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

Good morning everybody!

I was on with Matt this morning and we had a good discussion about the technology and cyberthreats that schools are facing and why as well as what is happening to the corporate networks of businesses that are in the process of reopening.  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] Craig Peterson: Who knows what I need to control peripherals like thumb drives hard drives other devices to their corporate laptops. They might've hooked up to their little files server in that house.

Craig Peterson here. Hey, if you listen to these podcasts a lot, you've probably noticed that most of these people that I interviewed with most of these radio hosts tend to ask about the same articles. In case you don't know, I put together usually eight articles every week. I kind of boil down the week's news to the top articles. There's a, I guess, a little bit of inside baseball and put together a summary paragraph or two, usually from those articles. And sometimes if I really disagree with the article, it'll be just original would be what I have to say about it. I send them off to all these different radio stations and then they have me on and they pick and choose. So like this particular interview, we talked about three of the different topics. And often we're talking about much the same thing. And. I try and take a bit of a different angle, so I don't get boring for you guys listening.

[00:01:00] But today it was kinda interesting. Matt had a different take. He was interested in some different articles today. So, you know, that's the way it goes. Variety's the spice of life, right? Yes, indeed. Hey, and my new studio. Is getting close to being finished. So,  I'm going to be doing a lot more training coming up here soon.

Take care of everybody. Yeah, here we go. In Maine with Matt on WGAN.

Matt Gagnon: Happy Wednesday friends. It's time to talk to Craig Peterson. Our tech guru joins us at this time every Wednesday to go over what's happening in the world of technology. Craig. Welcome.

Craig Peterson: Hey, thank you.

Matt Gagnon: Pleasure to have you as always. So let's kick things off here.

[00:02:00] With a question about schools. I know obviously we were all talking about whether or not we're going to be going back in the fall, with our kids in K through 12 education. But we do know what happened before in the last semester, they all stayed home and they were working from home and learning from home or whatever.

And I know that the schools already were struggling with cybersecurity issues, to begin with, with, then COVID-19 happened. Right? And then things changed. So tell me about this.

Craig Peterson: Yeah, things changed. Things changed pretty badly, you know, just in the last 30 days. More than seven and a half million malware incidences were detected affecting education worldwide.

 That is a lot of malware instances. And when we look at what's been happening in our schools, it has been a real problem. You know, the schools are unable to attract or retain or pay, or whatever it might be, the talent that really does understand what's happening in the cyber world.

[00:03:00] Now it isn't just schools. There still is a shortage of cybersecurity professionals, in the order of, depending on whose numbers you believe one and a half to two and a half million open jobs right now.  So when you look at something like our schools that tend to pay a lot less than some of the businesses, do they have limited resources?

It becomes a problem. The FBI's even warning about that right now that they just cannot, the schools cannot dedicate enough resources to network defense. They're vulnerable to cyber attacks. We've seen many school districts that have been nailed. Throughout New England, with ransomware and have had student information stolen.

[00:04:00] Then on top of it, as you pointed out, we've caught our latest infection here, the latest plague, it has driven us all home. Now we're looking at what are the right solutions? You know, do we have teachers that are concerned about health issues and might be older, or they might be having some general underlying health problem, do those teachers stay home and teach from home as opposed to keeping the students at home?

These students at home here in Maine, we've got all kinds of different data rates, different problems, they're different equipment at home. It's just an absolute nightmare. When you look at some of this stuff that's been going on. I just don't know what the right answer is.  Certainly, we've got huge problems with kids being at home and trying to connect to the schools and trying to keep their information safe.

Matt Gagnon: We're speaking with Craig Peterson, our tech guru joins us at this time every Wednesday that, is our time to talk to him. And by the way, you can hear him on this very station on Saturdays at one o'clock for the Craig Peterson show, where he goes into the stuff, in more depth. I, you know, the other thing about this, it's very, you know, in a similar vein here as offices are reopening.

[00:05:00]Tho, the stuff that we've been doing at home and our hardware at home is also its own security threat. Is that not true?

Craig Peterson: It is. It is a threat, even now, before some of these people return to the offices because so many of the employees have connected, you know, who knows what uncontrolled peripherals.

Like thumb drives, hard, drives, other devices to their corporate laptops. They might've hooked up to their little file server in that house. These peripherals are potentially cyber-attack tools used by bad actors. Look at the firewalls that we keep warning about this. So many of us have in our homes these consumer-grade firewalls that are under constant attack that are becoming a very big problem now for the businesses.

[00:06:00] We have to, as businesses now, reach out into our employee's homes. Now that gets to be an interesting problem, but we have to reach into their homes and secure the networks of our employees. Now, some businesses have said, well, we're just going to use a VPN, frankly, that just causes other problems.

The research is right now is showing, that 25% of devices on home networks, including PCs, printers, smart home products had one or more services exposed on the internet. 25% of home devices. It means ultimately it's a lot easier to hack when the bad guys can get at it directly from the internet.

Matt Gagnon: Speaking of hacking Craig Peterson, our tech guru, who joins us at this time every Wednesday, there's a new study out that says that 15 billion stolen and exposed credentials are, have been sort of found in criminal markets.

Tell us a little bit about this.

Craig Peterson: [00:07:00] Yeah, this is a very, very bad thing. And I wanted to really direct people to a website called "Have I been pwned?

Matt Gagnon: Oh yeah. I remember that. Yeah. That's a dated internet reference of I've heard one. Yeah.

Craig Peterson: Yeah, it kinda is. It goes way back. Have I been, poned (spelled PWNED) allows you to put in your email address that you use for signing into all these websites and tells you if your data is readily available on the dark web, what data is available, where it was stolen because when we're looking this study, that's saying 15 billion stolen, exposed credentials.

They're not kidding. Now you might say, well, wait a minute, a sanity check. There aren't 15 billion people in the world. Just like there aren't 245 million women voters here in the United States, to quote are one of the presidential candidates.

[00:08:00] Here's the problem. These credentials have been stolen multiple times. From multiple places and are for sale in underground marketplaces out there, and your credentials, it's just crazier. Here's what it's worth, right? It can take you 500 hours over the course of years to clear up all of the damage the bad guys do to your credit in all of these accounts, et cetera.

What it's worth is, right now, the price is about $3,000 for an admin account or a domain admin account. So if your credentials are used to control a Microsoft server, there in the office, that's worth about three grand. $70 for your bank account information, now. $21 for account access to your antivirus account and less than $10 for credentials for some of these adult sites out there, by the way, usernames and passwords for just regular sites are worth less than $2 each.

[00:09:00] 500 hours of your time is worth at what at $10 an hour, let's say $5,000. And in fact, you're worth less than a hundred dollars to the bad guys. It is crazy.

Matt Gagnon: That's encouraging.

Yeah. Paying more attention. At least make it worth more than five grand.

Yeah.  Well, Craig Peterson, our tech guru was nice to have to join us every Wednesday to go over what's happening in the world of technology.

Thanks again, Craig, as always make sure you hear him on this very station on Saturday and we'll talk to you next week.

Craig Peterson: Alright. Take care, Matt. Thanks.

That was it with Mr. Matt today.  I'll be back this weekend with another show. I ended up doing kind of a half and a half last weekend. Half of it was brand new and half of it was a repeat, I've just been feeling very, very under the weather, although I'm doing a lot better now, take care, everybody, and thanks for your time and comments too.

I got some messages from you guys. When I mentioned that I probably had the COVID it's saying, you know, just [00:10:00] some words of encouragement and support are really, really appreciate it. All of those. So take care of everybody.

Bye-bye.

--- 

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Good morning everybody!

I was on with Matt this morning and we had a good discussion about the technology and cyberthreats that schools are facing and why as well as what is happening to the corporate networks of businesses that are in the process of reopening.  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] Craig Peterson: Who knows what I need to control peripherals like thumb drives hard drives other devices to their corporate laptops. They might've hooked up to their little files server in that house.

Craig Peterson here. Hey, if you listen to these podcasts a lot, you've probably noticed that most of these people that I interviewed with most of these radio hosts tend to ask about the same articles. In case you don't know, I put together usually eight articles every week. I kind of boil down the week's news to the top articles. There's a, I guess, a little bit of inside baseball and put together a summary paragraph or two, usually from those articles. And sometimes if I really disagree with the article, it'll be just original would be what I have to say about it. I send them off to all these different radio stations and then they have me on and they pick and choose. So like this particular interview, we talked about three of the different topics. And often we're talking about much the same thing. And. I try and take a bit of a different angle, so I don't get boring for you guys listening.

[00:01:00] But today it was kinda interesting. Matt had a different take. He was interested in some different articles today. So, you know, that's the way it goes. Variety's the spice of life, right? Yes, indeed. Hey, and my new studio. Is getting close to being finished. So,  I'm going to be doing a lot more training coming up here soon.

Take care of everybody. Yeah, here we go. In Maine with Matt on WGAN.

Matt Gagnon: Happy Wednesday friends. It's time to talk to Craig Peterson. Our tech guru joins us at this time every Wednesday to go over what's happening in the world of technology. Craig. Welcome.

Craig Peterson: Hey, thank you.

Matt Gagnon: Pleasure to have you as always. So let's kick things off here.

[00:02:00] With a question about schools. I know obviously we were all talking about whether or not we're going to be going back in the fall, with our kids in K through 12 education. But we do know what happened before in the last semester, they all stayed home and they were working from home and learning from home or whatever.

And I know that the schools already were struggling with cybersecurity issues, to begin with, with, then COVID-19 happened. Right? And then things changed. So tell me about this.

Craig Peterson: Yeah, things changed. Things changed pretty badly, you know, just in the last 30 days. More than seven and a half million malware incidences were detected affecting education worldwide.

 That is a lot of malware instances. And when we look at what's been happening in our schools, it has been a real problem. You know, the schools are unable to attract or retain or pay, or whatever it might be, the talent that really does understand what's happening in the cyber world.

[00:03:00] Now it isn't just schools. There still is a shortage of cybersecurity professionals, in the order of, depending on whose numbers you believe one and a half to two and a half million open jobs right now.  So when you look at something like our schools that tend to pay a lot less than some of the businesses, do they have limited resources?

It becomes a problem. The FBI's even warning about that right now that they just cannot, the schools cannot dedicate enough resources to network defense. They're vulnerable to cyber attacks. We've seen many school districts that have been nailed. Throughout New England, with ransomware and have had student information stolen.

[00:04:00] Then on top of it, as you pointed out, we've caught our latest infection here, the latest plague, it has driven us all home. Now we're looking at what are the right solutions? You know, do we have teachers that are concerned about health issues and might be older, or they might be having some general underlying health problem, do those teachers stay home and teach from home as opposed to keeping the students at home?

These students at home here in Maine, we've got all kinds of different data rates, different problems, they're different equipment at home. It's just an absolute nightmare. When you look at some of this stuff that's been going on. I just don't know what the right answer is.  Certainly, we've got huge problems with kids being at home and trying to connect to the schools and trying to keep their information safe.

Matt Gagnon: We're speaking with Craig Peterson, our tech guru joins us at this time every Wednesday that, is our time to talk to him. And by the way, you can hear him on this very station on Saturdays at one o'clock for the Craig Peterson show, where he goes into the stuff, in more depth. I, you know, the other thing about this, it's very, you know, in a similar vein here as offices are reopening.

[00:05:00]Tho, the stuff that we've been doing at home and our hardware at home is also its own security threat. Is that not true?

Craig Peterson: It is. It is a threat, even now, before some of these people return to the offices because so many of the employees have connected, you know, who knows what uncontrolled peripherals.

Like thumb drives, hard, drives, other devices to their corporate laptops. They might've hooked up to their little file server in that house. These peripherals are potentially cyber-attack tools used by bad actors. Look at the firewalls that we keep warning about this. So many of us have in our homes these consumer-grade firewalls that are under constant attack that are becoming a very big problem now for the businesses.

[00:06:00] We have to, as businesses now, reach out into our employee's homes. Now that gets to be an interesting problem, but we have to reach into their homes and secure the networks of our employees. Now, some businesses have said, well, we're just going to use a VPN, frankly, that just causes other problems.

The research is right now is showing, that 25% of devices on home networks, including PCs, printers, smart home products had one or more services exposed on the internet. 25% of home devices. It means ultimately it's a lot easier to hack when the bad guys can get at it directly from the internet.

Matt Gagnon: Speaking of hacking Craig Peterson, our tech guru, who joins us at this time every Wednesday, there's a new study out that says that 15 billion stolen and exposed credentials are, have been sort of found in criminal markets.

Tell us a little bit about this.

Craig Peterson: [00:07:00] Yeah, this is a very, very bad thing. And I wanted to really direct people to a website called "Have I been pwned?

Matt Gagnon: Oh yeah. I remember that. Yeah. That's a dated internet reference of I've heard one. Yeah.

Craig Peterson: Yeah, it kinda is. It goes way back. Have I been, poned (spelled PWNED) allows you to put in your email address that you use for signing into all these websites and tells you if your data is readily available on the dark web, what data is available, where it was stolen because when we're looking this study, that's saying 15 billion stolen, exposed credentials.

They're not kidding. Now you might say, well, wait a minute, a sanity check. There aren't 15 billion people in the world. Just like there aren't 245 million women voters here in the United States, to quote are one of the presidential candidates.

[00:08:00] Here's the problem. These credentials have been stolen multiple times. From multiple places and are for sale in underground marketplaces out there, and your credentials, it's just crazier. Here's what it's worth, right? It can take you 500 hours over the course of years to clear up all of the damage the bad guys do to your credit in all of these accounts, et cetera.

What it's worth is, right now, the price is about $3,000 for an admin account or a domain admin account. So if your credentials are used to control a Microsoft server, there in the office, that's worth about three grand. $70 for your bank account information, now. $21 for account access to your antivirus account and less than $10 for credentials for some of these adult sites out there, by the way, usernames and passwords for just regular sites are worth less than $2 each.

[00:09:00] 500 hours of your time is worth at what at $10 an hour, let's say $5,000. And in fact, you're worth less than a hundred dollars to the bad guys. It is crazy.

Matt Gagnon: That's encouraging.

Yeah. Paying more attention. At least make it worth more than five grand.

Yeah.  Well, Craig Peterson, our tech guru was nice to have to join us every Wednesday to go over what's happening in the world of technology.

Thanks again, Craig, as always make sure you hear him on this very station on Saturday and we'll talk to you next week.

Craig Peterson: Alright. Take care, Matt. Thanks.

That was it with Mr. Matt today.  I'll be back this weekend with another show. I ended up doing kind of a half and a half last weekend. Half of it was brand new and half of it was a repeat, I've just been feeling very, very under the weather, although I'm doing a lot better now, take care, everybody, and thanks for your time and comments too.

I got some messages from you guys. When I mentioned that I probably had the COVID it's saying, you know, just [00:10:00] some words of encouragement and support are really, really appreciate it. All of those. So take care of everybody.

Bye-bye.

--- 

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Good morning everybody!

I was on with Matt this morning and we had a good discussion about the technology and cyberthreats that schools are facing and why as well as what is happening to the corporate networks of businesses that are in the process of reopening. 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] Craig Peterson: Who knows what I need to control peripherals like thumb drives hard drives other devices to their corporate laptops. They might've hooked up to their little files server in that house.

Craig Peterson here. Hey, if you listen to these podcasts a lot, you've probably noticed that most of these people that I interviewed with most of these radio hosts tend to ask about the same articles. In case you don't know, I put together usually eight articles every week. I kind of boil down the week's news to the top articles. There's a, I guess, a little bit of inside baseball and put together a summary paragraph or two, usually from those articles. And sometimes if I really disagree with the article, it'll be just original would be what I have to say about it. I send them off to all these different radio stations and then they have me on and they pick and choose. So like this particular interview, we talked about three of the different topics. And often we're talking about much the same thing. And. I try and take a bit of a different angle, so I don't get boring for you guys listening.

[00:01:00] But today it was kinda interesting. Matt had a different take. He was interested in some different articles today. So, you know, that's the way it goes. Variety's the spice of life, right? Yes, indeed. Hey, and my new studio. Is getting close to being finished. So, I'm going to be doing a lot more training coming up here soon.

Take care of everybody. Yeah, here we go. In Maine with Matt on WGAN.

Matt Gagnon: Happy Wednesday friends. It's time to talk to Craig Peterson. Our tech guru joins us at this time every Wednesday to go over what's happening in the world of technology. Craig. Welcome.

Craig Peterson: Hey, thank you.

Matt Gagnon: Pleasure to have you as always. So let's kick things off here.

[00:02:00] With a question about schools. I know obviously we were all talking about whether or not we're going to be going back in the fall, with our kids in K through 12 education. But we do know what happened before in the last semester, they all stayed home and they were working from home and learning from home or whatever.

And I know that the schools already were struggling with cybersecurity issues, to begin with, with, then COVID-19 happened. Right? And then things changed. So tell me about this.

Craig Peterson: Yeah, things changed. Things changed pretty badly, you know, just in the last 30 days. More than seven and a half million malware incidences were detected affecting education worldwide.

That is a lot of malware instances. And when we look at what's been happening in our schools, it has been a real problem. You know, the schools are unable to attract or retain or pay, or whatever it might be, the talent that really does understand what's happening in the cyber world.

[00:03:00] Now it isn't just schools. There still is a shortage of cybersecurity professionals, in the order of, depending on whose numbers you believe one and a half to two and a half million open jobs right now. So when you look at something like our schools that tend to pay a lot less than some of the businesses, do they have limited resources?

It becomes a problem. The FBI's even warning about that right now that they just cannot, the schools cannot dedicate enough resources to network defense. They're vulnerable to cyber attacks. We've seen many school districts that have been nailed. Throughout New England, with ransomware and have had student information stolen.

[00:04:00] Then on top of it, as you pointed out, we've caught our latest infection here, the latest plague, it has driven us all home. Now we're looking at what are the right solutions? You know, do we have teachers that are concerned about health issues and might be older, or they might be having some general underlying health problem, do those teachers stay home and teach from home as opposed to keeping the students at home?

These students at home here in Maine, we've got all kinds of different data rates, different problems, they're different equipment at home. It's just an absolute nightmare. When you look at some of this stuff that's been going on. I just don't know what the right answer is. Certainly, we've got huge problems with kids being at home and trying to connect to the schools and trying to keep their information safe.

Matt Gagnon: We're speaking with Craig Peterson, our tech guru joins us at this time every Wednesday that, is our time to talk to him. And by the way, you can hear him on this very station on Saturdays at one o'clock for the Craig Peterson show, where he goes into the stuff, in more depth. I, you know, the other thing about this, it's very, you know, in a similar vein here as offices are reopening.

[00:05:00]Tho, the stuff that we've been doing at home and our hardware at home is also its own security threat. Is that not true?

Craig Peterson: It is. It is a threat, even now, before some of these people return to the offices because so many of the employees have connected, you know, who knows what uncontrolled peripherals.

Like thumb drives, hard, drives, other devices to their corporate laptops. They might've hooked up to their little file server in that house. These peripherals are potentially cyber-attack tools used by bad actors. Look at the firewalls that we keep warning about this. So many of us have in our homes these consumer-grade firewalls that are under constant attack that are becoming a very big problem now for the businesses.

[00:06:00] We have to, as businesses now, reach out into our employee's homes. Now that gets to be an interesting problem, but we have to reach into their homes and secure the networks of our employees. Now, some businesses have said, well, we're just going to use a VPN, frankly, that just causes other problems.

The research is right now is showing, that 25% of devices on home networks, including PCs, printers, smart home products had one or more services exposed on the internet. 25% of home devices. It means ultimately it's a lot easier to hack when the bad guys can get at it directly from the internet.

Matt Gagnon: Speaking of hacking Craig Peterson, our tech guru, who joins us at this time every Wednesday, there's a new study out that says that 15 billion stolen and exposed credentials are, have been sort of found in criminal markets.

Tell us a little bit about this.

Craig Peterson: [00:07:00] Yeah, this is a very, very bad thing. And I wanted to really direct people to a website called "Have I been pwned?

Matt Gagnon: Oh yeah. I remember that. Yeah. That's a dated internet reference of I've heard one. Yeah.

Craig Peterson: Yeah, it kinda is. It goes way back. Have I been, poned (spelled PWNED) allows you to put in your email address that you use for signing into all these websites and tells you if your data is readily available on the dark web, what data is available, where it was stolen because when we're looking this study, that's saying 15 billion stolen, exposed credentials.

They're not kidding. Now you might say, well, wait a minute, a sanity check. There aren't 15 billion people in the world. Just like there aren't 245 million women voters here in the United States, to quote are one of the presidential candidates.

[00:08:00] Here's the problem. These credentials have been stolen multiple times. From multiple places and are for sale in underground marketplaces out there, and your credentials, it's just crazier. Here's what it's worth, right? It can take you 500 hours over the course of years to clear up all of the damage the bad guys do to your credit in all of these accounts, et cetera.

What it's worth is, right now, the price is about $3,000 for an admin account or a domain admin account. So if your credentials are used to control a Microsoft server, there in the office, that's worth about three grand. $70 for your bank account information, now. $21 for account access to your antivirus account and less than $10 for credentials for some of these adult sites out there, by the way, usernames and passwords for just regular sites are worth less than $2 each.

[00:09:00] 500 hours of your time is worth at what at $10 an hour, let's say $5,000. And in fact, you're worth less than a hundred dollars to the bad guys. It is crazy.

Matt Gagnon: That's encouraging.

Yeah. Paying more attention. At least make it worth more than five grand.

Yeah. Well, Craig Peterson, our tech guru was nice to have to join us every Wednesday to go over what's happening in the world of technology.

Thanks again, Craig, as always make sure you hear him on this very station on Saturday and we'll talk to you next week.

Craig Peterson: Alright. Take care, Matt. Thanks.

That was it with Mr. Matt today. I'll be back this weekend with another show. I ended up doing kind of a half and a half last weekend. Half of it was brand new and half of it was a repeat, I've just been feeling very, very under the weather, although I'm doing a lot better now, take care, everybody, and thanks for your time and comments too.

I got some messages from you guys. When I mentioned that I probably had the COVID it's saying, you know, just [00:10:00] some words of encouragement and support are really, really appreciate it. All of those. So take care of everybody.

Bye-bye.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome!

Good morning, everybody. I was on with Steve Fourni sitting in for the vacationing Jim Polito and we discussed Adobe Flash and why it went from Cool to Get it off my machine and why VPNs may not be keeping you safe. Here we go with Steve.

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

--- 

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

[00:00:00] Craig Peterson: They might not realize it, but you probably have not been using it for a year or more. And if you're an Apple iOS user, you've never used it.

Whoa, man. Things are moving fast this morning. Craig Peterson here, I was on with. Steve Forni on a couple of stations down in mass, WHYN and WTAG covering central Western Mass parts of Rhode Island and Vermont and Connecticut.

And we were talking about three or four different things. But to me, the thing that mattered the most was this discussion about VPNs at home and at work. Anyhow, here we go with this morning's radio hit.

Steve Fourni: After the eight 30 news on Tuesdays, we bring in our tech talk guru prey. Craig Peterson has got all kinds of good stuff for us today.

Good morning, Craig. How are you, sir?

Craig Peterson: Hey, good morning. I'm doing really, really well. You know, living West of the four [00:01:00] 95, it's just a different world. Isn't it? Somehow there's no COVID testing. No nothing.

Steve Fourni: We're just a, we're living in our own little world out here. Aren't we? It's unbelievable.

Craig Peterson: Yeah, it's unbelievable.

And now we've got our own time zones, not their own area code it's yeah,

Steve Fourni: yeah. It's we're yeah. We're we might as well just start. Our own form of government will be the people's republic of western mass of, the other two-thirds of the state. thanks for listening to the show, Craig.

Craig Peterson: It's a great show. I've enjoyed it. I've enjoyed it. I'm looking forward to Jim coming back. You've been great, Steve.

Steve Fourni: Thank you. I appreciate that. And I'm also looking forward to Jim's return. But you got all kinds of good stuff for us today. Let's start with something that I never understood. Why all of a sudden Adobe flash player went from the only thing to use to borderline dangerous.

Do not get the Flash upgrade. Do not do this. I don't know what happened there, but maybe you can tell us a little bit about Adobe flash player and what happened.

[00:02:00] Craig Peterson: Yeah, I've been warning about it here for a few years out. It wasn't really great because Flash was the first time on the internet that we actually saw things moving and it was so cool.

It was so easy to do. I remember when I first author tool to make these flash little animated videos, advertisers started using them. All of a sudden, everything was jumping out at you and moving around. Well, like so many things today, including Zoom, Flash was created in a hurry in a big hurry by people who did not understand the implications of what they were doing. They continued to add features to flash.

[00:03:00] So it wasn't just like move this little guy let's animate something. Yeah, it was, well, you know what? We really need to be able to store stuff on the user's computer. So the next time they come to the site, it's going to go faster. You know what? We gotta be able to read this stuff from the user's computer because we wrote it last time.

So flash, you guys got to give us access to the person's computer. Oh. We need to be able to use more CPU and memory in order to do all of this stuff. So you had all of this feature creep added on, added on, added on without a real major revision to the security policies, and what we have now is something that's just horrifically insecure.

It's kind of like Java it, you know, great language. I have a friend that works on the Java compiler and engine, and it's just evolved to the point where it's not that's useful. And it's very dangerous. In fact, iOS, which is Apple's operating system for iPads, and iPhones 10 years old now has never supported Adobe flash.

[00:04:00] And as of the end of this year, Google's Chrome will no longer support it. Firefox doesn't support it anymore. So, you know, you're still using flash where you're a business. You better ditch it quick.

Steve Fourni: How about other Adobe products? Like, I mean, we use Adobe audition for all of our audio and recording and editing and stuff.

Are other Adobe products besides flash, just as dangerous or was it this sort of flash specific?

Craig Peterson: [00:05:00] Really it's Flash specific. Adobe Audition is great. They've got video editors, of course, Photoshop. So many people use and variants of it. They just have the normal security problems that you might find in almost any software that's out there nowadays. Nothing's a hundred percent secure, but Flash is about 90% insecure. That's an overstatement, right? But with the new protocols, if you will, that are in place for the internet and called HTML five. This new programming language, your browser is actually an operating system unto itself. Anything you could do with flash and more, you can now do with it.

Just the basics that are supported in every browser that's made today. So you're okay. Most of the rest of the Adobe software, but flash is something that you might not realize it, but you probably have not been using it for a year or more. And if you're an Apple iOS user, you've never used it.

Steve Fourni: Yeah, that's interesting.

We're talking with Craig Peterson, our tech talk guru. I know you've got quite a list here of stuff that to talk about at all, pretty relevant. especially now that we're working from homes, let's move on to VPNs, which we were, I mean, we all thought we're safe and we're all thought we're doing the right thing.

And companies tell us to go home and use the two-factor authentication and do all this stuff. And now maybe it's still sort of vulnerable to, huh?

Craig Peterson: [00:06:00]Yeah. I, if you attended my courses, cause I do all of these free classes and pieces of training and I'm doing more and more of them to try and help people out.

But if you attended my training on VPN, you really is that in almost all cases, it makes you less secure, then not using a VPN. Well, there's, there's a lot of details here. And if someone has a question I'm more than glad to answer that question for them, they can just drop me an email and I'll definitely help them out.

[00:07:00] But now we've got a warning from the national security agency, an agency that never, ever used to produce warnings to people. In fact, they liked to these bugs because they use them to break into. So, you know, governments and businesses that they wanted to spy on foreign businesses supposedly, but the agency, cybersecurity director over at the NSA, by the way, it was launched and put in place by President Trump who mandated that they start helping businesses as opposed to going after them.

Just collecting all of our data. They said VPN gateways, in particular, are prone to network scanning brute force attacks, zero-day vulnerabilities. So the bottom line here is network administrators. Yeah, hopefully, you're listening closely right now. Make sure you have a strict traffic filtering rule to limit these people that are coming.

I mean, in, on the VPN, right? What ports they can get to the protocols, they can use the IP addresses. They can reach within your network that is going out to these VPN devices because remember VPNs were designed to replace leased lines for businesses. So it connects one network to another network. So you've got somebody working at home.

Who's using their home computer on their home network and is now VPNing into your business. You now [00:08:00] have piggybacked to their network onto your network. And so now, who knows what that 16, 18-year-old boys, been going to online, right? All of that data, all of that ransomware, all of that malware can now spread to your business network.

So VPNs, huge, huge surety risk. And then those people who use them for home. Home users, get you going. You use these free VPN servers and services. You are actually being spied on even more by using those services than if you never used them in the first place.

Steve Fourni: So what, so what are we supposed to, what are we supposed to do then?

I mean, there's some, there's some stuff that I, I can't access from home without connecting to the VPN. Like I can't, I can't, you know, share a screen from my work computer from home without VPNing in.

Craig Peterson: Yeah, man, again, I can't speak to your network. I'm not sure exactly what they've [00:09:00] done.

Maybe they did everything right. Because it is possible to do this stuff. Right. But you cannot do it with even the prosumer technology. You got to get into the enterprise stuff. So, What do you do? Well, most of the time, what you should be looking at are screen applications. So for instance, you might be on your home computer and you might have a machine that you use at the office.

So you could use something like log me in, which is a Massachusetts based company here Logmein.com. And so there's a client sitting on. Your computer at work that allows you to drive your work computer. As though you're sitting in front of it, anywhere in the world, it can be controlled and regulated, et cetera.

But the idea here is now you don't have a VPN, the stuff that's on your computer at home, on your network, on the other computers at home. It's not going to cause problems at the [00:10:00] office. Bottom line. So using those types of things, like log me in there are many others out there is, is really where you'll see the wind here.

Don't just knee jerk. Like so many businesses have done. Don't we're going to do another class on this. Steve, I've convinced myself because this is so important, but don't just do a knee jerk and put it in a VPN in place and say, okay, well, there you go. Now we're all set. Use some of these other services, Microsoft has something they used to call terminal services.

Now the remote desktop, what we've done for a lot of clients, we do not expose remote desktop because there are all kinds of security problems with that again and again and again, but, basically, you can just have of a big server that could have 50,000, a hundred thousand people on it. Each has its own individual virtual machines that they can access from anywhere.

[00:11:00] Again, getting rid of the need for these VPNs that more often than not according to the national security agency is misconfigured.

Steve Fourni: Wow. That's very interesting. We're talking with Craig Peterson, our tech talk guru. And I did want to get to this one too because I do think that in some way, shape or form, we're going to have.

Students learning at home, at, and again, I think there's this thought that, Oh, well we're just learning from home. Just go fire up the computer and have at it. but I mean, again, cybersecurity is going to be so big for not only the students that are at work but for. The teachers for the schools themselves, administrators, what, how are, what is the, I guess the dangers, and what are some of the things we need to focus on?

If our kids are at home learning and keeping them safe from things like cyber-attacks and the like.

Craig Peterson: I was one of the members of the technology committee for back to school for the state. And we came up with a number of guidelines, looking at this and schools have always had trouble with cybersecurity.

And the biggest problem they have the budget. Right? It's somebody is [00:12:00] it person in the school district. Hey, here you go, you get to be the cybersecurity czars. So now they struggle. Yay. Come up to speed and get that title and maybe get an extra a dollar per week. And that's very, very difficult.

So you're continually hearing about schools getting ransomware. You know on top of all of that, you've got these kids that are hacking in trying to do the Ferris Bueller thing and change their grades. So, you know, my heart goes out to these people just again and again, but there are a lot of shortcomings in this.

They just don't have dedicated the funding. They don't have the skilled personnel to continuously vet and improve cybersecurity defenses.

You know, when you look at businesses with a thousand employees, they are having to investigate more than 100 cybersecurity incidences a day with a thousand employees.

Well, how about a thousand kids? So many of the schools are [00:13:00] saying, well, we'll just use the web, right? Because of the cloud, because the cloud is secure, which of course just isn't true at all. And this pandemic now, Yeah, it has amplified all of these risks and they're using VPNs in many cases, which makes things even worse than that haven't adequately secured data in the platforms.

So the FBI has a warning out right now saying K to 12 institutions are vulnerable to cyber-attacks because of limited resources. Yeah. Dedicated to network defense. So we've, we've gotta be careful in the last 30 days alone, Steve we've had more than 4.7. Million malware, incidents in the education industry worldwide.

[00:14:00] Wow. Almost 5 million. Yeah. And malware incidents in the last 30 days in school. This is really, really problem they're, ill-equipped, they're ill-trained and I don't know what the real answer to this is because we're. We're not putting the money into the schools and you know what, with all of this Cove and stuff, there's even less money, the schools are worried about making sure the kids can connect online, particularly in more rural areas because they just don't know.

I have the bandwidth. They might not have the hardware at home is a nightmare that is coming down at us. Rolling full steam ahead.

Steve Fourni: Well, very interesting Craig, somebody to keep an eye on and, people want more information. They can sign up for, the helpful service that you provide free of charge. All they have to do is text. my name Steve that's right. My name that's Steve, with a V to this number

Craig Peterson: Eight-five five three eight five five 53. And if that doesn't work, you can just email me ME @craigpeterson.com.

Steve Fourni: I love that, Craig. Thanks again for the time. Appreciate it. And, we'll get up with it with a Jim next week, but we appreciate the time and have a great day.

Craig Peterson: Take care of Steve.

Steve Fourni: Thank you. Take that, take it easy. There goes a Craig Peterson. Good stuff. We'll [00:15:00] have a final word.

Craig Peterson: We're going to be kind of doing some of the sneaky stuff here. See how this works with some lives, with some video content and yes, Craig is finally getting into the more digital age and I'm definitely gonna do that VPN. Training again. In fact, I think I'll break it up into a few different pieces of training because I think a lot of people had trouble following some of it. Although we had 95% of the people stay from beginning to end for my VPN training. And that's pretty typical for all of my pieces of training, frankly. Keep an eye out for that because I will be doing that again soon.

Go online. If you haven't already Craig peterson.com/subscribe.

Take care, everybody. Talk to you later. Bye-bye.

--- 

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome!

Good morning, everybody. I was on with Steve Fourni sitting in for the vacationing Jim Polito and we discussed Adobe Flash and why it went from Cool to Get it off my machine and why VPNs may not be keeping you safe. Here we go with Steve.

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

--- 

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

[00:00:00] Craig Peterson: They might not realize it, but you probably have not been using it for a year or more. And if you're an Apple iOS user, you've never used it.

Whoa, man. Things are moving fast this morning. Craig Peterson here, I was on with. Steve Forni on a couple of stations down in mass, WHYN and WTAG covering central Western Mass parts of Rhode Island and Vermont and Connecticut.

And we were talking about three or four different things. But to me, the thing that mattered the most was this discussion about VPNs at home and at work. Anyhow, here we go with this morning's radio hit.

Steve Fourni: After the eight 30 news on Tuesdays, we bring in our tech talk guru prey. Craig Peterson has got all kinds of good stuff for us today.

Good morning, Craig. How are you, sir?

Craig Peterson: Hey, good morning. I'm doing really, really well. You know, living West of the four [00:01:00] 95, it's just a different world. Isn't it? Somehow there's no COVID testing. No nothing.

Steve Fourni: We're just a, we're living in our own little world out here. Aren't we? It's unbelievable.

Craig Peterson: Yeah, it's unbelievable.

And now we've got our own time zones, not their own area code it's yeah,

Steve Fourni: yeah. It's we're yeah. We're we might as well just start. Our own form of government will be the people's republic of western mass of, the other two-thirds of the state. thanks for listening to the show, Craig.

Craig Peterson: It's a great show. I've enjoyed it. I've enjoyed it. I'm looking forward to Jim coming back. You've been great, Steve.

Steve Fourni: Thank you. I appreciate that. And I'm also looking forward to Jim's return. But you got all kinds of good stuff for us today. Let's start with something that I never understood. Why all of a sudden Adobe flash player went from the only thing to use to borderline dangerous.

Do not get the Flash upgrade. Do not do this. I don't know what happened there, but maybe you can tell us a little bit about Adobe flash player and what happened.

[00:02:00] Craig Peterson: Yeah, I've been warning about it here for a few years out. It wasn't really great because Flash was the first time on the internet that we actually saw things moving and it was so cool.

It was so easy to do. I remember when I first author tool to make these flash little animated videos, advertisers started using them. All of a sudden, everything was jumping out at you and moving around. Well, like so many things today, including Zoom, Flash was created in a hurry in a big hurry by people who did not understand the implications of what they were doing. They continued to add features to flash.

[00:03:00] So it wasn't just like move this little guy let's animate something. Yeah, it was, well, you know what? We really need to be able to store stuff on the user's computer. So the next time they come to the site, it's going to go faster. You know what? We gotta be able to read this stuff from the user's computer because we wrote it last time.

So flash, you guys got to give us access to the person's computer. Oh. We need to be able to use more CPU and memory in order to do all of this stuff. So you had all of this feature creep added on, added on, added on without a real major revision to the security policies, and what we have now is something that's just horrifically insecure.

It's kind of like Java it, you know, great language. I have a friend that works on the Java compiler and engine, and it's just evolved to the point where it's not that's useful. And it's very dangerous. In fact, iOS, which is Apple's operating system for iPads, and iPhones 10 years old now has never supported Adobe flash.

[00:04:00] And as of the end of this year, Google's Chrome will no longer support it. Firefox doesn't support it anymore. So, you know, you're still using flash where you're a business. You better ditch it quick.

Steve Fourni: How about other Adobe products? Like, I mean, we use Adobe audition for all of our audio and recording and editing and stuff.

Are other Adobe products besides flash, just as dangerous or was it this sort of flash specific?

Craig Peterson: [00:05:00] Really it's Flash specific. Adobe Audition is great. They've got video editors, of course, Photoshop. So many people use and variants of it. They just have the normal security problems that you might find in almost any software that's out there nowadays. Nothing's a hundred percent secure, but Flash is about 90% insecure. That's an overstatement, right? But with the new protocols, if you will, that are in place for the internet and called HTML five. This new programming language, your browser is actually an operating system unto itself. Anything you could do with flash and more, you can now do with it.

Just the basics that are supported in every browser that's made today. So you're okay. Most of the rest of the Adobe software, but flash is something that you might not realize it, but you probably have not been using it for a year or more. And if you're an Apple iOS user, you've never used it.

Steve Fourni: Yeah, that's interesting.

We're talking with Craig Peterson, our tech talk guru. I know you've got quite a list here of stuff that to talk about at all, pretty relevant. especially now that we're working from homes, let's move on to VPNs, which we were, I mean, we all thought we're safe and we're all thought we're doing the right thing.

And companies tell us to go home and use the two-factor authentication and do all this stuff. And now maybe it's still sort of vulnerable to, huh?

Craig Peterson: [00:06:00]Yeah. I, if you attended my courses, cause I do all of these free classes and pieces of training and I'm doing more and more of them to try and help people out.

But if you attended my training on VPN, you really is that in almost all cases, it makes you less secure, then not using a VPN. Well, there's, there's a lot of details here. And if someone has a question I'm more than glad to answer that question for them, they can just drop me an email and I'll definitely help them out.

[00:07:00] But now we've got a warning from the national security agency, an agency that never, ever used to produce warnings to people. In fact, they liked to these bugs because they use them to break into. So, you know, governments and businesses that they wanted to spy on foreign businesses supposedly, but the agency, cybersecurity director over at the NSA, by the way, it was launched and put in place by President Trump who mandated that they start helping businesses as opposed to going after them.

Just collecting all of our data. They said VPN gateways, in particular, are prone to network scanning brute force attacks, zero-day vulnerabilities. So the bottom line here is network administrators. Yeah, hopefully, you're listening closely right now. Make sure you have a strict traffic filtering rule to limit these people that are coming.

I mean, in, on the VPN, right? What ports they can get to the protocols, they can use the IP addresses. They can reach within your network that is going out to these VPN devices because remember VPNs were designed to replace leased lines for businesses. So it connects one network to another network. So you've got somebody working at home.

Who's using their home computer on their home network and is now VPNing into your business. You now [00:08:00] have piggybacked to their network onto your network. And so now, who knows what that 16, 18-year-old boys, been going to online, right? All of that data, all of that ransomware, all of that malware can now spread to your business network.

So VPNs, huge, huge surety risk. And then those people who use them for home. Home users, get you going. You use these free VPN servers and services. You are actually being spied on even more by using those services than if you never used them in the first place.

Steve Fourni: So what, so what are we supposed to, what are we supposed to do then?

I mean, there's some, there's some stuff that I, I can't access from home without connecting to the VPN. Like I can't, I can't, you know, share a screen from my work computer from home without VPNing in.

Craig Peterson: Yeah, man, again, I can't speak to your network. I'm not sure exactly what they've [00:09:00] done.

Maybe they did everything right. Because it is possible to do this stuff. Right. But you cannot do it with even the prosumer technology. You got to get into the enterprise stuff. So, What do you do? Well, most of the time, what you should be looking at are screen applications. So for instance, you might be on your home computer and you might have a machine that you use at the office.

So you could use something like log me in, which is a Massachusetts based company here Logmein.com. And so there's a client sitting on. Your computer at work that allows you to drive your work computer. As though you're sitting in front of it, anywhere in the world, it can be controlled and regulated, et cetera.

But the idea here is now you don't have a VPN, the stuff that's on your computer at home, on your network, on the other computers at home. It's not going to cause problems at the [00:10:00] office. Bottom line. So using those types of things, like log me in there are many others out there is, is really where you'll see the wind here.

Don't just knee jerk. Like so many businesses have done. Don't we're going to do another class on this. Steve, I've convinced myself because this is so important, but don't just do a knee jerk and put it in a VPN in place and say, okay, well, there you go. Now we're all set. Use some of these other services, Microsoft has something they used to call terminal services.

Now the remote desktop, what we've done for a lot of clients, we do not expose remote desktop because there are all kinds of security problems with that again and again and again, but, basically, you can just have of a big server that could have 50,000, a hundred thousand people on it. Each has its own individual virtual machines that they can access from anywhere.

[00:11:00] Again, getting rid of the need for these VPNs that more often than not according to the national security agency is misconfigured.

Steve Fourni: Wow. That's very interesting. We're talking with Craig Peterson, our tech talk guru. And I did want to get to this one too because I do think that in some way, shape or form, we're going to have.

Students learning at home, at, and again, I think there's this thought that, Oh, well we're just learning from home. Just go fire up the computer and have at it. but I mean, again, cybersecurity is going to be so big for not only the students that are at work but for. The teachers for the schools themselves, administrators, what, how are, what is the, I guess the dangers, and what are some of the things we need to focus on?

If our kids are at home learning and keeping them safe from things like cyber-attacks and the like.

Craig Peterson: I was one of the members of the technology committee for back to school for the state. And we came up with a number of guidelines, looking at this and schools have always had trouble with cybersecurity.

And the biggest problem they have the budget. Right? It's somebody is [00:12:00] it person in the school district. Hey, here you go, you get to be the cybersecurity czars. So now they struggle. Yay. Come up to speed and get that title and maybe get an extra a dollar per week. And that's very, very difficult.

So you're continually hearing about schools getting ransomware. You know on top of all of that, you've got these kids that are hacking in trying to do the Ferris Bueller thing and change their grades. So, you know, my heart goes out to these people just again and again, but there are a lot of shortcomings in this.

They just don't have dedicated the funding. They don't have the skilled personnel to continuously vet and improve cybersecurity defenses.

You know, when you look at businesses with a thousand employees, they are having to investigate more than 100 cybersecurity incidences a day with a thousand employees.

Well, how about a thousand kids? So many of the schools are [00:13:00] saying, well, we'll just use the web, right? Because of the cloud, because the cloud is secure, which of course just isn't true at all. And this pandemic now, Yeah, it has amplified all of these risks and they're using VPNs in many cases, which makes things even worse than that haven't adequately secured data in the platforms.

So the FBI has a warning out right now saying K to 12 institutions are vulnerable to cyber-attacks because of limited resources. Yeah. Dedicated to network defense. So we've, we've gotta be careful in the last 30 days alone, Steve we've had more than 4.7. Million malware, incidents in the education industry worldwide.

[00:14:00] Wow. Almost 5 million. Yeah. And malware incidents in the last 30 days in school. This is really, really problem they're, ill-equipped, they're ill-trained and I don't know what the real answer to this is because we're. We're not putting the money into the schools and you know what, with all of this Cove and stuff, there's even less money, the schools are worried about making sure the kids can connect online, particularly in more rural areas because they just don't know.

I have the bandwidth. They might not have the hardware at home is a nightmare that is coming down at us. Rolling full steam ahead.

Steve Fourni: Well, very interesting Craig, somebody to keep an eye on and, people want more information. They can sign up for, the helpful service that you provide free of charge. All they have to do is text. my name Steve that's right. My name that's Steve, with a V to this number

Craig Peterson: Eight-five five three eight five five 53. And if that doesn't work, you can just email me ME @craigpeterson.com.

Steve Fourni: I love that, Craig. Thanks again for the time. Appreciate it. And, we'll get up with it with a Jim next week, but we appreciate the time and have a great day.

Craig Peterson: Take care of Steve.

Steve Fourni: Thank you. Take that, take it easy. There goes a Craig Peterson. Good stuff. We'll [00:15:00] have a final word.

Craig Peterson: We're going to be kind of doing some of the sneaky stuff here. See how this works with some lives, with some video content and yes, Craig is finally getting into the more digital age and I'm definitely gonna do that VPN. Training again. In fact, I think I'll break it up into a few different pieces of training because I think a lot of people had trouble following some of it. Although we had 95% of the people stay from beginning to end for my VPN training. And that's pretty typical for all of my pieces of training, frankly. Keep an eye out for that because I will be doing that again soon.

Go online. If you haven't already Craig peterson.com/subscribe.

Take care, everybody. Talk to you later. Bye-bye.

--- 

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome!

Good morning, everybody. I was on with Steve Fourni sitting in for the vacationing Jim Polito and we discussed Adobe Flash and why it went from Cool to Get it off my machine and why VPNs may not be keeping you safe. Here we go with Steve.

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

---

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

[00:00:00] Craig Peterson: They might not realize it, but you probably have not been using it for a year or more. And if you're an Apple iOS user, you've never used it.

Whoa, man. Things are moving fast this morning. Craig Peterson here, I was on with. Steve Forni on a couple of stations down in mass, WHYN and WTAG covering central Western Mass parts of Rhode Island and Vermont and Connecticut.

And we were talking about three or four different things. But to me, the thing that mattered the most was this discussion about VPNs at home and at work. Anyhow, here we go with this morning's radio hit.

Steve Fourni: After the eight 30 news on Tuesdays, we bring in our tech talk guru prey. Craig Peterson has got all kinds of good stuff for us today.

Good morning, Craig. How are you, sir?

Craig Peterson: Hey, good morning. I'm doing really, really well. You know, living West of the four [00:01:00] 95, it's just a different world. Isn't it? Somehow there's no COVID testing. No nothing.

Steve Fourni: We're just a, we're living in our own little world out here. Aren't we? It's unbelievable.

Craig Peterson: Yeah, it's unbelievable.

And now we've got our own time zones, not their own area code it's yeah,

Steve Fourni: yeah. It's we're yeah. We're we might as well just start. Our own form of government will be the people's republic of western mass of, the other two-thirds of the state. thanks for listening to the show, Craig.

Craig Peterson: It's a great show. I've enjoyed it. I've enjoyed it. I'm looking forward to Jim coming back. You've been great, Steve.

Steve Fourni: Thank you. I appreciate that. And I'm also looking forward to Jim's return. But you got all kinds of good stuff for us today. Let's start with something that I never understood. Why all of a sudden Adobe flash player went from the only thing to use to borderline dangerous.

Do not get the Flash upgrade. Do not do this. I don't know what happened there, but maybe you can tell us a little bit about Adobe flash player and what happened.

[00:02:00] Craig Peterson: Yeah, I've been warning about it here for a few years out. It wasn't really great because Flash was the first time on the internet that we actually saw things moving and it was so cool.

It was so easy to do. I remember when I first author tool to make these flash little animated videos, advertisers started using them. All of a sudden, everything was jumping out at you and moving around. Well, like so many things today, including Zoom, Flash was created in a hurry in a big hurry by people who did not understand the implications of what they were doing. They continued to add features to flash.

[00:03:00] So it wasn't just like move this little guy let's animate something. Yeah, it was, well, you know what? We really need to be able to store stuff on the user's computer. So the next time they come to the site, it's going to go faster. You know what? We gotta be able to read this stuff from the user's computer because we wrote it last time.

So flash, you guys got to give us access to the person's computer. Oh. We need to be able to use more CPU and memory in order to do all of this stuff. So you had all of this feature creep added on, added on, added on without a real major revision to the security policies, and what we have now is something that's just horrifically insecure.

It's kind of like Java it, you know, great language. I have a friend that works on the Java compiler and engine, and it's just evolved to the point where it's not that's useful. And it's very dangerous. In fact, iOS, which is Apple's operating system for iPads, and iPhones 10 years old now has never supported Adobe flash.

[00:04:00] And as of the end of this year, Google's Chrome will no longer support it. Firefox doesn't support it anymore. So, you know, you're still using flash where you're a business. You better ditch it quick.

Steve Fourni: How about other Adobe products? Like, I mean, we use Adobe audition for all of our audio and recording and editing and stuff.

Are other Adobe products besides flash, just as dangerous or was it this sort of flash specific?

Craig Peterson: [00:05:00] Really it's Flash specific. Adobe Audition is great. They've got video editors, of course, Photoshop. So many people use and variants of it. They just have the normal security problems that you might find in almost any software that's out there nowadays. Nothing's a hundred percent secure, but Flash is about 90% insecure. That's an overstatement, right? But with the new protocols, if you will, that are in place for the internet and called HTML five. This new programming language, your browser is actually an operating system unto itself. Anything you could do with flash and more, you can now do with it.

Just the basics that are supported in every browser that's made today. So you're okay. Most of the rest of the Adobe software, but flash is something that you might not realize it, but you probably have not been using it for a year or more. And if you're an Apple iOS user, you've never used it.

Steve Fourni: Yeah, that's interesting.

We're talking with Craig Peterson, our tech talk guru. I know you've got quite a list here of stuff that to talk about at all, pretty relevant. especially now that we're working from homes, let's move on to VPNs, which we were, I mean, we all thought we're safe and we're all thought we're doing the right thing.

And companies tell us to go home and use the two-factor authentication and do all this stuff. And now maybe it's still sort of vulnerable to, huh?

Craig Peterson: [00:06:00]Yeah. I, if you attended my courses, cause I do all of these free classes and pieces of training and I'm doing more and more of them to try and help people out.

But if you attended my training on VPN, you really is that in almost all cases, it makes you less secure, then not using a VPN. Well, there's, there's a lot of details here. And if someone has a question I'm more than glad to answer that question for them, they can just drop me an email and I'll definitely help them out.

[00:07:00] But now we've got a warning from the national security agency, an agency that never, ever used to produce warnings to people. In fact, they liked to these bugs because they use them to break into. So, you know, governments and businesses that they wanted to spy on foreign businesses supposedly, but the agency, cybersecurity director over at the NSA, by the way, it was launched and put in place by President Trump who mandated that they start helping businesses as opposed to going after them.

Just collecting all of our data. They said VPN gateways, in particular, are prone to network scanning brute force attacks, zero-day vulnerabilities. So the bottom line here is network administrators. Yeah, hopefully, you're listening closely right now. Make sure you have a strict traffic filtering rule to limit these people that are coming.

I mean, in, on the VPN, right? What ports they can get to the protocols, they can use the IP addresses. They can reach within your network that is going out to these VPN devices because remember VPNs were designed to replace leased lines for businesses. So it connects one network to another network. So you've got somebody working at home.

Who's using their home computer on their home network and is now VPNing into your business. You now [00:08:00] have piggybacked to their network onto your network. And so now, who knows what that 16, 18-year-old boys, been going to online, right? All of that data, all of that ransomware, all of that malware can now spread to your business network.

So VPNs, huge, huge surety risk. And then those people who use them for home. Home users, get you going. You use these free VPN servers and services. You are actually being spied on even more by using those services than if you never used them in the first place.

Steve Fourni: So what, so what are we supposed to, what are we supposed to do then?

I mean, there's some, there's some stuff that I, I can't access from home without connecting to the VPN. Like I can't, I can't, you know, share a screen from my work computer from home without VPNing in.

Craig Peterson: Yeah, man, again, I can't speak to your network. I'm not sure exactly what they've [00:09:00] done.

Maybe they did everything right. Because it is possible to do this stuff. Right. But you cannot do it with even the prosumer technology. You got to get into the enterprise stuff. So, What do you do? Well, most of the time, what you should be looking at are screen applications. So for instance, you might be on your home computer and you might have a machine that you use at the office.

So you could use something like log me in, which is a Massachusetts based company here Logmein.com. And so there's a client sitting on. Your computer at work that allows you to drive your work computer. As though you're sitting in front of it, anywhere in the world, it can be controlled and regulated, et cetera.

But the idea here is now you don't have a VPN, the stuff that's on your computer at home, on your network, on the other computers at home. It's not going to cause problems at the [00:10:00] office. Bottom line. So using those types of things, like log me in there are many others out there is, is really where you'll see the wind here.

Don't just knee jerk. Like so many businesses have done. Don't we're going to do another class on this. Steve, I've convinced myself because this is so important, but don't just do a knee jerk and put it in a VPN in place and say, okay, well, there you go. Now we're all set. Use some of these other services, Microsoft has something they used to call terminal services.

Now the remote desktop, what we've done for a lot of clients, we do not expose remote desktop because there are all kinds of security problems with that again and again and again, but, basically, you can just have of a big server that could have 50,000, a hundred thousand people on it. Each has its own individual virtual machines that they can access from anywhere.

[00:11:00] Again, getting rid of the need for these VPNs that more often than not according to the national security agency is misconfigured.

Steve Fourni: Wow. That's very interesting. We're talking with Craig Peterson, our tech talk guru. And I did want to get to this one too because I do think that in some way, shape or form, we're going to have.

Students learning at home, at, and again, I think there's this thought that, Oh, well we're just learning from home. Just go fire up the computer and have at it. but I mean, again, cybersecurity is going to be so big for not only the students that are at work but for. The teachers for the schools themselves, administrators, what, how are, what is the, I guess the dangers, and what are some of the things we need to focus on?

If our kids are at home learning and keeping them safe from things like cyber-attacks and the like.

Craig Peterson: I was one of the members of the technology committee for back to school for the state. And we came up with a number of guidelines, looking at this and schools have always had trouble with cybersecurity.

And the biggest problem they have the budget. Right? It's somebody is [00:12:00] it person in the school district. Hey, here you go, you get to be the cybersecurity czars. So now they struggle. Yay. Come up to speed and get that title and maybe get an extra a dollar per week. And that's very, very difficult.

So you're continually hearing about schools getting ransomware. You know on top of all of that, you've got these kids that are hacking in trying to do the Ferris Bueller thing and change their grades. So, you know, my heart goes out to these people just again and again, but there are a lot of shortcomings in this.

They just don't have dedicated the funding. They don't have the skilled personnel to continuously vet and improve cybersecurity defenses.

You know, when you look at businesses with a thousand employees, they are having to investigate more than 100 cybersecurity incidences a day with a thousand employees.

Well, how about a thousand kids? So many of the schools are [00:13:00] saying, well, we'll just use the web, right? Because of the cloud, because the cloud is secure, which of course just isn't true at all. And this pandemic now, Yeah, it has amplified all of these risks and they're using VPNs in many cases, which makes things even worse than that haven't adequately secured data in the platforms.

So the FBI has a warning out right now saying K to 12 institutions are vulnerable to cyber-attacks because of limited resources. Yeah. Dedicated to network defense. So we've, we've gotta be careful in the last 30 days alone, Steve we've had more than 4.7. Million malware, incidents in the education industry worldwide.

[00:14:00] Wow. Almost 5 million. Yeah. And malware incidents in the last 30 days in school. This is really, really problem they're, ill-equipped, they're ill-trained and I don't know what the real answer to this is because we're. We're not putting the money into the schools and you know what, with all of this Cove and stuff, there's even less money, the schools are worried about making sure the kids can connect online, particularly in more rural areas because they just don't know.

I have the bandwidth. They might not have the hardware at home is a nightmare that is coming down at us. Rolling full steam ahead.

Steve Fourni: Well, very interesting Craig, somebody to keep an eye on and, people want more information. They can sign up for, the helpful service that you provide free of charge. All they have to do is text. my name Steve that's right. My name that's Steve, with a V to this number

Craig Peterson: Eight-five five three eight five five 53. And if that doesn't work, you can just email me ME @craigpeterson.com.

Steve Fourni: I love that, Craig. Thanks again for the time. Appreciate it. And, we'll get up with it with a Jim next week, but we appreciate the time and have a great day.

Craig Peterson: Take care of Steve.

Steve Fourni: Thank you. Take that, take it easy. There goes a Craig Peterson. Good stuff. We'll [00:15:00] have a final word.

Craig Peterson: We're going to be kind of doing some of the sneaky stuff here. See how this works with some lives, with some video content and yes, Craig is finally getting into the more digital age and I'm definitely gonna do that VPN. Training again. In fact, I think I'll break it up into a few different pieces of training because I think a lot of people had trouble following some of it. Although we had 95% of the people stay from beginning to end for my VPN training. And that's pretty typical for all of my pieces of training, frankly. Keep an eye out for that because I will be doing that again soon.

Go online. If you haven't already Craig peterson.com/subscribe.

Take care, everybody. Talk to you later. Bye-bye.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

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Welcome,

Good Monday morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. I was on with Jack Heath this morning discussing the latest hacks that are hitting us all. 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, what I do with my credit cards is I have it set up with apps on my phone from the actual banks. Be careful about that, especially if you're on Android, there's a lot of fake banking apps out there we have to worry about out there. And that's just a little bit about what we talked about this morning with Mr. Jack Heath.

Jack Heath: Craig Peterson, our tech talk guy. How are you, Craig? Good morning.

Craig Peterson: Hey, good morning. Finally, over that bug I had, whatever it was Flu or I am not sure what. Man, I missed you last week.

Jack Heath: Have you been? What'd you have? What kind of a? Have you been sick? You've been tested?

Craig Peterson: No, I haven't been tested. Yeah was just a general malaise, not feeling well, no energy. So who knows, right? But the list of COVID-19 symptoms covers almost everything under the sun. I

[00:01:00] Jack Heath: You know they could check the box. Hey, I hope you feel better, Craig. I want to get right to it. I'd noticed. And we've noticed we had a friend that I'm with the credit union in New Hampshire. Recently, there are so many, I noticed a whole new batch of email scams that are coming to people's email servers and it says things like, and a stay with me. It's pretty clever. It will put in like the subject Craig Peterson, to someone who knows you. And all it says is like a name, you know, like Justin McIsaac click here, and there's a link. And then you look at them, a return email, and it's, not from Craig Peterson, but they somehow get a common name and they just send you an email with a link, making it look like it's from someone, you know, and don't open that link or what happened.

Craig Peterson: Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. It really looks like right now, like the Russian hackers are on a big spree here when it comes to the emails and there was this group called like, Cosmic link.

[00:02:00] And they've been getting more and more sophisticated to doing some of the things you just mentioned. What they're using to do this is basically 15 billion stolen, exposed credentials that are out there right now in the criminal markets. So they know a lot about you, they know websites that you've been to your usernames, your passwords.

So we're using this also to try and extort money out of people saying, Oh, we caught on some bad websites and here's your user name? Here's your password. What this boils down to obviously be careful what you click on. But on the other side is that we're still using the same usernames and same passwords on all these different websites that are out there.

They're able to trick us more and more. Now we've got the NSA warning us. That was something that started happening here again over the whole COVID thing is that many of us are working from home. We don't have the ability to just pop over to the IT people or ask someone else, Hey, Clara, did you get this email?

[00:03:00] Does this look fishy to you? Many people are starting to click on stuff they never would have clicked on just a few months ago.

Jack Heath: Yeah. And again, what happens if you do open one of those links? What happens?

Craig Peterson: Well, what'll happen is typically they'll try and get you to enter in some login information.

So they'll try and be something like an Amazon is a very, very big right now, but as a target by the threshing group. So it looks like it's a notice from Amazon saying that your, your subscription has expired, and you need a new credit card. So you'll go. Click on that link. It'll take you to a website that looks like Amazon and is asking you for new credit card information.

So people go ahead and put it in because they don't want their stuff to expire. And before you know it, the bad guys have your credit card and they'll typically run it up to its credit limit within a day,

Jack Heath: Within a day of just like random purchases before you get contacted from your bank or whatever credit union, you know, say, Hey, is this you in San Diego buying gas right now?

Craig Peterson: Yeah, [00:04:00] exactly. So what I do with my credit cards is I have it set up with apps on my phone from the actual banks. Be careful about that, especially if you're on Android there's a lot of fake banking apps out there, but I have it set up so that if there are purchases that are more than $50, it immediately informs me.

So I can say, okay, wait a minute. Something's going on? And now with the modern credit cards with the modern banking app, You can disable that credit card. So something else you might want to consider, and with visa cards, you can generate a one-time single-use credit card number and it can't take it. So who cares?

Jack Heath: All right, Craig. Well, glad you feel better. We have to run. Craig Peterson.com Thanks, Craig

Craig Peterson: Those drive time shows. I noticed on my audio was a little, I think I overdrove the telephone. I have a new, A to D to A converter. [00:05:00] And, it is I not quite configured. Right. So I'm going to work on that a little bit, hopefully for tomorrow.

Will sound a little bit better when it comes to .R. Polito. All right, everybody, take care. We are setting up our studio here for more and more content. So keep an eye out for that. We've been cleaning up our email lists. You might've gotten an email from me asking, why you haven't been opening my emails and we get some really good followup stuff too.

For those people that do click through, I am really kind of excited about what we have in store for you. We're going to do a whole. On of training. We're going to be helping you guys out when it comes to even the hardware, we're going to help get you into some good prosumer hardware. We did that for a few people, already.

This is from a much earlier this year and they, they kind of Guinea pigged it a little bit here with some new hardware from Cisco. And I am [00:06:00] happy to report that everybody is very happy with that as well. So everybody, take care and make sure you are on that email list. So you can find out about what I am doing when I'm doing it.

Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Take care of everybody.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

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 the latest hacks that are hitting us all. 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, what I do with my credit cards is I have it set up with apps on my phone from the actual banks. Be careful about that, especially if you're on Android, there's a lot of fake banking apps out there we have to worry about out there. And that's just a little bit about what we talked about this morning with Mr. Jack Heath.

Jack Heath: Craig Peterson, our tech talk guy. How are you, Craig? Good morning.

Craig Peterson: Hey, good morning. Finally, over that bug I had, whatever it was Flu or I am not sure what. Man, I missed you last week.

Jack Heath: Have you been? What'd you have? What kind of a? Have you been sick? You've been tested?

Craig Peterson: No, I haven't been tested. Yeah was just a general malaise, not feeling well, no energy. So who knows, right? But the list of COVID-19 symptoms covers almost everything under the sun. I

[00:01:00] Jack Heath: You know they could check the box. Hey, I hope you feel better, Craig. I want to get right to it. I'd noticed. And we've noticed we had a friend that I'm with the credit union in New Hampshire. Recently, there are so many, I noticed a whole new batch of email scams that are coming to people's email servers and it says things like, and a stay with me. It's pretty clever. It will put in like the subject Craig Peterson, to someone who knows you. And all it says is like a name, you know, like Justin McIsaac click here, and there's a link. And then you look at them, a return email, and it's, not from Craig Peterson, but they somehow get a common name and they just send you an email with a link, making it look like it's from someone, you know, and don't open that link or what happened.

Craig Peterson: Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. It really looks like right now, like the Russian hackers are on a big spree here when it comes to the emails and there was this group called like, Cosmic link.

[00:02:00] And they've been getting more and more sophisticated to doing some of the things you just mentioned. What they're using to do this is basically 15 billion stolen, exposed credentials that are out there right now in the criminal markets. So they know a lot about you, they know websites that you've been to your usernames, your passwords.

So we're using this also to try and extort money out of people saying, Oh, we caught on some bad websites and here's your user name? Here's your password. What this boils down to obviously be careful what you click on. But on the other side is that we're still using the same usernames and same passwords on all these different websites that are out there.

They're able to trick us more and more. Now we've got the NSA warning us. That was something that started happening here again over the whole COVID thing is that many of us are working from home. We don't have the ability to just pop over to the IT people or ask someone else, Hey, Clara, did you get this email?

[00:03:00] Does this look fishy to you? Many people are starting to click on stuff they never would have clicked on just a few months ago.

Jack Heath: Yeah. And again, what happens if you do open one of those links? What happens?

Craig Peterson: Well, what'll happen is typically they'll try and get you to enter in some login information.

So they'll try and be something like an Amazon is a very, very big right now, but as a target by the threshing group. So it looks like it's a notice from Amazon saying that your, your subscription has expired, and you need a new credit card. So you'll go. Click on that link. It'll take you to a website that looks like Amazon and is asking you for new credit card information.

So people go ahead and put it in because they don't want their stuff to expire. And before you know it, the bad guys have your credit card and they'll typically run it up to its credit limit within a day,

Jack Heath: Within a day of just like random purchases before you get contacted from your bank or whatever credit union, you know, say, Hey, is this you in San Diego buying gas right now?

Craig Peterson: Yeah, [00:04:00] exactly. So what I do with my credit cards is I have it set up with apps on my phone from the actual banks. Be careful about that, especially if you're on Android there's a lot of fake banking apps out there, but I have it set up so that if there are purchases that are more than $50, it immediately informs me.

So I can say, okay, wait a minute. Something's going on? And now with the modern credit cards with the modern banking app, You can disable that credit card. So something else you might want to consider, and with visa cards, you can generate a one-time single-use credit card number and it can't take it. So who cares?

Jack Heath: All right, Craig. Well, glad you feel better. We have to run. Craig Peterson.com  Thanks, Craig

Craig Peterson: Those drive time shows. I noticed on my audio was a little, I think I overdrove the telephone. I have a new, A to D to A converter. [00:05:00] And, it is I not quite configured. Right. So I'm going to work on that a little bit, hopefully for tomorrow.

Will sound a little bit better when it comes to .R. Polito. All right, everybody, take care. We are setting up our studio here for more and more content. So keep an eye out for that. We've been cleaning up our email lists. You might've gotten an email from me asking, why you haven't been opening my emails and we get some really good followup stuff too.

For those people that do click through, I am really kind of excited about what we have in store for you. We're going to do a whole. On of training. We're going to be helping you guys out when it comes to even the hardware, we're going to help get you into some good prosumer hardware. We did that for a few people, already.

This is from a much earlier this year and they, they kind of Guinea pigged it a little bit here with some new hardware from Cisco. And I am [00:06:00] happy to report that everybody is very happy with that as well. So everybody, take care and make sure you are on that email list. So you can find out about what I am doing when I'm doing it.

Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Take care of everybody.

--- 

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

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 the latest hacks that are hitting us all. 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, what I do with my credit cards is I have it set up with apps on my phone from the actual banks. Be careful about that, especially if you're on Android, there's a lot of fake banking apps out there we have to worry about out there. And that's just a little bit about what we talked about this morning with Mr. Jack Heath.

Jack Heath: Craig Peterson, our tech talk guy. How are you, Craig? Good morning.

Craig Peterson: Hey, good morning. Finally, over that bug I had, whatever it was Flu or I am not sure what. Man, I missed you last week.

Jack Heath: Have you been? What'd you have? What kind of a? Have you been sick? You've been tested?

Craig Peterson: No, I haven't been tested. Yeah was just a general malaise, not feeling well, no energy. So who knows, right? But the list of COVID-19 symptoms covers almost everything under the sun. I

[00:01:00] Jack Heath: You know they could check the box. Hey, I hope you feel better, Craig. I want to get right to it. I'd noticed. And we've noticed we had a friend that I'm with the credit union in New Hampshire. Recently, there are so many, I noticed a whole new batch of email scams that are coming to people's email servers and it says things like, and a stay with me. It's pretty clever. It will put in like the subject Craig Peterson, to someone who knows you. And all it says is like a name, you know, like Justin McIsaac click here, and there's a link. And then you look at them, a return email, and it's, not from Craig Peterson, but they somehow get a common name and they just send you an email with a link, making it look like it's from someone, you know, and don't open that link or what happened.

Craig Peterson: Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. It really looks like right now, like the Russian hackers are on a big spree here when it comes to the emails and there was this group called like, Cosmic link.

[00:02:00] And they've been getting more and more sophisticated to doing some of the things you just mentioned. What they're using to do this is basically 15 billion stolen, exposed credentials that are out there right now in the criminal markets. So they know a lot about you, they know websites that you've been to your usernames, your passwords.

So we're using this also to try and extort money out of people saying, Oh, we caught on some bad websites and here's your user name? Here's your password. What this boils down to obviously be careful what you click on. But on the other side is that we're still using the same usernames and same passwords on all these different websites that are out there.

They're able to trick us more and more. Now we've got the NSA warning us. That was something that started happening here again over the whole COVID thing is that many of us are working from home. We don't have the ability to just pop over to the IT people or ask someone else, Hey, Clara, did you get this email?

[00:03:00] Does this look fishy to you? Many people are starting to click on stuff they never would have clicked on just a few months ago.

Jack Heath: Yeah. And again, what happens if you do open one of those links? What happens?

Craig Peterson: Well, what'll happen is typically they'll try and get you to enter in some login information.

So they'll try and be something like an Amazon is a very, very big right now, but as a target by the threshing group. So it looks like it's a notice from Amazon saying that your, your subscription has expired, and you need a new credit card. So you'll go. Click on that link. It'll take you to a website that looks like Amazon and is asking you for new credit card information.

So people go ahead and put it in because they don't want their stuff to expire. And before you know it, the bad guys have your credit card and they'll typically run it up to its credit limit within a day,

Jack Heath: Within a day of just like random purchases before you get contacted from your bank or whatever credit union, you know, say, Hey, is this you in San Diego buying gas right now?

Craig Peterson: Yeah, [00:04:00] exactly. So what I do with my credit cards is I have it set up with apps on my phone from the actual banks. Be careful about that, especially if you're on Android there's a lot of fake banking apps out there, but I have it set up so that if there are purchases that are more than $50, it immediately informs me.

So I can say, okay, wait a minute. Something's going on? And now with the modern credit cards with the modern banking app, You can disable that credit card. So something else you might want to consider, and with visa cards, you can generate a one-time single-use credit card number and it can't take it. So who cares?

Jack Heath: All right, Craig. Well, glad you feel better. We have to run. Craig Peterson.com  Thanks, Craig

Craig Peterson: Those drive time shows. I noticed on my audio was a little, I think I overdrove the telephone. I have a new, A to D to A converter. [00:05:00] And, it is I not quite configured. Right. So I'm going to work on that a little bit, hopefully for tomorrow.

Will sound a little bit better when it comes to .R. Polito. All right, everybody, take care. We are setting up our studio here for more and more content. So keep an eye out for that. We've been cleaning up our email lists. You might've gotten an email from me asking, why you haven't been opening my emails and we get some really good followup stuff too.

For those people that do click through, I am really kind of excited about what we have in store for you. We're going to do a whole. On of training. We're going to be helping you guys out when it comes to even the hardware, we're going to help get you into some good prosumer hardware. We did that for a few people, already.

This is from a much earlier this year and they, they kind of Guinea pigged it a little bit here with some new hardware from Cisco. And I am [00:06:00] happy to report that everybody is very happy with that as well. So everybody, take care and make sure you are on that email list. So you can find out about what I am doing when I'm doing it.

Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Take care of everybody.

--- 

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Message Input:

Message #techtalk

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

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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 my recommendations for the type of security software, ransomware, 5G, and the cost of TV now.  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:

Here's what I kind of recommend for people. If you are going to get some of the software, here's what I say you should get. First of all. Well, that was me this morning on WGAN radio, talking with Matt about, again, this week's hot topics, and if you're wondering who I am, I'm Craig Peterson, but here we go with Matt.

Seven 36 WGAN morning news. Craig Peterson, our tech guru. He joins us now and he needs to turn down his radio. Cause I can hear my voice.

That was odd, I don't have my radio on.

A little echo there. Maybe we'll say so let me start off Craig, with a question about YouTube TV. I, I use YouTube TV. I'm a big fan of YouTube TV. And, it's been a decent price for me, not anymore though. Right? Yeah. A lot of us have been looking to, how can we cut back on our costs here? Cable TV was creeping up 50, 70, over a hundred dollars a month.

And all people looked at this whole cost-cutting thing as a, you know, let's go on the internet. We can just get it cheap and you certainly could, but what we're starting to see now is a split-up of stuff. For instance, our friends over at Disney have decided to pull the Marvel universe from its competitors, because it now has Disney plus that it wants to charge you 10 to 15 to $20 a month for all these different services.

Right. There's a plus there's Netflix. Peacock is coming up as NBC. CBS has theirs and YouTube has now. Taking the price of their we've kind of equivalent to the basic cable and has hiked that price by 30%. So if you're a brand new customer, you can expect to pay $65 a month for YouTube television service from here on out.

Now they've added some more channels in there. They've picked up CBS Viacom family of cable TV networks. But this is getting to the point now where, who knows cable might be cheaper, but. There is something on the horizon that might help us all out. And that is five G. This is where we could be kind of a savior because right now you're paying the cable company for the internet.

Anyways, most of us, right? Some of us might have DSL from the telephone company, which is not particularly fast. Some of us have the satellite service, which again is not particularly fast, but with five G that's going to reach even the smaller towns and cities eventually here. It's certainly not going to reach out in the middle of nowhere, but with five G we're going to have a platform that allows people to deliver very, very specific programming.

So. My fingers are crossed, Matt, that hopefully with 5g coming out. We are going to see a huge change in that we can just get whatever we like. You know, we can't watch the NFL anymore after their announcement this week, but, you know, maybe just watch the Red Sox or, or watch the games you want to watch rather than have to buy these bundles like YouTube $65 a month bundle.

Hmm, we are talking with Craig Peterson, our tech guru. He joins us at this time every week to go over. What's going on in the world of technology. Craig, I know that a lot of people are still worried about viruses on their computers. And so they oftentimes will try to get a. The free version of antivirus software or whatnot, but, there's a lot of reasons, perhaps not to do that and do instead pay for an antivirus software program.

Why is that? 

Yeah, there are a lot of free programs out there and I've used many of them over the years. I don't want to confuse people. I mentioning some of the ones that I've used, but the free versions are exactly that they're free there to try and get you going. The features that you get when you pay for the software, really add up pretty quickly.

Some of them have these anti-phishing features, some of them will even filter your email, looking for phishing attacks, which are really huge right now. And usually carry ransomware. It's on the increase. I'm afraid to say, but they include various other things that are going to help you out bank security, password managers, et cetera.

Here's what I kind of recommend for people. If you are going to get some of the software. Here's what I say you should get. First of all. Use what's already on your machine. So if you're a Windows user, use the software that came with Windows - Windows Defender, make sure it stays up to date.

Make sure it stays on. Another thing. This is kind of hard to do. I'll have to do a course on this, but lock down your computer. You can do this manually through the Windows firewall, unfortunately by default. Microsoft has too many services turned on. So turn off services you don't need and use Bit Defender. Get the paid version of Bit Defender. None of this is a hundred percent, but working together, you're going to get about an at this point about a 90% effectiveness and one more thing to get, and that's open DNS.

Get the paid version. There are family versions. That'll help keep your kids safe online as well, away from the things maybe say shouldn't be seeing online, but the open DNS can cost you a few bucks as well.

But those three things together, Matt, is going to save you from about 98% of all of the nastiness online.

Ooh, that's all quite a bit. we're talking with Craig Peterson, our tech guru. He joins us at this time every Wednesday to go over the world of technology. A final question for you here, Craig. the biggest threat that we experience out there online right now seems to be ransomware.

Is that getting worse?

Yeah, it's absolutely getting worse and we've gotta be careful here. The FBI has been warning us about the increases in it. We've got all these security companies talking about it as well. Just last week, there's a new wave of ransomware attacks against large organizations. It was identified in 31 large businesses.

Now, part of the reason it's identified there is they have security teams that are keeping an eye out for you as a small business. There's a home user. You're not going to report because you're not going to stop it. It's just going to be after the fact, hopefully, you have a good backup, frankly. But these attackers and breach the networks of these 31 different large businesses, and we're laying out the groundwork for their attacks.

It's kind of interesting in the way they do it, so I won't get into it. Now we might talk about it again on, on Saturday during my show. The bottom line of ransomware is easier for the bad guys to do than ever before. We are clicking on more stuff than ever before because of the whole COVID thing. We want to know what's going on and we get an email, we click on it.

So be very, very careful. Don't click on links to sites that you are not a hundred percent sure of. If you want to find out about COVID-19. There are a couple of sites you might want to go to. Some people go to the world health organization, but of course, you can go to cdc.gov and get all of the facts as we're being told, anyways. Just don't click on these emails, because ransomware is really nasty stuff.

Good advice. It says always Craig Peterson, our tech guru joins us on Wednesdays at this time to go over the world of technology. You can hear him on this very station, Saturdays a one, because he goes into all these stories and more in greater depth.

Craig, thanks as always for joining us. And we'll talk to you again soon.

Thanks, Matt. Take care of, appreciate it.

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