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

Welcome!

Craig discusses a hack at Uber that ended up with its Chief of Security facing Obstruction of Justice charges. 

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

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Read More:

Newly Patched Amazon Alexa Flaws -- A Red Flag for Home Workers

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Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Hey, I've got a story right now that should be a word of warning to businesses that have personal information. If you are working for a company and they've got your personal information, you're going to want to hear this too.

Hi everybody Craig Peterson here on WGAN. Thanks for joining me today. I'm on every Saturday from one until 3:00 PM. And if you miss any part of the show, make sure you go online. Craig peterson.com. You can also find me on tune in and any other streaming podcast app that you might care to look for me. I'm pretty much everywhere.

We are going to talk right now about Uber. There are many people who are really not knowledgeable about security that are in security jobs and positions. I would say that the majority of people that are in jobs responsible for security are not fully qualified. They know more than everybody else in the organization, but that doesn't mean they're qualified. So that's one class.

Of course, you have the people who really do know what they're doing. They are few and far between. Then you have Uber's former chief security officer. He just got nailed over a coverup of a hack that had occurred at Uber. This is really fascinating because he played some games.

He played very fast and loose with the truth and a criminal complaint ended up getting filed against him. In federal court this week, the guy's name is Joseph Sullivan. If you look at a picture of him, he's got the kind of beard that almost makes him look like he's one of these gangsters.

 I have a thing about facial hair and maybe it's just my generation, my age. I'm not sure what, but he looks creepy to me, that a beard thing that he has Joseph Sullivan, but he was charged with obstruction of justice and misprision of a felony connected with the attempted coverup of a 2016 hack of Uber.

Now isn't that interesting here? And this is a, I'm getting this from justice.gov and it's United States attorney David Anderson, and the FBI were involved in this, Craig de Faire. And this is really an interesting story when you get right down into it. And we'll cover a little bit of that right now.

But according to this complaint that was filed between April of 2015 and November of 2017. This guy, Joseph Sullivan, he's 52 years old lives in Palo Alto, California. Where else he was Uber's chief security officer. Now, he was contacted by two hackers via email that said that they had been able to hack Uber's system and they were able to download a database that had personally identifiable information-on 57 million Uber users and drivers. Now, remember Uber is the company that had this God-mode is what they called it. Uber is a company that had employees, including apparently their CEO. Watching people getting driven and where they started, where they ended up. Now, we'll go, okay. you got to do a little quality control. Hey, I get that.

It turns out they were monitoring celebrities, finding out where the celebrities lived, watching them go, where they were going, that the type of stuff you need. Yeah, in order to twist arms, right? Hold their data a little bit in ransom, little pirate operation going on there. So they got in trouble for that one too.

They have been hacked before. So apparently this Joseph Sullivan guy, when he got the email look to see, did this actually happen? And they found, yeah, indeed. At least this is what the criminal complaint is alleging. They did indeed get them the driver's license numbers for approximately 600,000 people who drove for Uber.

Think about that for a minute. And what are licenses good for? Oh yeah. This year voting, right? Yeah. Yeah, because there's no ID is necessary. It's just mailed in. 57 million users and drivers over half a million driver's license numbers. What he apparently did was he went and used Uber's bug bounty program.

Most companies have that nowadays. It's Hey, you found a bug in our software in our system. We will pay you because we appreciate that. We'd rather you did it and we pay you a bounty than for bad guys to find it. All right. apparently he was being extorted here because these hackers demanded a six-figure payment in exchange for their silence.

Now that's become very popular nowadays, by the way, this was a few years back. Now, nowadays ransomware works in two ways. One, they say, Hey, if you want your data back, if you want to decrypt it, you got to pay up. The other way it works is that this ransomware downloads your files, first. So the bad guys have it, so they will ransom it one way or the other.

It'll say, Hey, you pay up or I'm going to release all of this data. Or in this case, I'm going to give Uber or black eye. Cause I'm going to tell the media about it and release it. Or Hey, if you want your data decrypted, you gotta pay me. They can get, they're getting clever. These criminals. That's very common nowadays.

So it alleges this criminal complaint. That Sullivan took deliberate steps to conceal deflect and mislead the federal trade commission about the breach. Why? it turns out that a month or so later, their FTC filing was due and part of that needed to be about the security that they were taking because prior settlements with the government and the court required them to report on their security operation.

Yeah. Yeah. interesting Justine and the charges and the statement I've got there. In fact, when I'm reading it from here is the justice.gov, but it actually has the information about the indictment. So this is very one-sided.

There's nothing here from Sullivan's attorneys. It's just what the government is saying. So the complaint also describes how, Sullivan. Played a pivotal role in responding to the FCC inquiry about Uber cybersecurity.  It's just absolutely amazing. Okay.

So what do we learn from this? I think we learn a few things.

First of all, if you are a business owner and you have any data at all, really nowadays, it's pretty much every business. Even if you don't have driver's licenses, do you know what you got, you might have bank account information, your own bank, account information, not even just customers or businesses that you trade with, where you're just transferring funds back and forth.

You might have all of that stuff on your computers. And we do scans for businesses and we look specifically for bank account numbers, social security, numbers, phone numbers, all kinds of stuff that is illegal to disclose. it's absolutely amazing. Apparently Uber paid the hackers a hundred thousand dollars in Bitcoin in December 2016, and hackers obviously never provided their true names.

Sullivan tried to get the hackers to sign nondisclosure agreements and these agreements that Uber's lawyers put together contained false representations saying that the hackers did not take or store any data, which apparently is not true. So this complaint goes on. It's absolutely amazing.

Again, if you're a business, all 50 States now have laws that require you to disclose when data is stolen. You have to disclose it and you cannot hide it. Particularly if you are a publicly-traded company or if you're a division of a publicly-traded company earlier in the show, I mentioned this whole pencil whipping forms thing where people have a form, it might be for the insurance company and might be for federal or state regulators and they just check the box.

Yup. yup. Yup. Yup. Even though they don't really know. And they don't know enough to know that they don't really know. Okay. So we have to be very careful about that. And so that's why we do these scans. In fact, we do them daily for our customers just to see if the data is out there. So make sure you're not storing any of that data.

I am a bit of a packrat myself, a digital packrat. I have stuff going way back when, but I make sure I don't have any PII. At least I try and make sure of that. You need to do that too. If you're a consumer, remember again, all 50 states have in place laws to help protect you. Now about the only thing that you might be able to do is get a couple of bucks from a settlement.

Look at this. I filed for my settlement offer from Equifax, which is how many years old now, where they lost all of your personal data was all stolen. Maybe four years, five years ago, by hackers it's known to have been stolen. They admitted it was stolen because they didn't keep things patched up and their security people were underfunded work too hard. Which happens every day in this country, unfortunately. And, who knows? the attorneys did, they got their tens of millions of dollars in attorney's fees that happens every year here in this country. I'm still waiting for my supposed check for $25.

They're now saying, it was probably gonna be a lot less than $25. Cause you know, attorney's fees, right? I added that last part, but this is absolutely ridiculous. It's ridiculous.

So if something does happen, if your data shows up on the dark web, you should take action. Cause that's the only way these businesses are going to get their act together.

Craig Peterson: [00:11:08] So I want to encourage you right now to go to a website it's called, have I been pwned dot com. Have I been pwned is like pawned, but with a P w n e d  dot com. Okay. Look there, put in your email address and they will search their databases of known hacks. The data existing on the dark web and have been pwned will tell you where your data was stolen.

Craig Peterson: [00:11:35] What was stolen. Might've been just your email address might include your name, your social security number, bank, account numbers. They pretty much have it, but all, and then you can contact these various companies where your data was stored your people, and maybe you should get involved with the criminal complaint.

Against some of these companies be part of a class-action lawsuit, make some bucks, we've got to stop this. We've got to get people smartened up.

All right, everybody makes sure right now you go online Craig peterson.com/subscribe so that you can get in this training. You can get your reboot guide. You can get all of this stuff.

Listen Wednesday mornings at seven 30 while I'm on with Matt Gagnon right here on WGAN.

Take care, everybody.

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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

Good morning everybody!

I was on with Matt this morning and we had a good discussion about election technology and mail-in voting and what we learned from a study this week that makes it completely unreliable. Then we got into Facial Recognition and how it is being used in these riotous protests in some cities. Then a word of warning about Alexa and its latest updates and how it can put your business at risk if your remote workers have these devices on their networks that they use to connect to you. 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] We now exposed our businesses as well, but these particular vulnerabilities were made public last week. We're talking about more than 200 million Alexa devices.

Good morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. I was on with Mr. Gagnon this morning. I learned a new word from Matt, this morning. You learn something new every day.

We went into a couple of things you can do to protect your business and your home because we're connecting our homes to our businesses, now with people working from home. Things you can do to protect it from these "internet of things" devices, because yeah, yeah another hack this time against Alexa, at least a big red warning.

So here we go with Mr. Gagnon.

Matt Gagnon: [00:00:46] Craig Peterson. He is our tech guru. He joins us every Wednesday at this time. You also hear him on Saturdays at one o'clock for the show that he has on this very network friends.

Craig, welcome to the program.

Craig Peterson: [00:00:56] Hey, good morning.

What's this rumor I hear about you and maybe being a Karen or something.

Matt Gagnon: [00:01:04] I'm sorry. I don't know what you're talking about.

I, by the way, I thought we've all decided that the Karen equivalent for men was Dave.

Craig Peterson: [00:01:09] Dave, okay. I only found out about this recently. My wife's name is Karen and somebody used Karen as an insult and I had to dig into it more. And man, this is a weird world.

I never knew

Matt Gagnon: [00:01:24] you did not know about the Karen phenomenon. I'm a little surprised with as much time as you spend on the worldwide web, the internet.

Craig Peterson: [00:01:32] I'm always on the tech side. The latest Adam's family movie, the cartoon one. Have you seen that one? And it's really quite funny. There's a lady in there that apparently is the stereotypical Karen, her hair is almost taller than she is. She's trying to run everyone's life. Anyway, we learn something new every day.

Matt Gagnon: [00:01:54] Yes we do. We do indeed.

So Craig Peterson let's move on to our tech topics though, because we are just days, actually a little bit more than two months away from the presidential election.

And as we approach it, there are some additional security worries that are mounting. Tell us about what those are.

Craig Peterson: [00:02:11] Oh man. Yeah, this is really something.

Matt Gagnon: [00:02:15] I don't want bum anybody out or anything,

Craig Peterson: [00:02:16] I was just shaking my head back in the year 2000 with a whole Florida thing. You might remember they were using the card punches from IBM machines, and Hollerith code and everything else, but they had to punch through using a little stylus what they were voting for. There were hanging CHADS where it wasn't punched out all the way, everything else. It just became so obvious to me back then that technology is really not a solution for a lot of this voting. Now we've got a report out about this red-blue team thing.

Now, if you're in the military and of course, a lot of us are, a lot of us have been here in the Northeast. We have some of the highest per capita military populations of anywhere or ex-military in the country. You're familiar with the concept red team blue team is where you have one team that's attacking and another team that's defending.

We've taken that over the years and have started using it in cybersecurity. So we'll have people who are attacking systems and people who are trying to defend them. In fact, every one of our military academies puts is their students through red team blue team drills. Well, there was just one about the election this year and they found that it was cheap and easy to completely throw all of the counts out of whack.

Particularly, if we use mail-in ballot. They showed a feature that the machines have in the post office. You've gotten letters before, obviously, Matt, it's a barcode that sprayed near the bottom of the letter on the front. That's a code that tells the machine how to route it and ultimately it ends up in the right stack, if you will, for your post person to bring by your home.

Those codes that are on those pieces of mail are also used for programming the machines. It is easy enough. All someone has to do, and these codes are known. Is spray a code on the bottom of a piece of mail and it gets run through the machine and resets the machine. They went on and on it's a great article talking about all of the things that could be done.

Very cheaply, very easy to completely throw chaos into the mix, as to who really won the election. Another example here of how president Trump really was leading the curve. This was not just Republicans on this. This was military people. This was also Democrats who were on this. This is a really big study. It's surprising to me that I haven't really heard about it on the news.

Matt Gagnon: [00:05:05] I'm not surprised. you're talking to Craig Peterson our tech guru, who is joining us as he does every Wednesday to talk about the world of technology.

In nonpolitical news. We've heard a lot in Portland here about facial recognition technology.

They've been debating that in the city council for a little while, but what to do with it, how to use it, how not to use it, et cetera. Apparently police in Miami, in New York city have been arresting protestors using facial recognition matches, which is interesting.

Craig Peterson: [00:05:31] Yeah, they've been using a lot of this technology all over the world.

Particularly here in the US, we've had this stuff going on at an Oregon and many other cities. And the police would much rather not arrest someone in the middle of a protest. Where there are people that are gonna throw bricks or rocks or whatever at them, and cause more violence to come from that. So what they've been doing is using facial recognition technology to track people.

So the very violent people at this point are the only ones that are being used for. And they, it, them as they leave the area and then they have been arresting them a little bit later, once there were a few blocks away from the protests that are going on. Now, this is a really interesting problem because it's not just the camera's on the street.

It's not like the streets of London. If we're talking about aerial surveillance that is using facial recognition. Everything from drones through planes. All of these cameras that are on the street, even police cars in these cities now have cameras on them there. As they're driving around, they checked license plates to see if there's any outstanding tickets or warrants.

They track the people that are walking down in the streets at the side of the street and they do it all because it's according to the courts, we have no expectation of privacy when we're out in public.

Matt Gagnon: [00:06:57] Speaking with Craig Peterson, our tech guru. He joins us for a tech update every Wednesday at this time.

Lastly, Craig, do you want to talk to you a little bit about my Amazon Alexa? Apparently there are new flaws in the patch to Amazon. Alexa, what is this mean for people who are working at home particularly?

Craig Peterson: [00:07:15] Yeah, this is a bad thing. It's not just Alexa. We've seen them in pretty much every one of these smart devices that we have in our homes.

Now we're connecting our homes to our businesses because we have workers that are working from home. Those home networks have these Alexa and the Google homes and everything else on them we're using VPNs. People don't use these things. Are now exposed in our businesses as well, but these particular vulnerabilities were made public last week.

We're talking about more than 200 million Alexa devices, right? There are patches that have already been released for some of this. There are more patches that are on the way, but be very careful. My suggestion to everyone is don't use just the router that you got from the phone company or from the cable company.

Don't just run out to a big-box retailer and buy a little router for your home. Get at least a prosumer router. I really liked Cisco. I sell Cisco. Cisco has a really nice whole line called the GO routers and they let you split up your or network in your home so that you can put things like your Alexa or your Google home or your Roku, et cetera, on a completely separate network.

So it has no access to anything else. Any other computers, it cannot be used as a jumping-off point to hack your home computers or the business computers, if it's on another network. So again, I like GO hardware from Cisco. You can find it on Amazon. There are some others out there. Make sure you segment your network and keep everything up to date.

Matt Gagnon: [00:08:56] That's Craig Peterson. You hear him here on the weekends. Saturdays at one o'clock is when his show is he gets into these and more stories with more depth and detail.

Craig, we appreciate you joining us as always on Wednesdays. And we'll talk to you again next week.

Craig Peterson: [00:09:09] Hey, take care of Matt.

I put a little word of warning out there. I got a call from a listener. Who has attended a number of my webinars and understood a little bit about some of the VPN stuff going on, but he has a client who has offices down in Columbia, down South. He had a, apparently a person within the organization. Who was moderately high up a manager on Tinder swiping and found a girl and woke up the next morning with his laptop gone and apparently been drugged.

So just a bit of a warning. The old stuff is still out there. These honey traps, as they called them, we gotta be very careful about that. Of course, Laptop stolen. Was he using the right kind of technology? No. Did he have the whole disc encrypted? No.

Now, these bad guys have all of his business information right there in their hands. Anyhow. Just a word of caution, it's still happening. Take care of everybody. We'll be back Saturday and we are just hustling and hustling and keep an eye out mid-September.

Make sure you're on my email list so you can find out about it. Just all kinds of great free stuff for you guys. I got to get you trained

Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Take care, everybody. Bye-bye.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Good morning everybody!

I was on with Matt this morning and we had a good discussion about election technology and mail-in voting and what we learned from a study this week that makes it completely unreliable.  Then we got into Facial Recognition and how it is being used in these riotous protests in some cities.  Then a word of warning about Alexa and its latest updates and how it can put your business at risk if your remote workers have these devices on their networks that they use to connect to you. 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] We now exposed our businesses as well, but these particular vulnerabilities were made public last week. We're talking about more than 200 million Alexa devices.

Good morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. I was on with Mr. Gagnon this morning. I learned a new word from Matt, this morning. You learn something new every day.

We went into a couple of things you can do to protect your business and your home because we're connecting our homes to our businesses, now with people working from home. Things you can do to protect it from these "internet of things" devices, because yeah, yeah another hack this time against Alexa, at least a big red warning.

So here we go with Mr. Gagnon.

Matt Gagnon: [00:00:46] Craig Peterson. He is our tech guru. He joins us every Wednesday at this time. You also hear him on Saturdays at one o'clock for the show that he has on this very network friends.

Craig, welcome to the program.

Craig Peterson: [00:00:56] Hey, good morning.

What's this rumor I hear about you and maybe being a Karen or something.

Matt Gagnon: [00:01:04] I'm sorry. I don't know what you're talking about.

I, by the way, I thought we've all decided that the Karen equivalent for men was Dave.

Craig Peterson: [00:01:09] Dave, okay. I only found out about this recently. My wife's name is Karen and somebody used Karen as an insult and I had to dig into it more. And man, this is a weird world.

I never knew

Matt Gagnon: [00:01:24] you did not know about the Karen phenomenon. I'm a little surprised with as much time as you spend on the worldwide web, the internet.

Craig Peterson: [00:01:32] I'm always on the tech side. The latest Adam's family movie, the cartoon one. Have you seen that one? And it's really quite funny. There's a lady in there that apparently is the stereotypical Karen, her hair is almost taller than she is. She's trying to run everyone's life. Anyway, we learn something new every day.

Matt Gagnon: [00:01:54] Yes we do. We do indeed.

So Craig Peterson let's move on to our tech topics though, because we are just days, actually a little bit more than two months away from the presidential election.

And as we approach it, there are some additional security worries that are mounting. Tell us about what those are.

Craig Peterson: [00:02:11] Oh man. Yeah, this is really something.

Matt Gagnon: [00:02:15] I don't want bum anybody out or anything,

Craig Peterson: [00:02:16] I was just shaking my head back in the year 2000 with a whole Florida thing. You might remember they were using the card punches from IBM machines, and Hollerith code and everything else, but they had to punch through using a little stylus what they were voting for. There were hanging CHADS where it wasn't punched out all the way, everything else. It just became so obvious to me back then that technology is really not a solution for a lot of this voting. Now we've got a report out about this red-blue team thing.

Now, if you're in the military and of course, a lot of us are, a lot of us have been here in the Northeast. We have some of the highest per capita military populations of anywhere or ex-military in the country. You're familiar with the concept red team blue team is where you have one team that's attacking and another team that's defending.

We've taken that over the years and have started using it in cybersecurity. So we'll have people who are attacking systems and people who are trying to defend them. In fact, every one of our military academies puts is their students through red team blue team drills. Well, there was just one about the election this year and they found that it was cheap and easy to completely throw all of the counts out of whack.

Particularly, if we use mail-in ballot. They showed a feature that the machines have in the post office. You've gotten letters before, obviously, Matt, it's a barcode that sprayed near the bottom of the letter on the front. That's a code that tells the machine how to route it and ultimately it ends up in the right stack, if you will, for your post person to bring by your home.

Those codes that are on those pieces of mail are also used for programming the machines. It is easy enough. All someone has to do, and these codes are known. Is spray a code on the bottom of a piece of mail and it gets run through the machine and resets the machine. They went on and on it's a great article talking about all of the things that could be done.

Very cheaply, very easy to completely throw chaos into the mix, as to who really won the election. Another example here of how president Trump really was leading the curve. This was not just Republicans on this. This was military people. This was also Democrats who were on this. This is a really big study. It's surprising to me that I haven't really heard about it on the news.

Matt Gagnon: [00:05:05] I'm not surprised. you're talking to Craig Peterson our tech guru, who is joining us as he does every Wednesday to talk about the world of technology.

 In nonpolitical news. We've heard a lot in Portland here about facial recognition technology.

They've been debating that in the city council for a little while, but what to do with it, how to use it, how not to use it, et cetera. Apparently police in Miami, in New York city have been arresting protestors using facial recognition matches, which is interesting.

Craig Peterson: [00:05:31] Yeah, they've been using a lot of this technology all over the world.

Particularly here in the US, we've had this stuff going on at an Oregon and many other cities. And the police would much rather not arrest someone in the middle of a protest. Where there are people that are gonna throw bricks or rocks or whatever at them, and cause more violence to come from that. So what they've been doing is using facial recognition technology to track people.

So the very violent people at this point are the only ones that are being used for. And they, it, them as they leave the area and then they have been arresting them a little bit later, once there were a few blocks away from the protests that are going on. Now, this is a really interesting problem because it's not just the camera's on the street.

It's not like the streets of London. If we're talking about aerial surveillance that is using facial recognition. Everything from drones through planes. All of these cameras that are on the street, even police cars in these cities now have cameras on them there. As they're driving around, they checked license plates to see if there's any outstanding tickets or warrants.

They track the people that are walking down in the streets at the side of the street and they do it all because it's according to the courts, we have no expectation of privacy when we're out in public.

Matt Gagnon: [00:06:57] Speaking with Craig Peterson, our tech guru. He joins us for a tech update every Wednesday at this time.

Lastly, Craig, do you want to talk to you a little bit about my Amazon Alexa? Apparently there are new flaws in the patch to Amazon. Alexa, what is this mean for people who are working at home particularly?

Craig Peterson: [00:07:15] Yeah, this is a bad thing. It's not just Alexa. We've seen them in pretty much every one of these smart devices that we have in our homes.

Now we're connecting our homes to our businesses because we have workers that are working from home. Those home networks have these Alexa and the Google homes and everything else on them we're using VPNs. People don't use these things. Are now exposed in our businesses as well, but these particular vulnerabilities were made public last week.

We're talking about more than 200 million Alexa devices, right? There are patches that have already been released for some of this. There are more patches that are on the way, but be very careful. My suggestion to everyone is don't use just the router that you got from the phone company or from the cable company.

Don't just run out to a big-box retailer and buy a little router for your home. Get at least a prosumer router. I really liked Cisco. I sell Cisco. Cisco has a really nice whole line called the GO routers and they let you split up your or network in your home so that you can put things like your Alexa or your Google home or your Roku, et cetera, on a completely separate network.

So it has no access to anything else. Any other computers, it cannot be used as a jumping-off point to hack your home computers or the business computers, if it's on another network. So again, I like GO hardware from Cisco. You can find it on Amazon.  There are some others out there. Make sure you segment your network and keep everything up to date.

Matt Gagnon: [00:08:56] That's Craig Peterson. You hear him here on the weekends. Saturdays at one o'clock is when his show is he gets into these and more stories with more depth and detail.

Craig, we appreciate you joining us as always on Wednesdays. And we'll talk to you again next week.

Craig Peterson: [00:09:09] Hey, take care of Matt.

I put a little word of warning out there. I got a call from a listener. Who has attended a number of my webinars and understood a little bit about some of the VPN stuff going on, but he has a client who has offices down in Columbia, down South. He had a, apparently a person within the organization. Who was moderately high up a manager on Tinder swiping and found a girl and woke up the next morning with his laptop gone and apparently been drugged.

So just a bit of a warning. The old stuff is still out there. These honey traps, as they called them, we gotta be very careful about that. Of course, Laptop stolen. Was he using the right kind of technology? No. Did he have the whole disc encrypted? No.

Now, these bad guys have all of his business information right there in their hands.  Anyhow. Just a word of caution, it's still happening. Take care of everybody. We'll be back Saturday and we are just hustling and hustling and keep an eye out mid-September.

Make sure you're on my email list so you can find out about it. Just all kinds of great free stuff for you guys. I got to get you trained

Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Take care, everybody. Bye-bye.

--- 

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome!

Good morning, everybody. I was on the Jim Polito show this morning. Jim and I discussed securing your remote workforce and the number one problem, VPNs, Then we got into facial recognition being used by Police in these rioting cities to round up the criminals. Here we go with Jim.

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

---

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Make sure you're managing your VPNs correctly. These virtual private networks, if you got them. In some cases, you have to have them. But don't let that remote computer at somebody's home, where there are teenage boys on the network. A wink, nod, nudge.

If you've never heard me on one of my soapboxes before today's the day. I had a great little, chat with Mr. Jim Polito here, and ways to keep your remote workspace safe. I am very upset with all of these companies that are lying to you about what their software and hardware can do. Here we go with Jim, of course, find me online. Craig peterson.com.

Jim Polito: [00:00:44] Yeah, here we go. We've got a lot on the agenda. You know why that poll may not be scientific. It's always scientific with our tech talk guru, Craig Peterson.

Good morning, sir.

Craig Peterson: [00:00:57] Hey, good morning,

Jim Polito: [00:01:00] Craig. I want to talk to you about quite a few things. I think the most important we should start with. So, we don't run out of time and try to get to it was very interesting.

You shared with me seven ways to keep your remote workforce safe. I also think that applies to some of the things here I read people can do themselves to keep themselves safe while they're working remotely.

Since so much of the audience is doing that, Craig, I thought it would be a good opportunity for you to share your expertise.

Craig Peterson: [00:01:34] Sure. I appreciate that. Yeah, there are, there's a website that I read and if you aren't totally into security or you're just trying to keep up on security, this is a site you should probably pay a little bit of attention to, and it's called dark reading and it's not taken from a point of hackers or anything.

It really is about what can happen to all of us and the things to do. So they came up with this great little article here running through the different ways that you can use to help keep yourself safe. Now, as a business person, you have to realize that having your workers working from home has increased what's called your attack surface.

The attack surface is the way, the means the bad guys can get in. So it might've been at one point you had one door on the building and in this case, the door might've been into your email server, perhaps your web server or something else. Now that attack surface has expanded dramatically because you've got three, four, or five people working from home or a hundred, 200, a thousand people working from home. Every device that's connecting now remotely increases your attack surface.

We're finding that businesses are seeing better than a 300% increase in the attacks. The efficacy, the ability of the bad guys to attack successfully has gone way up. That's a real problem. Number one, VPNs.

If you've been on my VPN webinar and I'm going to be holding more of them. Make sure to watch my emails about it. VPNs, Jim, are not a panacea. In almost all cases, a small business using VPNs, almost all cases, it is making things worse.

Jim Polito: [00:03:36] Oh

Craig Peterson: [00:03:39] yeah.

Jim Polito: [00:03:40] Was that? Dramatic enough. All that. Yeah.

Craig Peterson: [00:03:44] You've got all of these computers that people at home, and they might be using one computer, which may not be a business computer. In other words, the company does not own it. The company does not have its advanced malware protection on it. All they have is one of these things that drive me crazy. People put Norton and other crap on the computers thinking it's going to keep them safe. It doesn't.

It doesn't and that's why the FBI and the NSA keep warning. I get warnings every day. now from them about how bad things are and how we have to pull up our socks because people are losing their businesses.

Make sure you're managing your VPNs correctly. These virtual private networks, if you got them. In some cases, you have to have them. But don't let that remote computer at somebody's home, where there are teenage boys on the network. A wink, nod, nudge, who are going to sites that are dangerous sites from a security standpoint. Don't let that computer straight in. The same thing with the remote desktop, you've got to teach your workers at home, how to segment networks.

Now, this is very complicated stuff and it's something that we do. Pro-sumer hardware, for instance, Cisco Go has the ability to do real segmentation.

So keep that in mind. You've got to teach them that. You've got to look at all the data that you have. Do we even know what data are your business is keeping? Jim, I walk into businesses all the time, that really have no clue. They have a general idea. They really don't know where it is. Who has access to it because these systems grow organically over time.

Even if you're a home user, where is my data? How do I protect that? You need to focus on the applications you have, get rid of them if you don't use it all the time if you haven't used it in awhile. Applications are one of the ways that bad guys have been getting in, and getting in a very big way. Make sure that data that's inside all of these apps are protected.

There's just a whole bunch and I'm going to be doing a training on this starting in September. These pieces of training are free. They're open. You're going to learn stuff, whether you're a home user or whether you're a business user on how to protect yourself. How to avoid these nasty people who are trying to sell you stuff that's supposedly going to protect you, that's useless.

Jim Polito: [00:06:15] I got it. We're talking with our good friend, tech talk guru, Craig Peterson.

You heard that. As we get closer to September, which is actually next week, but into the month and Craig has these seminars, we are going to pass that information along to you, so that you can do that.

Craig, I want to, I want to shift gears a little bit because this is interesting. We all worry about facial recognition. yeah, cops in Miami and New York City have arrested protestors. Now I wouldn't call them protesters. I call them criminals because why would they be arrested? They're not being arrested for peacefully protesting. They're being arrested for destroying things. Okay, committing crimes. but we'll just generically call them protesters, but they used facial recognition to do it.

Craig Peterson: [00:07:05] This is an interesting approach. You know how you've heard these, these protestors quote, unquote, the Marxists, who are in Portland and other places saying, Oh, the police are coming in and they're just picking people off of the streets randomly. What's actually been happening is the police have been taking photos, videos of what's been going on and they're not arresting just protesters.

We have a right to protest, generally speaking. What they're trying to do is find, who are these people. That is burning down buildings. Look at what happened last, just last night and Wisconsin, are you kidding me? Who are these people? What are they doing? A lot of them feel very comfortable in committing major crimes because they're wearing a mask, and they can never be identified. They can identify you just based on the upper portion of your face. They then track of people and they wait for these bad guys to get away from the crowd because you don't want the police going in there and getting pummeled like that police officer, apparently was last night there in Wisconsin hit by a brick in the head, down on the street. It was crazy.

Jim Polito: [00:08:20] Yeah. I saw that.

Craig Peterson: [00:08:21] They didn't want that to happen. So what they do is they track, they identify who they are, they track them, and then they arrest them, when they're away from the violent areas. And they've been continuing to do that where they're identifying them. And then they are basically going out and arresting them days later, in some cases.

At this point, we have already got hundreds of arrests of some of these people that are going after the very violent people. They're trying to find some of the leadership because what they're doing is by every definition, illegal and should not be happening.

Jim Polito: [00:08:57] So here's the question this goes to court and the argument is made, that's not me, you have to prove that your facial recognition is worthwhile. Do you know what I mean? okay. That's not me. And then you have experts. Competing experts on the stand saying that's not that person. No, that is that person. Am I right?

Craig Peterson: [00:09:22] Yeah. there's somebody who's been following a few cases that have gone to court. Absolutely. That's why they like tracking them the whole time.

So they have an overhead camera. Sometimes they have helicopters in the air. Nowadays. All they have to do is use drones. And it tracks them.

Now we've had this technology for a long time. We've used it in Somalia and other places as much as a decade ago. There were companies that sell small airplanes think of a kind of a Cessna and records everything going on in the city, everything.

So they fly above major cities and there's a crime committed, Jim, so they can track you backward. So where did you go? So the crime was committed here when you took off your hiding. They can now run it backward in time and track you back to your house and everywhere you went in between because everything happening in some of these major cities is recorded in super high def. So it can be played back.

I love the way your mind works. You're so logical when you're thinking that through.

Jim Polito: [00:10:35] Yeah.

Craig Peterson: [00:10:36] No it's true. And that voice of experience speaking there, Jim, from following some of these cases,

Jim Polito: [00:10:44] Listen, don't give me that much credit. it's just, from being a reporter. Thinking about these things and how we'd go to a court and what would happen. How the case would proceed.

But that's what you do whenever you bring in technology. That technology can be picked apart. Look, we saw it in the OJ trial about the DNA and it went well, how did you collect it? How did you collect the DNA? Where was it kept? They pick it apart, and by the way, you get people on a jury who don't completely understand it. And they glaze over and they invariably say, I, yeah, I don't know if I can trust that technology and there you go. That's all you have to do. Reasonable doubt.

Craig Peterson: [00:11:26] Or on the other side this is just too confusing for me. I'm going to follow the expert. Whatever expert smiled at me when I was on the stand.

There is a good argument for having a professional jury. I was an expert for a guy who was accused of having some pretty nasty stuff on his computer. Now computers are hacked every day and many of these computers, including businesses, computers are used for spreading Al Qaeda, ISIS, beheadings of Americans, kiddie porn, you name it. It's on your computer. But did you put it there? For a regular jury its getting too complicated?

Jim Polito: [00:12:10] Oh boy. All right. So look, you've got this great stuff coming up in September for folks to be able to protect themselves while they work from home.

There's always this information with Craig Peterson every week. Right here at this time, he joins us, gives us some of his time. Craig, how can folks get in touch with you now if they want to reach out?

Craig Peterson: [00:12:34] The best thing is to make sure you're getting my weekly newsletter. That's how you find out about the training. All of this stuff. Jim was just talking about, go to CraigPeterson.com/subscribe. That's Peterson SON, Craig peterson.com/subscribe. And I will keep you up to date and you will learn a lot more since you've been, you ever thought you needed to know and believe me, we need to know this stuff.

Jim Polito: [00:13:02] Yeah, we do. We absolutely do. Craig. I want to thank you so much for your time. It's always great. Always informative and I wish we had more, but we got to, we gotta pay some bills and, we got to wrap up the show, so thank you. Okay. Take care.

Craig Peterson: [00:13:17] Thanks, Jim. Take care.

Jim Polito: [00:13:19] All right. When we return, we have a web poll for you and a new one for tomorrow.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome!

Good morning, everybody. I was on the Jim Polito show this morning. Jim and I discussed securing your remote workforce and the number one problem, VPNs,  Then we got into facial recognition being used by Police in these rioting cities to round up the criminals. Here we go with Jim.

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

--- 

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Make sure you're managing your VPNs correctly. These virtual private networks, if you got them. In some cases, you have to have them. But don't let that remote computer at somebody's home, where there are teenage boys on the network. A wink, nod, nudge.

If you've never heard me on one of my soapboxes before today's the day. I had a great little, chat with Mr. Jim Polito here, and ways to keep your remote workspace safe. I am very upset with all of these companies that are lying to you about what their software and hardware can do. Here we go with Jim, of course, find me online. Craig peterson.com.

Jim Polito: [00:00:44] Yeah, here we go. We've got a lot on the agenda. You know why that poll may not be scientific. It's always scientific with our tech talk guru, Craig Peterson.

Good morning, sir.

Craig Peterson: [00:00:57] Hey, good morning,

Jim Polito: [00:01:00] Craig. I want to talk to you about quite a few things. I think the most important we should start with. So, we don't run out of time and try to get to it was very interesting.

You shared with me seven ways to keep your remote workforce safe.  I also think that applies to some of the things here I read people can do themselves to keep themselves safe while they're working remotely.

Since so much of the audience is doing that, Craig, I thought it would be a good opportunity for you to share your expertise.

Craig Peterson: [00:01:34] Sure. I appreciate that. Yeah, there are, there's a website that I read and if you aren't totally into security or you're just trying to keep up on security, this is a site you should probably pay a little bit of attention to, and it's called dark reading and it's not taken from a point of hackers or anything.

It really is about what can happen to all of us and the things to do. So they came up with this great little article here running through the different ways that you can use to help keep yourself safe. Now, as a business person, you have to realize that having your workers working from home has increased what's called your attack surface.

The attack surface is the way, the means the bad guys can get in. So it might've been at one point you had one door on the building and in this case, the door might've been into your email server, perhaps your web server or something else. Now that attack surface has expanded dramatically because you've got three, four, or five people working from home or a hundred, 200, a thousand people working from home. Every device that's connecting now remotely increases your attack surface.

We're finding that businesses are seeing better than a 300% increase in the attacks. The efficacy, the ability of the bad guys to attack successfully has gone way up. That's a real problem. Number one, VPNs.

If you've been on my VPN webinar and I'm going to be holding more of them. Make sure to watch my emails about it. VPNs, Jim, are not a panacea. In almost all cases, a small business using VPNs, almost all cases, it is making things worse.

Jim Polito: [00:03:36] Oh

Craig Peterson: [00:03:39] yeah.

Jim Polito: [00:03:40] Was that? Dramatic enough. All that. Yeah.

Craig Peterson: [00:03:44] You've got all of these computers that people at home, and they might be using one computer, which may not be a business computer. In other words, the company does not own it. The company does not have its advanced malware protection on it. All they have is one of these things that drive me crazy. People put Norton and other crap on the computers thinking it's going to keep them safe. It doesn't.

It doesn't and that's why the FBI and the NSA keep warning. I get warnings every day. now from them about how bad things are and how we have to pull up our socks because people are losing their businesses.

Make sure you're managing your VPNs correctly. These virtual private networks, if you got them. In some cases, you have to have them. But don't let that remote computer at somebody's home, where there are teenage boys on the network. A wink, nod, nudge, who are going to sites that are dangerous sites from a security standpoint. Don't let that computer straight in. The same thing with the remote desktop, you've got to teach your workers at home, how to segment networks.

Now, this is very complicated stuff and it's something that we do. Pro-sumer hardware, for instance, Cisco Go has the ability to do real segmentation.

So keep that in mind. You've got to teach them that. You've got to look at all the data that you have. Do we even know what data are your business is keeping? Jim, I walk into businesses all the time, that really have no clue. They have a general idea. They really don't know where it is. Who has access to it because these systems grow organically over time.

Even if you're a home user, where is my data? How do I protect that? You need to focus on the applications you have, get rid of them if you don't use it all the time if you haven't used it in awhile. Applications are one of the ways that bad guys have been getting in, and getting in a very big way. Make sure that data that's inside all of these apps are protected.

There's just a whole bunch and I'm going to be doing a training on this starting in September. These pieces of training are free. They're open. You're going to learn stuff, whether you're a home user or whether you're a business user on how to protect yourself. How to avoid these nasty people who are trying to sell you stuff that's supposedly going to protect you, that's useless.

Jim Polito: [00:06:15] I got it. We're talking with our good friend, tech talk guru, Craig Peterson.

You heard that. As we get closer to September, which is actually next week, but into the month and Craig has these seminars, we are going to pass that information along to you, so that you can do that.

Craig, I want to, I want to shift gears a little bit because this is interesting. We all worry about facial recognition. yeah, cops in Miami and New York City have arrested protestors. Now I wouldn't call them protesters. I call them criminals because why would they be arrested? They're not being arrested for peacefully protesting. They're being arrested for destroying things. Okay, committing crimes. but we'll just generically call them protesters, but they used facial recognition to do it.

Craig Peterson: [00:07:05] This is an interesting approach. You know how you've heard these, these protestors quote, unquote, the Marxists, who are in Portland and other places saying, Oh, the police are coming in and they're just picking people off of the streets randomly. What's actually been happening is the police have been taking photos, videos of what's been going on and they're not arresting just protesters.

We have a right to protest, generally speaking. What they're trying to do is find, who are these people. That is burning down buildings. Look at what happened last, just last night and Wisconsin, are you kidding me? Who are these people? What are they doing? A lot of them feel very comfortable in committing major crimes because they're wearing a mask, and they can never be identified. They can identify you just based on the upper portion of your face. They then track of people and they wait for these bad guys to get away from the crowd because you don't want the police going in there and getting pummeled like that police officer, apparently was last night there in Wisconsin hit by a brick in the head, down on the street. It was crazy.

Jim Polito: [00:08:20] Yeah. I saw that.

Craig Peterson: [00:08:21] They didn't want that to happen. So what they do is they track, they identify who they are, they track them, and then they arrest them, when they're away from the violent areas. And they've been continuing to do that where they're identifying them. And then they are basically going out and arresting them days later, in some cases.

At this point, we have already got hundreds of arrests of some of these people that are going after the very violent people. They're trying to find some of the leadership because what they're doing is by every definition, illegal and should not be happening.

Jim Polito: [00:08:57] So here's the question this goes to court and the argument is made, that's not me, you have to prove that your facial recognition is worthwhile. Do you know what I mean? okay. That's not me. And then you have experts. Competing experts on the stand saying that's not that person. No, that is that person. Am I right?

Craig Peterson: [00:09:22] Yeah. there's somebody who's been following a few cases that have gone to court. Absolutely. That's why they like tracking them the whole time.

So they have an overhead camera. Sometimes they have helicopters in the air. Nowadays. All they have to do is use drones. And it tracks them.

Now we've had this technology for a long time. We've used it in Somalia and other places as much as a decade ago. There were companies that sell small airplanes think of a kind of a Cessna and records everything going on in the city, everything.

So they fly above major cities and there's a crime committed, Jim, so they can track you backward. So where did you go? So the crime was committed here when you took off your hiding. They can now run it backward in time and track you back to your house and everywhere you went in between because everything happening in some of these major cities is recorded in super high def. So it can be played back.

I love the way your mind works. You're so logical when you're thinking that through.

Jim Polito: [00:10:35] Yeah.

Craig Peterson: [00:10:36] No it's true. And that voice of experience speaking there, Jim, from following some of these cases,

Jim Polito: [00:10:44] Listen, don't give me that much credit. it's just, from being a reporter. Thinking about these things and how we'd go to a court and what would happen. How the case would proceed.

But that's what you do whenever you bring in technology. That technology can be picked apart. Look, we saw it in the OJ trial about the DNA and it went well, how did you collect it? How did you collect the DNA? Where was it kept? They pick it apart, and by the way, you get people on a jury who don't completely understand it. And they glaze over and they invariably say, I, yeah, I don't know if I can trust that technology and there you go. That's all you have to do. Reasonable doubt.

Craig Peterson: [00:11:26] Or on the other side this is just too confusing for me. I'm going to follow the expert. Whatever expert smiled at me when I was on the stand.

There is a good argument for having a professional jury. I was an expert for a guy who was accused of having some pretty nasty stuff on his computer. Now computers are hacked every day and many of these computers, including businesses, computers are used for spreading Al Qaeda, ISIS, beheadings of Americans, kiddie porn, you name it. It's on your computer. But did you put it there? For a regular jury its getting too complicated?

Jim Polito: [00:12:10] Oh boy. All right. So look, you've got this great stuff coming up in September for folks to be able to protect themselves while they work from home.

There's always this information with Craig Peterson every week. Right here at this time, he joins us, gives us some of his time. Craig, how can folks get in touch with you now if they want to reach out?

Craig Peterson: [00:12:34] The best thing is to make sure you're getting my weekly newsletter. That's how you find out about the training. All of this stuff. Jim was just talking about, go to CraigPeterson.com/subscribe. That's Peterson SON, Craig peterson.com/subscribe. And I will keep you up to date and you will learn a lot more since you've been, you ever thought you needed to know and believe me, we need to know this stuff.

Jim Polito: [00:13:02] Yeah, we do. We absolutely do. Craig. I want to thank you so much for your time. It's always great. Always informative and I wish we had more, but we got to, we gotta pay some bills and, we got to wrap up the show, so thank you. Okay. Take care.

Craig Peterson: [00:13:17] Thanks, Jim. Take care.

Jim Polito: [00:13:19] All right. When we return, we have a web poll for you and a new one for tomorrow.

--- 

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome,

Good Monday morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. I was on with Jack Heath this morning discussing some of the hacking that has been going on here in regards to Roadside Warning Signs and how easily it is done but warning that it could lead to federal hacking penalties. Then we got into Voting issues and Election chaos and what Nation-states hope to do. Here we go with Jack.

These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit

- CraigPeterson.com

---

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] What they found, by the way, there were people from both sides of the political spectrum, there were law enforcement people involved, from local all the way up through federal, they found that it was very easy to hack our voting.

Craig Peterson (2): [00:00:16] Today's one of those days where I wish that technology had not been pushed into the political realm, technology and science, where now it's more important, what your truth is than what the truth is. This morning I got to speak with Mr. Jack Heath, of course, New Hampshire today. I heard throughout most of Northern New England. And we talked a little bit about a hack that had happened, but we really got into a bit about the election. This fall, the truth is it is going to be very easy to get people to the point where they don't know if the election was valid or not. We got into that and I just hit one point.

There are so many more. So I guess once again, we get a little bit political because somehow the truth about technology is political. Nowadays, my mind is just getting warped here. Here we go with Jack.

Jack Heath: [00:01:18] As I said earlier, we received this morning from one of our great listeners is the picture of one of these digital, electronic, real-time roadside signs that we see in these times, in New Hampshire and other States. In New Hampshire, they fairly, I think, use storm this afternoon or, road construction ahead, slow down. In the state of Maine, as we said earlier, I think they pretty much say if you're hungry, you should pull over and eat. Cause they got to tell everyone, no, they're over the top there.

Here they're pretty much used for construction, roadside stuff. traffic congestion ahead. Someone did hack route 28 in Barnstead and a political message saying something unflattering about Joe Biden and then Trump in 20. It's hacked and they say sent a picture of it. I don't think we could probably post it with the word that's written there, but I think from a tech talk point of view, it's interesting. Craig Peterson his show airs Saturdays here, tech talk on our iHeart stations. How hard is it to hack these? This has happened before in New Hampshire, someone puts up a message. How hard is it to do and what are the consequences if you're caught?

Good morning, Craig.

Craig Peterson: [00:02:26] Hey, good morning, Jack. Digital hacking, of course, a real problem we're all aware of. Is actually as easy to do. Is getting a pair of bolt cutters. In most cases, a lot of these digital signage machines that are besides this side of the road, have a keyboard right on them, that allows you to program the silly thing. Very easy to do with some of them.

Now, some of the newer ones have a little bit more safety on it, but we seeing these digital signs in some States where you have these huge signs over the freeways hacked statewide.

It is a real problem.

Jack Heath: [00:03:03] So it's not done remotely. You're saying physically it's done right there at the actual sign that sort of chain to something. It's not done remotely.

Craig Peterson: [00:03:13] Absolutely. These small, all signs are almost all local. Some of them are connected. Nowadays, is cheap enough to get digital self-service to them. But yeah, it's probably was done there locally was with a pair of bolt cutters. In some cases, you might need to have a little ethernet cable to program it but these things are fairly simple. Just to make it easier for the people who have to maintain them to run them.

Jack Heath: [00:03:39] All right. What else do you have for us this morning, Craig?

Craig Peterson: [00:03:42]By the way, it would be covered under the hacking statutes. If you did this. So depending on what sign and who owned it, you could be looking at a lot of years in prison or just a, basically a slap on the wrist.

The other big thing this last week has to do with the election coming up. There is a concept called red team blue team that's used in the cybersecurity community, used a lot in the military where you have a red team that's trying to hack in and you have a blue team that trying to defend.

In fact, all of our military colleges right now, the service academies have these types of teams. They put the kids through them and they come out just amazing people able to do this well there was a red team blue team that was conducted last week against voting in the United States.

What they found, by the way, there were people from both sides of the political spectrum, there were law enforcement people involved, from local, all the way up through federal. They found that it was very easy to hack our voting.

You were just talking about mail-in voting here, Jack. You may not be aware of it. These machines that we have, of course, they read bar codes, but yeah, you can send a piece of mail through the post office. You put a specific barcode on that letter and it's known what these are and they will reset the sorting machines. As easy as that, just the cost of a first-class stamp could completely mess up sorting machines throughout the nation.

It gets worse from there. The bottom line, the easiest thing for Russians to do, or for someone in the U S. To do is to create a complete lack of confidence. There are so many things they could do. It's just astounding.

We're not even talking about electronic voting, which is even worse.

Jack Heath: [00:05:41] Craig Peterson thank you very much. On this Monday morning. Make it a good one. Tech Talk. Thank you, Craig.

Craig Peterson: [00:05:46] Hey, I'll be back tomorrow with a little bit more. Of course. We'll be talking with Mr. Jim Polito covering much more of Northern New England in fact, depends on how far North, so that'll be fun also.

We're making some huge headway here. Things are going to change. You're going to see some of the email stuff change. I'm switching over to a lot more teaching, coaching, and mentoring here to help people out, as well as "done it for you" solutions, right?

If you need some help, we will actually take over your security administration, right? We can even provide you with the hardware and the people to run it. The whole nine yards.

Take care, everybody. Make sure you visit me online. Craig peterson.com and you'll be seeing some changes there coming up soon.

Bye-bye.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome,

Good Monday morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. I was on with Jack Heath this morning discussing some of the hacking that has been going on here in regards to Roadside Warning Signs and how easily it is done but warning that it could lead to federal hacking penalties. Then we got into Voting issues and Election chaos and what Nation-states hope to do. Here we go with Jack.

These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit

- CraigPeterson.com

--- 

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] What they found, by the way, there were people from both sides of the political spectrum, there were law enforcement people involved, from local all the way up through federal, they found that it was very easy to hack our voting.

Craig Peterson (2): [00:00:16] Today's one of those days where I wish that technology had not been pushed into the political realm, technology and science, where now it's more important, what your truth is than what the truth is. This morning I got to speak with Mr. Jack Heath, of course, New Hampshire today. I heard throughout most of Northern New England. And we talked a little bit about a hack that had happened, but we really got into a bit about the election. This fall, the truth is it is going to be very easy to get people to the point where they don't know if the election was valid or not. We got into that and I just hit one point.

There are so many more. So I guess once again, we get a little bit political because somehow the truth about technology is political. Nowadays, my mind is just getting warped here. Here we go with Jack.

Jack Heath: [00:01:18] As I said earlier, we received this morning from one of our great listeners is the picture of one of these digital, electronic, real-time roadside signs that we see in these times, in New Hampshire and other States. In New Hampshire, they fairly, I think, use storm this afternoon or, road construction ahead, slow down. In the state of Maine, as we said earlier, I think they pretty much say if you're hungry, you should pull over and eat. Cause they got to tell everyone, no, they're over the top there.

Here they're pretty much used for construction, roadside stuff. traffic congestion ahead. Someone did hack route 28 in Barnstead and a political message saying something unflattering about Joe Biden and then Trump in 20. It's hacked and they say sent a picture of it. I don't think we could probably post it with the word that's written there, but  I think from a tech talk point of view, it's interesting. Craig Peterson his show airs Saturdays here, tech talk on our iHeart stations. How hard is it to hack these? This has happened before in New Hampshire, someone puts up a message. How hard is it to do and what are the consequences if you're caught?

Good morning, Craig.

Craig Peterson: [00:02:26] Hey, good morning, Jack. Digital hacking, of course, a real problem we're all aware of. Is actually as easy to do. Is getting a pair of bolt cutters. In most cases, a lot of these digital signage machines that are besides this side of the road, have a keyboard right on them, that allows you to program the silly thing. Very easy to do with some of them.

Now, some of the newer ones have a little bit more safety on it, but we seeing these digital signs in some States where you have these huge signs over the freeways hacked statewide.

It is a real problem.

Jack Heath: [00:03:03] So it's not done remotely. You're saying physically it's done right there at the actual sign that sort of chain to something. It's not done remotely.

Craig Peterson: [00:03:13] Absolutely. These small, all signs are almost all local. Some of them are connected. Nowadays, is cheap enough to get digital self-service to them. But yeah, it's probably was done there locally was with a pair of bolt cutters. In some cases, you might need to have a little ethernet cable to program it but these things are fairly simple. Just to make it easier for the people who have to maintain them to run them.

Jack Heath: [00:03:39] All right. What else do you have for us this morning, Craig?

Craig Peterson: [00:03:42]By the way, it would be covered under the hacking statutes. If you did this. So depending on what sign and who owned it, you could be looking at a lot of years in prison or just a, basically a slap on the wrist.

The other big thing this last week has to do with the election coming up. There is a concept called red team blue team that's used in the cybersecurity community, used a lot in the military where you have a red team that's trying to hack in and you have a blue team that trying to defend.

In fact, all of our military colleges right now, the service academies have these types of teams. They put the kids through them and they come out just amazing people able to do this well there was a red team blue team that was conducted last week against voting in the United States.

What they found, by the way, there were people from both sides of the political spectrum, there were law enforcement people involved, from local, all the way up through federal. They found that it was very easy to hack our voting.

You were just talking about mail-in voting here, Jack. You may not be aware of it. These machines that we have, of course, they read bar codes, but yeah, you can send a piece of mail through the post office. You put a specific barcode on that letter and it's known what these are and they will reset the sorting machines. As easy as that, just the cost of a first-class stamp could completely mess up sorting machines throughout the nation.

It gets worse from there. The bottom line, the easiest thing for Russians to do, or for someone in the U S. To do is to create a complete lack of confidence. There are so many things they could do. It's just astounding.

We're not even talking about electronic voting, which is even worse.

Jack Heath: [00:05:41] Craig Peterson thank you very much. On this Monday morning. Make it a good one. Tech Talk. Thank you, Craig.

Craig Peterson: [00:05:46] Hey, I'll be back tomorrow with a little bit more. Of course. We'll be talking with Mr. Jim Polito covering much more of Northern New England in fact, depends on how far North, so that'll be fun also.

We're making some huge headway here. Things are going to change. You're going to see some of the email stuff change. I'm switching over to a lot more teaching, coaching, and mentoring here to help people out, as well as "done it for you" solutions, right?

If you need some help, we will actually take over your security administration, right? We can even provide you with the hardware and the people to run it. The whole nine yards.

Take care, everybody. Make sure you visit me online. Craig peterson.com and you'll be seeing some changes there coming up soon.

 Bye-bye.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome!

Craig explains why you should be extra careful about shopping online. ISIS set up shop selling PPE.

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

---

Read More:

Huawei's expired US license is bad news for phone owners

Security Jobs With a Future -- And Ones on the Way Out

NSA & FBI Disclose New Russian Cyberespionage Malware

FCC beats cities in court, helping carriers avoid $2 billion in local 5G fees

Business Email Compromise Attacks Involving MFA Bypass Increase

NSA and FBI warn that new Linux malware threatens national security

How Fast Is SpaceX's Satellite Internet? Beta Tests Show it Hitting Up to 60Mbps

ISIS Allegedly Ran a Covid-19 PPE Scam Site

---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] We've got a new warning from the NSA and the FBI. If you are running Linux. this is a very big deal. We are now looking at some bypasses for multifactor authentication. So if you're using MFA, I got some news for you and some tips about what to do.

This is Craig Peterson. Thanks for joining me today. You can find me online as well. On my website craigpeterson.com and every week we go through a whole bunch of articles. In the thousands to come up with the top seven or eight that we think everybody needs to know, that's what we'll be talking about today.

We'll be talking about ISIS and some of these PPE scams, a phenomenal announcement here from SpaceX about satellite internet. If your internet is really slow. I might be able to point you in a direction here. That'll get you. Internet 50 megabits for a buck for the first month, then two bucks after that, we'll be talking about that.

And the FCC here has been beating these cities in court that is trying to overcharge really some of the internet providers. And they're avoiding $2 billion in fees. So that's going to help with local 5g rollout, which is again, going to get you better, faster internet. We've got new Russian cyberespionage malware out there.

Security jobs. If you've been thinking about going into it. This means geeks as well as all of you, other guys. A guy who actually went through a training program to become a cybersecurity professional and he's doing that now. Which jobs have a real future, which ones don't, what's going to be impacted by artificial intelligence, if it ever really gets here.

Huawei in the news again, If you have a Huawei device of any sort, you need to keep listening. Looks like they are absolutely going to be knocked out of business, whether they want to or not. So we're going to start with, ISIS. I was going to say our friends, but yeah, they're not exactly our friends now.

You know who ISIS is right there. They are what President Obama called the junior varsity team. They had no idea what they were doing. It's a good thing that we can ignore them because ISIS just isn't there. It's not a big deal. as it turns out, of course, it was a very big deal.

President Trump drove them back something that hadn't been able to happen before. If you consider them the varsity team and they're really some serious bad guys, you might not be going after them the way you should. Politics aside, ISIS needs money. If you go back to the roots of ISIS and bin Ladin, and where did he get his money from? It came from his rich family in Saudi Arabia. Another, self-loathing liberal, frankly, who wanted to kill everyone that wasn't the same as him in so many ways, all of these people that just hated themselves. And of course, yeah. A project that outward, read Freud, if you want to find out what that's all about, transference is what it's called, but here's the bottom line here.

The justice department has been getting complaints. Now, if you have a problem, when you're online, Oh, you should really go and check out, the FBI has a website. The internet complaint center is what it's called and it is run by them. You can file complaints. IC3.gov is where you'll find it online. I see three.gov, just those letters, the internet crime complaint center.

So if you have been ripped off online, that's where you should go. You don't need to call the FBI or the secret service right away, file it there. They compile it all together. Sometimes they will go and try and help you out. And as part of that help you out, they will get ahold of the local police.

They'll tell you what to do, but you can file a complaint right there. In fact, they even have instructions before you file a complaint. Figure out what the details are, what happens after you file it. They've got all that stuff there. So have a look at that. IC3.gov. apparently a lot of people have been filing complaints about companies offering personal protective equipment PPE, right?

And that's a real big deal, a real big problem because some of this stuff has been absolutely and totally fake. Look at what's been happening around the country where we're really getting, what's the best word to put it? I guess confused. And so much of it comes from our friends over in China.

They, you might remember went ahead and frankly cornered the market. They were buying personal protective equipment from the United States, depleted all of our stockpiles here. They depleted their own stockpiles. It's a really bad thing. And California. You might remember what happened here with, again, Gavin Newsom and what did Gavin Newsom do?

What was the big problem? they went ahead and bought a whole bunch of them. Rumors are that they wired, this is an article from Cal matters, by the way, a mask dealer, a half a billion dollars. The masks shop. These are supposedly PPE and it was a deal with this medical supplier called blue flame.

It's interesting here because we had a whole deal fall apart. the stuff that was delivered was way substandard. Rumors are California's governor Newsom was involved in this, and there might've been some kickbacks here and there, but the deal died, frankly, within hours. This initial deal that they had wired $456.9 million, which is half of what legislature had allocated for California's pandemic response.

Then they canceled it about six hours later and they tried to pull the money back. They were actually able to get most of it back, which is a little bit surprising. Why did California make such a large purchase for a hundred million face masks from a brand new untested company?

You just don't know. But it does show us again how desperate so many people are. So when people found this website called face mask center.com. You can go there right now if you'd like to check it out and you'll see a seizure notice and it's been seized, has got the treasury and the FBI and Homeland security's logos on there.

There was a seizure warrant that was issued by a DC, a district of Columbia judge. They apparently received it because ISIS has been using it to raise money, to conduct terrorism around the world. People are just absolutely desperate for things like masks, Tyvek suits, goggles, face shields, you name it right.

These N95 masks, even thermometers. They were selling all of them on the face mask center.com website. Now, one of the things that really sticks out to me is apparently they wanted to be paid in Bitcoin. Now Bitcoin is not totally anonymous. And I can cite cases where the secret service has pierced the whole Bitcoin thing and was able to seize the money, arrest people, everything else.

All right. So it doesn't think the Bitcoin is a hundred percent secure because it isn't right. But bad guys use Bitcoin a lot. It goes back to the prisoner's dilemma, which you won't explain right now, but basically, how can a thief trust a thief? The answer is, they can't. So what do they try and do?

So they've been trying to use Bitcoin. I've seen some great articles written how about the value of Bitcoin has been directly related to the success of criminals. As they've been able to ransom more data where they might've encrypted it, they might've stolen it. They might be threatening to release it unless you pay the ransom.

Whenever that's been happening. The value of Bitcoin has been going up. yeah, I don't give investment advice, but I know some people that follow that advice pretty darn closely, and some people that have been recommending people do that. So the justice department recently seized hundreds of Bitcoin and Ethereum accounts, which is another type of cryptocurrency.

By the way, when we say cryptocurrency, we don't mean that it's encrypted and it's hard to get at it. It's a basic classification of occurred currency or currency exchange. It was millions of dollars four websites it's from known Islamic. Extremist groups included ISIS, the ELCA, some brigades, and Al Qaeda.

This is the government's largest-ever seizure of cryptocurrency in the terrorism context, according to the department of justice.

So be very careful because the bad guys are out there trying to rip you off. Now, in this case, most of the materials were not delivered. you ordered it, you paid your Bitcoin, or maybe in some cases, they took credit cards.

The articles are unclear about that, but. There's a company called dark owl that has been tried. These WuHan virus-related scams online for months and their chief executive officer Mark Turnage said that we've seen a massive volume of illegitimate materials like PPE being sold. I never delivered the fact that ISIS decided to get into the business. Isn't too surprising. Even they are capitalists. Now that's my comment. This is from an article on wired by Andy Greenberg. You might want to look it up.

There's lots of great information in there as well. The article goes on and talks a little bit more, but yeah. Be very careful when you're buying online.

Now, I talked about this a lot this week. Listen to my podcast, talking with various radio stations, including this one. We talked about what do you look for to help avoid PPE scams, so have a look at that.

Craig peterson.com/podcast. You'll be able to see them right there and listen to them.

All right. Stick around. Because when we come back, we're going to talk about some ways that you're going to be able to save a lot of money on the internet in the near future.

You're listening to Craig Peterson, stick around. Cause it will be right back.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome!

Craig explains why you should be extra careful about shopping online.  ISIS set up shop selling PPE.

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

---

Read More:

Huawei's expired US license is bad news for phone owners

Security Jobs With a Future -- And Ones on the Way Out

NSA & FBI Disclose New Russian Cyberespionage Malware

FCC beats cities in court, helping carriers avoid $2 billion in local 5G fees

Business Email Compromise Attacks Involving MFA Bypass Increase

NSA and FBI warn that new Linux malware threatens national security

How Fast Is SpaceX's Satellite Internet? Beta Tests Show it Hitting Up to 60Mbps

ISIS Allegedly Ran a Covid-19 PPE Scam Site

---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] We've got a new warning from the NSA and the FBI. If you are running Linux. this is a very big deal. We are now looking at some bypasses for multifactor authentication. So if you're using MFA, I got some news for you and some tips about what to do.

This is Craig Peterson. Thanks for joining me today. You can find me online as well. On my website craigpeterson.com and every week we go through a whole bunch of articles. In the thousands to come up with the top seven or eight that we think everybody needs to know, that's what we'll be talking about today.

We'll be talking about ISIS and some of these PPE scams, a phenomenal announcement here from SpaceX about satellite internet. If your internet is really slow. I might be able to point you in a direction here. That'll get you. Internet 50 megabits for a buck for the first month, then two bucks after that, we'll be talking about that.

And the FCC here has been beating these cities in court that is trying to overcharge really some of the internet providers. And they're avoiding $2 billion in fees. So that's going to help with local 5g rollout, which is again, going to get you better, faster internet. We've got new Russian cyberespionage malware out there.

Security jobs. If you've been thinking about going into it. This means geeks as well as all of you, other guys. A guy who actually went through a training program to become a cybersecurity professional and he's doing that now. Which jobs have a real future, which ones don't, what's going to be impacted by artificial intelligence, if it ever really gets here.

 Huawei in the news again, If you have a Huawei device of any sort, you need to keep listening. Looks like they are absolutely going to be knocked out of business, whether they want to or not. So we're going to start with, ISIS. I was going to say our friends, but yeah, they're not exactly our friends now.

You know who ISIS is right there. They are what President Obama called the junior varsity team. They had no idea what they were doing. It's a good thing that we can ignore them because ISIS just isn't there. It's not a big deal. as it turns out, of course, it was a very big deal.

President Trump drove them back something that hadn't been able to happen before. If you consider them the varsity team and they're really some serious bad guys, you might not be going after them the way you should. Politics aside, ISIS needs money. If you go back to the roots of ISIS and bin Ladin, and where did he get his money from? It came from his rich family in Saudi Arabia. Another, self-loathing liberal, frankly, who wanted to kill everyone that wasn't the same as him in so many ways, all of these people that just hated themselves. And of course, yeah. A project that outward, read Freud, if you want to find out what that's all about, transference is what it's called, but here's the bottom line here.

The justice department has been getting complaints. Now, if you have a problem, when you're online, Oh, you should really go and check out, the FBI has a website. The internet complaint center is what it's called and it is run by them. You can file complaints. IC3.gov is where you'll find it online. I see three.gov, just those letters, the internet crime complaint center.

So if you have been ripped off online, that's where you should go. You don't need to call the FBI or the secret service right away, file it there. They compile it all together. Sometimes they will go and try and help you out. And as part of that help you out, they will get ahold of the local police.

They'll tell you what to do, but you can file a complaint right there. In fact, they even have instructions before you file a complaint. Figure out what the details are, what happens after you file it. They've got all that stuff there. So have a look at that. IC3.gov. apparently a lot of people have been filing complaints about companies offering personal protective equipment PPE, right?

And that's a real big deal, a real big problem because some of this stuff has been absolutely and totally fake. Look at what's been happening around the country where we're really getting, what's the best word to put it? I guess confused. And so much of it comes from our friends over in China.

They, you might remember went ahead and frankly cornered the market. They were buying personal protective equipment from the United States, depleted all of our stockpiles here. They depleted their own stockpiles. It's a really bad thing. And California. You might remember what happened here with, again, Gavin Newsom and what did Gavin Newsom do?

What was the big problem? they went ahead and bought a whole bunch of them. Rumors are that they wired, this is an article from Cal matters, by the way, a mask dealer, a half a billion dollars. The masks shop. These are supposedly PPE and it was a deal with this medical supplier called blue flame.

It's interesting here because we had a whole deal fall apart. the stuff that was delivered was way substandard. Rumors are California's governor Newsom was involved in this, and there might've been some kickbacks here and there, but the deal died, frankly, within hours. This initial deal that they had wired $456.9 million, which is half of what legislature had allocated for California's pandemic response.

Then they canceled it about six hours later and they tried to pull the money back. They were actually able to get most of it back, which is a little bit surprising. Why did California make such a large purchase for a hundred million face masks from a brand new untested company?

You just don't know. But it does show us again how desperate so many people are. So when people found this website called face mask center.com. You can go there right now if you'd like to check it out and you'll see a seizure notice and it's been seized, has got the treasury and the FBI and Homeland security's logos on there.

There was a seizure warrant that was issued by a DC, a district of Columbia judge.  They apparently received it because ISIS has been using it to raise money, to conduct terrorism around the world. People are just absolutely desperate for things like masks, Tyvek suits, goggles,  face shields, you name it right.

These N95 masks, even thermometers. They were selling all of them on the face mask center.com website. Now, one of the things that really sticks out to me is apparently they wanted to be paid in Bitcoin. Now Bitcoin is not totally anonymous. And I can cite cases where the secret service has pierced the whole Bitcoin thing and was able to seize the money, arrest people, everything else.

All right. So it doesn't think the Bitcoin is a hundred percent secure because it isn't right. But bad guys use Bitcoin a lot. It goes back to the prisoner's dilemma, which you won't explain right now, but basically, how can a thief trust a thief? The answer is, they can't. So what do they try and do?

So they've been trying to use Bitcoin.  I've seen some great articles written how about the value of Bitcoin has been directly related to the success of criminals. As they've been able to ransom more data where they might've encrypted it, they might've stolen it. They might be threatening to release it unless you pay the ransom.

Whenever that's been happening. The value of Bitcoin has been going up. yeah, I don't give investment advice, but I know some people that follow that advice pretty darn closely, and some people that have been recommending people do that. So the justice department recently seized hundreds of Bitcoin and Ethereum accounts, which is another type of cryptocurrency.

By the way, when we say cryptocurrency, we don't mean that it's encrypted and it's hard to get at it. It's a basic classification of occurred currency or currency exchange. It was millions of dollars four websites it's from known Islamic. Extremist groups included ISIS, the ELCA, some brigades, and Al Qaeda.

This is the government's largest-ever seizure of cryptocurrency in the terrorism context, according to the department of justice.

So be very careful because the bad guys are out there trying to rip you off. Now, in this case, most of the materials were not delivered. you ordered it, you paid your Bitcoin, or maybe in some cases, they took credit cards.

The articles are unclear about that, but. There's a company called dark owl that has been tried. These WuHan virus-related scams online for months and their chief executive officer Mark Turnage said that we've seen a massive volume of illegitimate materials like PPE being sold. I never delivered the fact that ISIS decided to get into the business. Isn't too surprising. Even they are capitalists. Now that's my comment. This is from an article on wired by Andy Greenberg. You might want to look it up.

There's lots of great information in there as well. The article goes on and talks a little bit more, but yeah. Be very careful when you're buying online.

Now, I talked about this a lot this week. Listen to my podcast, talking with various radio stations, including this one. We talked about what do you look for to help avoid PPE scams, so have a look at that.

Craig peterson.com/podcast. You'll be able to see them right there and listen to them.

All right. Stick around. Because when we come back, we're going to talk about some ways that you're going to be able to save a lot of money on the internet in the near future.

You're listening to Craig Peterson, stick around. Cause it will be right back.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome!

Craig discusses Elon Musk's Starlink Satellite Project and the future of rural internet

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

---

Read More:

Huawei's expired US license is bad news for phone owners

Security Jobs With a Future -- And Ones on the Way Out

NSA & FBI Disclose New Russian Cyberespionage Malware

FCC beats cities in court, helping carriers avoid $2 billion in local 5G fees

Business Email Compromise Attacks Involving MFA Bypass Increase

NSA and FBI warn that new Linux malware threatens national security

How Fast Is SpaceX's Satellite Internet? Beta Tests Show it Hitting Up to 60Mbps

ISIS Allegedly Ran a Covid-19 PPE Scam Site

---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] If you are tired of these crazy cable bills, we've got a couple of articles that are going to talk about right now. we're going to start with one on our friend Elon Musk, who's going to save you a lot of money, at least by the looks of it.

Hey, welcome. This is Craig Peterson, of course. Thanks for listening to me and visiting me online at craigpeterson.com. You probably saw my newsletter last week. We had a great little note. From one of our listeners, he, his name is Dick and he was trying to figure out a couple of things. We had a few more this week and I had a great little conversation as well another listener, he has some really cool old cars, and he was lamenting the demise of the Buick Roadmaster. You might remember that car and that whole generation. And we kinda got back and forth talking about my 1980 Mercedes that I drive. That's actually my daily driver, believe it or not, and it's got more than 200,000 miles on. It needs a little bit more work. I'm not going to restore it. He was suggesting, he watches, not Pawn Stars, American pickers, which I really enjoy as well. Having a car that's in original shape has some real value to it.

Of course, in this case, it's in the Northeast and although it's spent its initial part of its life down South, quite a ways, still on the coast, it has a lot of rust. So I'm not going to really try and restore it to that sort of a condition. I'm trying to bring it up to make it look really nice. Needs a new paint job, but it's got some unseen rust.

We fixed the major stuff like in the rocker panels, but it's just so much fun. I love driving these old cars. It just handles so well drive so well gets good fuel mileage, nothing like diesel for that. For longevity. In fact, this generation of the car that engine in it is known to go for a million miles before it even needs a rebuild. It's just absolutely incredible. Yeah, we'll see where that goes. It was fun chatting with him about that. So I'm like a shout out to you.

So let's get into this whole thing. Elon Musk, we're talking about cars, right? Is that what you think of when you think of Elon Musk? Do you think of a, one of the world's richest men?

Do you think about somebody that is just, maybe yeah, a little too caffeinated or too much red bull or something? You've seen the guy, And he's into almost everything. You've got the Tesla cars. He also has a solar company where they'll put solar tiles. on your roof now as well as regular solar panels.

He'll also sell you if you want it a trip up into space. He ran Bob and Doug astronauts up into space. The first time ever we had a commercial endeavor, take us, astronauts, up. I thought that was really cool. I totally watched that. I was in Kentucky at the time, but it was very cool. He's been doing a lot of neat things. A boring company, which has been contracted to put in a tunnel out there in Vegas. They've been trying to get, tunnel a high-speed tunnel. We're talking. More than a hundred miles an hour, closer to 200. They've been trying to put in a tunnel, going from Vegas to Los Angeles as well. And they tried to get one going up the interior, California, basically uproot five LA up to Fresno, or maybe all the way up.

To the San Francisco area. He is amazing. He's been driving this stuff. He's got his huge battery plant. He's moving some of this stuff out of California. Hopefully, he's not bringing a single Californian in with him. Don't poluteTexas or some of these other great States, by bringing in these Californians.

As you might know, I lived there for a decade and my wife was born and raised there and we managed to escape, which is, I think, a testament to her ability to recognize idiocy all around her in California. It's really changed over the years.

But he has another endeavor that you might not have heard of. Part of what he does, of course, is he launches satellites into space, not just our spaceman. and eventually women as well. I'm sure there's a lot of amazing women that are in the space program, but as SpaceX is preparing to launch Starlink. The big question is how well will it work in the real world.

Now, if you've been on a WebEx call, for instance, lately, a WebEx team interaction, you might've noticed, sometimes some people have very slow connections. You might have noticed even on the telephone, like when I'm talking to certain people on the radio, the delay between me stopping saying something and the host responding can be a couple of seconds, and then it gets very annoying. That's called round trip time, just keeping all those stuff simple and knowing what the round trip time is between you and somebody else is really going to help you determine whether or not you can use the phone. These internet-connected phones, which by the way, if you have a cell phone nowadays, most of them actually make calls over the internet when you're at home. Or if you're connected to wifi over at a coffee shop or something, I've got T-Mobile and it is always trying to use wifi and I get really great connectivity.

But if you have a lot of jitter, it's a problem for gamers. It's a problem with telephones. It's a problem for video conferences and the longest phone calls. Is it certainly, isn't what it used to be. Yeah. Where are you call up the long-distance operator and they try and connect you across the country and you're constantly being dropped and losing it? Heaven forbid you try to go over the pond. So when we're talking about these low earth satellites, we're talking about a much different type of connection. Historically, all of our connections have gone over landlines are undersea cables and they've been. scratchy and it gets worse.

The further that call is being made, and then they switched to digital. The phone company had digital technology long before CDs came out. These remember CDs. Yeah. Where you buy a CD, you can listen to music. So the phone company was using CDs for that type of technology, not CDs, but digital audio for a very long time.

And it was a huge advantage for them. It still is because now instead of having to have all these switches with the bucket switches, these round switches. I don't know if you ever were in a central office, but it was loud in there. It was really cool.

Instead of all, in that it was all done on computers and computers just transferred your data around. So from your phone to the phone, on the other side, there were no amplifiers that were causing problems with your signal. There were no bad lines that had a bad connection on them and really could have had some contacts clean. none of that stuff. It's just nice and clear on both sides. In fact, it's so clear that the phone company started introducing a little bit of hiss, a little bit of noise. So people did not think that they got disconnected. That's how good it is.

That is the technology of today. There was also a microwave in the middle of there. They'd use that for a long haul. There's still a lot of microwave antennas up. You might remember MCI. I used that for quite a while. They had their own little network and anyways, nowadays we are using all kinds of data lines. In some cases, if you have a satellite phone, you are actually talking through a satellite and these satellite phones can be great almost anywhere in the world.

But what we're talking about with Elon Musk's Starlink is actually something. Different than that. These are a completely different breed of satellite in a completely different orbit than almost all other satellites that are out there and they're going to provide us with a completely different experience.

And you can be a big winner with all of this that's going on. So I'm going to tell you how you can win this. Okay. Why you might want to get involved if you're in the Northern part of the United States. Elon wants you. So when we get back, that's exactly. What we're going to talk about.

What is SpaceX satellite, internet doing? What's it going to do? Then we're going to get this slightly geeky or talking about a new NSA and FBI warning.

You're listening to Craig Peterson. Thanks for being with me.

We'll be right back, stick around.

Of course, you can find me online. Craig peterson.com.

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