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

Welcome!

Craig discusses the uptick in Ransomware and Phishing.

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

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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 And the OpenCourseWare stuff is from 2014, which is in, you know, by today's standards very outdated and not of a whole lot of use because as I mentioned things like antivirus totally useless in this day and age.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.

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More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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For questions, call or text:

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Welcome!

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

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

---

Read More:

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

YouTube TV jumps 30% in price effective immediately

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

New Mac ransomware is even more sinister than it appears

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

Apple's Silicon Macs promise screaming performance

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

An embattled group of leakers picks up the WikiLeaks mantle

---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Both of those are paid.

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

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

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

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

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome!

Craig discusses Microsoft Teams and other collaboration platforms.

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

---

Read More:

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

YouTube TV jumps 30% in price effective immediately

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

New Mac ransomware is even more sinister than it appears

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

Apple's Silicon Macs promise screaming performance

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

An embattled group of leakers picks up the WikiLeaks mantle

---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

[00:00:00] 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

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For questions, call or text:

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Welcome!

Craig discusses the uptick in Ransomware and Phishing.

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

---

Read More:

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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:

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For questions, call or text:

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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:

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For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome!

Craig’s walking you through a deep dive of the Pros and Cons of Online Collaboration Tools for Businesses and the Security implications for Businesses who have Regulatory Requirements. 

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

---

Read More:

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UPnP flaw exposes millions of network devices to attacks over the Internet

---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

This is probably one of the most requested shows ever. We're going to talk about online collaboration. We'll the stuff that's needed absolutely needed for working from home. So stick around for the whole show. We got a lot to talk about.

[00:00:22] Of course you're listening to Craig Peterson. I am so glad you're here and online. Craig peterson.com. In fact, that's where I've been getting a lot of feedback from you guys. And I want to thank everybody that sent me a no talking about the types of things you want to learn more about. And today that's precisely what we will be talking about.

[00:00:43] We're going to go through the. Top online collaboration tools that are out there. We'll be talking about WebEx, which is by far my favorite. It's what we use because of the security, the flexibility. But we're going to get into that. We're going to talk about Zoom and that's what we used for my daughter's wedding a couple of weeks ago.

[00:01:04] Why would we use that one? It's so insecure. Well, we're going to get into Zooms biggest features, Microsoft. Teams is a fairly new player on the block, but we're going to talk about them and the pros and cons, and then the granddaddy of them all. We're going to be talking about, go-to-meeting. They've been around a very, very long time.

[00:01:26] They have pros, they have cons. We're going to be talking about that as well. And we have a number of articles to get to in this week's news. But we'll see just how far we can get with some of those things. But there are two things we have to get to right now at the top of the show. And one of them is about the latest windows 10 upgrade that they came up with.

[00:01:52] Now, the May updates are starting to roll out, in a little bit better speed. Now, if you can believe it here we are the middle of June and, the windows, what the 10th of May. It's starting to roll out to everybody because of all of the problems. And unfortunately, that's the big problem we're seeing right now with windows 10, version 2004.

[00:02:18] Now, if you have a computer, one of the best things you can do for that computer to protect your data from a crash, not from the bad guys, but from a crash, is to have something called Raid, which stands for redundant array of inexpensive disks. And the idea here behind raid is that you can have multiple disc drives and

[00:02:43] it will store the data on those multiple disc drives, but it stores it in such a way that if a block goes bad on one of those drives, it can pull that block from another drive because essentially it keeps two copies of all of the data you technically, it's not really two copies, but we don't need to get into that right now.

[00:03:05] So if you lose a whole disc or you lose a part of a disc, even as small as one block, hopefully, can be recovered. Now, there are a lot of different types of raid out there. Many of them are done in hardware and can provide you with some really great defense. Those are the ones I've been using for probably about 30 years now.

[00:03:25] Now with my customers, but there's something else that I've been using for almost as long, ever since it came out, it was developed by Sun Microsystems and it's a file system called ZFS. Now. It's absolutely amazing. It is continually every time you read that disc, it is checking the checksums, see if anything might be wrong with it, if there's anything wrong with it, it recovers that block because there's something known as bit rot when we're talking about computers and discs and even memory, frankly, but particularly with disks.

[00:04:01] And that is over time, mathematically, we can figure out how much of that data. That you haven't changed that it's being stored there, the emails, but more importantly, things like your accounting files, et cetera, how just individual bits can decay literally decay because remember they're magnetic. Remember they're on magnetic media. Nowadays that magnetic media is usually on a piece of glass.

[00:04:31] That's sitting inside that disc drive. Well as decay, the problem is that the numbers change. So you could have something that says a million dollars and because of bit rot, it changes to, again, could change to zero, right? Because just one bit flips from a one to a zero. That's all it takes. You could lose data storage because a bit flipped inside your directory structure.

[00:05:02] You can lose bits on the discs at any time. And they do decay over time. I remember there's a French aerospace manufacturer who we put a proposal to, and I did all of the math. I showed all of the research or some great Ph.D. research that I had found that showed how over time, regular raid devices are not going to help them with longterm retention of the data because they made parts for airplane engines and they had to keep all of the data, all of the scans, the X rays, everything they did, they had to keep it for decades.

[00:05:43] As long as that blade that was in that turbofan for that engine for a plane. As long as that blade was out there. In the field in use, they had to keep all of the original data. And so I showed them all of the studies cause I knew what they were looking at. They were looking at just standard grade stuff, Hitachi data systems and some others and, you know, pretty high end, very, very, very expensive hardware.

[00:06:12] And I showed how it was impossible for them to keep that data long term. If they put it into a normal raid system. So I proposed, this was some years back, but I proposed a system where there were multiple machines and each machine had what was called the ZFS, which is a Zetta-byte file system on it. Then on top of all of those machines was another distributed file system and I showed how they would not ever lose any data for decades and decades and decades. Now they'd have to replace just drives as they went bad and we have the system set up, so it would inform them about a bad drive so they could replace it. They could actually lose three drives with each one of these data set handlers, just a fantastic system.

[00:07:03]It is the type of system we've been using for our clients forever because nowadays, under the federal rules of civil procedure that every business has to follow. You have to have plans in place to keep things like the purchase orders, the bills you send out, even emails have to be retained longterm, IRS and others require you to have policies, retention policies in place, and to keep that data.

[00:07:31] You can't do that with regular raid for the longterm. So I brought all of this up because of what Microsoft is doing right now with windows 10 version 2004, Microsoft introduced something that. Is kind of patterned after this ZFS that I talked about. ZFS is just phenomenal. I typically use the two or three, for those of you that are really technical and know what that means in order to help keep the data safe.

[00:08:00] And then. Of course, I encrypt it all, push it up into cloud storage, which also has raid, but guaranteed, the data will never be lost. So Microsoft said all this is just wonderful. Wonderful, wonderful. And so they came up with their own version. Apple came up with a version as well. They started to use EFS.

[00:08:16] And then when Sun Microsystems went under basically, and their technology was acquired, and this particular ZFS technology, I think it was Oracle that managed to glom onto it. There wouldn't be licensing issues. Apple said, okay, well, we got to do our own thing. So Apple has some very cool advanced file system that is on the SSDs that are in so many of our machines today.

[00:08:42] So there's a lot of cool stuff, but Microsoft has stored spaces. Now I don't trust it. I never trusted it. I always use EFS even in the Linux world where they've come up with their own version of the software. That's kind of patterned after ZFS. ZFS, just been around for so long and, and is just so stable.

[00:09:03] That's what I use. Cause it's available for them. Really everything out there. But this particular thing I'm talking about storage spaces is a feature Windows and Windows server, and it supports systems with multiple drives and lots of users put those drives together into bundles and create a pool of storage that you can then use to store your stuff.

[00:09:26] And the idea is if a disc goes bad, just like raid, just like ZFS have a disc goes bad. You can recover. Now, one of the beauties of the systems we've designed for our clients over the years on ZFS, and you can do this yourself. If you're a little bit more advanced is, as I said, you can guarantee the data never goes bad because every time it's red, it is checked.

[00:09:48] Now, if you're using hardware raid or some of these other storage systems that combine desks, it's rare that it's ever checked. Ever checked. Right? So you can check to make sure that that raid array is working properly, but you cannot check that the data in that array has not been damaged. Maybe it was damaged by the raid controller itself or the disc drive or the cashing function on the disc drive, or it lost the power at the exact wrong time.

[00:10:22] And now you lost even more of that data. Well, Microsoft has come to yet a new low, well, I don't know. Should we call it a new low? Why not? Okay. A new low. And it turns out that their storage spaces, software that's designed to keep your data safe. Apparently can mess up all of your data. How's that for fun.

[00:10:48] And that's particularly from Windows 10, version 2004, Microsoft apparently didn't bother testing it or at least testing it thoroughly enough. And according to these articles, I'm seeing online, like right now, I'm looking at one from ZDnet. It's saying when using some configurations partitioned for storage spaces might show as raw in disk manager.

[00:11:12] Microsoft has advised against running the check disk command on any device affected by this issue because fixing your disc is going to make things even worse. Oh gosh. So if you're using storage spaces wise up, get something better. And secondly, don't upgrade yet. It's just like, the May release. It's not out there yet.

[00:11:37] Anyway, stick around guys. We'll be right back listening to Craig Peterson and we've got a whole lot more coming up and yes, we're going to get to collaboration. I guarantee.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome!

Craig’s walking you through a deep dive of the Pros and Cons of Online Collaboration Tools for Businesses and the Security implications for Businesses who have Regulatory Requirements. 

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

---

Read More:

Twitter wants to know if you meant to share that article

DHS Warns on New Exploit of Windows 10 Vulnerability

FBI Says Sudden Increase in Mobile Banking Is Heightening Risks For Users

What COVID-19 Teaches Us About Social Engineering

UPnP flaw exposes millions of network devices to attacks over the Internet

---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

This is probably one of the most requested shows ever. We're going to talk about online collaboration. We'll the stuff that's needed absolutely needed for working from home. So stick around for the whole show. We got a lot to talk about.

[00:00:22] Of course you're listening to Craig Peterson. I am so glad you're here and online. Craig peterson.com. In fact, that's where I've been getting a lot of feedback from you guys. And I want to thank everybody that sent me a no talking about the types of things you want to learn more about. And today that's precisely what we will be talking about.

[00:00:43] We're going to go through the. Top online collaboration tools that are out there. We'll be talking about WebEx, which is by far my favorite. It's what we use because of the security, the flexibility. But we're going to get into that. We're going to talk about Zoom and that's what we used for my daughter's wedding a couple of weeks ago.

[00:01:04] Why would we use that one? It's so insecure. Well, we're going to get into Zooms biggest features, Microsoft. Teams is a fairly new player on the block, but we're going to talk about them and the pros and cons, and then the granddaddy of them all. We're going to be talking about, go-to-meeting. They've been around a very, very long time.

[00:01:26] They have pros, they have cons. We're going to be talking about that as well. And we have a number of articles to get to in this week's news. But we'll see just how far we can get with some of those things. But there are two things we have to get to right now at the top of the show. And one of them is about the latest windows 10 upgrade that they came up with.

[00:01:52] Now, the May updates are starting to roll out, in a little bit better speed. Now, if you can believe it here we are the middle of June and, the windows, what the 10th of May. It's starting to roll out to everybody because of all of the problems. And unfortunately, that's the big problem we're seeing right now with windows 10, version 2004.

[00:02:18] Now, if you have a computer, one of the best things you can do for that computer to protect your data from a crash, not from the bad guys, but from a crash, is to have something called Raid, which stands for redundant array of inexpensive disks. And the idea here behind raid is that you can have multiple disc drives and

[00:02:43] it will store the data on those multiple disc drives, but it stores it in such a way that if a block goes bad on one of those drives, it can pull that block from another drive because essentially it keeps two copies of all of the data you technically, it's not really two copies, but we don't need to get into that right now.

[00:03:05] So if you lose a whole disc or you lose a part of a disc, even as small as one block, hopefully, can be recovered. Now, there are a lot of different types of raid out there. Many of them are done in hardware and can provide you with some really great defense. Those are the ones I've been using for probably about 30 years now.

[00:03:25] Now with my customers, but there's something else that I've been using for almost as long, ever since it came out, it was developed by Sun Microsystems and it's a file system called ZFS. Now. It's absolutely amazing. It is continually every time you read that disc, it is checking the checksums, see if anything might be wrong with it, if there's anything wrong with it, it recovers that block because there's something known as bit rot when we're talking about computers and discs and even memory, frankly, but particularly with disks.

[00:04:01] And that is over time, mathematically, we can figure out how much of that data. That you haven't changed that it's being stored there, the emails, but more importantly, things like your accounting files, et cetera, how just individual bits can decay literally decay because remember they're magnetic. Remember they're on magnetic media. Nowadays that magnetic media is usually on a piece of glass.

[00:04:31] That's sitting inside that disc drive. Well as decay, the problem is that the numbers change. So you could have something that says a million dollars and because of bit rot, it changes to, again, could change to zero, right? Because just one bit flips from a one to a zero. That's all it takes. You could lose data storage because a bit flipped inside your directory structure.

[00:05:02] You can lose bits on the discs at any time. And they do decay over time. I remember there's a French aerospace manufacturer who we put a proposal to, and I did all of the math. I showed all of the research or some great Ph.D. research that I had found that showed how over time, regular raid devices are not going to help them with longterm retention of the data because they made parts for airplane engines and they had to keep all of the data, all of the scans, the X rays, everything they did, they had to keep it for decades.

[00:05:43] As long as that blade that was in that turbofan for that engine for a plane. As long as that blade was out there. In the field in use, they had to keep all of the original data. And so I showed them all of the studies cause I knew what they were looking at. They were looking at just standard grade stuff, Hitachi data systems and some others and, you know, pretty high end, very, very, very expensive hardware.

[00:06:12] And I showed how it was impossible for them to keep that data long term. If they put it into a normal raid system. So I proposed, this was some years back, but I proposed a system where there were multiple machines and each machine had what was called the ZFS, which is a Zetta-byte file system on it. Then on top of all of those machines was another distributed file system and I showed how they would not ever lose any data for decades and decades and decades. Now they'd have to replace just drives as they went bad and we have the system set up, so it would inform them about a bad drive so they could replace it. They could actually lose three drives with each one of these data set handlers, just a fantastic system.

[00:07:03]It is the type of system we've been using for our clients forever because nowadays, under the federal rules of civil procedure that every business has to follow. You have to have plans in place to keep things like the purchase orders, the bills you send out, even emails have to be retained longterm, IRS and others require you to have policies, retention policies in place, and to keep that data.

[00:07:31] You can't do that with regular raid for the longterm. So I brought all of this up because of what Microsoft is doing right now with windows 10 version 2004, Microsoft introduced something that. Is kind of patterned after this ZFS that I talked about. ZFS is just phenomenal. I typically use the two or three, for those of you that are really technical and know what that means in order to help keep the data safe.

[00:08:00] And then. Of course, I encrypt it all, push it up into cloud storage, which also has raid, but guaranteed, the data will never be lost. So Microsoft said all this is just wonderful. Wonderful, wonderful. And so they came up with their own version. Apple came up with a version as well. They started to use EFS.

[00:08:16] And then when Sun Microsystems went under basically, and their technology was acquired, and this particular ZFS technology, I think it was Oracle that managed to glom onto it. There wouldn't be licensing issues. Apple said, okay, well, we got to do our own thing. So Apple has some very cool advanced file system that is on the SSDs that are in so many of our machines today.

[00:08:42] So there's a lot of cool stuff, but Microsoft has stored spaces. Now I don't trust it. I never trusted it. I always use EFS even in the Linux world where they've come up with their own version of the software. That's kind of patterned after ZFS. ZFS, just been around for so long and, and is just so stable.

[00:09:03] That's what I use. Cause it's available for them. Really everything out there. But this particular thing I'm talking about storage spaces is a feature Windows and Windows server, and it supports systems with multiple drives and lots of users put those drives together into bundles and create a pool of storage that you can then use to store your stuff.

[00:09:26] And the idea is if a disc goes bad, just like raid, just like ZFS have a disc goes bad. You can recover. Now, one of the beauties of the systems we've designed for our clients over the years on ZFS, and you can do this yourself. If you're a little bit more advanced is, as I said, you can guarantee the data never goes bad because every time it's red, it is checked.

[00:09:48] Now, if you're using hardware raid or some of these other storage systems that combine desks, it's rare that it's ever checked. Ever checked. Right? So you can check to make sure that that raid array is working properly, but you cannot check that the data in that array has not been damaged. Maybe it was damaged by the raid controller itself or the disc drive or the cashing function on the disc drive, or it lost the power at the exact wrong time.

[00:10:22] And now you lost even more of that data. Well, Microsoft has come to yet a new low, well, I don't know. Should we call it a new low? Why not? Okay. A new low. And it turns out that their storage spaces, software that's designed to keep your data safe. Apparently can mess up all of your data. How's that for fun.

[00:10:48] And that's particularly from Windows 10, version 2004, Microsoft apparently didn't bother testing it or at least testing it thoroughly enough. And according to these articles, I'm seeing online, like right now, I'm looking at one from ZDnet. It's saying when using some configurations partitioned for storage spaces might show as raw in disk manager.

[00:11:12] Microsoft has advised against running the check disk command on any device affected by this issue because fixing your disc is going to make things even worse. Oh gosh. So if you're using storage spaces wise up, get something better. And secondly, don't upgrade yet. It's just like, the May release. It's not out there yet.

[00:11:37] Anyway, stick around guys. We'll be right back listening to Craig Peterson and we've got a whole lot more coming up and yes, we're going to get to collaboration. I guarantee.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome!

Craig's walking you through a deep dive of the Pros and Cons of Online Collaboration Tools for Businesses and the Security implications for Businesses who have Regulatory Requirements.

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

---

Read More:

Twitter wants to know if you meant to share that article

DHS Warns on New Exploit of Windows 10 Vulnerability

FBI Says Sudden Increase in Mobile Banking Is Heightening Risks For Users

What COVID-19 Teaches Us About Social Engineering

UPnP flaw exposes millions of network devices to attacks over the Internet

---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

This is probably one of the most requested shows ever. We're going to talk about online collaboration. We'll the stuff that's needed absolutely needed for working from home. So stick around for the whole show. We got a lot to talk about.

[00:00:22] Of course you're listening to Craig Peterson. I am so glad you're here and online. Craig peterson.com. In fact, that's where I've been getting a lot of feedback from you guys. And I want to thank everybody that sent me a no talking about the types of things you want to learn more about. And today that's precisely what we will be talking about.

[00:00:43] We're going to go through the. Top online collaboration tools that are out there. We'll be talking about WebEx, which is by far my favorite. It's what we use because of the security, the flexibility. But we're going to get into that. We're going to talk about Zoom and that's what we used for my daughter's wedding a couple of weeks ago.

[00:01:04] Why would we use that one? It's so insecure. Well, we're going to get into Zooms biggest features, Microsoft. Teams is a fairly new player on the block, but we're going to talk about them and the pros and cons, and then the granddaddy of them all. We're going to be talking about, go-to-meeting. They've been around a very, very long time.

[00:01:26] They have pros, they have cons. We're going to be talking about that as well. And we have a number of articles to get to in this week's news. But we'll see just how far we can get with some of those things. But there are two things we have to get to right now at the top of the show. And one of them is about the latest windows 10 upgrade that they came up with.

[00:01:52] Now, the May updates are starting to roll out, in a little bit better speed. Now, if you can believe it here we are the middle of June and, the windows, what the 10th of May. It's starting to roll out to everybody because of all of the problems. And unfortunately, that's the big problem we're seeing right now with windows 10, version 2004.

[00:02:18] Now, if you have a computer, one of the best things you can do for that computer to protect your data from a crash, not from the bad guys, but from a crash, is to have something called Raid, which stands for redundant array of inexpensive disks. And the idea here behind raid is that you can have multiple disc drives and

[00:02:43] it will store the data on those multiple disc drives, but it stores it in such a way that if a block goes bad on one of those drives, it can pull that block from another drive because essentially it keeps two copies of all of the data you technically, it's not really two copies, but we don't need to get into that right now.

[00:03:05] So if you lose a whole disc or you lose a part of a disc, even as small as one block, hopefully, can be recovered. Now, there are a lot of different types of raid out there. Many of them are done in hardware and can provide you with some really great defense. Those are the ones I've been using for probably about 30 years now.

[00:03:25] Now with my customers, but there's something else that I've been using for almost as long, ever since it came out, it was developed by Sun Microsystems and it's a file system called ZFS. Now. It's absolutely amazing. It is continually every time you read that disc, it is checking the checksums, see if anything might be wrong with it, if there's anything wrong with it, it recovers that block because there's something known as bit rot when we're talking about computers and discs and even memory, frankly, but particularly with disks.

[00:04:01] And that is over time, mathematically, we can figure out how much of that data. That you haven't changed that it's being stored there, the emails, but more importantly, things like your accounting files, et cetera, how just individual bits can decay literally decay because remember they're magnetic. Remember they're on magnetic media. Nowadays that magnetic media is usually on a piece of glass.

[00:04:31] That's sitting inside that disc drive. Well as decay, the problem is that the numbers change. So you could have something that says a million dollars and because of bit rot, it changes to, again, could change to zero, right? Because just one bit flips from a one to a zero. That's all it takes. You could lose data storage because a bit flipped inside your directory structure.

[00:05:02] You can lose bits on the discs at any time. And they do decay over time. I remember there's a French aerospace manufacturer who we put a proposal to, and I did all of the math. I showed all of the research or some great Ph.D. research that I had found that showed how over time, regular raid devices are not going to help them with longterm retention of the data because they made parts for airplane engines and they had to keep all of the data, all of the scans, the X rays, everything they did, they had to keep it for decades.

[00:05:43] As long as that blade that was in that turbofan for that engine for a plane. As long as that blade was out there. In the field in use, they had to keep all of the original data. And so I showed them all of the studies cause I knew what they were looking at. They were looking at just standard grade stuff, Hitachi data systems and some others and, you know, pretty high end, very, very, very expensive hardware.

[00:06:12] And I showed how it was impossible for them to keep that data long term. If they put it into a normal raid system. So I proposed, this was some years back, but I proposed a system where there were multiple machines and each machine had what was called the ZFS, which is a Zetta-byte file system on it. Then on top of all of those machines was another distributed file system and I showed how they would not ever lose any data for decades and decades and decades. Now they'd have to replace just drives as they went bad and we have the system set up, so it would inform them about a bad drive so they could replace it. They could actually lose three drives with each one of these data set handlers, just a fantastic system.

[00:07:03]It is the type of system we've been using for our clients forever because nowadays, under the federal rules of civil procedure that every business has to follow. You have to have plans in place to keep things like the purchase orders, the bills you send out, even emails have to be retained longterm, IRS and others require you to have policies, retention policies in place, and to keep that data.

[00:07:31] You can't do that with regular raid for the longterm. So I brought all of this up because of what Microsoft is doing right now with windows 10 version 2004, Microsoft introduced something that. Is kind of patterned after this ZFS that I talked about. ZFS is just phenomenal. I typically use the two or three, for those of you that are really technical and know what that means in order to help keep the data safe.

[00:08:00] And then. Of course, I encrypt it all, push it up into cloud storage, which also has raid, but guaranteed, the data will never be lost. So Microsoft said all this is just wonderful. Wonderful, wonderful. And so they came up with their own version. Apple came up with a version as well. They started to use EFS.

[00:08:16] And then when Sun Microsystems went under basically, and their technology was acquired, and this particular ZFS technology, I think it was Oracle that managed to glom onto it. There wouldn't be licensing issues. Apple said, okay, well, we got to do our own thing. So Apple has some very cool advanced file system that is on the SSDs that are in so many of our machines today.

[00:08:42] So there's a lot of cool stuff, but Microsoft has stored spaces. Now I don't trust it. I never trusted it. I always use EFS even in the Linux world where they've come up with their own version of the software. That's kind of patterned after ZFS. ZFS, just been around for so long and, and is just so stable.

[00:09:03] That's what I use. Cause it's available for them. Really everything out there. But this particular thing I'm talking about storage spaces is a feature Windows and Windows server, and it supports systems with multiple drives and lots of users put those drives together into bundles and create a pool of storage that you can then use to store your stuff.

[00:09:26] And the idea is if a disc goes bad, just like raid, just like ZFS have a disc goes bad. You can recover. Now, one of the beauties of the systems we've designed for our clients over the years on ZFS, and you can do this yourself. If you're a little bit more advanced is, as I said, you can guarantee the data never goes bad because every time it's red, it is checked.

[00:09:48] Now, if you're using hardware raid or some of these other storage systems that combine desks, it's rare that it's ever checked. Ever checked. Right? So you can check to make sure that that raid array is working properly, but you cannot check that the data in that array has not been damaged. Maybe it was damaged by the raid controller itself or the disc drive or the cashing function on the disc drive, or it lost the power at the exact wrong time.

[00:10:22] And now you lost even more of that data. Well, Microsoft has come to yet a new low, well, I don't know. Should we call it a new low? Why not? Okay. A new low. And it turns out that their storage spaces, software that's designed to keep your data safe. Apparently can mess up all of your data. How's that for fun.

[00:10:48] And that's particularly from Windows 10, version 2004, Microsoft apparently didn't bother testing it or at least testing it thoroughly enough. And according to these articles, I'm seeing online, like right now, I'm looking at one from ZDnet. It's saying when using some configurations partitioned for storage spaces might show as raw in disk manager.

[00:11:12] Microsoft has advised against running the check disk command on any device affected by this issue because fixing your disc is going to make things even worse. Oh gosh. So if you're using storage spaces wise up, get something better. And secondly, don't upgrade yet. It's just like, the May release. It's not out there yet.

[00:11:37] Anyway, stick around guys. We'll be right back listening to Craig Peterson and we've got a whole lot more coming up and yes, we're going to get to collaboration. I guarantee.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome!

Craig's walking you through a deep dive of the Pros and Cons of Online Collaboration Tools for Businesses and the Security implications for Businesses who have Regulatory Requirements.

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

---

Read More:

Twitter wants to know if you meant to share that article

DHS Warns on New Exploit of Windows 10 Vulnerability

FBI Says Sudden Increase in Mobile Banking Is Heightening Risks For Users

What COVID-19 Teaches Us About Social Engineering

UPnP flaw exposes millions of network devices to attacks over the Internet

---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Hey, do you know what demonetization is? Well, besides being a trend, it is, in fact, making a major impact on what you are seeing online. So we're going to get into that right now.

[00:00:19] Hi, everybody, of course, Craig Peterson here. Thanks for joining me. And, this is, this is just something that's been bothering me all week. I have to talk about this. It's been in the news. You know, I went to Google news and did a search for this and you know what? It doesn't show up in Google news anymore.

[00:00:39] This is crazy because it really hit all of the news really when it was it probably Wednesday this week. It's crazy. But here's, what's happened. Google banned a website called Zero Hedge from its ad platform. And, you know, we've been looking at this for a while. What happens, what's going on with these ad platforms, right?

[00:01:07] If, if you're basically, libertarian, as if you're conservative, you don't want to shut down free speech. If you are a socialist-communist or fascist, of course, you want to shut down free speech. And that's exactly what's been happening here. You see places like Zero Hedge require advertising revenue in order to stay in business.

[00:01:32] Right. Is that what news organizations have done for forever? You have an article, people read your newspaper, your magazine, your website, in order to get at that article. And you've got ads, right? Used to be, you'd have classified ads and one section of the newspaper, right. You'd go to the C section and that was sports, or maybe it was B in your newspaper and there'd be ads for sportspeople in that write an ad for things like that, you know, baseball gloves that are, or games or maybe movies that are things they thought you'd be interested in were in that section of the newspaper. In the business section, they're not going to have ads that are for kids clothes. Right. That's very unlikely. But that's how they stay in business. It's all about advertising and the advertising revenue. So what's happening right now. What's going on and why is this happening?

[00:02:34] It's happening more and more. Frankly, it's getting scarier and scarier. The left has figured out that if they complain if they say I was insulted by this content, They will pull the content. Right. What happened to the days when the editorial page had all kinds of stuff on there. Frankly, they designed in some ways to get people to talk about it.

[00:03:01] Cause that means we're thinking about it, right? It's just like these statues that are being pulled down. The problem I have with it is if they're up and we're talking about the things that these people had done that were evil, in some cases, we're talking about it. We're thinking about it. It's just like barring any part of history that we don't like, and don't agree with, it doesn't help us today. Yet, somehow these people just don't get it. Do they? These people are saying, Oh, we're going to tear this down. They're tearing it down. They're stopping free speech because they don't agree with it.

[00:03:46] What happened to the days when universities were the place where free speech was praised, right? You remember way back when you might be too young to remember this? I know I'm, iffy too young to remember some of this stuff, but it used to be that in universities, there was very liberal thought. No. I'm not talking about liberal the way that for instance, Hillary Clinton defined it, which was early 20th century liberals in the United States, which was then renamed, the communist party of America, which people didn't like.

[00:04:17] So they changed it to the liberal party. Right. So same people, same methodologies, same thinking, same idiocy. Right. and we seem to have forgotten about that. That somehow frees speeches bag that, does that make sense to you? The speech that should be protected the most is probably the most insensitive speech because people who are saying things that are racist or otherwise are obviously idiots at the very least.

[00:04:54]Now we know they're not people that you really should be hanging out with. Don't you. Yeah, it just doesn't make any sense to me. So the left, which once touted itself as a bastion of free speech, when conservatives were running the universities nowadays, it's not so much, right. We can't have conservative-speech on campus.

[00:05:19] We're going to protest, we're going to riot. We're going to make anything possible to make a free speech. More available. We're going to get rid of it. We're going to stop it, which is really concerning to me. So that's why I had to print this up, right? Yeah.

[00:05:37] Yeah. We're going to get into the online collaboration tools. I think it's an important thing for us to discuss, but so is this so Google ban of the website, Zero Hedge from its ad platform. That's Demonetization. And in other words, zero hedge, if it was reliant on ads from Google, which it was in order to generate revenue can no longer generate revenue from that side.

[00:06:09] Now the part of the problem is as a conservative or libertarian, we look at it and say, okay, well, Google has the right to do, basically whatever it wants with his platform. That's our knee jerk reaction. Of course, the less knee jerk reaction is that that's evil. You can't. No, no, you can't do that. You can't do that.

[00:06:31] You can't have that speech. Well, The problem we have right now when we're starting to see this President Trump's been talking about it. But the problem that we have right now is Google and Facebook and Twitter. Some of these other platforms are protected under the law as an open forum. So if somebody says something on one of those sites that are offensive, or maybe even would normally be considered, something that under tort law could be prosecuted.

[00:07:07] It doesn't matter because they are protected. So now here they are, they're protected from publishing people, publishing things on their platforms that other people might be offended by, or that might be against the law, frankly, Frankly, any other platform and they are censoring what's being said. So in this case, Google ban of Zero Hedge from its ad platform.

[00:07:36] Over comments that were made on articles about the riots that are going on. No, of course, you know, the news. If they reported it at all, NBC reported it as a Google's banning website, Zero Hedge from its ad platform over comments on protest. Again, civil libertarians conservatives were all for free speech.

[00:08:01] If you want to have a group of people in the streets, protesting something, by all means, please do it. It's part of free speech. It's part of what so many lives have been lost over so much. Blood has been shed over in this country is free speech. So do it.

[00:08:21] However, writing doesn't fit in. So Google said, because of things, users have commented because of things that comments have said on your platform, we're going to ban you now.

[00:08:38] Behind this is also NBC. Apparently it was NBC that reported this to Google saying, ah, people who are saying bad things about the protests going on, they're calling them riots and rioters, and we've got to stop that. In other words, one so-called news platform complaining about another news platform.

[00:09:14] To get them to put out of business because that's effectively what happens when you're demonetized. So when we get back, I got a little bit more to talk about this here. this is something else because guess what? It's not just Zero Hedge. It's the Federalist, another conservative online. News site so stick around.

[00:09:36] We'll be right back. This is Craig Peterson and online Craig peterson.com.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome!

Craig’s walking you through a deep dive of the Pros and Cons of Online Collaboration Tools for Businesses and the Security implications for Businesses who have Regulatory Requirements. 

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

---

Read More:

Twitter wants to know if you meant to share that article

DHS Warns on New Exploit of Windows 10 Vulnerability

FBI Says Sudden Increase in Mobile Banking Is Heightening Risks For Users

What COVID-19 Teaches Us About Social Engineering

UPnP flaw exposes millions of network devices to attacks over the Internet

---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Hey, do you know what demonetization is? Well, besides being a trend, it is, in fact, making a major impact on what you are seeing online. So we're going to get into that right now.

[00:00:19] Hi, everybody, of course, Craig Peterson here. Thanks for joining me. And, this is, this is just something that's been bothering me all week. I have to talk about this. It's been in the news. You know, I went to Google news and did a search for this and you know what? It doesn't show up in Google news anymore.

[00:00:39] This is crazy because it really hit all of the news really when it was it probably Wednesday this week. It's crazy. But here's, what's happened. Google banned a website called Zero Hedge from its ad platform. And, you know, we've been looking at this for a while. What happens, what's going on with these ad platforms, right?

[00:01:07] If, if you're basically, libertarian, as if you're conservative, you don't want to shut down free speech. If you are a socialist-communist or fascist, of course, you want to shut down free speech. And that's exactly what's been happening here. You see places like Zero Hedge require advertising revenue in order to stay in business.

[00:01:32] Right. Is that what news organizations have done for forever? You have an article, people read your newspaper, your magazine, your website, in order to get at that article. And you've got ads, right? Used to be, you'd have classified ads and one section of the newspaper, right. You'd go to the C section and that was sports, or maybe it was B in your newspaper and there'd be ads for sportspeople in that write an ad for things like that, you know, baseball gloves that are, or games or maybe movies that are things they thought you'd be interested in were in that section of the newspaper. In the business section, they're not going to have ads that are for kids clothes. Right. That's very unlikely. But that's how they stay in business. It's all about advertising and the advertising revenue. So what's happening right now. What's going on and why is this happening?

[00:02:34] It's happening more and more. Frankly, it's getting scarier and scarier. The left has figured out that if they complain if they say I was insulted by this content, They will pull the content. Right. What happened to the days when the editorial page had all kinds of stuff on there.  Frankly, they designed in some ways to get people to talk about it.

[00:03:01] Cause that means we're thinking about it, right? It's just like these statues that are being pulled down. The problem I have with it is if they're up and we're talking about the things that these people had done that were evil, in some cases, we're talking about it. We're thinking about it. It's just like barring any part of history that we don't like, and don't agree with, it doesn't help us today. Yet, somehow these people just don't get it. Do they? These people are saying, Oh, we're going to tear this down. They're tearing it down. They're stopping free speech because they don't agree with it.

[00:03:46] What happened to the days when universities were the place where free speech was praised, right? You remember way back when you might be too young to remember this? I know I'm, iffy too young to remember some of this stuff, but it used to be that in universities, there was very liberal thought. No. I'm not talking about liberal the way that for instance, Hillary Clinton defined it, which was early 20th century liberals in the United States, which was then renamed, the communist party of America, which people didn't like.

[00:04:17] So they changed it to the liberal party. Right. So same people, same methodologies, same thinking, same idiocy. Right. and we seem to have forgotten about that. That somehow frees speeches bag that, does that make sense to you? The speech that should be protected the most is probably the most insensitive speech because people who are saying things that are racist or otherwise are obviously idiots at the very least.

[00:04:54]Now we know they're not people that you really should be hanging out with. Don't you. Yeah, it just doesn't make any sense to me. So the left, which once touted itself as a bastion of free speech, when conservatives were running the universities nowadays, it's not so much, right. We can't have conservative-speech on campus.

[00:05:19] We're going to protest, we're going to riot. We're going to make anything possible to make a free speech. More available. We're going to get rid of it. We're going to stop it, which is really concerning to me. So that's why I had to print this up, right? Yeah.

[00:05:37] Yeah. We're going to get into the online collaboration tools. I think it's an important thing for us to discuss, but so is this so Google ban of the website, Zero Hedge from its ad platform. That's Demonetization. And in other words, zero hedge, if it was reliant on ads from Google, which it was in order to generate revenue can no longer generate revenue from that side.

[00:06:09] Now the part of the problem is as a conservative or libertarian, we look at it and say, okay, well, Google has the right to do, basically whatever it wants with his platform. That's our knee jerk reaction. Of course, the less knee jerk reaction is that that's evil. You can't. No, no, you can't do that. You can't do that.

[00:06:31] You can't have that speech. Well, The problem we have right now when we're starting to see this President Trump's been talking about it. But the problem that we have right now is Google and Facebook and Twitter. Some of these other platforms are protected under the law as an open forum. So if somebody says something on one of those sites that are offensive, or maybe even would normally be considered, something that under tort law could be prosecuted.

[00:07:07] It doesn't matter because they are protected. So now here they are, they're protected from publishing people, publishing things on their platforms that other people might be offended by, or that might be against the law, frankly, Frankly, any other platform and they are censoring what's being said. So in this case, Google ban of Zero Hedge from its ad platform.

[00:07:36] Over comments that were made on articles about the riots that are going on. No, of course, you know, the news. If they reported it at all, NBC reported it as a Google's banning website, Zero Hedge from its ad platform over comments on protest. Again, civil libertarians conservatives were all for free speech.

[00:08:01] If you want to have a group of people in the streets, protesting something, by all means, please do it. It's part of free speech. It's part of what so many lives have been lost over so much. Blood has been shed over in this country is free speech. So do it.

[00:08:21] However, writing doesn't fit in. So Google said, because of things, users have commented because of things that comments have said on your platform, we're going to ban you now.

[00:08:38] Behind this is also NBC. Apparently it was NBC that reported this to Google saying, ah, people who are saying bad things about the protests going on, they're calling them riots and rioters, and we've got to stop that. In other words, one so-called news platform complaining about another news platform.

[00:09:14] To get them to put out of business because that's effectively what happens when you're demonetized. So when we get back, I got a little bit more to talk about this here. this is something else because guess what? It's not just Zero Hedge. It's the Federalist, another conservative online. News site so stick around.

[00:09:36] We'll be right back. This is Craig Peterson and online Craig peterson.com.

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