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

Welcome,

Good Monday morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. I was on with Jack Heath this morning discussing what we learned about VPNs.  BTW, if you have been listening to me for a while I have been telling you this -- but now there is Proof in Black and White that I what shared with you is TRUE! Here we go with Jack.

These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit

- CraigPeterson.com

--- 

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

[00:00:00] Craig Peterson: So these VPN services said they did not keep logs of what you were doing online. They were not tracking you. Guess what was in this data that was found online?

Hey, good morning everybody. Craig Peterson here. I can't believe summer's almost half over. Well, that's what. It happens, right? Anyhow, I was on with Jack this morning and they had the most major I told you so, and I hate to say this, but if you're using VPNs, man, listen in because a huge, huge problem came out just last week.

Jack Heath: Craig Peterson, a tech talk guy joins us his show air Saturdays. Here are these iHeart stations on the tech talk side, Craig. Good morning. One of these stories. Locally is more people falling victim to scams?

What else do you have for us?

[00:01:00] Craig Peterson: Oh man. I'm afraid. I have an I told you so, here this morning about VPN's. People have been using virtual private networks and the FBI came out with a warning a few weeks ago. Well, now we have discovered a group of seven of these free VPN apps that left all of their data exposed online. 1.2 terabytes of your personal data. So if you're using one of these free VPN services, which I warn against all of the time, in fact using a VPN service is usually worse than not using a VPN service. It turns out. Not just their email, their home addresses passwords in plain text, IP addresses, but all of these VPN services said they did not keep logs of what you were doing online.

[00:02:00]They were not tracking. You get within this data that was found online. Every place you visited, where you went, your passwords, the whole nine yards. You cannot trust them. These VPN services, particularly the free VPN services. It's not going to make you safer.

Jack Heath: Well, good, a good lesson learned. What about, um, the scam seemed to be going up as people do more virtual stuff.

I'm not surprised people are going to try and take advantage of a bad situation. Is it ending? I mean, the basics don't open something. If you don't recognize it. Don't don't don't don't if a spam call comes through don't call and say, you know, here's my credit information, but is there anything new we should be doing to avoid these any good blockers or anything?

Good. You know the way to kind of knock out the crap coming through, or is it just something that they're always going to get through?

Craig Peterson: Well, we've got some really good news because of what's been happening over at the FCC and the FTC, actually. And that is that most now of the major cell phone carriers are able to block text messages.

[00:03:00] If they look like they are a scam. So for instance, You guys I know are familiar with what happened with President Trump's text here that over the last week. Okay. And that is that his texts, he was sending out to his supporters were blocked. Now that's part of this automatic system, where if it looks like it might be a scam, it might be a spam-sending it out to thousands or millions of people it will be blocked.

So yeah. Good news on that front T-Mobile has really taken a forward front position on this, which also now includes Sprint, but they're all kind of doing this and that is you are not going to be getting these text messages at the volume your before that are scams when you click on them or respond to them, or heaven forbid you callback a number that you don't recognize where they will be billing you $10-$20 for that phone call that number you didn't recognize. Those are all on a down surge right now.

Jack Heath: All right, Craig Peterson. [00:04:00] Thank you very much. Craig Peterson.com. Make it a good Monday. Enjoy the heat.

Craig Peterson: Take care.

Jack Heath: All right. Hey,

Craig Peterson: Were you, one of the people that went to my, one of my trips I did on VPNs, I did a bunch in February this year, not just VPNs, but general pieces of training.

I'm going to do a lot more of them coming up. Probably back to school time in early September, but before then I'm going to be doing a bunch of smaller things and kind of getting my ducks in a row, working on some courses and stuff that we're going to be doing. We've also got some really great hardware done for you packs we're working on, but anyways.

Those pieces of training that I did in February, I told you so, right. Right? How many of you guys dropped your VPN and services because I told you exactly what was going on? Now we have. Proof. Right.

This has nothing to do with the general security problems businesses are [00:05:00] having because of VPNs and the misuse of VPN's.

Anyway, I'm going to have to do that one again, obviously updated, but, O M G this is a very, very big deal.

Take care, everybody. We'll be back tomorrow. Bye-bye.

--- 

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Message Input:

Message #techtalk

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome,

Good Monday morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. I was on with Jack Heath this morning discussing what we learned about VPNs.  BTW, if you have been listening to me for a while I have been telling you this -- but now there is Proof in Black and White that I what shared with you is TRUE! Here we go with Jack.

These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit

- CraigPeterson.com

--- 

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

[00:00:00] Craig Peterson: So these VPN services said they did not keep logs of what you were doing online. They were not tracking you. Guess what was in this data that was found online?

Hey, good morning everybody. Craig Peterson here. I can't believe summer's almost half over. Well, that's what. It happens, right? Anyhow, I was on with Jack this morning and they had the most major I told you so, and I hate to say this, but if you're using VPNs, man, listen in because a huge, huge problem came out just last week.

Jack Heath: Craig Peterson, a tech talk guy joins us his show air Saturdays. Here are these iHeart stations on the tech talk side, Craig. Good morning. One of these stories. Locally is more people falling victim to scams?

What else do you have for us?

[00:01:00] Craig Peterson: Oh man. I'm afraid. I have an I told you so, here this morning about VPN's. People have been using virtual private networks and the FBI came out with a warning a few weeks ago. Well, now we have discovered a group of seven of these free VPN apps that left all of their data exposed online. 1.2 terabytes of your personal data. So if you're using one of these free VPN services, which I warn against all of the time, in fact using a VPN service is usually worse than not using a VPN service. It turns out. Not just their email, their home addresses passwords in plain text, IP addresses, but all of these VPN services said they did not keep logs of what you were doing online.

[00:02:00]They were not tracking. You get within this data that was found online. Every place you visited, where you went, your passwords, the whole nine yards. You cannot trust them. These VPN services, particularly the free VPN services. It's not going to make you safer.

Jack Heath: Well, good, a good lesson learned. What about, um, the scam seemed to be going up as people do more virtual stuff.

I'm not surprised people are going to try and take advantage of a bad situation. Is it ending? I mean, the basics don't open something. If you don't recognize it. Don't don't don't don't if a spam call comes through don't call and say, you know, here's my credit information, but is there anything new we should be doing to avoid these any good blockers or anything?

Good. You know the way to kind of knock out the crap coming through, or is it just something that they're always going to get through?

Craig Peterson: Well, we've got some really good news because of what's been happening over at the FCC and the FTC, actually. And that is that most now of the major cell phone carriers are able to block text messages.

[00:03:00] If they look like they are a scam. So for instance, You guys I know are familiar with what happened with President Trump's text here that over the last week. Okay. And that is that his texts, he was sending out to his supporters were blocked. Now that's part of this automatic system, where if it looks like it might be a scam, it might be a spam-sending it out to thousands or millions of people it will be blocked.

So yeah. Good news on that front T-Mobile has really taken a forward front position on this, which also now includes Sprint, but they're all kind of doing this and that is you are not going to be getting these text messages at the volume your before that are scams when you click on them or respond to them, or heaven forbid you callback a number that you don't recognize where they will be billing you $10-$20 for that phone call that number you didn't recognize. Those are all on a down surge right now.

Jack Heath: All right, Craig Peterson. [00:04:00] Thank you very much. Craig Peterson.com. Make it a good Monday. Enjoy the heat.

Craig Peterson: Take care.

Jack Heath: All right. Hey,

Craig Peterson: Were you, one of the people that went to my, one of my trips I did on VPNs, I did a bunch in February this year, not just VPNs, but general pieces of training.

I'm going to do a lot more of them coming up. Probably back to school time in early September, but before then I'm going to be doing a bunch of smaller things and kind of getting my ducks in a row, working on some courses and stuff that we're going to be doing. We've also got some really great hardware done for you packs we're working on, but anyways.

Those pieces of training that I did in February, I told you so, right. Right? How many of you guys dropped your VPN and services because I told you exactly what was going on? Now we have. Proof. Right.

This has nothing to do with the general security problems businesses are [00:05:00] having because of VPNs and the misuse of VPN's.

Anyway, I'm going to have to do that one again, obviously updated, but, O M G this is a very, very big deal.

Take care, everybody. We'll be back tomorrow. Bye-bye.

--- 

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Message Input:

Message #techtalk

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Good morning everybody!

I was on with Matt this morning and we had a good discussion about Twitter's technology and what they are doing with banning and censoring people and organizations and what we learned since last week about the Twitter hack. Also, the FBI is warning us about being sure who you are booking with when it comes to travel. The bad guys are trying to trick you so be careful. and cyberthreats Let's get into my conversation with Matt on WGAN.

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

---

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

[00:00:00] Matt Gagnon: About the time we talked to Craig Peterson every week. Yes it is. And he's with us right now, Craig, how are you this morning?

Hey, good morning. Doing pretty good.

Pleaure to have you as always. So our tech guru needs to lead things off here by talking about Twitter. So I was just doing that with the whole Q Anon thing.

And I suppose you can weigh in on that if you want to. But the other thing that's really big with Twitter here that we need to chat about. Is this Twitter breach, which exposed, its own employees. I think, you know, this whole Barack Obama and Elon Musk and all those other, prominent accounts were, were hacked.

And it really was because of the back end employees. Was it not.

Craig Peterson: Yeah, this is kind of a niche that's teen trick. It looks right now with the police investigations. Of course, the FBI is involved with this, that it was some kids that did this and they were able to get some inside people inside of Twitter here, contractors or [00:01:00] employees.

To use Twitter's, what I call "God-mode," to take control of various accounts. And including, as you mentioned, a few, you've probably heard of like this Joe Biden guy, Kanye West Jeff Bezos, and many others. And what they were trying to do is persuade people to send them Bitcoin. So Joe Biden, for instance, on the Joe Biden accounts was saying, Hey, if you send me Bitcoin, this is a chance for me to give back.

And for the next 30 minutes, if you send me Bitcoin, I'll double it. So if you send me a thousand dollars in Bitcoin, I'll send you $2,000 back. And there's postings out on Twitter of pictures, of this ,what I'm calling God-mode, with Beyonce's account and a few other people's accounts. So it looks like it was probably a social engineering attack.

It was probably conducted by just [00:02:00] some kids and they were able to get some employees inside to give them access to absolutely everything.

Matt Gagnon: We're talking with Craig Peterson. He is our tech guru and he joins us now to talk about the world of technology. Do you have any, I just mentioned it a moment ago, but I'm sure you're, you're a little bit up on this whole Q Anon thing.

I mean, it seems to be a part of a, now a much more forceful and aggressive Twitter in terms of policing the speech that's on its own platform, which. You know, by the way, a, if that was going to be what they do, where the heck was this stuff like six or eight years ago. But, B this, this is, this is going into some really squirrely territory, in my opinion.

What do you think about this, Craig?

Craig Peterson: Yeah, I agree with that. It Twitter, just the public square where people can stand there and say almost anything or is Twitter something that should be a little bit more regulated here where if [00:03:00] they're going to start to censor things, what are they going to censor, where's the line.

We already know that the. Person who was responsible for basically censoring president Trump's tweet was an avid Trump hater. That was working for Twitter. It, this whole thing is really quite a bit of a problem right now. The Feds are looking into how should we be regulating Twitter?

Are they as a phone company or can they be liable for the types of things that they say? Like, for instance say a newspaper, is because newspaper does edit what it is they're going to publish. And when you look at the Q Anon stuff, some of it is turned out to be right. Some of it's turned out to be wrong, but conspiracy theories and language that we just don't want to hear, frankly, should not be governed by this [00:04:00] private organization. And last you have the ability to Sue them for what would it you been being with Twitter, slander or libel, right? Is it the, really, the written word? The lot of questions that we just haven't really been able to answer yet.

Matt Gagnon: We're speaking with Craig Peterson, our tech guru joins us at this time every Wednesday to go over the world of technology.

So turning our gears somewhere else, here, not that there are very many air travelers right now, but the FBI has issued a cyber security warning to air travelers that are actually going around the country right now. So what is that warning all about Craig?

Craig Peterson: Yeah, this is kind of an interesting problem here because so many of us are booking online.

We are going online and, and, as part of that, we're going to the website to see if, has our flight's been canceled. It is, is a flight leaving on time. Something we've done for many years now, frankly, but right now the FBI is trying to raise some [00:05:00] awareness about the creation of a number of websites that are faked to look like the real deal, not just websites for Boston, Logan, or whatever, major airports out there, but they're also faking the website of the major.

Airlines now, typically it involves having the carrier or two that is misspelled because many of us misspelled words, we're tied beam in and the airlines, frankly, weren't smart enough to grab misspellings of their names, but they're saying this is a real threat for travelers. They have had a lot of reports from people coming in saying there are fake websites out there for airports and all over the whole aviation industry.

So be very, very careful. These websites do feature whatever organization or businesses logo, their fonts or color schemes or writing style. But in fact, they're just fooling users into thinking the site's [00:06:00] authentic and safe to use.

Matt Gagnon: And Craig, before I let you go, I do have to ask you about this resurgence of the emoTet spam Trojan thing.

So that's kind of been dormant for a while. Kind of a, what, what is what's happening with it now? Yeah, this is

Craig Peterson: hate this stuff, man. here's, what's been happening. People who have not been securing their machines properly. Their machines have been taken over and they become part of what's called a botnet.

Now you, you wouldn't know unless you were using more professional software, right? Your, your regular antivirus, your Norton, et cetera, is not going to pick this up. You need to do it right. And that's part of what we try and talk about on the weekends, how to do it, right. How to keep your business and personal computers safe.

But what's happening right now is they are using these machines again, part of this bot net to spam people. So there's a spam Trojan called as [00:07:00] you mentioned, emotet. It is sending out malicious emails again by the millions. And it has, it's been dormant really now since early this year, which has been nice because the amount of spam has been down, but it is coming back up again.

It is sending malicious documents. It's utilizing URLs in there that you click on. And many times it's using hacked WordPress sites. So remember if your business and you have an online website. Make sure you remember to patch it up as well. It's not just your laptops, your windows, desktops, it's your servers.

It's your web servers. And in many cases, the hosting sites that we're using to host our WordPress and other websites, that many cases they are not being kept up to date by the vendor. You have to do it [00:08:00] yourself.

Matt Gagnon: His name is Greg Peterson. You hear him on this very network on Saturdays at one o'clock for his show, where he goes into much of this in more detail.

Craig, thanks so much for joining us this morning and giving us the tech update. We'll talk again next week.

Craig Peterson: Hey, take care of Mr. Matt.

Matt Gagnon: Appreciate it.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Good morning everybody!

I was on with Matt this morning and we had a good discussion about Twitter's technology and what they are doing with banning and censoring people and organizations and what we learned since last week about the Twitter hack.  Also, the FBI is warning us about being sure who you are booking with when it comes to travel.  The bad guys are trying to trick you so be careful. and cyberthreats   Let's get into my conversation with Matt on WGAN.

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

---

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

[00:00:00] Matt Gagnon: About the time we talked to Craig Peterson every week. Yes it is. And he's with us right now, Craig, how are you this morning?

Hey, good morning. Doing pretty good.

Pleaure to have you as always. So our tech guru needs to lead things off here by talking about Twitter. So I was just doing that with the whole Q Anon thing.

And I suppose you can weigh in on that if you want to. But the other thing that's really big with Twitter here that we need to chat about. Is this Twitter breach, which exposed, its own employees. I think, you know, this whole Barack Obama and Elon Musk and all those other, prominent accounts were, were hacked.

And it really was because of the back end employees. Was it not.

Craig Peterson: Yeah, this is kind of a niche that's teen trick. It looks right now with the police investigations. Of course, the FBI is involved with this, that it was some kids that did this and they were able to get some inside people inside of Twitter here, contractors or [00:01:00] employees.

To use Twitter's, what I call "God-mode," to take control of various accounts. And including, as you mentioned, a few, you've probably heard of like this Joe Biden guy, Kanye West Jeff Bezos, and many others. And what they were trying to do is persuade people to send them Bitcoin. So Joe Biden, for instance, on the Joe Biden accounts was saying, Hey, if you send me Bitcoin, this is a chance for me to give back.

And for the next 30 minutes, if you send me Bitcoin, I'll double it. So if you send me a thousand dollars in Bitcoin, I'll send you $2,000 back. And there's postings out on Twitter of pictures, of this ,what I'm calling God-mode, with Beyonce's account and a few other people's accounts. So it looks like it was probably a social engineering attack.

It was probably conducted by just [00:02:00] some kids and they were able to get some employees inside to give them access to absolutely everything.

Matt Gagnon: We're talking with Craig Peterson. He is our tech guru and he joins us now to talk about the world of technology. Do you have any, I just mentioned it a moment ago, but I'm sure you're, you're a little bit up on this whole Q Anon thing.

I mean, it seems to be a part of a, now a much more forceful and aggressive Twitter in terms of policing the speech that's on its own platform, which. You know, by the way, a, if that was going to be what they do, where the heck was this stuff like six or eight years ago. But, B this, this is, this is going into some really squirrely territory, in my opinion.

What do you think about this, Craig?

Craig Peterson: Yeah, I agree with that. It Twitter, just the public square where people can stand there and say almost anything or is Twitter something that should be a little bit more regulated here where if [00:03:00] they're going to start to censor things, what are they going to censor, where's the line.

We already know that the. Person who was responsible for basically censoring president Trump's tweet was an avid Trump hater. That was working for Twitter. It, this whole thing is really quite a bit of a problem right now. The Feds are looking into how should we be regulating Twitter?

Are they as a phone company or can they be liable for the types of things that they say? Like, for instance say a newspaper, is because newspaper does edit what it is they're going to publish. And when you look at the Q Anon stuff, some of it is turned out to be right. Some of it's turned out to be wrong, but conspiracy theories and language that we just don't want to hear, frankly, should not be governed by this [00:04:00] private organization. And last you have the ability to Sue them for what would it you been being with Twitter, slander or libel, right? Is it the, really, the written word? The lot of questions that we just haven't really been able to answer yet.

Matt Gagnon: We're speaking with Craig Peterson, our tech guru joins us at this time every Wednesday to go over the world of technology.

So turning our gears somewhere else, here, not that there are very many air travelers right now, but the FBI has issued a cyber security warning to air travelers that are actually going around the country right now. So what is that warning all about Craig?

Craig Peterson: Yeah, this is kind of an interesting problem here because so many of us are booking online.

We are going online and, and, as part of that, we're going to the website to see if, has our flight's been canceled. It is, is a flight leaving on time. Something we've done for many years now, frankly, but right now the FBI is trying to raise some [00:05:00] awareness about the creation of a number of websites that are faked to look like the real deal, not just websites for Boston, Logan, or whatever, major airports out there, but they're also faking the website of the major.

Airlines now, typically it involves having the carrier or two that is misspelled because many of us misspelled words, we're tied beam in and the airlines, frankly, weren't smart enough to grab misspellings of their names, but they're saying this is a real threat for travelers. They have had a lot of reports from people coming in saying there are fake websites out there for airports and all over the whole aviation industry.

So be very, very careful. These websites do feature whatever organization or businesses logo, their fonts or color schemes or writing style. But in fact, they're just fooling users into thinking the site's [00:06:00] authentic and safe to use.

Matt Gagnon: And Craig, before I let you go, I do have to ask you about this resurgence of the emoTet spam Trojan thing.

So that's kind of been dormant for a while. Kind of a, what, what is what's happening with it now? Yeah, this is

Craig Peterson: hate this stuff, man. here's, what's been happening. People who have not been securing their machines properly. Their machines have been taken over and they become part of what's called a botnet.

Now you, you wouldn't know unless you were using more professional software, right? Your, your regular antivirus, your Norton, et cetera, is not going to pick this up. You need to do it right. And that's part of what we try and talk about on the weekends, how to do it, right. How to keep your business and personal computers safe.

But what's happening right now is they are using these machines again, part of this bot net to spam people. So there's a spam Trojan called as [00:07:00] you mentioned, emotet.  It is sending out malicious emails again by the millions. And it has, it's been dormant really now since early this year, which has been nice because the amount of spam has been down, but it is coming back up again.

It is sending malicious documents. It's utilizing URLs in there that you click on. And many times it's using hacked WordPress sites. So remember if your business and you have an online website. Make sure you remember to patch it up as well. It's not just your laptops, your windows, desktops, it's your servers.

It's your web servers. And in many cases, the hosting sites that we're using to host our WordPress and other websites, that many cases they are not being kept up to date by the vendor. You have to do it [00:08:00] yourself.

Matt Gagnon: His name is Greg Peterson. You hear him on this very network on Saturdays at one o'clock for his show, where he goes into much of this in more detail.

Craig, thanks so much for joining us this morning and giving us the tech update. We'll talk again next week.

Craig Peterson: Hey, take care of Mr. Matt.

Matt Gagnon: Appreciate it.

--- 

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Good morning everybody!

I was on with Matt this morning and we had a good discussion about Twitter's technology and what they are doing with banning and censoring people and organizations and what we learned since last week about the Twitter hack.  Also, the FBI is warning us about being sure who you are booking with when it comes to travel.  The bad guys are trying to trick you so be careful. and cyberthreats   Let's get into my conversation with Matt on WGAN.

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

---

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

[00:00:00] Matt Gagnon: About the time we talked to Craig Peterson every week. Yes it is. And he's with us right now, Craig, how are you this morning?

Hey, good morning. Doing pretty good.

Pleaure to have you as always. So our tech guru needs to lead things off here by talking about Twitter. So I was just doing that with the whole Q Anon thing.

And I suppose you can weigh in on that if you want to. But the other thing that's really big with Twitter here that we need to chat about. Is this Twitter breach, which exposed, its own employees. I think, you know, this whole Barack Obama and Elon Musk and all those other, prominent accounts were, were hacked.

And it really was because of the back end employees. Was it not.

Craig Peterson: Yeah, this is kind of a niche that's teen trick. It looks right now with the police investigations. Of course, the FBI is involved with this, that it was some kids that did this and they were able to get some inside people inside of Twitter here, contractors or [00:01:00] employees.

To use Twitter's, what I call "God-mode," to take control of various accounts. And including, as you mentioned, a few, you've probably heard of like this Joe Biden guy, Kanye West Jeff Bezos, and many others. And what they were trying to do is persuade people to send them Bitcoin. So Joe Biden, for instance, on the Joe Biden accounts was saying, Hey, if you send me Bitcoin, this is a chance for me to give back.

And for the next 30 minutes, if you send me Bitcoin, I'll double it. So if you send me a thousand dollars in Bitcoin, I'll send you $2,000 back. And there's postings out on Twitter of pictures, of this ,what I'm calling God-mode, with Beyonce's account and a few other people's accounts. So it looks like it was probably a social engineering attack.

It was probably conducted by just [00:02:00] some kids and they were able to get some employees inside to give them access to absolutely everything.

Matt Gagnon: We're talking with Craig Peterson. He is our tech guru and he joins us now to talk about the world of technology. Do you have any, I just mentioned it a moment ago, but I'm sure you're, you're a little bit up on this whole Q Anon thing.

I mean, it seems to be a part of a, now a much more forceful and aggressive Twitter in terms of policing the speech that's on its own platform, which. You know, by the way, a, if that was going to be what they do, where the heck was this stuff like six or eight years ago. But, B this, this is, this is going into some really squirrely territory, in my opinion.

What do you think about this, Craig?

Craig Peterson: Yeah, I agree with that. It Twitter, just the public square where people can stand there and say almost anything or is Twitter something that should be a little bit more regulated here where if [00:03:00] they're going to start to censor things, what are they going to censor, where's the line.

We already know that the. Person who was responsible for basically censoring president Trump's tweet was an avid Trump hater. That was working for Twitter. It, this whole thing is really quite a bit of a problem right now. The Feds are looking into how should we be regulating Twitter?

Are they as a phone company or can they be liable for the types of things that they say? Like, for instance say a newspaper, is because newspaper does edit what it is they're going to publish. And when you look at the Q Anon stuff, some of it is turned out to be right. Some of it's turned out to be wrong, but conspiracy theories and language that we just don't want to hear, frankly, should not be governed by this [00:04:00] private organization. And last you have the ability to Sue them for what would it you been being with Twitter, slander or libel, right? Is it the, really, the written word? The lot of questions that we just haven't really been able to answer yet.

Matt Gagnon: We're speaking with Craig Peterson, our tech guru joins us at this time every Wednesday to go over the world of technology.

So turning our gears somewhere else, here, not that there are very many air travelers right now, but the FBI has issued a cyber security warning to air travelers that are actually going around the country right now. So what is that warning all about Craig?

Craig Peterson: Yeah, this is kind of an interesting problem here because so many of us are booking online.

We are going online and, and, as part of that, we're going to the website to see if, has our flight's been canceled. It is, is a flight leaving on time. Something we've done for many years now, frankly, but right now the FBI is trying to raise some [00:05:00] awareness about the creation of a number of websites that are faked to look like the real deal, not just websites for Boston, Logan, or whatever, major airports out there, but they're also faking the website of the major.

Airlines now, typically it involves having the carrier or two that is misspelled because many of us misspelled words, we're tied beam in and the airlines, frankly, weren't smart enough to grab misspellings of their names, but they're saying this is a real threat for travelers. They have had a lot of reports from people coming in saying there are fake websites out there for airports and all over the whole aviation industry.

So be very, very careful. These websites do feature whatever organization or businesses logo, their fonts or color schemes or writing style. But in fact, they're just fooling users into thinking the site's [00:06:00] authentic and safe to use.

Matt Gagnon: And Craig, before I let you go, I do have to ask you about this resurgence of the emoTet spam Trojan thing.

So that's kind of been dormant for a while. Kind of a, what, what is what's happening with it now? Yeah, this is

Craig Peterson: hate this stuff, man. here's, what's been happening. People who have not been securing their machines properly. Their machines have been taken over and they become part of what's called a botnet.

Now you, you wouldn't know unless you were using more professional software, right? Your, your regular antivirus, your Norton, et cetera, is not going to pick this up. You need to do it right. And that's part of what we try and talk about on the weekends, how to do it, right. How to keep your business and personal computers safe.

But what's happening right now is they are using these machines again, part of this bot net to spam people. So there's a spam Trojan called as [00:07:00] you mentioned, emotet.  It is sending out malicious emails again by the millions. And it has, it's been dormant really now since early this year, which has been nice because the amount of spam has been down, but it is coming back up again.

It is sending malicious documents. It's utilizing URLs in there that you click on. And many times it's using hacked WordPress sites. So remember if your business and you have an online website. Make sure you remember to patch it up as well. It's not just your laptops, your windows, desktops, it's your servers.

It's your web servers. And in many cases, the hosting sites that we're using to host our WordPress and other websites, that many cases they are not being kept up to date by the vendor. You have to do it [00:08:00] yourself.

Matt Gagnon: His name is Greg Peterson. You hear him on this very network on Saturdays at one o'clock for his show, where he goes into much of this in more detail.

Craig, thanks so much for joining us this morning and giving us the tech update. We'll talk again next week.

Craig Peterson: Hey, take care of Mr. Matt.

Matt Gagnon: Appreciate it.

--- 

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Welcome!

Craig discusses collaboration tools for business and reviews his favorite - WebEx Teams

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

---

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Apple's Next MacBook Could Solve the Worst Thing About Working Remotely

---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

[00:00:00] We've talked about GoToMeeting. We've talked about Zoom. We've talked about Microsoft teams. Now it's time to talk about my favorite. How should you be collaborating in your business? Maybe your organization, your agency there's really. Only one solution and I'll tell you why.

Hey, welcome back everybody. Craig Peterson here. We have had quite a week this week and it's been quite a year, right? It's a Jumanji season. I don't know if you've ever seen that movie, but I think somebody playing Jumanji was set here in New Hampshire and the latest Jumanji movies out. It's actually pretty good.

I watched it. With the grandkids. I can count. I quite enjoyed it always. There are some issues with it and yeah, you have to ignore those things. but anyway, that's me. So we've been talking about online collaboration tools. Now, if you're like most of us and you had to have some people working from home.

[00:01:00] So even if you're. A business that was considered essential. And you had people who were in the office all day, maybe your County people worked from home. Maybe if you had to deal with an attorney, it was remotely. It was from my home. And how did you do that? We've been going into businesses lately that have been having troubles and having a look at this very question, how did they do it?

And I think really it boiled down to one of two products that people were using. One of them. Was the Microsoft team's product. And I was actually quite surprised to see the number of companies that were using the service go WebEx teams big. Now I was surprised because I didn't know that many people really knew about it.

[00:02:00]How many people knew about it? WebEx Teams? It was frankly, it was a surprise to me, but WebEx Teams is the only product out there right now that is fully compliant with the federal government requirements. So that includes things like D FARs fed ramp, et cetera. Microsoft is. Promising that they will be compliant.

Sometime in July, but at this point, they're not compliant. So if you have HIPAA regulations that you have to follow, or you have I tar, or any of these other federal government requirements, there's only one option. And that's WebEx teams. Now, oftentimes when there is a government mandate to use something it's terrible.

[00:03:00] How many times have you had that? You have to get her driver's license in order to drive on the road, not only in your state but another state. So that. Is a terrible experience, right? Going to the DMV, trying to get that all taken care of. It's not something I look forward to, but do you get even into the worst spots?

I remember doing some work for the US Navy. As a subcontractor and all of the hoops who had to jump through all of the things that we had to do. And that was a few years back. Now, we're doing work with government subcontractors that are doing work for the US Navy. And I thought after these years, things would be a lot tighter.

And in fact, they are. In fact, the new regulations, the CMMC regulations are much tighter with way more teeth on them. People will be going to jail. We're talking about huge multi multimillion-dollar fines, right? Even for a small company. So it is a very bad thing here to mess up on some of these regulations.

[00:04:00] So I've been surprised when I go in and find them using things like Microsoft teams, heaven forbid they've been using Zoom, which they have been. And they are a federal government subcontractor, in fact, for the DOD department of defense. Because again, what did we talk about? All those stuff, rather through China and China, isn't just, looking for military information.

China is looking for information from our companies that they can use to compete against us are designed designs that they can use. They're selling it to their allies. The same thing is happening over North Korea. An article came out just this week. That North Korea has 7,000 and highly trained hackers.

[00:05:00] That is aiming directly at our businesses here in the US in order to cause economic harm, but also those hackers to gain access to potential military information. So think about that. Think about how bad all of that's Tel fizz and. Companies just don't understand what they should be using. So yeah, you had an excuse during COVID to not use something that's secure.

I do get that. Believe me, don't know that the governor, the regulators are going to be happy with you. You may go to jail, but. I understand it. So for instance, for the HIPAA requirement, those were loosened because of COVID-19 the federal government said, Hey, listen, if you're a doctor in one state, you don't have to get licensed in another state in order to do the telemedicine stuff that made just a ton of sense.

And they also, because of that loosened some of the HIPAA regulations, which they pretty much had to do. Cause they didn't loosen the HIPAA regulations. You couldn't do the Teladoc across state lines. And you sure as heck could not do Teladoc using zoom. So they just loosened it all up, but that's not going to last.

[00:06:00] All right. So start paying more attention to some of this. Now, some of these Teladoc things have their own platforms, your doctor, you get paid per whatever it is, hour or patient, whatever it might be. And you're not worried about the platform. And you're probably okay. If that platform is not secure in just speaking in general terms.

Because you don't know anything about it, but some of these telemedicine companies that have these apps, et cetera, should be anyways, that gets into WebEx teams here. Some of the advantages that have made it the most Bueller web conferencing solution today. Number one, it's a software as a service. You just have to subscribe to the surface, you have internet access and you're ready to go.

[00:07:00] WebEx teams are also one of the oldest out there that you can use. And I think that's really cool when you get right down to it. And remember I mentioned a little bit early. that, it was the GoToMeeting was one of the older ones that were out there. You might remember some of the ads I do from WebEx, that it has been around a long time, but WebEx was founded in 1995.

It really is the grandpa out there. It has been doing the software, this meeting software for a long time. So it works everywhere. You, unlike zoom, you do not have to have a desktop app to do pretty much everything or anything that you might want to do on WebEx, which is a very big advantage. You don't have to have a download your audience.

[00:08:00] Doesn't need to be a subscriber to watch and listen. Which is not true for some of these other products that we've talked about today. It also, I think it very successfully combined your online viewing with the ability to teleconference easily. And you can connect to the webinar via just the webinars access code.

You can have passwords and whatever you might want to do. And this lots of presenters know who is actually there during the presentation. You don't have to have a time consuming, roll call or anything else. It's right there. You have. Also, of course, the chats, you have the questions and answers and you can have automatically in this space, a meeting, just take place as scheduled one or just ad hoc.

So let's say you have a space in WebEx teams, that's for the team to discuss some part of some project. And so you're going back and forth. I said, okay, look, let's just hop on right now. you just hit the button, the meat button and. Poof up at comes. You're now in a meeting and people can call in on the phone.

[00:09:00] They can connect via their smart device. Anybody that's in the room's going to get notified that there's a meeting on right now can go from your desktop. It is phenomenal. Just a simple click is all it takes. Then anybody who's in the meeting can present. You can use a built-in whiteboard, it can take remote control of your computer.

Are you kidding me? Why would anyone not use this? And it's using the military-grade encryption that we were talking about earlier, right? The exact opposite of what zoom has been using it also. Allows you to do what we do ourselves, from what we do for our, government subcontractors that are, we host the event.

The encryption key for all of the meetings and all of the communications. So the only way anyone can see any of this stuff. There was in a meeting is to have this encryption key is absolutely phenomenal. Absolutely phenomenal. You also have your own site. So for instance, my company has a site at, company named.webex.com.

[00:10:00] If you want to meet with me again, it's just. Company name.webex.com/meat sauce. Craig Tata, you are done. They've got tons of training articles for subscribers to use. It uses a proprietary network that has no food all over the world. It's reliable. It's secure. It is absolutely amazing. You have to use it.

You have to try it. And I advise people to use WebEx over anything else for almost anything. All right. You and you're going to have conferences. For instance, my room allows up to 10,000 people into it, 10,000. where else can you get that? But you don't have to have that bigger room if you don't need it.

[00:11:00] It is just phenomenal share files. Oh, videos, chat back and forth. Multiple spaces are what WebEx calls them. Ad hoc meetings, conferences. It is the tool to use. And you can find out a lot more by just going to webex.com. If you would like a demo, you can just get one right there. I'm not going to make a dime off of it.

Okay. It's not like I own WebEx or own any stock in it. Cause I don't, but it is the way to go. And if you'd like me to help you with it, that's a different story. You can get help from me about almost anything we talked about here on the show. You can just email me ME at Craig peterson.com and we help people out every day.

It doesn't have to do with WebEx. Doesn't have to do with anything that you're buying from me. I just make myself on my team available. We have a, an offer going where we had 20 companies that we selected from people that applied, that we provided an hour of tech support for anything they wanted. So that went really well.

[00:12:00] We've done that before. We may be doing the. The whole cyber health assessment thing. Again, we'll see how that goes. We did those for free about a year ago. So we may do that as part of our security summer this year, but the only way you find out about all of this stuff is to be on my regular emails, my weekly emails.

And you do that. By going to Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Craig peterson.com/subscribe.

Make sure you're on that list. You'll get my weekly show notes and you'll find out about all of the extra free stuff and services that we provide.

Talk to you next week.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

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

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Welcome!

Craig discusses collaboration tools for business and reviews Zoom and why you should not use it for business

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

---

Read More:

Iranian Spies Accidentally Leaked Videos of Themselves Hacking

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Cybercriminals Turning Bullies; Ransomware the Latest Weapon of Torture

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New wave of attacks aiming to rope home routers into IoT botnets

The Streaming Wars: A Cybercriminal's Perspective

Emotet spam trojan surges back to life after 5 months of silence

Apple's Next MacBook Could Solve the Worst Thing About Working Remotely

---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

[00:00:00] We've talked about, go to meeting Microsoft teams. We've mentioned the WebEx teams. We've mentioned Zoom. Now we're going to start delving into that even more. We're going to be talking right now about Zoom, the pros, and cons. It's probably the one you've been using.

How do I know it's probably the one you've been using because that's been the default. Zoom has a lot of advantages and some serious disadvantages as well. So we'll talk a little bit about those, but the number one problem that we've had with Zoom over, frankly, the years has been security and lies.

Did you know that Zoom has misrepresented so many times about, their ability to encrypt what they're doing, where they're routing? It is been, it's just been crazy what these guys have been up to. So it is not end-to-end encrypted. Let's just start with that, which means that anybody who is potentially in the middle.

[00:01:00] What'd you is, by the way, Zoom itself is somebody who can listen in on the conversation. Now, remember what I said about Zoom and that their developers are, many of them are at least I think it might be most of them, but they're in China. And we had a big story that I don't think we're really talked about on the radio here, but it had to do with China and zoom routing people's phone calls.

To China, which was absolutely a huge thing, then zoom had excuses for it. we have data centers all over the world. We try and run them back and forth. Oh, okay. Yeah, exactly. I absolutely get it. Yeah. But there are articles online, have a look at the intercept. For instance, they are generating their encryption keys in China for Zoom that had to absolutely credible zoom has also just in the last week or so it's been exposed.

[00:02:00] They have been. Cutting off some of the Zoom user's meetings, because China objected to China. Didn't want some of these people who were talking about China and some of the bad things China has been doing. And in reality, we haven't been talking about these anywhere near enough here in the United States.

But Zoom has capitulated to the Chinese government, the socialist over there. It's absolutely amazing. What has it been going on? And they're using some old versions of encryption that have been easily hacked. They've got the worst type of AES keys out there. Those the researchers have confirmed that they're using 128-bit keys for their communications.

[00:03:00] In other words, Even the encryption that they have, which is extremely limited, is extremely yeah. Poor. It's just amazing. Keep saying, Oh, we're fixing it or we have fixed it and they keep getting caught in what the media has been calling lies again. And again. And these encryption keys in China and routing the data through China and capitulating to what China wants him to do.

I don't know about you, but to me, that's a very big concern, These guys just have not been upfront and honest with people. it's a terrible situation. So Zoom is something I absolutely would never. Use for anything that really mattered. So if you're talking about some business process that might be confidential, if you're talking about some intellectual property things, Which is confidential business information. If you're talking about banking information, if you're talking to your accountant, if you're talking about anything that could be used by hackers or Nation-States anybody malicious. Don't use Zoom. Now I get it. I understand why people used it. I have used Zoom and I'm probably still going to continue to use Zoom for certain things.

[00:04:00] The big advantages to Zoom are. Number one it's easy to use and set up and manage. It is quite straightforward. Now. Unfortunately, unlike WebEx teams, you do have to install a client. You have to install software on your computer. Guess what? That's another area. Zoom has been caught doing some things that are very poor.

Practices from a programming standpoint and the nefarious. If you want to look at this through a slightly different lens, when it comes to Mac computers, they were installing a whole server on your computer that allowed remote access to pretty. Everything on your computer. Can you believe these guys? Okay.

[00:05:00] It's really crazy, Zoom, you don't need IT team to manage it. You don't need to have somebody like me come in and get everything set up, help explain it to you. Cause there are not very many functions in it. There are not very many features. It's not like a WebEx team room and spaces that can all be.

Tied into other devices, get set up on your mobile devices. And maybe like I have sitting right here, I have this amazing WebEx team names displayed. It's just absolutely amazing. We were using it yesterday for a meeting and it has a built-in whiteboard and I'm just drawing on the screen. It's it is really quite impressive, but.

[00:06:00] You don't need any of that with Zoom. And that's why so many people went on and used it. And frankly, they've more than doubled in size over the last six months or so. It's been huge. So you would zoom, you can get up to a hundred participants, Penn standard on your Zoomer count. You can have a quick one on one meeting, which is handy.

You have your own zoom room. In fact, the zoom rooms have been where most of the Zoom bombing has been going on, where people drop in and it takes pornography in the middle of your meeting. It's been happening for schools. It's been happening for everybody. Who's been using them by the way. If you're a school, don't use Zoom, get something good.

Get again, WebEx teams, Hey, listen, we sell it. We use it. We do that because we love it. Believe me. It's just phenomenal. You can have your meetings on Zoom phone webinars, chats on zoom, which is really handy. They have conference rooms and mobile devices.

[00:07:00] I really like conference rooms. That's what I used to run. The FBI's InfraGard webinars for a couple of years. Works pretty darn well for that sort of stuff. Zoom also has some of these one-on-one or excuse me all in one and appliances, which makes it even simpler to deploy, manage, and scale the room experience.

But again, Those all in one appliance have been found to be anything but secure. It's just crazy. These guys, they just don't get it. They either don't know anything about security or they just don't care about it. So these all in one appliance has been shown from Zoom to be very insecure.

And it's very cheap. It's inexpensive to do it. And it does have some integration with Google and Microsoft. So you can use their app marketplaces over 200 integrations with things like Slack and PayPal and many others. In fact, that's what we did with the FBI InfraGard program. We had some that were paid, some of these meetings that were paid, and that went over like a lead balloon.

[00:08:00] Let me tell you. Yeah, but, at any rate, kind of one of the final straws when I left doing that for the FBI InfraGard program, because so much of this information, I'm trying to get it outright. Why should people have to pay for some of these webinars where the presenters are, volunteers, me running the webinars for the FBI InfraGard program, our volunteers, and then they start charging people.

And then they're, they in a couple of cases, they actually paid behind the scenes, the people who are doing the presentations, but for the most part, they weren't getting paid anyway. I don't know. Maybe that's a little inside baseball. Okay. Now, why am I still going to use Zoom? In some cases, Zoom is just what everybody knows.

It's what everybody uses. It just makes life so easy. And I think probably continue to use it for some people. Some people have a hard time with anything new, but you know what, now that the majority of people know how to use zoom, because they've had to, because of working from home. With the coronavirus thing, the Zoom is going to be a platform that's going to be around for quite a while.

[00:09:00] And yeah, it's got its drawbacks as I just talked about, but the fact that it's ubiquitous, everybody knows that everybody can use it. Everybody has used it. It is not going away anytime soon. So stick around if you missed any of today's show, make sure you go to Craig peterson.com. You'll find it all there as well as on your favorite cast app and stickers because we're going to talk about my favorite collaboration system.

When we get back, I'll stick around.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

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Welcome!

Craig continues his discussion on collaboration tools for business and Microsoft Teams

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

---

Read More:

Iranian Spies Accidentally Leaked Videos of Themselves Hacking

Twitter breach exposes one of tech's biggest threats: Its own employees

Cybercriminals Turning Bullies; Ransomware the Latest Weapon of Torture

FBI Issues Cybersecurity Warning to Air Travelers

New wave of attacks aiming to rope home routers into IoT botnets

The Streaming Wars: A Cybercriminal's Perspective

Emotet spam trojan surges back to life after 5 months of silence

Apple's Next MacBook Could Solve the Worst Thing About Working Remotely

---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

[00:00:00] We're going to finish up our discussion about Microsoft teams. What are some of the things you might want to use it for? What is this? How was it different from zoom and everything else on the market? So let's get going.

hi everybody. Craig Peterson here. Thanks for being with us today. I really appreciate all your comments to me M E @craigpeterson.com. A lot of people just respond to my weekly show notes and. You get those by signing up for my email list to find out what's going on, what you should be doing, what free trainings we have, what paid courses there are.

And we are coming out with a free again, free. I'm trying to help out here. It really is for you. Okay. A free, special report about all of these apps we're talking about today. So Karen's been working really hard on that with me, and we hope to have it out either this week or maybe the week after.

[00:01:00] And it's going to be. Pretty detailed about some of the pros and cons, when you should be using it, what policies should you have in place for your employees? It comes to these collaboration apps. So I think it's a very. important topic, so many of us just knee jerk our way into this with the COVID-19 thing, and we needed something now, please, anything.

And we need jerked into zoom. Most of us, some of us started using Slack. All of these things are up in usage. In fact, WebEx had so many people applying for it because it's really the only one. If you're a business that you should be using, That they had to cut back. They were giving it away for free for two or three months.

[00:02:00] And even though they have a huge worldwide infrastructure. Sure. They still, I had some problems with the onboarding, getting everybody set up and ready. So there may or may not be free WebEx stuff going on right now. They're supposed to go. Maybe it was through the end of June until the end of July. I'm not sure what it is right now, but anyway, We're talking about Microsoft teams right now.

Okay. so as I mentioned at the very end with Microsoft teams, you need to integrate your Skype. Went in, we already know Skype is not. Considered to be overly secure. It was actually a little more security before Microsoft bought it. And then Microsoft changed its entire architecture to one where it goes through Microsoft servers.

And that way, if you're in China, Microsoft can sensor you. Or if the law enforcement agencies in the US want to hear what you're saying, Microsoft can provide it to them and they couldn't do it before. So yeah. A little bit of resentment there. You probably noticed in my voice, Danielle, back to Microsoft here, the second big thing is it has this integration that a lot of people.

[00:03:00] Yeah. looking forward to your business apps so you can use word Excel, PowerPoint, one-note planners, share 0.1 drive. All integrated with Microsoft teams. And that is a huge win because all of that stuff is right there. Now the integration isn't as clean or as neat or as easy as maybe it should be.

But it is there and it will get better over time. You can still use all of those tools, word, Excel, PowerPoint, et cetera, with pretty much anything. Any of these apps, they're all designed to be integrated to varying degrees, but yeah, Microsoft ultimately will win this battle. Because they own the source code, They own the programs. They're going to take care of themselves first. And they've been sued about that before. So no news there. Next point, customized workspace, and every team is different. So Microsoft teams is customizable so that you can integrate it with third-party apps, as well as Microsoft apps.

[00:04:00] That's really the trend right now. I see that across all of the industries, Cisco has done an interesting thing, and that is a couple of years ago, they decided to do a policy called API first. Now Microsoft is not doing this, but the whole idea behind API first is. That I'm like Microsoft that tries to play everything close to the chest and give itself advantages over all of its competitors.

And we've seen suits on that forever, like integrating internet Explorer, right into the kernels, supposedly. And so that you could not use other browsers. You always had to have a ye initially, and then they allowed other browsers, but you still had to have IE, and then the courts ruled against them yet again.

[00:05:00] And so unlike Microsoft's approach to try and lock you in, Cisco has decided that they want to make. All of the Cisco software uses the same interfaces that third-party vendors have to use. And that is phenomenal when it comes to integration. So if you want to use WebEx or WebEx teams or any component of any of the Cisco stuff, including their firewalls and the routers, et cetera, you can.

They've got APIs for everything. Cause that's the only way they can access their own software. It says absolutely phenomenal. So Microsoft teams do have some third party integration available on it, which can be handy. You also get real-time communications, which as I mentioned can be a problem.

[00:06:00] This isn't just true with Microsoft. This is true for WebEx teams and Slack and everything else out there. But it's real-time. So a smart person's going to do something different with email excuse me. something caught in my throat, email, you typically try and delay, right? I try and read my email once a day and that's it.

And if someone really needs to get ahold of me, they probably know how to really get ahold of me. So I'm not getting interrupted. I can work on the stuff I need to get to work on. No, I'm putting his stuff. Together for my lives, for my webinars, for my radio show for everything else. And if I get interrupted, particularly if I'm doing some programming work, it can cost me hours of time.

[00:07:00] So I put off email and only go through it maybe once a day. Sometimes I'll go two or three days without really paying attention to my email. So I apologize to you if you sent me an email and you're hoping for a quick answer, I don't always get back to you very quickly. I have other people in my team that's what it's four.

So when we're talking about communicating in real-time with some of these collaboration apps, It's a double edge sword. So instead of having emails, bouncing back and forth, which might take hours and hours, right? Because someone says something and half an hour later, another person reads it and responds now than that first-person an hour later, read to them response.

You can just have it go over very quickly. It's phenomenal for productivity. When you need quick productivity, the high priority initiatives that you have can really move a lot faster because it's not an email. It's not getting a push back while you're waiting. This is really instant messaging. Think of it like texting, So everybody can be on the same page with these teams apps you can see who has seen your messages. People can respond to them, they can start a thread. normally how does it work you on? You might send an email to everybody. Giving them an update, right? they reply to you, but maybe not to everybody that happens all of the time.

[00:08:00] I know people that I, I expect them to copy all because I, I've got two or three people on it that are need to know, and they don't, they just reply directly to me. with these types of teams, apps, everybody's on the same page. Everybody can see everything. This conversation with email can split into a bunch of different conversations with ideas, being directed at one person when it really should be a group discussion.

So keep that in mind as well. When you're considering some of these team's applications, everybody knows what's going on, what the status is, and productivity. Just keeps flowing. You're listening to Craig Peterson. Appreciate you being with me today. And of course, you can get me online as well. Craig peterson.com.

[00:09:00] Make sure you sign up to my email. Craig peterson.com/subscribe. And that gets you an email every week. Oftentimes it's Saturday mornings lately. It's been more like Mondays, summertime COVID-19 every excuse in the book, As to why it's been a little bit more delayed, expected by Monday.

And it's got my summary for the week. It's got links to my podcast and also info about classes and courses and lives when they happen. And then of course, here on the air, take care, everybody we'll be right back, stick around.

---

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Welcome!

Craig discusses collaboration tools for business and reviews his favorite - WebEx Teams

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

---

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---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

[00:00:00] Well, we went into our first collaboration product and now we're going to get into our next product. And this one is actually more of a team collaboration rather than just a video conferencing setup. Really.

Can Gotomeeting has been around a long time, man? It has its pros and its cons and its pros really have to do with frankly how long it has been around because that makes it. More stable, right? They've been addressing every problem. They've seen every problem in the last, my gosh, how long has it been for them? 16 years.

So they go to my meeting, is a very, very stable product, something you might want to consider. I want to move into our next collaboration tool, which is Microsoft teams. Now, most businesses today are using a whole array of tools. And the reason I bring up Microsoft teams is that so many of us are using what's now called Microsoft three 65.

[00:01:00] It used to be called office three 65, but now it's Microsoft three 65, which is a little bit misleading because office three 65, depending on which level you were on, gave you access to all of Microsoft office tools and where you could get windows as well, windows licenses, they pull it all under one roof and.

As would be expected from Microsoft or frankly, almost any company out there. The price has risen and dramatically in some cases. So Microsoft three 65 has some inexpensive offerings we're talking just dollars per month. Or if you are an actual business, the need to get something done. Cares about having backups cares about having an email with the proper email filters in place and the cares to have some of these collaboration tools.

[00:02:00] While now you're in the 30, 40, $50 per person. Per month range, which is pretty high when you get right down to it. Not out of the ordinary, not just totally out of the question, but it starts getting much more expensive there, including things like Microsoft windows licenses themselves. So you can really make sure all of your software from Microsoft is up to date and that you have the appropriate licenses for it because many of us, unfortunately, just don't have that., Right?

What's one of the reasons that we're not keeping our software up to date. One of the reasons that I've seen, again and again, is that Microsoft charges you in order to get an update in an upgrade. So, the first little bit of advice here is if you are a business, even as SO/HO, small office home office, make sure you get the enterprise versions of Microsoft three 65.

[00:03:00] And typically those start with an E and I don't recommend anything less than an E- three and it goes up from there. There's three and four and five and there's one and two and stuff. Uh, they change it frequently. So who knows this week, right? It might've changed. And I didn't notice, but either three is where you want to start.

And that's going to give you access to all of the basic stuff that you need. Now. Typically we'll put a Cisco email firewall in front of Microsoft and their outlook. And exchange servers. And the reason for that is the same email filter is just so much better than the stuff Microsoft is offering. Plus you also can still use, and you still do use the Microsoft filters, but once they've gone through those incredible Cisco filters, those Microsoft filters, just frankly, don't add up to much, not much at all.

[00:04:00] Well, that's what we normally do. But a lot of companies, they just stick with the regular Microsoft stuff. Now I get questions a lot of the time about Google and whether or not they should get to Google because Google has their Gmail, but they also have offerings for businesses. I have mixed feelings on that, but basically I say, no.

Don't use Google tools. Google has been decent at security. No question about it better than Microsoft that's for sure. Microsoft security is not their product. Let me tell you, but remember Google's product is you, even if you're paying them. They are watching your emails. They are selling that information and who knows whose hands it ends up in, even if it's supposedly anonymized.

[00:05:00] That doesn't mean it's truly anonymous data. That data can be de-anonymized. We talked about that on the show before. So we're talking about Microsoft and if you already have a Microsoft license, like the older office, three 65, or the newer licenses that are known as Microsoft three 65. You have the option of getting Microsoft teams.

And that's what a lot of people have done. Their saying, Hey, listen, we're already using all this Microsoft stuff. We're just going to start using teams. Now I have to give kudos to Microsoft because they have come a long way. Their software was terrible for years for a decade or more, just terrible. They would put every feature under the sun, into their software.

[00:06:00] Not that it worked, but people, when they're doing a selection, they're not looking for what they want. They're trying to eliminate the things they don't want. So if you're a vendor and you have some things missing in the mind of your prospect, You're not going to get that sale. It's just not going to happen, right?

So Microsoft would throw everything in, including the kitchen sink into their software. And most of them had a lot of bugs. Now, Microsoft, no has tons of bugs, still tons. It's crazy. And those bugs drive me nuts. Sometimes it's like the moment we talked about at the top of the show, major, major bug in some of their software, that's supposed to keep your data secure, basically from hard disk crashes and from data loss.

And in fact, is barely done the exact opposite. So I'm not a big Microsoft fan, but they're tools that they've been developing more recently for online news. Have been a lot better than anything they've had before. I guess that's faint praise, right? Because what they had before, well, it's just so terrible, but anyhow, Microsoft has their team's app.

[00:07:00] And a lot of businesses that are already using Microsoft have said, "Well, we'll just use their teams because, you know, it's Microsoft" and that's the employee they have used since day one, they tried to build up a name for themselves. They destroyed competitors by having people just waiting because they knew Microsoft is going to come up with something.

So we'll just wait and see because Microsoft announced something that not only did they not have in development, but apparently. We're barely even thinking about and just trying to put the competitors out of business and test the marketplace. Right? That's what it is. So where are you using these businesses today?

A whole bunch of different tools for communication and collaboration and Microsoft teams. It might be something not just for your business, but if you have a nonprofit or a small family business, something you might want to look at. Because teams are designed to be collaborative and it does tie in a lot of Microsoft's other tools.

[00:08:00] It allows you to deploy it company-wide and that can help to bring together employees. Now it can also make it so that your employees can't get anything done because they're constantly getting notes and messages from other employees, but. If your employees get some decent training and you can kind of help them out that overload the case and come with some of these teams, tools can basically go away.

So here are a few different ways that using a team tool could help you out your business. One company-wide chat, which is kind of handy. It helps you to get your overall company message into the hands of all of your employees. That's a very good thing. And that chat functionality is one of the main value adds of a team's application over something like Slack, that designed more for some typing back and forth, or some of these other things like go to meeting or zoom that are designed primarily for you to hold a meeting.

[00:09:00] All of the teams, apps, Microsoft, and WebEx, both have. What's called threaded conversations. Now you'll see that in Slack where someone will make a comment in a channel, and then you can have a thing thread off of that comment. So those people that are looking through the channel or space or whatever it's called and the software you're using, don't have to see all of the comments about some.

The main item that's in there. So threads that's important to have and Microsoft and WebEx teams both have that. Everything's really corded in one easy to find so that all of your conversations or right there in the channel, you know what they are, and you can find them. A WebEx team recently has set it up so that, yeah, everything is right there in that space, but it also has a separate set of tabs that let you look at just the files that were uploaded or just the meetings that took place in that space.

[00:10:00] I love that about WebEx. There's no more digging through your inbox, looking for emails, or just all of a sudden there are 50 emails that come in because. Everybody had a comment on an email that somebody else sent. So you don't get that mailbox when you're using these teams' apps. And that helps a lot making it, I mean, you know, a filter because we're so overloaded in all of our lives.

Now your conversation and these team maps can take place as a team discussion, or you could have private chats or private meetings. It really, this changes everything. If you haven't used either Microsoft teams or WebEx teams, and there's the ability to integrate Skype, to have audio and video conversations.

[00:11:00] That's true in Microsoft teams. If you're using WebEx teams, you have much better options. And we'll talk about those in an upcoming segment here. Uh, let's see, I think next segment. Yeah. Next segment. We're going to finish up a discussion about Microsoft teams. There are still a few more things we need to talk about.

We're going to also, so get into zooms pros and cons. What can you use zoom for? Why did I use zoom? I still use it. And why? Both for marketing and for business and for families. So we'll talk about all of that and some other options that are out there that Google has. And also Apple has some just amazing things.

What you can use to communicate securely and privately all of that right here and [email protected]. Stick around.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

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

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Welcome!

Craig discusses collaboration tools for business and reviews the grand-daddy of them all Go To Meeting.

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

---

Read More:

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The Streaming Wars: A Cybercriminal's Perspective

Emotet spam trojan surges back to life after 5 months of silence

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---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

[00:00:00] Now we're starting to talk about collaboration systems, the things you can use like I did for a wedding and people are using constantly now for business. What should the best ones, what should you be using, it's time for us to get our right together because we are back in. Business.

I think we're going to start here with the oldest one. The oldest is Gotomeeting. We'll start there because it's actually the most mature in some ways of all of these products and what we're going to talk about, the pros and cons of different features you're going to want to look at in them. And the problems with 'em, and that's part of the pros and cons.

And since we're starting with GoToMeeting, let's start about the con, okay. the basic con for this is, it is only really for meetings. So it lets you do some collaboration in meetings, but it is really mainly for meetings, unlike the two teams' product. So we're going to be talking about as well. That is for ongoing collaboration and meetings but GoToMeeting.

[00:01:00] Here's their big things that you're going to want to consider. First of all, it is the easiest to use collaboration product on the market, even though it is aimed mostly at meetings, it lets you collaborate during those meetings. It has. Video conferencing in high definition and it just plain works.

They have been able to because they've been around so long, really master the whole concept of high availability and high bandwidth streaming to multiple locations. So there is nothing better on the market today. And when it comes to having the ability to have conferences and meetings with people that might be on very slow internet lines that may be sharing their home internet with users who are watching TV, there's streaming Netflix.

[00:02:00] You're trying to have a meeting. What's the matter of these people. So go to meetings. Very good for that sort of thing. And again, a very immature product. It provides generally a great experience for people who are on it and because it's the oldest, it is well done. Just stood in the business world.

Now. It's not that well understood how to use it by a lot of people who are new to this online space. Those people are most likely to use Zoom. And I'll tell you why. I just use zoom just a couple of weeks ago at my daughter's wedding, but this is one of the big reasons it GoToMeeting. It's known. It's used a lot by business and has been for a very long time, but it is not well known by end-users.

[00:03:00] You've got to consider that as well. how well is it known by people? but it is pretty easy to use. And it started in 2004, the use the sharing technology from GoToMyPC go to assist and they have changed ownership. I think a couple. Yeah. Yeah. Back in 2017, I think it was, it became a product of log me in and I know a couple of the founders over there log me in.

So a small world, I guess when you get down to it, Now GoToMeeting also supports mobile years. Cause it's allowing people to attend meetings on-off devices as well as of course, iPad and I phoned and you can host. Go to meeting very well on an iPad or an iPhone, right? Really, this is a business-centric product, very business-centric, as are some of these others, these team applications.

[00:04:00] Now you can achieve a significant return on investment because of the features that they have. They got HD faces video. They have a flat fee, but I gotta say. Of all of them go to meetings. Fees can be pretty high. So it depends on whether or not you need that kind of high availability flexibility when it comes to the devices that you're watching it on, et cetera, pretty easy to manage a lot of administrative capabilities.

It, Kim combines this practicality with cost-effectiveness and it has. Very good security. Now zoom, when we get into it, I'm going to have a lot of complaints about security and how zoom effectively has lied to us over and over again. You're not going to see that with GoToMeeting, zoom routed these meetings through China, zoom uses Chinese developers, which is all well and good, except remember.

[00:05:00] And that in China, almost everything is owned by the people's liberation army and is run by it. So when they're routing meetings through China, There are some problems with zoom GoToMeeting. Doesn't have any of that. We'll talk about the zoom stuff when we get around to zoom here, but it is very good on the security side and it is something that you can use to increase sales.

If you have been following me for a long time, I run webinars. These free webinars, right? In some of them, I offer some products for sale. In some of them, I offer some information products, some hardware products. we talk many times about what you should be doing business, not using some home equipment for small business because that can be a nightmare.

[00:06:00] So I'll have webinars and I'll talk about it and I'll make an offer for people who want it. I don't do anything high pressure, but that's something to consider. When it comes to GoToMeeting, is there something that you want to offer and would do well in a webinar GoToMeetings has a great webinar platform.

I use a product called, a webinar jam for webinars. I have really liked it because of having it. Webinars where I'm interacting with people who are really potential clients or just trying to learn. I like to go to the webinar for that, but it's not secure. That's where you get GoToMeeting. So let's talk about

So let's talk about three big things GoToMeeting has that you might want, it is great for presentations, so it can help you with, if you're a sales, professional marketing professional, to get prospects and gauge target audiences and qualified leads. Now we use GoToMeeting, I've been involved with the state reopening I'm on the governor's task force for reopening schools.

[00:07:00] Of course, I'm on the technology task force. We used GoToMeeting. It wasn't my choice. It wasn't my account. It's something the state had. It worked really well for that. It's also great for demonstrations. So if you are a sales rep of some sort and you want to conduct. Live demonstrations of products for prospects or give one-on-one impromptu presentations during cold calls.

It's a great way to do it a very easy way to do it. but I gotta say. I have a little bit of a preference for zoom for those types of meetings where you are just doing something in prompt too because so many people now know zoom. Okay. But go to meetings. It's been good for that for a long time. It's good for collaboration.

[00:08:00] Every professional who wants to collaborate in real-time can get on there. It worked really well for us and the governor's task force and GoToMeeting. Can. Grow so that you have thousands of people at a meeting as well. All right. You can share any application on the presenter's desktop, even if the application is not installed on the attendee's computers, and we're seeing this morning, zoom still requires an application to be installed, but a WebEx does not and GoToMeeting does not.

It'll just run right there in your browser. And I think that's a very important thing because who wants to install software, particularly in this day and age where you don't know if it's legitimate or if it's malicious, et cetera. On the followup side. There is an extra trip that people have to take some time, but GoToMeeting has some really great stuff for followup.

[00:09:00] It lets you put URLs over in the chatbox because they can stay there. So there are some materials you want people to get pumped. Right up there in the chatbox and it stays. Is there, even though the chatbox may be strolling scrolling, I should say that goes right to the top of that chatbox, which makes it really nice.

And I've used that many times where I'm doing training with GoToMeeting where. We've got a URL that we want people to see. I see. So there it is. And that's part of the thing I like about webinar jam as well as I can put things up there. I can have links. I can put graphics in there and it just stays there.

So it, it does help you with converting leads, tie up loose ends, review contracts, closed deals a lot faster. So go to a meeting. Great alternative. Been around a long time. 2004 is a long time, particularly in this space, and is something you should seriously consider. And I consider it as well. I tend to not use it, frankly.

[00:10:00] Because I think people nowadays are much more in tune to use zoom. Now that's great when it's initial talking, but if I'm doing something with a, the prospect that we have a. A signed contract with, even if it's just a nondisclosure agreement, I would never ever use zoom for those. I use WebEx for very good reasons.

And you can still get it for free by the way, WebEx, I think it's through the end of July, I might be wrong on that, but the real commercial versions, like the ones that we use where everything's integrated. You must, must sign up through a reseller and we're a reseller of that, just, just to make sure I've got all my proper disclosures, in fact, sitting right here, right next to me right now.

[00:11:00] I've got this demo unit. That is, it's just absolutely amazing from the, our friends at Cisco and Cisco owns WebEx. Now they have for a while, but this thing is just so cool. It's a 27-inch display and it is bill set up. It's got a camera on the top. Of course, it's an HD camera and they also have the four K cameras and everything.

But right here, it's a touch screen. I've got a white board, I can make phone calls as well as get into my WebEx rooms and conferences and chat rooms. it's dedicated. It is just absolutely amazing. And it also ties in with our phone system, which we have. We have a WebEx phone system that lets us make private calls, secure calls, end to end, and as well as get on calls with people.

[00:12:00] Who are outside of our business. So it's very cool. I think this is like a $12,000 device. It is not cheap, but it's very cool. most of the time I'm just using either my computer or my phone or my smartphone with WebEx. It just, it ties into everything it's phenomenal. So anyway, that's the COTA meeting.

We've been talking about Zoom. We've been talking about WebEx and some of the. Real pros there. And we're also going to be talking about Microsoft teams when we get back. So keep an eye on that. And when I'm talking about WebEx, by there, I'm talking about WebEx teams, not just the stuff for video conferencing.

Alright. Stick around. Visit me online. Craig peterson.com. Cause we're losing some you guys right now as more stations are going away.

Craig peterson.com/subscribe. And you can hear the whole thing stick around.

We'll be right back.

---

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