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

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

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---

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.

---

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 what it means for Rural internet users.

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] Elon Musk, he's been doing some amazing things with technology. he's trying to change the way all of your internet access works, all of your phone calls work. He's eventually going to try and get all of this embedded into our new smartphones.

I'm not even sure we can call them smartphones anymore. Craig Peterson here. When was the last time you made a phone call on that smartphone of yours? Just not using them for that anymore.

We're using them for browsing the internet. I've used them many times going online and doing video conferences. I use them for checking websites for doing research, even for ordering stuff. I do all of that using my smartphone. I don't know. We've got to come up with a better name for these things.

Now, Elon Musk stands out a lot about where technology's going he's been really very insightful on all of this.

Of course, that insight eventually anyways, can build serious value. Look at what just happened with Apple, the first company to pass $2 trillion public company, $2 trillion in market capitalization. That is huge. And by the way, Apple reached the $2 trillion mark about two years after it set the last record, which was a trillion dollars in market capitalization. Apple didn't invent the idea of a smartphone or personal digital assistant. None of that stuff. They just made it better. They did not invent MP3 three players. I had one I really liked, and it was, I think, much better, had much better audio in it. Originally designed by digital equipment corporation, a company I did some contract work for. But made by another third party and sold in a third party, they just licensed the technology was phenomenal.

But when the iPod came out, it just basically wiped out the rest of the market. And nowadays who buys an audio player anymore, very few of us. That's not what we're interested in.

We have our smartphone with us or the data on the smartphone. We download podcasts. We download music. actually, you know what? That was last year, maybe two years ago, because now we have data plans that work almost everywhere. We are in the United States. In fact, throughout Europe and other places as well. My plan covers Europe and other places. It's just amazing.

So we have a lot of data available to us and we're used to it. So if you're traveling coast to coast and if you're staying on the major interstates or even major state highways, you're going to find that you always have data connectivity, at least almost all of the time, if not, absolutely all of the time.

So how do you deal with this? We're finding that even though things like your iPhones and heaven forbid if you have an Android because of the security problems we talk about almost every week. Get rid of it. That's my advice. I'm prejudiced here and I'm not always going to be with Apple and I'm not a huge Apple fan. I'm just a huge fan of their technology and what they've done. They were the real adults about it all.

Anyhow, we're driving down the highway. We can now listen to anything or you, many of you guys might be listening to this as a podcast. We're listening to it. We're enjoying it. We're having fun. We're not downloading them.

Many of us just don't download anymore. So you can certainly subscribe to a podcast, for instance, subscribe to your favorite radio station and to have it downloaded. But most of us know, no we're, we are streaming. So there are still people that download like me and there are all are still areas in the United States where there just isn't enough data service. Particularly when you start getting up into some of the Northern States, there are really internet deserts.

I'm carried in the Northeast and I can tell you from people who contact me all the time, Northern Maine, central Maine, and also New Hampshire parts of Vermont, a lot of Vermont, in fact, have almost no internet service.

Now, Vermont it's their own fault because they don't want those terrible, heaven forbid, poles put up that have cable on them. Or the poles already exist having a cable on them. So let's just put Vermont aside, right?

Although this is going to benefit them hugely. Because what we're talking about now is a constellation of satellites. We're going to talk about what our friend Elon Musk is doing, but you know what, he's not the only one out there that is putting up a constellation of satellites. Now, what is a constellation of satellites? It is really a whole bunch of satellites that are tying together, performing the same function, and are really going to give you a whole new experience when it comes out.

When it comes down to how we can access things online? What we're going to access? When we're going to access it? All of the stuff that frankly really matters. So they tie them all together.

Now with our friends over at SpaceX, their constellation of satellites is being called Starlink. Which is really, that's a cool name, isn't it? Starlink. It reminds me of Marvel, right? Star-Lord. Starlink is a whole network that will eventually be hundreds and hundreds of satellites that are in low earth orbit. Now, what that means is they are down low. So that they can hear faint signals from our devices and can also use less power to reach us.

So that's the bottom line on it now in low earth orbit, it means you're going to get a little bit more drag, some more pull from the earth. They're going to have to try and keep themselves in that order, in that orbit. But what we're looking at now is these rural areas that have particularly slow internet speeds or no real speed at all.

Some people. Can only get about a megabit worth of bandwidth. Now compare that to me, where I'm in a decent metropolitan area. I'm right by a Comcast central office and I have three gigabits. Worth of bandwidth on fiber coming right in here, which is just absolutely phenomenal. I got to say, Comcast, people might complain about them, but I have had zero problems with this network connection. It's absolutely fantastic. I use it for my business and for my home. It's just amazing.

So how about everybody else? how about the people that are paying way too much? For some of these data packages that are out there. that's where Elon Musk is hoping that Starlink is really gonna help out.

They're seeing upload speeds right now from about five megabits to about 20 megabits, which isn't bad, not bad at all latency, which is the time it takes for a packet to get to the satellite. And back has ranged from about 20 milliseconds up to about a hundred milliseconds, which is really not bad. I remember the days when a hundred milliseconds was, Oh my gosh, that's amazing.

On your local network. Okay. They have a target reaching gigabit speeds, which is phenomenal. And most people that have the beta are getting 50 megabit speed. So imagine that gigabit speeds from a satellite. All you have to do is put a small satellite dish outside. So let me give you a little hint here.

You can go two starlink.com right now on your web browser, starlink.com. And on that website, you can put in your name and your address as a service address is asking for. And if you are selected, Elon Musk's people at Starlink will give you they'll charge you a dollar for a satellite dish that you can mount yourself in 20 minutes to an hour, depending on how complex it's going to be, where you are at. Month two, it goes up to $2 and they want you to use it a lot, so they can test it out.

So kudos out to Elon Musk, but also all of these other companies that are doing much the same thing with putting up their own constellations.

All right. Stick around when we come back.

Hey, if you are an IT person for your business, I've got some NSA and FBI news for you.

Stick around. Cause we'll be right back. You're listening to Craig Peterson.

---

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 what it means for Rural internet users.

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] Elon Musk, he's been doing some amazing things with technology. he's trying to change the way all of your internet access works, all of your phone calls work. He's eventually going to try and get all of this embedded into our new smartphones.

I'm not even sure we can call them smartphones anymore. Craig Peterson here. When was the last time you made a phone call on that smartphone of yours? Just not using them for that anymore.

We're using them for browsing the internet. I've used them many times going online and doing video conferences. I use them for checking websites for doing research, even for ordering stuff. I do all of that using my smartphone. I don't know. We've got to come up with a better name for these things.

Now, Elon Musk stands out a lot about where technology's going he's been really very insightful on all of this.

Of course, that insight eventually anyways, can build serious value. Look at what just happened with Apple, the first company to pass $2 trillion public company, $2 trillion in market capitalization. That is huge. And by the way, Apple reached the $2 trillion mark about two years after it set the last record, which was a trillion dollars in market capitalization. Apple didn't invent the idea of a smartphone or personal digital assistant. None of that stuff. They just made it better. They did not invent MP3 three players. I had one I really liked, and it was, I think, much better, had much better audio in it. Originally designed by digital equipment corporation, a company I did some contract work for. But made by another third party and sold in a third party, they just licensed the technology was phenomenal.

 But when the iPod came out, it just basically wiped out the rest of the market. And nowadays who buys an audio player anymore, very few of us. That's not what we're interested in.

We have our smartphone with us or the data on the smartphone. We download podcasts. We download music. actually, you know what? That was last year, maybe two years ago, because now we have data plans that work almost everywhere. We are in the United States. In fact, throughout Europe and other places as well. My plan covers Europe and other places. It's just amazing.

So we have a lot of data available to us and we're used to it. So if you're traveling coast to coast and if you're staying on the major interstates or even major state highways, you're going to find that you always have data connectivity, at least almost all of the time, if not, absolutely all of the time.

So how do you deal with this? We're finding that even though things like your iPhones and heaven forbid if you have an Android because of the security problems we talk about almost every week. Get rid of it. That's my advice. I'm prejudiced here and I'm not always going to be with Apple and I'm not a huge Apple fan. I'm just a huge fan of their technology and what they've done. They were the real adults about it all.

Anyhow, we're driving down the highway. We can now listen to anything or you, many of you guys might be listening to this as a podcast. We're listening to it. We're enjoying it. We're having fun. We're not downloading them.

Many of us just don't download anymore. So you can certainly subscribe to a podcast, for instance, subscribe to your favorite radio station and to have it downloaded. But most of us know, no we're, we are streaming. So there are still people that download like me and there are all are still areas in the United States where there just isn't enough data service. Particularly when you start getting up into some of the Northern States, there are really internet deserts.

I'm carried in the Northeast and I can tell you from people who contact me all the time, Northern Maine, central Maine, and also New Hampshire parts of Vermont, a lot of Vermont, in fact, have almost no internet service.

Now, Vermont it's their own fault because they don't want those terrible, heaven forbid, poles put up that have cable on them. Or the poles already exist having a cable on them. So let's just put Vermont aside, right?

Although this is going to benefit them hugely. Because what we're talking about now is a constellation of satellites. We're going to talk about what our friend Elon Musk is doing, but you know what, he's not the only one out there that is putting up a constellation of satellites. Now, what is a constellation of satellites? It is really a whole bunch of satellites that are tying together, performing the same function, and are really going to give you a whole new experience when it comes out.

When it comes down to how we can access things online? What we're going to access? When we're going to access it? All of the stuff that frankly really matters. So they tie them all together.

Now with our friends over at SpaceX, their constellation of satellites is being called Starlink. Which is really, that's a cool name, isn't it? Starlink. It reminds me of Marvel, right? Star-Lord. Starlink is a whole network that will eventually be hundreds and hundreds of satellites that are in low earth orbit. Now, what that means is they are down low. So that they can hear faint signals from our devices and can also use less power to reach us.

So that's the bottom line on it now in low earth orbit, it means you're going to get a little bit more drag, some more pull from the earth. They're going to have to try and keep themselves in that order, in that orbit. But what we're looking at now is these rural areas that have particularly slow internet speeds or no real speed at all.

Some people. Can only get about a megabit worth of bandwidth. Now compare that to me, where I'm in a decent metropolitan area. I'm right by a Comcast central office and I have three gigabits. Worth of bandwidth on fiber coming right in here, which is just absolutely phenomenal. I got to say, Comcast, people might complain about them, but I have had zero problems with this network connection. It's absolutely fantastic. I use it for my business and for my home. It's just amazing.

So how about everybody else? how about the people that are paying way too much? For some of these data packages that are out there. that's where Elon Musk is hoping that Starlink is really gonna help out.

They're seeing upload speeds right now from about five megabits to about 20 megabits, which isn't bad, not bad at all latency, which is the time it takes for a packet to get to the satellite. And back has ranged from about 20 milliseconds up to about a hundred milliseconds, which is really not bad. I remember the days when a hundred milliseconds was, Oh my gosh, that's amazing.

On your local network. Okay. They have a target reaching gigabit speeds, which is phenomenal. And most people that have the beta are getting 50 megabit speed. So imagine that gigabit speeds from a satellite. All you have to do is put a small satellite dish outside. So let me give you a little hint here.

You can go two starlink.com right now on your web browser, starlink.com. And on that website, you can put in your name and your address as a service address is asking for. And if you are selected, Elon Musk's people at Starlink will give you they'll charge you a dollar for a satellite dish that you can mount yourself in 20 minutes to an hour, depending on how complex it's going to be, where you are at. Month two, it goes up to $2 and they want you to use it a lot, so they can test it out.

So kudos out to Elon Musk, but also all of these other companies that are doing much the same thing with putting up their own constellations.

All right. Stick around when we come back.

Hey, if you are an IT person for your business, I've got some NSA and FBI news for you.

Stick around. Cause we'll be right back. You're listening to Craig Peterson.

---

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 Linux and MacOS operating systems are better at security than Windows for sure, but that does not mean that they are absolutely secure.

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] Hey, if you're a business person and you're using or looking for a secure operating system, you might be considering MacOS, or maybe you have Linux running in the server room. At least I hope you do, but now there's a problem.

Hey everybody. Craig Peterson thanks for joining me. This is the last hour for some of our listeners and for others, we're going to be continuing on. So make sure you stick around and always visit me [email protected]. If you subscribe to my email list, I have a bunch of things that I'll be sending you to get you.

In your cybersecurity stance, whether you're a home user or small, medium business, there's a lot of stuff that you need to know and I'm giving it to you all absolutely for free. Then we have our newsletter every week, and this is a different world, right? I'm not someone who's going to be sitting there nailing you.

I want to help you out. I've been doing cybersecurity since 91, when I was first attacked and I almost lost my business. It was absolutely crazy. It really woke me up to the need for cybersecurity. Then I remembered a lot of business owners had no idea how to do this, or even how much trouble it was in.

So back then it was trying to convince people, Hey, you need cybersecurity, especially if you're going to be doing anything on the internet, which is how I got nailed was over the internet. If you are just even taking a computer and you're not hooking it up directly, To the internet you need to do that too.

So it was a real uphill battle. Cause how can you convince somebody of something theme that they don't want, at all? Okay. Want versus need. You got to want it in order to get something, right. Move your feet and get going in the right direction. They just plain old did not want it. Which is an interesting thing?

So that was my life for the first, really almost 20 years. It's only been very recent that businesses have decided they want to try and become secure. That's what we do. That's what my business does. We stop breaches before they happen while they're trying to get in, while they're trying to do the phishing attacks and everything else, that's what I do. That's the best way to do it.

So I follow all of the cybersecurity stuff very closely. And I have always been a bit big proponent of what's called a Unix. Unix is nowadays a general classification of a type of operating system. I've been involved with Linux way before any of them became a commercial product. It's something that I've grown to know and love, partially because I helped to develop some versions of Unix, and implemented the internet protocols themselves in the kernels.

So I've been. In it for a long time. I understand it really well. I asked people to use Linux. One of the things that I have found when I'm doing these live webinars is sometimes I am misunderstood and I apologize for that. I try and be as clear as possible. Most people say I do a great job with that, but when it comes to things like using a Unix server, that's a generic statement then. It doesn't really mean much to most people.

What does that mean to you use a Unix server? So some people have gone out and used Unix like Pat, for instance, he has decided some years ago, 20 years ago. I think I convinced him to get off of windows. He's been a claims adjuster for a very long time, a high level one too. So he decided I've got to get off of windows is just too insecure and he moved to a Linux platform and he's never looked back. He's been very happy with it. So I'm very happy for him too.

Just because you're using Linux or you're using a version of Unix does not mean you can sit on your laurels at all. Bad guys are going after all of these. And what's really happening, frankly, is the bad guys are shifting their targets. They realized that many businesses have switched to a Unix like operating system without understanding the implications of it.

Now. I remember sitting down with a company about three, four, maybe five years ago. And I spoke with our it guy who really wasn't an IT guy. He was a big sports fan. He was a jock in college and now he was ahead of it and they had some Linux machines and he asked a couple of what I considered to be just a, what are you talking about, type questions because he didn't understand it, but he thought that he did. My response to him led him to say, no, thanks. We're not going to work with you, which was very disappointing to me because Linux can be great. But you have to be careful.

Now then reminds me of another thing that just happened this week. I got to tell you guys about this is just absolutely, headshaking a rather large company that is in the healthcare industry. Got ransomware about a week and a half ago. That ransomware apparently wiped out everything. I mean everything. Their backups didn't work, because so many people are doing backups wrong.

That's why I do the webinars on backups to help you guys understand the right ways to do it. So that ransomware isn't going to nail you.

All of the records may have been stolen. Now, if you are in the medical field at all, The law requires you to be back online within four hours, you cannot be offline for more than four hours. Macs.

Yeah. I have a small dental practice or a small single doctor's office and they kept Slack for the real little guys, but in the case like this, where they have lost everything, all of the patients. Think about it. X-rays, medical diagnoses, all of the notes from the doctors that were stored on those servers that are now completely lost. They cannot even contact their patients to tell them that all of their data is lost.

They have to comply in the Northeast with Massachusetts regulations about data loss. They can't even comply because they don't know who their patients were. That's how bad it is. Are you in a boat like that?

Are your IT guys good enough? Right now it's been revealed here by the FBI and the national security agency that Russian military intelligence has built malware to specifically target Linux systems. Now they have called this thing, Drovorub, and it's part of their cyber espionage operations and Drovorub, lots of them steal files and take over devices.

This is far from the very first piece of malware to target Linux. There have been lots before. It's not even the first piece of Russian malware to target Linux devices. You cannot just rest on your laurels, saying we have Linux or maybe you're on an IBM mainframe and you're running Linux, it is not enough of protection.

You might remember the lab last year, we talked about this. Microsoft warned about malware that was attacking the internet of things devices as well as their devices, not a month goes by without Microsoft releasing patches because of some attack that's underway. The 2018 VPN filter malware probably also came from Russia.

They're trying to do all of this stuff to you. Now malware isn't just a problem for windows. Remember too, that MacOs for many years have been based on Unix. That's why I switched to Macs. That was the winner for me before it was a toy operating system, just like windows was, it was just a toy. Cause I was used to systems that ran huge companies like AT and T or Verizon on the telephony side and many others. And it was just a joke to play around with windows and Mac OS

Nowadays it's based on Unix, which is much more secure out of the box than many other operating systems, certainly than windows.

So Microsoft has been trying to lock down windows much to the chagrin of developers who've just developed terrible bad habits over the years.

So you cannot make the assumption. That your organization is not going to be a target anymore. You cannot make the assumption that running some version of Unix or some version of Linux is going to protect you.

Much of what Russia is trying to do is just cause chaos. Now, if they think there's a profit, they will go for the profit. But simply causing chaos, they consider a win for them.

Unfortunately, this is causing chaos for entire countries, poor countries, third world countries have just been decimated by this and as I just gave you the example. Right here in New England.

Again, this last week, a company in the medical field with hundreds of employees, does it dozens of offices attacked by malware. In this case, it was a type of ransomware that lost everything because it has not been following the five pillars of cybersecurity. So we'll talk more about that in weeks to come.

I'm going to be having more webinars, more little pieces of training, too. I'm going to try and do these Lives. We've got a whole bunch of topics. I have been working my butt off as has the rest of my team, trying to get some of this stuff together. And remember too, that we're re we are supporting companies already with their cybersecurity. So we already all have full-time jobs. Basically helping the companies out and we only accept so many customers. We're not somebody that just out there. Yeah. Yeah. Send us some money. We'll send you some hardware or software and then disappear.

We stop. Malware, That's what we do. We block these attacks and it takes a lot of time. So that's on my plate as well as everything else.

But here on the weekends, I like to spend a little bit of time with you guys. I want you now if you're not on my email list to get on it right away. Everybody on it seems to enjoy it.

I have very few people that unsubscribe and I'm going to be providing, I think, more organized information, some better information, and you're only way going to get it. Is by going right now to Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Love to see it.

I'm going to be sending you when you subscribe a bunch of great stuff, including my security reboot guide, and there'll be much more. In the near term coming up.

So have a great day. If you're leaving us.

If not stick around, cause we'll be back right after the top of the hour and look for my podcasts as well on your favorite podcast platform, Craig Peterson you'll see my ugly mug. On that as well.

So stick around, I'll be right back or there'll be some other great content I'm sure. On this radio station and online Craig peterson.com.

---

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 Linux and MacOS operating systems are better at security than Windows for sure, but that does not mean that they are absolutely secure.

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] Hey, if you're a business person and you're using or looking for a secure operating system, you might be considering MacOS, or maybe you have Linux running in the server room. At least I hope you do, but now there's a problem.

Hey everybody. Craig Peterson thanks for joining me. This is the last hour for some of our listeners and for others, we're going to be continuing on. So make sure you stick around and always visit me [email protected]. If you subscribe to my email list, I have a bunch of things that I'll be sending you to get you.

In your cybersecurity stance, whether you're a home user or small, medium business, there's a lot of stuff that you need to know and I'm giving it to you all absolutely for free. Then we have our newsletter every week, and this is a different world, right? I'm not someone who's going to be sitting there nailing you.

I want to help you out. I've been doing cybersecurity since 91, when I was first attacked and I almost lost my business. It was absolutely crazy. It really woke me up to the need for cybersecurity. Then I remembered a lot of business owners had no idea how to do this, or even how much trouble it was in.

So back then it was trying to convince people, Hey, you need cybersecurity, especially if you're going to be doing anything on the internet, which is how I got nailed was over the internet. If you are just even taking a computer and you're not hooking it up directly, To the internet you need to do that too.

So it was a real uphill battle. Cause how can you convince somebody of something theme that they don't want, at all? Okay. Want versus need. You got to want it in order to get something, right. Move your feet and get going in the right direction. They just plain old did not want it. Which is an interesting thing?

So that was my life for the first, really almost 20 years. It's only been very recent that businesses have decided they want to try and become secure. That's what we do. That's what my business does. We stop breaches before they happen while they're trying to get in, while they're trying to do the phishing attacks and everything else, that's what I do. That's the best way to do it.

So I follow all of the cybersecurity stuff very closely. And I have always been a bit big proponent of what's called a Unix. Unix is nowadays a general classification of a type of operating system.  I've been involved with Linux way before any of them became a commercial product. It's something that I've grown to know and love, partially because I helped to develop some versions of Unix, and implemented the internet protocols themselves in the kernels.

So I've been. In it for a long time. I understand it really well. I asked people to use Linux. One of the things that I have found when I'm doing these live webinars is sometimes I am misunderstood and I apologize for that. I try and be as clear as possible. Most people say I do a great job with that, but when it comes to things like using a Unix server, that's a generic statement then. It doesn't really mean much to most people.

What does that mean to you use a Unix server? So some people have gone out and used Unix like Pat, for instance, he has decided some years ago, 20 years ago. I think I convinced him to get off of windows. He's been a claims adjuster for a very long time, a high level one too. So he decided I've got to get off of windows is just too insecure and he moved to a Linux platform and he's never looked back. He's been very happy with it. So I'm very happy for him too.

Just because you're using Linux or you're using a version of Unix does not mean you can sit on your laurels at all. Bad guys are going after all of these. And what's really happening, frankly, is the bad guys are shifting their targets. They realized that many businesses have switched to a Unix like operating system without understanding the implications of it.

Now. I remember sitting down with a company about three, four, maybe five years ago. And I spoke with our it guy who really wasn't an IT guy. He was a big sports fan. He was a jock in college and now he was ahead of it and they had some Linux machines and he asked a couple of what I considered to be just a, what are you talking about, type questions because he didn't understand it, but he thought that he did. My response to him led him to say, no, thanks. We're not going to work with you, which was very disappointing to me because Linux can be great. But you have to be careful.

Now then reminds me of another thing that just happened this week. I got to tell you guys about this is just absolutely, headshaking a rather large company that is in the healthcare industry. Got ransomware about a week and a half ago. That ransomware apparently wiped out everything. I mean everything. Their backups didn't work, because so many people are doing backups wrong.

That's why I do the webinars on backups to help you guys understand the right ways to do it. So that ransomware isn't going to nail you.

All of the records may have been stolen. Now, if you are in the medical field at all, The law requires you to be back online within four hours, you cannot be offline for more than four hours. Macs.

Yeah. I have a small dental practice or a small single doctor's office and they kept Slack for the real little guys, but in the case like this, where they have lost everything, all of the patients. Think about it. X-rays, medical diagnoses, all of the notes from the doctors that were stored on those servers that are now completely lost. They cannot even contact their patients to tell them that all of their data is lost.

They have to comply in the Northeast with Massachusetts regulations about data loss. They can't even comply because they don't know who their patients were. That's how bad it is. Are you in a boat like that?

Are your IT guys good enough? Right now it's been revealed here by the FBI and the national security agency that Russian military intelligence has built malware to specifically target Linux systems. Now they have called this thing, Drovorub, and it's part of their cyber espionage operations and Drovorub, lots of them steal files and take over devices.

This is far from the very first piece of malware to target Linux. There have been lots before. It's not even the first piece of Russian malware to target Linux devices. You cannot just rest on your laurels, saying we have Linux or maybe you're on an IBM mainframe and you're running Linux, it is not enough of protection.

You might remember the lab last year, we talked about this. Microsoft warned about malware that was attacking the internet of things devices as well as their devices, not a month goes by without Microsoft releasing patches because of some attack that's underway. The 2018 VPN filter malware probably also came from Russia.

They're trying to do all of this stuff to you. Now malware isn't just a problem for windows. Remember too, that MacOs for many years have been based on Unix. That's why I switched to Macs. That was the winner for me before it was a toy operating system, just like windows was, it was just a toy. Cause I was used to systems that ran huge companies like AT and T or Verizon on the telephony side and many others. And it was just a joke to play around with windows and Mac OS

Nowadays it's based on Unix, which is much more secure out of the box than many other operating systems, certainly than windows.

So Microsoft has been trying to lock down windows much to the chagrin of developers who've just developed terrible bad habits over the years.

So you cannot make the assumption. That your organization is not going to be a target anymore. You cannot make the assumption that running some version of Unix or some version of Linux is going to protect you.

Much of what Russia is trying to do is just cause chaos. Now, if they think there's a profit, they will go for the profit. But simply causing chaos, they consider a win for them.

Unfortunately, this is causing chaos for entire countries, poor countries, third world countries have just been decimated by this and as I just gave you the example. Right here in New England.

Again, this last week, a company in the medical field with hundreds of employees, does it dozens of offices attacked by malware. In this case, it was a type of ransomware that lost everything because it has not been following the five pillars of cybersecurity. So we'll talk more about that in weeks to come.

I'm going to be having more webinars, more little pieces of training, too. I'm going to try and do these Lives. We've got a whole bunch of topics. I have been working my butt off as has the rest of my team, trying to get some of this stuff together. And remember too, that we're re we are supporting companies already with their cybersecurity. So we already all have full-time jobs. Basically helping the companies out and we only accept so many customers. We're not somebody that just out there. Yeah. Yeah. Send us some money. We'll send you some hardware or software and then disappear.

We stop. Malware, That's what we do. We block these attacks and it takes a lot of time. So that's on my plate as well as everything else.

But here on the weekends, I like to spend a little bit of time with you guys. I want you now if you're not on my email list to get on it right away. Everybody on it seems to enjoy it.

I have very few people that unsubscribe and I'm going to be providing, I think, more organized information, some better information, and you're only way going to get it. Is by going right now to Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Love to see it.

I'm going to be sending you when you subscribe a bunch of great stuff, including my security reboot guide, and there'll be much more. In the near term coming up.

So have a great day. If you're leaving us.

If not stick around, cause we'll be back right after the top of the hour and look for my podcasts as well on your favorite podcast platform, Craig Peterson you'll see my ugly mug. On that as well.

So stick around, I'll be right back or there'll be some other great content I'm sure. On this radio station and online Craig peterson.com.

---

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 how cybercriminals are now bypassing multi-factor authentication and what you can do to protect yourself.

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] I've been harping on multifactor authentication, and now a little bit concern because based on what kind you're using, the bad guys are getting around some of it.

Hey, Craig Peterson here. Thanks for joining me online and here on WGAN make sure you tune in every Wednesday morning when I'm on with Matt Gagnon for the early morning shift, as he goes through the latest in tech news with me. It's really fun. I like having a host to talk to who really understands things, he's on the ball and Matt is certainly one of those, no question about it.

Businesses are faced with the real problem as our consumers and that is how do you keep the bad guys out of your systems? One of the things that we've been using for the last few years is called MFA multifactor authentication. As I have said for decades, the best security combines something, along with something you have.

So for instance, in the computer world, something, might be the email address to sign in with and of course the password that you sign in with. So there you go, something know, something you have. In many cases, it's turned out to be your smartphone and people are using the smartphone to do authentication.

So you try and log in. It'll send you a text message than with that text message, you can now say, yeah, that's me and you type in the code, right? A four-digit, six-digit code and you are let in, I've explained before why that is a bad idea, using texts or SMS as it's called, and it's a very bad idea.

If you have anything at risk, something to lose, there have been many cases now well-documented of people that are big business people all the way on through people who own Bitcoin. Where, what will happen is the bad guy will transfer your phone number to a phone, not yours, but one the bad guy has control over.

So now he tries to log in because he got your username and your password from the dark web. If you haven't checked it out yet, make sure you go to have I been poned.com. And check out your email address, and you're almost certain to find your email has been compromised and your password was stolen along with your email address and maybe even more things like your social security number, your home address, et cetera.

So the bad guys will do is say, okay, so I'm going after company X and I am going to now find out what the guy's phone number is. They use little social engineering, find out the phone number, and then once they have the phone number, they can go to the next step, which is let's transfer that phone number to my phone.

Then they log as you. Let's say even your Yahoo mail account or whatever your mail account is, and then they look around and, yeah. Okay, great. He has an account at Bank of America. So they go to Bank of America site, cause they just found Bank of America emails. I count emails in your email box and they use your username and the password they got for your username.

You're smart and Bank of America and your Yahoo email account use different passwords. Goody for you because now all they have to do is say I forgot my password. Where is Bank of America going to send the password reset? It's good. I'm going to send it to your email box. So now your email box has a password reset.

They reset it to it, whatever they want to. And then Bank of America says yes, but wait. we need multifactor authentication. So we're going to send a text to your phone to make sure it's you and Romero. We're the bad guy. They just went ahead and tried, transferred your phone number to their phone. So what does that text from?

Bank of America? Go right into their hands. So now they've got your Bank of America account and they are in, and they transfer the money out in according to the United States secret service, 90 seconds later, it is likely out of reach and out of the country. That's how bad it is right now. It's really bad.

So that's why I warned you guys forever. Don't use SMS as a way to authenticate yourself as part of multifactor authentication. There are a number of apps out there that will work quite well for you. You might remember 10, 20 years ago, probably 20 plus years ago. Now actually people had these little key fobs.

I think it was Bank One that had the first one that I ever used. And you put it on your key chain and it had a little six-digit number that changed every 30 seconds.

So when you went to log in. You knew your username, you knew your password, and you looked at the key fob to see what the code was for this 30 second period and it would let you in. That's actually a great way to do it, but if you use one password or Google authenticator or last pass, there are a number of ways you can do it.

I recommend a few. You just don't have the money. If you're not a business, just use Google authenticator. Most websites will work with Google authenticator.

So what will happen is the website will pop up a QR code on the screen and you then take a picture of that QR code with Google authenticator will say, Oh, okay, great. I got it. And then it'll start giving you codes. New codes, every 30 seconds that you can use. So all you have to do is have your smartphone.

Now make sure your smartphone is locked down, but it's a little harder for them. If they're in Belarus or somewhere else, a little harder for them to get a hold of that phone so that they can then hack you by looking at your phone in order to get that code.

Now one password does the same thing and then we combine one password with Duo and a little key fobs and everything else. So depending on how security has to be, there may be multiple levels, but that's the basics.

Dark reading has an article out this week, talking about this legacy, email clients, and what they're doing. So I explain to you the right way to do multi-factor authentic occasion right now, and it's really, it's considered to be a very strong measure to protect you against an account takeover attack.

But the bad guys have a way around it and here's what they're doing. I have normal security this week is reporting that they've seen an increase in attacks where the bad guys are using legacy apps with old email protocols. So nowadays, for instance, You might be using something called OAuth 2 behind the scenes, whom you as a user probably wouldn't know that, but is used to authenticate you.

We have it set up for ourselves and our clients that you have to read completely we authenticate every week, which gets to be a bit of a pain, but it's actually a very good thing. In fact, I should probably have it set up to do it every day, but every week is pretty reasonable. And it uses more advanced protocols to authenticate me.

But if you've been around for a while, you're familiar with a protocol called pop, which was the post office protocol. I used that for many years, and that allowed me to connect to the mail server, download all of them. My email would be deleted off the server. I'd have it on my laptop and hopefully, I had my laptop.

Backed up so that I wouldn't get totally messed up if everything went wrong, but there's an old protocol. All that really shouldn't be used anymore. In most cases, another one is called Imam and it's a more modern protocol, but it doesn't have all these security checks supported. SMTP is another one that we've been trying to.

Beef up somewhat. And they've done that by putting some encryption TLS on top of this simple mail transport protocol. So what the bad guys are doing is they're connecting to your business, email server, or a third-party email server. They're collecting all of the data, all of the information that they can about you.

Then there's signing in using a protocol that does not support and therefore it's not required to have multi-factor authentication. Very interesting. And they'll look at the email account information. They'll find it on paste sites. They'll find it out on the dark web. But one example is an old email client like mail bird, which allows Gmail to be set up via IMAP, and then once they're using iMac, they've gotten around the multifactor authentication.

So consider all of that stuff, If you're using Microsoft office three 65, there are multiple versions of it. Microsoft has well over 12,000 skews. And in other words, individual products that you can buy. Most of the time we find businesses are buying the wrong. Microsoft office three 65 products. They have whole groupings of them, but here's what I want you to pay attention to. If you are using Microsoft office three 65, most of their licenses give your organization the ability to turn on access policies, to restrict these older protocols. Legacy access using all of these protocols we were just talking about is enabled by default called on Microsoft office three 65.

So if you're a security guy, gal, You've got to go in. You have to disable legacy access on a per person basis across the whole organization. How's that for fun? Now, there are some ways to do this using some CRM, why tools looking through, but you've got to do it one per one. But even so the best protection an organization can implement is multifactor authentication and conditional access, best policies for all of these legacy apps, just like I constantly advise. You have to have restrictions, access policies by the group for different people and different groups within your organization. That goes down to the control, which in many cases is using a Microsoft tool in order to allow logins and other things. So keep an eye out for all of that.

By the way, the FBI estimated US businesses lost almost $2 billion to this type of fraud last year.

Stick around. We'll be right back.

You're listening to Craig Peterson.

We're going to talk about the FCC and what they're doing to help you.

Stick around. We'll be right back here on WGAN and online.

---

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 how cybercriminals are now bypassing multi-factor authentication and what you can do to protect yourself. 

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] I've been harping on multifactor authentication, and now a little bit concern because based on what kind you're using, the bad guys are getting around some of it.

Hey, Craig Peterson here. Thanks for joining me online and here on WGAN make sure you tune in every Wednesday morning when I'm on with Matt Gagnon for the early morning shift, as he goes through the latest in tech news with me. It's really fun. I like having a host to talk to who really understands things, he's on the ball and Matt is certainly one of those, no question about it.

Businesses are faced with the real problem as our consumers and that is how do you keep the bad guys out of your systems? One of the things that we've been using for the last few years is called MFA multifactor authentication. As I have said for decades, the best security combines something, along with something you have.

So for instance, in the computer world, something, might be the email address to sign in with and of course the password that you sign in with. So there you go, something know, something you have. In many cases, it's turned out to be your smartphone and people are using the smartphone to do authentication.

So you try and log in. It'll send you a text message than with that text message, you can now say, yeah, that's me and you type in the code, right? A four-digit, six-digit code and you are let in, I've explained before why that is a bad idea, using texts or SMS as it's called, and it's a very bad idea.

If you have anything at risk, something to lose, there have been many cases now well-documented of people that are big business people all the way on through people who own Bitcoin. Where, what will happen is the bad guy will transfer your phone number to a phone, not yours, but one the bad guy has control over.

So now he tries to log in because he got your username and your password from the dark web. If you haven't checked it out yet, make sure you go to have I been poned.com. And check out your email address, and you're almost certain to find your email has been compromised and your password was stolen along with your email address and maybe even more things like your social security number, your home address, et cetera.

So the bad guys will do is say, okay, so I'm going after company X and I am going to now find out what the guy's phone number is. They use little social engineering, find out the phone number, and then once they have the phone number, they can go to the next step, which is let's transfer that phone number to my phone.

Then they log as you. Let's say even your Yahoo mail account or whatever your mail account is, and then they look around and, yeah. Okay, great. He has an account at Bank of America. So they go to Bank of America site, cause they just found Bank of America emails. I count emails in your email box and they use your username and the password they got for your username.

You're smart and Bank of America and your Yahoo email account use different passwords. Goody for you because now all they have to do is say I forgot my password. Where is Bank of America going to send the password reset? It's good. I'm going to send it to your email box. So now your email box has a password reset.

They reset it to it, whatever they want to. And then Bank of America says yes, but wait. we need multifactor authentication. So we're going to send a text to your phone to make sure it's you and Romero. We're the bad guy. They just went ahead and tried, transferred your phone number to their phone. So what does that text from?

Bank of America? Go right into their hands. So now they've got your Bank of America account and they are in, and they transfer the money out in according to the United States secret service, 90 seconds later, it is likely out of reach and out of the country. That's how bad it is right now. It's really bad.

So that's why I warned you guys forever. Don't use SMS as a way to authenticate yourself as part of multifactor authentication. There are a number of apps out there that will work quite well for you. You might remember 10, 20 years ago, probably 20 plus years ago. Now actually people had these little key fobs.

I think it was Bank One that had the first one that I ever used. And you put it on your key chain and it had a little six-digit number that changed every 30 seconds.

So when you went to log in. You knew your username, you knew your password, and you looked at the key fob to see what the code was for this 30 second period and it would let you in. That's actually a great way to do it, but if you use one password or Google authenticator or last pass, there are a number of ways you can do it.

I recommend a few. You just don't have the money. If you're not a business, just use Google authenticator. Most websites will work with Google authenticator.

So what will happen is the website will pop up a QR code on the screen and you then take a picture of that QR code with Google authenticator will say, Oh, okay, great. I got it. And then it'll start giving you codes. New codes, every 30 seconds that you can use. So all you have to do is have your smartphone.

Now make sure your smartphone is locked down, but it's a little harder for them. If they're in Belarus or somewhere else, a little harder for them to get a hold of that phone so that they can then hack you by looking at your phone in order to get that code.

Now one password does the same thing and then we combine one password with Duo and a little key fobs and everything else. So depending on how security has to be, there may be multiple levels, but that's the basics.

Dark reading has an article out this week, talking about this legacy, email clients, and what they're doing. So I explain to you the right way to do multi-factor authentic occasion right now, and it's really, it's considered to be a very strong measure to protect you against an account takeover attack.

But the bad guys have a way around it and here's what they're doing. I have normal security this week is reporting that they've seen an increase in attacks where the bad guys are using legacy apps with old email protocols. So nowadays, for instance, You might be using something called OAuth 2 behind the scenes, whom you as a user probably wouldn't know that, but is used to authenticate you.

We have it set up for ourselves and our clients that you have to read completely we authenticate every week, which gets to be a bit of a pain, but it's actually a very good thing. In fact, I should probably have it set up to do it every day, but every week is pretty reasonable. And it uses more advanced protocols to authenticate me.

But if you've been around for a while, you're familiar with a protocol called pop, which was the post office protocol. I used that for many years, and that allowed me to connect to the mail server, download all of them. My email would be deleted off the server. I'd have it on my laptop and hopefully, I had my laptop.

Backed up so that I wouldn't get totally messed up if everything went wrong, but there's an old protocol. All that really shouldn't be used anymore. In most cases, another one is called Imam and it's a more modern protocol, but it doesn't have all these security checks supported. SMTP is another one that we've been trying to.

Beef up somewhat. And they've done that by putting some encryption TLS on top of this simple mail transport protocol. So what the bad guys are doing is they're connecting to your business, email server, or a third-party email server. They're collecting all of the data, all of the information that they can about you.

Then there's signing in using a protocol that does not support and therefore it's not required to have multi-factor authentication. Very interesting. And they'll look at the email account information. They'll find it on paste sites. They'll find it out on the dark web. But one example is an old email client like mail bird, which allows Gmail to be set up via IMAP, and then once they're using iMac, they've gotten around the multifactor authentication.

So consider all of that stuff, If you're using Microsoft office three 65, there are multiple versions of it. Microsoft has well over 12,000 skews. And in other words, individual products that you can buy. Most of the time we find businesses are buying the wrong. Microsoft office three 65 products. They have whole groupings of them, but here's what I want you to pay attention to. If you are using Microsoft office three 65, most of their licenses give your organization the ability to turn on access policies, to restrict these older protocols. Legacy access using all of these protocols we were just talking about is enabled by default called on Microsoft office three 65.

So if you're a security guy, gal, You've got to go in. You have to disable legacy access on a per person basis across the whole organization. How's that for fun? Now, there are some ways to do this using some CRM, why tools looking through, but you've got to do it one per one. But even so the best protection an organization can implement is multifactor authentication and conditional access, best policies for all of these legacy apps, just like I constantly advise. You have to have restrictions, access policies by the group for different people and different groups within your organization. That goes down to the control, which in many cases is using a Microsoft tool in order to allow logins and other things. So keep an eye out for all of that.

 By the way, the FBI estimated US businesses lost almost $2 billion to this type of fraud last year.

Stick around. We'll be right back.

You're listening to Craig Peterson.

We're going to talk about the FCC and what they're doing to help you.

 Stick around. We'll be right back here on WGAN and online.

---

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

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For questions, call or text:

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Welcome!

Craig discusses the decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals against some of the large Democratic cities and 5G rollout.

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] Hey, you might've been wondering, what's taking five G the rollout so long. Well, there've been some court battles going on. Part of the reason, frankly, might be your own town or city.

Hi everybody. Craig Peterson here on WGAN and online Craig peterson.com. Wow. This is really interesting because five G is going to do a few things for us. Ultimately, it's going to allow billions of devices to attach to the internet, which means things like you remember that Levi coat from a couple of years ago that had internet connectivity built-in Bluetooth built-in all of that stuff, that trucker jacket.

that means that we'll be able to connect directly to the internet. We're getting these chipsets down. So they are minuscule. It won't be long before they'll almost fit on the head of a pin. These things are just amazing. What they're doing. And five G is an important part of that. Driving down the highway, getting updates for your automatic driving car that tells it about the road conditions.

Right now, it's meshing with other cars on the road around you. So it has a. Picture of what all of the cars are doing, how fast they might be going. They're going to overtake you. You should change the lanes. There is a charging station or a fuel station, just so far ahead. All of that stuff is going to be done with five G internet.

it's also going to be calling home telling your car manufacturer what's going on with the car. It'll be telling your insurance company just how your driving, whether or not you should get a discounted rate. Because you're a good driver or you're a bad driver, all of this stuff. And then in your house, think about all of the internet of things, your light switches, your light bulbs, the lights on your driveway, your walkway, the chicken coop cameras. If you're like me, the beehive cameras.

All of that stuff is going to be hooked up to these five G networks. And we have seen a problem with the rollout of five G in some areas. You know right now T-Mobile is the leader in five G. I have T-Mobile myself. I don't have any promotional consideration from them or whatsoever.

So I'm going to tell you the truth, just like the truth on VPNs and how VPNs almost always are a rip off in so many ways, including. Making you less secure, but that's a topic for frankly, a whole training course, a whole webinar of the FCC under Ajit Pai, who was appointed by President Trump has been going after cities in court, have these been suing them.

What they're saying is, Hey, Mr. City, you cannot go and charge. AT and T, Verizon, T-Mobile whomever. Rates for them to offer five G in your city. You think back to the cable days, which are still here, frankly. Where the city gave the cable company and exclusive deal saying, Hey, cable company, if you will put in cable, TV, and cable internet in our town, we'll give you have a five-year 10-year exclusive license and we'll regulate your fees.

Now that's never worked out well. I don't think anybody. Because these companies, these utility companies, including the power companies, get to make a certain amount of profit. So the incentive for many of these companies is to have their expenses as high as possible. You saw that coming, right?

Because if you say they're allowed to have a 5% profit margin, would you rather have 5% of a million dollars or 5% of $10 million? How about, would you rather have 5% of 500 million or 5% of a billion dollars? Yeah. So these utilities that are governed this way, don't want to keep prices under control. They have absolutely no incentive to do it. So they come in front of the city council, the mayor, or whatever it is, where you live. They say, our expenses have gone up. We have to raise rates and you end up with these cable TV bills with your internet that are 120 bucks a month. You have a phone somewhere in the basement that they gave you as part of the package to save you money, a phone you've never used.

How many of you put your hand up? How many of you have done that? You don't even know what that phone number is. I was just talking with Steve Forney about that. In fact, this week that's exactly what's happened with him. So the FCC voted to preempt cities and towns. Now, this was back in 2018 and what they wanted to do is prevent these local governments from charging wireless carriers, an estimated two billion dollars worth of fees over five years related to the deployment of wireless equipment. Such as the small cells that are needed for five G. Now that's less than 1% of the estimated almost $300 billion that the carriers are going to have to spend to deploy these five G small cells throughout the United States. But the cities promptly turned around after the FCC says, Hey guys, you've got to keep these costs under control. The city's sued the FCC, but a ruling this week by the US court of appeals for the ninth circuit. Which almost always rules wrong, the most overturned circuit court in the country.

And they've actually been having some decent decisions lately. Thank goodness. But the decision ruled mostly in the FCCS favor and in your favor as well. Now it wasn't a complete victory for the FCC. They overturned a portion of the ruling that said that you can basically, they said you can have some aesthetic requirements if you're a city or town.

So think of those trees that don't look like trees that are really cell towers. Really that's necessary. These people it's absolutely crazy. But the FCC does have the responsibility to ensure that this whole infrastructure deployment for five G is not impeded by these exorbitant fees that are imposed by the state and counties and cities and everything else.

Also, they said they, that these a local jurisdiction cannot have undue delays in the local permitting and unreasonable barriers to pole access. That's straight from the FCC chairman,and he said, it's a massive victory for US leadership in five G, nation's economy, American consumers, which is absolutely true.

Huawei has been the leader in some ways in five G because the Chinese government gave them enough money to fit the whole world with 5G equipment. That's how much Huawei was subsidized.

Now, why would China do that? It wouldn't be put five G equipment in my neighborhood, that allows the Chinese to spy on us. Could it? Oh man.

The losing side, see if you can figure out what all of these cities have in common Portland, Oregon, San Francisco, California, New York City, Los Angeles, Boston mass, Chicago, Washington, DC Las Vegas, Philadelphia, and Austin, Texas. They all lost. They were trying to charge exorbitant fees and it turns out they're all. What you might call blue. I called red because they're all democrat controlled, right? Socialism red. Can't believe how they change that word around how, good news. All the way around.

All right. Stick around.

When we come back, let's jump right into security jobs with a future. And this is going to be a theme. We're going to talk more about cybersecurity jobs next week, I think.

Which ones are on the way in, which ones are on the way out.

Then we should have time to get around to this whole Huawei thing. If you have a Huawei phone, you might want to get rid of it ASAP for a number of reasons.

We'll explain all of that coming up.

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

Stick around. We'll be right back.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome!

Craig discusses the decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals against some of the large Democratic cities and 5G rollout.

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] Hey, you might've been wondering, what's taking five G the rollout so long. Well, there've been some court battles going on. Part of the reason, frankly, might be your own town or city.

Hi everybody. Craig Peterson here on WGAN and online Craig peterson.com. Wow. This is really interesting because five G is going to do a few things for us. Ultimately, it's going to allow billions of devices to attach to the internet, which means things like you remember that Levi coat from a couple of years ago that had internet connectivity built-in Bluetooth built-in all of that stuff, that trucker jacket.

that means that we'll be able to connect directly to the internet. We're getting these chipsets down. So they are minuscule. It won't be long before they'll almost fit on the head of a pin. These things are just amazing. What they're doing. And five G is an important part of that. Driving down the highway, getting updates for your automatic driving car that tells it about the road conditions.

Right now, it's meshing with other cars on the road around you. So it has a. Picture of what all of the cars are doing, how fast they might be going. They're going to overtake you. You should change the lanes. There is a charging station or a fuel station, just so far ahead. All of that stuff is going to be done with five G internet.

it's also going to be calling home telling your car manufacturer what's going on with the car. It'll be telling your insurance company just how your driving, whether or not you should get a discounted rate. Because you're a good driver or you're a bad driver, all of this stuff. And then in your house, think about all of the internet of things, your light switches, your light bulbs, the lights on your driveway, your walkway, the chicken coop cameras. If you're like me, the beehive cameras.

All of that stuff is going to be hooked up to these five G networks. And we have seen a problem with the rollout of five G in some areas. You know right now T-Mobile is the leader in five G. I have T-Mobile myself. I don't have any promotional consideration from them or whatsoever.

So I'm going to tell you the truth, just like the truth on VPNs and how VPNs almost always are a rip off in so many ways, including. Making you less secure, but that's a topic for frankly, a whole training course, a whole webinar of the FCC under Ajit Pai, who was appointed by President Trump has been going after cities in court, have these been suing them.

What they're saying is, Hey, Mr. City, you cannot go and charge. AT and T, Verizon, T-Mobile whomever. Rates for them to offer five G in your city. You think back to the cable days, which are still here, frankly. Where the city gave the cable company and exclusive deal saying, Hey, cable company, if you will put in cable, TV, and cable internet in our town, we'll give you have a five-year 10-year exclusive license and we'll regulate your fees.

Now that's never worked out well. I don't think anybody. Because these companies, these utility companies, including the power companies, get to make a certain amount of profit. So the incentive for many of these companies is to have their expenses as high as possible. You saw that coming, right?

Because if you say they're allowed to have a 5% profit margin, would you rather have 5% of a million dollars or 5% of $10 million? How about, would you rather have 5% of 500 million or 5% of a billion dollars? Yeah. So these utilities that are governed this way, don't want to keep prices under control. They have absolutely no incentive to do it. So they come in front of the city council, the mayor, or whatever it is, where you live.  They say, our expenses have gone up. We have to raise rates and you end up with these cable TV bills with your internet that are 120 bucks a month. You have a phone somewhere in the basement that they gave you as part of the package to save you money, a phone you've never used.

How many of you put your hand up? How many of you have done that? You don't even know what that phone number is. I was just talking with Steve Forney about that. In fact, this week that's exactly what's happened with him. So the FCC voted to preempt cities and towns. Now, this was back in 2018 and what they wanted to do is prevent these local governments from charging wireless carriers, an estimated two billion dollars worth of fees over five years related to the deployment of wireless equipment. Such as the small cells that are needed for five G. Now that's less than 1% of the estimated almost $300 billion that the carriers are going to have to spend to deploy these five G small cells throughout the United States. But the cities promptly turned around after the FCC says, Hey guys, you've got to keep these costs under control. The city's sued the FCC, but a ruling this week by the US court of appeals for the ninth circuit. Which almost always rules wrong, the most overturned circuit court in the country.

And they've actually been having some decent decisions lately. Thank goodness. But the decision ruled mostly in the FCCS favor and in your favor as well. Now it wasn't a complete victory for the FCC. They overturned a portion of the ruling that said that you can basically, they said you can have some aesthetic requirements if you're a city or town.

So think of those trees that don't look like trees that are really cell towers. Really that's necessary. These people it's absolutely crazy. But the FCC does have the responsibility to ensure that this whole infrastructure deployment for five G is not impeded by these exorbitant fees that are imposed by the state and counties and cities and everything else.

Also, they said they, that these a local jurisdiction cannot have undue delays in the local permitting and unreasonable barriers to pole access. That's straight from the FCC chairman,and he said, it's a massive victory for US leadership in five G, nation's economy, American consumers, which is absolutely true.

Huawei has been the leader in some ways in five G because the Chinese government gave them enough money to fit the whole world with 5G equipment. That's how much Huawei was subsidized.

Now, why would China do that? It wouldn't be put five G equipment in my neighborhood, that allows the Chinese to spy on us. Could it? Oh man.

The losing side, see if you can figure out what all of these cities have in common Portland, Oregon, San Francisco, California, New York City, Los Angeles, Boston mass, Chicago, Washington, DC Las Vegas, Philadelphia, and Austin, Texas. They all lost. They were trying to charge exorbitant fees and it turns out they're all. What you might call blue. I called red because they're all democrat controlled, right? Socialism red. Can't believe how they change that word around how, good news. All the way around.

All right. Stick around.

When we come back, let's jump right into security jobs with a future. And this is going to be a theme. We're going to talk more about cybersecurity jobs next week, I think.

Which ones are on the way in, which ones are on the way out.

Then we should have time to get around to this whole Huawei thing. If you have a Huawei phone, you might want to get rid of it ASAP for a number of reasons.

We'll explain all of that coming up.

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

Stick around. We'll be right back.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome!

Craig discusses the Cybersecurity jobs of the future -- What is Hot and What is not.

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] Hey, if you're thinking about a career in cybersecurity, or maybe you are already someone in cybersecurity. We've got a great little article here from dark reading that gets right into it. What does a job look like?

Hi everybody. Craig Peterson here. Now you've heard about the world's most dangerous jobs and they come down in the United States to two things. One is being a forestry person that cuts down trees and logs and all that sort of stuff. What would you call that a logging person? Even if it's someone who does it in the residential areas, very dangerous, very high rate of insurance, and insurance claims.

And then the other one of course is. Up in the North seas here in the Pacific ocean, up in the past, the Bering Strait and all that mess up there, which is crab fishing. And how dangerous that is there. They're very dangerous. And people leave those jobs often because they got injured. People die from those jobs. It's very scary. they called dead branches on trees, widow makers, because they are going to fall down on you causes just nothing but problems, right? They'll kill you. That's what widow makers all about.

If you are looking at cybersecurity careers, it's not going to kill you. At least. Hopefully, it's not going to kill you, but the number of people that experience burnout is huge. We're talking people on average, leaving these jobs after about eight months. Now, in some cases, they're getting the training that they want and increasing their value in the marketplace and then leaving for a better job, better pay, whatever it is elsewhere because they can.

We're looking at giving or take 2 million open jobs here within the next year or two, I've seen numbers saying as high as 5 million open jobs cybersecurity. That is a very big thing. So if your kids are in college thinking about this, if you're like some of our listeners, a few of you guys, I know I've gone back to school for this.

We're going to be covering some of these things over the next few weeks aspects of cybersecurity jobs, what you might be looking at if you're going to do that. And also right now, we're going to get right into some of the job titles. What's hot. And what's not because cybersecurity, isn't just one thing.

It's like any other it profession, they get very narrow. There are people who are, who are really into two specific things. Now the job sets are not as they were two or three years ago. Now, this is according to, let's see, it's Michael Malley, VP of strategy at Radware, and I have to agree with him.

He is saying that the types of skillsets employers are looking for is evolving rapidly. And we'll be talking more about some of the stuff next week, but the bottom line for next week is that university degrees in cybersecurity will not get you hired. That's the bottom line here.

They want people who have hands-on experience with this because it gets so difficult. The whole red team blue team, where you have one team of people who are attacking the infrastructure and another group of people who are trying to defend the infrastructure, all important stuff, and very difficult to, by the way, the red team are the hardest people to find. People who are attacking, who have attack skills.

So we're seeing a lot of changes over the last few years, and now we've got this whole WuHan virus and people afraid of the COVID-19.

So now we've got these large scale remote workforces we're trying to deal with. We're seeing a need for people who understand that concept and have the ability to implement what is called zero-trust work environment. This means just because you have a login doesn't mean you should have access to this machine.

It's like I've said forever. I have caught salespeople going into the accounting systems and the accounting shares and changing their compensation. Yeah, they do that. Not all of them, but the less scrupulous ones do. So we need to come to the understanding that it is a business really. We can't trust anything.

Zero trust networks. Now go to the point where even inside the office itself, there is no trust dabbling between the different devices that are on the same switch.

Now, many of us have done this in the past by using some basic technology kinda like VPNs, right? Where we set up a virtual network and that network has the ability to talk to specific things.

All these specific machines are on that little virtual network called a VLAN that we can set up. So that's all well and good. Yeah.

Now we're moving really to the next level where every device on a switch or anything within the organization speaks directly to and only to a firewall slash router.

We don't want this one to go to a generic router, we want it to go to a firewall. We want to make sure that it computer isn't infected and is trying to cross infect.

One of the first things that happen when the bad guys get control of a system inside a network is they try and spread laterally. So they have control of a workstation. They try and get on other workstations within the business, find out what information is there that they can steal, that they can ransom. That's what they're trying to do.

So as the true zero-trust network says, okay, Marie's workstation is trying to scan other machines on the network and it is shut off.

That's the sort of thing we do. We stop the intrusions, we stop the hacks and that's what you need as well. Everything and everyone inside the network should be considered to be an outsider.

Now, this whole concept of zero-trust is gaining popularity for very good reasons. I talk on the show every week about another company that has been hacked.

So that has been a fish that has had ransomware that has had people inside, the Chinese back doors, man, it seems to be a weekly occurrence for us.

Yet when you hear some of these feds talking about it under oath, Is there any evidence of the Chinese getting into any systems here to the United it States? They're talking about Huawei, they're talking about, all of these different companies from China, and they say, No, there's no evidence.

I have personally seen it. I ran the FBI's InfraGard webinars for a couple of years. I put them together. I hosted them. I got the interviews. I did the interviews, the Q and A.

I have not only seen this stuff myself on business networks, but I have spoken to many people who've also seen it. So I don't get why. These people in the government are trying to deny that the Chinese are doing anything here. It's absolutely just mind-blowing to me. So we've got more and more organizations putting their workloads now into public and private clouds and they're less interested in the hardware expertise.

They want people who understand techs complex, IP infrastructure, not right, realizing what's really going on. A bigger focus on business resiliency really is this third major trend and the know-how needed here really focuses on technologies that make a network more intelligent and enabled to learn how to protect itself.

Thinking about automation, about integration, about one pane of glass, about artificial intelligence and machine learning. So we're going to get into those exact titles, those exact roles. So you know what they are. So that we can speak to where's the career path, where are things going?

And I can give you a little hint, AI and machine learning. They're going to be big.

Hey, you're listening to Craig Peterson right here, online your favorite podcast app and of course on WGAN, including Wednesday mornings with Matt Gagnon seven 30.

---

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