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

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

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  • Welcome! Microsoft Teams part 1 and Collaboration Tools plus more on Tech Talk with Craig Peterson on WGAN

    Welcome!

    Craig discusses Microsoft Teams and other collaboration platforms.

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

    ---

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

    Really, as I mentioned, GoToMeeting's been around a long time, man. They'd have its pros and its cons and its pros really have to do with frankly how long it has been around because that makes it. More stable. Right? They've been addressing every problem. They've seen every problem in the last, my gosh, how long has it been for them? 16 years.

    So Go To Meeting, a very, very stable product, something you might want to consider. I want to move into our next collaboration tool, which is Microsoft teams. Now, most businesses today are

    [00:01:00] using a whole array of tools. And the reason I bring up Microsoft teams is that so many of us are using what's now called Microsoft three 65.

    It used to be called office three 65, but now it's Microsoft three 65, which is a little bit misleading because office three 65, depending on which level you were on, gave you access to all of Microsoft office tools and where you could get windows as well, windows licenses, they pull it all under one roof and as would be expected from Microsoft or frankly, almost any company out there.

    The price has risen and dramatically in some cases. So Microsoft three 65 has some inexpensive offerings we're talking just dollars per month, or if you're an actual business that needs to get something done,

    [00:02:00] cares about having backups, cares about having an email with the proper email filters in place. And cares to have some of these collaboration tools. Well, now you're in the 30, 40, $50 per person per month range, which is pretty high when you get right down to it.

    Not out of the ordinary, not just a totally out of the question, but it starts getting much more expensive there, including things like Microsoft windows licenses themselves. So you can really make sure all of your software from Microsoft is up to date and that you have the appropriate licenses for it because many of us, unfortunately, Just just don't have that. Right?

     What's one of the reasons that we're not keeping our software up to date. Well, one of the reasons that I've seen, again and again, is that Microsoft charges you in order to get an update in an upgrade. So.

    [00:03:00] The first little bit of advice here is if you are a business, even as SO/HO, small office home office, make sure you get the enterprise versions of Microsoft three 65.

    Typically those start with an E and I don't recommend anything less than an E three. And it goes up from there there's three and four and five and there's one and two and stuff. They change it frequently. So who knows this week, right? It might've changed and I didn't notice, but either three is where you want to start and that's going to give you access to all of the basic stuff that you need.

    Now, typically we'll put a Cisco email firewall in front of Microsoft and their outlook and exchange servers. The reason for that is the Cisco email filters, just so much better than the stuff Microsoft offering. Plus you also can still

    [00:04:00] use, and you still do use the Microsoft filters, but once they've gone through those incredible Cisco filters, those Microsoft filters, just frankly, don't add up to much, not much at all.

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

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

    [00:05:00] up in, even if it's supposedly anonymized.

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

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

    Not that it worked, but people, when they're doing a selection, they're not looking for what they want. They're trying to

    [00:06:00] eliminate the things they don't want.

    So if you're a vendor and you have some things missing in the mind of your prospect, You're not going to get that sale. It's just not going to happen. So Microsoft would throw everything, including the kitchen sink into their software. And most of them had a lot of bugs.

    Now Microsoft still has tons of bugs, still tons. It's crazy. And those bugs drive me nuts. Sometimes it's like the moment we talked about at the top of the show, major, major bug in some of their software, that's supposed to keep your data secure, basically from hard disk crashes and from data loss and in fact is barely done the exact opposite.

    So I'm not a big Microsoft fan, but they're tools that they've been developing more recently for online news. Have been a lot better than anything they've had before. I guess that's faint praise, right?

    [00:07:00] Because what they had before was just so terrible, but anyhow, Microsoft has their teams app.

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

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

    A whole bunch of different tools for communication and collaboration and Microsoft teams. It might be something not just for your business, but if you have a nonprofit or small family business, something you might want to

    [00:08:00] look at. Because teams are designed to be collaborative and it does tie in a lot of Microsoft's other tools.

    It allows you to deploy it company-wide and that can help to bring together employees.

    Now it can also make it so that your employees can't get anything done because they're constantly getting notes and messages from other employees, but if your employees get some decent training and you kind of help them out that overload that can come with some of these teams tools, can basically go away.

    So here are a few different ways that using a team tool could help out your business. One company-wide chat, which is kind of handy. It helps you to get your overall company message into the hands of all your employees. That's a very good thing. And that chat functionality is one of the main value adds of a team's application

    [00:09:00] over something like Slack, that designed more for some typing back and forth. Or some of these other things like Go to meeting or Zoom that are designed primarily for you to hold a meeting.

    All of the team's apps, Microsoft, and WebEx, both have. What's called threaded conversations. Now you'll see that in Slack where someone will make a comment in a channel, and then you can have a thread off of that comment. So that people that are looking through the channel or space or whatever it's called on the software you're using, don't have to see all of the comments about some main item that's in there. So threads that's important to have and Microsoft and WebEx teams both have that. Everything's recorded in one easy to find a place so that all of your conversations are right there in the channel. You know what they are, and you can find [

    00:10:00] them. A WebEx team recently has set it up so that, yeah, everything is right there in that space, but it also has a separate set of tabs that let you look at just the files that were uploaded or just the meetings that took place in that space.

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

    Now, your conversations in these team apps can take place as a team discussion, or you could have private chats or private meetings. It really, this changes everything. If you haven't used either Microsoft teams or WebEx teams,

    [00:11:00] and there's the ability to integrate Skype, to have audio and video conversations.

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

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

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

    ---

    More stories and tech updates at:

    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

    12 min
  • Welcome! Ransomware Uptick plus more on Tech Talk with Craig Peterson on WGAN

    Welcome!

    Craig discusses the uptick in Ransomware and Phishing.

    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] Hey, did you think WannaCry was the end, the final blow of ransomware. A couple of years back turns out it is back with a vengeance and I mean, vengeance.

    You are listening to Craig Peterson. Of course, you'll find me online @craigpeterson.com. You'll find my podcasts. There you'll be able to subscribe to my email list. You'll be able to see some of the training stuff that I'm starting to do right now. You'll get announcements about Lives when I'm doing training.

    So you can decide what makes sense for you in your move forward. Whether you're a career security person or maybe security is just yet another hat that you have to wear, right? If you're a business owner, it's one of a hundred hats you have to wear. Well, we try and have it all there for you. So, there's a good path to follow.

    I had a really interesting discussion this last week

    [00:01:00] because of a friend of mine. In fact, she's in one of my mastermind groups, she was saying that one of her best friends has been trying to learn about security and couldn't find any real courses on it. And the OpenCourseWare stuff is from 2014, which is in, you know, by today's standards very outdated and not of a whole lot of use because as I mentioned things like antivirus totally useless in this day and age. Okay.

    So, there are so many things that we have to worry about and what I'm going to be doing more training on this stuff, but there's only one way to find out that is to be on my list.

    So, let's get back into this. Cause this is just fascinating about ransomware. It was kind of a menace mainly for consumers. Back in the day, I had a couple of my clients that were hit with WannaCry. It never went anywhere inside their networks. It never encrypted –

    [00:02:00] anything, at least the divisions I was covering.

    The other divisions all got nailed. All got nailed very, very badly by the WannaCry ransomware. And they, I have one client who is a worldwide, a fortune 10 or 50 anyways, very, very big company. And they refuse to follow my advice corporate-wide. They did follow that my advice and one of their divisions and that division didn't get nailed with ransomware.

    So, I'm pretty proud of that right now. All of the rest of them had to shut down all operations for a couple of weeks. Now with this whole COVID-19 shutdown, you know what that can do to a company. Very, very difficult. In fact, to this day, the division that we've been protecting is the only profitable division in the entire corporation, just absolutely amazing. So, the bad guys now

    [00:03:00] realize they didn't have to steal data to make money. Like they used to do. All they had to do was make it almost impossible to access encrypting it. Unless we pay up. So there are some new twists now. Not only are they not just going after consumers, but they're also going after businesses, including large businesses.

    Like for instance, the client I just mentioned, which is a huge company, many municipalities you probably heard about Atlanta. Got nailed with it. Like three times. They, everything went down, they lost everything. They couldn't collect taxes, even water payments, nothing. Oh, you know, they should have hired me.

    Right. They hire these huge corporations that have no idea what they're doing. Right. They send out these kids that just graduated, paying them almost nothing with sleeping bags underneath the desks. That's a good way to tell, by the way, if you hired a good company, do they have sleeping bags under their desk? We're seeing

    [00:04:00] now that they are also getting on to our computers. And usually, within about two weeks, they start what's called a lateral spread. So, they start to go from the one computer that they've compromised to other computers within the organization. So, they'll get on to the, you know, the CFO's computer, which we just found in one of our clients, a couple of weeks ago, that DOD contractor again, where they were using Malwarebytes, which is, as I said, pretty good.

    They had some other antivirus software, but that computer, the CFO's computer ended up getting compromised and it had a back door and active back the back door on the computer. That's a huge deal, especially for the CFO, especially for a military subcontractor, just amazing the data that they

    [00:05:00] were able to steal off of that computer.

    They only found out because their Malwarebytes contract had expired. They said, Hey, you've been hounded us in us to put this AMP on it. So, let's put AMP on it. This whole anti-malware platform and a stack of software and you know, what the heck. It’s a lot more expensive, but let's try it out. So, we tried it out and bam right away.

    On the first day, we found that as well as a number of other problems on their network. So, they'll spread laterally as they did in this organization here. This was just like a week or two ago. And that lateral spread is access to more data and then they will pull data off of the computers. So, there's another reason to monitor all of the outbound flow of data, which we do automatically for all of our mid-tier and above customers, where we're watching all of the outflows, right?

    The exfiltration of

    [00:06:00] data, where's it going? What's it doing? Is this normal? Is this normal for this time of day? Is this normal for this machine? Is this normal for this type of data? We do that all automatically. If we notice something. Oh, we have another client that we saw. That there was some data exfiltration going on to Mexico, which was not normal. Was not something expected? So, the systems automatically shut it down, set off our pagers. We had a look and indeed somebody had gotten into their network through a portion of the network. We did not control. So, we were able to catch that. Thank goodness. They were able to get a few gigabytes of data out versus the entire file server. Right.

    Very, very big deal. So that's one way that the bad guys are doing it right now. They take your data and then they try and ransom it to you now. Yeah, they may encrypt all of your data. And part of the reason they do that is just to get you on your

    [00:07:00] toes. So, you realize, Oh my gosh, somebody has been in here.

    But the other reason they do that is so that they can come back to you and say, Hey, we have all of your customer's information. We have all of your intellectual property. If you don't pay us, we are going to post this up on the internet. Usually, they'll post it on the dark web. So the bad guys have full access to it.

    Many times they will sell it and make a few extra bucks off of it. So, you know, you can pay them or the other bad guys can pay them. So we get, we've got to be careful about all of this. There are a lot of ransomware attacks going on right now. These groups are smart and sophisticated about half of the companies pay the ransoms.

    So these bad guys are frankly, very well funded. They are skilled and you've got to have the right type of stuff. You've got to have the firepower firewalls.

    [00:08:00] You've got to have the stuff that's constantly monitoring them. So you're looking for in intrusion detection systems and intrusion prevention systems, which the Cisco firepower stuff provides, but you have to be able to monitor it.

    You have to have special, not just rules in place, but rules to watch the logs and everything. Okay. they also, by the way, the bad guys now are searching out encrypting any backups that organizations are leaving connected to the network. So think about that hard drive, you have connected to your computer that has all of this data on it.

    And the bad guys will see that backup data and encrypted as well. So if you, if your only backup is something attached to your computer, It ain't going to help much in the event of ransomware. In fact, it's not going to help at all. So make sure at the very least you disconnect it when you're not backing up and that you back up every day or

    [00:09:00] follow the training that I gave on backups, do a three, two, one backup, and that is going to keep you safe.

    Okay. by the way, the police departments, the FBI, et cetera. They are not going to do much follow up on any of this type of stuff. Any of this ransomware, if it happens to you. And I've had so many listeners contact me M E @craigpeterson.com asking what do they do and how do they report it to the police and how do they get it escalated?

    Cause the police don't seem to be doing anything. Okay. So be, be very careful out there, frankly. There's also some new ransomware that's out there for Macintoshes. Now you have to be a complete idiot for this ransomware to take, hold on your Mac, because it is going to pop up on your Mac multiple times asking you, Hey, do you really want to install this?

    [00:10:00] This is from an unidentified developer. So, again, be careful when you are downloading software. It's, you know, my, one of my mantras, if you are grabbing software from an unknown source online, Be extra, extra careful, even if it is properly signed with an Apple ID, all that's going to happen is it gives Apple the opportunity to trace back where it came from, who might've been the developer behind it.

    So this is real ransomware. It's called theft quest. It's got all kinds of menacing features, but it's very unlikely to infect your Mac anytime soon unless you're in the habit of downloading pirated embedded software. Cause what they're doing is they are packing this in with software on some of these BitTorrent sites.

    So, so, yeah, it's a little bit of a problem, right?

    [00:11:00] So yeah, first of all, you're getting there from a torrent site, which is probably questionable. Now there are legitimate torrent sites. I use them as well for downloading things like versions of, of, Linux, et cetera, et cetera. So there are legitimate sites out there, but there are many that are illegitimate.

    So be careful. That's how you get nailed on a Mac. So we are going to be disappearing from most of these stations. And I appreciate you being with me today. If you miss part of today's show, or you'd like to hear the rest of it, just spend a minute here and go to Craig peterson.com/itunes or go to your favorite podcast program and right there do a search for Craig Peterson, but you know what?

    It's even easier if you use iHeart or tune-in or iTunes, just go to Craig peterson.com/. For instance, slash  Iheart, slash tune-in. It'll take you right to my

    [00:12:00] podcast and please consider subscribing because that really helps the numbers, which helps me to know that there are people listening. And if you are listening, drop me a note.

    Let me know what you like about the show and some of the changes that have been underway and some of the changes that are coming up. Drop me a note as well. Craig peterson.com. Everybody, take care. And stick around or we'll talk next week. Bye-bye.

    ---

    More stories and tech updates at:

    www.craigpeterson.com

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

    www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

    Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

    www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

    For questions, call or text:

    855-385-5553

    13 min
  • Welcome! Police Hack a Criminal Network and Ransomware plus more on Tech Talk with Craig Peterson on WGAN

    Welcome!

    In this segment, Craig tells you about how police hacked a criminal network and why we are seeing a resurgence of ransomware.

    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] Hey, have you been using EncroChat to make sure your communications are secure? It's only thousands of dollars a year and bad guys have been using it.

    Well, they've been using it until now. the Europeans caught them. They had this thing called operation and it was being run by various police agencies. it's been reported now by major local news outlets. Motherboard has an interesting article about it as well. I have a tech crunch article about it up on my website, but the police secretly took over.

    Encrochat now was something that was designed to be very, very safe, right? A private communication tool for you to use anywhere in the world

    [00:01:00] and the way they made this stuff private is they also included the hardware. So the idea here is kind of similar to another company that I've liked over the, over the years.

     It's Silent Circle. They have something called the black phone and in the Silent circle's case, they're using an Android device, which makes me a little bit nervous, but it is being run by some of the best cryptographers in the world. And with Silent circle and the black phone, you, you buy their phone and you can send messages back and forth, and it keeps your teams connected and secure.

    They have an app that works on any Android or iOS device now instead of just having to have the physical device, but they still have the physical device, I believe. Let me see. Let me get on there. Yeah. Silent phone. There you go. Silent

    [00:02:00] phone deliver secure enterprise. Ready? Silent world, silent manager, or actually that looks like the silent phone is their new product, which is kind of interesting.

    They've obviously changed their tune a little bit out there. Anyhow. In order to be truly safe. You need new hardware, at least that's the thinking. And the looks like a Silent circle's changed their tune a little bit. I use. Something in order to keep me and my messages safe. We use WebEx teams internally with our own encryption keys, and that's really quite secured meets military-grade encryption, which we have to do because we provide services to military contracts.

    Cheers. This stuff rolls downhill, right? So if we're providing a service to a DOD subcontractor, we have to be compliant with those regulations as well. So we are, and

    [00:03:00] then there are some other apps that you can use that are pretty darn good. that worked quite well. Things like WhatsApp, et cetera. But in this case, back to our story here, this was a network that was being used by.

    Organized crime and the police apparently were able to monitor a hundred million encrypted messages. Sent through this network called Encrochat  and they were discussing drug deals, murders, extortion, plots. Okay. Kind of everything. and I love this article and vice it starts out saying something wasn't right.

    Starting earlier this year, please kept arresting associates of Mark, a U K-based, alleged drug dealer. Mark took the security of his operation seriously with the gang using code names to discuss business on custom encrypted phones made by a company called Encrochat and for legal reasons, they're referring to Mark

    [00:04:00] as the pseudonym. Okay. But it goes on and on because the messages are encrypted on the devices themselves. Please couldn't tap the group's phones or intercept messages as authority normally would I still want to encourage chat criminal spoke openly negotiated the deals. In detail and priceless name to customers, explicit references to the drugs they were selling and how much, et cetera, and a motherboard.

    This is such a great article, but in the same timeframe, police across the UK in Europe started busting these criminals. And in mid-June, they picked up, the alleged member of another drug gang and then millions of dollars worth of illegal drugs were seized in Amsterdam. Hmm, what's going on? Well, it turns out that the messages weren't really secure, these guys were paying thousands of dollars a year to have these security devices and to have secure messaging.

    [00:05:00] But turns out that, due to this mass hacking operation run by the police, they'd been quietly reading these users' communications for months, and then investigators shared the messages with agencies all around. Europe. It's just an amazing scale. It's amazing what they were able to do. It's amazing that the Encrochat people obviously didn't have any real professionals, security people building this stuff, but, man, good for them.

    Some of the information and receptive by authorities showed how deeply law enforcement seems to have breached to the alleged criminal organizations. It's just going on and on. The Netherlands, and what they were able to do there pill mill and covered by law enforcement. They were doing this, this goes on for pages.

    They got all of this great video and then Encrochat 

    [00:06:00] device here. They've got a YouTube video showing all of it. So if you're interested in this, check it out because it just really, I think reinforces the concept that you're not. Safe online with your communications, no matter what you have to be very, very careful.

    And if you're using something like WhatsApp, great for you, glad you are. I use what's an app with my, my mastermind, one of my mastermind teams that I'm on. I really enjoy using it. It's simple. It's easy to use. So that's something you might want to look at. And then the other one I use is signal it's called signal S-I-G-N -A-L. Hey, if you want to get information like this from me on a weekly basis, or sometimes even more.

    Make sure you are on my email list. Just go to Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Go there right now, before you forget, and

    [00:07:00] you'll be getting this stuff. People who are already on my list knew about these things, how to communicate. Privately and securely, even when we're talking about a family gathering. You don't want to run it through China on Zoom.

    Really? You don't. Okay. So how do you do all of that? No, you know, we talked about that in some of my pieces of training and in some of my newsletters. So I'll make sure you go there. Craig peterson.com/subscribe. And if you have any questions. Make sure you ask, just send me an email. M [email protected]. So let's get into ransomware because it is once again, your biggest online security nightmare.

    You thought the nightmare was over three years ago? No, no, no, no. It is back. And it's back with a vengeance, great article on ZDNet this week. There are so

    [00:08:00] many IoT devices we're connecting to our enterprise networks. It is getting more and more dangerous. IOT of course is the internet of things. These are things like your lights, your. Oh, everything, right?

    I just saw a thing or an article talking about major hacks going on with some of these network attacks, attached storage devices, these NAS devices that we're putting on that you might think are more or less commercial when they are not. So this is rapidly ransomware shaping up to be the defining online security issue of the era, frankly.

    It's a very simple idea. It is so easy to execute right now with increasing sophistication by criminal groups. It has gotten to the point where you can hire a company that writes ransomware and gives you technical support on it. Some of them will even

    [00:09:00] just go ahead and take a percentage of the money that you get for the ransoms and you don't have to do anything.

    So the ransomware group gives you the software. Gives you all of the services. If somebody gets the ransomware, they're contacting the ransomware group, they're sending the Bitcoin to the ransomware group. The ransomware group is taking their money off the top and sending you the bad guy. The Bitcoin. So we're going to talk about that even more.

    When we get back, stick around, you're listening to Craig Peterson and online. Make sure you subscribe right now. Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Stick around. We're going to be right back.

    ---

    More stories and tech updates at:

    www.craigpeterson.com

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

    www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

    Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

    www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

    For questions, call or text:

    855-385-5553

    10 min
  • Welcome! Craig continues discussion on Anti-Virus and why it costs more now to cut the cable plus more on Tech Talk with Craig Peterson on WGAN

    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:

    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

    10 min
  • Welcome! Craig continues discussion on Anti-Virus and why it costs more now to cut the cable plus more on Tech Talk with Craig Peterson on WGAN

    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:

    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

    10 min
  • Welcome! Police Hack a Criminal Network and Ransomware plus more on Tech Talk with Craig Peterson on WGAN

    Welcome!

    In this segment, Craig tells you about how police hacked a criminal network and why we are seeing a resurgence of ransomware.

    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] Hey, have you been using EncroChat to make sure your communications are secure? It's only thousands of dollars a year and bad guys have been using it.

    Well, they've been using it until now. the Europeans caught them. They had this thing called operation and it was being run by various police agencies. it's been reported now by major local news outlets. Motherboard has an interesting article about it as well. I have a tech crunch article about it up on my website, but the police secretly took over.

    Encrochat now was something that was designed to be very, very safe, right? A private communication tool for you to use anywhere in the world

    [00:01:00] and the way they made this stuff private is they also included the hardware. So the idea here is kind of similar to another company that I've liked over the, over the years.

     It's Silent Circle. They have something called the black phone and in the Silent circle's case, they're using an Android device, which makes me a little bit nervous, but it is being run by some of the best cryptographers in the world. And with Silent circle and the black phone, you, you buy their phone and you can send messages back and forth, and it keeps your teams connected and secure.

    They have an app that works on any Android or iOS device now instead of just having to have the physical device, but they still have the physical device, I believe. Let me see. Let me get on there. Yeah. Silent phone. There you go. Silent

    [00:02:00] phone deliver secure enterprise. Ready? Silent world, silent manager, or actually that looks like the silent phone is their new product, which is kind of interesting.

    They've obviously changed their tune a little bit out there. Anyhow. In order to be truly safe. You need new hardware, at least that's the thinking. And the looks like a Silent circle's changed their tune a little bit. I use. Something in order to keep me and my messages safe. We use WebEx teams internally with our own encryption keys, and that's really quite secured meets military-grade encryption, which we have to do because we provide services to military contracts.

    Cheers. This stuff rolls downhill, right? So if we're providing a service to a DOD subcontractor, we have to be compliant with those regulations as well. So we are, and

    [00:03:00] then there are some other apps that you can use that are pretty darn good. that worked quite well. Things like WhatsApp, et cetera. But in this case, back to our story here, this was a network that was being used by.

    Organized crime and the police apparently were able to monitor a hundred million encrypted messages. Sent through this network called Encrochat  and they were discussing drug deals, murders, extortion, plots. Okay. Kind of everything. and I love this article and vice it starts out saying something wasn't right.

    Starting earlier this year, please kept arresting associates of Mark, a U K-based, alleged drug dealer. Mark took the security of his operation seriously with the gang using code names to discuss business on custom encrypted phones made by a company called Encrochat and for legal reasons, they're referring to Mark

    [00:04:00] as the pseudonym. Okay. But it goes on and on because the messages are encrypted on the devices themselves. Please couldn't tap the group's phones or intercept messages as authority normally would I still want to encourage chat criminal spoke openly negotiated the deals. In detail and priceless name to customers, explicit references to the drugs they were selling and how much, et cetera, and a motherboard.

    This is such a great article, but in the same timeframe, police across the UK in Europe started busting these criminals. And in mid-June, they picked up, the alleged member of another drug gang and then millions of dollars worth of illegal drugs were seized in Amsterdam. Hmm, what's going on? Well, it turns out that the messages weren't really secure, these guys were paying thousands of dollars a year to have these security devices and to have secure messaging.

    [00:05:00] But turns out that, due to this mass hacking operation run by the police, they'd been quietly reading these users' communications for months, and then investigators shared the messages with agencies all around. Europe. It's just an amazing scale. It's amazing what they were able to do. It's amazing that the Encrochat people obviously didn't have any real professionals, security people building this stuff, but, man, good for them.

    Some of the information and receptive by authorities showed how deeply law enforcement seems to have breached to the alleged criminal organizations. It's just going on and on. The Netherlands, and what they were able to do there pill mill and covered by law enforcement. They were doing this, this goes on for pages.

    They got all of this great video and then Encrochat 

    [00:06:00] device here. They've got a YouTube video showing all of it. So if you're interested in this, check it out because it just really, I think reinforces the concept that you're not. Safe online with your communications, no matter what you have to be very, very careful.

    And if you're using something like WhatsApp, great for you, glad you are. I use what's an app with my, my mastermind, one of my mastermind teams that I'm on. I really enjoy using it. It's simple. It's easy to use. So that's something you might want to look at. And then the other one I use is signal it's called signal S-I-G-N -A-L. Hey, if you want to get information like this from me on a weekly basis, or sometimes even more.

    Make sure you are on my email list. Just go to Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Go there right now, before you forget, and

    [00:07:00] you'll be getting this stuff. People who are already on my list knew about these things, how to communicate. Privately and securely, even when we're talking about a family gathering. You don't want to run it through China on Zoom.

    Really? You don't. Okay. So how do you do all of that? No, you know, we talked about that in some of my pieces of training and in some of my newsletters. So I'll make sure you go there. Craig peterson.com/subscribe. And if you have any questions. Make sure you ask, just send me an email. M [email protected]. So let's get into ransomware because it is once again, your biggest online security nightmare.

    You thought the nightmare was over three years ago? No, no, no, no. It is back. And it's back with a vengeance, great article on ZDNet this week. There are so

    [00:08:00] many IoT devices we're connecting to our enterprise networks. It is getting more and more dangerous. IOT of course is the internet of things. These are things like your lights, your. Oh, everything, right?

    I just saw a thing or an article talking about major hacks going on with some of these network attacks, attached storage devices, these NAS devices that we're putting on that you might think are more or less commercial when they are not. So this is rapidly ransomware shaping up to be the defining online security issue of the era, frankly.

    It's a very simple idea. It is so easy to execute right now with increasing sophistication by criminal groups. It has gotten to the point where you can hire a company that writes ransomware and gives you technical support on it. Some of them will even

    [00:09:00] just go ahead and take a percentage of the money that you get for the ransoms and you don't have to do anything.

    So the ransomware group gives you the software. Gives you all of the services. If somebody gets the ransomware, they're contacting the ransomware group, they're sending the Bitcoin to the ransomware group. The ransomware group is taking their money off the top and sending you the bad guy. The Bitcoin. So we're going to talk about that even more.

    When we get back, stick around, you're listening to Craig Peterson and online. Make sure you subscribe right now. Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Stick around. We're going to be right back.

    ---

    More stories and tech updates at:

    www.craigpeterson.com

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

    www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

    Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

    www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

    For questions, call or text:

    855-385-5553

    10 min
  • Welcome! WebEx and Collaboration Tools plus more on Tech Talk with Craig Peterson on WGAN

    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.

    ---

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    13 min
  • Welcome! Zoom and Collaboration Tools plus more on Tech Talk with Craig Peterson on WGAN

    Welcome!

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

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

    ---

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    ---

    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:

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    10 min
  • Welcome! Continued discussion on Microsoft Teams and Collaboration Tools plus more on Tech Talk with Craig Peterson on WGAN

    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

    ---

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    ---

    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

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

    www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

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    10 min
  • Welcome! Microsoft Teams part 1 and Collaboration Tools plus more on Tech Talk with Craig Peterson on WGAN

    Welcome!

    Craig discusses Microsoft Teams and other collaboration platforms.

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

    ---

    Read More:

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

    Really, as I mentioned, GoToMeeting's been around a long time, man. They'd have its pros and its cons and its pros really have to do with frankly how long it has been around because that makes it. More stable. Right? They've been addressing every problem. They've seen every problem in the last, my gosh, how long has it been for them? 16 years.

    So Go To Meeting, a very, very stable product, something you might want to consider. I want to move into our next collaboration tool, which is Microsoft teams. Now, most businesses today are

    [00:01:00] using a whole array of tools. And the reason I bring up Microsoft teams is that so many of us are using what's now called Microsoft three 65.

    It used to be called office three 65, but now it's Microsoft three 65, which is a little bit misleading because office three 65, depending on which level you were on, gave you access to all of Microsoft office tools and where you could get windows as well, windows licenses, they pull it all under one roof and as would be expected from Microsoft or frankly, almost any company out there.

    The price has risen and dramatically in some cases. So Microsoft three 65 has some inexpensive offerings we're talking just dollars per month, or if you're an actual business that needs to get something done,

    [00:02:00] cares about having backups, cares about having an email with the proper email filters in place. And cares to have some of these collaboration tools. Well, now you're in the 30, 40, $50 per person per month range, which is pretty high when you get right down to it.

    Not out of the ordinary, not just a totally out of the question, but it starts getting much more expensive there, including things like Microsoft windows licenses themselves. So you can really make sure all of your software from Microsoft is up to date and that you have the appropriate licenses for it because many of us, unfortunately, Just just don't have that. Right?

     What's one of the reasons that we're not keeping our software up to date. Well, one of the reasons that I've seen, again and again, is that Microsoft charges you in order to get an update in an upgrade. So.

    [00:03:00] The first little bit of advice here is if you are a business, even as SO/HO, small office home office, make sure you get the enterprise versions of Microsoft three 65.

    Typically those start with an E and I don't recommend anything less than an E three. And it goes up from there there's three and four and five and there's one and two and stuff. They change it frequently. So who knows this week, right? It might've changed and I didn't notice, but either three is where you want to start and that's going to give you access to all of the basic stuff that you need.

    Now, typically we'll put a Cisco email firewall in front of Microsoft and their outlook and exchange servers. The reason for that is the Cisco email filters, just so much better than the stuff Microsoft offering. Plus you also can still

    [00:04:00] use, and you still do use the Microsoft filters, but once they've gone through those incredible Cisco filters, those Microsoft filters, just frankly, don't add up to much, not much at all.

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

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

    [00:05:00] up in, even if it's supposedly anonymized.

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

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

    Not that it worked, but people, when they're doing a selection, they're not looking for what they want. They're trying to

    [00:06:00] eliminate the things they don't want.

    So if you're a vendor and you have some things missing in the mind of your prospect, You're not going to get that sale. It's just not going to happen. So Microsoft would throw everything, including the kitchen sink into their software. And most of them had a lot of bugs.

    Now Microsoft still has tons of bugs, still tons. It's crazy. And those bugs drive me nuts. Sometimes it's like the moment we talked about at the top of the show, major, major bug in some of their software, that's supposed to keep your data secure, basically from hard disk crashes and from data loss and in fact is barely done the exact opposite.

    So I'm not a big Microsoft fan, but they're tools that they've been developing more recently for online news. Have been a lot better than anything they've had before. I guess that's faint praise, right?

    [00:07:00] Because what they had before was just so terrible, but anyhow, Microsoft has their teams app.

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

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

    A whole bunch of different tools for communication and collaboration and Microsoft teams. It might be something not just for your business, but if you have a nonprofit or small family business, something you might want to

    [00:08:00] look at. Because teams are designed to be collaborative and it does tie in a lot of Microsoft's other tools.

    It allows you to deploy it company-wide and that can help to bring together employees.

    Now it can also make it so that your employees can't get anything done because they're constantly getting notes and messages from other employees, but if your employees get some decent training and you kind of help them out that overload that can come with some of these teams tools, can basically go away.

    So here are a few different ways that using a team tool could help out your business. One company-wide chat, which is kind of handy. It helps you to get your overall company message into the hands of all your employees. That's a very good thing. And that chat functionality is one of the main value adds of a team's application

    [00:09:00] over something like Slack, that designed more for some typing back and forth. Or some of these other things like Go to meeting or Zoom that are designed primarily for you to hold a meeting.

    All of the team's apps, Microsoft, and WebEx, both have. What's called threaded conversations. Now you'll see that in Slack where someone will make a comment in a channel, and then you can have a thread off of that comment. So that people that are looking through the channel or space or whatever it's called on the software you're using, don't have to see all of the comments about some main item that's in there. So threads that's important to have and Microsoft and WebEx teams both have that. Everything's recorded in one easy to find a place so that all of your conversations are right there in the channel. You know what they are, and you can find [

    00:10:00] them. A WebEx team recently has set it up so that, yeah, everything is right there in that space, but it also has a separate set of tabs that let you look at just the files that were uploaded or just the meetings that took place in that space.

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

    Now, your conversations in these team apps can take place as a team discussion, or you could have private chats or private meetings. It really, this changes everything. If you haven't used either Microsoft teams or WebEx teams,

    [00:11:00] and there's the ability to integrate Skype, to have audio and video conversations.

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

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

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

    ---

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    12 min

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

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