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

Welcome!

Good morning, everybody. I was on with Steve Forni who was sitting in for the vacationing Jim Polito. We discussed voting methods (electronic, mail-in, and via an app), Anti-virus and cutting the cord. Here we go with Steve.

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

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Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

[00:00:00] Craig Peterson: Think of what happened in 2004 with hanging chads, you had a Republican, you had a Democrat, you had various attorneys at each table who were examining the ballots. At least they had ballots to examine. Well, Mr. Polito was out for the week. So Steve Fourni and I got into a number of different topics.

I also found out his name is actually not French. It's Italian. So I guess I just mispronounced it again.

Steve Fourni: All right. Yeah. We'll get back to the show. Steve Fourni here in for Jim Polito this morning. Every week at this hour we're joined by Craig Peterson, our tech talk guru.

Good morning, Craig. How are you, sir?

Craig Peterson: Hey, good morning, Steve. Yeah, I sent you a couple emails over the last couple of weeks and never heard back from you. Busy times over there. Were you like vacationing last week or something?

Steve Fourni: No. Although I did see that you, that you tried to send to, Stefan Ford, the EA, Oh, that must be my French, my French Canadian, cousin,

[00:01:00] I'll have to dig. I'll tell you when I lived up in Northern Vermont, every place I'd go out on the lawn, like Forney they're like, Oh, F O U R N I E R. I'm like, no, no, I Italian Forni, Forni.

Hey, Craig can we talk about, I know you do have a list of things we want to talk about, but I've been talking about the voting, the mail, and voting, and I don't understand why we can. pick our winner of American idol via our cell phones, but we can't pick the next President via our cell phones. What are some of the maybe concerns that you would have if we were to go to electronic voting?

Craig Peterson: Well, I heard Bayback trying to straighten you out on this morning. So I, hopefully, this isn't a lost cause, but here's the problem. When we're talking about American idol voting and putting in more votes for their winner, then the President gets. It's just such a difference. From saying it, who cares if somebody wins American Idol or not. In fact, they even

[00:02:00] admit that they allow you to vote 10 times when we're talking about the President of the United States or Congress critters, et cetera, we really do want to have a reasonable accounting of what's happened and what's happening. So we let's start with a mail-in ballot. How do we know the mail-in ballots are legitimate?

We, we already had an arrest a week and a half ago from somebody that printed up ballots themselves and sent them in. Now it's obviously what we're talking about here. This person was indeed caught, but the problem you have with the mail-in ballots is they. Personally, I think it was a guy is an idiot, but if China or Russia really wanted to influence our campaigns or our elections, I should say, well, how better to do it than to inject thousands of fake ballots. But even then we don't need

[00:03:00] thousands, look at the election for Senate that happened up in New Hampshire a few years ago. Kelly Ayotte lost by literally a hand full of votes. That's where you can really topple an election and to having some extra votes in your hip pocket there that you can throw in at the last minute that aren't necessarily trackable.

Is a problem. So how about trackable? Oh, if you're going to be able to track these votes, you now have to identify the person that sent in the ballot. And in some States, they even have different colored envelopes for these mail-in ballots. So the clerk, when they receive the ballot can automatically, let's see, we've got one Republican, one Democrat, one, two Republican two Democrat to one, right.

And start throwing away ballots based on their colors. Or there are others that say, well, let's put a bar code on it so that we know it's a legitimate

[00:04:00] ballot. All right. So the barcode let's say has a checksum on it, or it's actually registered in the database as something that was sent to a person and an individual home.

So we now know that this is John Bayback's vote. And even though he may not care how you vote, Steve people might care how John votes, and we can now take John's and throw it away or know exactly how John voted and use it for extortion. Or all we need to do is hack the computer that has the database throw in a few thousand extra ballots that weren't legitimate or reverse engineer the software.

When we get into what let's vote via an app, let's do the American idol thing. Well now, the flood gates for fraud are completely wide open. The flood Gates for fraud have already been shown to be, to be wide open in the testing that's been done.

[00:05:00] We've talked before on my show about some of them, some of these applications that were looked at by third parties, these applications are that they were trying to sell to various States and, and even look what happened with the DNC, with their electronic voting.

Out in Iowa for the primaries, the whole thing could fall apart very, very quickly. And there's no way to have a real audit of what happened. It's not like you've got a card. And you filled in the blank. So the little circles and you handed it to the machine that counted it. And now we're questioning, wait a minute.

Why this machine gets so many votes, this doesn't seem right. Or we spot check a machine. We can go grab those original ballots and. If worst came to worse, we can have an army of people counting them. Think of what happened in 2000 in Florida with a hanging CHADS, you had a Republican, you had a Democrat, you had various attorneys

[00:06:00] at each table who were examining the ballots.

At least they had ballots to examine. None of that can be true here. And that's what gets me concerned. Steve.

Steve Fourni: Well it's fair enough. I mean, you were the guy to ask, so I, if anybody's going to, you know, poopoo the idea, it'd be you. That's fine with me I suppose. But, no, but it's insightful. And I mean, I, you know, again, I know, I know it's so much easier obviously to just do the American Idol thing, but even like, it's funny when I log on, if I want to log into, see my VPN at home, I have to go through all these steps and I have to send a notification to my phone to verify and.

You know, I have all these channels that I have to go through in order to have some sort of security. And I didn't know if there's anything we could do, but I wish we were ahead of places like Russia and China, but I guess we're not, we're not technologically,

Craig Peterson: We are ahead. In Russia and China, your vote doesn't count. At least in the US, we're trying to make your vote count, right? You get 99.8% voting for the guy or gal that's at the head.

[00:07:00] Yes. It probably wasn't a legitimate vote. Right. And it's much easier if you want to be a socialist country to just have an electronic ballot where. There's no way to tell that all of these virtual ballot boxes were stuffed boxes. So this is not an easy problem to solve the technology can't solve it.

And I, I am for 100%, those heavy papers with very little felt pen where you fill in the oval a hundred percent for those.

Steve Fourni: Interesting. All right. Fair enough. We're talking with Craig Peterson our tech talk guru. And I'm moving off from that. one of the things you want to talk about was antivirus software, which I think we all get the ads for the free ones from companies we've probably never heard of.

And the best thing to do really is to just pay for them. But, but what are some of the processes that we should take, and how do we sort of know which ones to choose?

[00:08:00] Craig Peterson: Yeah, that's a difficult position, right? To be in nowadays. It's like a submarine. You have to have multiple compartments and having some of this antivirus software on your computer will.

The fight with each other. So you've gotta be a little bit careful. So let me just tell you what I think people should probably be looking at. you mentioned paying for them versus the free version. Absolutely. You get more flexibility. You get more good stuff and ease of use and support and a little bit of a better cover for business.

As long as you're not a regulated business, you can just use the basic stuff, but here's what I recommend people do. If you're using windows and you cannot change to something more secure, then here's, there's the basics use, Microsoft windows defender. It comes with Microsoft windows, make sure that you have that properly enabled and brought up [00:09:00] a date.

The second thing to do turn on automatic updates. If you have professional versions of windows, you can tell it to wait a week before it installs them. I absolutely advise you to wait a week because Microsoft is well known to mess up these things and cause problems on your computer. Okay. Then. As third party software, it goes right now.

I am recommending people use Bitdefender for their antivirus. Plus it works on windows. It also works on Mac. It's 30 bucks. It's very, very cheap that's per year. if you are a regulated industry, then you've got to get into the professional software and you should be expecting to pay about $50 a month per computer in order to help keep them safe. That's my.advice.

Bit defender, the windows software, avoid Kaspersky, like the plague. It is right up there with these other Chinese companies.

[00:10:00] In this case, it's Russian and we just don't know how good it is. The Norton three 60. I'm not a fan of and trend micro. I have avast, I'm not a fan of any of those. They are not great.

And none of the antivirus software, except for. To varying degrees, except for a bit defender, none of the antivirus software actually protects you from modern threats. So be very careful out there. Everybody, the bad guys are up to their activities up over 300%. They really are coming for us, but pay at least to pay the bit defender guys.

And if there's something else you've been using for the last 20, 30 years, while maybe you should pay for that too.

Steve Fourni: We're talking with the good stuff we're talking with. and, just one other thing that you had in here that I thought it was important to get to is somebody who would love to cut the cable.

But I also don't want to have to describe the 15 different things. it looks like YouTube TV just got a little bit more expensive, but it also looks like it suddenly got more options now, too. Right?

[00:11:00] Craig Peterson: Yeah, it did. They've added CBS, Viacom, the family of cable TV networks, but here's what we're talking about, YouTube, which initially was free.

Right? Hey, I get 30 days free. It's wonderful. You get all your local TV, et cetera. It is now $65 a month for the service. So compare that to what your basic cable used to cost you. Okay. It's we're at the point. Now, if you want to get your Disney plus you want to get YouTube for instance for television.

Maybe you want HBO or Showtime or some of these others, Netflix, because they've all got their own original series. Now about the Peacock, NBCs is coming out soon. It is way more expensive than cable. So yeah, there you go. Higher prices, basically all the way around.

Steve Fourni: That's disappointing. I mean, I'd like to do something and again, I am, you know, I'm paying for Disney plus I think my Hulu comes through my Spotify.

[00:12:00] Like that's part of the issue I'm having is it's also, it's, it's all just, so confusing. I, you know, if all I want to watch is jeopardy and sports and let my wife get her trash TV, I should find a cheaper way to do it, but it's, and then it always changes Netflix every month I add this, take this away.

And it's like, you never know what you're paying for. I guess.

Craig Peterson: Yeah. Yeah, that's absolutely true. It's very, very frustrating. I don't know if it's going to get much better. You know, I remember when cable TV was first introduced really back in the early eighties and how frustrating it was, then you had to buy packages and you couldn't Ala cart. Now, what is this today? 40 years later. And we've still got these same problems.

Steve Fourni: And then, of course, I think to myself, well, what if all these companies just got together and made one platform? Well, then they would be Comcast.

Craig Peterson: Yeah. Well, there's the opposite is happening. You know, we Disney just pulled all of their Marvel stuff from other networks.

[00:13:00] So it's, it's getting even more divided than it was before I think unless you can get it through your cable company at a reasonable. Price is going to just keep adding up. Cause you're talking 10, $15 a month for each one of these premium services. And then on top of it, there's 65 that YouTube wants to charge you or there's Sling.

There are dish networks. Those satellite service providers are getting nailed A T and T the losing subscribers like crazy, but it's, unfortunately, Steve, it's just not clear yet.

Steve Fourni: Yeah, that's a, it's interesting. Well, something to follow, Craig, we appreciate the time again, if you want information like this from Craig, all kinds of good stuff.

you can, text, well, I guess you could text my name right Steve to this number

Craig Peterson: (855) 385-5553. So just text Steve to (855) [00:14:00] 385-5553, or send an email to me. [email protected].

Steve Fourni: That is the best email address in the world. [email protected]. You can't, can't screw that one. I probably can't hack it either a certain even try Craig Peterson.

Thanks for the time today. We appreciate it and we'll catch up next week.

Craig Peterson: Take care, Steve. Bye-bye.

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Welcome!

In this segment, Craig explains what the best type of Anti-Virus to use is and why.

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

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Read More:

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Ransomware is now your biggest online security nightmare. And it's about to get worse

Apple's Silicon Macs promise screaming performance

TikTok and 32 other iOS apps still snoop your sensitive clipboard data

An embattled group of leakers picks up the WikiLeaks mantle

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Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

[00:00:00] Well, there is a lot of antivirus software available up there for free but, should you be using it?

Hi everybody. This is Craig Peterson. We're going to talk right now a little bit about the antivirus software that is out there. What I think you should be using in order to help keep yourself safe enough online. There is no such thing as totally safe. Is there? But we'll give you. Actual names, places you can go, things you can do.

We also talk a little bit today about YouTube and police roll up some crime networks over there in Europe. This new Mac ransomware is even more sinister than it appears. We'll talk a little bit about ransomware in general as well. Hey, I want you guys to take a couple of minutes right now. If you would make sure you sign up for my email list.

Go to Craig peterson.com/subscribe. I've got some really cool

[00:01:00] things for you there. Once you subscribe, I have like three or four different things, and I got a lot of comments on them over the last couple of weeks, we put them up. One of them is a security reboot guide, and it has been so popular.

Hey, listen, let's start again with your security. Let's reboot. This stuff it's become so popular. I think what we may do is turn this into a kind of a post-COVID-19 little thing. Maybe even have a course on it. So we'll be doing that as well, but you'll get that. If you subscribe Craig peterson.com/subscribe. So please do that. I'm not going to just send you all kinds of crap.

I send good stuff. Believe me. We have people that have been on my email list now for decades. So it's good stuff. All right. Then the let's get into the good stuff right now. And that has to do with all of this antivirus software. You know, our friends over at Microsoft have come

[00:02:00] up with their own antivirus software if you will.

Who knows the whole windows environment better than Microsoft. Well, that's how the thinking goes. Microsoft has even released versions of it's kind of antivirus software for Linux. If you can believe it. I don't, I'm having a hard time with that, but I guess they have to because now they're including Linux as part of windows.

Now, if that's not a tacit admission that you need Linux, I don't know what. Is Linux is really great for a lot of people and a lot of things, but it is kind of difficult to use. I have a friend who uses Linux and has for probably 20 plus years. Now, he listened to what I had to say way back then started exploring Linux.

He's an insurance adjuster, Pat, and he had tried to figure out what's the best one. What should I use coming from a windows environment? I had helped them with solving some insurance problems. Some

[00:03:00] insurance claims against some windows machines where some of the data had been mangled badly and then I wrote some, some code from scratch in the Unix world. In fact, Linux extracted all of this stuff.

You know, there was a doctor who had was a plastic surgeon. He had all of these photos of all of the patients and that he had inadvertently when he was messing around with all these photos. Change the name of every photo to be exactly the same. So they had no idea who the photos were of when they were taken.

They had nothing. So I wrote some code that went into the photos and, and, went in and looked around and found good data and made it so they could recover those photos for those people that had to have the plastic surgery.

So Pat said to me, Craig, How can I be secure, now? This was some years ago, as I said, probably two decades ago. I said, well, there's no way to be

[00:04:00] completely secure in the online space, Pat, but I can tell you one thing, windows is not the place to be. If you are looking at security.

That is still the case today. If you're truly a security researcher, you are going to be using a VR version of Linux. A lot of people that just need to go online, who just need to access basic websites are using these Google Chrome devices, which are absolutely fantastic little devices.

Now they don't meet all of the regulatory compliance issues that. You might have if you are in some sort of a regulated space as a business. I definitely don't like them in the school environment because Google has been caught taking the information about our students and selling it and sharing it.

So, you know, I'm not a big Google fan and that's part of the reason why. But if you are a security guy and you want

[00:05:00] something that doesn't really store much locally, that gets updated all of the time.

Then the Chromebook is not a bad option and they use that now. And what's the Chromebook based on, of course, it has a Linux kernel underneath it. And Linux was designed to be secure before there was Linux. There were various versions of Unix, BSD being one of the big ones, A T and T, UNIX system three, system five, all of which I've had experience with over the years, man, it's been awhile are the predecessors of it. That's how the internet was designed. And the BSD, this Berkeley software distribution of Unix that comes from way back when the and threes and just earlier's it. How that. It was really designed to keep students out of the systems to provide the very first networking that ever there was.

There was some of the very first, there was actually some of the machines that were before

[00:06:00] these Unix machines, but it is absolutely fantastic.

But, Pat figured out how to use Linux. And he was very determined. He managed to do it. I don't think it's for everybody. Dell does now offer Linux pre-installed on some of their laptop lines.

So if you're interested in Linux and you like Dell and Dell is what we typically recommend nowadays. Be careful when we're talking about Dell because there's the consumer stuff and then there's the enterprise stuff, right? There is a difference between the two. But when we're talking about these Dell laptops that have Linux pre-installed, they are kept up to date.

They do get their patches. Now Microsoft has had anti-virus for some of these versions of Linux, but you might want to try them out. Try out either a Chromebook or try out a Linux laptop, or even a desktop. I tend to use Mac. Because, unless it's a server function, in which

[00:07:00] case I use a version of Unix, either BSD, derivative, like open BSD, which is one of the more secure versions of Unix out there. Or I use free BSD, or I use Ubuntu or Red Hat. I tend to use Red Hat a lot, but I use those for servers. I don't use those for desktop.

So back into the antivirus software realm, Where you really, really need antivirus software is on your Windows computer. There are antivirus software packages that are available for all kinds of other platforms for your Android devices, which again are not terribly secure.

We've talked about that before. I'm not going to talk about it right now and you could use it on some other platforms as well. Kaspersky has some for Linux. And as I mentioned, Microsoft does now too, but you really, really, really gotta be careful on Windows. It's attacked more than anything else. It is so common and it was so poorly

[00:08:00] designed that it has all kinds of nasty holes all over the place.

So the first piece of advice here, when we're talking about keeping your Windows computer safe, Is to use Windows defender. That sounds pretty straightforward. Does it? A lot of people use Windows defender. It's pretty solid. Make sure you've got it turned on. Cause it is on by default, but make sure it's turned on and make sure it's getting updated.

So that's number one. Now we get into the third party software very, very quickly here. Now antivirus software is useless. A hundred percent against the most modern of attacks. So antivirus software will work for some of the old stuff. Now some of the old stuff still floating around out there and people are still getting nailed because they have not applied the patches to Windows and to all of the other programs that they have sitting

[00:09:00] on that Windows machine.

So yeah, your antivirus software could do you some good, but frankly, you shouldn't need it cause you should be all patched up. But. What I think you should get. And again, this is not a hundred percent and now things are a hundred percent, but go ahead and get Malwarebytes Malwarebytes, and put it on your Windows PC.

It is a good idea also to put it on to your Macintosh computers, Malwarebytes. We tend to use something beyond Malwarebytes is called AMP, which is the anti-malware prevention software from Cisco. It's very good. I don't think you can buy it retail. I think you have to buy it through a reseller like me, but there are plenty of resellers out there.

So if you can afford it, put AMP on your computer. But if not, get a paid version of Malwarebytes because you're going to get a little bit better

[00:10:00] coverage for businesses. You're going to get some on-call support. It's going to be easier to use. You get some anti-phishing stuff, some extra banking security.

Some of them include password managers and you know how important I keep telling everybody how important password managers are. I prefer by far 1password. That's what it's called the digit one password in order to keep all of my accounts safe in the online world, online space because one password just requires you to remember one really good password.

Everything else is stored in a vault on the computer and you, you can't get much better than the way one password does it. We also use a third party, something called DUO. but you know, that's more advanced stuff that we're not going to get into right now.

So. AMP I like number one, number two, Malwarebytes.

Both of those are paid.

[00:11:00] You can get free versions of Malwarebytes by the way. Although if you can afford it, go ahead and buy it. And it's going to provide protection for the whole family. Sometimes these things are really rather cheap. I'm surprised at how little Malwarebytes costs, but it isn't like the best thing in the world.

And Bitdefender, absolutely Bitdefender is the other one to look at. Okay. Bitdefender, Hey, I'm out of time for right now. We're going to be back.

So stick around you listening to Craig Peterson here on WGAN and I'm on every Wednesday morning at seven 30. Two with Mr. Matt during the drive time show, stick around.

We're going to finish this list. When we get back, visit me online. Craig Peterson.com.

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More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

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For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome!

Craig discusses Zoom and the security drawbacks it poses to businesses.

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

---

Read More:

7 reasons to pay for antivirus software and skip the free versions

YouTube TV jumps 30% in price effective immediately

Police roll up crime networks in Europe after infiltrating popular encrypted chat app

New Mac ransomware is even more sinister than it appears

Ransomware is now your biggest online security nightmare. And it's about to get worse

Apple's Silicon Macs promise screaming performance

TikTok and 32 other iOS apps still snoop your sensitive clipboard data

An embattled group of leakers picks up the WikiLeaks mantle

---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

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

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

Did you know that Zoom has misrepresented so many times about their ability to encrypt what they're doing and where they're routing? It is been,

[00:01:00] it's just been crazy what these guys have been up to. It is not end-to-end encrypted. Let's just start with that, which means that anybody who is potentially in the middle which is by the way, Zoom itself. Is somebody who can listen in on the conversation. Now, remember what I said about Zoom and their developers, many of them. At least I think it might be most of them, they're in China. We had a big story that I don't think I ever really talked about on the radio here, but it had to do with China and Zoom routing people's phone calls to China. Which was absolutely a huge thing, then Zoom had excuses for it. Well, you know, we have data centers all over the world. We try and run them back and forth. Oh, okay. Yeah, exactly. I absolutely get it. There are articles online, have a look at the intercept, for instance,

[00:02:00] they are generating their encryption keys in China for Zoom.

That's absolutely incredible. Zoom has also just in the last week or so been exposed. They have been cutting off some of the Zoom user's meetings because China objected. China didn't want some of these people who were talking about China and some of the bad things China has been doing. In reality, we haven't been talking about these anywhere near enough here in the United States, but Zoom has capitulated to the Chinese government, the socialists over there.

It's absolutely amazing what has it been going on? They're using some old versions of encryption that have been easily hacked. They've got the worst type of AES keys out there. The researchers have confirmed that they're

[00:03:00] using 128-bit keys for their communications.

In other words, even the encryption that they have, which is extremely limited, is extremely poor. It's just amazing. They keep saying, Oh, you know, we're fixing it. Or we have fixed it. They keep getting caught in what the media has been calling lies again and again. These encryption keys in China and routing the data through China and capitulating to what China wants them to do.

I don't know about you, but to me, that's a very, very big concern, right. These guys just have not been upfront and honest with people. It's a terrible situation. So Zoom is something I absolutely would never. Use for anything that really mattered. So if you're talking about some business process that might be confidential, if you're talking about some intellectual property things,

[00:04:00] right which is confidential business information. If you're talking about banking information if you're talking to your accountant if you're talking about anything. That could be used by hackers or the Nation States.

Anybody malicious doesn't use Zoom. Now I get it. I understand why people used it. I have used zoom and I'm probably still going to continue to use zoom for certain things.

The big advantages to zoom are Number one it's easy to use and set up and manage. It is quite straightforward. Now. Unfortunately, unlike WebEx teams, you do have to install a client. You have to install software on your computer. Guess what? That's another area. Zoom has been caught doing some things that are very, very poor practices from a programming standpoint and the nefarious if you want to look at this through a slightly different lens when it comes to Mac computers, they were installing a whole server

[00:05:00] on your computer that allowed remote access to pretty much everything on your computer. Can you believe these guys? OK, it's really crazy, but you know, zoom, you don't need IT team to manage it.

You don't need to have somebody like me come in and get everything set up, help explain it to you. Cause there are not very many functions in it. There are not very many features. It's not like a WebEx team, the room, and spaces that can all be tied into other devices and get set up on your mobile devices.

Maybe like I have sitting right here, I have this amazing WebEx teams displayed. It's just absolutely amazing. We were using it yesterday for a meeting and it has a built-in whiteboard and I'm just drawing on this screen. It's it is really quite impressive, but. You don't need any of that with Zoom.

And that's why so many people went on and used it. And frankly, they've more than doubled in size over the last six months or so.

[00:06:00] It's been huge. So with Zoom, you can get up to a hundred participants standard on your Zoom account. You can have a quick one on one meeting, which is handy. You have your own Zoom room.

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

Get again, WebEx teams, Hey, listen, we sell it. We use it. We do that because we love it. Believe me. It's just phenomenal.

You can have your meetings on Zoom phone webinars, chats on Zoom, which is really kind of handy. They do also have the ability to with browsers attend some of the meetings. They have conference rooms and mobile devices.

I really like conference rooms. That's what I used to

[00:07:00] run the FBI's InfraGard webinars for a couple of years. It works pretty darn well for that sort of stuff. Zoom also has some of these all in one in appliances, which makes it even simpler to deploy, manage, and scale the room experience.

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

So these all in one appliance has it been shown from Zoom to be very, very insecure and it's very cheap.

It's inexpensive to do it. It does have some integrations with Google and Microsoft. You can use their app marketplaces over 200 integrations with things like Slack and PayPal and many others. In fact, that's what we did with the FBI InfraGard program. We had some that were paid, some of these

[00:08:00] meetings that were paid and that went over like a lead balloon.

Let me tell you. that was kind of one of the final straws when I left doing that for the FBI InfraGard program, because so much of this information, I'm trying to get it outright. Why should people have to pay for some of these webinars where the presenters are, volunteers, me running the webinars for the FBI InfraGard program, our volunteers, and then they start charging people and then there, they, in a couple of cases, they actually paid behind the scenes, the people who were doing the presentations. But for the most part, they weren't getting paid. Anyway, so I don't know, maybe that's a little inside baseball. Okay.

Now, why am I still going to use Zoom? In some cases, Zoom is just what everybody knows.

It's what everybody uses. It just makes life so easy. I think I would probably continue to use it for some people. Some people have a hard time with anything new, but

[00:09:00] you know what, now that the majority of people know how to use Zoom, because they've had to, because of working from home. With the coronavirus thing, the Zoom is going to be a platform that's going to be around for quite a while.

And yeah, it's got its drawbacks as I just talked about, but the fact that it's kind of ubiquitous, everybody knows that everybody can use it. Everybody has used it. It is not going away anytime soon. So stick around if you missed any of today's show, make sure you go to Craig peterson.com. You'll find it all there as well as on your favorite podcast app and stick around.

Cause we're going to talk about my favorite collaboration system when we get back. So, stick around.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

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Welcome!

In this segment, Craig continues his discussion of Microsoft Teams and other collaboration platforms.

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

---

Read More:

7 reasons to pay for antivirus software and skip the free versions

YouTube TV jumps 30% in price effective immediately

Police roll up crime networks in Europe after infiltrating popular encrypted chat app

New Mac ransomware is even more sinister than it appears

Ransomware is now your biggest online security nightmare. And it's about to get worse

Apple's Silicon Macs promise screaming performance

TikTok and 32 other iOS apps still snoop your sensitive clipboard data

An embattled group of leakers picks up the WikiLeaks mantle

---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

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

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

We are coming out with a free again, free, free, free. I'm trying to help out here. It really is for you. Okay. A free, special report about all of these apps we're talking about

[00:01:00] today. So Karen's been working really hard on that with me, and we hope to have it out either this week or maybe the week after.

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

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

Even though they have a huge worldwide

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

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

That way, if you're in China, Microsoft can censor you. Or if the law enforcement agencies in the US want to hear what you're saying, Microsoft can provide it to them. They couldn't do it before. So yeah. A little bit of resentment there. You

[00:03:00] probably noticed in my voice, right, Anyhow, back to Microsoft here.

The second big thing is it has this integration that a lot of people are looking for with your business apps. So you can use Word, Excel, PowerPoint, One Note. Planners, Sharepoint, one-drive. All integrated with Microsoft teams. And that is a huge win because all of that stuff is right there. Now the integration isn't as clean or as neat or as easy as maybe it should be.

But it is there and it will get better over time. You can still use all of those tools, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, et cetera, et cetera, with pretty much any of these apps. They're all designed to be integrated to varying degrees. Microsoft ultimately will win this battle because they own the source code, right.

They own the programs. They're going to take care of themselves first and they've been

[00:04:00] sued about that before. So no news there. The next point, customized workspace, and every team is different. So Microsoft teams is customizable so that you can integrate it with third-party apps, as well as Microsoft apps.

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

We've seen suits on that forever, like integrating Internet Explorer, right into the kernels, supposedly. And so that you could not use other browsers. You always had to have IE initially, and then they allowed other

[00:05:00] browsers, but you still had to have IE and then the courts ruled against them yet again.

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

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

This isn't just true with

[00:06:00] Microsoft. This is true for WebEx teams and Slack and everything else out there. But it's real-time. So a smart person's going to do something different with the email you typically try and delay, right? I try and read my email once a day and that's it.

If someone really needs to get ahold of me, but they probably know how to really get ahold of me. Right. So I'm not getting interrupted. I can work on the stuff I need to get to work on. I'm putting stuff together for my lives, for my webinars, for my radio show for everything else. If I get interrupted, particularly if I'm doing some programming work, it can cost me hours of time.

So I put off email and only go through it maybe once a day. Sometimes I'll go two or three days without really paying attention to my email. So I apologize to you. If you send me an email and you're hoping

[00:07:00] for a quick answer, I don't always get back to you very quickly. Right. I have other people in my team that that's what it's for.

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

Now, then that first person an hour later read to them response, you can just have it go over very quickly. It's phenomenal for productivity. When you need quick productivity, the high priority initiatives that you have can really move a lot faster because it's not an email. It's not getting a push back while you were waiting.

This is really instant messaging. Think of it like texting, right? So everybody can be on the same page with these teams apps you can see who has seen your

[00:08:00] messages and people can respond to them. They can start a thread. normally how does it work? You're well, you might send an email to everybody. Giving them an update, right?

They reply to you, but maybe not to everybody that happens all of the time. I know people that I, you know, I expect them to copy all because I, you know, I've got two or three people on it that are need to know, and they don't, they just reply directly to me. with these types of teams, apps, everybody's on the same page.

Everybody can see everything. This conversation with email can split into a bunch of different conversations with ideas, being directed at one person when it really should be a group discussion. So keep that in mind as well. When you're considering some of these team's applications, everybody knows what's going on, what the status is, and productivity.

Just keeps flowing. You're listening to Craig Peterson.

[00:09:00] Appreciate you being with me today. And of course, you can get me online as well. Craig peterson.com. Make sure you sign up to my email list. Craigpeterson.com/subscribe. And that gets you an email every week. Oftentimes it's Saturday mornings. Lately, it's been more like Mondays, you know, summertime, COVID-19, every excuse in the book, right. As to why it's been a little bit more delayed, but you know, expected by Monday. And it's got my summary for the week. It's got links to my podcast and also info about classes and courses and lives when they happen.

And then of course, here on the air. Take care, everybody. We'll be right back, stick around.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

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For questions, call or text:

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Welcome!

In this segment, Craig continues his discussion of Anti-Virus and explains why it will cost you more if you cut the cord on cable tv.

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

---

Read More:

7 reasons to pay for antivirus software and skip the free versions

YouTube TV jumps 30% in price effective immediately

Police roll up crime networks in Europe after infiltrating popular encrypted chat app

New Mac ransomware is even more sinister than it appears

Ransomware is now your biggest online security nightmare. And it's about to get worse

Apple's Silicon Macs promise screaming performance

TikTok and 32 other iOS apps still snoop your sensitive clipboard data

An embattled group of leakers picks up the WikiLeaks mantle

---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

[00:00:00] Well, we covered some of the very first things you need to do to keep your computer secure. Now we're going to get into what I think is going to help stop the ransomware.

You are listening to Craig Peterson. Thanks for joining us. We are talking about your computer right now. Your computer security. There are many reasons. To pay for antivirus. In fact, that was in my newsletter this week, seven reasons to pay for Anti-virus, very worthwhile. And we had just mentioned Bitdefender antivirus plus 2020.

So that's another one to consider putting on. So you've got Malwarebytes. You have your Bitdefender. I'm not gonna mention the names of the other ones that I don't want you to use, because that is going to confuse you, right? But there's one more thing that you should put on that.

Again, you should get a

[00:01:00] paid version of it's important to get the paid versions of some of these things because you get better support, you get better software, you get more features and that helps the company stay in business. And. Frankly, if they're not in business, they're not going to be able to support you very well.

Are they the last piece that you need to put on? There is something called open DNS. Now I did a webinar or actually a couple of webinars about open DNS. You will find it online. It just opendns.com. My company mainstream has the commercial enterprise versions that we use for our customers.

However, if you go to opendns.com, you'll see, there is a consumer tab and a consumer. Button. So they have DNS services for your home or small business. If you are a home user and

[00:02:00] you have a family, the open DNS family shield is a really great way to go. It is simple. You couldn't get more simple than this.

It doesn't have any configuration options. It's not like the enterprise version where we can do all kinds of specific restrictions, but it is going to be very, very handy for you. Okay. So, it just goes to opendns.com click on the consumer. And they'll look at Familyshield and it helps to stop your kids, your self, even from getting those websites that you really don't want to go to.

Okay. Then they have open DNS home. This is a little bit more open. Then Familyshield is, but they do want you to have an account with them. So I don't have a problem with that, frankly.

I know Cisco, I trust Cisco. My company

[00:03:00] mainstream uses Cisco. We sell Cisco. Okay. So I trust it. So you can enter in all of your information there and it's going to help with some of the website's loading faster, open DNS is much higher.

Time than most of the ISP is out there for their DNS services. So many times when you think the internet down, or it's not really down, or it's just that there's no name resolution working because you're, you're a internet service provider. They're DNS is busted, so it'll, it'll fix a lot of those things for you.

They have over 30 million customers, by the way, OpenDNS. Now, this is what I mentioned at the very end of the last segment. Is going to help with the ransomware because most of the time, the ransomware calls home. So what it's doing is setting itself up to do the bidding of the bad guys out there. And your

[00:04:00] computer becomes part of a botnet, or at least a remote control net. And then they start poking around looking through what's going on, looking through what you're doing and becomes a problem. Now, remember I said, you should get the paid versions. Well, they have open DNS home, VIP, which is $20 a year. And then they have a small business prosumer version, which is $20 a user.

I believe that is per month. I am not absolutely positive about that. I think it is cause that's I know that's what we charge for the professional version is $20 per user per month, but you'll see all of that. So if you tie all of these things together, your windows defender. And you add the malware bytes to that, because again, windows defender, isn't going to catch absolutely everything.

[00:05:00] So you have to be careful about what you have on your computer Bitdefender and openDNS. You are going to be safe against far more than 90% of the attacks out there. And if you're a home user, this is going to be good enough. If you are in a regulated industry, like your defense subcontractor, you have medical information. In other words, even if you have employees and you have the employee's information for health care, et cetera, be very careful because this is not good enough. You could get yourself in a whole lot of trouble.

Hey, you're listening to Craig Peterson. You can find me [email protected].

This week's articles you would have received if you were subscribed to my email list. So make sure you subscribe right now. You'll find out about it. All of the training and I'm going to be starting to do probably every other day pieces of training coming up soon that

[00:06:00] you can watch it at your convenience. I'll probably be doing a lot of them live so you can ask questions live, and I'll be telling me about those as well, but you have to sign up Craig peterson.com/.

Subscribe. Well, let's move on to our next topic here, by the way, if you have questions about any of what we just talked about or what we're about to talk about, just email me M [email protected]. Be more than glad to get back to you. If you've been looking for a way to save money on your cable bill, most of us have, of course, and many of us have kinda cut the cable.

You know what? I haven't cut the cable. I've got my cable set up so that it only gives me the channels I want. I'm not paying for extra channels. I don't care about sports. So I don't have any of these sports packages, which tend to be a huge part of the cost of cable.

[00:07:00] Well, many people have used some of the other services that are out there.

And, you know, what we're talking about really here is cable TV over the internet. And what are the platforms out there? Sling is one of them I've had Sling on the show before you've got FUBO or BTV I've had on my show before as well. But there's a, been a number of cord-cutting options over the years and things that'll help you do to really get what you want.

Okay. But when you start adding these up, they get very expensive, very, very quickly. And I am looking right now at an article talking about what our friends at YouTube have done. If you've been on YouTube over the last six months, you've seen these ads that keep popping up that remind you, Hey, you YouTube.

We have cable TV, try it free for 30 days. And

[00:08:00] many people jumped right on that. Existing customers have been paying $50 a month for basic cable TV. Now, remember YouTube is not getting you the internet. You still have to have the internet. So you're probably paying a cable company to give you the internet.

You might be using a lead telephone company using DSL or something like that, which is, you know, limited juice. good for you. Isn't that wonderful? But now brand new customers can expect to pay $65 a month for you tubes live cable, TV, alternative. And those people that already have it take a look at your July bill because the price jumps from 50 to $65, it's a lot of money when you get right down to it.

[00:09:00] I love this article here by ARS Technica. And he wrote an article titled YouTube TV ads, channels, and raises prices. And you can't opt-out of either change. So the price started at $40. Then it went to $50. Now it's at $65. and it's even worse if you are using A T and T.

So there you go so much for that stick around. When we come back, I'm going to tell you a little bit about the five G alternatives that are coming when it comes to cable TV. And we have even more to talk about here. As pleased in Europe are closing down a crime gang, interesting stuff. Your listening to Craig Peterson, stick around.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

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For questions, call or text:

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Welcome!

Craig discusses why you should use WebEx Teams over other collaboration platforms.

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

---

Read More:

7 reasons to pay for antivirus software and skip the free versions

YouTube TV jumps 30% in price effective immediately

Police roll up crime networks in Europe after infiltrating popular encrypted chat app

New Mac ransomware is even more sinister than it appears

Ransomware is now your biggest online security nightmare. And it's about to get worse

Apple's Silicon Macs promise screaming performance

TikTok and 32 other iOS apps still snoop your sensitive clipboard data

An embattled group of leakers picks up the WikiLeaks mantle

---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

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

Hey, welcome back everybody. Craig, Peterson here. We have had quite a week this week and it's been quite a year, right? It's a Jumanji season. I don't know if you ever saw that movie, but I think somebody playing. Jumanji was set here in New Hampshire. The latest Jumanji movie out is actually pretty good. I watched it with the grandkids. I quite enjoyed it. There are some issues with it and yeah, you have to just ignore you, ignore those things. but anyway, that's me. Right? So we've been talking about online

[00:01:00] collaboration tools. Now, if you're like most of us and you had to have some people working from home.

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

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

[00:02:00] really knew about it.

How many people knew about WebEx teams? It was a frankly, it was a surprise to me. But WebEx teams is the only product out there right now that is fully compliant with the federal government requirements. So that includes things like DFARS, fed ramp, et cetera. Microsoft is promising that they will be compliant sometime in July, but at this point, they're not compliant. So if you have HIPAA regulations that you have to follow, or you have DFARS, ITAR, or any of these other federal government requirements, there's only one option. And that's WebEx teams. Now, oftentimes when there is a government mandate to use something it's terrible. Right? How many times have you had that?

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

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

And in fact, they are. In fact, the new regulations, the CMMC regulations are much tighter with way more teeth on them. People will be going to jail. We're talking about

[00:04:00] huge multi multimillion-dollar fines. Even for a small company. So it is a very bad thing here to mess up on some of these regulations. So I've been surprised when I go in and find them using things like Microsoft teams, heaven forbid they've been using Zoom, which they have been.

And they are a federal government subcontractor, in fact, for the DOD department of defense. Because again, what did we talk about? Then, all those stuff routers through China. And China isn't just looking for military information. China is looking for information from our companies that they can use to compete against us. Our designs so that they can use they're selling it to their allies.

The same thing is happening over North Korea. An article came out just this week, that North Korea has 7,000 highly

[00:05:00] trained hackers. That is aiming directly at our businesses here in the US in order to cause economic harm, but also those hackers to gain access to potential military information. So think about that.

Think about how bad all of that stuff is. Companies just don't understand what they should be using. So yeah, you had an excuse during COVID to not use something that's secure. I do get that. Believe me, don't know that the government regulators are going to be happy with you. You may go to jail, but. I understand it. So for instance, for the HIPAA requirement, those were loosened because of COVID-19 the federal government said, Hey, listen, if you're a doctor in one state, you don't have to get licensed in another state in order to do the telemedicine stuff. That made just a ton of sense.

And they also, because of that loosened some of the HIPAA regulations, which they pretty much had to do. Right. Cause they didn't loosen the

[00:06:00] HIPAA regulations. You couldn't do the Teladoc across state lines. And you sure as heck could not do Teladoc using zoom. So they just loosened it all up, but that's not going to last.

All right. So start paying more attention to some of this. And some of these Teladoc things have their own platforms.

You're a doctor, you get paid per whatever it is, hour or patient, whatever it might be. And you're not worried about the platform. And you're probably okay. If that platform is not secure in just speaking in general terms. Because you don't know anything about it, but some of these telemedicine companies that have these apps, et cetera, should be anyways, that gets into WebEx teams here.

Some of the advantages that have made it the most popular web conferencing solution today. Number one, it's a software as a service. You just have to subscribe to the surface, you have internet access [

00:07:00] and you're ready to go. WebEx teams are also one of the oldest out there that you can use. And I think that's really kind of cool when you get right down to it.

And remember I mentioned a little bit early. that, it was the GoTo meeting was one of the older ones that were out there. You might remember some of the ads I do from WebEx, that it has been around a long time. But WebEx was founded in 1995. It really is the grandpa out there. It has been doing this meeting software for a long time.

So it works everywhere. You, unlike zoom, you do not have to have a desktop app to do pretty much everything or anything that you might want to do on WebEx, which is a very big advantage. You don't have to have a download your audience. Doesn't need to be a subscriber to watch and listen. Which is not true for some of these other products that we've talked about today.

[00:08:00] It also, I think it very, very successfully combined your online viewing with the ability to teleconference easily. And you can connect to the webinar via just the webinars access code. You can have passwords and whatever you might want to do. And this lets of presenters know who is actually there during the presentation.

You don't have to have a time consuming, roll call or anything else. It's right there. You have. Also, of course, the chats, you have the questions and answers and you can have automatically in this space, a meeting, just take place as scheduled one or just ad hoc. So let's say you have a space in WebEx teams, that's for the team to discuss some part of some project.

And so you're going back and forth, back and forth. I said, okay, look, let's just hop on right now. You, you just hit the button, the meet button, and Poof up in it comes. You're now in a meeting and people can call in on the [00:09:00] phone. They can connect via their smart device. Anybody that's in the room's going to get notified that there's a meeting on right now can go from your desktop.

It is phenomenal. Just a simple click is all it takes. Then anybody who's in the meeting can present. You can use a built-in whiteboard, it can take remote control of your computer. Are you kidding me? Why would anyone not use this? And it's using the military-grade encryption that we were talking about earlier, right?

The exact opposite of what zoom has been using it also. It allows you to do what we do ourselves and what we do for our government subcontractors. And that is we host the encryption key for all of the meetings and all of the communications. So the only way anyone can see any of this stuff that was in a meeting is to have this encryption key.

[00:10:00] It's absolutely phenomenal. Absolutely phenomenal. You also have your own site. So for instance, my company has a site at, you know, company named.webex.com. If you want to meet with me again, it's just. Company name.webex.com/meat slash. Craig Tada, you are done. They've got tons of training articles for subscribers to use.

It uses a proprietary network that has nodes all over the world. It's reliable. It's secure. It is absolutely amazing. You have to use it. You have to try it. And I advise people to use WebEx over anything else for almost anything. All right. You and you can have conferences. For instance, my room allows up to 10,000 people into it, 10,000.

You know, where else can you get that? But you don't have to have that big a room if you don't need it. It is just phenomenal

[00:11:00] to share files, videos, chat back and forth. Multiple spaces are what WebEx calls them. Ad hoc meetings, conferences. It is the tool to use. And you can find out a lot more by just going to webex.com.

If you would like a demo, you can just get one right there. You know, I'm not going to make a dime off of it. Okay. It's not like I own WebEx or own any stock in it. Cause I don't, but it is the way to go. And if you'd like me to help you with it, well, that's a different story. You can get help from me about almost anything we talked about here on the show.

You can just email me. ME at Craig peterson.com and we help people out every day. It doesn't have to do with WebEx. Doesn't have to do with anything that you're buying from me. I just make myself on my team available. We have an offer going where we had 20 companies that we

[00:12:00] selected from people that applied, that we provided an hour of tech support for anything they wanted.

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

And you do that. By going to Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Make sure you're on that list. You'll get my weekly show notes and you'll find out about all of the extra free stuff and services that we provide.

---

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:

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For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome!

In this segment, Craig explains what the best type of Anti-Virus to use is and why. 

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

---

Read More:

7 reasons to pay for antivirus software and skip the free versions

YouTube TV jumps 30% in price effective immediately

Police roll up crime networks in Europe after infiltrating popular encrypted chat app

New Mac ransomware is even more sinister than it appears

Ransomware is now your biggest online security nightmare. And it's about to get worse

Apple's Silicon Macs promise screaming performance

TikTok and 32 other iOS apps still snoop your sensitive clipboard data

An embattled group of leakers picks up the WikiLeaks mantle

---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

[00:00:00] Well, there is a lot of antivirus software available up there for free but, should you be using it?

Hi everybody. This is Craig Peterson. We're going to talk right now a little bit about the antivirus software that is out there. What I think you should be using in order to help keep yourself safe enough online. There is no such thing as totally safe. Is there? But we'll give you. Actual names, places you can go, things you can do.

We also talk a little bit today about YouTube and police roll up some crime networks over there in Europe. This new Mac ransomware is even more sinister than it appears. We'll talk a little bit about ransomware in general as well. Hey, I want you guys to take a couple of minutes right now. If you would make sure you sign up for my email list.

Go to Craig peterson.com/subscribe. I've got some really cool

[00:01:00] things for you there. Once you subscribe, I have like three or four different things, and I got a lot of comments on them over the last couple of weeks, we put them up. One of them is a security reboot guide, and it has been so popular.

Hey, listen, let's start again with your security. Let's reboot. This stuff it's become so popular. I think what we may do is turn this into a kind of a post-COVID-19 little thing. Maybe even have a course on it. So we'll be doing that as well, but you'll get that. If you subscribe Craig peterson.com/subscribe. So please do that. I'm not going to just send you all kinds of crap.

I send good stuff. Believe me. We have people that have been on my email list now for decades. So it's good stuff. All right. Then the let's get into the good stuff right now. And that has to do with all of this antivirus software. You know, our friends over at Microsoft have come

[00:02:00] up with their own antivirus software if you will.

Who knows the whole windows environment better than Microsoft. Well, that's how the thinking goes. Microsoft has even released versions of it's kind of antivirus software for Linux. If you can believe it. I don't, I'm having a hard time with that, but I guess they have to because now they're including Linux as part of windows.

Now, if that's not a tacit admission that you need Linux, I don't know what. Is Linux is really great for a lot of people and a lot of things, but it is kind of difficult to use. I have a friend who uses Linux and has for probably 20 plus years. Now, he listened to what I had to say way back then started exploring Linux.

He's an insurance adjuster, Pat, and he had tried to figure out what's the best one. What should I use coming from a windows environment? I had helped them with solving some insurance problems. Some

[00:03:00] insurance claims against some windows machines where some of the data had been mangled badly and then I wrote some, some code from scratch in the Unix world. In fact, Linux extracted all of this stuff.

You know, there was a doctor who had was a plastic surgeon. He had all of these photos of all of the patients and that he had inadvertently when he was messing around with all these photos. Change the name of every photo to be exactly the same. So they had no idea who the photos were of when they were taken.

They had nothing. So I wrote some code that went into the photos and, and, went in and looked around and found good data and made it so they could recover those photos for those people that had to have the plastic surgery.

So Pat said to me, Craig, How can I be secure, now? This was some years ago, as I said, probably two decades ago. I said, well, there's no way to be

[00:04:00] completely secure in the online space, Pat, but I can tell you one thing, windows is not the place to be. If you are looking at security.

That is still the case today. If you're truly a security researcher, you are going to be using a VR version of Linux. A lot of people that just need to go online, who just need to access basic websites are using these Google Chrome devices, which are absolutely fantastic little devices.

Now they don't meet all of the regulatory compliance issues that. You might have if you are in some sort of a regulated space as a business. I definitely don't like them in the school environment because Google has been caught taking the information about our students and selling it and sharing it.

So, you know, I'm not a big Google fan and that's part of the reason why. But if you are a security guy and you want

[00:05:00] something that doesn't really store much locally, that gets updated all of the time.

Then the Chromebook is not a bad option and they use that now. And what's the Chromebook based on, of course, it has a Linux kernel underneath it. And Linux was designed to be secure before there was Linux. There were various versions of Unix, BSD being one of the big ones, A T and T, UNIX system three, system five, all of which I've had experience with over the years, man, it's been awhile are the predecessors of it. That's how the internet was designed. And the BSD, this Berkeley software distribution of Unix that comes from way back when the and threes and just earlier's it. How that. It was really designed to keep students out of the systems to provide the very first networking that ever there was.

There was some of the very first, there was actually some of the machines that were before

[00:06:00] these Unix machines, but it is absolutely fantastic.

But, Pat figured out how to use Linux. And he was very determined. He managed to do it. I don't think it's for everybody. Dell does now offer Linux pre-installed on some of their laptop lines.

So if you're interested in Linux and you like Dell and Dell is what we typically recommend nowadays. Be careful when we're talking about Dell because there's the consumer stuff and then there's the enterprise stuff, right? There is a difference between the two. But when we're talking about these Dell laptops that have Linux pre-installed, they are kept up to date.

They do get their patches. Now Microsoft has had anti-virus for some of these versions of Linux, but you might want to try them out. Try out either a Chromebook or try out a Linux laptop, or even a desktop. I tend to use Mac. Because, unless it's a server function, in which

[00:07:00] case I use a version of Unix, either BSD, derivative, like open BSD, which is one of the more secure versions of Unix out there. Or I use free BSD, or I use Ubuntu or Red Hat. I tend to use Red Hat a lot, but I use those for servers. I don't use those for desktop.

So back into the antivirus software realm, Where you really, really need antivirus software is on your Windows computer. There are antivirus software packages that are available for all kinds of other platforms for your Android devices, which again are not terribly secure.

We've talked about that before. I'm not going to talk about it right now and you could use it on some other platforms as well. Kaspersky has some for Linux. And as I mentioned, Microsoft does now too, but you really, really, really gotta be careful on Windows. It's attacked more than anything else. It is so common and it was so poorly

[00:08:00] designed that it has all kinds of nasty holes all over the place.

So the first piece of advice here, when we're talking about keeping your Windows computer safe, Is to use Windows defender. That sounds pretty straightforward. Does it? A lot of people use Windows defender. It's pretty solid. Make sure you've got it turned on. Cause it is on by default, but make sure it's turned on and make sure it's getting updated.

So that's number one. Now we get into the third party software very, very quickly here. Now antivirus software is useless. A hundred percent against the most modern of attacks. So antivirus software will work for some of the old stuff. Now some of the old stuff still floating around out there and people are still getting nailed because they have not applied the patches to Windows and to all of the other programs that they have sitting

[00:09:00] on that Windows machine.

So yeah, your antivirus software could do you some good, but frankly, you shouldn't need it cause you should be all patched up. But. What I think you should get. And again, this is not a hundred percent and now things are a hundred percent, but go ahead and get Malwarebytes Malwarebytes, and put it on your Windows PC.

It is a good idea also to put it on to your Macintosh computers, Malwarebytes. We tend to use something beyond Malwarebytes is called AMP, which is the anti-malware prevention software from Cisco. It's very good. I don't think you can buy it retail. I think you have to buy it through a reseller like me, but there are plenty of resellers out there.

So if you can afford it, put AMP on your computer. But if not, get a paid version of Malwarebytes because you're going to get a little bit better

[00:10:00] coverage for businesses. You're going to get some on-call support. It's going to be easier to use. You get some anti-phishing stuff, some extra banking security.

Some of them include password managers and you know how important I keep telling everybody how important password managers are. I prefer by far 1password. That's what it's called the digit one password in order to keep all of my accounts safe in the online world, online space because one password just requires you to remember one really good password.

Everything else is stored in a vault on the computer and you, you can't get much better than the way one password does it. We also use a third party, something called DUO. but you know, that's more advanced stuff that we're not going to get into right now.

So. AMP I like number one, number two, Malwarebytes.

Both of those are paid.

[00:11:00] You can get free versions of Malwarebytes by the way. Although if you can afford it, go ahead and buy it. And it's going to provide protection for the whole family. Sometimes these things are really rather cheap. I'm surprised at how little Malwarebytes costs, but it isn't like the best thing in the world.

And Bitdefender, absolutely Bitdefender is the other one to look at. Okay. Bitdefender, Hey, I'm out of time for right now. We're going to be back.

So stick around you listening to Craig Peterson here on WGAN and I'm on every Wednesday morning at seven 30. Two with Mr. Matt during the drive time show, stick around.

We're going to finish this list. When we get back, visit me online. Craig Peterson.com.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

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Welcome!

Craig discusses why you should use WebEx Teams over other collaboration platforms.

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

---

Read More:

7 reasons to pay for antivirus software and skip the free versions

YouTube TV jumps 30% in price effective immediately

Police roll up crime networks in Europe after infiltrating popular encrypted chat app

New Mac ransomware is even more sinister than it appears

Ransomware is now your biggest online security nightmare. And it's about to get worse

Apple's Silicon Macs promise screaming performance

TikTok and 32 other iOS apps still snoop your sensitive clipboard data

An embattled group of leakers picks up the WikiLeaks mantle

---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

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

Hey, welcome back everybody. Craig, Peterson here. We have had quite a week this week and it's been quite a year, right? It's a Jumanji season. I don't know if you ever saw that movie, but I think somebody playing. Jumanji was set here in New Hampshire. The latest Jumanji movie out is actually pretty good. I watched it with the grandkids.  I quite enjoyed it. There are some issues with it and yeah, you have to just ignore you, ignore those things. but anyway, that's me. Right? So we've been talking about online

[00:01:00] collaboration tools. Now, if you're like most of us and you had to have some people working from home.

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

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

[00:02:00] really knew about it.

How many people knew about WebEx teams? It was a frankly, it was a surprise to me. But WebEx teams is the only product out there right now that is fully compliant with the federal government requirements. So that includes things like DFARS, fed ramp, et cetera. Microsoft is promising that they will be compliant sometime in July, but at this point, they're not compliant. So if you have HIPAA regulations that you have to follow, or you have DFARS,  ITAR, or any of these other federal government requirements, there's only one option. And that's WebEx teams. Now, oftentimes when there is a government mandate to use something it's terrible. Right? How many times have you had that?

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

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

And in fact, they are. In fact, the new regulations, the CMMC regulations are much tighter with way more teeth on them. People will be going to jail. We're talking about

[00:04:00] huge multi multimillion-dollar fines. Even for a small company. So it is a very bad thing here to mess up on some of these regulations. So I've been surprised when I go in and find them using things like Microsoft teams, heaven forbid they've been using Zoom, which they have been.

And they are a federal government subcontractor, in fact, for the DOD department of defense. Because again, what did we talk about? Then, all those stuff routers through China. And China isn't just looking for military information. China is looking for information from our companies that they can use to compete against us. Our designs so that they can use they're selling it to their allies.

The same thing is happening over North Korea. An article came out just this week, that North Korea has 7,000 highly

[00:05:00] trained hackers. That is aiming directly at our businesses here in the US in order to cause economic harm, but also those hackers to gain access to potential military information. So think about that.

Think about how bad all of that stuff is. Companies just don't understand what they should be using. So yeah, you had an excuse during COVID to not use something that's secure. I do get that. Believe me, don't know that the government regulators are going to be happy with you. You may go to jail, but. I understand it. So for instance, for the HIPAA requirement, those were loosened because of COVID-19 the federal government said, Hey, listen, if you're a doctor in one state, you don't have to get licensed in another state in order to do the telemedicine stuff. That made just a ton of sense.

And they also, because of that loosened some of the HIPAA regulations, which they pretty much had to do. Right. Cause they didn't loosen the

[00:06:00] HIPAA regulations. You couldn't do the Teladoc across state lines. And you sure as heck could not do Teladoc using zoom. So they just loosened it all up, but that's not going to last.

All right. So start paying more attention to some of this. And some of these Teladoc things have their own platforms.

You're a doctor, you get paid per whatever it is, hour or patient, whatever it might be. And you're not worried about the platform. And you're probably okay. If that platform is not secure in just speaking in general terms. Because you don't know anything about it, but some of these telemedicine companies that have these apps, et cetera, should be anyways, that gets into WebEx teams here.

Some of the advantages that have made it the most popular web conferencing solution today. Number one, it's a software as a service. You just have to subscribe to the surface, you have internet access [

00:07:00] and you're ready to go. WebEx teams are also one of the oldest out there that you can use. And I think that's really kind of cool when you get right down to it.

And remember I mentioned a little bit early. that, it was the GoTo meeting was one of the older ones that were out there. You might remember some of the ads I do from WebEx, that it has been around a long time. But WebEx was founded in 1995. It really is the grandpa out there. It has been doing this meeting software for a long time.

So it works everywhere. You, unlike zoom, you do not have to have a desktop app to do pretty much everything or anything that you might want to do on WebEx, which is a very big advantage. You don't have to have a download your audience. Doesn't need to be a subscriber to watch and listen. Which is not true for some of these other products that we've talked about today.

[00:08:00] It also, I think it very, very successfully combined your online viewing with the ability to teleconference easily. And you can connect to the webinar via just the webinars access code. You can have passwords and whatever you might want to do. And this lets of presenters know who is actually there during the presentation.

You don't have to have a time consuming, roll call or anything else. It's right there. You have. Also, of course, the chats, you have the questions and answers and you can have automatically in this space, a meeting, just take place as scheduled one or just ad hoc. So let's say you have a space in WebEx teams, that's for the team to discuss some part of some project.

And so you're going back and forth, back and forth. I said, okay, look, let's just hop on right now. You, you just hit the button, the meet button, and Poof up in it comes. You're now in a meeting and people can call in on the [00:09:00] phone. They can connect via their smart device. Anybody that's in the room's going to get notified that there's a meeting on right now can go from your desktop.

It is phenomenal. Just a simple click is all it takes. Then anybody who's in the meeting can present. You can use a built-in whiteboard, it can take remote control of your computer. Are you kidding me? Why would anyone not use this? And it's using the military-grade encryption that we were talking about earlier, right?

The exact opposite of what zoom has been using it also. It allows you to do what we do ourselves and what we do for our government subcontractors. And that is we host the encryption key for all of the meetings and all of the communications. So the only way anyone can see any of this stuff that was in a meeting is to have this encryption key.

[00:10:00] It's absolutely phenomenal. Absolutely phenomenal. You also have your own site. So for instance, my company has a site at, you know, company named.webex.com. If you want to meet with me again, it's just. Company name.webex.com/meat slash. Craig Tada, you are done. They've got tons of training articles for subscribers to use.

It uses a proprietary network that has nodes all over the world. It's reliable. It's secure. It is absolutely amazing. You have to use it. You have to try it. And I advise people to use WebEx over anything else for almost anything. All right. You and you can have conferences. For instance, my room allows up to 10,000 people into it, 10,000.

You know, where else can you get that? But you don't have to have that big a room if you don't need it. It is just phenomenal

[00:11:00] to share files, videos, chat back and forth. Multiple spaces are what WebEx calls them. Ad hoc meetings, conferences. It is the tool to use. And you can find out a lot more by just going to webex.com.

If you would like a demo, you can just get one right there. You know, I'm not going to make a dime off of it. Okay. It's not like I own WebEx or own any stock in it. Cause I don't, but it is the way to go. And if you'd like me to help you with it, well, that's a different story. You can get help from me about almost anything we talked about here on the show.

You can just email me. ME at Craig peterson.com and we help people out every day. It doesn't have to do with WebEx. Doesn't have to do with anything that you're buying from me. I just make myself on my team available. We have an offer going where we had 20 companies that we

[00:12:00] selected from people that applied, that we provided an hour of tech support for anything they wanted.

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

And you do that. By going to Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Make sure you're on that list. You'll get my weekly show notes and you'll find out about all of the extra free stuff and services that we provide.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome!

Craig discusses Zoom and the security drawbacks it poses to businesses.

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

---

Read More:

7 reasons to pay for antivirus software and skip the free versions

YouTube TV jumps 30% in price effective immediately

Police roll up crime networks in Europe after infiltrating popular encrypted chat app

New Mac ransomware is even more sinister than it appears

Ransomware is now your biggest online security nightmare. And it's about to get worse

Apple's Silicon Macs promise screaming performance

TikTok and 32 other iOS apps still snoop your sensitive clipboard data

An embattled group of leakers picks up the WikiLeaks mantle

---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

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

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

Did you know that Zoom has misrepresented so many times about their ability to encrypt what they're doing and where they're routing? It is been,

[00:01:00] it's just been crazy what these guys have been up to. It is not end-to-end encrypted. Let's just start with that, which means that anybody who is potentially in the middle which is by the way, Zoom itself. Is somebody who can listen in on the conversation. Now, remember what I said about Zoom and their developers, many of them. At least I think it might be most of them, they're in China. We had a big story that I don't think I ever really talked about on the radio here, but it had to do with China and Zoom routing people's phone calls to China. Which was absolutely a huge thing, then Zoom had excuses for it. Well, you know, we have data centers all over the world. We try and run them back and forth. Oh, okay. Yeah, exactly. I absolutely get it. There are articles online, have a look at the intercept, for instance,

[00:02:00] they are generating their encryption keys in China for Zoom.

That's absolutely incredible. Zoom has also just in the last week or so been exposed. They have been cutting off some of the Zoom user's meetings because China objected. China didn't want some of these people who were talking about China and some of the bad things China has been doing. In reality, we haven't been talking about these anywhere near enough here in the United States, but Zoom has capitulated to the Chinese government, the socialists over there.

It's absolutely amazing what has it been going on? They're using some old versions of encryption that have been easily hacked. They've got the worst type of AES keys out there. The  researchers have confirmed that they're

[00:03:00] using 128-bit keys for their communications.

In other words, even the encryption that they have, which is extremely limited, is extremely poor. It's just amazing. They keep saying, Oh, you know, we're fixing it. Or we have fixed it. They keep getting caught in what the media has been calling lies again and again. These encryption keys in China and routing the data through China and capitulating to what China wants them to do.

I don't know about you, but to me, that's a very, very big concern, right. These guys just have not been upfront and honest with people. It's a terrible situation. So Zoom is something I absolutely would never. Use for anything that really mattered. So if you're talking about some business process that might be confidential, if you're talking about some intellectual property things,

[00:04:00] right which is confidential business information. If you're talking about banking information if you're talking to your accountant if you're talking about anything. That could be used by hackers or the Nation States.

Anybody malicious doesn't use Zoom. Now I get it. I understand why people used it. I have used zoom and I'm probably still going to continue to use zoom for certain things.

The big advantages to zoom are Number one it's easy to use and set up and manage. It is quite straightforward. Now. Unfortunately, unlike WebEx teams, you do have to install a client. You have to install software on your computer. Guess what? That's another area. Zoom has been caught doing some things that are very, very poor practices from a programming standpoint and the nefarious if you want to look at this through a slightly different lens when it comes to Mac computers, they were installing a whole server

[00:05:00] on your computer that allowed remote access to pretty much everything on your computer. Can you believe these guys? OK, it's really crazy, but you know, zoom, you don't need IT team to manage it.

You don't need to have somebody like me come in and get everything set up, help explain it to you. Cause there are not very many functions in it. There are not very many features. It's not like a WebEx team, the room, and spaces that can all be tied into other devices and get set up on your mobile devices.

Maybe like I have sitting right here, I have this amazing WebEx teams displayed. It's just absolutely amazing. We were using it yesterday for a meeting and it has a built-in whiteboard and I'm just drawing on this screen. It's it is really quite impressive, but. You don't need any of that with Zoom.

And that's why so many people went on and used it. And frankly, they've more than doubled in size over the last six months or so.

[00:06:00] It's been huge. So with Zoom, you can get up to a hundred participants standard on your Zoom account. You can have a quick one on one meeting, which is handy. You have your own Zoom room.

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

Get again, WebEx teams, Hey, listen, we sell it. We use it. We do that because we love it. Believe me. It's just phenomenal.

You can have your meetings on Zoom phone webinars, chats on Zoom, which is really kind of handy. They do also have the ability to with browsers attend some of the meetings. They have conference rooms and mobile devices.

I really like conference rooms. That's what I used to

[00:07:00] run the FBI's InfraGard webinars for a couple of years. It works pretty darn well for that sort of stuff. Zoom also has some of these all in one in appliances, which makes it even simpler to deploy, manage, and scale the room experience.

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

So these all in one appliance has it been shown from Zoom to be very, very insecure and it's very cheap.

It's inexpensive to do it. It does have some integrations with Google and Microsoft. You can use their app marketplaces over 200 integrations with things like Slack and PayPal and many others. In fact, that's what we did with the FBI InfraGard program. We had some that were paid, some of these

[00:08:00] meetings that were paid and that went over like a lead balloon.

Let me tell you. that was kind of one of the final straws when I left doing that for the FBI InfraGard program, because so much of this information, I'm trying to get it outright. Why should people have to pay for some of these webinars where the presenters are, volunteers, me running the webinars for the FBI InfraGard program, our volunteers, and then they start charging people and then there, they, in a couple of cases, they actually paid behind the scenes, the people who were doing the presentations. But for the most part, they weren't getting paid. Anyway, so I don't know, maybe that's a little inside baseball. Okay.

Now, why am I still going to use Zoom? In some cases, Zoom is just what everybody knows.

It's what everybody uses. It just makes life so easy.  I think I would probably continue to use it for some people. Some people have a hard time with anything new, but

[00:09:00] you know what, now that the majority of people know how to use Zoom, because they've had to, because of working from home. With the coronavirus thing, the Zoom is going to be a platform that's going to be around for quite a while.

And yeah, it's got its drawbacks as I just talked about, but the fact that it's kind of ubiquitous, everybody knows that everybody can use it. Everybody has used it. It is not going away anytime soon. So stick around if you missed any of today's show, make sure you go to Craig peterson.com. You'll find it all there as well as on your favorite podcast app and stick around.

Cause we're going to talk about my favorite collaboration system when we get back. So, stick around.

---

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!

In this segment, Craig continues his discussion of Microsoft Teams and other collaboration platforms.

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

---

Read More:

7 reasons to pay for antivirus software and skip the free versions

YouTube TV jumps 30% in price effective immediately

Police roll up crime networks in Europe after infiltrating popular encrypted chat app

New Mac ransomware is even more sinister than it appears

Ransomware is now your biggest online security nightmare. And it's about to get worse

Apple's Silicon Macs promise screaming performance

TikTok and 32 other iOS apps still snoop your sensitive clipboard data

An embattled group of leakers picks up the WikiLeaks mantle

---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

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

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

We are coming out with a free again, free, free, free. I'm trying to help out here. It really is for you. Okay. A free, special report about all of these apps we're talking about

[00:01:00] today. So Karen's been working really hard on that with me, and we hope to have it out either this week or maybe the week after.

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

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

Even though they have a huge worldwide

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

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

That way, if you're in China, Microsoft can censor you. Or if the law enforcement agencies in the US want to hear what you're saying, Microsoft can provide it to them. They couldn't do it before. So yeah. A little bit of resentment there. You

[00:03:00] probably noticed in my voice, right, Anyhow, back to Microsoft here.

The second big thing is it has this integration that a lot of people are looking for with your business apps. So you can use Word, Excel, PowerPoint, One Note. Planners, Sharepoint, one-drive. All integrated with Microsoft teams. And that is a huge win because all of that stuff is right there. Now the integration isn't as clean or as neat or as easy as maybe it should be.

But it is there and it will get better over time. You can still use all of those tools, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, et cetera, et cetera, with pretty much any of these apps. They're all designed to be integrated to varying degrees. Microsoft ultimately will win this battle because they own the source code, right.

They own the programs. They're going to take care of themselves first and they've been

[00:04:00] sued about that before. So no news there. The next point, customized workspace, and every team is different. So Microsoft teams is customizable so that you can integrate it with third-party apps, as well as Microsoft apps.

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

We've seen suits on that forever, like integrating Internet Explorer, right into the kernels, supposedly. And so that you could not use other browsers. You always had to have IE initially, and then they allowed other

[00:05:00] browsers, but you still had to have IE and then the courts ruled against them yet again.

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

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

This isn't just true with

[00:06:00] Microsoft. This is true for WebEx teams and Slack and everything else out there. But it's real-time. So a smart person's going to do something different with the email you typically try and delay, right? I try and read my email once a day and that's it.

 If someone really needs to get ahold of me, but they probably know how to really get ahold of me. Right. So I'm not getting interrupted. I can work on the stuff I need to get to work on.  I'm putting stuff together for my lives, for my webinars, for my radio show for everything else. If I get interrupted, particularly if I'm doing some programming work, it can cost me hours of time.

So I put off email and only go through it maybe once a day. Sometimes I'll go two or three days without really paying attention to my email. So I apologize to you. If you send me an email and you're hoping

[00:07:00] for a quick answer, I don't always get back to you very quickly. Right. I have other people in my team that that's what it's for.

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

Now, then that first person an hour later read to them response, you can just have it go over very quickly. It's phenomenal for productivity. When you need quick productivity, the high priority initiatives that you have can really move a lot faster because it's not an email. It's not getting a push back while you were waiting.

This is really instant messaging. Think of it like texting, right? So everybody can be on the same page with these teams apps you can see who has seen your

[00:08:00] messages and people can respond to them. They can start a thread. normally how does it work? You're well, you might send an email to everybody. Giving them an update, right?

They reply to you, but maybe not to everybody that happens all of the time. I know people that I, you know, I expect them to copy all because I, you know, I've got two or three people on it that are need to know, and they don't, they just reply directly to me. with these types of teams, apps, everybody's on the same page.

Everybody can see everything. This conversation with email can split into a bunch of different conversations with ideas, being directed at one person when it really should be a group discussion. So keep that in mind as well. When you're considering some of these team's applications, everybody knows what's going on, what the status is, and productivity.

Just keeps flowing. You're listening to Craig Peterson.

[00:09:00] Appreciate you being with me today. And of course, you can get me online as well. Craig peterson.com. Make sure you sign up to my email list. Craigpeterson.com/subscribe. And that gets you an email every week. Oftentimes it's Saturday mornings. Lately, it's been more like Mondays, you know, summertime, COVID-19, every excuse in the book, right. As to why it's been a little bit more delayed, but you know, expected by Monday. And it's got my summary for the week. It's got links to my podcast and also info about classes and courses and lives when they happen.

And then of course, here on the air. Take care, everybody. We'll be right back, stick around.

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