your hacker team.

Once that hacker team has found that, and you now have a hack that works. You now have to get it out in people's hands. So you have to have somebody that writes some emails that are phishing style. That's how most of it's spread, nowadays and that fishing style has to get people to click on it. It's not like the Nigerian Prince scams. Those are, those were so 1990s. No, we're talking about some professional email. So let me see how many people do we have. We've got the hackers and that's a few people, right? And so they're probably going to be mostly full time because hacks don't work forever and then you gotta have the programmers that can program to find machines that are vulnerable. Then you have to have the programmers that take that hack into those vulnerable machines and can now encrypt all of their data. Then you've got to send the information back from the machines that have been encrypted to let you know, Hey, this machine has been encrypted here, so how much money do we want out of these people, We need Bitcoin? So we have to have somebody that manages the Bitcoin account, make sure the money's coming in and then we have to have other people that send it back. Doesn't that make sense to you? As that's the way it would have to work.

You would be wrong. Yes. All you need nowadays to become a ransomware corporation is anywhere from 20 to a hundred dollars. You go onto the dark web, which is very easy to get on to. I've given you guys instructions on that before here on the radio show because there are legitimate reasons to go out onto the dark web, but you go on the dark web and you pay.

 In fact, did you realize that you don't even have to buy the ransomware software anymore? Yeah. You could pay 20 bucks for some ransomware software, but now there are companies that provide ransomware as a service, and these ransomware-as-a-service companies like DarkSide, which is what I'm talking about right now, they'll do it all for you. They'll just take a percentage of the profits if you will, the money that you're swindling out of all of these companies that are out there. Yeah.

So these people, this is amazing, they've got a venture capitalist friendly pitch deck that they use. They're obviously not as strict and they say in this pitch deck that we created DarkSide because we didn't find the perfect product for us. This is the latest in a strain of ransomware. That's built to shake down big game targets for millions of years dollars with attacks that have this air of professionalism.

They've got tech support people. They've got real-time live chat software so that the victims of your ransomware can call.  They don't know what's going on. They didn't patch their systems.  They weren't patched up to date. Usually, you have a few weeks between the time that a patch is released and the bad guys really start going after it. Right now, you might even have a month or two.

Heck, it took the huge hugest attack, right where over 200 million people stolen from Equifax, all of your personal information, it took them about six months. So no, after a new hack comes out, you might have a few.

But these guys, they just take care of it for you.

If you haven't patched because you don't know how to patch or you don't want to patch, it's not your core business. I haven't hired a good Managed Services Provider (MSP). No one's going to come after me. These guys come after you.

Now they'd love to get their ransomware paws on to a city government computer, or they'd love to get them on to Equifax, again, but they just as soon get them on you and your personal computer.

How do the bad guys know that you have millions of dollars to pay in ransom? Because if it's on your computer, you're a 70, 80, 90-year-old retiree. You don't have a whole lot of cash sitting around, at least a pretty unlikely. If you're a very small business, you're not going to have a lot of cash sitting around. If you're a big business if you're a hospital, a school, a nonprofit, government target you do. So how do they find out?

Ransomware today isn't the ransomware of yesteryear. The ransomware of today gets onto your computer. It starts spreading laterally inside your network, unbeknownst to you because you didn't bother investing in the right kind of hardware or software to track any of this stuff.

So now it's on a bunch of your business machines and it gives the bad guys a back door now. Where they go onto your machines and poke around. Their software is even automated. It looks for word documents, Excel spreadsheets, all kinds of documents, even PDFs that might be of interest to them. Then they'd start poking around and say, Whoa, wait a minute.

Here we're into a police department. I wonder what they would pay to keep all of their records, to get them all back or to keep them secure. Or I wonder what this business would pay to us to not release all of their documents. So they download all these documents from you. And the now they've got it figured out. So they actually do have a team that sits there and analyzes it and says, okay, I think we can get. $2 million out of this business or this government agency. They have all of your documents in hand and so they will now present you with a ransom. They will encrypt your machines, just like yesteryear, just like the good old days, they'll encrypt your machines. Then they will say, Hey, listen here. Now you pay up.

 It's only $2 million who can afford it. You can afford it. If you pay up, we'll give you a key. We even have tech support people. In fact, you probably are on a real-time chat right now and those tech support people are going to give you a hug and they are going to take care of you. They're going to decrypt your files.

Odds are, by the way, only about 50% that even if you pay the ransom, you get all your files back. Then they'll say here's the other edge of that sword. Hey, by the way, if you don't pay.  By the way, the price is going up in three days, but if you don't pay, we're going to release all of your files to the dark web. We're going to post them up there and they're going to be in the hands of your competitors, or whoever wants to get their hands on it.

By the way, depending on the industry you're in, that's only a 10-year federal prison sentence and how many hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines, nothing to worry about.

They have turned ransomware into a corporate entity. It is very scary.

Make sure you are on my email list. So you can get those three-minute pieces of training. You can attend my free training everything. Especially if you are a C-level within a corporation, if you're just an individual you're going to get some great stuff. You're going to learn stuff.

Really I am trying to train business people on what they should be doing with their systems and with their personnel.

All right. Have a great weekend, everybody.

I'll be back Wednesday morning with Mr. Matt. Gagnon at about seven 34. We'll talk to you then.

You've been listening to Craig Peterson on news radio 98.5, and AM 560.

Have a great week, everybody.

---

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

Good morning everybody!

I was on WGAN this morning with Matt Gagnon and we began with talking about Online and Mail-in Voting and some of the technical problems with those forms of voting, then we got into what the big Nation-States are hoping to do during this election cycle up to and including the possibility of launching an EMP and what that could mean for us in the US. Let's get into my conversation with Matt on WGAN.

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

---

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Could put us back to those 18 hundred timeframes where we don't have electricity. And it is a scary thing because if they're able to knock out some of our major transmission transformers, we don't have any.

Hey, good morning, everybody. We got to a few different subjects and I ended in a bit of a depressing tone here talking about China in this electromagnetic pulse, apparently, that is being planned. I'll be talking about this a little bit more this weekend as well with Mr. Matt gang all over on a WGAN. So here we go with Matt.

Matt Gagnon: [00:00:43] Craig Peterson joins us now at seven 36 on the WGAN and morning news on this fine Wednesday, Craig, how are you this morning?

Craig Peterson: [00:00:49] Hey, good morning. This is the kind of weather I like. Fall's my favorite season

Matt Gagnon: [00:00:54] Fall also is my favorite season. Although a little bit warmer than it was yesterday. Certainly, it would be good. I think it was like 38 degrees when I woke up in the morning. That might be a little much,

Craig Peterson: [00:01:03] but surprise.

Matt Gagnon: [00:01:04] Yeah, as well as Maine for you. So it was great. Let's get right into things here. there's a lot of stuff I'd like to tackle with you, but, I think I'd like to lead off if you don't mind here with the Russians being back once again, election interference in 2020. What is this all about and what are the United States do about it?

Craig Peterson: [00:01:20] Yeah, who would have known a, the Russians? They've been after us for quite a few years. That's our whole goal really is to upset the elections. They don't appear to have ever had a goal to elect someone specifically, but there is a lot going on right now. The FBI is reporting that they have seen multiple attacks and almost consistent, apparently from Russia, it's hard to know a hundred percent for sure, but it looks like it's from Russia. Against both major campaigns here for the president. So they are targeting the US populace. But in reality, they're going after President Trump's campaign and vice President Biden's campaign, as well as other prominent US persons and members of the US government. We'll see what ends up happening here. It looks like it was actually China that managed to get all of those emails back in the last election cycle. Between the two of them, they're definitely going to cause a few problems this year. But they don't appear to be going after changing the vote, just confusing the heck out of us.

Matt Gagnon: [00:02:32] That was going to be my next question to you was while that is concerning and something we should care about, obviously, what do you think the real threat to the system is? Is there any sort of real concern that there's going to be wholesale problems with voting or votes changed or anything like that? Or is this really just what we saw in 2016, which was like manipulative interference ie they were trying to shape and shift public opinion and doing things like that.

Craig Peterson: [00:02:58] Yeah. That's what we're looking at this year as well. There's a group of Russian trolls, that's what they're called, where they're posting things on social media.

We'll see what ends up happening. But as far as the security of the technology, the election goes. We have 50 state elections all run by our secretaries of state and in every state. That makes it a lot harder for someone to hack our election results. Now, I would expect that some of the websites so that the secretaries of state are publishing the results on some of those websites will probably be hacked and that does give them the opportunity to change votes because frankly, that's all that's been done lately. Is people the news media, even Washington, DC when they're trying to tell you this all up, they go to all 50 websites and they try and pull the final results from there. This year we're expecting they will do more followup than that and actually contact a live person and verify the result totals. Because those could be hacked, but it would be just very difficult, Matt.

Matt Gagnon: [00:04:11] We're speaking with Craig Peterson, our tech guru, who joins us at this time every Wednesday. And of course, you can also hear him on this very station on Saturdays at one o'clock. For his own show where he goes through a lot of these topics in more detail in depth.

Speaking of voting though, online voting is another animal altogether, and it is a great deal harder than other things you do online, for instance, online banking. Why is that, sir?

Craig Peterson: [00:04:34] It has to do with the idea, the concept we've had for many years of having a secret ballot. The whole idea is if it's secret, someone cannot be holding a gun to your head. They can't be trying to influence your vote. They can't take your vote and just do what they want with it as happened in orange County last year. The election cycle out in California, where they were passing out ballots that had the Democrats already selected for you, which just makes voting so much easier. You can't verify. Now the bank counts on you going ahead and checking your bank account every once in a while.

Hopefully. We're all looking at our bank statements to make sure that nothing bad has happened. And even with banking where we have some of these checks and balances in place, we have encryption in place. There is an estimated $28 billion in credit card fraud that occurred in 2018. Teen. So even that isn't perfect.

And now of course we have those chips on our cards that are using more and more. They're still losing money. So the banks expect a fair amount of fraud and in fact, there is some fraud during the elections. There always has been. But we cannot double-check our ballot. We can't check the balance at the end to make sure that the state had tallied our votes properly and still have some sort of privacy or secrecy over our votes.

Matt Gagnon: [00:06:07] We're speaking with Craig Peterson, our tech guru, he joins us this time, every Wednesday. Craig, the other thing that I wanted to check in with you about is this story. You had a, that you sent me this morning about an EMP attack and, and the potential for that as the election nears, as if 2020 wasn't bad enough, is that something that's a realistic possibility?

Craig Peterson: [00:06:26] It is, of course, we're talking about an electromagnetic pulse. The United States had one of these called the Carrington events that occurred naturally and they do occur naturally, right here in Maine. We might remember what happened just North of Quebec, back in the mid-1980s. Where in both cases, we're talking about a solar flare and that's solar flare loss, not the grid electrical grid in Quebec, just from that one solar flare.

Think of all of these power lines as basically antennas so that when you get that mass and pulse of electromagnetic energy coming from that sun out there, it can and does disrupt our grid. In fact, burns out all kinds of things. So I can tell you most assuredly from some of the training I've done for the FBI InfraGard program, that we are addressing that problem.

However, China we know for the last 25 years has been considering an EMP attack as a first strike or even a retaliatory strike against us in the US. So if it were to happen in, it's very easy to do all we're talking about for a manmade electromagnetic pause is a fairly small nuclear bomb that isn't designed really to destroy buildings, but it set off high in the air and that will give a huge blast radius electromagnetically, and could put us back to those 18-hundreds timeframes where we don't have electricity.

This is a scary thing, because if they're able to knock out some of our major transmission transformers, we don't have any, and I'll give you three guesses where these things are made.

Matt Gagnon: [00:08:18] Oh, I don't know. China, and yeah.

Craig Peterson: [00:08:22] We would be completely out of luck there's estimates that if they did this right against us, we could be without power in many areas of the country for at least 18 months, if not for years. So it's a very big concern. They are addressing it, or the power companies are addressing it, but it's very real here. They could shut off a blast. That would cover 1500 miles worth of the United States and knock off all of our computers and even our air conditioners and in some cases our heating systems.

Matt Gagnon: [00:08:58] On that happy note, Craig Peterson has joined us on this fine Wednesday to go over the world of technology.

We'll talk to him again next Wednesday, and again, make sure you tune in on Saturday morning to hear Craig talk about this in more depth. Thanks a lot, Craig. We'll talk to you next week.

---

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

Good morning everybody!

I was on WGAN this morning with Matt Gagnon and we began with talking about Online and Mail-in Voting and some of the technical problems with those forms of voting, then we got into what the big Nation-States are hoping to do during this election cycle up to and including the possibility of launching an EMP and what that could mean for us in the US. Let's get into my conversation with Matt on WGAN.

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

---

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Could put us back to those 18 hundred timeframes where we don't have electricity. And it is a scary thing because if they're able to knock out some of our major transmission transformers, we don't have any.

Hey, good morning, everybody. We got to a few different subjects and I ended in a bit of a depressing tone here talking about China in this electromagnetic pulse, apparently, that is being planned. I'll be talking about this a little bit more this weekend as well with Mr. Matt gang all over on a WGAN. So here we go with Matt.

Matt Gagnon: [00:00:43] Craig Peterson joins us now at seven 36 on the WGAN and morning news on this fine Wednesday, Craig, how are you this morning?

Craig Peterson: [00:00:49] Hey, good morning. This is the kind of weather I like. Fall's my favorite season

Matt Gagnon: [00:00:54] Fall also is my favorite season. Although a little bit warmer than it was yesterday. Certainly, it would be good. I think it was like 38 degrees when I woke up in the morning. That might be a little much,

Craig Peterson: [00:01:03] but surprise.

Matt Gagnon: [00:01:04] Yeah, as well as Maine for you. So it was great. Let's get right into things here. there's a lot of stuff I'd like to tackle with you, but, I think I'd like to lead off if you don't mind here with the Russians being back once again, election interference in 2020. What is this all about and what are the United States do about it?

Craig Peterson: [00:01:20] Yeah, who would have known a, the Russians? They've been after us for quite a few years. That's our whole goal really is to upset the elections. They don't appear to have ever had a goal to elect someone specifically, but there is a lot going on right now. The FBI is reporting that they have seen multiple attacks and almost consistent, apparently from Russia, it's hard to know a hundred percent for sure, but it looks like it's from Russia. Against both major campaigns here for the president. So they are targeting the US populace. But in reality, they're going after President Trump's campaign and vice President Biden's campaign, as well as other prominent US persons and members of the US government. We'll see what ends up happening here. It looks like it was actually China that managed to get all of those emails back in the last election cycle.  Between the two of them, they're definitely going to cause a few problems this year. But they don't appear to be going after changing the vote, just confusing the heck out of us.

Matt Gagnon: [00:02:32] That was going to be my next question to you was while that is concerning and something we should care about, obviously, what do you think the real threat to the system is? Is there any sort of real concern that there's going to be wholesale problems with voting or votes changed or anything like that? Or is this really just what we saw in 2016, which was like manipulative interference ie they were trying to shape and shift public opinion and doing things like that.

Craig Peterson: [00:02:58] Yeah. That's what we're looking at this year as well. There's a group of Russian trolls, that's what they're called, where they're posting things on social media.

We'll see what ends up happening. But as far as the security of the technology, the election goes. We have 50 state elections all run by our secretaries of state and in every state. That makes it a lot harder for someone to hack our election results. Now, I would expect that some of the websites so that the secretaries of state are publishing the results on some of those websites will probably be hacked and that does give them the opportunity to change votes because frankly, that's all that's been done lately. Is people the news media, even Washington, DC when they're trying to tell you this all up, they go to all 50 websites and they try and pull the final results from there. This year we're expecting they will do more followup than that and actually contact a live person and verify the result totals. Because those could be hacked, but it would be just very difficult, Matt.

Matt Gagnon: [00:04:11] We're speaking with Craig Peterson, our tech guru, who joins us at this time every Wednesday. And of course, you can also hear him on this very station on Saturdays at one o'clock. For his own show where he goes through a lot of these topics in more detail in depth.

Speaking of voting though, online voting is another animal altogether, and it is a great deal harder than other things you do online, for instance, online banking. Why is that, sir?

Craig Peterson: [00:04:34] It has to do with the idea, the concept we've had for many years of having a secret ballot. The whole idea is if it's secret, someone cannot be holding a gun to your head. They can't be trying to influence your vote. They can't take your vote and just do what they want with it as happened in orange County last year. The election cycle out in California, where they were passing out ballots that had the Democrats already selected for you, which just makes voting so much easier. You can't verify. Now the bank counts on you going ahead and checking your bank account every once in a while.

Hopefully. We're all looking at our bank statements to make sure that nothing bad has happened. And even with banking where we have some of these checks and balances in place, we have encryption in place. There is an estimated $28 billion in credit card fraud that occurred in 2018. Teen. So even that isn't perfect.

And now of course we have those chips on our cards that are using more and more. They're still losing money. So the banks expect a fair amount of fraud and in fact, there is some fraud during the elections. There always has been. But we cannot double-check our ballot. We can't check the balance at the end to make sure that the state had tallied our votes properly and still have some sort of privacy or secrecy over our votes.

Matt Gagnon: [00:06:07] We're speaking with Craig Peterson, our tech guru, he joins us this time, every Wednesday. Craig, the other thing that I wanted to check in with you about is this story. You had a, that you sent me this morning about an EMP attack and, and the potential for that as the election nears, as if 2020 wasn't bad enough, is that something that's a realistic possibility?

Craig Peterson: [00:06:26] It is, of course, we're talking about an electromagnetic pulse. The United States had one of these called the Carrington events that occurred naturally and they do occur naturally, right here in Maine. We might remember what happened just North of Quebec, back in the mid-1980s. Where in both cases, we're talking about a solar flare and that's solar flare loss, not the grid electrical grid in Quebec, just from that one solar flare.

Think of all of these power lines as basically antennas so that when you get that mass and pulse of electromagnetic energy coming from that sun out there, it can and does disrupt our grid. In fact, burns out all kinds of things. So I can tell you most assuredly from some of the training I've done for the FBI InfraGard program, that we are addressing that problem.

However, China we know for the last 25 years has been considering an EMP attack as a first strike or even a retaliatory strike against us in the US. So if it were to happen in, it's very easy to do all we're talking about for a manmade electromagnetic pause is a fairly small nuclear bomb that isn't designed really to destroy buildings, but it set off high in the air and that will give a huge blast radius electromagnetically, and could put us back to those 18-hundreds timeframes where we don't have electricity.

 This is a scary thing, because if they're able to knock out some of our major transmission transformers, we don't have any, and I'll give you three guesses where these things are made.

Matt Gagnon: [00:08:18] Oh, I don't know. China, and yeah.

Craig Peterson: [00:08:22] We would be completely out of luck there's estimates that if they did this right against us, we could be without power in many areas of the country for at least 18 months, if not for years. So it's a very big concern. They are addressing it, or the power companies are addressing it, but it's very real here. They could shut off a blast. That would cover 1500 miles worth of the United States and knock off all of our computers and even our air conditioners and in some cases our heating systems.

Matt Gagnon: [00:08:58] On that happy note, Craig Peterson has joined us on this fine Wednesday to go over the world of technology.

We'll talk to him again next Wednesday, and again, make sure you tune in on Saturday morning to hear Craig talk about this in more depth. Thanks a lot, Craig. We'll talk to you next week.

--- 

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

Good morning everybody!

I was on WGAN this morning with Matt Gagnon and we began with talking about Online and Mail-in Voting and some of the technical problems with those forms of voting, then we got into what the big Nation-States are hoping to do during this election cycle up to and including the possibility of launching an EMP and what that could mean for us in the US. Let's get into my conversation with Matt on WGAN.

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

---

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Could put us back to those 18 hundred timeframes where we don't have electricity. And it is a scary thing because if they're able to knock out some of our major transmission transformers, we don't have any.

Hey, good morning, everybody. We got to a few different subjects and I ended in a bit of a depressing tone here talking about China in this electromagnetic pulse, apparently, that is being planned. I'll be talking about this a little bit more this weekend as well with Mr. Matt gang all over on a WGAN. So here we go with Matt.

Matt Gagnon: [00:00:43] Craig Peterson joins us now at seven 36 on the WGAN and morning news on this fine Wednesday, Craig, how are you this morning?

Craig Peterson: [00:00:49] Hey, good morning. This is the kind of weather I like. Fall's my favorite season

Matt Gagnon: [00:00:54] Fall also is my favorite season. Although a little bit warmer than it was yesterday. Certainly, it would be good. I think it was like 38 degrees when I woke up in the morning. That might be a little much,

Craig Peterson: [00:01:03] but surprise.

Matt Gagnon: [00:01:04] Yeah, as well as Maine for you. So it was great. Let's get right into things here. there's a lot of stuff I'd like to tackle with you, but, I think I'd like to lead off if you don't mind here with the Russians being back once again, election interference in 2020. What is this all about and what are the United States do about it?

Craig Peterson: [00:01:20] Yeah, who would have known a, the Russians? They've been after us for quite a few years. That's our whole goal really is to upset the elections. They don't appear to have ever had a goal to elect someone specifically, but there is a lot going on right now. The FBI is reporting that they have seen multiple attacks and almost consistent, apparently from Russia, it's hard to know a hundred percent for sure, but it looks like it's from Russia. Against both major campaigns here for the president. So they are targeting the US populace. But in reality, they're going after President Trump's campaign and vice President Biden's campaign, as well as other prominent US persons and members of the US government. We'll see what ends up happening here. It looks like it was actually China that managed to get all of those emails back in the last election cycle.  Between the two of them, they're definitely going to cause a few problems this year. But they don't appear to be going after changing the vote, just confusing the heck out of us.

Matt Gagnon: [00:02:32] That was going to be my next question to you was while that is concerning and something we should care about, obviously, what do you think the real threat to the system is? Is there any sort of real concern that there's going to be wholesale problems with voting or votes changed or anything like that? Or is this really just what we saw in 2016, which was like manipulative interference ie they were trying to shape and shift public opinion and doing things like that.

Craig Peterson: [00:02:58] Yeah. That's what we're looking at this year as well. There's a group of Russian trolls, that's what they're called, where they're posting things on social media.

We'll see what ends up happening. But as far as the security of the technology, the election goes. We have 50 state elections all run by our secretaries of state and in every state. That makes it a lot harder for someone to hack our election results. Now, I would expect that some of the websites so that the secretaries of state are publishing the results on some of those websites will probably be hacked and that does give them the opportunity to change votes because frankly, that's all that's been done lately. Is people the news media, even Washington, DC when they're trying to tell you this all up, they go to all 50 websites and they try and pull the final results from there. This year we're expecting they will do more followup than that and actually contact a live person and verify the result totals. Because those could be hacked, but it would be just very difficult, Matt.

Matt Gagnon: [00:04:11] We're speaking with Craig Peterson, our tech guru, who joins us at this time every Wednesday. And of course, you can also hear him on this very station on Saturdays at one o'clock. For his own show where he goes through a lot of these topics in more detail in depth.

Speaking of voting though, online voting is another animal altogether, and it is a great deal harder than other things you do online, for instance, online banking. Why is that, sir?

Craig Peterson: [00:04:34] It has to do with the idea, the concept we've had for many years of having a secret ballot. The whole idea is if it's secret, someone cannot be holding a gun to your head. They can't be trying to influence your vote. They can't take your vote and just do what they want with it as happened in orange County last year. The election cycle out in California, where they were passing out ballots that had the Democrats already selected for you, which just makes voting so much easier. You can't verify. Now the bank counts on you going ahead and checking your bank account every once in a while.

Hopefully. We're all looking at our bank statements to make sure that nothing bad has happened. And even with banking where we have some of these checks and balances in place, we have encryption in place. There is an estimated $28 billion in credit card fraud that occurred in 2018. Teen. So even that isn't perfect.

And now of course we have those chips on our cards that are using more and more. They're still losing money. So the banks expect a fair amount of fraud and in fact, there is some fraud during the elections. There always has been. But we cannot double-check our ballot. We can't check the balance at the end to make sure that the state had tallied our votes properly and still have some sort of privacy or secrecy over our votes.

Matt Gagnon: [00:06:07] We're speaking with Craig Peterson, our tech guru, he joins us this time, every Wednesday. Craig, the other thing that I wanted to check in with you about is this story. You had a, that you sent me this morning about an EMP attack and, and the potential for that as the election nears, as if 2020 wasn't bad enough, is that something that's a realistic possibility?

Craig Peterson: [00:06:26] It is, of course, we're talking about an electromagnetic pulse. The United States had one of these called the Carrington events that occurred naturally and they do occur naturally, right here in Maine. We might remember what happened just North of Quebec, back in the mid-1980s. Where in both cases, we're talking about a solar flare and that's solar flare loss, not the grid electrical grid in Quebec, just from that one solar flare.

Think of all of these power lines as basically antennas so that when you get that mass and pulse of electromagnetic energy coming from that sun out there, it can and does disrupt our grid. In fact, burns out all kinds of things. So I can tell you most assuredly from some of the training I've done for the FBI InfraGard program, that we are addressing that problem.

However, China we know for the last 25 years has been considering an EMP attack as a first strike or even a retaliatory strike against us in the US. So if it were to happen in, it's very easy to do all we're talking about for a manmade electromagnetic pause is a fairly small nuclear bomb that isn't designed really to destroy buildings, but it set off high in the air and that will give a huge blast radius electromagnetically, and could put us back to those 18-hundreds timeframes where we don't have electricity.

 This is a scary thing, because if they're able to knock out some of our major transmission transformers, we don't have any, and I'll give you three guesses where these things are made.

Matt Gagnon: [00:08:18] Oh, I don't know. China, and yeah.

Craig Peterson: [00:08:22] We would be completely out of luck there's estimates that if they did this right against us, we could be without power in many areas of the country for at least 18 months, if not for years. So it's a very big concern. They are addressing it, or the power companies are addressing it, but it's very real here. They could shut off a blast. That would cover 1500 miles worth of the United States and knock off all of our computers and even our air conditioners and in some cases our heating systems.

Matt Gagnon: [00:08:58] On that happy note, Craig Peterson has joined us on this fine Wednesday to go over the world of technology.

We'll talk to him again next Wednesday, and again, make sure you tune in on Saturday morning to hear Craig talk about this in more depth. Thanks a lot, Craig. We'll talk to you next week.

--- 

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome!

Good morning, everybody. I was on WTAG this morning with Jim Polito. He had a few questions about Voting and the Technology surrounding Mail-in and Online Voting and then we got into the sales of the Chinese company ByteDance to Oracle. Here we go with Jim.

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

---

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] They've been using some of our drone footage, which is why these Chinese drones are illegal to use for government contractors and many others. Good morning, everybody. Craig Peterson, here. I am enjoying this weather. This is my time of year. I was on with Jim this morning, we talked about TikTok, this whole Oracle thing. Why did the president do what he did and is the sale actually going to fix the problem? President Trump identified. So we talked about that and of course, we also talked about voting. It can't get political sometimes with Mr. Polito. So here we go.

Jim Polito: [00:00:41] Okay, this is the guy you need to have at your side through all of this. I want to talk to him about Oracle and TikTok, cause I want to get his take on it. I've got something more important to talk about first, and that is online voting - God help us. Here are our good friend and tech guru. Craig Peterson. Good morning, sir.

Craig Peterson: [00:01:05] Hey, good morning, Jim. Love this weather. Love it.

Jim Polito: [00:01:09] This is Canada weather. Speaking of the great white North, Gary, a listener from Gardner sent a picture of him. You know, some scrape marks on his windshield had a little bit of frost on the windshield little bit there. Yeah. I would figure that you would like this you're coming into your season here.

Craig Peterson: [00:01:30] I am. I, I remember summers, it would get to like 70 or 72 and it was just wonderful. That was summer weather. I just don't like 90 degrees.

Jim Polito: [00:01:41] Well, I'm kinda, with you there. I'm with you there. I don't like it.

Alright. Here's what I don't like. I don't like online voting. First of all. I don't like mail-in voting. I don't like online voting, but you sent me some interesting information. We can do online banking, which you would think needs all of this security. What's the difference between that and attempting to do online voting? Why can't online voting be done?

Craig Peterson: [00:02:10] Yeah, this is a really interesting problem. The bottom line for everybody is it's not a problem that will be solved any time soon, or my soon. I mean, it will take many years before this problem is solved. The big problem you have has to do with a secret ballot. So when you go to the voting booth, although this year they took the little flap off the back of the booth. So people could potentially look over your shoulder, but people were there to monitor to make sure there wasn't somebody holding a gun to your head to make sure you voted the right way. In fact, it's illegal pretty much everywhere to take a picture of your ballot. And that's gone to court many times because again, Someone could be extorting you to make sure you're voting the way they want you to.

Or if you live in Orange County, California, the ballots came pre-filled with the Democrats, checked off. How do you know if it's a legitimate ballot, that's the problem really comes in Jim? When you're talking about ATMs, banking is different. We do have encryption from the ATM machine, all the way to the data center for the bank.

And then the banks also share their data over secure links and, and they count on you checking your bank statement at least every once in a while.

But once you've voted, all right. How do you know that your vote was counted? That your vote made it? How can you do it secretly? Yeah. And so that's the big problem here.

You cannot have it secret. Now. There are some technologies out there right now that allow this auditable voting system, kind of using the technology that's behind Bitcoin, but it's not there yet. We can't be sure someone is literally or figuratively holding a gun to your head while you vote. Mail-in voting doesn't work because of that one reason and we can't do online voting because again, the same reason, but it just can't be audited.

Jim Polito: [00:04:24] Yeah, I get it. Now that makes complete sense to me because you do lose the ability of the secret ballot. I want everybody to vote, but if somebody chooses not to vote, that's their right. I guess it's public information that someone could look at.

Well, what ballot did Jim Polito take in the primary? You know, if I take a Democrat, I'm an unenrolled. So if I take a Democrat ballot or I take a Republican ballot or whatever, somebody can look at that and say, Oh, he took a Republican ballot. Oh, he voted in that election. And then you get on a certain list, but I see where you're going.

The next step from this is, yeah, it's actually easier to do the banking because everybody's upfront about it. There are built-in checks and balances. You would give away the secret ballot if we were to say you vote online.

Craig Peterson: [00:05:17] Well, even with banking, we look at it and look at your credit card.

Now they have the chips on them that do help to authenticate your card. But right now, the latest numbers that we have are from 2018, and credit card fraud alone costs the world's banks almost $28 billion. In 2018. That's a system that is sure. So what kind of fraud could we expect from heaven forbid, we have mail-in voting.

I think that might be inevitable, but that was a fraud. There's going to be crazy and it's not like an ATM, we just can't secure it. We can't be sure that people are voting secretly and that's been fundamental. You look at some of these other countries, China has 98% of the population voting every time there's an election. They know exactly who you voted for. Yeah.

Jim Polito: [00:06:14] Well, and you don't have much of a choice, frankly, when you voted China, you're voting for the communist party that's it. We're talking with tech talk guru, Craig Peterson, our good friend who loves the little cold snap in the air right now.

Alright. Let's get to Oracle and TikTok. Now, you know, I, I don't post things on TikTok but I did register my name so that I would have Jim Polito on TikTok as I do on everything else because someday, maybe, you know, people, my age will take over TikTok. I don't know. I found it. They talk to me decently. I was explaining to my stepsons. They said you're on TikTok. And they said, well, wait a minute. I'm not posting anything. I do view stuff on TikTok and I said, my TikTok experience is much different than yours and they said, what do you mean? I said, my TikTok experiences, politics and home improvement, and maybe motorcycles and the rolling stones. You know, like that's the kind of stuff that gets sent to me. Cause that's the kind of stuff that I like. Oracle now beats out Microsoft to buy this platform owned by the Chinese communists. I've been looking forward to hearing your take on this

Craig Peterson: [00:07:34] This real interesting thing, because it's the first time ever I'm aware of where some deal like this has happened. Certainly during the war, we had businesses that were broken up. For instance, Bayer here in the US that makes the aspirin was a German company in world war two. Congress divested the German company, Bayer of all interest in the United States. And, given the company to some buddies, right.

But you know, maybe not that I couldn't happen here in the United States. What we're looking at right now is this company called Bytedance, which is this Chinese company. Don't think of companies under socialism the way we think of them under a typical free market. The company is controlled by the socialists in China, by the Chinese communist party.

They were sending data to China. And anything that goes to China is monitored by the Chinese military. They've been using some of our drone footage, which is why these Chinese drones are illegal to use for government contractors, and many others because they have GPS in them. They're showing video it's giving them the exact GPS coordinates and they'd probably have a better map of the United States than we do now.

When it comes to TikTok much the same problem. We're taking videos. We're giving locations where we are, who our friends are. So if they want to trick you into something with phishing, et cetera, they now have enough information to do it. So that's why President Trump said that. This is it. I am invoking these powers that have been with the president in Congress for many, many decades now. I am going to force the divestiture of TikTok. Or it's going to be illegal to have on the stores here in the US. So where we're at right now is the Chinese government said we will not allow Microsoft to buy TikTok. So that came in over the weekend and that's when Oracle's rose to the top.

Cause Microsoft and Walmart were, kind of, going into together. Walmart really wanted to control it and Microsoft would do the technology. But what they're going to do is bring it here, under US control. But unlike the Bayer Aspirin factory, where you can have someone go when you can see there is no socialist influence here. The national socialists of Germany are not here running it anymore, it's the Americans. You can't audit all of this code, that is TikTok in a matter of days, weeks, months, or maybe even years. There's still going to be problems here, but it is moving in the right direction. Oracle is an odd company and their pricing strategy historically has been to grab people by the ankles and shake them upside down and see how much money comes out and that's how much it costs to buy their database.

Jim Polito: [00:10:39] Isn't the CEO of Oracle kind of an odd duck.

Craig Peterson: [00:10:44] Oh yeah. He has the biggest Yacht in the world. And he is very, very, very, very strange, Larry Elison. This is going to be interesting on that front alone is TikTok going to become a charge for service? What's going to happen? But we're not going to get the security we want out of TikTok for some time. But I would imagine initially the servers are going to move directly in the US, under US control, and Oracles going to be mandated to not allow any of that data to go to China. They will probably be able to stop most of that from happening.

Jim Polito: [00:11:19] Unless, of course, there's some little sleeper bit of code somewhere in there that the Chinese have developed, but we'll see. Interesting. I feel better. Look, I never really cared about the Chinese knowing what I'm looking at on TikTok and where I am. I'm not important. But maybe we just don't want the Chinese to know what do Americans do and where do they go to be able to mine, that kind of information about us. Maybe in that respect, I don't care as an individual, but I care as a country. We'll see. The good thing is, Craig we have you here with us to watch this whole thing. Very helpful information, especially about voting and everything else.

So Craig, if people want to know more about Craig Peterson, I guess they can tune in on Saturdays, but there are other ways to reach you.

Craig Peterson: [00:12:11] Yeah. In fact, starting today, I have a couple of times a week. You got to have emails going out there about a three-minute read. I'm trying to keep these short to help you understand what's going on here in the tech business, particularly securities, I'm giving you some tips, some tricks, other things.

I'll be doing live pieces of training, all of this free. I'm not trying to sell something right. This isn't the way you might expect it to be, but I am going to be putting that out and you can get it by going to Craig peterson.com/subscribe, correct. peterson.com slash subscribe. You'll get my weekly newsletter, which covers everything Jim and I talk about.

And even some things we don't get to as well as some of this real quick minute training that I'm going to be doing.

Jim Polito: [00:12:58] That's fantastic. The Craig Peterson show, if you want to listen Saturday mornings at 11 o'clock on WTAG obviously in Western mass, you can use the iHeart radio app. And, there you have Mr. Peterson. We've got you covered front to back. Thank you. Craig so much enjoys the Canadian weather and we'll talk with you next week.

Craig Peterson: [00:13:19] Indian summer. Alright? Bye-bye.

Keep an eye out for this first email today, these three-minute emails. And let me know what you think if it's worth my doing, I think it is. And I'm sure it'll get better, but what do you think might make it a little bit better as well?

All right. Take care, everybody, and we'll be back tomorrow. Bye-bye.

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