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

[2021-06-19 Week #1118] The Columbia lawsuit. This is just amazing. I've been telling businesses for a long time that insurance companies just are not paying out on many of these claims, the insurance companies come back to you after you've been hacked, or you had ransomware and you try and file a claim and say, okay, so no problem. [00:00:20] Now you met all of these qualifications, right? And they have this big checklist. Everything. And I bet you most companies, if you have not seen this list would be totally surprised by what the insurance companies are requiring of you now, the same thing's true of home users. If you look in your home policy homeowner's policy, you probably see something in there that says ransomware or computer failures, et cetera. [00:00:53] And they will cover dependent on your policy. Some amount of money, maybe it's 10 grand, five grand could be a lot of different things and it's not terribly expensive. Now you got to ask yourself, why is it so cheap, particularly when there are so many viruses, ransomware, Trojans, fishing, all of these things out there in the wild. [00:01:15] And from a business standpoint, it costs a lot more. I know my business is paying a lot of money for the insurance. But we go through in detail, everything that's right there in the policy. And we even ask for a list of everything kind of separate list, so that we know what exactly they want. So we've got to check the list and I can send it to, if you want, just go ahead and email me. [00:01:40] So if you have a a hack, if you have ransomware and you have insurance, you're probably going to file against the insurance, right? Because looking at all of these numbers, a medium, a small, medium business is going to be. But not a pocket about one and a half million dollars. And that's, if they're not paying the ransom, it's really expensive is difficult. [00:02:04] And if you're a home user, oh my, you are, will never get your information back. You have maybe a 50% chance if you pay the ransom of getting. Your stuff back. Think about all the photos you have on your hard desk, all of the letters, all of the emails, same trick for business and to business. It's not just all of the emails, it's your contracts, it's your plans, your intellectual property, everything that you can think of that's out there. [00:02:33]Getting it back. So this is interesting when we look at this. Company it's called cottage healthcare systems. They filed a claim of more than $4 million against a breach. Now that is a fair amount of money, but it is not unreasonable for a medium-sized company. The SBA, the small business administration says that if you're under 10 million in revenue, then you are a small business under 200 employees, right? [00:03:05] It has those levels. So think of it that way, right? A small business is not necessarily just some home users. You can have some serious money involved in a small business. So they had claimed here this again, cottage health care systems that they had been just totally protected. At least not from the cybersecurity standpoint, but from the insurance standpoint. [00:03:32] And for years, software vendors have assume that they can take that security risk and push it on to their customers. We're seeing this a lot in the medical business with doctor's offices. They've got these HIPAA regulations and they've got all kinds of private information. Plus they have payment card industry regulations that they have to fall under or agreement because they have credit card and other billing information. [00:04:00] And of course the billing information that's going to the insurance company has to be protected as well. And these doctor's offices are making a very bad assumption that somehow they don't have to worry about it. And the reason they don't have to worry about it is it's quite simple because I'm using a cloud service. [00:04:20]Have you heard that before? Do you know anybody that said that? So I'm using the cloud thing now. Yeah. Yeah. I'm using salesforce.com for a regular business for your customer relationship management or all of these patient management systems that are out there. Now there's some, I'm just shocked that. [00:04:37] Won't charge the doctor's office, anything. And yet they'll keep all of the client records for the doctor and supposedly keep it safe. Maybe they will, maybe they won't. And then also on top of all of that, they'll do the billing and that's how they make their money because they shave a percentage off of every bill that they issue to the health insurance carriers. [00:05:03]So these doctors are sitting there saying I'm using these online services. I've got Microsoft office email. I've got whatever it might be. Google has of course their professional emails too. And when those guys get hacked on fine, because they had my data. Reality is no, that is absolutely not true. [00:05:26] And we've seen software companies, ship products. We've seen these cloud services deliver services with known vulnerabilities and expect the customer using the service or using the software to absorb all of the risk. And then the vendor of the services or software is protected from loss by. It's insurer. [00:05:50] So this is called shifting risk and the software companies can delay fixing vulnerabilities in their code and maintain their release schedules because they're sitting there pretty thinking, oh, I'm fine. There's no problem here. I got my insurance and it's fine that the customer, that shrink wrap agreement, or maybe even it's a contract that was signed, which is more true for doctors, offices and regular businesses. [00:06:16] Says that the doctor's office has a liability. I'm afraid to have to inform everybody here that you cannot shift that liability. The insurance company is not on hook for covering the damage. And this is a very big deal. And what I'm talking about is this insurance company called Columbia casualty, their division of this industry giant called CNA, which is a course in the insurance business. [00:06:47] Oh, that's what they do. So they had paid out. This four mill Morton for a million dollar claim and their suit that was filed by the insurance company against cottage healthcare systems said that they hadn't kept their security controls up to date. And. When a breach occurred, they tried to put the insurance company on the hook to cover all of the damages. [00:07:15] I've got a copy up on my screen right now from health it security.com. Talking about this. This is a, an older articles is in 2015, but even then we knew that you cannot fall back on your insurance. And that's why, again, that's why the rates are so cheap, right? They're just not paying out. So the suit is still underway and it's something we've got to pay close attention to because the court case documents are saying that Columbia quote, six declaration, that it has no duty to defend our identity and indemnify cottage in the underlying action. [00:07:55] Or the department of justice proceedings. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. They're DOJs in on this as well. So they had to end their practice of what they were doing and frankly, keeping systems up to date, having the minimum required practices, including yep. Replacing just basic stuff. Default settings in their it environment, checking for vendor supplied security patches, implementing the patches within, 30 days, something reasonable. [00:08:25] Most of us delay putting patches in place for least a week. You guys you're the best and brightest, if you put a patch in. The Jess came out, it might make things a little unstable, right? So a lot of us wait for, I think good reason, frankly. So the bottom line is this is again, over the course of seven years here, insurers understand that not all breaches are inevitable. [00:08:52] And that the companies here, the healthcare companies, the software vendors, the cloud vendors have to do more to protect their clients. But from what I'm seeing, it just is not happening. It's not happening at all. We are getting people who are looking at an equation differently than you or I do. Look at what happened with the colonial pipeline. [00:09:17] What do you think was happening in the board of directors meetings before the security breach? The same thing with TJX, same thing with home Depot, same thing with that, that meat packer, all of these guys. What do you think they were saying? They were saying, okay, Mr. It direct director. How much is it going to cost us to have good cyber security? [00:09:37] And the it director is going to say, okay we need some really great hardware. We need also software. We needed on all of the workstations. We need smart switches so we can trace things when they're inside the network. We need 24 hour manned security operation center with at least one person. [00:09:57] So that means four people, right? Because three people, plus people have to have vacations people go on training. I know my people spend at least a quarter of their time in training. Let me see that, over the course of a year, it's probably going to be five to $10 million minimum. And so the board of directors says five to 10 million. [00:10:17] Oh, okay. How much is it going to cost us? We get breached, oh, maybe 5 million. Forget it then we're not going to secure our systems. And I'm not saying that this is the conversation colonial had. I'm saying this is the type of conversations businesses are having and they should not be having, because frankly. [00:10:37] It is not only illegal because you are supporting terrorists by paying these ransoms, but you're hurting yourself and your customers stick around. [00:10:48]Craig Peterson: Tesla has a number of cars out. And these things I think are just totally cool. [00:10:53] My daughter ended up buying one she's over Norway. So of course it was heavily subsidized by the Norwegian government. They get a 25% discount. Yeah. That actually is Tax. Yeah, so they don't have to pay the sale

[As heard on WGAN on 2021-06-16-wgan] Did you notice on your IRS tax forum this year? The very first question. Yes. The government is starting to crack down on cryptocurrency transactions. We just found out about what the FBI did. There's a whole lot there. And then also this morning, Tesla versus Volkswagen, completely different ideas and methodologies for your next autonomous and even electric car. How might things turn out for us? So here we go. [00:00:35] Aaron Chadborn: [00:00:35] This is Aaron Chadbourne in for Matt on the WGAN morning news, and we are excited to be joined now as we are every week by Craig Peterson. Craig. Good morning. [00:00:45] Craig Peterson: [00:00:45] Hey, good morning. [00:00:45] Aaron Chadborn: [00:00:45] Sure. So with Biden meeting with Putin, obviously we've been dealing with the Russian hackers. [00:00:51]One thing that I've always understood about cryptocurrency and why it's become so popular is because these payments are untraceable. And we've seen that these ransomware attacks they've asked for payment in Bitcoin, but now they're turning up and investigations with the announcement by the FBI that they've reclaimed the cryptocurrency that was paid. [00:01:10] What's going on, Craig. [00:01:11] Craig Peterson: [00:01:11] Yeah, this is a very interesting problem because initially Bitcoin value came because of a bunch of illegal maneuvers. These guys were trading Bitcoin back and forth to each other and would pay a little bit more every time. They were pulling money from the same pot, manipulating the value of bitcoin to try and get it to be worth something right? When you're paying thousands of Bitcoin for a pizza, it tells you something. So next up, what we had is the next major momentum for Bitcoin was ransomware. In fact, if you look at the value of Bitcoin and compare it to the amount of ransomware that's out there and how much people are paying in ransom, they go hand in hand because of what you just said, Aaron. [00:02:02] People look at it and think, oh wow, it's "crypto" currency, it cannot be traced. Now I've sat in briefings with the secret service, where they went through exactly how they trace Bitcoin. And this time with the whole colonial pipeline hack, the FBI has actually come out and told us how they have tracked it. [00:02:25] Bitcoin is moderately anonymous. It's like cash, frankly. It can be traced. It was traced. The Bitcoin from the colonial pipeline hack was found in California of all places. And the, these guys are not safe. So as soon as the FBI announced that they had gotten back more than half of what colonial pipeline had paid, the value of Bitcoin dropped, but then Bitcoin went back up again. Why? [00:02:56] While the meat packing company that we've all heard about getting hacked and maybe losing our meat, we had a little bit of a rush. They paid $11 million Bitcoin, and we have businesses now who are putting in their public filings with the securities and exchange commissions indications. [00:03:15] In fact, the absolute declaration. They have been buying Bitcoin in case they get hacked. There's a counter for, oh my gosh. Who got hack. Okay. We've already got the Bitcoin. All of this drives up the price and it is not secure in that you don't really know. Who has it forget about it? They can track it depending right there. [00:03:39] There's some dependencies here [00:03:41] Aaron Chadborn: [00:03:41] I wondered, though weather. There was this drop, obviously because it, the mystique and the idea that it couldn't be traced, but part of the hesitancy. Of, reputable finance authorities to, to acknowledge Bitcoin and say that they're going to accept cryptocurrencies was this idea that it could be used for these purposes, but this idea that it is traceable, maybe it speeds up the broader scale adoption of cryptocurrency. [00:04:00]Craig Peterson: [00:04:00] It might absolutely. It has no inherent value. It's just the value people place on it, but you know what. I just described our U S currency. You can turn it in for silver anymore. You certainly can't do it. And for gold anymore, the value in it is what we place in it. And the whole idea behind cryptocurrency and the way the blockchain works behind it is to build trust in it. [00:04:24] We trust it. We know about it. Governments are taxing it. In fact, this year, first question on your IRS. Forum was about Bitcoin, frankly. And have you had any of these transactions? The government is now going after all of these trading institutions that are dealing in it. And now these institutions are providing the IRS with information about any transactions, more than $10,000, in cryptocurrencies, not just Bitcoin, but any of them. So they are cracking down. China sees this as a huge opportunity and has been pushing their own cryptocurrency and they've been pushing it very hard. To become the international standard in trade of oil instead of the us dollar. So we're going to get something you saw on Facebook. [00:05:13] They were going to do their own thing with a cryptocurrency that kind of fell by the wayside. Other companies have as well, but it is something that desktops and governments worldwide really want to do because it makes everything entirely traceable allows them to print money. Like that just by adding a little bit more into their crypto pipeline, [00:05:35] Aaron Chadborn: [00:05:35] you're listening to the WGA and morning news. [00:05:38] This is Aaron infer, Matt chatting with Craig Peterson, who you can catch every Saturday from one to three right here on WGAN Craig, another topic I know you wanted to dive into, has to do with. Automakers trying to figure out these advanced features for autonomous driving, how they can capitalize office and whether they can charge kind of software as a service type payments. [00:05:57] What are you seeing with this announcement from Volkswagen? [00:06:00] Craig Peterson: [00:06:00] Yeah, this is an interesting one because many people know about Tesla. There are other electric cars out there and there are regular. Cars, let go. A Cadillac did a few years ago with their high-end cars driving down the freeway. [00:06:14] Basically it was a cruise control using radar to keep the proper distance Virginia and the cars in front of you. There was a lot of them out there and Tesla charges you for the autonomous driving. They said that from the beginning an extra fee. Do you want that feed? Do you want to pay for the Tesla? [00:06:34] And that's what Volkswagen has been trying to figure out. And they just had a board meeting and the board they were discussing. Do we want to have a $50,000 of. Bill or check out underneath the hood of the car, if you will for features people don't want. And so they're saying instead of having this this new plaid version of the Tesla model S which is totally cool, by the way, at 120 grand, what should we do? [00:07:01] Because we're the people's car. Volkswagen's looking at putting all of the features into their new cars, all these auto driving features and the fancy cruise controls and things, and then having a golden key. They're all there, but you can't use them until you pay for them, but they're taking an even different tact than Tesla is using. [00:07:22] They're saying. How about if we charge by the hour for the fees, if you're driving your car around town, you're not going to be using the autonomous mode. It just doesn't work yet. Some estimates are it's going to be 20 years before it's entirely reliable around town, but when you're on the highway, Would you pay $8 and 50 cents per hour to have the car drive you somewhere? [00:07:48] It's like an [00:07:48] Aaron Chadborn: [00:07:48] Uber driver, right? Do you value your automatic driver at the same way? You would an Uber driver? [00:07:53] Craig Peterson: [00:07:53] Exactly. You're right on [00:07:55] Aaron Chadborn: [00:07:55] Aaron Craig. If our listeners want to hear more, they can catch you every Saturday. One to three right here on WGAN for a tech talk. This is Aaron Chad. We're on for Matt on the WGAN morning news.

[As heard on WTAG, WHYN, WHJJ 2021-06-15] Hey, we've got this meeting between Presidents Biden and Putin, and I have some serious words for our President. I've got some opinions about our federal bureaucracy when it comes to cybersecurity and Mr. Jim Polito pulled them out of me this morning. [00:00:18] Jim Polito: [00:00:18] So here we go. Hey, every week on Tuesday, we have the honor of my next guest. [00:00:26] And he is the tech talk guru, as far as I'm concerned, Craig Peterson an all around great guy here, just in time, Craig to save Joe Biden, you're going to be the advisor to Joe Biden. How do you like that? [00:00:44] Craig Peterson: [00:00:44] I already have a good job. I don't want to work. [00:00:48] Jim Polito: [00:00:48] Listen. I know that Canada day is just two weeks away and you're preparing, you're stocking up on Molson and Labatt's and moose head. [00:00:57] I know you're stocking up on all of that, and I know you've got a lot going on, but you could give Joe Biden some advice. He's going to sit across. And look into the eyes of Latta mere Putin. And as far as I'm concerned, Vladimir Putin knows exactly what the cyber hackers in his country are doing. So what does Joe Biden say to the man who's at the top of the cyber hacking, uh, pyramid. [00:01:33] Craig Peterson: [00:01:33] By the way I am sending out an email today, I put together a little video training for everyone. Who's on my email list on how to stop these Russian hackers. It's 95%. Effective. Okay. But the here's the advice I would give him. First of all, he needs to pull back what he said to the bladder, because just a couple of days ago where president Putin came out and said, Hey, listen, you know, we'd be more than glad to extradite these people to the U S you just need to extradite terminals back to Russia as well. [00:02:06] And Joe Biden seems to have given us tacit approval for that. The reason I say that is if you look at what we've done here in the us, We have indicted Chinese military officials for hacking into our computer systems. So when you hear president Putin say things like that, you are sure he has in the back of his mind. [00:02:31] The same thing that we did, which is I'm going to ask you to extradite your military hackers, because we do have them, every branch of service had Packers. Absolutely. So I think what the president Biden should do when he's talking with gluten is say, Hey, listen, I'm going to reopen the Keystone pipeline over all the guy who was doing it says I've given up now. [00:02:58] It's ridiculous. And I am going to continue to put pressure on Merkel and others to not allow oil. From Russia into their countries because it is war. We are at war we can continue or continue to just capitulate to these people. No, [00:03:17] Jim Polito: [00:03:17] we're talking with Craig Peterson, a tech talk guru. And, um, while I said it in a joking way, I knew he would take it seriously. [00:03:24] Yeah. Um, This trade of, I, I brought it up earlier, a trade of prisoners. I mean, Biden is running circles around him by, by bringing [00:03:35] Craig Peterson: [00:03:35] that up. Yeah. Putin has really, really out of played a president Biden. It's very, very unfortunate. And when you look at a war, for instance, there's skirmishes, you have battles here and there and. [00:03:51] People die. You are really trying to hurt the economy. Uh, I, I hate to say it, but that's why you shoot someone with a small caliber weapon. You want to wound the, the opponent so that they now have to have three to five people behind the lines to get that opponent back to help that soldier. Well, what happens here in the us, we lost, we were colonial pipeline for a week and say, goodness, near in the Northeast, we didn't really feel it because we had just, I mean, just had all of our tanks filled up by colonial. [00:04:28] Down in New Jersey. Cause the way they do it, as they staged deliveries, the south didn't do that. So how much did they hurt us and our economy by doing that? I would say they heard us more than many of the skirmishes we've had over the years. Not in depth in lives loss, which of course is just completely incalculable, but certainly the damaged door. [00:04:53] Yeah. [00:04:54] Jim Polito: [00:04:54] I mean, it's been, it's been terrible. And so you see the thing is that, you know, and I know I'm asking you to step out of the tactical world into the world of international diplomacy, but you've got a guy sitting there who you and I both know has. Control over these individuals who Putin wanted them to stop. [00:05:17] He could make them disappear, like, like, like that could make them disappear. So how do you, how do we just quietly? Behind the scenes continue to strengthen our offensive abilities as cyber attackers, and that we encourage all of our private industry to harden themselves to cyber attacks. [00:05:46] Craig Peterson: [00:05:46] All right, here we go. [00:05:48] Hopefully you're still sitting down Jaya. [00:05:54] Here's the, here's the really big issue as I see it, I strongly suspect cause I've been watching what our government does and you know, I have a little bit of an insight track, not my battle. And that, that helps me to understand a little bit about what's going on. Is he, if the Biden administration can continue to literally approve of some of these hacks, let's just play this game through a little bit, a war games. [00:06:26] If we are all worried that we're going to be attacked. And we're not seeing the software that does not protect you. People like, you know, the McAfee and the Norton antivirus, et cetera. It's not going to protect you enough. We've got Microsoft conditioned us now to the point where we don't want to install up. [00:06:49] Because it's finished mess up her computer and we're going to be down for a week or two or three or four while we try and figure it out. Right. So if they can get us to the point where we're saying, this is a huge problem, and we've already been conditioned that if it's a big problem, it must be a federal government problem. [00:07:07] Because it's a big problem. Yeah. So now we need this federal government to step in and take over all of our networks, take over all of our security monitor. Exactly what's going on because here's what I do. I write these, you know, I do cybersecurity and I am tied in with Cisco. That's, who we use. They are the best out there for so many things. [00:07:31] And Cisco's looking at almost a trillion. Transactions a day. We're talking about emails, website visits, et cetera, et cetera. And the reason they're so effective is because they can take all of this data that they're gathering from their customers. Now, Cisco doesn't send any of your data, just sends what are called check sums up, but it's looking at what's going on across all of these networks. [00:07:56] And it says, okay, Here's what's up right now. And it immediately tells all of the equipment, the Cisco equipment all over the country. Okay. Block this. Now, if you have the right system come in and it's blocked. So what would happen is if we get to the point where we're on bended knee and, and asking you, please president Biden protect us and they now decide, okay, well, we're going to propose. [00:08:20] Correct. You quote unquote, they're going to have to provide robes that live on our computers, Jim, that computer there in your studio, the computer that's in front of everyone out there right now, even people listening on the iHeart radio app or whatever app or whatever website, those mobile devices are going to have federal government software on them. [00:08:44] Wow. Where do you think that leaves us? [00:08:48] Jim Polito: [00:08:48] Yeah, it leads us to more vulnerability. [00:08:53] Craig Peterson: [00:08:53] More vulnerability. Yes, exactly. From maybe, maybe you trust president and Biden, but how about the next administration or the next illustration? Right. It's win, win. And I hate to bring up the national socialists in Germany, but when the national socialists took over, there were already lists of people who would have been prepared by the prior government that had guns that could defend themselves that were trained and they were rounded up. [00:09:19] First, right? Yep. So the officials put into place. It makes it, so now we have a potential real big problem. So let's look at what's happened with China and Russia when it comes to very valuable information. For instance, wouldn't you, if you were a foreign adversary like China, what didn't you love to have all of the information from all of the background checks of every federal employee. [00:09:46] Wouldn't you love to know who works for who, where they are, their family situation, everything, uh, China stole it from us already. Yeah, they have it. Okay. And, and that's the sort of thing that the bad guys go for. So if we don't pull up our socks ourselves, yeah. It's not going to change. So let's look at colonial. [00:10:09] How long you were paid, how much ransom [00:10:11] Jim Polito: [00:10:11] was it? 5 million, I think where you're talking about in Bitcoin. Yeah, [00:10:16] Craig Peterson: [00:10:16] absolutely. It was like a four and a half give or take $5 million. Absolutely. Right. Yeah. And the meat Packers, you know, they paid about 11 million. Yeah. I read [00:10:25] Jim Polito: [00:10:25] that. I read that. Yup. And which is, as you have said, that's the worst thing you can do cause you just painted a, a, um, a bullseye [00:10:35] Craig Peterson: [00:10:35] on your back. [00:10:36] And the Trump administration said, you pay ransoms, you are supporting terrorism, and we're going to come after you with the justice department. The byte administration says [00:10:48] what's 5 million. Yeah. Look at an equation that of that of a perverted person would have in their heads. Uh, the equation is okay. So cost colonial, let's say $5 million plus obviously time and materials to get everything back in

There is a simple way to stop most Russian Ransomware. I'm going to show you why it works and how to do it. Ransomware is a bigger problem than we've seen in years. We're talking about triple the number of ransomware payouts this last year. And the cost of ransomware has doubled when we include what's your pain, as well as the loss of business. And the loss of reputation. It is absolutely huge, but you know what? There is a quick and easy trick that I'm going to show you right now that will stop most of the ransomware. Hey, we know the ransomware's primarily coming from Russia. China has obviously some attempts to get into our networks. We've seen that before personally, but Russia is really the source of much of this ransomware. And what's happening with the Russian ransomware is these guys just don't want to go to jail. They don't want to go to jail. So they don't attack any Russian countries or any of the affiliates to the Russian countries in order to do that, they have to make sure that when that ransomware gets onto your machine, there is no way for that ransomware to. In fact of the machine, if you're in Russia, because they don't want to end up in Russian jails, but it's not just Russia. It's the OIC, it's all of these countries that used to be part of the Soviet union. So the quick and easy trick that they're using in order to keep themselves out of Russian prisons is to check to see if there is a keyboard that support Russian or any of these other. Oh, I see. Languages. We're just going to stick with Russian. Cause that's the simplest. If you look right now on your screen, you'll see how you can do this. With windows and windows 10. So you're going to want to bring up your settings. You can see I've got them pulled up here on the screen. You're going to just select region and language, which is right under date and time. And now you're going to look at the right side of that screen because what we want to do now is select a language. We're going to add a new language you can see on here. I've already got a U S English and Canadian English. Yes. There is a difference. And what you're going to do now is click on, add a language and you're going to select the language from any of these countries. So it could be Bela Reuss. It could be obviously Russia. There could be Estonia Armenia. You need to have one of these languages on there. Now you might already have Spanish for instance, installed on your computer. That might mean, you know how to do it already, but just go right here. You're going to go ahead once you're there. And select the Bosnian Serbian Azerbaijani. I would select Russian just because it's the simplest. What will happen now is if this Russian malware gets over onto your computer, the first thing it does is check. Is there, uh, an OAC keyboard? And is there a Russian, are there any of these other languages, if there is. It immediately exits and it does not install the ransomware at all. Talk it about a cheap and easy to do, do this. And you're safe from probably 90% of all, all of that malware that's out there. Certainly almost all of the Russian malware. To find out more, just visit me online Craig peterson.com. And if you subscribe to my newsletter there, you'll be able to get my weekly newsletter that has all kinds of tips and tricks. And what's in the news this week. Again, Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Thanks for being with me. Bye. Bye .

[As Heard On WGIR WQSO WKXL on 2021-06-14] Hey, we just found out that Bitcoin is very traceable. So I talked about that this morning, as well as what's happening with autonomous vehicles -- big announcement from Waymo and JB Hunt with Mr. Chris, Ryan, just this morning. Here we go. [00:00:16] Chris Ryan: [00:00:16] Joining us right now is Craig Peterson. He is the host of tech talk on news radio,610 and 96.7, 11:30 on Saturday and Sundays. [00:00:27] Craig, how are you? [00:00:28] Craig Peterson: [00:00:28] Hey, I am doing great this morning. [00:00:30] Chris Ryan: [00:00:30] So we've been teasing Bitcoin with your appearance today. And one of the major attractions to Bitcoin was that it was viewed by many as being untraceable, right? You couldn't tell where the money went. And it was used to as a method of payment that was not traceable by governments, not traceable by individuals or entities, but. [00:00:52] In the reporting that we saw on the colonial pipeline hacking Bitcoin was traceable. And a lot of that money, millions of dollars in fact, was retrieved from dark side. So how was it traced by the FBI? And is this something that signals to you that Bitcoin is in fact traceable and will be traced moving forward? [00:01:17] Craig Peterson: [00:01:17] I had a really interesting briefing that was given by the secret service. And this was a couple of years ago and they talked about how they went ahead and did trace Bitcoin. So we've been able to do it for a while. It's been a little difficult, but we've been working on it. What really surprised me this. [00:01:36] Time is the FBI has come out and given some serious detail on exactly what they did in order to track this Bitcoin. And in fact, a Bitcoin, wasn't a wallet in California. Not some foreign country and it's just fascinating to look at all the details, but yes, these cryptocurrencies are not completely untraceable. [00:02:04] If you want to use the money that's in your wallet, then you have a problem because the basic concept behind it and the technology behind it is something called blockchain. And these blockchains require basically a ledger. It's like just like a book. He would have a ledger of all of the monies that he's owed or perhaps that he owes to somebody else that ledger isn't just in that piece, safe, hidden, underground somewhere when it comes to Bitcoin, that ledger is everywhere. [00:02:34] There are multiple like a hundreds of copies of it. And that is how you can validate Bitcoin itself. You have to have this ledger. It has to be in a lot of hands. And now the FBI has figured out some very clever ways to reverse engineer that ledger to find out where the money is. [00:02:55] Chris Ryan: [00:02:55] Another couple of things. [00:02:56] I want to talk a little bit about self-driving trucks and self-driving cars. And, one of the main reasons that in my view, the technology has existed that self-driving cars and trucks have not been overly utilized to this point is that there is a fear that they're not going to be 100% effective. [00:03:18] In other words, one may crash. And if one crash is particularly at the beginning and causes a problem, then that's going to create a ripple effect afterwards. And we're starting to see self-driving trucks. In fact, there's going to be a self-driving car. A truck we're going to be hauling loads in Texas D company J B hunt has announced that they're gonna be working with Waymo and they're going to have a driverless truck, which is going to operate on I 45 in Texas, taking cargo between Houston and Fort worth trucks is still going to have. [00:03:52] Humans onboard a truck driver as well as technicians. So this in my view is the precursor to the future. And we're going to see driverless vehicles, which will still have the driver in it, but it's going to basically operate like a plane would where you can put the plane on autopilot. Cars will be put on. [00:04:13] Autopilot, but we're going to have a individual who is going to be there. The driver's gonna be encouraged not to go to sleep, et cetera, but they are going to be able to do quote unquote distracted driving and have the vehicle, on autopilot and even think about the technology that exists. [00:04:28] Today, just in terms of the cameras that allow for you to back up into the, a particular space or the sensors that let you know that there's a vehicle to your left or to your right, the technology exists within the vehicle for this to take place. Right now, the concern has always been. Would it be, 100% factive and would there be problems with the cameras? [00:04:52] What if you lose your GPS signal? And the vehicle, it is in a state where it can no longer be driven and there's connectivity problems. But to me, we're there and this is an interesting experiment. [00:05:03] Craig Peterson: [00:05:03] It's really interesting. And these autonomous vehicles have already driven millions of miles. [00:05:10] So this is what we've always predicted to be the first step towards having really fully autonomous vehicles for all of us staff. Of course, we've got Elon Musk out there promising that. They're going to have fully autonomous. You can just have a nap, hypotonic Amos for his Tesla vehicles by the end of the year. [00:05:29] And then the, his main technology guy poo-pooed it pretty quickly and pushed it out a couple of years with this, that the trucks and tying it all together, going between Houston Fort worth, which has quite a ways to go. We're seeing the very first industry that's likely to be completely automated. [00:05:50] Now, Waymo, we know you've heard about this before has been operating a taxi service just outside of Phoenix. You might remember the car accident that happened, and the lady that was killed by one of these autonomous vehicles with a human driver behind it. But what we're looking at now is going to be phenomenal. [00:06:10] This is pretty much a straight road. If there's any road in the U S it's a road between those two cities, Houston Fort worth and Texas. That is a great one to try. We're thinking that we will be seeing a long haul trucks. Driving themselves, except for the last mile, of course, being the tougher part. [00:06:31] In other words, they would go to just like you might commute to Boston. For instance, they would go to a community area. They parked themselves, a local driver would get in and start driving. But this is huge and is completely different than for instance, what Volks and is predicting or hoping might happen do with the autonomous vehicles. [00:06:53] Chris Ryan: [00:06:53] Craig. Thank you so much. All right. Take care. Craig Peterson joining us here on New Hampshire today.

A Whole Class of "Free" Apps Found Exposing You -- and Our Nuclear Secrets As heard on 2021-06-09 on WGAN Using some of these free apps can be a very bad way to try and keep your information private. So much of it ends up out on the internet where anyone can get their hands on it. And that's what we just found now about the military. Again. Now we've got nuclear secrets out. There. And apparently some of them have been out there now for almost a decade, just because some people were trying to use a free app to memorize things. [00:00:29]I got into that this morning with Mr. Matt, [00:00:31] Matt Gagnon: [00:00:31] 7:36 on WGAN morning news on Wednesday morning. Thanks for listening friends. It's time to talk to Craig Peterson who joins us at this time every week. And. You can always hear him on Saturdays at one o'clock for his own show on this ferry station, where he talks about these topics in more depth of detail. [00:00:48] Craig, how are you this morning? [00:00:49]Craig Peterson: [00:00:49] I am doing great. Matt, [00:00:51] Matt Gagnon: [00:00:51] Craig, explain something to me please. On Monday, I was sitting here doing my job, trying to read the news. Going around the internet. And I came across a couple of things I wanted to read, clicked on them. CNN article MSNBC, article a few others. And I got this error message. [00:01:10] I'm sorry, the internet doesn't work anymore. And I got it for about 10 different places. I was trying to go for a couple hours actually. So it was a pretty big outage. What happened? Why did it happen and how do we not have this happen again? [00:01:23]Craig Peterson: [00:01:23] Frankly, I'm a little surprised it doesn't happen more often. [00:01:26] Yeah. If you lived in the UK, the entire UK government websites went down, all of them, uk.gov or kind, I should say at one downer as well as gov is absolutely amazing. Actually, I got those backwards. It was anyways. What happened was one of the major providers of web hosting had a major problem, and this was not a hack. [00:01:54] It wasn't ransomware, et cetera, by the looks of it at this point. But what happens when you go to a website is you're connecting to a server somewhere. Now, normally let's say you've got your local soccer club and they have a website that is hosted. Maybe it's on Amazon. Maybe it's just hosted locally. [00:02:14] Somebody right here in Maine and they've got it in their little data center. So if someone in the UK or South Africa or California wants to go to the soccer club website, they're going to Maine in order to get at it because that's where the servers hosted. So the problem is that means you now have all kinds of delays because the data has to travel through much of the internet. [00:02:40]What we've come up with is something called content delivery networks, and there's a number of them out there. Some are bigger, some are smaller. And what w what companies do is they put major portions of the website. So for instance, if you go to Craig peterson.com, that site, we hosted here locally, and. [00:02:59] All of the graphics and all of the videos that are on that website are actually delivered to you over a content delivery network. So your in Portland, for instance, you will get those pictures from my website, those videos from my website, all of that large content from a, hopefully a data center really close to where you're at and someone in California is going to get it from a data center, close to where they're at. [00:03:26] It really speeds things up. So the problem was all of these sites that weren't up and online were having problems because the content delivery network they were using, which consists of 80 servers centers all over the world, it had a bug probably from distributing a new release of software and it stopped working. [00:03:50] So it was down for a little more than an hour. This was just a normal situation. I'm not going to use that acronym. And it's something that happens and happened before. It'll probably happen again. So this was not one of those attacks from Russia or China or anybody else. [00:04:08]Matt Gagnon: [00:04:08] Speaking of attacks from Russia, that's maybe a nice little segue into the second question I had for you, Craig, because obviously we're seeing cyber attacks happen more frequently. [00:04:17] And right now us intelligence is probing. Whether or not the Russians Vladimir Putin, et cetera, are testing the Biden administration. Of course, not even a year old yet. With a lot of these cyber attacks to see what's going to happen to see how they're going to react to it. And you're going to have a meeting coming up between Biden and Putin here. [00:04:33]This is all part of a larger geopolitical context. Don't need you to comment on that, but I would love to get your thoughts on what exactly. Nation to nation, cyber warfare looks like these days and exactly what's going on here? What are they up to? [00:04:46]Craig Peterson: [00:04:46] It really looks in fact, we are in a war, right? [00:04:49] We've said that before the first shots of world war three have already been fired and it's online and we had energy secretary, Jennifer Granholm on Sunday. Warning us all that the us power grid is vulnerable to attack. So CNN is Jake Tapper and say to the union said, are we safe? Can our adversaries shut it down? [00:05:13] And grand said, yes, they, they can. And in fact, They do. The first one I remember was back in 2004, I was down in Connecticut. Hadn't done in New York city and the power grid went offline. And apparently that was a task based on all of the research that was done after the fact they were seeing, can we get into the power grid? [00:05:35] They actually didn't mean to shut it down, but they didn't really know what they were doing. And they brought it down so fast forward to today from 2000. Four. And we are seeing a whole lot of hacking going on against all kinds of infrastructure. We've got the meat packing plants, right? We've had the power, we've had water purification plants. [00:05:57] We've had of course colonial pipeline. And in fact it's difficult to defend against now whether or not. Putin is testing us is a very good question. I suspect he is, we talked to him on my show and talked last week about using Russian keyboards to stop the ransomware attacks because. [00:06:18] The ransomware, first thing it does is check to see, is there a Russian or Russia affiliated keyboard? If there is a short circuits, in other words, they don't want to attack Russian systems. They are definitely attacking our systems. And the attacks that I just mentioned were very directed attacks. These weren't the normal ones. [00:06:39] These weren't the ones where they're casting a wide net. Pulling anything up they can, and then taking advantage of it. These were direct attacks against various parts of our infrastructure. They were coordinated. They were thought through very carefully. So I think the answer to that is, yeah they are testing us. [00:07:00]The question is why. [00:07:01]Matt Gagnon: [00:07:01] Good question. Finally, Greg, before I let you go, I want to ask you about the flashcard thing here. The U S soldiers were exposing nuclear weapons, secrets via flashcard apps. I saw this story a little while ago. And I meant to click on it to learn more, but I didn't. [00:07:19] So you're going to educate me here a little bit on this and tell me a little bit about what happened. What is the deal here [00:07:23] Craig Peterson: [00:07:23] about this? We have military personnel who have to memorize things and particularly those personnel who are around the nuclear. And so they've got to memorize it. [00:07:34] And how do you memorize? You use flashcards, works really well. That's what I used in college as well. So this is all about rote learning. And the problem that we're seeing here is something we've seen before with the military. They're using standard apps for flashcards and those apps they've loaded in all of these questions about the locations of our nuclear weapons the disbursement patterns of them, everything you can think of about our weapon. [00:08:05] This sounds like a great idea, by the way. That's a great idea. So there's something called open source intelligence, and I've worked with them quite extensively in doing my. BI InfraGuard webinars that have been running, but these researchers go and see what they can find online. They found stashes of these cards with our nuclear secrets in them. [00:08:29] So it is a problem. It's a very big problem in the remind you of what happened with these these tracker watches that many people wear. That we're exposing where our secret bases were because these guys were jogging around the base, keeping track of all of that, to where they ran, how fast they ran, competing with their buddies, maybe on different bases or the same basis. [00:08:53] And all of that was being posted online. So even though there's no official base there, for some reason, there's a lot of people who are running a pattern that really looks a lot like a landing strip. [00:09:05]Matt Gagnon: [00:09:05] That's Craig Peterson, my friends. Thanks so much for joining us, Craig, as always, we appreciate you joining us and of course, make sure you listen to him on Saturdays as well. [00:09:12] Craig, talk to you next week. [00:09:14] Craig Peterson: [00:09:14] Absolutely. Take care.

[As Heard 2021-06-08 on WTAG, WHYN, WHJJ. Fastly CDN failure] Hi, so glad you are joining me today. I was speaking with Mr. Polito about a couple of different things. One, this problem you might have noticed with all of these major websites, CNN, all the way through the government of the United Kingdom going offline. So I explain how sites work on the larger scale site. And I also got into what happened here. What was the problem? [00:00:28] And then we got a little bit more into the question about Putin he's meeting with president Biden. As he been testing, president Biden. Some people really think that he has mean that Putin is trying to see how far he can go. So we get into that and I think I disprove the absolute certainty. [00:00:51] Some people have been expressing. [00:00:54] Jim Polito: [00:00:54] Right now, I want to get this guy on board. He is our good friend and tech talk guru, Craig Peterson. I think it was just recently the birthday of the man who's credited with inventing the internet. No, not Al gore. And I just want to remind you that if you're on the internet, you may be using, or part of your search on the internet may have. [00:01:16] Some code that was written by the great Craig Peterson and he joins us now. Good morning, sir. [00:01:24] Craig Peterson: [00:01:24] Good morning. Yeah. Back in the day. I remember when, [00:01:29] Jim Polito: [00:01:29] so let's get to this. Yeah, let's get to this. I want to get to Putin Biden and cyber attacks. And your take on that. But first we just had a, some kind of a crash of of a cloud, what out on the west coast. [00:01:47] But obviously when something like that happens, that affects all of these, right? [00:01:53] Craig Peterson: [00:01:53] Yeah. Yeah. It's something that Trump of Aqua knows a lot about. And [00:01:58]Jim Polito: [00:01:58] Please don't bring Tommy we'll be into this. It's certainly even, I know it's a different type of cloud. [00:02:06] Craig Peterson: [00:02:06] Oh, okay. Yeah. Here's what the happened to have here. [00:02:10]Let's talk about what happens with normal websites when things are working properly, there are distributed servers all over the world and this company, Fastly has 80 data centers located everywhere. And the idea is you go to one of these bigger websites and that website has a quick look at you saying, where are you? [00:02:31] Oh, okay. You're in Western mass. So we have a data center close to you. So now it's feeding the website, which is, the pictures and the texts and everything. It's feeding that website to you from Western mass. Does that make sense to have it come from California? It's going to slow it down and it's just going to be annoying. [00:02:54] Or if you're in Europe or South Africa, right? So these are all distributed data centers and they're called a content delivery network. And there's a few of them out there. I use one that Amazon provides Fastly has their own content delivery network, so that all of this content, particularly the big content, like if you're watching a video on CNN, that's going to be delivered. [00:03:19] Through Fastly is content delivery network somewhere close to you. That's the whole idea behind it. And apparently what happened this morning is just tons of major sites like Reddit, Spotify, Twitch, the UK government, Hulu HBO for a PayPal Vineo goes on and on CNN, New York times, BBC Bloomberg financial times all went offline. [00:03:43] And that was due to a problem with this content delivery network at Astley. And it looks like right now, according to everything I've seen out of Fastly this morning and researching it, that they had a bug and it wasn't a hack that they weren't hit with ransomware, but they had a bug in their content delivery network. [00:04:05] They were able to get it up and running in about an hour. It wasn't a big, long outage, and these are the types of things that happen with these very complex networks nowadays. It's amazing. It doesn't happen more often. [00:04:18] Jim Polito: [00:04:18] I'm glad to hear that from you that it's amazing to hear it doesn't happen more often. [00:04:22] I'm glad to hear that. Now let's get to something that is happening more often. More and more attacks out of Russia. And which Putin [00:04:31] Craig Peterson: [00:04:31] says, I don't know what they're all about. I have no [00:04:35] Jim Polito: [00:04:35] idea ask  squirrel, is protect, pretending he doesn't know anything about it. And but in fact he does is, and Putin and bind are gonna meet in the next few days is, the whole G seven summit is going on. [00:04:50] Is this Putin testing Biden? Like how much can I get away with. This guy pops my dog, does he will test the limits? Like how much can I get away with until they say, Hey, No sit or whatever. [00:05:06] Craig Peterson: [00:05:06] Yeah, this is this is a problem. W every time a president's coming to offer Obama was this way. [00:05:14]It happened to a lesser degree with Bush and others, and it did not happen at all with Trump. The Russians, the Chinese and others have tested the president of North Korea. If you look at China right now, flying over Taiwan. And in their air space, threatening our country by taking over Taiwan. [00:05:36] And we've talked about it before. That's where our major production of chips is when you're talking about this whole cyber security thing. And again, it smells like Russia. And the main reason that smells like Russia is this ransomware has killed switches in it. Let's say, if you have a Russian or one of a dozen other keyboards, then we will immediately stop and it doesn't install the software. [00:06:06] So there's two, two reasons. And I'm sending out an email about that with a little video training on how to put a virtual fresher keyboard on your computer to everyone that's on my email list. So if you're on my list, You're going to find out how to do it. It's very easy. And it's going to stop almost all of this Russian malware, but here's the big question. [00:06:28] Is it in fact, a the reason for this, because it's gluten and he doesn't want to mess around with all of these former Soviet states or is it bad guys saying I don't want to go to a Russian Gulag. We don't really know, but what we do know is what's your word just leading towards, which is we've had taxed against all of our major infrastructure. [00:06:54] Yeah, every piece of it. And we're seeing releases from the FBI that none of the infrastructure is safe. We've in fact had some statements about that. Look at the statement on CNN did last Sunday, two days ago, where one of the secretaries of the byte administration I forget her name now said that we are not safe. [00:07:16] Our infrastructure is not safe. And we've got rep Michael McCall from Texas saying that the cyber incursions absolutely are Poutine's way of testing, president Biden. How are we going to respond? Yeah. And it's a big, it's a big question, Jim, because if there's a missile that launches from Russian territory, we know where it launched from. [00:07:40] We can send something in and blow up that missile silo or whatever it might be. If there is a hack. And if it's a somewhat indiscriminant hack, which many of these are, but maybe even more directed hack, all we know is the tools they were using. Look like they were Russian. What is China? It's trying to convince us that it's Russia and is using these tricks and Russian tools. [00:08:08] Yes. You're getting it from [00:08:09] Jim Polito: [00:08:09] China, James Bond on me right now. Like specter would always like in, from Russia with love, make the free world think it was the right, the Soviets and make the Soviet thing. It's the free world. When, in fact, right in the middle. It's specter. Yeah. [00:08:25] It's it's right out of it's right out of the James Bond novels. [00:08:29]Craig Peterson: [00:08:29] Then how about Carver? Where he, tomorrow never dies. He's launching his own metals, trying to get both sides to fight. And we were warned decades ago about the military industrial complex. Yeah, exactly. That this is going to be a problem. [00:08:48] So let's throw that into the mix. Who's to say some nefarious guy, like the car for character from James Bond, isn't manipulated. We just don't know we can see fingerprints, but as we know for mission impossible, those can be faked [00:09:07] Jim Polito: [00:09:07] as well. Yeah. We're talking with correct. Greg Peterson, our tech talk guru and all around great guy. [00:09:12] And it is interesting. I know last week it was fascinating when you told us one of the ways to protect yourself from Russian hacking is to have this virtual rushing keyboard. And most of their hacking will ignore you because, okay. We don't want to go after one of our own, but you're saying, yeah, how do we know? [00:09:30] That's not the Chinese making it look like it's the Russians, you can't trust anybody. In this and my fear is, and we step out of tech now and we go into politics. My fear is that Biden is not considered a someone who's going to be tough on Right nations for doing this, that he's going to be weak and they just want to know to what extent can we get away with it? [00:09:55] And if they get away with it with this, then that's going to embolden them, say the Chinese oh, we're going to take time one. We're going to take Taiwan. What's she going to do? During the Obama Biden administration Putin took the Crimea. Boom just grabbed right now. This is ours, not yours. And we let it happen. [00:10:14]Craig Peterson: [00:10:14] They did respond, Jim president Obama said that he told them to [00:10:18] Jim Polito: [00:10:18] stop it. That was over the hacking of the election. Like I told them to stop it now. That's great. [00:10:26] Craig Peterson: [00:10:26] That's great. [00:10:28] Jim Polito: [00:10:28] Yeah. Yeah. We do know there's a response. Yeah, exactly. So [00:10:33] Craig Peterson: [00:10:33] there's only one thing we can do here, Jim. And that is

[2021-06-07-WGIR-WQSO] Apparently, I was a bit of a ratings Bonanza, yours truly? Yes, indeed. A couple of weeks ago when I was on the air and I told my story about my alien encounter with UFO. And the, we talked more this morning about UFO's and a little bit more also about the apparent this last weekend on CNN of energy, secretary, Jennifer Granholm, who talked about how our businesses are constantly under attack and our grid is in danger. [00:00:36] She even admitted that our grid electrical grid could be shut down by a foreign adversary. So here we go with Mr. Chris Ryan [00:00:47] Chris Ryan: [00:00:47] It's uh, Craig Peterson. The host of tech talk on news radio 610AM and 96.7FM Saturdays and Sundays at 11:30. Craig, how are you? [00:00:54] Craig Peterson: [00:00:54] Hey, I am doing well. [00:00:56] Chris Ryan: [00:00:56] Appreciate joining us. So let's start with this. [00:00:59] I don't want to do aliens each time with you, but given the fact that the second to last time you were on it was a ratings Bonanza. When you talked about the fact that you had experienced a an encounter with a UFO and we Scott the report or the leaking of what's potentially in the report from the New York times, we're all waiting this congressional report and indicates that we still don't know. [00:01:19]Is that problematic for you as somebody that has experienced a encounter and you have the documented visual evidence and the testimony of individuals in the Navy, or is it not? Because we can't make any clear determinations based upon the fact that we have. At least reportedly not have any evidence to indicate that there is extraterrestrial life on earth. [00:01:46]Craig Peterson: [00:01:46] It depends on what you define as evidence, right? There's the Roswell theory that somehow we were able to capture a crashed UFO with potentially aliens on board. That would be hard evidence. These types of videos that we're seeing are all in fact not just a visual videos, but they also include various other frequencies like ultraviolet, infrared. [00:02:12] They have really done some amazing things in the military in order to track potential enemy targets. So it's one thing to say that was a cloud. Formation or maybe it was the sun reflecting off of something that might be true in the visual spectrum, Chris. But when we're talking about all these other frequencies that we're also monitoring and we see things, and that includes like radar, for instance, which is not affected by any of these visual things that we might see in the sky ourselves. [00:02:42] Chris Ryan: [00:02:42] And the personal testimony as well. There was the there was the individual that was captain of the Naval ship that said there's basically daily occurrences that they would, or I shouldn't say daily currency. It was regular that they would see these types of phenomena and the pilots and everybody else. [00:02:58]In my view, the report is going to indicate that yes, these things are seen, but we can't clearly say who is responsible for it because we don't have the, that much evidence. I think that's the direction that the report is going. Your thoughts on that before we move on. [00:03:14] Yeah. We'd have to have our hands on it. [00:03:16] It's just like when I had the encounter I wasn't taking anything away from it. If all you're doing is observing it. Through multiple frequencies. Again, we know something was there. We know it could move in ways that we just can't imagine. Yes, absolutely. It's I obviously, I believe in these things, I saw them or I've seen them before. [00:03:39] My mother has seen them before. I know people personally who have had muddle encounters. I know people who say they can summon UFO's. And have them come down and I've seen the videos that they've taken it. This is a very interesting topic, but I agree with you again, Chris. I don't think anything totally earth shattering is going to come out of this. [00:04:01] It's going to be, yeah. We're seeing something, we have hard evidence that something was there, but there's no way to tell exactly what it [00:04:08] was Beth. And I'm jealous of the people that can summon UFO's. Cause I don't feel like you have any real power until you can summon a UFO Avenger. Yeah. Yeah. I got you. [00:04:17] You can do whatever you want. Like I could discuss policy with anybody go to any sporting event, but unless you can some on a UFO, I feel like I'm a failure in life. [00:04:26] Craig Peterson: [00:04:26] Yeah, it's interesting the way they do it too. In, it's a mental thing. They feel that as well, they have a mental bridge with these people. [00:04:34]The law of one people. I'm not sure if you're familiar with them or not, but some of the things that they've been doing and then they use lasers in order to help the UFO's kind of pick what exactly where they are and call them up. And. And I've seen videos of entire smaller, modest, if you will, of these lights in the sky coming down and various types of light patterns and movements and just disappear again with. [00:05:02] With 50 witnesses, who all say it absolutely happened. [00:05:06] Chris Ryan: [00:05:06] Let's move on to Russia and the most recent cyber hack involving a major meat producer Brazilian based JBS. So just the latest on that in your view. As we heard early on that the Biden administration was pushing the Kremlin as to whether they were responsible for this attack. [00:05:26] We haven't seen a lot of reporting basically on the circumstance surrounding JBS. They're able to regain control of that. There wasn't any it would appear major supply chain issues at this point in regard to beef production and distribution. What are your thoughts on this? [00:05:43]Craig Peterson: [00:05:43] JBS is a pretty standard case nowadays. [00:05:47] And I talked over the weekend here on my show about something I'm going to be releasing. Hopefully I'll get it finished today, but it gives some real evidence. Again, evidence-based that this major set of attacks, including what we saw from colonial is in fact, coming from Russia and that is. That when the ransomware first gets onto your computer system, it checks to see if you have one of, about a dozen different keyboards. [00:06:15] Now, those keyboards are keyboards of countries that are part of the OIC, these independent states, if you will. That used to be part of the Soviet union. So the way the ransomware works and I went into some detail, I'm going to send out some videos today or tomorrow to all of my subscribers. You can see how to do it yourself. [00:06:36] But when most ransomware gets on your computer, Chris, the first thing it does is say, do you have a Russian keyboard or Belarus or Armenian a number of different keyboards that looks for, if you have a Russian keyboard immediately? It goes ahead and doesn't install itself just exits immediately. And the theory behind this, and by the way, it can be just a virtual keyboard. [00:07:01] Doesn't have to be a real keyboard. The theory really now comes forward. Why would they do that? Is it because these bad guys are based in an area where the Russians. Have enough control that they could grab them and throw them into a Gulag somewhere. And that seems to be what we in the security community are thinking is happening. [00:07:22] So yeah, it really looks like it's coming from Russia. And we just had the energy secretary yesterday on CNN, Jennifer Granholm, say that. Yeah, they're happening all the time. I see them all the time. My customers are getting attacked multiple times a second. Even they're getting scanned and. [00:07:42] President Biden came out with two executive orders now that are mandating that the federal government and its suppliers start really locking things down. And we've been working with a lot of companies in order to do that, but it smells a lot of that. This was really a Russian thing. And as again, secretary Granholm said over the weekend, we cannot pay ransoms. [00:08:07] All it's doing is encouraging them and to see colonial pipeline, give them four and a half million dollars. Just absolutely blows my mind. I agree. [00:08:17]Chris Ryan: [00:08:17] It's one of the basic principles and basically, cyber attackers are terrorists. You don't pay the terrorists, you don't pay them. Because when you do the next time, they want more money. [00:08:28] It also in create creates environment of like-minded individuals are going to start to perpetrate these crimes and it's pretty easy for them to do and it seems like a lot of government entities and businesses are running blind. Craig, we got to run. Thank you so much. Take care. Craig Peterson, host of tech talk. You're on news radio 610 and 96.7 Saturdays and Sundays at 1130.

2021-06-05 1116 Craig Peterson: This is a concerning report. At least it is concerning to me and it should be to everyone, frankly, but despite Colonial Pipeline to attack the likelihood of utility sector hacks has increased as was evidenced just this week. [00:00:15] I wish I had thought of this one because it's just so simple and those are always the best, right? The simple ways to really work around a problem. And I've brought you a few before where we talked about some of the VPN stuff. We've talked about different types of security, this particular one, though, I think takes the cake. [00:00:36] It's absolutely amazing. If you get right down to it and think about Russian hackers, real Russian hackers, not the fake ones, not just the white house saying that's Russia and it's really China. And then it sometimes frankly, between you and me, it's hard to tell because. The Russians can easily use [00:00:57] chinese [00:00:57] tools. [00:00:58] They're available to almost any hacker out there that bothers to go out of their way to grab them. And the Russian tools are much the same way. So the way you figure out whether or not it might've been China or Russia, Or a particular hacking group or another is to look how they behaved when you're there in yeah. [00:01:17] Your computer system. So let's say you think your computer got hacked. You might look for different pieces of software or names of files or where they went, how long they were there and what kind of ransomware might they've used on yours, computer, all of those types of things. Give you a serious clue as to who it was and where they came from. [00:01:42] You can't really tell where they came from. You can look at the IP address and a lot of people say that. Why don't you just look at the IP address? The reason you can't obviously you can look at the IP address, but the reason you can't depend on that in order to determine where someone's coming from is just like they showed in the movies where. [00:02:02] They're trying to back trace a phone call or back trace something, and it shows up on this big world map on this huge screen. That's bigger than. A 20 foot wall and it's showing a little dot. Okay. Here's OS and oh, and came in from Des Moines. Okay. Okay. Before that they were in London. Okay. [00:02:22] Before that they're in South Africa, they were in Russia and they were in Vancouver. You've seen that. And it shows the dots popping up and the lines being drawn between them. That is not possible. Certainly not in real time, but it's really not possible at all. Because all you have to do is have a hacker take control of a few dozen computers around the world and use them to hack you. [00:02:51] So that bad guy is now using dozens of people's home computers, which have no real logging. No, one's really paying attention to them. You're using it for gaming or maybe a little bit of work, email, web browsing, all of that basic stuff. So you're using it for all of those things, but you're not securing that computer tightly. [00:03:16] So they'll just use it. If they want to attack from North Korea, they can easily hop through a few different computers and then end up on a computer in Russia. And now it was like, it's coming from Russia. It's really that simple. And they have these botnets to do that. Very thing. Yeah. That's why I keep telling everybody, make sure your computer is up to date that it is in fact patched up and the bad guys are less likely to be able to use it because your computer can be used to hack somebody else. [00:03:51] It can be used to bring a denial of service attack against someone. The distributed denial of service attacks are way up this last year. It can do a lot of things that frankly, it should not be doing. So that's why I'm always warning you guys. Cause you don't want your computer to be used in a crime. So we can't tell where these hackers are necessarily coming from, but what Brian Krebs revealed this week, I thought was absolutely brilliant. [00:04:24] Apparently many of these ransomware guys are in fact in the Commonwealth of independent states. And that includes a few different countries, Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan all of these stands over there. And some others [00:04:39] basically [00:04:40] Craig Peterson: it's the former Soviet union countries. So they're part of this Commonwealth of independent states. [00:04:46] And if you're living in there, let's say you're in Russia and you're in Moscow. And you're using computers. You're sending out ransomware and you wanna make some bucks off of it by charging people a ransom. You need to be darn careful that you do not ransom any Russian computers or in fact, any of these Russian affiliate computers. [00:05:11] Because if you do, you're going to have the gremlin coming down on top of you. They do not take kindly to it. And I don't know if you've seen any of these Russian. Prisons jails doesn't seem like place. Most people would want to end up at some pretty bad places and you don't stand a chance. [00:05:29] Okay. So the bad guys are trying to be careful. So if you're sending them ransomware, that's indiscriminate, I'm not talking about a dark side going after colonial pipeline where they're aiming at colonial pipeline. There. Aiming at one specific business. Cause they know that business has money to pay. And you got to ask yourself, why did they aim at colonial? [00:05:54] Was it just because of the money? Because they knew they could pay. Because we've had water plants, ransomed police departments, Ranson. We just had meat, the largest meat processor in the world. Branson is this a pattern where they're checking our critical infrastructure, the ability to put fuel in our vehicles. [00:06:17] The ability to have electricity. I have food. Is that what's going on? I really don't know, but I can tell you almost all of the ransoms that are out there are indiscriminate. So you can't just sit there and say I'm not going to get ransom because I'm not colonial pipeline or I'm not a meeting. [00:06:33] Packer, et cetera, et cetera. It's not gonna affect me. I'm too small. No one cares about me and I can get my business back online in a day, a week at the most. And you may be able to, okay, but you are still the target because almost all of this ransomware is random. Basically it's distributed in emails, sent out to millions of people that have no idea where it's gonna end up at. [00:06:59] So let's say that you get this ransomware and you open it up and it's a business and all of a sudden you get ransomed. How does the ransomware know if you are in the Commonwealth of independent states? How does it know that your businesses in Russia or Kazakhstan or Armenia or one of these other countries. [00:07:23]Basically it, it doesn't. And I'm I know I'm going to get, let me just double check Armenia here, because I know I'm going to get all kinds of flack from people. Yeah. All camera and yet Armenia is part of it. It doesn't know. Or at least it doesn't know if it doesn't check and that's the beauty of this, but Brian Krebs did Brian Krebs came out and said, and I think he got it from someone else too, but he's the one that really populated it, our populated popularized it. [00:07:56] What this ransomware software parently does is it looks at your computer for something very simple. Now what could you look at if you were writing ransomware? What might you want to just check real quick? That's a real quick check. You can see if you are probably within the Commonwealth of independent states or maybe you're on a computer in a Russian embassy in the United States, which you also don't want to hack while why don't you just look at the keyboard? [00:08:27] Apparently, that's what they're doing. They look at the keyboard of the computer when it gains control of the computer. And I'm not talking about the physical keyboard because many people worldwide use a us standard keyboard, but. What they're looking for is a keyboard. And when I'm saying a keyboard in this case, I'm talking about a virtual keyboard in one of a few languages, including Russian isn't that something. [00:09:02] So they looked at this dark side, ransomware and cyber reason did some reverse engineering on it and he found. Which languages you can have virtual languages on your keyboard. Now you might already have them. I've got French on mine, as well as English. You might have Spanish. I don't know. [00:09:23] There's the Chinese, there's a lot of the Mandarin. If you have Russian Ukrainian, Armenian, or a number of these others, Romanian, any of those languages that are part of, again, this Commonwealth of independent states as former Soviet union on your computer as a virtual keyboard. Yeah, it doesn't have to be a real keyboard, just a virtual keyboard. [00:09:49] This particular piece of nastiness, this ransomware from dark side will immediately shut itself down. Isn't that amazing? So simply put, there are countless versions types, strains of malware that check to see if you have one of these languages installed on your system. And if they're detected, the malware will immediately exit and will not even install itself. [00:10:20] Isn't that something. Yeah. So whether or not we can absolutely tell if something's from Russia or China or North Korea or someone somewhere else. We do know that having one of these Russian keyboards or again, one of the stands, et cetera, keyboards on your computer. Will short circuit, the ransomware and a won't even install itself. [00:10:47] Isn't that just amazing. So look in your newsletter. That's coming out this weekend and have a look and I've put together a whole thing about this, a little video. You have to watch Craig peterson.com. [00:11:02]This particular app is called citizen and we've seen apps. There's millions of them out there nowadays. The do almost anything. Absolutely. Anything, and this particular app, you can find online. I'm going right now to their websi

[As heard on WGAN 2021-06-02-wgan. The following is an automated transcript.] Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Good morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. Thanks for joining me this morning. I was talking more about this Commonwealth of independent states. In case you're not aware of it, these are the countries that were part of the Soviet Union. Now not all of them are in it, but the majority of them are. And why are the hackers going out of their way to avoid hacking? [00:00:25] It might be a red herring, frankly, but it also might be because there could be some severe penalties for them and how you can use that in order to help save you from getting hacked. So all of that here this morning, as well as a little bit more about the meatpacking plant that had to close down here throughout. [00:00:49] North America. So here we go with Mr. Matt, Gagnan [00:00:54] Matt Gagnon: [00:00:54] 7:36 on WGAN morning news. A good time to talk to Craig Peterson, our tech guru, who joins us at this time every Wednesday. Of course, you also hear him on Saturdays at one. When he talks about all these topics and more in more depth, Craig, how are you this morning? [00:01:12] Craig Peterson: [00:01:12] Oh, WGAN is always a good time. Not just when I'm on, I'd do a little something extra, [00:01:17] Matt Gagnon: [00:01:17] a little something extra. Thanks so much for joining us here. Of course, for that little something extra right now, Craig Peterson, I do have to ask you first about. Meat hacking. I've been plugging it all morning here. [00:01:30] Obviously, we had the oil pipeline hack. Now we have beef plants forced to shut down because of a cyber attack here. So these cyber attacks are happening with increased frequency. And are a problem. Tell me, sir, what's happening here and what it means for us? [00:01:45]Craig Peterson: [00:01:45] We have a whole crew of people internationally. [00:01:49] Some are in Russia, some are in China. Of course, we've talked about North Korea and others before who are trying to make money. And the way they can make money is by going after targets that are particularly rich that have the money to pay the ransom. And that's why they're going after these guys. It's like Sutton. Why did he Rob banks, supposedly? Because that's where the money was. And in this case, that's really what they're doing, Matt. [00:02:20] Matt Gagnon: [00:02:20] It certainly is where the money is, and they're happening with, it seems like greater frequency or at the very least greater visibility because they're going after big stuff here. [00:02:28]Do you expect this to continue? I know that there's been some talk hereafter the pipeline attack that we're going to reinforce our infrastructure and make sure things like this don't happen again. Any truth to that. [00:02:37]Craig Peterson: [00:02:37] Yeah, there is there, there's a number of things that are going on right now to try and tighten things up. [00:02:43] But I've got to say this JBS, which is the company that was attacked here, this meatpacking company, that basically a quarter of all of our beef and a fifth of all of our poultry is packed to there. They responded pretty darn well. They didn't, obviously, keep the hackers out, but nothing is a hundred percent. [00:03:05] They immediately did something thing that solar winds took a not soldier cringe, but were a colonial pipeline, took a little bit longer to do. And that is, they shutting me down very quickly. Yeah. They started to look, see what was going on. They immediately brought in a team of people. This is what they do. [00:03:25] They help bring companies back from a ransomware attack. They brought in a lot of people, so they could start restoring all of the systems. It looks like from backups and then starts turning things back on one at a time. I imagine they'll tighten up some of their security operations, which we. All need to do, which goes right into your question of are we going to do more? [00:03:49] Is there more we can do? And the answer to that is absolute. Yes. Every one of us, that most of the time the bad guys are using what is called zero-day attacks initially, which means there is a vulnerability in something very often in Microsoft windows or in a firewall. And the bad guys know about it, but it hasn't been patched yet. [00:04:15] But I got to tell ya that is only really used against these very big operators where there's a whole lot of money involved. Most of the time, we're getting hacked. Because we haven't patched. Now I know how painful it could be the patch. Okay. Especially when we're talking about Microsoft, you can apply their patches and then brick to your machine. [00:04:38] In other words, turn your machine into something that's almost useless, and it's going to take you days to recover. So people are weighing that back and forth. Is it worth, potentially knocking myself off the air for a day or two or three? Because the patch was bad from Microsoft or from another vendor, or should I do the patch and take the risk of it not working very well or may be causing harm and then going further, I blame Microsoft budget. [00:05:09] You blame [00:05:09] Matt Gagnon: [00:05:09] Microsoft for a lot of things. [00:05:11] Craig Peterson: [00:05:11] Greg terrible company. They really are. They're the things they've done to the industry, but the reason I'm blaming Microsoft here is, are you kidding me? They're sitting on billions of dollars in cash, and they released patches for their buggy software. Okay. I get that. [00:05:27] Everybody releases patches, and the patches break systems. So people don't trust it anymore. So that's how I'm looking at it. Here. I read an article this morning from the New York times, and they were looking at this hack from a again, probably, maybe Russia, maybe China. And they're quoting, they're saying. [00:05:50] President Biden says it's from Russia reading between the lines. Microsoft said their hack, which was the major part of the whole SolarWind attack was actually from China and the Biden administration went quiet on this, but it's hard to say we know Russia has been hacking a lot. We know China's been hacking a lot of little China's more behind the scenes. [00:06:12] We don't really know where they come from, but Matt, we can do something about it. Keep your software up to date. If you can, don't use windows and switch over to a Mac, their patches work, and they have for years and be more security conscious. So [00:06:30] Matt Gagnon: [00:06:30] speaking of Russian hackers, Craig, I do have to ask you whether or not there is something we can do a one weird trick, if you will. [00:06:37] One of those eternal click baity items area, right? If there is one weird trick to stop these Russian hackers right there, out there, how do you do it? [00:06:46] Craig Peterson: [00:06:46] This is the coolest thing ever. It's absolutely true. This comes from Brian Krebs and a few other people out there right now. There is something you can do right now. [00:06:56] It only take you 10 minutes, maybe 15, and we're here. Here's what it is. We know that the Russian hackers are not. Attacking former Soviet territories. And the reason from that it, for that is if they are hacking from Russian territory and they hack a Russian company or another one of these companies that are part of the Commonwealth of independent state, which is again the former Soviet union for the most part if they hack a Russian company, they, and they get caught, they get to go to a Russian prison, which doesn't sound like much fun to me. [00:07:35] And so what they've done is they've built into almost all of this soft, where a kill switch. We're talking about ransomware software, hacker software. If you install a virtual. Russian keyboard on your computer, just like a, you may have a Spanish keyboard or a French keyboard on your computer, install, a Russian or one of a few other languages keyboard on your computer. [00:08:01] You don't have to use it. You don't have to type in rush and you don't have to learn Cyrillic. None of that when the software starts to run in your computer, almost all of it. The first thing it does is says, is there a Russian keyboard? And if the answer's yes, it's short circuits at shelf, and this is what we're thinking. [00:08:21] And I think this is right. This is the way the Russian hackers are avoiding attacking Russian or Russian Commonwealth states is Commonwealth of independent states. It's a way they're stopping the inadvertent hack of a nation of a company that might end them up in Siberia because they still do have some fun stuff going on up there. [00:08:43]Matt Gagnon: [00:08:43] Greg Peterson, our tech guru joins us at this time every week to go over the world of technology. Thanks Greg, as always good luck on Saturday. And we'll talk to you next week, sir. Hey, you're [00:08:52] Craig Peterson: [00:08:52] welcome. And I'm going to put instructions on how to do this in this week's newsletter. So make sure you're signed up@craigpeterson.com and we'll talk a little bit more about it as well on Saturday.

[As Heard on WTAG, WHJJ, and WHYN 2021-06-01. Automated transcript follows.] Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Good morning, everybody doing well this morning course, Craig Peterson here, and I was talking this morning about two different things. One, and this sounds like one of these marketing things in part of these ads, right? One weird trick while I got one. This is amazing. This is from Brian Krebs and it is a trick that will stop most, if not all, frankly, Russian based. [00:00:28] Ransomware and even hackers. So we went into that. I'm going to put more about that in my newsletter this weekend. So make sure you are on that list. Craig peterson.com/subscribe. [00:00:42] And we also talked a little bit about this newest hack against the largest meat company. In the world, if you can believe that. [00:00:53] Absolutely huge. So both of those of this morning with Mr. Jim Polito, here we go. [00:01:01] Jim Polito: [00:01:01] Hey, this guy is on top of it all. I'm talking about our tech talk guru, Craig Peterson, and nobody. Smarter than this man. And he joins us now. Good morning, Craig. Hey, good morning. It's Jimmy P how you doing? I'm good, Greg. Thank you. [00:01:20] Hey, can I just, I want to ask you about this simple trick that will stop most Russian hackers. And it's not hiding a bottle of vodka somewhere. No, the it's about Microsoft. I want to ask you about now that now what ransomware and a meat packing facility. So they went after power grids. They went after water. [00:01:43] Now they want to go after our food. They're there, they went after the oil pipeline. They want meet what's this all about. They really are what we're talking about right now. The major organized hackers. So the guys that have gotten together that are working together that really want to go after targets that have money. [00:02:06] Yeah. And even though those say things like we don't, I want to really affect the us economy. We really don't want to hurt people. That's what it tends to do in this case. This is a big company. It headquarters in Greeley, Colorado. At least the us headquarters are, they are both. They have operations in new, excuse me, new north America and Australia. [00:02:30] And they noticed it. Now this. Is a beautiful example, right? There is nothing, 100% effective against a determined hacker. However, they noticed that what these hackers were doing. So they took the name of it is JBS USA. So world's largest meat supplier. They took immediate. Action. They automatically suspended all of these it systems and other systems that might be effected. [00:03:02] They immediately notified the authorities, the FBI. That's what we do. Bri, bring them in as well. They brought in all of their it professionals that got them all together and they brought in some good third party experts like yours, truly. I tend to try and figure out what the situation was and how do we resolve it now it looks like it probably spread quite a ways inside this meat packing plant, because the company is saying that their backup servers were not affected. [00:03:35] And they're working with an incident response firm to get the operations back as soon as possible. I think they're going to be back very quickly. But these bad guys are not gone. I mentioned dark side. These are the hackers that went after the colonial pipeline, probably part of the solar winds attack on and on. [00:03:56] And they shut down that one operation, the dark side operation, but it also looks like. We may have been able to shut them down. We won't get it, all the details right now, but here's here's another side to all of this. We need to know when it's happening. So kudos to JBS USA. They knew when it was happening, they knew you and that's something by the way I'm working on, I'm actually starting a business. [00:04:22] That's what it's going to do. I decided that's the most important thing, because people are not willing to spend real money on the right types of hardware, types of software, but let's look at what's happening on the network anyway, separate issue entirely. But the Biden administration. [00:04:39] Refuses now to say that these dark side attacks and the the, what ultimately led to the solar winds and potentially colonial pipeline, they've been saying all along Russia, and now Microsoft came out and Microsoft is a company that the whole attack vector went through solar winds, which affected every American. [00:05:04] Every one of us that attack because of the companies we deal with solar winds, I attack according to the byte administration came from Russia, or Russia. However Microsoft said we have confirmed it's China. And Microsoft has been saying that now for weeks. And we men president Biden was asked about this as was at a press conference. [00:05:29]Jean, what Sakhi. And they say now nothing about it. They won't say that it's Russia. They won't say that it's China. If we don't know who's attacking, that's where it's coming from. And frankly, retaliate against them. We're never going to stop this. We're talking with Craig Peterson, our tech talk girl. [00:05:51]I'm glad you're sounding the alarm and all this, and buying is going to meet with Putin. He's got a summit with Putin coming up within the next two weeks. It'd be nice if he would be on top of this. And say, just cut it out. Remember Barack Obama, when it went through the election hacking, he was telling a, but remember he said, I told Putin to cut it out. [00:06:15]Yeah, exactly. But it's not potent. It looks like it's absolutely China. Yeah. All right. Great, lovely. Speaking of let's go back to Putin. A simple trick can lock out Russian hackers. You sent me this information. What is this? Yeah, I'm going to put this in the newsletter coming up on Saturday this week. [00:06:38] So if you miss the details to make sure you get the newsletter, you can just get it on my website. This is absolutely true. You and I have talked Jim before about where the hacks are coming from and how we think some of these hacked are definitely Russian because. They're not attacking cause Dr. Stan Ukraine, all of these former Soviet countries, right? [00:07:03]Yeah. They're there. They're taking care of their own. Yeah, they absolutely are. And they don't want to get in trouble either. Russia. Doesn't exactly take hacking lightly. If you have them or you hack one of their all-in guard buddies, they will come after you and you don't want to end up in a rush Russian prison. [00:07:24] So that's the theory behind this. So here's the, this is simple, everybody. This is simple and I'll send you some links to it. All you have to do is install what are called a virtual keyboard on your windows machine. So for instance, I'm, multi-lingual I speak English and I speak French. Yeah. So I, cause I, my, my schooling was in print schools, so I have installed on my computer, a virtual French keyboard, so I can say, okay, now I'm going to be typing a note off to my friend over in Paris. [00:07:55] And so I am going to now do an overlay on my keyboard. And so now I can use all those funny accents as things are French, too. So here's what the trick is. They look this nasty where most of it, most of the ransomware goes ahead and look to see if you have a. Russian virtual keyboard installed. [00:08:19] Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. So it looks for some other languages to Ukrainian Belarusian, to jock and Armenian and some others, but Russian keyboard is the easy one. So here is a work around from getting hacked by some of this ransomware installed. A virtual Russian keyboard on your computer and what'll happen is if it gets the ransomware on it, the first thing it does is it looks to see, is this potentially someone in the Commonwealth of independent states, which of course are the former Soviet territories. [00:08:57] And it's also, if you have a Russian keyboard, it will immediately stop what it's doing. Wow. That's simple. Yeah, that is cool. I'm sure they'll find a workaround, but in the meantime, that's pretty cool. How do you, no, it won't stop at all right. But yeah, go ahead and no, how do you do it? How do you install the virtual keyboard? [00:09:21]You can actually do a duck, go search on it and it will show you there. One of articles, but it's just, it's a virtual keyboard, right? So if you've, if you speak Spanish, you've probably got an English and a Spanish keyboard on your computer. You probably already know how to do it. It's really rather simple. [00:09:38] You can go into the settings, you can load the Russian keyboard in your, and you're off and running. But apparently is according to the research I'm looking at right now done by mandate act and a couple of others. This will help you against almost all of them. So just a Cyrillic keyboard. You can also, there's a specific registry edits you can do. [00:09:58]We won't get into that just to keyboards. All you have to do it. Duck, go by the way I have been using it considerably. And there is such a difference between searching on duck, go versus searching with Google. I should do a podcast and do a side by side and yeah. In the blog, put the pictures of just putting in, one, two words and seeing what you get for results in Google and then seeing what you get for results in duck, go doesn't use politics, which is great. [00:10:32] No, yeah, it's it is very good. There's another one you might want to look at. It's called Quan, Q w a N T. But I prefer dark.co. Wow. Greg, this has been as usual. Illuminating. Fascinating. How goes the recuperation of your lovely bride? It's going quite well. She's very frustrated. I would be right. [00:10:55] And she can't do anything, and she's just sitting there, but thank goodness we have one of these chairs that even injects you, which helped initially. But now she's starting to get a little itchy and I'm wanting to get up and go around and do things, which is a really good sign. So my fingers are crossed. [00:11:13] Yeah, I think she'll do well. I

[Following is an automated transcript of Week 1115 podcast aired 2021-05-29] Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] We've got these semiconductor shortages. What that means is various types of chips are just not available and it's been hurting us all the way across our economy. And that's where we're going to start the day with today. Semiconductors. [00:00:15] Man, this has been so bad, these semiconductor shortages, because what it means is we just cannot get the types of devices that we want because those raw components just aren't available. I was talking with a gentleman earlier this week and he was telling me how he has a special little app that tells him when there is a Sony PS five available for sale anywhere online. [00:00:45] It's gotten that bad. First of all, Why does he want a PS five so bad? I've never owned one or an X-Box or any of those gaming consoles? Since the original Nintendo, we had a we as well. Cause we had all the exercise stuff that went along with the week. But anyways, that's a different story entirely. [00:01:04] I'm sure a lot of you guys play a lot of video games, but. There really are not Sony  available. And we're finding much the same problem in even the car industry where some of these major manufacturers here in the U S have had to shut down lines. They've had, gone from three shifts down to a single shift every day. [00:01:30] And in some cases it's gotten even worse where vehicle manufacturers are only. Making vehicles of few times a week. It is incredible. What's been happening and there a number of reasons for it. This isn't just one reason, but it does bring up the real problem we could have with our critical infrastructure. [00:01:53] How critical is it that we have computers that can run our businesses, drive our cars, and fly our airplanes. I think it's pretty darn critical when you get right down to it. Yeah. You can probably get an extra year out of that computer, if you really need to many times that computer's just plain broken, you just can't use it. [00:02:15] So you do need to replace it. But in reality, we've gotten a little bit soft. We are not making most of the chips here in the U S anymore. Yes, it's us technology. But most of this is in Southeast Asia, particularly in Taiwan. And do you remember what's happening with Taiwan with the threats from China? [00:02:38] China is flying over Taiwan right now with military jets in Taiwanese air space, because China has never officially recognized that Taiwan is independent from the people's Republic of China. And do you know how socialists are? They're just going to go ahead and take that land. What would happen if they did. [00:03:00] Remember China really wants to get their hands on our top chip technology because that helps them in the military. It helps them with all of these facial recognition systems they have in China, the social credit systems that they have in China, by the way, all built primarily by us companies and sold to China to track their people. [00:03:23] Including the nasty things have been happening with the Wiggers over there. It's just absolutely incredible as well as Christian communities and others in China. So all of this tech has stuff they want to get their hands on. If they were to invade Taiwan, what would happen? The Biden administration. [00:03:40] There they've been a little soft on this. Unlike president Trump, who said, yeah, the Trump administration, we're not going to tolerate any of this. And the Trump administration shipped all kinds of military systems to Taiwan, so they could potentially defend themselves because we don't really want to get drawn into a hot war, but. [00:04:00] Oh, if they had taken over Taiwan, they would now have access to the U S technology on chip making. Now let me explain what that means from a technology standpoint, the chips that we have are.  into a wafer of silicone. I'm going to try and keep this pretty simple. And then, and that silicone is grown. Cause you think of a crystal or maybe think of a still-life tight or it's like titers to leg might that you'd find in a cave. [00:04:34] Those crystals are grown. They're humanly grown, and obviously you don't want any defects in them. So it's very hard to do to grow them. And we need those crystals for all kinds of things, including these solar panels that some people are so hot to trot about. I, Hey, I love the idea. Don't get me wrong. [00:04:52] It's just right now, again, with solar panels, like so many other things, don't think you're green because you. Are or putting up solar panels. You're not right. There's certainly other advantages to it, but you're not being green by doing that. But what really matters is how much power does that chip use in order to do a certain number of computations? [00:05:17] And how much heat is given off by the chip. Think again about the old Edison light bulbs that we've had and still have in some places and those Edison light bulbs, by the way, one of the original ones still burning in New York city and the fire department after over a hundred years, that one light bulb just incredible. [00:05:37] But think about that Edison light bulb, it gives off light. Sure. But it also gives off heat. And the same thing is true with. Anything electronic the movement of the electricity through that conductor or semiconductor create heat. Heat is a waste. That's part of the problem with Edison bulbs. It'd be one thing if they were giving off just straight light, the, but so much of that energy is used to generate heat that we don't want. [00:06:06] And then we have to dissipate that heat somehow, but that's another story. The same thing is true. When we're talking about these chips, the chips have a resistance to them. In fact, that's what a semiconductor does. It provide some resistance, so that resistance is going to. Do what create heat. So you feel your laptop when you're running it and so hot to get over time, the laptops have gotten faster and have actually created less heat, certainly poorer computational unit. [00:06:44] They created a lot less heat. What we're looking at now is if we can make these chips even smaller. We can decrease the amount of electricity they need, because it doesn't have electricity. It doesn't have to flow as far through the conductors or semiconductors inside these chips. So that's what the race has been over the years. [00:07:09] The race has been how small can we make them? And by making them smaller, You're doing a couple of things. You're making them faster because electricity has to travel less distance. Even though electricity is really fast. When you're talking about a billion transistors inside one of these chips or more, you are traveling through a whole lot of conductor and semiconductor. [00:07:32] So you can make that chip faster by making it smaller and you can reduce the amount of power it needs, because you're not going to be giving off as much power via heat and heat generation. And that's important for everything, but particularly important for our mobile devices. Look at your apple watch or your iPhone or your laptop or your desktop. [00:07:56] All of them need to consume less and less electricity as time goes on. So what we're talking about now are just teeny tiny measurement. We're talking about nanometers. So if you go online, you look up nano meter. Which is a foul. Yeah, there you go. 10 to the negative nine meters. It's a billionth of a meter. [00:08:21] Isn't that something looking it up right now, sell it a 1E-9.000000000. Give or take, and it's a unit of measurement that is being used now in chips and chip designs. And we're seeing these faster and faster chips getting down into the five nanometer process that is incredibly small, incredibly. [00:08:49] Fast potentially, but likely incredibly fast and uses a lot less electricity right now. We're seeing seven nanometers out of Taiwan and we're working on five nanometer, but we have such a shortage of chips right now that they're bringing some of these old 15 nanometer. Chip fabs online, even 22 nanometer. [00:09:14] I'm looking right now online at some of these old chip fabricators that are being brought online and China really wants to get their hands on some of this technology, because at this point anyways, they really can't get to the seven nanoliter chips. China right now. I think is pretty much limited to 14 nanometer. [00:09:39] So we're still, I had in that race, but because they're being made in Taiwan, these chips that we're using here in the us using us technology, and because we had the lockdown in Taiwan and pretty much worldwide, the whole supply chain got interrupted and these big car manufacturers just. Shut off the orders. [00:10:01] So there's no reason for the manufacturers to continue to make these things are a little reason for them to make them for the car industry in the current street, he thought we can just turn it back on and we'll have the chips. And of course they didn't, but it's also been compounded by the conditions in Taiwan right now. [00:10:19] Because the Taiwanese centers for disease control this week raised it's epidemic warning level and is strengthening their containment measures and making things even worse. Taiwan is in the midst of a severe drought. So they are. Rationing water in Taiwan. They're looking at cutoffs of two days a week. [00:10:42] And water reduction plans are expected to decrease supply to all major manufacturers by as much as 15%. So there you go. In a nutshell, that's why we care. Nanometers and we're talking about chips. That's why we need to start making them back here in the U S. And the good news, apple and others are doing exactly that. [00:11:03] Starting to bring some of this technology back from Taiwan, into the U S and I think that's going to help keep us safer in the long run [00:11:12]All electric vehicles are I think very cool. And some people give me a hard time because I am not a fan of it. [00:11:20] If y

[As heard on WTAG, WHYN, WHJJ 2021-05-25 - Automated Transcript] Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] On with Mr. Polito this morning, and we gave a little bit of a eulogy to Microsoft internet Explorer. Finally, almost gone. And I don't know if it will ever be completely gone. So here we go with Mr. Polito, [00:00:17] Jim Polito: [00:00:17] Our good friend, Craig Peterson, nothing like a little rage against the machine. To introduce our tech talk guru, the master of all machines, right? [00:00:33] He is our tech talk guru here to talk about the death of Microsoft Explorer. What is that? Joining us now? Craig Peterson. Good morning, Craig. [00:00:48] Craig Peterson: [00:00:48] Hey, good morning. Microsoft Explorer of course had been used for years by Microsoft in order to let you go online. And it was the source of a major lawsuit against Microsoft. [00:01:02]Right now you're talking about what's happening with this whole apple lawsuit and what directions is going to go what's happening? Microsoft had this major problem years ago, and that is. It did not have anything to do with the internet at all. Microsoft was a very much a late comer to the internet and to all of the connectivity that comes from it. [00:01:26] And so what they did is they stole, borrowed some software from NCSA, this lab over in Europe. And use that as a basis to create a web browser. And since of course, Microsoft didn't really care so much about the internet as they never put much thought or work into it. However, Many of these kids that are doing programming thought internet Explorer is the way to go. [00:01:54] And the people who were running the businesses who had windows on their desks, they looked at it and said in genetics blowers, what we need to do. So a large percentage of businesses over 50% of businesses designed their website. To work with internet Explorer and never bothered checking any other web browsers out there to see if they were compatible. [00:02:19] Yeah. So Microsoft got even more and more into this and Microsoft added things to internet Explorer made it the most dangerous browser on the internet. It allows a website to take control of your computer. It allowed websites to download malicious software and start running with it. It might be Microsoft. [00:02:41] It just sometimes drives me crazy. [00:02:44] Jim Polito: [00:02:44] Let's roll it. You've just put a lot out there. So let's just go back and take a look at it. First of all, Dan and I were laughing earlier and you just said it. Oh, Microsoft didn't think this internet was going to be a big deal. Yeah. So bill gates is our real genius. [00:02:59]Something comes along like the internet. Eh, so Netscape was really the big browser in the beginning. Am I correct? [00:03:07] Craig Peterson: [00:03:07] It was one of the early Browns. Yeah, very popular one. The internet didn't really start really going anywhere until the browsers came out. NCSA mosaic was really the first one. [00:03:22] Wow. I used that one extensively way back when and yeah. Firefox has been around. Yeah, Microsoft. Yeah. As part of an incredible internal arrogance decided that it would wire internet Explorer into the operating system, for lack of a better term, you could argue that Microsoft has never had a true operating system until the latest ones, but it hardwired the men. [00:03:51] So now. You had places like Firefox Mozilla project and some of these other like Google, et cetera. Say, wait a minute wait. We have browsers. And there is no way to delete internet Exploder off of your computer. Oh, I forgot about [00:04:09] Jim Polito: [00:04:09] that. Nickname, internet Exploder. Greg you're, we're talking with our tech dog guru, Craig Peterson. [00:04:15] We're having a little bit of a way care. He's performing the eulogy for internet Explorer. So they get rid of it. Does that mean that Microsoft is out of the browsing business? [00:04:27] Craig Peterson: [00:04:27] Oh, I never very big way. See Microsoft decided that people fought that Microsoft was it, they're the go-to people. [00:04:35] And so they said we've got to get rid of, first of all, we've got to get out of the operating system because the courts ordered it. And so they finally did. And so now there's some competition in the browser space and then they came up with. The edge browser, you could still use internet Explorer on your windows, computer, and still came with it because so many websites were so poorly programmed. [00:05:02] They would only ever work with this one browser. So they came up with the edge browser, which was their answer to everything. And of course it didn't work so good and it didn't work with most websites that had any complexity to them. And so they came up with another edge. Browser and they called it an edge because it was a completely different browser. [00:05:23] And then they went and said, okay this just isn't working so well. So nowadays Microsoft edge browser is, do you have a drum roll? Oh yeah. Hold on. Hold on a second. I got it. Ready. Alright. Here Microsoft edge is actually Google Chrome. Are you kidding? There you go. No it's based on what Microsoft did is Google had open source. [00:05:55] In other words, it made available the source code, the program, and they call the chromium and chromium is the base for for the Chrome web browser, Google Chrome web browser. Wow. So now Microsoft edge, the latest versions of edge, they have completely benched all of them. Terrible software or web browsers anyway, still got plenty left. [00:06:19]And they are now, if you're running Microsoft edge, you are actually running Google Chrome and Microsoft of course has made changes to it and is tracking you in different ways. And Jen number one question I have from listeners really is. What browser should I use? And [00:06:38]Jim Polito: [00:06:38] Your answer to the question? [00:06:41] Craig Peterson: [00:06:41] Sure. It depends but Firefox. Wow. [00:06:47] Jim Polito: [00:06:47] I haven't been I haven't been using it. Here at work, I use Chrome. I didn't use it on my home laptop Firefox. But I hardly use my laptop at home. Anymore, because I use my smartphone or my tablet to do most things when I'm at home. So that's all very interesting now let's move on to something that came up earlier and you made the recommendation, is that Jim start using duck go. [00:07:20] For your searching because they don't track you and they have a better rhythms. They don't get political with their algorithms. You said, Jim, if you're going shopping, yes, Google is still the best place to go. But if you want information, it's duck go. This came up earlier because we've been discussing the power. [00:07:44] That Google exerts in politics. And, there's real evidence that if you search for a liberal candidate for office versus a conservative, you're going to get. Better results of the liberal or the liberals results are going to be at the top of results, as opposed to a conservative and Google will say it's the algorithm, it's based on hits and bologna, people make out algorithms. [00:08:12] The algorithms don't drop from the sky, right? [00:08:15] Craig Peterson: [00:08:15] Yeah. You're absolutely right. Yeah. And there is no such thing as artificial intelligence, at least not in this day and age, but here's the, I, I mentioned this to you before I think, but here's that quote from a study that was done in a top on this is student news daily. [00:08:32] But he was talking about a study that I read. We found significant pro liberal bias on Google enough, quite easily to have flipped all three congressional districts in orange county, California for Republican to Democrat. Okay. Very big deal. And that the study looked at the 2016 looked at 2018 as well. [00:08:57] I haven't seen any good studies out yet about 2020, but Google and in you. And I saw this Google goes in and. Purposely makes changes to the recommendations, their search results. So you can look for a story and hardly find any evidence of it. And yet that story was covered by all of the major news agencies, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, CNN, you name it, they all discuss it. [00:09:28] And yet you look forward on Google and it just doesn't show up. So you're right. And now the rhythm of a computer program is written by a person. Computers are not writing the code and there are biases in everything you and I would agree. We're bias, right? Thousands of articles, of course, thousands of articles. [00:09:51] And I put together six to 10 of them every week that I think are important. That's showing some bias why you thought they were important. And that's the reason you're talking about things today, George foil, and then other things, right? Because you think they're important. And so that bias leaks out. [00:10:09] And when it comes to Google and almost all of these big tech, not only does it leaked out, they enforce their bias on. You, which is why I recommend duck go. And then for browsers, Firefox Mozilla Firefox is a good general browser. There are some reasons not to use it. And I still recommend epic API C if you want very private browsing, if not, quite as good as it used to be, but it's also okay. [00:10:39] Based on chromium. It's basically Google Chrome that they ripped. All of the tracking code out of epic browser.com is where you can find it online. Oh, this has been [00:10:49] Jim Polito: [00:10:49] fantastic. Very helpful as usual and Firefox and duck go. And that is Craig's opinion, his well-educated opinion, but that's his opinion. [00:11:02] Look. Greg, I've got an example for you, and then I've got to let you go, Kathy and I went to a museum. With the boys in New York city this past weekend and the museum, the it's called the Frick museum. It's right near the met and their location is undergoing renovations. They're actually in an old mansion. [00:11:23] And so they're in a temporary location where they couldn't show their entire collection. So they picked from their collecti

[The following is an automated transcript.] Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] The lies and misinformation that are going on right now over in Israel, between Hamas and of course the Israeli government. This Tesla owner got bulled over sent to jail because he was driving the Tesla from a back seat. And a little bit more about the colonial pipeline with Mr. Matt Gagnon. We joined him of course, this morning. [00:00:27] Here we go. [00:00:28] Matt Gagnon: [00:00:28] Good to have you with us. 7:36 on a Wednesday means it's time to talk to Craig Peterson, our tech guru. He joins us at this time every single week. Craig, how are you this week? [00:00:38]Craig Peterson: [00:00:38] Hey, I am doing quite well. I had a couple of my hives swarm. It's just been such a great day; over winter and a great spring. [00:00:47] And so I was able to capture them. So I'm up two more hives. I cut two swarms. [00:00:53] Matt Gagnon: [00:00:53] So I'm what are you talking about? Are you a bee person? [00:00:56] Craig Peterson: [00:00:56] My honey bees. Yeah. You didn't know that? [00:00:58] Matt Gagnon: [00:00:58] Well, yeah. Okay. I sort of remember that a little bit, but you wouldn't mean you caught a swarm. I mean, they like you, you go out there with a net, I mean, yeah, [00:01:06] Craig Peterson: [00:01:06] Well,, the way it works is bees multiply by dividing. So if they're, if they're really, really healthy, they will go ahead and make some new Queens. And then when that queen emerges, the old queen will take about half of the workers and we'll go to try and find a new hive. So she'll go out and she'll just sit on a branch. [00:01:28] And of course, all of these other workers that had 10 to 15,000 bees will swarm right around her. So they'll all be resting on this poor branch, which is almost always just sagging. So if you can touch them. So what you do is if you can get that queen particularly, and get her into another little hive or a box to begin with, then now you've got a whole new hive. So that's how they have new colonies. That's how the honeybees is started expanding. And I, I often just let them go because it helps with the whole diversity thing and they become wild honey bees, which we need because this year, about half of all of the colonies in the U S died. So that's how it works. [00:02:14] There's a bigger than a football, but kind of shaped like it. And if you see one call a beekeeper in your area, so they can either go and grab them and help them make sure they're healthy because unfortunately our wild bees are dying at very high rates, but they can make sure they're healthy. They can capture them and they'll be happy. [00:02:34] And hopefully they won't end up in somebody's Eve's over there that they then have to try and get those beat colony out of. [00:02:43] Matt Gagnon: [00:02:43] Well, I learned something about bees today. Ladies and gentlemen, Craig Peterson joins us at this time. He also joins the program where we're joins the station, excuse me, on Saturdays at one o'clock where he hosts the show where he goes into many of these topics in more detail. [00:02:54] I don't know if you're going to hear about bees, but I guess you're probably going to hear about the colonial pipeline. I know that we talked a little bit about this last week, but Craig, they paid a $5 million ransom. And from what I understand, they basically, I mean, what they got back for a key, they didn't even really use any way. [00:03:09] And they ended up like using a, sort of a backup, uh, uh, of theirs to restore things. Anyway. I mean, first of all, tell me about what actually happened with that payment ransom. And second of all, what's the impact of this? I mean, does this not just incentivize more of this garbage happening? Yeah, [00:03:24] Craig Peterson: [00:03:24] it really does. [00:03:25] And that not only incentivizes it generally, but it incentivizes them to go after colonial dam, just like they've done with the city of Atlanta, where they paid a ransom. And of course they got hit again just weeks later. Another ransom. Right? They got hit again. So this is really bad. Under the Trump administration, the department of justice said you are supporting terrorism. [00:03:51] If you pay ransoms. And we consider that to be a legal. Now under the Biden administration, they said, no, you know, whatever, do whatever you want. It's kind of, you know, up to you. Uh, they paid $5 million. The bad guys gave them the decryption key. And, and in fact, tried to help them decrypt to their data that wasn't successful. [00:04:14] What colonial ended up doing is two things. One, they switched their pipeline over to manual. Control away from computer control. So they actually had to have people all the way up and down the coast. How long does that? It's like two, 3000 mile pipeline and all of the valves turn them on and off. That's how they had to deal with it. [00:04:36] But pain, your ransom is a bad thing to do. Having a backup is a good thing to do, but you gotta remember. And I cover this in my backup. Of course that when we're talking about backups, something that's attached to your machine is also going to be encrypted as part of the ransom. So make sure your backups are remote and the bad guys can't get it them, but that's the easiest way to get them. [00:05:01] Pass that first part of the ransom. The second part is what's going to be interesting here mind, because what they will do this group is they'll steal your data and then they will threaten to release the data. And, uh, when Zach shoe going to drop, and then also there are claims out there that the reason they shut the pipeline down, Matt was because their billing systems were offline. [00:05:28] That was the part of their network that was attached, attacked by ransomware. And they wanted to be paid for the fuel. So they shut it down because they didn't want it to deliver fuel that they couldn't bill for. [00:05:45] Matt Gagnon: [00:05:45] It's quite a mess, obviously, correct. Peter Sohn joins us at this time, uh, every Wednesday to go over what's happening in the world of technology or the big story besides this colonial pipeline issue, which is really more of a last week thing is what's going on in Israel with, uh, you know, obviously the, uh, the, the rockets being watched back and forth, the potential of a ground invasion, the conflict. [00:06:04] At its worst point for the last probably eight years or so. Uh, social media has been a part of this story here. And one of the things that's interesting about that is that misinformation lies a bunch of garbage has been skewed around on social media. And there seems to be no stopping it. Craig Peterson. [00:06:21] Craig Peterson: [00:06:21] Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And what we're finding now is really something that's been going on for a long time, all over the world. And that is, they are showing at official press conferences on basically on both sides of this conflict. There's showing videos. Of other past conflicts and representing it as it's happening right now. [00:06:48] So this is a real big problem, frankly, these, this is a different world. Many of our news organizations are not investigating. They find a video, they use the video, even though it misrepresents it. And of course, a lot of people are familiar. With that at our U S border where they were showing pictures of kids in cages, when they were, those bridges are taken cherry, the Obama administration. [00:07:15] And yet it is the Trump administration. They're complaining about same thing here. So we are able to do research online, please do the research, and it's disgusting to see the state of Israel. Using videos that are not particularly relevant and misrepresenting them in the same thing on the other side with [00:07:37] Matt Gagnon: [00:07:37] Tomas. [00:07:38] Yeah. That's not the first time that's ever happened. We're talking with Craig Peterson, our tech guru who joins us this time every single week. Lastly, just want to ask a little bit about Tesla. Uh, a Tesla owner who drives from the back seat got arrested recently. [00:07:53] Craig Peterson: [00:07:53] Yeah. You said he apparently told the police officer that, uh, and this was in California highway patrol that he felt safer in the back seat. [00:08:05] Matt Gagnon: [00:08:05] This is, this is the self-driving car revolution about to happen to us. Right? Do we are going to get a lot more stories like this [00:08:11] Craig Peterson: [00:08:11] happening soon? It absolutely is traveling eastbound on the IAT or across the San Francisco Oakland Bay bridge. Uh, if you're familiar with it. [00:08:21] Matt Gagnon: [00:08:21] Oh my God. He drove on that bridge. [00:08:24] Seriously. Yeah, I know I've spent an awful lot of time out there and I've driven on that bridge more than once. And that's the last place I would be in the backseat, not driving my car. I guess. It's just my I'm terrified of Heights, but now that's insane. Yeah. [00:08:37] Craig Peterson: [00:08:37] So people were reporting it to the police. [00:08:40] The police pulled him over. You apparently climbed into the front seat and in order to stop the car and he actually got arrested, put in jail. He was released as is the norm in California. And so what does he do? He does it again. And he's caught again and arrested again. He says, I just feel safer back here than I do. [00:09:02] Uh, there, uh, this is, yeah, this is what we're in for here. Remember, even though Tesla calls it full self-driving, it is not with autonomous, [00:09:14] Matt Gagnon: [00:09:14] right. It's meant to be an autopilot while you're sitting there. Behind the wheel, just in case and, and directing things still really. I mean, it's not a full self-driving for real right now, Craig Peterson. [00:09:25] Thanks for joining us as always good luck on Saturday on this very program one, o'clock make sure you tune in for that. And we'll talk again next week. Hey, take care. All right, we're go

[A quick, automated transcript of my conversation with Jim Polito on WTAG, WHYN, and WHJJ on 2021-05-18] Good morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. I was on with Mr. Polito this morning, and we went through the colonial pipeline and why you don't want to pay a ransom. And then I went into the things you can do for free. That'll give you 90%, maybe a little higher protection. So some websites to go to some things to do on a windows computer. So it went a little deeper, I think, than I usually. Go into, but I think a lot of great info. So here we go with Mr. Polito.  If I ever got hacked, ransomware, whatever there's one guy had called, not the Ghostbusters. I would call our tech talk guru and good friend, Craig Peterson, who joins us every week at this time. Good morning, sir.  Hey, good morning, Mr. Jim.  Craig, why don't you just say, I told you so because they, it looks like colonial paid the $5 million ransom, the stories I'm reading say that then the Russian hackers gave them the key to fix the encryption, and it didn't work. And then they eventually figured it out themselves. Am I correct? Yeah.  Yeah. That's pretty much what happened.  Brilliant guy because that's called colonial pipeline. So you said, and you have said many times before, the easiest way to get yourself in the crosshairs of a cyber hacker, ransomware criminal is to pay the ransom. Then you have painted a bullseye on your back. Why don't you tell us about that?  Yeah, we have a whole country thing. You might remember. There was an organization called the United States Navy. And the United States Marine Corps. And you remember, the Marine Corps Anthem, right?  Oh yeah. From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli, the barber. Okay. And why did they form the Marine Corps? Why did the Navy come to be? It came to be in both cases to protect our merchants, our merchant leads; we were having some problems with some alumnus back 250 years ago. And we sent our Marines over. In fact, the whole thing about leather neck comes from that same period. So they wouldn't get their heads chopped off. I hate to talk about that, but we've been facing this—type of thing, extortion as a country forever. And now we've got president and Biden out there. Know  I'm trying to do a hairy imitation. There might've been the Russians, but it wasn't the Russians; it wasn't Putin. At this point, it seems very obvious that because of dark by the way, who shut themselves down over the weekend, along with two other major ransomware operations, it looks like they were at the very least under the protection of the Russian government. So they go out, and who do they want to target? It used to just go out there, spray and pray. See who you can find now it's, let's go after the people with the bigger pockets, as much as we can, at least these professional groups of which of course are present, colonial or act by. But these professional groups now go after people. Now, who are they going to go after? They want somebody with the big. Wallet, a big deep pocket. And they also want to have somebody that they know is going to pay. So let's take the city of Atlanta, for instance. This is a small city in the south, and Atlanta went ahead and got around somewhere and paid. And what happened again? A couple of weeks later, they got ransomware and paid. And then what happened about a month later, they got ransomware and they. Multiple times now compare that, for instance, with the metropolitan police department down in Washington, DC. Now in Washington, of course, again, a small town, and they have a metropolitan police department. And again, They didn't bother putting together the type of security they need. And we just did an audit in fact of a county who will go on named that their cybersecurity was almost completely non-existent, yet you talked to them, and they say it's absolutely there, but in Washington, DC, they got into the police department computers. Now, if you are connected to one of these networks, you have what is called the feed, just requirements, which are really aimed at law enforcement. But they got on, and they were able to grab all kinds of data, and they said, okay, pay up. Watching the DC said, no, we're not going to pay. We're just going to restore from backup. So they said, okay, we'll pay up now. Or we're going to release the names of all of your informants and their phone numbers and their home addresses. And what's ended up happening so far. Is. He still hasn't paid, but they did release the identities of the police officers within the department. At least some of them in this is a real problem. We are, as a nation, allowing these foreign countries to get. Bitcoin typically, which by the way, has been the major motivator, driving up the price of Bitcoin and getting away with it. We are funding North Korean operations. This is one of their major sources of currency attacking us in the United States. We're talking with Craig Peterson, our tech talker right now, generally, we're talking about things that are to protect your new gadgets, all this stuff, software, and that's generally what we discussed, but there comes a time when we have to open it up globally. And Craig Peterson is the man to do it two weeks. Stand what's going on. The bigger picture, Greg Bitcoin, is the way. That they can fund themselves because you can't trace it. If I have money, I've got to have some way. If I'm asking for ransom and dollars, there's gotta be some way to get those dollars to me. And, financial institutions can say, we're not doing business with you. Credit card companies can say we're not doing business with you. And so they get Bitcoin. It's like the wild west. It's like robbing the stagecoach and getting the pieces of gold.  It is. I had a briefing by the secret service and went through the takedown of one of these dark web operations that were only using. Bitcoin. And a lot of people have the con the idea that somehow cryptocurrency, because it has crypto in the name as in cryptography, they have the impression that somehow it's secure, they're never going to get caught. And yet, in fact, that's exactly what happened. So there is some speculation right now that because we can track many Bitcoin. Transactions that these three major ransomware operations shut down over the weekend because of somebody getting a little bit too close. Okay. I don't think it was the call from president Biden that lasted what, three minutes? Yeah.  Please gimme a break, gimme a bread.  Yeah. So there are some things that we should do as home users. And as a business, as small businesses, you can get better than 90%, probably close to 95% protection by doing just a full of things 90%, I'd say, but they're both free. Okay. If you have windows use windows defender, it's free. It's part of your windows 10 installation. Make sure you keep everything up to date and use windows defender. All right. Don't bother with so many of these other antivirus packages that really aren't going to do you any good? So that's number one. Number two, what I teach in my courses and show you exactly how to do it is there's a professional version, but I'm going to tell you right now, get your pencils out. I'm going to tell you right now the version that it doesn't do anywhere near as much the commercial, but this is going to get you way closer. This is going to get you on the higher side of the 90% range. There is a website out there called OpenDNS. No Cisco, who is the company that runs that makes hardware that runs the internet and is a company that we deal with. When we install firewalls and switches and clean things up, it's always Cisco bought OpenDNS, and then they improved it. They call it an umbrella. But if you go to OpenDNS, it is simple and it is three. All right. They have paid versions. If you can afford them, get the paid versions, they are better. They've got all of this consumer stuff and basically all you have to do is make a couple of changes in your network. Are you going to connect to your little firewall router or on your PC? You really don't even have to install any software. You see what happens is once the bad guys get their software on your computer. Then you have your computer call them up. So essentially you're paying for the phone call, but call them up and say, okay, I've got a computer. What do you want me to do? And then they use your computer now to move around within the network and then install ransomware that et cetera. But if they can't call home, They can't do much or do anything. And almost all modern ramps are more. If it gets on your machine calls home, can't get there. It just sits dormant. So by telling your computer to use OpenDNS instead of Comcast or whoever your local provider is, what happens now is it asks OpenDNS. Hey how do I get to bad guys.com internet bad guys.com. And I want to challenge you guys right now. Go there on your computer, internet bad guys.com. And this is a demonstration site. All right. And what'll happen is how do I get your internet bad guys.com? Or how do I get to dark sky or whoever it might be. And OpenDNS will say,   what, where what? And so they can't call home gym. So if you can. If you can get to that website, internet, bad guys.com right now on your computer. That means that your internet provider is not blocking DNS appropriately. So you can do this simply OpenDNS.com, install the software. If you want more professional stuff, let me know. We're starting to do some more cybersecurity health assessment is I want businesses and individual to be able to protect themselves. This is the 90% solution. And sorry, I've been rambling for a while.  Yeah. Oh, this has been great. Now, Craig, if folks want to get in touch with you how do they do it? Just send me an email just to me@craigpeterson.com. It might take me a few days to get back to you. My wife, as you might know, at a serious activity, but just email me M E Craig peterson.com in the

As Heard On WGIR - 2021-05-17 Hi, everybody, Craig Peterson here. I'm not quite sure how to describe this interview, but you're going to find out something about me you may not have known and it's not a bad thing. It's just, I've never really disclosed it. Certainly not publicly. Anyhow. So we talked today about the colonial pipeline what's happening with these ransomware groups and there are a number of them and why. Why is it happening? And then also of course, over the weekend, there's a little bit of discussion with Marco Rubio and others on 60 minutes, I think it was about UFO's. So I guess there's a clue. So here we go with Mr. Chris, Ryan Stanford.  I am Chris Ryan joining us right now is Craig Peterson. He is the host of tech talk. On Saturdays and Sundays at 11:30 AM on news radio six, 10 and 96 seven Craig area.  Hey, good morning. That's a nice kickoff there with the stones.  Love to hear it. We really do. And there's nothing better. Little Keith Richards riff to get us into the mood here on this Monday morning cross the great state of New Hampshire. So Craig. It's amazing how our news cycle works. We have the colonial pipeline is one of the biggest and maybe most significant stories that we've had so far this year. And we talked about this actually, Liz Cheney as well. When she joined us on Friday to me, there has to be a priority. And a predominance of focus placed upon cyber warfare and germ warfare and electromagnetic warfare. We're hearing about, UFO's and that report from 60 minutes, which I think is really important as well. I It's clear now that there are. UFO's used to be. The question was, do they exist? The answer is, yeah, they do, because we have video evidence of them and people have seen him at firsthand accounts. So those are the two things we're going to get delve into today. And I want to start with your takeaways from the colonial pipeline circumstance.  I talked about it a lot on the radio show this last weekend. Cause it is a change. It really reflects a change in the way ransomware works too. And over the weekend we saw a big change yet. Again, ransomware used to be just, they got software on your machine. Usually through. Phishing, which is sending you an email, getting on something, and then they'd encrypt all of your files and say, pay up sucker, if you want access to your files again. And then it moved to the next stage, which was people didn't always pay off because they might have backups and say we can just restore from backups for Canada better. We're not paying you a dime. They decided maybe what we should do then is get a little more. Vance. And before we encrypt your files, we're going to steal all of your important data. And then we're going to hold that data hostage and threatened to release it just like they did with the metropolitan police department down in Washington, Jen DC. And yes, indeed. They did release home information about the police officers in the metropolitan police department right down there in Washington, DC, because they didn't pay this ransom. Now, what we have is something called dark side, which is a group that's been around for almost a year. And they sell services to other bad guys who want to rent some people. So dark side, we'll take a 25% cut all the way down to 10%. They have it on their website, depending on how much money you're able to get out of. People twenty-five percent cut on anything under about $5 million and they'll do tech support for you and everything else. So when you take over someone's computer and they are now trying to pay you buy Bitcoin, et cetera, in order to do that dark side, we'll do the tech support. It turns out the dark side was behind this hack of the colonial pipeline. And ArcSight is now a little bit nervous. They brought their website down. Of course it's on the dark web has two other major operations that are again, ransomware for hire. So we've seen three major groups. Chris go completely dark over the weekend. What does that mean as well? Are they nervous that what are they nervous about in particular? Are they nervous about the FBI? Are they nervous about, and does the FBI have. No jurisdiction over a cause that's one of the main challenges for whether it's for local police departments or for even an entity like the FBI, where there's a international type of a flavor to these many of these entities, how, who has jurisdiction over them? How do you. How do you make them accountable? And how does things have to change in order for that to take place?  Part of what drove up the value of Bitcoins so high and continues to our businesses who are buying Bitcoin in case they get ransom. So that obviously supply and demand limited supply of Bitcoin businesses buying right. Bitcoin by the millions in case they ever get hacked. And look at what just happened with Tesla, buying all kinds of Bitcoin as a quote investment unquote, most of the time, these investments are to protect themselves who has jurisdiction. I have been to a lecture by the secret service where they were able to shut up. Down a major black market operation that was running on the dark web and they were doing all of their transactions in Bitcoin that's cryptocurrency. And it is not. Safe. They were able to figure out who it was, where they were. Okay. And they were able to get an Interpol involved and get it all shut down and get most of the money back, which is interesting as well. So here in the us, the FBI does get involved and I've worked with them on a number of cases. And there's the, of course secret service gets involved because they're talking about currency, staffs, international fashion, and then they. In the international community to round these guys up. So I suspect they're either very nervous because someone's getting awfully close to them. And we've seen a lot of shutdowns lately of these bad guys, or maybe it's just good business. Let's just put up a different shingle and move on. I don't really know what's happening yet. And  why out in the open, the way that they are to begin with, because you're going to draw attention. To yourself and they, as you were referencing, they basically opened up a business and put forward that business and said, here we are, we're going to supply a commission-based environment. And that, to me says that they're not that fearful of repercussions because of being. Very much a international type of a, of an entity. And there being questions, about how you go about enforcement on this side. And there still are questions in regards to jurisdiction. There has to be a lot of cooperation for arrests and for investigation and things of that nature to transpire. So why do they have this type of confidence in your own?  So excellent question again. Look at their targets. They've been very careful not to target Eastern European countries, specifically countries or parts of the former Soviet union. So it does make me wonder Chris about whether or not the Russians are actually involved and are providing them with some protection. And maybe Mako has said, Hey, get your heads down.  Biden said there was no direct relationship. He did not say there was no relationship. He said that he did not believe that Latimer Putin was behind it specifically, but that does not mean that he is not behind the entity or that there is some sort of branch out to them as there are. Many companies and all oligarchs and individuals who have not necessarily a direct association with Putin, but indirect ones. The final thing is on the UFO's Craig and your thoughts on this and how this also plays into what we're talking about with no technological warfare, as I've said before, based upon the evidence. I am still not on board with the fact that the UFO's are from outer space. I'm on board with them being Chinese or Russian or another country has developed some sort of a technology that allows for these identified flying objects to get close to our aircraft carriers or be seen off of the coast of Florida. And in other. Circumstance, as I've said before, I've seen UFO's flying over and as many other people have flying over our airspace here in New Hampshire things that just don't make sense, different colors and so forth. And now we know that they have been we've seen them on video. We know that they exist. There's no question about that. The question is who is responsible,  right? Yeah, absolutely. Chris, my experience with you at post goes back to 1982, when I had a close encounter. With the UFO, not just the movie back then, but I was driving up the central Valley there in California and I, all of a sudden saw this light that was blasting right into my car. There was probably about a half a mile ahead of me. And then it came closer and I had my windows open. Didn't have air conditioning and it came right next to me. Now I know that helicopters make a lot of noise. We didn't have anything like drones back then. And it followed me and stayed right next to me as I went up that central Valley and took curves and everything else. Wow. My mother also had an experience. Where do they come from? That's your right? That's the really big question. We certainly did not have that type of technology in the 82 or so when I saw it and when it followed me and that technology, I doubt existed 20 years before when my mother had an encounter with a UFO. And it's it's a scary thing. It really scared the living daylights out of me that day, here I am on my twenties, a driving scene that there are some right now, some technologies that we do have that provide on an extremely limited scale. Some of the features that we've seen of many types of UFO's. And at this point, Chris, I'd have to say again, we really don't know where they are. Come from, it would take an incredible breakthrough in physics in order to be able to have an aircraft or some forum that can hover make almost no noise. If any noise at all and change directions completely without causing enough

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Good morning, everybody Craig Peterson here. And I was just talking with Mr. Chris, Ryan about some of the impact that we are beginning to feel with the remote hackers, right? Was this China was this Russia. And I thought it was interesting because Chris was obviously going online and. Doc going some of these different topics that we were talking about and 19 administration officials that were saying things that I don't think were true, frankly. [00:00:36] So here we go with Mr. Chris Ryan. [00:00:39]Chris Ryan: [00:00:39] The program right now, Craig Peterson, host of tech talk here on news radio 610 and 96.7, which airs on Saturdays at 11:00 AM, actually 1130, Craig, how are you? [00:00:52] Craig Peterson: [00:00:52] I am doing fine. And yeah, there's only one right lane. [00:00:55] Chris Ryan: [00:00:55] Thank you. Thank you at score another one for Chris. [00:00:59] He's not just sucking up to me because I'm the host. He is legit in this circumstance. Craig, I got a lot of important things to talk about with you and I want to start with what the United States is doing in regards to cyber attacks reportedly against Russia and retaliation for what Vladimir Putin has done in regards to election interference. [00:01:17] And also. Some of the cyber attacks that they've perpetrated against this country. What's the latest on this. And what do you see as being the state of play? [00:01:25]Craig Peterson: [00:01:25] There have been outages of course, here in the us and a lot of them attributed to just us making mistakes. So a lot of people businesses that are running parts of the internet that. [00:01:37] Did the wrong thing. So remember, again, the internet is not run by one organization. It isn't run by the federal government. It is a whole bunch of networks that are connected together. Now that said, we have seen some major strikes against outs here in the U S from both. Russia. And from China, frankly, China has been much, much worse at this, but the Biden administration has decided to really try and single out Russia. [00:02:07] In fact, president Biden came out and criticize them and said, we are going to retaliate. We had a problem in Russia where the Russian main Russian government websites were shut down and they went off the air is that as he sent them down on purpose and we've seen similar things before. So Chris, I suspect we have been involved. [00:02:30] Chris Ryan: [00:02:30] Yeah, the Biden administration, according to Yahoo news is preparing a series of aggressive cyber attacks on Russia. I'm in a major shift in tactics designed as a warning shot to rival powers. They are saying that they're not going to target civilian structures or networks, but the hack will instead serve as a direct challenge to Vladimir Putin and his cyber army, according to the telegraph. [00:02:56] Craig Peterson: [00:02:56] Yeah, but the one to really worry about is China. I, there's this whole Russia thing has really gone overboard here. All of the. Real cyber experts are saying that China's the big one. We just had two major attacks that attacked and compromised tens of thousands of businesses here in the United States, as well as government agencies, as well as our schools, stealing our information, grabbing bank account information, personal information, personal health information. [00:03:26] And none of that is attributed to Russia. It is entirely including the federal government Homeland security and the FBI it's entirely attributed to China. But yeah, it looks like we've done a little saber rattling, according [00:03:41] to what the American government has said, the agencies believe that the attack was the solar winds attack was actually perpetrated and they have traced. [00:03:50] Back to the Kremlin and this is going to be retaliation for that. So you do not believe that's the case. You believe it is China. [00:04:00] Yeah. Most of what we're seeing with solar winds is actually originated with Microsoft and Microsoft office three 65 system, and more particularly with Microsoft exchange servers and apparently. Both countries, there's all, some others have been involved in this. No, I don't say that it was not Russia at all, because there is some evidence that they were involved in it, but the most dramatic stuff has been caused by China has been coming from China. [00:04:29] Now I've got to explain one other thing here. Sure. The reason there are questions about this isn't because people are trying to hide things or cover up or blame a country that had no involvement. The reason it's so hard to figure this out entirely is we don't know where it really originates. No, we can track down a little bit. [00:04:50] We know, okay. There's an IP address that came from, but that IP address was someone's home computer that had been compromised and as part of a bot net, and then that home computer, if we get our hands on it, we can see, Oh, that was compromised from this machine in India. Oh. And that compromise came from here or there, the way we tell. [00:05:10] Whether or not a machine has been compromised from a certain place is by looking at how it was done. And I've worked with the FBI on these cases before. And so I can tell you what we're looking at is a fingerprint. What tools did they use? How did they use them once they got into the network? [00:05:29] How did they spread? And it is easy enough. For the Russians or the Chinese or the North Vietnamese now to come in and do something just as though they are someone else. And it's much like these people that commit crimes and they, the police look at it and say, okay, this has the same ammo. [00:05:52] Motorcyle Rhonda, is this other crime? Therefore they're probably related. That's what we're doing here, Chris. So there's no hard and fast rules that this was, or was not Russia on. And you're talking about one specific part of one specific tack. We do know most. Countries were involved. And we do know that China has been doing most of this over the last really 15 years, [00:06:20] Chris Ryan: [00:06:20] U S national security advisor, Jake Solvan who's from New Hampshire was a part of the delegation that met with the Chinese in Alaska. [00:06:27] And that wrapped up over the weekend. It began with a very tense. Standoff between the two nations, which was supposed to be a photo op and instead they engaged in, as you referenced before, or some saber rattling between the two sides. And I'm interested in what your takeaways were from that. As Mr. [00:06:46] Sullivan has continually. Said that traditional sanctions are not going to be what the Biden ministration uses in these circumstances. And there's going to be different elements as the United States. Again, looking at the cyber side of things in regards to attacks and and following up from previous attacks, perhaps perpetrating new ones in a new type of response. [00:07:11] Craig Peterson: [00:07:11] Yeah, there are many options available. We do in every branch of the armed services, have people who are not just there to defend, but to attack. And we are continually looking into that. Of course, the NSA we've seen before for tools that were offensive. Cyber warfare tools we've seen them used. And we just saw China here last week, how Tesla, but it cannot be selling cars in China because it has seven cameras and it has all of this other computer equipment. [00:07:44] And they think that we might be using it to steal information. Of course, Elon Musk came out and said, no, that's not the case. But that's the sort of thing we really could be doing. If we wanted to do it, you can be sure we're probing their networks. You can be sure we're into them as much as we can be. So how we resigned, it's hard to say, but there are a lot of options available and we have been shooting around the corners in shutting down power plants in Russia, in shutting down some of the infrastructure in China an hour. [00:08:20] Fingerprints are all over those things, just like it was in Iran with those centrifuges that were being used reportedly to make nuclear fuel for bombs. We have a record of doing this sort of thing. Preston. So in saber rattling might well be backed up by something. That's a very, obviously from the UK. [00:08:41] Chris Ryan: [00:08:41] And I think it has to be, I think that talk particularly in the current world, climate only goes. So far and it has to be followed by reciprocal action where we'll be seen as just being talk. Craig, thank you so much. And I look forward to chatting again next week. Take care, Chris. That is Greg Peterson. [00:09:01] He hosts tech talk on news radio six, 10 and 96, seven Saturdays at 11:30 AM.

Welcome to today's episode where we dive into the rapidly evolving world of technology and its impact on privacy, history, democracy, and consumer behavior. Join us as we explore the implications of Google FLoC cookies on online privacy, the dangers posed by AI Gemini in altering historical narratives, the role of technology in ensuring election integrity, and the influence of platforms like Temu on the online shopping experience. Google FLoC Cookies: Understand how Google's FLoC technology is reshaping online privacy and targeted advertising. Dangers of AI Gemini Changing History: Discover the risks of AI Gemini's potential to manipulate and rewrite historical events. Election Integrity Technology: Learn about the latest technologies designed to safeguard election integrity and ensure fair democratic processes. Temu and Online Shopping: Explore the impact of Temu and similar platforms on the future of online shopping and consumer habits. Don't forget to sign up for our Insider Newsletter to stay updated on the latest in technology and its implications for our world! You can also catch Craig at the following stations and channels: With Jim Polito at 0836 on TuesdaysWTAG AM 580 - FM 94.9 Talk 1200News Radio 920 & 104.7 FM WHJJNewsRadio 560 WHYNWXTKCraigs Show Airs 0600 Saturday and Sunday With Jeff Katz 1630 - TuesdaysWRVA 96.1 FM, 1140 AM   WGAN Matt Gagnon 0730 WednesdaysCraigs Show Airs 1700 Saturday  WGIR 610 & News Radio 96.7

Have you ever considered the impact of a powerful solar storm or an unexpected Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) on our way of life? This article dives deep into the resilience of our electric grid in the face of these potential threats, exploring the concerning "what ifs." Solar Flares and EMPs: Disrupting Our Connected World Solar Flares: These are massive eruptions of energy from the sun's surface. A powerful enough solar flare can induce electrical currents in our power grids, potentially causing widespread blackouts and damage to transformers. Electromagnetic Pulses (EMPs): These are bursts of electromagnetic energy that can disrupt or damage electronic devices. EMPs can be caused by natural phenomena like solar flares, but also by human actions like nuclear detonations. The Electric Grid: A Fragile Lifeline The electric grid is a vast network of interconnected power lines, transformers, and substations that deliver electricity to our homes and businesses. A major disruption to the grid could have a cascading effect, impacting everything from communication networks to critical infrastructure. Beyond Blackouts: The Looming Threat to Cybersecurity While a large-scale power outage is certainly a concern, the real danger from EMPs and solar flares lies in their potential to disrupt cybersecurity measures. Critical infrastructure control systems and financial networks could be vulnerable, leading to data breaches and widespread chaos. Taking Action: Protecting Ourselves and the Grid The good news is that there are steps we can take to mitigate the risks posed by solar flares and EMPs. These include: Grid Hardening: Upgrading the grid infrastructure with surge protection and other measures to improve resilience. Cybersecurity Measures: Implementing robust cybersecurity protocols to protect critical infrastructure from cyberattacks that could exploit vulnerabilities caused by EMPs. Personal Preparedness: Understanding how to protect electronic devices in your home and developing a plan for surviving a prolonged power outage. Click to Learn More, Empower, and Protect Yourself This article just scratches the surface of this complex issue. For a deeper dive into the science behind solar flares and EMPs, practical tips on how to safeguard your devices, and information on how to advocate for grid improvements, click the link below. Together, we can ensure a more resilient future for our electric grid and the way of life it supports. You can also catch Craig at the following stations and channels: With Jim Polito at 0836 on TuesdaysWTAG AM 580 - FM 94.9 Talk 1200News Radio 920 & 104.7 FM WHJJNewsRadio 560 WHYNWXTKCraigs Show Airs 0600 Saturday and Sunday With Jeff Katz 1630 - TuesdaysWRVA 96.1 FM, 1140 AM   WGAN Matt Gagnon 0730 WednesdaysCraigs Show Airs 1700 Saturday  WGIR 610 & News Radio 96.7

  Chris's $10,000 smartphone hack is just one instance of a concerning trend of cyberattacks. Today, we're delving deep into eSIM technology, a game-changer in mobile privacy and security. Cybersecurity Concerns: The rise in hacking incidents highlights the urgent need for robust cybersecurity measures, especially in the mobile space. eSIM Technology: Exploring the intricacies of eSIMs reveals both their potential and the security challenges they present. Online Privacy: With eSIMs becoming more prevalent, understanding their impact on online privacy is crucial for users. Combatting Hacking: Strategies for combatting hacking, including tips on how to keep your smartphone safe, are essential knowledge in today's digital landscape. haveibeenpawnd: Tools like Have I Been Pwned can help individuals check if their data has been compromised, adding another layer of security awareness. If you're intrigued by the intersection of technology, security, and privacy, this article is a must-read. Dive into the world of eSIMs and equip yourself with the knowledge to safeguard your digital life. Click the link below for insightful checklists and actionable advice. Unmasking the eSIM: A Deep-Dive into Mobile Privacy, Security, and the Combat against Hacking You can also catch Craig at the following stations and channels: With Jim Polito at 0836 on TuesdaysWTAG AM 580 - FM 94.9 Talk 1200News Radio 920 & 104.7 FM WHJJNewsRadio 560 WHYNWXTKCraigs Show Airs 0600 Saturday and Sunday With Jeff Katz 1630 - TuesdaysWRVA 96.1 FM, 1140 AM   WGAN Matt Gagnon 0730 WednesdaysCraigs Show Airs 1700 Saturday  WGIR 610 & News Radio 96.7