Podcasts about advertisers

It's no secret that data is one of the most valuable commodities in today's economy. Advertisers and publishers have long fought over who should control this precious resource, but there is a new player in town that is changing the game: AdHash. AdHash believes that advertisers should own their data, and for the first time, they can collect and store campaign performance data directly on their servers. This means no more data loss, discrepancies, or theft. Advertisers now have complete transparency into where their data is stored and how it is being used.What is AdHash?AdHash is a decentralized AdTech platform that cuts out the middlemen to bring efficiency, trust, and privacy to digital advertising. The platform makes transparency the default state of digital advertising. This means that advertisers can see exactly where their ads are being shown, who is seeing them, and how much they are paying for each impression.AdHash also allows advertisers to collect first-party data directly from users with consent. This data is stored on the advertiser's own hardware or infrastructure and can be used to improve ad targeting and measurement. This is a major change from the traditional model of the advertising network owning the data and sharing it with your competitors.Why should you own your data?First-party data are your most valuable proprietary asset. They allow you to understand your customers better than anyone else and give you a competitive advantage in the marketplace. When you control your data, you can be sure that it is being used to maximum effect.But, owning your data also means that you have the power to control how it is used and by whom. AdHash believes that advertisers should have the final say in how their data is used and shared. This includes being able to choose who can access your data, setting limits on how it can be used, and having the ability to delete it at any time. AdHash gives you the power to collect, store, and use your data the way you want.There are many benefits to owning your own data.TransparencyYou know exactly where your data is stored and how it is being used. With AdHash, you can store it on the network or protect it behind your own network to ensure privacy.ControlYou have complete control over who can access your data and how it can be used. No more worrying about whether your hard work in cultivating an audience will be used against you by an advertising network.SecurityYour data is stored securely on AdHash's decentralized network. This means that only those who are supposed to see and use the data may do so.PrivacyAdHash respects your privacy and will only collect data with your consent.Why AdHash?AdHash is the only platform that allows advertisers to own their data. They are changing the AdTech landscape by making transparency the default state of digital advertising. The platform gives you the power to collect, store, and use your data the way you want. To learn more about AdHash's vision of the future of digital advertising, check out their website.Sponsored by: Get $5 to protect your credit card information online with Privacy. Amazon Prime gives you more than just free shipping. Get free music, TV shows, movies, videogames and more.

It's no secret that data is one of the most valuable commodities in today's economy. Advertisers and publishers have long fought over who should control this precious resource, but there is a new player in town that is changing the game: AdHash. AdHash believes that advertisers should own their data, and for the first time, they can collect and store campaign performance data directly on their servers. This means no more data loss, discrepancies, or theft. Advertisers now have complete transparency into where their data is stored and how it is being used.What is AdHash?AdHash is a decentralized AdTech platform that cuts out the middlemen to bring efficiency, trust, and privacy to digital advertising. The platform makes transparency the default state of digital advertising. This means that advertisers can see exactly where their ads are being shown, who is seeing them, and how much they are paying for each impression.AdHash also allows advertisers to collect first-party data directly from users with consent. This data is stored on the advertiser's own hardware or infrastructure and can be used to improve ad targeting and measurement. This is a major change from the traditional model of the advertising network owning the data and sharing it with your competitors.Why should you own your data?First-party data are your most valuable proprietary asset. They allow you to understand your customers better than anyone else and give you a competitive advantage in the marketplace. When you control your data, you can be sure that it is being used to maximum effect.But, owning your data also means that you have the power to control how it is used and by whom. AdHash believes that advertisers should have the final say in how their data is used and shared. This includes being able to choose who can access your data, setting limits on how it can be used, and having the ability to delete it at any time. AdHash gives you the power to collect, store, and use your data the way you want.There are many benefits to owning your own data.TransparencyYou know exactly where your data is stored and how it is being used. With AdHash, you can store it on the network or protect it behind your own network to ensure privacy.ControlYou have complete control over who can access your data and how it can be used. No more worrying about whether your hard work in cultivating an audience will be used against you by an advertising network.SecurityYour data is stored securely on AdHash's decentralized network. This means that only those who are supposed to see and use the data may do so.PrivacyAdHash respects your privacy and will only collect data with your consent.Why AdHash?AdHash is the only platform that allows advertisers to own their data. They are changing the AdTech landscape by making transparency the default state of digital advertising. The platform gives you the power to collect, store, and use your data the way you want. To learn more about AdHash's vision of the future of digital advertising, check out their website.Sponsored by: Get $5 to protect your credit card information online with Privacy. Amazon Prime gives you more than just free shipping. Get free music, TV shows, movies, videogames and more.

Season 8 of the affiliate marketing podcast has finally landed and we are kicking off the season with an amazing, yet controversial topic. The great resignation is truly upon us and for employers, it is causing a bit of a stir. On the show this week we have Susannah Rayburn, General Manager of Affiliate Network at Diablo Media. Since 2013, Susannah has been working behind the scenes helping to make Diablo Media one of the top Performance Marketing companies in the US. With a passion to help others succeed, she thrives on providing leadership, support, and education to all members of the team. Who else better to discuss the effects of the great resignation? Diablo Media pride itself on being able to run effective performance marketing campaigns that you need to deliver the right message across the right channels. Whether you need to acquire new customers, generate leads, or drive other customer actions—They have the tools, the people, and the expertise to get the job done. If you'd like to learn more about Diablo Media's services or are interested in becoming an Advertiser or Publisher with Diablo, please visit their website at https://diablomedia.com/Listen to hear more about: What is the great resignation? 4-day work weeks and how beneficial they have been for both the company and employees The ways that Susannah has managed to retain the company culture[01:00] - Susannah takes us through her career and how she got to where she's at now [05:30] - Lee-Ann discusses how difficult it is to already retain talent in this industry [09:30] - Listen to hear about Monday.com and how crucial it has been for Diablo Media [22:00] - Lee-Ann discusses incentives that the affiliate industry should be looking to implement“I love AffiliateINSIDER's Affiliate Marketing Podcast.”

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1. TikTok To Show Who Viewed Your Post - In addition to the “Profile View”, TikTok is now working on a new feature that will allow users to see who viewed their posts. This is another set of data you can use to identify your most engaged followers.The trade-off is that your followers will be able to see when you view their posts too. If you're not comfortable with that, you can opt-out of post view history. But then you won't be able to see view history for your content either. TikTok's post view history isn't like Instagram and Facebook stories, where it's turned on for everyone by default.2. Making Your Pages Appear As A Sitelink In Search Results - Sitelinks are the additional results that are sometimes shown below a Google search result, where it's usually just a one-line link to a different part of the website.And there is no meta tag or structured data that you can use to kind of like enforce a sitelink to be shown. It's for Google Algorithm to figure out what is actually kind of related or relevant for users when they're looking at this one web page as well.To improve your odds, Mueller recommends to have a good website structure, to have clear internal links so that it's easy for Google to recognize which pages are related to those pages, and to have clear titles that they can use and kind of show as a sitelink.This is also covered in the Google's Search Central page.“We only show sitelinks for results when we think they'll be useful to the user. If the structure of your site doesn't allow our algorithms to find good sitelinks, or we don't think that the sitelinks for your site are relevant for the user's query, we won't show them.  Make sure that the text you use as your page titles and in your headings is informative, relevant, and compact.  Create a logical site structure that is easy for users to navigate, and make sure you link to your important pages from other relevant pages.  Ensure that your internal links' anchor text is concise and relevant to the page they're pointing to.  Avoid repetitions in your content.” 3. ‘Warning' Labels In Google Search Console Going Away - There seems to be a lot of confusions around the ‘warning‘ label for URLs and items in Google Search Console. So In an effort to help people focus more on critical issues, Google will now label top-level items as either valid or invalid.‘Valid' refers pages or items without critical issues, while ‘invalid' to pages or items with critical issues. You'll also see ‘valid' and ‘invalid' labels when looking at reports rendered by Google's URL inspection tool.Individual issues are still classified as error, warning, or good, which is communicated through use of color and icon rather than a text label. The following reports are affected by this update: Core Web Vitals: Poor/Need improvement/Good categories are retained, while pages are grouped into good and not-good tables. Mobile Usability: Categories are labeled as either ‘Not usable' and ‘Usable.' AMP report: Warnings are replaced with ‘valid' and ‘invalid' labels. Rich result reports: New labels will apply to Events, Fact checks, Logos, and other types of report. URL Inspection: The top level verdict for a URL will be either: URL is on Google URL is on Google, but has issues URL is not on Google 4. Microsoft Implementing Advertiser Identity Verification - Microsoft Advertising now requires advertiser identity verification, which the company claims improves customer experiences by ensuring that customers see ads from reputable sources. "Advertisers will be required to go through a verification process to confirm their legal identity as part of this program," Microsoft wrote. Advertisers can complete this process with Microsoft Advertising by using government-issued, photograph-enabled personal identity or business-related documents issued by relevant regulatory authorities. Microsoft claims that the process is highly automated, and that it has been simplified so that "advertisers can finish it fast."The current scope of the program has been restricted to advertisers belonging to specific verticals or unclear business models. The program is currently available in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, the Netherlands, Poland, Mexico, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and the United States.How does advertiser identity verification work? Microsoft Advertising will request advertiser identity verification for one or more of your accounts via email.  Follow the instructions in the email request that you receive to complete identity verification. You may be required to verify your status as a business, an individual, or both.  You must complete all identity verification related tasks within 30 days of receiving the email request or we will pause your account and your ads will not show. In that case, once you have successfully completed identity verification, we will enable your account and will start showing your ads again.  Review and approval of your verification submission may take 3-5 business days to complete. To appeal a decision, please contact support. For more information on verification status, please see Identity verification status below. You can learn more in this help document.5. Google Ad Manager Integration With GA4 For Web In Open Beta - The Google Analytics 4 integration with Google Ad Manager for web data is now in open beta. Follow the steps to link your Ad Manager account to Google Analytics 4 properties. To view reporting on Google Analytics metrics and dimensions, you can use the Analytics report type.6. YouTube Now Allows ‘Corrections' After Publishing - Per YouTube,“Up until now, if a creator wanted to correct an error in an existing upload or provide an update to information that was no longer accurate, short of editing and re-uploading the video, resulting in loss of engagement metrics and comments, the options were limited to adding a note in the description, responding to comments calling out the error, pinning a comment or doing nothing. With the launch of Corrections, creators will be able to call attention to corrections and clarifications in the descriptions of their already published videos.”The new Corrections info card will show up at the top right of the playback window, at the timestamp of the first Correction in the clip. Clicking on the info card will expand the video description, where the creator will be able to provide a written correction or clarification based on the change.But as YouTube explains, that could save creators from having to re-upload their clips – and it could be a particularly big help in adding important context to timely and evolving news-related videos shared in the app.Creators could also use the option to direct viewers to newer clips on the same subject. So if you've posted a popular tutorial video on, say, a certain app or device, you could add a note that it's since been updated via the Corrections marker, where you could also point users to your newer video on the topic.To add a correction to your YouTube clips, you can write “Correction:” or “Corrections:” within the video description, followed by the timestamp (00:00), and an explanation of your update. You can read more about video Corrections here.7. 1.5 Billion/Month YouTube Users Engage With YouTube Shorts Content - “YouTube Shorts are now being watched by over 1.5 billion logged-in users every month.” That is a huge amount, especially when you also consider that YouTube's total monthly ‘logged in' audience is 2 billion total users. That means that around 75% of YouTube users are engaging with Shorts.8. Additional Reels Remix Options In IG - Remix for Photos enables users to create Reels based on your feed post content, which they can then download themselves, within their own clips. Which means that people can re-use your content however they like – but you can switch off the option in your settings if you'd prefer that not to happen.Remixing your existing videos into shorter clips - Meta is notifying Creator Studio users of its new process to trim your existing videos into Reels clips. The process guides you through the editing process to create Reels and Stories clips, by using the best parts of your existing video uploads.9. New Promotional Options From Pinterest - Pinterest is introducing two new ad options to enable marketers get into its Stories-like Idea Pins, as well as a new 'Paid Partnership' tagging procedure that will provide creators another way to profit from their Pin efforts.The 'Idea Ads' feature, which are full-screen, multi-page presentations with unique links, similar to Idea Pins. Pinterest's interest targeting technologies will be used to increase response for Idea Ads, which will show in user feeds. It's basically an Idea Pin that you can boost with paid marketing to get your content in front of even more app users.Meanwhile, Idea ads with paid collaborations allow marketers to promote user-created Idea Pin content. This feature enables businesses to increase the reach of collaborative Pin projects, putting your promotions in front of the creators', your, and those you pay to reach audiences.Paid partnership Idea Ads feature a 'Promoted by' badge beneath the creator's name, as well as links to both the creator's and partner brand's app accounts. It's another method for the app to generate more lucrative creative collaborations, which helps brands create better content while also paying creators for their platform knowledge.According to Pinterest, brand collaborations with creators result in a 38 percent increase in brand recognition and a 37 percent increase in Pin awareness. This method allows creators to tag a partner brand in their Idea Pin, alerting the brand to the possibility of collaborating. The creator and the company then work out the details of their collaboration, and brands can promote the content further if they want to.This is another method for creators to generate money streams while also serving as a showcase for them, with free ad examples accessible for approval in the app.It could be a smart way to streamline brand relationships while also offering up new avenues for promotion through collaborators you might not have considered before.

Gathering user data through cookies is extremely valuable in targeted advertising. However, it could compromise user privacy. Therefore, giving the users the ability to thoroughly understand and decide what information they are willing to give up to certain brands is important. Joshua Wilson, Commercial Director, JAPAC, Crimtan talks to more the role of his company in ensuring relevant and consented advertising. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

How Private is Crypto? What About WhatsApp and Signal? Cryptocurrencies were thought to be like the gold standard of security, of having your information stay private. Maybe you don't want to use regular currency and transactions. It's all changed. [Automated transcript follows.] [00:00:14] We have had such volatility over the years when it comes to what are called cryptocurrencies. [00:00:21] Now I get a lot of questions about cryptocurrencies. First of all, let me say, I have never owned any cryptocurrencies and I do not own any crypto assets at all. Most people look at crypto currencies and think of a couple of things. First of all, an investment. An investment is something that you can use or sell, right? [00:00:42] Typically investments you don't really use. It's like a house. Is it an investment? Not so much. It's more of a liability, but people look at it and say listen, it went from what was a 10,000. Bitcoins to buy a pizza to, it went up to $50,000 per Bitcoin. There's a pretty big jump there. [00:01:03] And yeah, it was pretty big. And of course, it's gone way down and it's gone back up and it's gone down. It's gone back up. But the idea of any kind of currency is can you do anything with the currency? You can take a dollar bill and go and try and buy a cup of coffee. Okay. A $10 bill and buy a cup of coffee in most places anyways. [00:01:26] That sounds like a good idea. I could probably use a cup of coffee right now and get a tickle on my throat. I hate that. But if you have something like Bitcoin, where can you spend it? You might remember Elon Musk was saying, yeah, you can use Bitcoin to buy a Tesla. Also Wikipedia would accept donations. [00:01:45] Via Bitcoin, there were a number of places online that you could use. Bitcoin. In fact, there's a country right now in south central America that has Bitcoin as its currency. That's cool too. When you think about it, what is, so what are you gonna do? Latin American country? I'm trying to remember what it is. [00:02:05] Oh yeah. It's all Salvador. The first country in the world to adopt Bitcoin is an official legal tender. Now there's a number of reasons they're doing that and he can do it basically. If you got a dictator, you can do almost anything you want to. So in El Salvador, they've got apps that you can use and you can go and buy a tree taco using Bitcoin using their app. [00:02:31] So there you go. If you have Bitcoin, you can go to El Salvador and you can buy all of the tacos and other basic stuff you might wanna buy. But in general, No you can't just go and take any of these cryptocurrencies and use them anywhere. So what good are they as a currency? we already established that they haven't been good as an investment unless you're paying a lot of attention and you're every day buying and selling based on what the movement is. [00:02:59] I know a guy that does exactly that it's, he's a day trader basically in some of these cryptocurrencies, good for. But in reality, is that something that makes sense in a long term? Is that going to help him long term? I don't know. I really don't because again, there's no intrinsic value. [00:03:18] So some of the cryptocurrencies have decided let's have some sort of intrinsic value. And what they've done is they've created what are generally known as stable coins. And a stable coin is a type of cryptocurrency that behind it has the ability to be tied to something that's stable. So for instance, one that really hit the news recently is a stable coin that is tied to the us dollar. [00:03:46] And yet, even though it is tied to the us dollar and the coin is a dollar and the dollar is a coin. They managed to get down into the few pennies worth of value, kinda like penny. so what good was that, it has since come back up, some are tied to other types of assets. Some of them say we have gold behind us. [00:04:09] Kinda like what the United States used to do back when we were on the gold standard. And we became the petrol dollar where countries were using our currency are us dollars, no matter which country it was to buy and sell oil. Things have changed obviously. And we're not gonna talk about. The whole Petro dollar thing right now. [00:04:30] So forget about that. Second benefit. Third benefit is while it's crypto, which means it's encrypted, which means we're safe from anybody's spine on us, anybody stealing it. And of course that's been proven to be false too. We've seen the cryptocurrencies stolen by the billions of dollars. We've seen these cryptocurrencies lost by the billions of dollars as well. [00:04:58] That's pretty substantial. We get right down to it, lost by the billions because people had them in their crypto wallets, lost the password for the crypto wallet. And all of a sudden, now they are completely out of luck. Does that make sense to you? So the basic. Idea behind currency is to make it easier to use the currency than to say, I'll trade you a chicken for five pounds of nail. [00:05:25] Does that make sense to you? So you use a currency. So you say the chicken is worth five bucks. Actually chicken is nowadays is about $30. If it's a LA hen and those five pounds of nails are probably worth about $30. So we just exchanged dollars back and forth. I think that makes a lot of sense. One of the things that has driven up the value of cryptocurrencies, particularly Bitcoin has been criminal marketplaces. [00:05:53] As you look at some of the stats of ransoms that are occurring, where people's computers are taken over via ransomware, and then that person then pays a ransom. And what happens when they pay that ransom while they have to go find an exchange. Pay us dollars to buy cryptocurrency Bitcoin usually. And then they have the Bitcoin and they have to transfer to another wallet, whether or not the bad guys can use the money. [00:06:25] Is a, again, a separate discussion. They certainly can than they do because some of these countries like Russia are going ahead and just exchanging the critical currencies for rubs, which again, makes sense if you're Russia. Now we have a lot of criminals that have been using the Bitcoin for ransoms businesses. [00:06:49] Publicly traded businesses have been buying Bitcoin by the tens of millions of dollars so that they have it as an asset. In case they get ransom. Things have changed. There's a great article in NBC news, by Kevin Collier. And Kevin's talking about this California man who was scammed out of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of cryptocurrency. [00:07:15] Now this was a fake romance scam, which is a fairly common one. It. It tends to target older people who are lonely and a romance starts online and they go ahead and talk and kind of fall in love. And it turns out she or he has this really almost terminal disease. If only they had an extra, a hundred thousand dollars to pay for the surgery. [00:07:45] You, you know the story, so he was conned out of the money. What's interesting to me is how the investigation and investigative ability has changed over the years. Probably about five years ago, I sat through a briefing by the secret service and. In that briefing, they explained how they had gone and very, quite cleverly tracked the money that was being sent to and used by this dark web operator who ran a site known as a silk road. [00:08:22] And that site was selling illegal things online. Oh, and the currency that they were tracking was Bitcoin. Yes, indeed. So much for cryptocurrency being secure it, five years ago, the secret service was able to do it. The FBI was able to do it and they couldn't do a whole lot about it. But part of the problem is all of your transactions are a matter of public record. [00:08:52] So if someone sends you a fraction of a Bitcoin. That is now in a ledger and that ledger now can be used because when you then spend. Fraction of a Bitcoin somewhere else, it can be tracked. It is tracked is a hundred percent guaranteed to be tracked. And once it's tracked government can get in. [00:09:15] Now, in this case, a deputy district attorney in Santa Clara county, California, was able to track the movement of the cryptocurrency. Yeah. So this district attorney, okay. Deputy district attorney, not the FBI, not the secret service, not the national security agency, a local district attorney in Santa Clara county, California, not a particularly huge county, but. [00:09:44] She was able to track it. And she said that she thinks that the scammer lives in a country where they can't easily extradite them. And so they're unlikely to be arrested at any time soon. So that includes countries like Russia that do not extradite criminals to the United States. Now getting into the details. [00:10:03] There's a great quote from her in this NBC news article, our bread and butter these days really is tracing cryptocurrency and trying to seize it and trying to get there faster than the bad guys are moving it elsewhere, where we can't. Grab it. So she said the team tracked the victim's money as it bounced from one digital wallet to another, till it ended up at a major cryptocurrency exchange where it appeared the scammer was planning to launder the money or cash out, they sent a warrant to the exchange. [00:10:35] Froze the money and she plans to return it to the victim. That is a dramatic reversal from just a few years back when cryptocurrencies were seen as a boon for criminals. Amazing. Isn't it? Stick around. We get a lot more to talk about here and of course, sign up online Craig peterson.com and get my free newsletter. [00:11:01] There have been a lot of efforts by many companies, Microsoft, apple, Google, to try and get rid of passwords. How can you do that? What is a password and what are these new technologies? Apple thinks they have the answer. [00:11:17] Passwords have been the bane of existence for a long while. And if you'd like, I have a special report on passwords, where I talk about password managers, things you can do, things you should do in order to help keep your information safe, online things like. [00:11:34] Bank accounts, et cetera. Just email me, Craig peterson.com and ask for the password special report and I'll get it to you. Believe me it's self-contained it's not trying to get you to buy something. Nothing. It is entirely about passwords and what you can do again, just email me, me@craigpeterson.com and we'll get right back with you. [00:11:56] Give us a couple of days, passwords are a problem. And over the years, the standards for passwords have changed. I remember way back when some of the passwords might be 2, 3, 4 characters long. and back then, those were hard to crack. Then Unix came along. I started using Unix and when was that? [00:12:16] Probably about 81. And as I was messing around with Unix, I. They used to had a couple of changes in how they did passwords. They added assault to it. They used basically the same cipher that the Germans used in world war II, that enigma cipher, which again was okay for the times today, we have much more powerful ciphers and the biggest concern right now, amongst real cybersecurity people. [00:12:43] Government agencies is okay. So what are we going to do when these new quantum computers come along with their artificial intelligence and other things, that's going to be a bit of a problem because quantum computers are able to solve problems in fractions of a second. Even that traditional computers cannot solve it. [00:13:10] It's a whole different thing. I want you to think. Something here. I, if you have a handful of spaghetti now we're talking about hard spaghetti, not cooked spaghetti and they all dried out and they are a varying links. How could you sort those into the smallest to largest, if you will, how could you find which ones were the longest, perhaps? [00:13:37] Which ones were the shortest? There's an analog way of doing that and there's a digital way of doing that. So the digital way for the computer would be. To measure them all and compare the measurements and then identify how long the longest one was. And then maybe you'd have to go back and try and find that. [00:13:55] So you can imagine that would take some time, the analog way of doing that. Cuz there still are analog computers out there and they do an amazing job in certain tasks, but the analog way of doing that is okay. So you take that bundle of various length spaghetti and you slam it on the table. What's gonna happen while those pieces of dried spaghetti are going to self align, right? [00:14:22] The shortest ones are going to be down at the bottom and the tallest one's gonna be sticking out from the top. So there you go. There's your tallest, your longest pieces of spaghetti, and it's done. Instantly. So that's just an idea here, quantum, computing's not the same thing, but that's a comparison really of digital and analog computers, but it's the same type of thing. [00:14:45] Some of these problems that would take thousands of years for digital computer. To work out, can just take a fraction of a second. It's absolutely amazing. So when we're looking at today's algorithms, today's programs for encrypting things like military information, secret telegrams, if you will going back and forth in inside the secretary of state embasies worldwide. [00:15:10] Today they're considered to be quite secure, but with quantum computing what's gonna happen. So there are a lot of people out there right now who are working on trying to figure out how can we come up with an algorithm that works today with our digital computers and can be easily solved by quantum computer. [00:15:34] We have a pretty good idea of how quantum computers are going to work in the future, how they work right now, but this really gets us to the next level, which is cool. Franklin. That's a little bit here about cybersecurity. How about you and your password? How does this all tie in? [00:15:51] There are a few standards out there that people have been trying to pass is it's no longer the four character password you might remember. Oh, it needs to be eight to 10 characters, random mix of upper lowercase, special digits, character numbers. You remember those? And you should change it every 30 days. [00:16:09] And those recommendations changed about three or four years ago when the national Institute of standards and technology said, Hey guys pass phrase is much better than the, what we've been doing because people are gonna remember it and it can be longer. So if you are using I have some past phrases I use that are 30 characters or more. [00:16:33] And I mix up the case and I mix up mix ins on special characters and some numbers, but it's a phrase that I can remember and I have different phrases for different websites. Cause I use a password manager right now. I have about 3,100 entries in my password manager. That's a lot. And I bet you have a lot more passwords or at least a lot more websites and accounts than you realize. [00:17:03] And so that gets to be a real problem. How do you make all of this work and make it easy for people? One of the ways that that. They're looking at using is something called the Fido alliances technique. And the idea behind Fido is actually similar to what I do right now. Cause I use one password.com. [00:17:24] I have an app on my phone and the phone goes ahead and gives me the password. In fact, it'll. Put it in. I have plugins in my browsers. It'll put it right into the password form on the website. And then it'll ask me on my phone. Hey, is that really you? And I'll say yes, using duo and TA I'm logged in it's really quite cool. [00:17:48] Fido is a little different than that, but the same, the whole idea behind Fido is you registered a website and the website will send a request to the Fido app. That's on your phone. So now on your phone, you'll use biometrics or maybe one time pass key, those six digit keys that change every 30 seconds. [00:18:13] And so now you on your phone, you say yeah. That's me. That's good. That's me. Yeah. Okay. And then the app will exchange with the website using public key cryptography. A public key and it's gonna be unique public key for that website. So it'll generate a private key and a public key for that website. [00:18:35] And now TA a, the website does not have your password and cannot get your password. And anytime you log in, it's going to ask you on your smartphone. Is this. And there's ways beyond smartphones. And if you wanna find out more about passwords, I've got, again, that free, special report, just Craig peterson.com. [00:18:59] Email me, just email me@craigpeterson.com and I'll make sure we send that off to you and explains a lot about passwords and current technology. So Fido is one way of doing this and a few different companies have gone ahead and have invested some. Into final registration, because it requires changes on the websites as well in order to. [00:19:25] With Fido. Now you might use a pin, you might use the biometrics, et cetera, but apple has decided they've come up with something even better. Now there's still a lot of questions about what apple is doing, but they are rolling it into the next release of iOS and also of Mac operating system. And you'll be able to use that to secure. [00:19:48] Log into websites. I think Apple's gonna get a lot of traction on this and I think it's gonna be better for all of us involved here. We'll see. There's still a lot of UN unanswered questions, but I'll keep you up to date on this whole password technology stick around. [00:20:08] There are ways for us to communicate nowadays easy ways, but are the easy ways, the best ways, the question here, frankly. And part of this answer has to do with WhatsApp and we'll talk right now. [00:20:23] Many people have asked me about secure messaging. You probably know by now that sending text messages is not secure. [00:20:34] In fact, it could be illegal if you have any personal information about. Patients or maybe employees, you just can't send those over open channels. So what apple has done for instance is they've got their messaging app and if the message is green, it's just reminding you that this is a text message. Now they stuck with green because that was the industry's standard. [00:21:01] Green does not mean safe in the apple world when it comes to iMessage. Blue does. So they've got end to end encryption. So if the message is blue, that means the encryptions in place from side to side, there are on the other end of the spectrum. There are apps like telegram, which are not. Particularly safe. [00:21:22] Now, telegram has pulled up it socks a little bit here, but in order to have end to end encryption and telegram, you have to manually turn it on. It is not on by default. I also personally don't trust telegram because of their background, things that they've done in the past. Avoid that. [00:21:43] WhatsApp is something I've been asked about. I had a family member of a service member who was overseas, ask if WhatsApp was safe for them to communicate on cuz they didn't want third parties picking. Private messages, things you say and do online with friends and family are not necessarily things there are for public consumption. [00:22:06] So the answer that I gave was yeah, you might remember Facebook getting WhatsApp. They bought it and deciding they were going to make some changes to the privacy settings in. now that was really a big mistake. They said we're gonna add advertisements. How are you going to effectively advertise? [00:22:27] If you don't know what we're talking about, have you noticed advertising platforms? If you look up something or someone else in your house looks up something, if your neighbors are looking up, they assume that you might be interested in it as well. So what do they do? They go ahead and show you ads for that brand new pair of socks that you never really cared about, but because the algorithms in the background figured yeah, that's what you've been talking about. [00:22:55] Let's pass out your pair of socks. So if Facebook is going to. Add into WhatsApp, what's going to happen. Are they going to be monitoring what you're saying? And then sending you some of these messages, right? These ads, because of that, a lot of people started looking for a more secure. Platform and that's frankly, where Moxi Marlin spike comes in a fun name, the bloom in this case, but he started a company called signal. [00:23:30] He didn't just start it. He wrote the code for it, the server code, everything. And the whole idea behind signal was to have a guaranteed safe end to end way to communicate. A third party with a friend, a relative, et cetera. So signal is something that I've used in the past. And I used from time to time now, as well, depending on who I'm talking to. [00:23:56] And it does allow you to send messages. It does allow you to talk. You can do all kinds of stuff with it. So now there's an issue with signal. It's disappointing. Moxi has stepped down from running signal. There's a company behind it in January, 2022. And he said, the company's begin off. They can run themselves. [00:24:19] He's still on the board of direct. And the guy who's currently the head of signal is also a very privacy focused guy, which is really good too signal by the way is free. And you can get it for pretty much any platform you would care to have it for a very nice piece of software. I like what they've done. [00:24:38] Now the problem is that some of those people at signal have decided that they should have a way of making payments inside signal. So a few months ago, they went ahead and added into signal, a piece of software that allows you to send. Payments online. Now this is a little concerning and the let's talk about some of the reasons for the concern. [00:25:09] Basically what we're seeing is a cryptocurrency that Moxi himself helped to put in place now, I guess that's good cuz he understands it. It's supposedly a cryptocurrency that is privacy. Focused. And that's a good thing. What type of crypto is it? That's privacy focused. And how good is it going to be? [00:25:34] Those are all good questions, but here's the biggest problem. I think that comes from this. We've got our friends at Facebook, again, trying to add crypto payments to their various messenger and other products. We're seeing that from a lot of these communication systems, cuz they can skim a little off the top legally, charge you a fee and then make their money that way. But. What happens when you put it into an encrypted messaging app? Bottom line, a lot of bad things can happen here because now all of a sudden you come under financial regulations, right? Because you are performing a financial. Function. So now potentially here, there could be criminal misuse of the app because you could have ransomware and they say, reach us on signal. [00:26:33] Here's our signal account. And go ahead and send us crypto. it's called mobile coin by the way, this particular cryptocurrency. So now all of a sudden you are opening up the possibility of all kinds of bad things happening and your app signal, which was originally great for messaging now being used nefariously. [00:26:57] I think that's a real problem. Now, when it comes to money transfer functions with cryptocurrencies to say that they're anonymous, I think is a hundred percent a misnomer because it's really pseudo anonymous. It's never completely anonymous. So now you've increased the legal attack surface here. So now the various regulators and countries around the world can say, Hey. [00:27:26] This is no longer just a messaging app. You are using it to send money. We wanna track all money transactions. And so what does that mean? That means now we need to be able to break the encryption or need to shut down your app, or you need to stop the ability to send money. So the concern right now with signal is we really could have some legal problems with signal. [00:27:53] And we could potentially cause some real life harm. On the other side of, this is what Moi Marlin spike has been really driving with signal over the years, which is we don't want anyone to be able to break into signal. So there's a particularly one Israeli based company that sells tools that you can buy that allow you to break into smartphone. [00:28:20] And they're used by everybody from criminals. You can even buy some of these things on eBay. And they're used also by law enforcement agencies. So he found that there was a bug in one of the libraries that's used by this Israeli soft. To where that causes it to crash. And so he puts some code into signal, at least he threatened to that would cause any of the scanning software that tries to break into your smartphone to fail to crash. [00:28:53] Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Greg Peterson here, online Craig peterson.com and really you are not alone. [00:29:09] I got some good news about ransomware and some bad news about B E C business email compromise. In fact, I got a call just this just this week from someone who had in fact again, had their operating account emptied. [00:29:27] Ransomware is a real problem, but it's interesting to watch it as it's evolved over the years. [00:29:36] We're now seeing crackdowns driving down ransomware profits. Yes, indeed. Ransomware's ROI is dropping the return on investment. And so what we're starting to see is a drive towards more. Business email compromise attack. So we'll talk about those, what those are. And I have a couple of clients now that became clients because of the business email compromises that happened to them. [00:30:10] A great article that was in this week's newsletter. You should have received it Tuesday morning from me. If you are signed up for the free newsletter. Craig peterson.com/subscribe. You'll get these usually Tuesday morning. It's my insider show notes. So you can get up to speed on some of the articles I'm talking about during the week that I talk about on the radio. [00:30:38] And of course talk about here on the radio show and podcast and everything else as well. So what we're seeing here, according to dark readings, editor, Becky Bracken is some major changes, a pivot by the bad guys, because at the RSA conference, they're saying that law enforcement crackdowns try cryptocurrency regulations. [00:31:05] We've been talking about that today and ransomware as a service operator. Downs are driving the return on investment for ransomware operations across the world all the way across the globe. So what is ransomware as a service? I think that's a good place to start because that has really been an Albert Cross around our next for a long time. [00:31:30] The idea with ransomware is they get you to download some software, run some software that you really should not be running. That makes sense to you. So you get this software on your computer, it exfil trades files. So in other words, it takes files that you have sends them. Off to the bad guys. And then once it's done that, so it'll send like any word files, it finds Excel, other files. [00:32:00] It might find interesting once it's done that, then it goes ahead and encrypts those files. So you no longer have access to them and it doesn't just do them on your computer. If you share a drive, let's say you've got a Gdrive or something else on your computer that is being mounted from either another computer or maybe a server. [00:32:24] It will go ahead and do the same thing. With those files. And remember it, isn't just encrypting because if you have a good backup and by the way, most businesses that I've come into do not have a good backup, which is a real problem because their backups fail. They haven't run. I had one case where we helped the business out and it had been a year and a half since they had a successful backup and they had no. [00:32:52] They were dutifully carrying home. These USB drives every day, plug in a new one in, and the backups were not running. Absolutely amazing. So anyhow, ransomware is a service then. So they've encrypted your files. They've exfiltrated. In other words, they've taken your files and then they demand a ran. [00:33:14] So usually it's like this red screen that comes up and says, Hey all your files are belong to us and you need to contact us. So they have people who help you buy Bitcoin or whatever they're looking for. Usually it's Bitcoin and send the Bitcoin to them. And then they'll give you what's hopefully a decryption. [00:33:38] Now what's particularly interesting about these decryption keys is they work about half of the time. So in other words, about half of the time, you'll get all your data back about half the time. You will not, it's just not good. So if you are a small operator, if you are just a small, bad guy and it's you and maybe somebody else helping you, you got your nephew there helping you out. [00:34:03] How are you going to. Help these people that you're ransoming by the cryptocurrency. How are you going to threaten them with release of their documents online? Unless you have a staff of people to really help you out here? That's where ransomware's a service comes in. The whole idea behind RA is. [00:34:25] You can just be a one man shop. And all you have to do is get someone to open this file. So you go ahead and register with the ransomware service provider and they give you the software and you embed your little key in there, so they know it's you. And then you send it off in an email. You might try and mess with those people to get them to do something they shouldn't do. [00:34:49] And. That's all you have to do because once somebody opens up that file that you sent them, it's in the hand of these service guys and ransomwares the service guys. So the, these ransomwares of service people will do all of the tech support. They'll help people buy the Bitcoin. They'll help them pay the ransom. [00:35:11] They'll help them recover files, to a certain extent. Does this make sense to you? Yeah, it's kinda crazy. Now I wanna offer you, I've got this document about the new rules for backup and again, it's free. You can get it. No problem. Just go ahead and email me, me@craigpeterson.com m@craigpeterson.com because the backups are so important and. [00:35:38] Just like password rules have changed. The rules have changed for backups as well. So just drop me an email me@craigpeterson.com and ask for it and we'll make sure we send it off to you and is not trying to sell you more stuff. Okay. It's really is explaining the whole thing for you. I'm not holding anything back. [00:35:54] These ransoms, the service operators, then get the payment from you and then pay a percentage anywhere from 80% to 50%, sometimes even lower to the person who ransom due. Isn't that just wonderful. So our law enforcement people, as well as in other countries have been going after the ransomware as a service providers, because if they can shut down. [00:36:21] These RAs guys just shutting. One of them down can shut down thousands of small ransomware people. Isn't that cool works really well. So they have been shut down. Many of them there's one that just popped its head back up again. After about six months, we'll see how far they get, but it is a very big. [00:36:46] Blow to the whole industry, ransomware really because of these O as a service operators has become a centralized business. So there's a small number of operators responsible for the majority of these thousands of hundreds of thousands of attacks. Really. It's probably worse than. So couple of dis big groups are left the KTI group and lock bit, and they've got more than 50% of the share of ransomware attacks in the first half of 2022. [00:37:18] But now they're going after them. The feds. And I think that makes a whole lot of sense, because who do you go for while you go for the people who are causing the most harm and that's certainly them. So I expect they'll be shut down sometimes soon, too. Ransomware had its moment over the last couple of years, still a lot of ransomware out there, still a lot of problems, but now we're seeing B C business, email compromise tactics, and I did a. [00:37:50] At television appearance, where I was working with the the newsmaker or whatever they call them, talking heads on that TV show and explaining what was happening. And the most standard tactic right now is the gift card swindle. I should put together a little video on this one, but it was all, it's all about tricking employees into buying bogus gift cards. [00:38:18] So this good old fashioned Grif is still working. And what happened in our case is it was actually one of the newscasters who got an email, supposedly from someone else saying, Hey we wanna celebrate everybody. And in order to do that, I wanna give 'em all gift cards. So can you go out and buy gift cards? [00:38:42] And so we messed around with them. It was really fun and said, okay what denomination, how many do you think we need? Who do you think we should give them to? And of course we knew what we were doing. Their English grammar was not very good. And it was really obvious that this was not. [00:38:59] The person they were pretending to be. So that happens and it happens a lot. They got into a business email account, the email account of that newscaster. So they were able to go through their email, figure out who else was in the business, who was a trusted source inside of the business. So they could pretend that that they were that newscaster and send emails to this trusted source. [00:39:31] And today these business email compromise attacks are aimed at the financial supply chain. And once these threat actors are inside, they look for opportunities to spoof vendor emails, to send payments to controlled accounts. And the worst case I know of this is a company that sent $45 million. To a scammer. [00:39:57] And what happened here is the, this woman pretended to be the CEO who was out of the country at the time and got the CFO to wire the money to her. An interesting story. We'll have to tell it to you sometime, but it's a real problem. And we just had another one. We've had them in school districts, look, 'em up online, do a duck dot, go search for them and you'll find them right. [00:40:24] Left and center because social engineering works. And frankly, business email compromise is a clear threat to businesses everywhere. I, as I mentioned, we had one listens to the show, contact us just last week. Again, $40,000 taken out of the operating account. We had another one that had a, I think it was $120,000 taken out of the operating account. [00:40:53] And another one that had about $80,000 taken outta the operating account. Make sure you're on my newsletter. even the free one. I do weekly free trainings. Craig peterson.com. Make sure you subscribe now. [00:41:10] Facebook's about 18 years old coming on 20 Facebook has a lot of data. How much stuff have you given Facebook? Did you fall victim for that? Hey, upload your contacts. We'll find your friends. They don't know where your data is. [00:41:26] It's going to be a great time today because man. This whole thing with Facebook has exploded here lately. [00:41:35] There is an article that had appeared on a line from our friends over at, I think it was, yeah. Let me see here. Yeah. Yeah. Motherboard. I was right. And motherboards reporting that Facebook doesn't know what it does with your data or. It goes now, there's always a lot of rumors about different companies and particularly when they're big company and the news headlines are grabbing your attention. [00:42:08] And certainly Facebook can be one of those companies. So where did motherboard get this opinion about Facebook? Just being completely clueless about your personal data? It came from a leaked document. Yeah, exactly. So I, we find out a lot of stuff like that. I used to follow a website about companies that were going to go under and they posted internal memos. [00:42:38] It basically got sued out of existence, but there's no way that Facebook is gonna be able to Sue this one out of existence because they are describing this as. Internally as a tsunami of privacy regulations all over the world. So of course, if you're older, we used to call those TIAL waves, but think of what the implication there is of a tsunami coming in and just overwhelming everything. [00:43:08] So Facebook internally, they, their engineers are trying to figure out, okay, so how do we deal? People's personal data. It's not categorized in ways that regulators want to control it. Now there's a huge problem right there. You've got third party data. You've got first party data. You've got sensitive categories, data. [00:43:31] They might know what religion you are, what your persuasions are in various different ways. There's a lot of things they might know about you. How are they all CATA categorized? Now we've got the European union. With their gen general data protection regulation. The GDPR we talked about when it came into effect back in 2018, and I've helped a few companies to comply with that. [00:43:56] That's not my specialty. My specialty is the cybersecurity side. But in article five, this European law mandates that personal data must be collected for specified explicit and legitimate purposes and not further processed in a manner that is incompatible with those purposes. So what that means is that every piece of data, like where you are using Facebook or your religious orientation, Can only be collected and used for a specific purpose and not reused for another purpose. [00:44:34] So there's an example here that vice is giving in past Facebook, took the phone number that users provided to protect their accounts with two factor authentication and fed it to its people, feature as well as. Advertisers. Yeah. Interesting. Eh, so Gizmoto with the help of academic researchers caught Facebook doing this, and eventually the company had to stop the practice. [00:45:01] Cuz this goes back to the earlier days where Facebook would say, Hey, find out if your friends are on Facebook, upload your contacts right now. And most people. What did you know back then about trying to keep your data private, to try and stop the proliferation of information about you online and nothing. [00:45:21] I think I probably even uploaded it back then thinking that'd be nice to see if I got friends here. We can start chatting, et cetera. According to legal experts that were interviewed by motherboard who wrote this article and has a copy of the internal me memo, this European regulation specifically prohibits that kind of repurposing of your phone number of trying to put together the social graph and the leak document shows that Facebook may not even have the ability to limit. [00:45:53] how it handles users data. Now I was on a number of radio stations this week, talking about this and the example I gave, I is just look at an average business from the time it start, Facebook started how right. You scrape in pictures of young women off of Harvard universities. Main catalog, contact page, and then asking people what do you think of this rate? This person rate that person and off they go, trying to rate them. Yeah. All that matters to a woman, at least according to mark Zuckerberg or all that matters about a woman is how she looks. Do I think she's pretty or not ridiculous what he was doing? [00:46:35] I, it just, oh, that's Zuckerberg, right? That's. Who he is not a great guy anyways. So you go from stealing pictures of young ladies asking people to rate them, putting together some class information and stuff there at Harvard, and then moving on to other universities and then opening up even wider and wider. [00:47:00] And of course, that also created demand cuz you can't get on. If you're not at one of the universities that we have set it up for. And then you continue to grow. You're adding these universities, certain you're starting to collect data and you're making more money than God. So what do you do? You don't have to worry about inefficiencies. [00:47:20] I'll tell you that. One thing you don't have to do is worry about, oh, GE we've got a lot of redundant work going on here. We've got a lot of teams working on basically the same thing. No, you've got more money than you can possibly shake a stick at. So now you go ahead and send that money to this group or that group. [00:47:41] And they put together all of the basic information, that, that they want. They are. Pulling it out of this database and that database, and they're doing some correlation writing some really cool sequel queries with some incredible joins and everything else. And now that becomes part of the main code for Facebook. [00:48:02] And then Facebook goes on to the next little project and they do the same thing. Then the next project, then the next project. And then someone comes along and says Hey, we. This feature, that feature for advertisers and then in that goes, and then along comes candidate Obama. And they, one of the groups inside Facebook says yeah here we go. [00:48:25] Here's all of the information we have about everybody and it's free. Don't worry about it. And then when Trump actually bought it and hired a company to try and process some of that information he got in trouble. No but the Obama. The whole campaign could get access to anything they wanted to, again, because the data wasn't controlled, they had no idea who was doing what with the data. [00:48:50] And according to this internal memo, they still don't know. They don't even know if they can possibly comply with these regulations, not just in Europe, but we have regulations in pretty much all of the 50 states in the us Canada of course, has their own Australia, New Zealand think about all the places. [00:49:12] Facebook makes a lot of money. So here's a quote from that we build systems with open borders. The result of these open systems and open culture is well described with an analogy. Imagine you hold a bottle of ink in your hand, the bottle of ink is a mixture of all kinds of user data. You pour that ink into a lake of water. [00:49:34] Okay. And it flows every. The document red. So how do you put that ink back in the bottle, in the right bottle? How do you organize it again? So that it only flows to the allowed places in the lake? They're totally right about that. Where did they collect it from it? Apparently they don't even know where they got some of this information. [00:49:58] This data from reminds me of the no fly list. You don't know you're on it and you can't get yourself off of it. It is crazy. So this document that we're talking about was written last year by. Privacy engineers on the ad and business product team, whose mission is to make meaningful connections between people and businesses and which quote sits at the center of a monetization strategy. [00:50:22] And is the engine that powers Facebook's growth. Interesting problems. And I see this being a problem well into the future for more and more of these companies, look at Twitter as an example that we've all heard about a lot lately. And I've talked about as well along comes Elon Musk and he says wait a minute now. [00:50:41] Now I can make Twitter way more profitable. We're gonna get rid of however many people it's well over a thousand, and then we are going to hire more people. We're gonna start charging. We're gonna be more efficient. You can bet all of these redundancies that are in Facebook are also there on Twitter. and Twitter also has to comply with all of these regulations that Facebook is freaking out about. [00:51:09] It, for really a very good reason. So this document is available to anybody who wants to look at it. I'm looking at it right now, talking about regulatory landscape and the fundamental problems Facebook's data lake. And this is a problem that most companies have not. As bad as Facebook does, but most companies, you grow. I have yet to walk into a business that needs help with cybersecurity and find everything in place as it should be, because it grew organically. You started out with a little consumer firewall, router and wifi, and then you added to it and you put a switch here and you added another switch behind that and move things around. [00:51:54] This is normal. This is not total incompetence on the part of the management, but my gosh, I don't know. Maybe they need an Elon Musk. Just straighten them out as well. Hey, stick around. I'll be right back and sign up online@craigpeterson.com. [00:52:13] Apparently looting is one of the benefits of being a Russian soldier. And according to the reports coming out of Ukraine, they've been doing it a lot, but there's a tech angle on here that is really turning the tables on these Russian looters. [00:52:30] This is really something, we know in wars, there are people that loot and typically the various militaries try and make sure, at least recently that looting is kept to an absolute minimum. [00:52:45] Certainly the Americans, the British, even the Nazis during world war II the the socialists they're in. Germany they tried to stop some of the looting that was going on. I think that's probably a very good thing, because what you end up with is just all of these locals that are just totally upset with you. [00:53:10] I found a great article on the guardian and there's a village. Had been occupied for about a month by Russian troops and the people came back, they are just shocked to see what happened. They're giving a few examples of different towns. They found that alcohol was stolen and they left empty bottles behind food rappers, cigarette butts, thrown all over the place in apartments and homes. [00:53:39] Piles of feces blocking the toilets, family photographs torn, thrown around the house. They took away all of the clothes. This is a code from one of the people, literally everything, male and female coats, boots, shirts, jackets, even my dresses and lingerie. This is really something. It, the Soviets didn't do this, but now Russian. [00:54:02] Military apparently does. So over the past couple of weeks, there've been reporting from numerous places where Russian troops had occupied Ukrainian territory and the guardian, which is this UK newspaper collected evidences suggests looting by Russian forces was not merely a case of a few way, word soldiers, but a systematic part of Russian military behavior across multiple towns. [00:54:29] And villages. That's absolutely amazing. Another quote here, people saw the Russian soldiers loading everything onto Euro trucks, everything they could get their hands on a dozen houses on the villages. Main street had been looted as well as the shops. Other villagers reported losing washing machines, food laptops, even as sofa, air conditioners. [00:54:53] Being shipped back, just you might use ups here, they have their equivalent over there. A lady here who was the head teacher in the school. She came back in, of course, found her home Lood and in the head teacher's office. she found an open pair of scissors that had been jammed into a plasma screen that was left behind because if they can't steal it, they're gonna destroy it. [00:55:19] They don't only leave anything behind. They found the Russians had taken most of the computers, the projectors and other electronic equipment. It's incredible. So let's talk about the turnaround here. A little. You might have heard stories about some of these bad guys that have smashed and grabbed their way into apple stores. [00:55:38] So they get into the apple store. They grab laptops on iPads, no longer iPods, cuz they don't make those anymore. And I phones. And they take them and they run with them. Nowadays there's not a whole lot of use for those. Now what they have been doing, some of these bad guys is they take some parts and use them in stolen equipment. [00:56:03] They sell them on the used market, et cetera. But when you're talking about something specific, like an iPhone that needs specific activation. Completely different problem arises for these guys because that iPhone needs to have a SIM card in order to get onto the cell network. And it also has built in serial numbers. [00:56:26] So what happens in those cases while apple goes ahead and disables them. So as soon as they connect to the internet, let's say they put 'em on wifi. They don't get a SIM card. They don't. service from T-Mobile or Verizon or whoever it might be. So now they disconnect to the wifi and it calls home, cuz it's gonna get updates. [00:56:45] So on download stuff from the app store and they find that it's been bricked. Now you can do that with a lot of mobile device managers that are available for. All kinds of equipment nowadays, but certainly apple equipment where if a phone is lost or stolen or a laptop or other pieces of equipment, you can get on the MDM and disable it, have it remotely erased, et cetera. [00:57:11] Now, police have had some interesting problems with that. Because a bad guy might go ahead and erase a smartphone. That's in the evidence locker at the police station. So they're doing things like putting them into Fairday cages or static bags or other things to try and stop that. So I think we've established here that the higher tech equipment is pretty well protected. [00:57:36] You steal it. It's not gonna do you much. Good. So one of the things the Russian stole when they were in it's called I think you pronounce it. Mela me pole which is again, a Erian city is they stole all of the equipment from a farm equipment dealership and shipped it to Chenia. Now that's according to a source in a businessman in the area that CNN is reporting on. [00:58:06] So they shipped this equipment. We're talking about combines harvesters worth 300 grand a piece. They shipped it 700 miles. and the thieves were ultimately unable to use the equipment, cuz it had been locked remotely. So think about agriculture equipment that John Deere, in this case, these pieces of equipment, they, they drive themselves. [00:58:33] It's autonomous. It goes up and down the fields. Goes any pattern that you want to it'll bring itself within a foot or an inch of your boundaries, of your property being very efficient the whole time, whether it's planting or harvesting, et cetera. And that's just a phenomenal thing because it saves so much time for the farmer makes it easier to do the companies like John Deere. [00:58:58] Want to sell as many pieces of this equipment as they possibly can. And farming is known to be a, what not terribly profitable business. It certainly isn't like Facebook. So how can they get this expensive equipment into the hands of a lot of farmers? What they do is they lease it. So you can lease the equipment through leasing company or maybe directly from the manufacturer and now you're off and running. [00:59:26] But what happens if the lease isn't paid now? It's one thing. If you don't pay your lease on a $2,000 laptop, right? They're probably not gonna come hunting for you, but when you're talking about a $300,000 harvester, they're more interested. So the leasing company. Has titled to the equipment and the leasing company can shut it off remotely. [00:59:51] You see where I'm going with this so that they can get their equipment in the hands of more farmers cuz the farmers can lease it. It costs them less. They don't have to have a big cash payment. You see how this all works. So when the Russian forces stole this equipment, that's valued. Total value here is about $5 million. [01:00:11] They were able to shut it all. And obviously, if you can't start the engine, because it's all shut off and it's all run by computers nowadays, and there's pros and cons to that. I think there's a lot of cons, but what are you gonna do? How's that gonna work for you? It. Isn't going to work for you. [01:00:32] And they were able to track it. It had GPS trackers find out exactly where it was. That's how they know it was taken to Chenia and could be controlled remotely. And in this case, how'd they control it. They completely. Shut it off. Even if they sell the harvesters for spare parts, they'll learn some money, but they sure can be able to sell 'em for the 300 grand that they were actually worth. [01:00:57] Hey, stick around. We'll be right back and visit me online@craigpeterson.com. If you sign up there, you'll be able to get my insider show note. And every week I have a quick five. Training right there in your emails, Craig Peter san.com. That's S O N in case you're wondering. [01:01:22] If you've been worried about ransomware, you are right to worry. It's up. It's costly. And we're gonna talk about that right now. What are the stats? What can you do? What happens if you do get hacked? Interesting world. [01:01:38] Ransomware has been a very long running problem. I remember a client of ours, a car dealership who we had gone in. [01:01:49] We had improved all of their systems and their security and one of their. People who was actually a senior manager, ended up downloading a piece of ransomware, one of these encrypted ones and opened it up and his machine, all of a sudden TA, guess what it had ransomware on it. One of those big reds. [01:02:12] Greens that say pay up is send us this much Bitcoin. And here's our address. All of that sort of stuff. And he called us up and said, what's going on here? What happened? First of all, don't bring your own machine into the office. Secondly, don't open up particularly encrypted files using the password that they gave. [01:02:33] and thirdly, we stopped it automatically. It did not spread. We were able to completely restore his computer. Now let's consider here at the consequences of what happened. So he obviously was scared. And within a matter of a couple of hours, we actually had him back to where he was and it didn't spread. [01:02:59] So the consequences there they weren't that bad. But how about if it had gotten worse? How about if they ransomware. Also before it started holding his computer ransom, went out and found all of the data about their customers. Would, do you think an auto dealership would love to hear that all of their customer data was stolen and released all of the personal data of all of their customers? [01:03:25] Obviously not. So there's a potential cost there. And then how long do you think it would take a normal company? That thinks they have backups to get back online. I can tell you it'll take quite a while because the biggest problem is most backups don't work. We have yet to go into a business that was actually doing backups that would work to help restore them. [01:03:52] And if you're interested, I can send you, I've got something. I wrote up. Be glad to email it back to you. Obviously as usual, no charge. and you'll be able to go into that and figure out what you should do. Cause I, I break it down into the different types of backups and why you might want to use them or why you might not want to use them, but ransomware. [01:04:15] Is a kind of a pernicious nasty little thing, particularly nowadays, because it's two, two factor, first is they've encrypted your data. You can't get to it. And then the second side of that is okay I can't get to my data and now they're threatening to hold my data ransom or they'll release. So they'll put it out there. [01:04:38] And of course, if you're in a regulated industry, which actually car dealers are because they deal with financial transactions, leases, loans, that sort of thing you can lose your license for your business. You can U lose your ability to go ahead and frankly make loans and work with financial companies and financial instruments. [01:05:00] It could be a very big deal. so there are a lot of potential things that can happen all the way from losing your reputation as a business or an individual losing all of the money in your operating account. And we, again, we've got a client that we picked up afterwards. That yes, indeed. They lost all of the money in their operating account. [01:05:24] And then how do you make payroll? How do you do things? There's a new study that came out from checkpoint. Checkpoint is one of the original firewall companies and they had a look at ransomware. What are the costs of ransomware? Now bottom line, I'm looking at some stats here on a couple of different sites. [01:05:44] One is by the way, KTI, which is a big ransomware gang that also got hacked after they said we are going to attack anyone that. That doesn't defend Vlad's invasion of Ukraine, and then they got hacked and their information was released, but here's ransomware statistics. This is from cloud words. First of all, the largest ransom demand is $50 million. [01:06:11] And that was in 2021 to Acer big computer company. Now 37% of businesses were hit by ransomware. In 2021. This is amazing. They're expecting by 2031. So in about a decade, ransomware is gonna be costing about $265 billion a year. Now on average Ransomware costs businesses. 1.8, 5 million to recover from an attack. [01:06:41] Now that's obviously not a one or two person place, but think of the car dealer again, how much money are they going to make over the year or over the life of the business? If you're a car dealer, you have a to print money, right? You're selling car model or cars from manufacturer X. And now you have the right to do that and they can remove that. [01:07:03] How many tens, hundreds of millions of dollars might that end up costing you? Yeah. Big deal. Total cost of ransomware last year, 20 billion. Now these are the interesting statistics here right now. So pay closer attention to this 32% of ransomware victims paid a ransom demand. So about her third paid ransom demand. [01:07:27] Last. It's actually down. Cuz my recollection is it used to be about 50% would pay a ransom. Now on average that one third of victims that paid a ransom only recovered 65% of their data. Now that differs from a number I've been using from the FBI. That's a little bit older that was saying it's little better than 50%, but 65% of pain victims recovered their data. [01:07:55] Now isn't that absolutely amazing. Now 57% of companies are able to recover the data using a cloud backup. Now think about the different types of backup cloud backup is something that can work pretty well if you're a home user, but how long did it take for your system to get backed? Probably took weeks, right? [01:08:19] For a regular computer over a regular internet line. Now restoring from backup's gonna be faster because your down link is usually faster than your uplink. That's not true for businesses that have real internet service ours. It's the same bandwidth up as it is down. But it can take again, days or weeks to try and recover your machine. [01:08:39] So it's very expensive. And I wish I had more time to go into this, but looking at the costs here and the fact that insurance companies are no longer paying out for a lot of these ransomware attacks, it could be incredibly expensive for you incredibly. So here you. The number one business types by industry for ransomware tax retail. [01:09:13] That makes sense. Doesn't it. Real estate. Electrical contractors, law firms and wholesale building materials. Isn't that interesting? And that's probably because none of these people are really aware, conscious of doing what, of keeping their data secure of having a good it team, a good it department. So there's your bottom line. [01:09:40] Those are the guys that are getting hit. The most, the numbers are increasing dramatically and your costs are not just in the money. You might pay as a ransom. And as it turns out in pretty much every case prevention. Is less expensive and much better than the cure of trying to pay ransom or trying to restore from backups. [01:10:06] Hey, you're listening to Craig Peterson. You can get my weekly show notes by just going to Craig peterson.com. And I'll also send you my special report on how to do passwords stick around will be right back. [01:10:24] You and I have talked about passwords before the way to generate them and how important they are. And we'll go over that again a little bit in just a second, but there is a new standard out there that will eliminate the need for passwords. [01:10:40] I remember, I think the only system I've ever really used that did not require passwords was the IBM 360. [01:10:49] Yeah, 360, you punch up the cards, all of the JCL you feed the card deck in and off it goes. And does this little thing that was a different day, a different era. When I started in college in university, we. We had remote systems, timeshare systems that we could log into. And there weren't much in the line of password requirements in, but you had a username. [01:11:18] You had a simple password. And I remember one of our instructors, his name was Robert, Andrew Lang. And his password was always some sort of a combination of RA Lang. So it was always easy to guess what his password was. Today, it has gotten a lot worse today. We have devices with us all of the time. [01:11:40] You might be wearing a smart watch. That requires a password. You of course probably have a smart phone. That's also maybe requiring a password, certainly after boots nowadays they use fingerprints or facial recognition, which is handy, but has its own drawbacks. But how about the websites? You're going to the systems you're using when you're at work and logging in, they all require passwords. [01:12:10] And usernames of some sort or another well, apple, Google, and Microsoft have all committed to expanding their support for a standard. That's actually been out there for a few years. It's called the Fido standard. And the idea behind this is that you don't have to have a password in order to log. Now that's really an interesting thing, right? [01:12:37] Just looking at it because we're so used to having this password only authentic. And of course the thing to do there is make sure you have for your password, multiple words in the password, it should really be a pass phrase. And between the words put in special characters or numbers, maybe mix. [01:12:59] Upper lowercase a little bit. In those words, those are the best passwords, 20 characters, 30 characters long. And then if you have to have a pin, I typically use a 12 digit pin. And how do I remember all of these? Cuz I use a completely different password for every website and right now, Let me pull it up. [01:13:21] I'm using one password dot com's password manager. And my main password for that is about 25 characters long. And I have thirty one hundred and thirty five. Entries here in my password manager, 3,100. That is a whole lot of passwords, right? As well as software licenses and a few other things in there. [01:13:48] That's how we remember them is using a password manager. One password.com is my favorite. Now, obviously I don't make any money by referring you there. I really do like that. Some others that I've liked in the past include last pass, but they really messed. With some of their cybersecurity last year and I lost my faith in it. [01:14:08] So now what they're trying to do is make these websites that we go to as well as some apps to have a consistent, secure, and passwordless sign in. and they're gonna make it available to consumers across all kinds of devices and platforms. That's why you've got apple, Google, and Microsoft all committing to it. [01:14:32] And you can bet everybody else is going to follow along because there's hundreds of other companies that have decided they're gonna work with the Fido Alliance and they're gonna create this passwordless future. Which I like this idea. So how does this work? Basically you need to have a smartphone. [01:14:50] This is, I'm just gonna go with the most standard way that this is going to work here in the future. And you can then have a, a. Pass key. This is like a multifactor authentication or two factor authentication. So for instance, right now, when I sign into a website online, I'm giving a username, I'm giving a password and then it comes up and it asks me for a code. [01:15:14] So I enter an a six digit code and that code changes every 30 seconds. And again, I use my password manager from one password dot. In order to generate that code. So that's how I log into Microsoft sites and Google sites and all kinds of sites out there. So it's a similar thing here now for the sites for my company, because we do cyber security for businesses, including regulated businesses. [01:15:41] We have biometrics tied in as. so to log into our systems, I have to have a username. I have to have a password. I then am sent to a single sign on page where I have to have a message sent to my smart device. That then has a special app that uses biometrics either a face ID or a fingerprint to verify who I am. [01:16:06] Yeah, there's a lot there, but I have to protect my customer's data. Something that very few it's crazy. Actual managed security services providers do, but it's important, right? By the way, if you want my password. Special report, just go to Craig peterson.com. Sign up for my email list. [01:16:29] I'll send that to you. That's what we're sending out right now for anyone who signs up new@craigpeterson.com. And if you'd like a copy of it and you're already on the list, just go ahead and email me M E. At Craig peterson.com and ask for the password special report where I go through a

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The UK's newest TV news channel, GB News, is one year old but it's got serious financial problems caused by left wing agitation groups convincing Advertisers to boycott it.   Please help support our work and Buy Me A Coffee https://www.buymeacoffee.com/DavidVanceV  or support us via https://donorbox.org/let-free-speech-prevail Just Scan the QR Code     Be part of the Community with David https://thedavidvance.locals.com    Gettr: https://gettr.com/user/davidvance BrandNewTube:  https://brandnewtube.com/@TheDavidVanceChannel Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/DavidVancePodcast  Telegram: @davidvance1 A Tangled Web:  https://www.atangledweb.org   Also try my second channel with ilana Mercer Hard Truth Podcast: https://HardTruthWithDavidVanceAndIlanaMercer.Podbean.com

Next in Marketing spoke to IAB CEO David Cohen about the state of ad-supported streaming, and why he's pushing traditional TV advertisers to shift their mindsets when it comes to pricing strategy, measurement and what role the medium will play over time. Cohen also spoke about how many brands have been dragging their feet when it comes to preparing for massive changes in ad targeting, and what he thinks the prospects are for a national data privacy law. Guest: David CohenHost: Mike Shields

FTC is more concerned about protecting the rights of consumers against manipulative ads and marketing. As an endorser or advertiser, being honest pays more than being dishonest. When you're honest and truthful, your followers or audience will be endeared to you. According to Randon Morris, "they'll trust you more and purchase the advertised products

EP292- Quarterly Recap Sorry for the delay since our last show. We took a beginning of summer hiatus, and Jason upgraded to a new knee! This episode was recorded in front of a live audience at the NYC Google HQ, for Zenith Basecamp. Key Topics discussed: Amazon's rate of growth declined in Q1, what lies ahead for them. Impact of App Tracking Transparency (ATT) on advertising platforms Shopify vs. Facebook Retail Media Networks Q1 2022 US Department of commerce data and trends Audience questions (including buy now pay later) If you'd like to follow along, the audience could see this deck during the discussion: JAS_ZenithDownload Episode 292 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Wednesday June 8, 2022. http://jasonandscot.com Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. Transcript Jason: [0:23] Welcome to the Jason and Scot show I'm Jason retailgeek Goldberg. This episode is number 292 being recorded on Wednesday June 8, the beautiful New York City Google headquarters for Zenith base camp and is a special treat we're recording the show in front of a live audience. Scot: [0:45] That was a super important. Jason: [0:49] That Applause is super important because I have no credibility with our audience so they wouldn't believe me if you didn't applaud thank you very much as I mentioned I'm Jason retailgeek Goldberg as always I'm here with my co-host Scot Wingo. Scot: [1:01] Hey Jason and welcome back Jason Scott show listeners. Jason: [1:05] I think I've met most of you but for those of you who I haven't mentioned a met yet thrilled to do so today I as was mentioned earlier I'm the chief Commerce strategy officer for publicist your, almost certainly going to hear from Scott that he thinks might title is super funny and, I'm a fourth-generation retailer back in the Dark Ages I helped launch e-commerce at some funny retailers like, Blockbuster and Best Buy and Target and today I get to work across all the Publicis groupe with all the clients that care about Commerce and I'm super interested to know which clients, don't care about Commerce at this point and so that's me but like I said many of you have met. My annoyingly successful co-host Scott you may not have met so Scott can you tell us a little bit about yourself as they flip the slides. Scot: [1:56] Sure and congrats on that a win at Blockbuster on the digital that was that was good you crush that one yeah. Jason: [2:03] It's super fun every presentation ever done a publicist starts with a big Blockbuster logo and a saying like don't let this happen to you. Scot: [2:11] Isn't there one still open in Alaska if you're gone to visit them. Jason: [2:13] Bend Oregon. Scot: [2:14] Okay then yeah I knew you know that have you talked to them about their digital strategy. Jason: [2:20] It's on the to-do list. Scot: [2:22] I'm a Serial entrepreneur from the Research Triangle Park area and so I started a company I have an engineering background started a company the developer tools. And then this thing called the internet came along and I have a lot of weird Hobbies one of my hobbies we'll talk about a lot of those today is I'm a Star Wars fan so I started I had this I sold my first company, said this dangerous combination of e-commerce has born and I had a lot of liquidity so I started buying really big Star Wars stuff, it stays at my office I have an agreement with my wife that it does not come into the house sadly I probably won't be married if it did so there you go, so that was there at the early days of e-commerce that company I parlayed into a company called challenge visor so started that in 2001 that's a B2B soccer as a service platform for selling on marketplaces are there any channel guys are customers in the house about 3,000 customers and then so Channel visors biggest partners are eBay and Amazon so I've been I'm also he's retailgeek I'm Amazon geek if we have to Brand ourselves maybe a little bitty big geek so I'm in the marketplace side and that's how I met Jason we were on a board together at shot dot-org, remember the first meeting I was there with Jason the CEO of NRF walks in and he's like does anyone have a question Jason raises his hand and says why do we have the worst website on the internet and I was like. [3:38] I need to get to know this guy so he called him out on the terribleness of the in R Us website which was kind of fun and then took Channel advisor public so that was one of my things is an option where I always wanted to do was do an IPO so I got to do that in 2013 that was a lot of fun got to ring the bell I'm a also a CNBC donkeys got to meet and Jim Cramer my wife calls him the guy that yells every night on TV and makes all the loud noises, that was fun and then my current startup let's go to the next slide next two slides yeah it's called spiffy and next slide. [4:12] So spiffy was actually good and go through this animation Jason was supposed to take this on and, so spiffy was actually kind of inspired by the podcast so on our podcast would talk a lot about consumer behavior and for me I'm also an Elon Musk geek and Elon talks about core principles his core principles are physics he's always talking about well if you want to send a ship from here to Mars you're going to have to you can't use let's see welds you have to like mix the atoms together and because of physics we can do we don't do that on Jason Scott show we talk about consumer behaviors so we spent a lot of time talking about the bifurcation in the convenience oriented consumer saw that was swirling around in my head I had my first Uber experience and the this the series of things that lit up for me was alright services are going to go digital we've seen products go digital in the form of e-commerce if you look at GDP consumer services are twice the size of consumer products and then the then as I looked out there there was a lot of companies in this space but none of them were going after the convenience oriented consumer. [5:15] Another hobby of I guess it was a shared one is we like to coin phrases, one of the ones that I coined was Zero friction addiction so when consumers have these low-friction experiences not only are they great. But they amplify the friction of previously previous experiences you didn't think we're friction e Starbucks mobile app for example how many of you use the Starbucks mobile, once you do that and then like the mobile app systems down it's like the worst day of your life because you have to wait in line behind three people and you're like oh my God I'm going to claw my eyes out. And before the mobile app existed you're like three people whoaa short line this is going to be a faster bruxism. So all that was swimming around in my head and I was like I wonder where I could participate in this idea and I was gravitated to car care because I previously invested in a car wash and then I researched and Car Care has a minus 85 net promoter score especially with women, how many of mean if you don't have cars in New York but how many of you have had a bad car experience especially. You're my people so another thing that fascinates me is the Auto industry is going to go through this digital change that we've seen e-commerce go through but it's also the car is changing so I've had a Tesla since 2012 since I've been living that kind of vehicle 2.0 lifestyle so next line so started spiffy in 2014 and today we're in 27 locations about a 50 million run rate doubling, we have 250 Vans across the United States and about 500 technicians so that's a little bit of background on me. Jason: [6:44] That's amazing Scott and so you know Scott mentioned we started this podcast that the joke is he and I met at a board meeting it shop dot org and he and. After the meetings we'd go to a bar and we would just talk shop about what was going on in Scotts Valley. You know we should record this there's like eight other people that would be interested in this conversation and the joke is that like the next day I showed up with like five thousand dollars worth of audio equipment I think. Scot: [7:10] This 90 is forget your mom. Jason: [7:12] That's true yeah. Scot: [7:12] 99.9 listeners. Jason: [7:13] Including my mom who gives me notes on every show hi Mom. So so that's kind of how the show started and you know that one of the topics that's most frequent in fact we often say it wouldn't be a Jason and Scot show without talking about Amazon. And so you know Amazon have their quarterly earnings last month and in the u.s. they're gmv growth rate they sold 6.7% more stuff than they did in q1 of last. Um so that is a alarmingly slow rate of growth by traditional Amazon standards and we click to the next slide. The. This month you've seen all these news articles about Amazon actually having too much warehouse space too much what they call fulfillment center space and how they're literally trying to sublease space to other people that they may have over-invested, as e-commerce starts to slow down and if you cook to the this next slide. [8:15] Actually graft my pandemic Hobbies I learned Tableau by the way if anyone super exciting other people are not a big bread. I'm a geek what can I say so I graphed e-commerce has growth rate versus Amazon's growth rate and historically in the u.s. e-commerce has kind of grown about 10% a year before the pandemic Amazon despite being. 35 to 40% of all e-commerce grows quite a bit faster as you can see the gold line above the blue line but when the pandemic. Um they their paths kind of linked and and you know for these last several months Amazon has grown at about the race. E-commerce and so there's a bunch of analysts that are freaking out. Is the gravy train over the good times done is Amazon selling off and so that's the first topic we want to talk about is what the heck is going on with Amazon Scott. Scot: [9:11] Yeah and it's been interesting another one of my hobbies is Amazon Fulfillment centers this one's riveting and so this started I think it's like 2005 I was driving to work and I saw some construction and you know you're later they put a big amazon logo on it that's like holy cow there's like a million square foot building, this is the Raleigh-Durham area so it's like I wonder how many of these there are so I went on to Amazon's website and they said something like we have around 10 fulfillment centers nice like that, that seems low and then what I discovered at that point time was no one was tracking. From the Wall Street analysts through Amazon fulfillment center roll out so so started working on that and quickly discovered that they had about sixty fulfillment centers built and they were building like another 16 so I started publishing data on this, and fun fact they always use airport codes so this was like RDU 3 soyuz rd1 and these numbers and this kind of thing so I get to know about the Amazon fulfillment center really interesting you know really deeply so I think then one of our most popular popular episodes I think we got till like 12:00 listeners on this one so a 30 percent increase this was February 18th we did episode 287 which is a deep dive into Amazon's fulfillment. [10:19] And to me it's just endlessly fascinating I haven't been to a fulfillment center but I have been able to sneak into some of the delivery stations and that's kind of a fun thing so what ties into this is what I think happened is Amazon was in front of their capacity needs before the pandemic and then the pandemic flip that upside down so I think what's happened is over that time where they're in line with e-commerce they were just out of capacity they literally couldn't ship the couldn't build enough fulfillment centers fast enough and whatnot so during the pandemic they have built an incredible amount of infrastructure so I'd have some data here the other thing you need to know is in 2018 another this was probably the most popular one Jason I coined the phrase ship again is even heard this one. And this is where we. Jason: [11:03] We got on like The Today Show. Scot: [11:05] Be on the Today Show they're like what is this ship again and should we be concerned that was us that was us we cause that and we take all the credit, and what happened is Jason has many of his Tableau slides he had this he has a slide that shows the FedEx capacity USPS and ups and then Amazon's growth and you can see that Amazon alone then you layer in e-commerce was going to we would run out of capacity for shipping well Amazon also saw those so in 2018 they started a program called, the DSP now this is confusing because they have two DS p– programs there's one in your world of ads I don't know what that one is, delivery service professionals is the one I focus on and what Amazon did is he basically took a page out of the FedEx Playbook and they went and they built a network of 1099 contractors to do last mile deliveries so whenever an Amazon Prime van comes to your house that is an Amazon DSP. [11:59] They've built that entire network since 2018 which is pretty crazy okay so the problem with that Network though is they started it out of fulfillment centers and very quickly it was obvious the Fulfillment centers were when you have these million square-foot buildings and you're just putting things through a door or a loading dock you can't reload Vans quickly so what they've done is they've come up with a new format called a delivery station, this is a smaller about a 200 thousand square foot thing and what it is it's largely attached to a fulfillment center and it's pretty wild at eight am the Fulfillment center doors open and these rafts of containers come down and there's these Vans all lined up, staged in line, where they go furthest packages away get loaded in the first Vans and then they're off and then it's like a military operation it's like D-Day it's like crazy to watch this happen hundreds of employees loading these vans that get deployed through the day. [12:49] So just to give you some numbers that started at zero and now they have built 487 delivery stations for small products 108 delivery stations for large so they built about 600 delivery stations in the last 3 years which is pretty crazy that represents so there's so nothing Amazon does each delivery station has four or five dsps and they play them off each other so they're small businesses and then they give them all these scorecards and if you score well you get more routes and trucks so there's like this gamification, and I've met some of these guys and they're just like constantly going at each other and and Amazon is very clever because they're like stuck in this game gamification they don't really realize it that Amazon just playing them off each other the thing that fascinates me is they're all run by this you know data in the cloud so everyone in this operation there's no real managers or anything they're just like all looking at their their their devices and it's telling them what to do every day that's kind of as a computer science guy that kind of fascinating we do have a i overlords that that just kind of run things so there's two 2500 dsps and 100,000 Vans and so they've invested a ton in that and then that's just the delivery stations so they've also added you know 88 sortable fulfillment centers. [14:08] Basically they've invested so much in infrastructure during the pandemic that I think we're going to see these numbers they're they actually have admitted they have too much capacity but I think it's going to give them the ability to re-accelerate versus e-commerce because they now have the capacity in this new world. [14:22] It was a long answer to that one but but you know I think what's key to me is if you buy into this theory that getting product to the consumer fast and efficiently is going to be key, they've gotten the cost to deliver a package and that last mile down to a dollar fifty with this. [14:37] You know so many of you that are shipping products and you're looking at FedEx at eight nine ten twelve dollars in different zones that's kind of the economics they've baked into that now for a long time thought one of the Amazons unusual playbooks is they'll build something really really crazy expensive and you're like this is insane and then they'll open it up which for most people in the old score world you're like, that doesn't make any sense because you used to build these proprietary networks like Walmart's Data Center and computer infrastructure, that was proprietary and gave them an edge Amazon's philosophy is let's open it up that makes the product better and we get third parties to help pay for the. So this is obvious now that the AWS and Amazon third-party Network I believe that there will be a day when I could ship I'm enrolling your in Charlotte I'll be able to ship you a package I'll just put on my front porch the Amazon DSP will pick it up and I'll ship you a package for three bucks right so it'll be half the cost of FedEx or UPS but don't make a hundred percent are 50% gross margin on it, so that's going to be really interesting and they'll be able to offer that they are actually offering a lot of that kind of capability to other Merchants so so that'll be interesting you'll have to face this decision of if you're your Cody or someone like that do you want to switch from FedEx to Amazon shipping your products and so there's a lot of real interesting things going on in the Amazon World those are some of the big ones. Jason: [15:51] Yeah yeah to kind of put that in consumer terms. Before the pandemic Amazon had invested something like 50 billion dollars in their fulfillment centers and so on. It wasn't that long ago I would talk to clients and they're like hey Jason we've got the secret plan to compete with Amazon where we're gonna buy a warehouse in Kentucky because that can ship to the whole us and we're going to compete with Amazon and I'm like. You realize Amazon has 109 million square foot fulfillment centers and 50 billion dollars worth of infrastructure and that was before the pandemic from. Mid 2018 to today they've invested another 50 billion dollars and literally double the size of their capacity so the likelihood of anyone in the u.s. competing with him in terms of. Capacity is next to know and as Scott mentioned in 2018 we had this bad holiday where we didn't deliver everything on time Amazon became you know aware that they weren't going to grow where they want to grow using third-party parcels and I think there's this famous quote from Fred Smith it FedEx like. Amazon's an amazing company but they're our partner they're not a competitor they never understand the competitiveness of the, the parcel business and back then Amazon delivered eight percent of their own packages that was 2018 today Amazon delivers over 60% of their own packages right and so in a very short period of time. [17:16] They they've created this phenomenal capability so the magic question is is this a blip like, is the are they going to start growing faster than e-commerce as soon as we get out of all this crazy economic Madness or like is this going to be the new normal for Amazon that they're you know so big that they can't grow as fast anymore. Scot: [17:35] My prediction is yes they will I think they'll get the capacity they'll turn on these other things another area that I think they'll get into and we've covered this on the show is where we call these things like to go Puffs the road you have a fancy name for. Jason: [17:47] Instant delivery or ultra-fast delivery. Scot: [17:49] Yeah Amazon part of this infrastructure they built out is in that similar vein so some same-day infrastructure where, you know these delivery stations are getting smaller and smaller and closer and closer to the consumer so that they can do same delivery in fact at the delivery station I was at they do 7 a.m. to 10 a.m. load out and then everyone comes back at to and they do another load out of a smaller portion of vans, for same-day delivery orders that have come in so so so I think I think what they're going to do is they're going to Crank It Up, Prime will eventually go to same day and then that's going to create a whole new stimulation of demand and then they will grow faster than e-commerce. Jason: [18:24] I feel like that's another funny one is talk to like there's a bunch of new startups that are like trying to do e-commerce fulfillment and they're like we're going to do two day delivery just as well as Amazon. Scot: [18:34] Yeah this is this is a good segue into Shopify so one of the things that there's defied explanation for me is the rise of Shopify shopify's a great platform great CEO but they got this valuation of like 50 times forward earnings forward Revenue which just never made sense to me and then they started poking the bear so they started to give Amazon and Jeff Bezos so hard time like when his pictures they were like making fun of him and I was like this you and I have seen this. Jason: [19:01] They're arming the rebels. Scot: [19:02] We've seen this play out we're like who was it the CEO of Macy's said Amazon will never get into apparel and if they do it'll be a bloodbath everyone that makes one of those statements they end up a you know ruining their career and then be very being very wrong so. Jason: [19:17] Terry Lundgren. Scot: [19:18] Terry Lundgren yeah thanks he was also in the in that in our f word me the so so so it's really interesting is Shopify has been poking at Amazon and then Shopify announced that they were going to. Arm the rebels with two day shipping and they're going to build a fulfillment center we're like. Okay this doesn't ever end well then in this then like literally 30 days later they announced and they were going to spend a billion dollars and build a fulfillment center are two billion which you know Amazon spend 100 billion so that's kind of a ridiculous and then they were going to get everywhere two day shipping and Beebe in parallel with prime which doesn't make any sense then they punted on that and they acquire deliver. And then at the same time and this is a good segue into our next topic they basically said, and this goes back to March of this year last year we saw that after Apple's WWDC that year last year, they announced IDF a and I-80 T which is next slide. Jason: [20:18] Yeah jump to slides actually one more. Scot: [20:20] So you and I were like this is going to change everything and destroy all these middle players so so basically you guys probably know what this is I'll let Jason describe it better these new privacy things basically you get rid of not only third-party cookies for web-based things but if you have an app based ecosystem you get rid of tracking it all together and we were like freaking out about it no one else was I, and I felt like Shopify was going to be worse because if you think about Shopify the bulk of their traffic comes from social then they sit in the middle and then they have the merchant well these things in the middle aren't going to really exist in a world where you can't track anything and sure enough this is really caught up not only to them but the social media guys. So we're entering this world where Shopify poked the bear Amazon has a bunch of stuff going on that hasn't even come out to counteract Shopify and when that stuff comes out, then I'll know if you've seen it but Shopify is down like 98% or something like that because they've lost you lost a lot of credibility with this fulfillment thing and then the overall economic has been a really interesting impact and then I think everyone realizes that they're really exposed to these IDF a changes. Jason: [21:25] Yeah and so I think most people in this room are probably painfully familiar with idea Fay but essentially. It's become harder to track a consumer across multiple website so all these advertising platforms that aggregate an audience and send them to third-party content sites used to be able to buy a super-efficient audience on that third party site and then they used to be able to measure how effective it was when they sent people to that site and what they ultimately bought and so because of the tracking deficiencies too bad things happen we can't buy as good an audience as we used to buy so the by is less efficient so the CPM is higher and we can't measure how effective it was right and so there's a lot of impacts certainly for all of you folks that are involved in advertising there's there's a very direct impact on those changes but the secondary impacts can I talked a lot about is before these changes it felt like Shopify and Facebook for example where cozying up, like Shopify has a digital wallet called shop pay which is very exciting successful and they actually made it possible to buy items not from Shopify sellers on Facebook. With Sharpay and you're like oh man it's very synergistic Facebook gets the audience and then they send them to Shopify seller to close the deal and it seemed like they had this partnership and we saw IDF a coming and were like oh man this is going to break up because in the New World. [22:47] The Facebook's of the world need to own that conversion they need to own the sale so they can see the conversion data so they can report on the efficacy they need instead of third party data they need first-party data and so now all these advertising platforms most notably Facebook and Google are doubling down on becoming Commerce platforms which you've talked for a long time about Google is secretly Marketplace. Scot: [23:13] Yeah and then I think ultimately Facebook has to buy Shopify or build show, so that'll be interesting now the price is down before when it was like 40 times for door like they'll never do that but I think now but they do seem, it's hard to know what's going to happen to Facebook because they're so focused on the metaverse that I don't know if Shopify fits into that somewhere inside of there you know someone watches Revenue versus like Ford things and and if you care about revenue and Facebook you would buy you would buy, Shopify the other thing that's really interesting another one of my weird habits is I love to listen to public quarterly calls. Probably the worst quarterly call I've ever heard and I have a lot of empathy for this because I've done many of these is this the Snapchat the last the q1 Snapchat call they basically it was like they just rolled in there, half drunk and had no idea what's going on in the business and like the analysts are asking them questions like do you think this is the bottom of i d f a and the last quarterly call they had said that was the bottom. They're like well you know last time we said it was the bottom we think this is a bottom Jason do you know if it's a bottom it was just like that kind of a thing so if you're an investor and you're sitting there like these guys have no idea how bad this is where the bottom is or how to remediate. And you know that that leg down I think that really big one there that was right after that quarterly call everyone there while she was like these guys have no clue what's going on. So it's really interesting. [24:33] Wall Street is very much awake that these changes that apple and then subsequently Google have made and the Android have really just clobbered these ad networks that kind of our sit between AD networks and kind of relying on on third-party data the converse of that so every time there's a there's a zero-sum game here every time there's a loser there's a winner the big winner here is retail networks and I heard that we're going to have talk about their ad Network I'm the Amazon guy so Amazon's ad network doesn't get a lot of play here but just as of last year it was 30 billion dollars in revenue and they're growing that 25%. And I know they have a massive amount of investment going on there they have a new marketing Cloud they're doing a ton of stuff in there because they realize hey thanks Apple and Google the you have created gold dust out of first-party data guess who has the most first-party data on buyer intent and conversion it's Amazon. But then if you're other retailer be at a Walmart or Target and even smaller retailers are getting into this and kind of more of a, I called a Battlestar Galactica kind of way but more of like a shared data kind of a way that's going to be real interesting. [25:41] You are yeah yeah I think you and I are the only ones to get them the, so that's that's really fascinating to watch this one change in mobile platform just cause these billion-dollar ripples down there and you kind of wonder who it Apple did they think about this where they like, you know that Mark Zuckerberg he's too big for his britches let's let's clobber him in the rest of these guys but you know they don't love app Amazon either so they have to be kind of frustrated that it has helped enable one type of competitor but that just clobbered the other ones. Jason: [26:12] Yeah it's I mean it's super fascinating I. The retail the emergence of retail media networks I think you know is a direct cause of this essentially that you know you now have all this first-party data it Walmart and Target and to your point like. Craziest retail media Network to me is Gap in the reason I say that like most retail media Networks primarily sell ads to endemic Advertiser so you know Cody wants to sell through Sephora so for launches retail media Network they have some leverage to get Cody to invest in, in add-on Sephora but Gap doesn't have any endemic advertisers like Gap only sells their own stuff right so they're now you know trying to go find. Advertisers that are synergistic with The Gap lifestyle and sell ad so I don't think that could have ever happened in a world in which you could really cost effectively by that audience from Facebook but today because it's harder for the Facebook's of the world I think this is a. A permanent shift we're seeing and another reason that it's really an imperative for Facebook to become a Commerce platform of Their Own. Scot: [27:20] Yeah this is probably a good time to pause and see if there's any questions yeah so Amazon or IDF a any questions on those two topics any other comments how many of you have felt some kind of an impact from the IDF a thing that's called you to change strategy. Wow I guess we're wrong yeah. Jason: [27:38] We usually are so there's that I feel like a lot of the success of the show is Scott and I rarely agree and I feel like people like to hear us debate right and so the last topic we put together is. Again one that's probably only near and dear to my heart but the, US Department of Commerce publish all this data about the health of the US retail right and I'm this dork that like wakes up at 8 a.m. I'm kidding I'm up at 8 a.m. right now I wasn't supposed to say that out loud, on the on the day the data is released to like load the stuff into Tableau and so may was a super exciting month because that's the first time we get the. Q1 quarterly data for all the retail categories and e-commerce and so I kind of put together a quick. Quick summary and week I just want to hear if you're surprised or not so first thing if sorry if you go back just one side for just a sec. From from January through April in the u.s. we sold 2.2 trillion dollars of stuff that's almost 10% more stuff than we sold in 2020. [28:42] 36% more stuff than we sold in 2019 so everybody talks about how hard the last two years have been and how challenging and difficult and that's all true. What doesn't get hit is it's been the greatest two years in the history of retail like we've grown, way faster than we ever have before and so if you flip to this next slide this is this visualization that's got an icon of created this is sales by month so that Gray Line is retail sales in 2019 and then the Gold Line is 20/20 so you can see oh my gosh we all panicked in April when the pandemic first happened we have this dip but 2020 we actually sold more stuff than we did in 2019 even with the the pandemic. What we sold changed dramatically we'll talk about that, and then we get to 20 21 and look how much higher 2021 was like 20 everyone was like oh my gosh was 2020 a weird year and growth is going to go down and instead, growth went way up and so at the end of 20 21 I was advising all my peers that worked at clients to retire right because your comps are going to be impossible from, from 20:21 so that was a great time to go out on top. And I was really worried that 2022 was going to come in below that and of course we're talking about all these economic headwinds and things that we may talk about but so far in 2022. [29:59] Even ahead of 2021 so you hear all this news about how like. Oh man the rate of growth has slowed we grew so much in 2021 and now we're only growing a little bit and doom and gloom and all these things. But when you see this picture you go wait a minute. With the best year in the history of retail last year and we're doing even better this year it's actually quite a Rosy story but if you flip to the next slide of course there are certain categories that did. Especially well right and so if you are a gas station and you got utterly creamed. During the pandemic and one was driving anywhere it was easy as to grow fast if you are restaurant that no one went to it was easiest to grow fast apparel that. Scot: [30:41] Miscellaneous that's my favorite yeah I wish I sold more miscellaneous. Jason: [30:46] It's the hardest category to buy. Um and so you can see there's categories that kind of outperform the industry average and there's categories that underperformed the industry average food and beverages grocery right so even though grocery had a really good time in the pandemic it's actually underperforming, the overall category because there were some of those other categories that were so much and whenever I talk about this people are like yeah Jason but all the growth you're talking about isn't, consumer changes or more spending its inflation right and so I actually tried this, experiment of taking the inflation out and I looked at the last three years of growth in 2018 dollars and as you can see, information used to not matter very much in the data so through 2020 and then we started opening up this Gap where inflation legitimately has an impact on our sales right now but even if you just look at the Gold Line which is taking all the inflation Outlook. Um the growth is still very meaningful in phenomenal so it's a like Well you certainly inflation is part of the reason that we're seeing a lift in sales it's a mistake to assume. [31:51] People are just buying less stuff and they're just having to pay more for that stuff in that there really isn't a consumer change the really is a consumer change here in so we want double click on a couple categories in the first category I grab because it's super near and dear to Scott's heart is Automotive right so they sold half a trillion bucks last year they're up 50% from the bed you have 20/20 and if you go to the next slide you'll see the. You know they're their shape that obviously the you know the pandemic gave him a temporary dip but again like most categories they we did slightly better in 2020 2021 was a phenomenal year and then it seems like 20:22 is having a little bit of trouble comping against that what's going on in the apparel or the automotive industry. Scot: [32:34] Was a guy that buys like 30 Vans a month you can't buy vehicles yeah so there are no vehicles out there it's pretty crazy I had to buy my daughter a vehicle and we had to wait like six months and then had to pay like over sticker. Against all grains of my being but had to do it yeah the things we do for our kids. Jason: [32:52] Combo of like there's increased demand and there's these supply-chain constraints and there's no chips right. Scot: [32:58] Yeah yeah so it went from chips now they seem to have the chips but then all the zero covid policy in China is made all the other inputs go to hell in a handbasket so-so so there was some Supply that got out because they had all these vehicles waiting for chips the chips have gotten there but now they can't make a lot of the other components of the vehicle as my understanding and we order we ordered 100 Vans and we got three delivered this year from from new which is just crazy. The other problem I'm up against his there's this other company buying a lot of ants called Amazon and they're buying I'm buying I'm buying what it feels like a lot to us 100 and they're buying like you know, twenty thousand so so they seemed to get a higher spot. Jason: [33:36] They're higher in the queue than you yeah so if you take nothing else out of this this segment if you have to sell a car right now do not use Blue Book value your car is way more valuable than Blue Book value. Scot: [33:47] And before you sell your car get a new car so it's kind of like yeah because you may be hoofing it if you don't you may be getting to know the Uber app really well. Jason: [33:55] Yeah and whichever card you get get it clean by get spiffy. So let's a lot of people in here in the cpg space so grocery super important this is a category that I follow really closely almost 300 billion in sales in the first quarter and again it's up its up. By the way a new coin we turned is your over 32 years ago right like that's the new the new black in earnings calls is everyone's talking about their silver says 2019 which was the. Quote unquote normal year so groceries up twenty Twenty-One percent from from that normally year and we've kind of had this 8% growth rate which is better than grocery historically grew if you go the next slide you see our shape again, grocery is a unique one right like. Yet average sales in 2019 and then 20:28 was great for grocery right because nobody went to restaurants like so all the calories that used to buy from restaurant you're buying from grocery so that Gold Line is way up and then, in 2021 they had trouble comping against it in the first half of the Year where all that growth happen but they still 2021 ended up. [35:00] About 10% from 20/20 and 2022 is continuing to be up so far, from from 20 21 and so the way I like to think about this if you jump to the next slide is Sheriff stomach so this gray line is how much. Calories you buy from grocery stores in the Gold Line is how many calories you buy from restaurants and historically over the last 10 years it's been almost a 50/50 split so then the pandemic happened and we got seventy percent of our calories from grocery stores thirty percent of our calories from restaurants and everyone's like wait how did we get any calories from restaurants they're all closed doordash, right it was all off Prem consumption and then we've been waiting to see what would happen could grocery permanently hang onto that lead would restaurants come back and you can see over the last year it kind of close the gap but then look what's happened these like this year restaurants are way above Grocery and so the magic question here is, was their pent-up demand and we're all rushing out to restaurants because we haven't been there and that's kind of a, a one-time Spike and it's going to normalize back to 50/50 or is the new normal that we're all so sick of being in the kitchen for the last two years. That groceries going to have a real decline because if you're you know a leading Grocer in the US this this is a really scary slide at the moment you have a guess. Scot: [36:21] Yeah I'll throw a Freakonomics curveball in here I think a one input into this is the work from home trend, so when you're working from home it's a lot easier to go to the grocery store prep the veggies between zooms or while you're on his Zoom or something like that or like chopping below below the line and just prepare a meal right but when you're in the office and you work late and now you're kind of gone back to that office lifestyle then I think that's going to be a big driver I think. I think we're going to go back to working in the office I think when everything's up into the right you're like okay everyone can work from home but if things get tougher and we go into recession one of the levers Executives can pull as well we need everyone back in the office so I think we're going to get back to that, it won't be the same so it's not going to be whatever we were at before it'll be ten to twenty percent lower but I think that's going to be the Big Driver of this one is that work from from home Trend and I bet it's spiking now, um because of that so I'm seeing and we have data at spiffy for this so one of the things we do at spiffy is we go to office Parks as an amenity if I look at Dallas the Raleigh-Durham area and Atlanta, we're almost back to 80 or 90 percent to pre-pandemic levels at office parks. Now you look at Blue States like California New York Etc you're like a zero so so ultimately I don't know if that separation remains or not but ultimately we're seeing people get back to the office park at least in this Southeast kind of region which is which is I think that's going to drive this more than what you show her. Jason: [37:47] And so then the the last category we're going to talk about is obviously most near and dear to our heart is e-commerce. So in March we sold almost a hundred billion dollars worth of stuff inside baseball thing this is data from the US Department of Commerce it comes out every every month there's better data that comes out every quarter this quarter we had a crazy thing happen, the US Department of Commerce restated the data that they had published in the past and they actually added 100 billion dollars of extra e-commerce sales last year they said we've been Under reporting how big e-commerce was so you may have earlier in the year seen these articles in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere talking about how the e-commerce craze is over and retailers caught up and it's a much more complicated story than that again e-commerce is up 55% from 20/20 so that's going to be tough to comp against the if we flip to the next slide. Scot: [38:45] Well I disagree with their methodology so we had them on the show and it was. Jason: [38:49] US Department of Commerce. Scot: [38:50] Here's the geekish I had to like break-in Jason was like you were just like. Jason: [38:53] It would be like if anyone mask was on the show. Scot: [38:55] Yes yeah you're just like slobbering all over yourself it was embarrassing and they God we're. Jason: [38:59] Tending that's unusual. Scot: [39:00] They got were Audio Only and the, but then as we got into it you know they count like curbside pickup is e-commerce and to me as an e-commerce guy I have to kind of throw the flag on that one because you know going during the pandemic you know, order online have it shipped to me and now I just go to the Best Buy and set outside they bring it to the store and now I've converted that to an e-commerce sale that doesn't really pencil for me so I think these numbers are overinflated because all the curbside pickup flipped over to e-commerce. Jason: [39:29] There's a common debate and you and I violently disagree on that one. Scot: [39:33] Digital influencer blah blah blah. Jason: [39:35] Yeah yeah exactly but yeah I mean if you so if you what's happening is e-commerce orders are being fulfilled from the store but you think about all these orders at Target that you place online and get delivered to your home from a shipped person or even from a u.s. post office targets fulfilling 96 percent of all their e-commerce orders from stores so curbside pickup is just another. E-commerce order that's fulfilled from a store and so again like to me. Scot: [40:03] But I had to get my car ready to go to Best Buy and I kind of blue shirts only difference is the blue shirt walked 50 feet to me versus me walking 50 feet in the store. Jason: [40:12] But so yeah we'll agree to disagree. Scot: [40:13] That's e-commerce more people can disagree. Jason: [40:13] Smart people can disagree and us so you see the shape again you know again 2020 accelerated e-commerce 2021 still did better although slower and so far in 2022 we're doing better again. Scot: [40:28] Boy what's the one that you hate so much what's the chart you hate the Goldman Sachs one. Jason: [40:33] Well yeah I mean there's a couple different. Scot: [40:38] Mackenzie or McKenzie yeah that's it. Jason: [40:40] Yeah so we'll talk. Yeah so jump to the next slide so Mackenzie is the early in the pandemic came out with this thing and said hey e-commerce has been perfect permanently accelerated by 10 years. Which is utterly wrong right like e-commerce. White kind of went three years ahead and now some categories are still three years ahead like grocery but a lot of categories are much closer to where we'd forecast which I'll show you in just one sec before I get to that though I just wanted to kind of show you pre-pandemic the Gold Line is have as retail grew this The Gray Line is how fast e-commerce grew again Scott and I would disagree about how to count e-commerce but still. [41:18] Retail tended to grow three to four percent a year a great year would be 5% e-commerce grew ten to fifteen percent a year, and and in the pandemic obviously e-commerce wildly accelerated and Retail kind of stayed flat people thought it went down but it kind of stayed flat so then we had this thing that's never happened in my lifetime, which is in like May of 2021, because retail had been so soft for so long retail actually grew faster than e-commerce and we're now having this topsy-turvy thing where the rate of growth for e-commerce and Retail are very similar and so you know I said hey. Well what would have happened if we didn't have the pandemic so this next slide is kind of showing the growth rate for e-commerce. And showing where we would have forecasted e-commerce to go and again in the Wall Street Journal they showed the blue line under the Gold Line. They have this old US Department of Commerce data and if you go to the next slide I zoom. Scot: [42:15] They don't wake up at 8:00 and put it into the table like it. Jason: [42:18] They don't know Tableau like I know tableau, and shout out to all my friends at Salesforce for the own table so you can see it's very noisy right now but it does seem like the pandemic permanently accelerated e-commerce. You know 122 years of acceleration not, not ten years and so then I think the very last slide I put together on the shape of e-commerce is in this is a scary one of me I'm curious what you think about this while e-commerce is continuing to grow well. Is Gary is this is traffic to the top 10 eCommerce sites in the US and this is a different story the gold on the grey line was before the pandemic the blue, the Gold Line was after the pandemic but you can see traffic went down in 2021 even though sales went up and traffic is down even further in 2022 and so what this means is fewer. Are going to e-commerce that the big eCommerce sites less often but they're buying more stuff when they go so. This will be our last question is we're way over time is, that like an inflation thing is that a change in consumer Behavior what do you have any hypothesis what's going on here. Scot: [43:30] So I think people were pegged at home for a while they bought everything they possibly could and they've bought forward so they feel like they got new laptops they've got their fancy exercise bikes. They've got all that stuff their peloton's and now they're just spin out on stuff and now they're wanting to do experiences and services so that's where the dollars are going if you know I think the Gainer of this traffic is probably, Airline sites hotel sites another we have visibility in this a spiffy because our largest customer set is rental car companies, we had a record day yesterday so people are traveling like. Pre-pandemic levels and which is really interesting so the dollars they do want to spend the discretionary dollars are going to experiences and not Services I'd call this a year to go I was a year early, I'm sadly many of our predictions. Jason: [44:16] We have a forecast every year and I get to cream Scott in the for. Scot: [44:19] Well I don't know what. Jason: [44:21] History doesn't show that but you guys don't know. Scot: [44:23] So I think that's what's going on so I you know but I feel like a really really interesting indicator is going to be Amazon Prime day so that's going to be in July of this year and we call it Prime day but every other retailer is glommed onto it and sees a bump from it so it's kind of this fabricated holiday not unlike singles day. That yeah that you know, that is going to be really interesting data point so that could you know the the bullish cases that's going to stimulate people to be like oh yeah I do need a couple other you know cables or a battery or whatever it is so we'll see that we'll be a nursing data point that I think will set us up for holiday and we'll get a pretty good indication of how this is going to go, will the consumer be like okay I'm all travelled out and I want to buy more things or will they continue down this Services dollars been passed. Jason: [45:11] I do think it's really complicated economy right now part of this is inflation and inflation I think is hitting e-commerce harder than than the sort of CPI numbers because the price of a lot of the goods that tend to sell on e-commerce are tend to be. Scot: [45:25] Their supply chain a lot of stuff you just can't get. Jason: [45:27] So there's there's constraints but also consumer Behavior has changed their categories that we would never sell on e-commerce before the pandemic that we are now so one of them that we talked about is Automotive that's a big ticket item right so you need less visits to sell a big Tesla then you then you did to sell a TV and another one is Grocery and when I say that people are Jason are you hi Grocery and I am hi I just had my knee replaced and I'm on some Good Meds the I wore it out going on store visits, the the grocery isn't that expensive but grocery sales and e-commerce are a week's worth of groceries it's 60 to 120 items so that. It is actually a lot higher per visit so some of these new categories becoming more important combined with inflation combined with the supply chain constraints I think off, aspire to do that and that's kind of our, our last take away because it's happen again if you go to the next slide we have used way more than our allotted time but there was no one that could put us off the stage and so. Appreciate it and Scott any closing words. Scot: [46:34] Did anyone have any questions. [46:49] How do you think is going to impact and trends that we're seeing right now. Jason: [46:53] So to repeat the question really quick big Trend in buy now pay later Apple just announced that they were going to have their own flavor buy now pay later built in the Apple pay this week at their event. Scot: [47:06] I've seen some interesting consumer behavior and I'm a little little incredulous on it because it's always sponsored when you dig into it it's like sponsored by a firm and so but what it what it shows is Millennials and gen Z they don't like to have as much open credit they kind of view that negatively and I see this I have kids that are in their 20s and they are freaked out by credit cards but they like to attach that credit to a thing and then pay it off and be done with it, so I think there's an argument to be made that there will be a generational the way we interact with credit will change and then people will after certain over a hundred dollars they'll interact with it in that way so I think that's a really fascinating thing and I want to see more data on that before 100% believe it but I was super incredulous that talk to my kids are like yeah that's how I think I was like well I guess there may be something here. Jason: [47:53] Yeah and as usual that's a really thoughtful and wrong answer. Scot: [47:58] For you yes. Jason: [48:00] No so it. Buy now pay later is huge right now it's the fastest growing form of check out and / Scott's point I would argue they've done an amazing job of branding right like oh it's credits evil credits bad this is not credit right and I talked to our traditional, um Financial customers and I talked to a family-run bank that's a fourth-generation bank and the CEO is like Jason, my family's been in the money renting business which I think that's an awesome way of calling the credit money money renting business for 100 years and that buy now pay later dog doesn't hunt, like it's just a bad version of credit that's been rebranded and. At the moment it's working like it's more expensive to sell something with with a firm or with a buy now pay later service than it is with a credit card but retailers are all doing it because they're selling more stuff because of it right so that's the argument at a firm. Best Buy you should pay more to use buy now pay later. Scot: [48:59] Conversion rates go up. Jason: [49:00] Because conversion rates go up. The scary thing that's starting to come up is guess what's happening right now 42% of all those buy now pay later purchases are now in arrears right so so kids haven't kept up with those purchases it's a. Scot: [49:15] What would a firm would say is that on the front end they can tighten the credit now so yeah that's what they all say. Jason: [49:20] The jury is out and I would say like this Amazon announcement is kind of an interesting nothing Burger because guess how you pay for the the Amazon the Apple buy now pay later service with a credit. Right so you're so it it's kind of like. If the buy now pay later services are rebranded credit and they kind of hide the fact that as credit that Apple buy now pay later is installment payments on a credit card. So so the. Is still out but there is a fear that that this whole bubble of buy now pay later is about to burst and whether it does or not I would say there's too many of them there's going to be a, consolidation retailers are having a lot of pain about. All the consumer requests they're getting to support all of them and we call it NASCAR in the checkout when like you have to you know have 57 logos on the checkout for all these different different ways to pay so I think it's kind of going away. Any other questions before they kick us off the stage. Awesome well thank you guys so much and until next time happy Commerceing! Scot: [50:20] Thanks everybody.

Local news update  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Twitter plans to offer Elon Musk access to its "firehose" of raw data on hundreds of millions of daily tweets in an effort to push forward the Tesla billionaire's agreed-to $44 billion acquisition of the social media platform, according to multiple news reports.Lawyers involved in the deal would not confirm the data sharing agreement. Musk made no comment on Twitter, although he has previously been vocal about various aspects of the deal. Twitter declined to confirm the reports and pointed to a Monday statement in which the company said it is continuing to "co-operatively" share information with Musk.Musk, who struck a legally binding agreement to buy Twitter in April, contends that the deal can't proceed unless the company provides more information about the prevalence of fake accounts on its platform. He has argued, without presenting evidence, that Twitter has significantly underestimated the number of these "spam bots" - automated accounts that typically promote scams and misinformation — on its service.On Monday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton also announced an investigation into Twitter for allegedly failing to disclose the extent of its spam bot and fake accounts, saying his office would look into "potential false reporting" of bots on Twitter.The Washington Post first reported Twitter's plan to provide Musk with full access to the firehose, citing a person familiar with the matter. Other reports suggested the billionaire might only receive partial access.Twitter's reported offer could blunt Musk's attempts to use the spam bot issue to cast doubt on the deal's future. This week, lawyers for Musk accused the company of refusing to surrender information about the true number of bot accounts on Twitter. Mike Ringler, the Palo Alto, California, attorney who signed that Monday letter, told the AP he was not at liberty to speak about the matter when reached Wednesday afternoon.Fake social media accounts have been problematic for years. Advertisers rely on the number of users provided by social media platforms to determine where they will spend money. Spam bots are also used to amplify messages and spread disinformation.The problem of fake accounts is well-known to Twitter and its investors. The company has disclosed its bot estimates to the US Securities and Exchange Commission for years, while also cautioning that its estimate might be too low.Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal has said that Twitter has consistently estimated that fewer than 5 per cent of its accounts are spam. But Musk has disputed that figure, contending in a May tweet — without evidence — that 20 per cent or more of Twitter's accounts are bogus.- AP

Greetings from our initial episode discussing the reasoning as to why this podcast came into being. Advertisers are paid big bucks to make you buy, drive, dress, feel, eat, watch, do etc etc. and WE are here to tell you how they are getting into your minds and are manipulating your everyday actions. Stay with us as we will start to dissect these ads and find out exactly how they are brainwashing the masses into whatever they want you to do. We will also be inviting quite a few guest speakers on the show in upcoming episodes so make sure to stay with us and click the follow buttons on your favorite server. 

Yeah I'm giving you my peace of mind I'm giving you thoughts on how I feel I'm also talking about stuff I need and how my financial responsibilities tennis podcast to starting to matter I'm really looking forward to finding their great sponsor and a great Advertiser and I hope that in the next couple weeks I'll be on well Pandora that's my dream. I'm giving you what you call goals for this podcast in this piece of mind and thoughts because I want to make sure that everybody knows that I will do my best to bring you good quality content and also mix in a little bit of my own creations of music and conversation together so in the beginning there is music and at the end there is music so I hope you enjoy and please follow me on iHeartRadio catch me on Spotify and also follow me right here on anchor.fm and apple podcast. You can also catch me anywhere podcaster livestream or played so I hope to see you guys soon and have a wonderful Thursday

Two members of the Calabrian mafia living in Adelaide's northern suburbs   have been charged with conspiracy to import more than a tonne of cocaine from South America. Supermarket prices have surged by up to 22  per cent since last year, an investigation by The Advertiser shows, adding more than $2000 to a typical family's annual grocery bill.  South Australia's last dine-in Pizza Hut has been inundated with bookings as nostalgic fans prepare to bid farewell to the popular fast-food restaurant, which will close its doors for the final time this month. And in sport, Adelaide's reigning club champion Anne Hatchard has joined fellow midfielder Ebony Marinoff in rejecting offers from expansion clubs to remain a key part of the Crows' premiership defence. For updates and breaking news throughout the day, take out a subscription atadvertiser.com.au  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Next in Marketing spoke to Donna Speciale President Sales and Marketing at Univision Communications about what's happening in the TV ad market as Nielsen faces a number of new challengers. Not only does Speciale question whether any one company will be able to claim the measurement mantle - she believes that Univision's Hispanic American audience is being severely undercounted - which is why the company is going it alone in building a proprietary Hispanic audience graph. Guest: Donna SpecialeHost: Mike Shields

Der Prime Day 2022 steht vor der Tür. In diesem Jahr fahren Shopper durch die Inflation mehr denn je auf Schnäppchen ab. Und das bedeutet vor allem eins: Deine Performance ändert sich maßgeblich. Wie du deine Gebote dementsprechend anpasst, erklärt dir Florian in Folge 109. Außerdem hat er ein kleines Geschenk im Gepäck: den ADFERENCE Gebotsrechner für Shopping-Events wie den Prime Day!   Alle Themen der Episode im Überblick: Intro (00:00-01:41) Wann wird der Prime Day 2022 stattfinden & was ist dieses Jahr besonders? (03:32) Recap: Wie lief das Shopping-Event aus Seller und Vendoren Sicht letztes Jahr? (06:42) Ableitungen für den Prime Day 2022 (14:05) Welche Szenarien ergeben sich daraus? (19:11) Der ADFERENCE Gebotsrechner zum Prime Day (25:03) Checkliste zum Prime Day (35:04) Fazit (41:40) Links & Ressourcen: Free Download:

OPENER. FOOTY PREVIEW - The boys preview the Adelaide Crows' clash tomorrow afternoon against the West Coast Eagles BLEWEY PLAGARISED - Front page of the Advertiser today - “CLEAN BILL OF HEALTH” & Jars thinks they are plagiarising Blewey's material. $1K MINUTE QUIZ BERNIE IS CONCERNED ABOUT JARS - Bernie ‘calls out' some audio of Jars from yesterday's show in final facts… we're worried about him. HALFTIME - Shane Warne Tribute & Tattoos you regret? CALLS – TATTOOS YOU REGRET HIGHLIGHT TAPES. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Marc Maron has struck a three-year deal with Acast to host, monetize, and distribute the comedian's hit podcast, WTF With Marc Maron. Comedian Marc Maron launched “WTF” in 2009. 1,335 episodes have been published, with new ones coming out twice a week. The show gets about 55 million listens per year. Wow, that is a platform. And platforms are worth money. For example, former late-night host Conan O'Brien recently sold his podcast company to SiriusXM for a reported $150 million. In May 2020, Spotify announced a licensing deal with Joe Rogan to host The Joe Rogan Experience, exclusively on the streaming platform, for what insiders say was a three-and-half-year deal worth at least $200 million. Spotify's exclusive deal meant that Joe Rogan fans could only listen to or watch JRE from the Spotify app. Shows were removed from YouTube and all other platforms. Generally, being on fewer platforms means sacrificing listeners who do not want to migrate to an exclusive app. For $200 million, Joe deemed it worthwhile!  I'm curious, what would your number be? Going a different route, WTF With Marc Maron will be hosted, monetized, and distributed via Acast. Notably, WTF will continue to be available on all major podcast platforms. “Entering into a partnership with the podcast giant Marc Maron is a big win for Acast and for the open podcasting landscape, as this deal guarantees that the podcast can continue to be listened to by everyone, everywhere, and on their preferred listening platform,” Ross Adams, the CEO of Acast, said. Deal Highlights: WTF will offer bonus content, merchandise, and live event offerings via Acast+, the podcast company's subscription service.  The WTF back catalog, currently available without ads on SiriusXM's Stitcher Premium, will be moved over to the open feed.  A “small portion” will be paywalled on Acast+. Advertisers will be able to place dynamic ads or use Acast's in-house team for premium spots that will appear on Maron's show. WTF also hopes the Acast partnership will help grow the show's international listenership. EXPERIMENT LIKE A SCIENTISTBig podcasts with lots of downloads can sell lucrative ad spots, but they too are experimenting. Open podcasting vs exclusivity. Paywalled bonus content. Dynamic ad spots and Premium spots. These ideas can inspire the niche, independent podcaster too. Figure out which advertisers (sponsors and affiliates) would most benefit by reaching your audience. Make a pitch deck and earmark times to consistently sell your podcast to advertisers. Be willing to experiment by offering different packages and campaigns to see what works. BUILD A PLATFORMDon't shortchange your podcast by just thinking of it as a podcast. Build a platform. Celebrity podcasters are taking advantage of the opportunities arising from the decentralization of content. But you do not have to be a celebrity. Today is the Golden Age of the creator and one reason is that you have countless distribution channels at your fingertips.  You can ideate and execute episodes more nimbly than ever as a solo creator or small team.  Seize the opportunity to build a loyal audience.  How can you do that? Follow the data Know your target listener and look at your analytics to see what episodes performed well. Are there topics that you should revisit or go deeper into? Be authentic Your audience knows and trusts you. Lean into your brand and stories.  Communicate your value With so many podcasts, listeners like shows that provide help and have a purpose. Clearly stating your value (it could be ‘entertainment') will give you a leg up on increasing audience and influence.   With the audience as your primary focus, your platform and value will inevitably grow. What tips can you share for growing a podcast? Visit...

Welcome back to another fun filled episode of Sound Pollution. Just a quick reminder here that if you could please DOWNLOAD the episodes that would be incredibly helpful for us. Advertisers use downloads to gage the show, thank you. Also, please remember we have a Tour coming up this October, in the Austin Tx, area. We are so excited, make sure you are following us on social media for updates and announcements. This week we have the very gifted, songwriter and musician Josh Hines. We are going to be discussing his current solo project Starer, his songwriting process, inspirations, and how many groups he is currently in, and of course the stories behind a few of his tracks. Including, but not limited to, why one of those tracks drove Uncle Brent crazy. Finally, we will be discussing charity work with animals and a book Josh wrote. Please remember to click those links below to show the artist some love. Make Some Noise! BANDCAMP: https://starer.bandcamp.com/           https://bihargam.bandcamp.com/          https://snowwolfrecords.bandcamp.com/ FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/starermusic           http://facebook.com/bihargam        https://www.facebook.com/SnowWolfRecords/ INSTAGRAM: http://instagram.com/starermusic https://www.instagram.com/bihargam/ https://www.instagram.com/snowwolfrecords/ Use these links to like, friend, follow, subscribe and share Sound Pollution Website: https://www.soundpollutionpodcast.com/ SPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/show/4ZXYavu5ZfOaThUme95GH8?si=59223ba3abdf4f95 YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAnoXgETk8A_UA4QQQuqy8Q SOUNDCLOUD: https://soundcloud.com/user-968048044 IHEARTRADIO: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/966-sound-pollution-59877258/ APPLE:  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sound-pollution/id1502557141 FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/SoundPollutionPodcast TWITTER: https://twitter.com/home?lang=en INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/soundpollutionpodcast/ PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/SoundPollutionPodcast   Use the links below to Like, Friend and/or Follow Uncle Brent:  WEBSITE:  https://UncleBrentMusic.com FACEBOOK:  https://www.facebook.com/UncleBrentMusic  INSTAGRAM:  https://www.instagram.com/UncleBrentMusic  SPOTIFY:  https://open.spotify.com/artist/0JlsPIHAPivXEtme3ENje7 TWITTER:  https://twitter.com/UncleBrentMusic  YOUTUBE:  https://www.youtube.com/NoStoneMusic  DarkStereo Interview https://darkstereo.com/sound-pollution-podcast-we-interview-the-interviewer/?fbclid=IwAR24HhVoYmzmjAFP7Q0W7bKxY0gZW5Hwd08OhBP2Rur9NRa7n5J1MLUMTsE Intro & Outro music by Ketsa and is available at https://freemusicarchive.org/available at https://freemusicarchive.org/)      

1. Post To TikTok From Your Favorite Social Media Management Tools - TikTok's Marketing Partners Program has expanded to include a new set of social media management tools that will allow you to organize, schedule, and, yes, publish content to TikTok from your preferred platform. Per TikTok:“Today, we are excited to introduce the TikTok Marketing Partners Program's inaugural group of badged partners in the Content Marketing specialty. These eight industry leaders - Brandwatch, Dash Hudson, Emplifi, Hootsuite, Khoros, Later, Sprinklr, and Sprout Social - have built innovative solutions that make it easier for brands to publish, manage, and track their content on TikTok, all within the content management tools that brands already use and love. We are excited to connect brands with these trusted partners who can help them lean into and level up their TikTok-first content strategies.”This will make planning and posting TikTok updates much easier, as well as streamlining the repurposing process so you can re-share your video assets across platforms.2. TikTok Introduces Livestream Subscription Service - You can now subscribe to your favorite LIVE TikTok creators with a monthly membership to LIVE Subscription.Currently, LIVE Subscription is only available to invited TikTok creators, and it will be available to everyone in the following months. This functionality contributes to TikTok's efforts to give creators more ways to earn money on the platform.The current subscriber benefits are fairly similar to those found on Twitch and YouTube. Subscribers will receive badges that will be displayed next to their names, as well as personalized emotes to use in chat and access to a subscriber-only chat.Source: https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/live-subscription-invite-only 3. Ads In YouTube Shorts - With Shorts now driving more than 30 billion daily views, Google will be a fool not to monetize it without Ads. Now Google revealed at its Marketing Live event this week that it will begin to gradually roll out ads in YouTube Shorts around the world. The company has been experimenting with ads in YouTube Shorts since last year. Video action marketing and app campaigns will automatically scale to YouTube Shorts starting this week. Advertisers will be able to connect their product feed to their video campaigns later this year, making their video advertising on YouTube Shorts more shoppable. FYI: TikTok already has shoppable video ads, allowing users to view things without having to switch to a browser.Source: https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/resilience-results-reinvention-google-marketing-live/ 4. Google Marketing Live ‘22 Event Announcements - Google's Discover feeds are getting additional additional video options.“Discover is where people scroll through their favorite personalized content for ideas and inspiration. We're exploring ways to help you bring short video assets to Google's feeds so you can offer more compelling and engaging ad experiences.”Although Discover is a less-used personalization feature within the Google app, the new video ad possibilities may assist to engage with users who are interested in specific themes and trends.A/B testing, support for store sales targets to optimize for in-store sales, new insights and explanations, including attribution, audience and auction data, and optimization score and suggestions, are all part of Google's Performance Max updates. Performance Max campaigns enable advertisers to effectively extend their Search ad efforts, by enabling Google's system to showcase your promotions across more surfaces.In order to increase contextual understanding and targeting, Google is now adding fresh search data to its ad insights page.“Based on the billions of searches we see every day and the millions of signals we analyze for every ad auction, we're introducing three new reports that will roll out worldwide over the coming months.”The three new reports are: Attribution insights - show how your ads work together across Google surfaces — like Search, Display and YouTube — to drive conversions. Budget insights - find new opportunities for budget optimization and show how your spend is pacing against your budget goals. Audience insights - for first-party data show how your customer segments, like those created with Customer Match, are driving campaign performance. Google is also introducing automatically generated assets for responsive search advertising, which will generate assets for your campaigns based on material from your landing pages and existing ads.“The system will then display the best-performing combination of automatically created assets, and the assets you provide, to make your ads more relevant.”Check out the sessions from Google Marketing Live here.5. How Does LinkedIn Feed Algorithm Work? - LinkedIn is facing the same issues as other platforms: re-posts from other platforms, spam, vaguely topical polls, and various other low-interest posting actions, designed specifically to generate shallow engagement. So, LinkedIn's VP of Engineering Sabry Tozin shared what types of content LinkedIn seeks to amplify in-stream:a.) In “What kind of conversations are welcomed on LinkedIn?” Tozin emphasized the importance of constructive and respectful conversations. Conversations that people care about and talk about. b.) In “What does it mean to be professional when it comes to content on LinkedIn? Tozin, share advice on what it means to be "professional" on LinkedIn. Be authentic and talk about what's important to you.Things you ought to know about: LinkedIn considers a user's 'dwell time' when ranking content, which is the amount of time someone spend looking at an update or link as a measure of relative interest. LinkedIn posts containing double-spaced text, which are intended to entice clicks by requiring the user to tap on the post to see the entire message, are now penalized with lower reach. Posts that ask or encourage users to interact with them through likes or reactions will have a lower reach. LinkedIn is now actively limiting the number of polls that viewers see in-stream. So, if you want to get the most out of your LinkedIn content, stay away from these elements and concentrate on writing useful, engaging pieces that are relevant to your target audience.Source: https://blog.linkedin.com/2022/may/23/mythbusting-the-feed-helping-our-members 6. Google Ads Prohibiting Skin Lightening Products - Starting in June 2022, Google Ads will ban any skin whitening product Ads that implies one skin tone is superior to another. Google has already published this new policy, which can be seen here "In June, Google will update the Dangerous and Derogatory policy under the Inappropriate Content section to enforce against the promotion of skin lightening products that imply the superiority of one skin tone over another. These products will be prohibited under enforcement guidance."Advertisers who promote such products are being warned by Google to delete their advertising before June 30, 2022, or Google will do so for them.Through this policy update, Google is telling the world they “value diversity and respect for others, and we strive to avoid offending users, so we don't allow ads or destinations that display shocking content or promote hatred, intolerance, discrimination, or violence”7. Google Ads Display Campaign Changes - Google announced that, to simplify campaign creation and management, Smart Display campaign features are now available within all Display campaigns. What do you need to do? Nothing. Any Smart Display campaigns in your account (on Aug 1, 22) will automatically migrate (keeping your settings intact.) without any action needed on your end. Per Google, the migration will not cause any fluctuations with your campaign's performance and Optimized targeting is now set as the default targeting method when you create new Display campaigns.Display campaigns will be the only Display campaign type. Your migrated Smart Display campaigns will become Display campaigns.To replicate Smart Display campaigns you can use the recommended defaults for a new campaign. This will include using the Smart Bidding strategy that works best for your needs, using optimized targeting, and using responsive display ads.FYI: Optimized targeting looks beyond manually-selected audience segments in your campaign to find audience segments that you may have missed to improve the campaign's performance. Optimized targeting works best for advertisers in any of the following situations: You want your campaign to serve to audience segments most likely to convert.  You want to acquire new customers beyond your existing segments and still meet your goals.  You want to identify new people who perform well for your campaign.  You want to increase conversions without increasing bids or the cost per customer. 8. Google Announces May 2022 Broad Core (SEO) Update - Google announced "Several times per year, we make substantial improvements to our overall ranking processes, which we refer to as core updates. Core updates are designed to increase the overall relevancy of our search results and make them more helpful and useful for everyone. Today, we're releasing our May 2022 core update. It will take about 1-2 weeks to fully roll out."Here are the most important things that we know right now in short form: Name: Google May 2022 Broad Core Update Launched: May 25, 2022 at around 11:30pm ET Rollout: It will take about one to two weeks to roll out Targets: It looks at all types of content Penalty: It is not a penalty, it promotes or rewards great web pages Global: This is a global update impacting all regions, in all languages. Impact: Google did not share what percentage of queries or searches were impacted by this update. Discover: Core updates impact Google Discover and other features, also feature snippets and more. Recover: If you were hit by this, then you will need to look at your content and see if you can do better with Google's advice below. Refreshes: Google will do periodic refreshes to this algorithm but may not communicate those updates in the future. Maybe this is what we saw the past couple of weeks or all those unconfirmed Google updates. If you are impacted by this update, check out the Google core update advice story for more.

Today we're going to talk about the coming data privacy changes that will affect marketers, such as third party cookie and mobile device ID changes. These important methods of tracking and understanding users and their behavior are being modified, which is going to affect your marketing, advertising, and attribution. We're going to discuss what marketers can do to stay ahead of this.

Zeze Peters is a serial entrepreneur, aerospace engineer & innovator with 20 years of experience in software, robotics & applied A.I. who has led large teams across continents to build million dollar platforms for Fortune 1000 & other fast growing companies. Currently executing on Beam.city DNA, the worlds 1st unified advertising automation platform that uses A.I. & algorithms to help businesses automatically plan and optimize their ads on all top advertising channels with fantastic results in days or weeks. It's also helps brands achieve multi-location intelligence and personalization at scale. Connect with Zeze: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zezewo/ Website for Beam.city: https://beam.city/ +++++ Subscribe to the Podcast! ▶︎ PODCAST | https://bit.ly/3bU6D3l Please Follow & Connect with me! Link's Below ▶︎ WEBSITE | https://tyzerevans.com ▶︎ YOUTUBE | https://youtube.com/c/tyzerevans ▶︎ INSTAGRAM | https://instagram.com/tyzerevans ▶︎ FACEBOOK | https://facebook.com/grindsellelevate ▶︎ LINKEDIN | https://linkedin.com/in/tyzerevans ▶︎ TWITTER | https://twitter.com/tyzerevans ▶︎ TIKTOK | https://tiktok.com/tyzerevans ▶︎ PATREON | https://patreon.com/tyzerevans Check out Tyzer's other podcast "The Book Legion" at https://thebooklegion.com

How do marketers leverage CTV to drive digital-like business outcomes (website traffic, sales, ROI)? View the full video interview here. Jason Fairchild is the co-founder and CEO of tvScientific, a ConnectedTV (CTV) advertising and attribution platform. An Idealab company, tvScientific is the first performance platform for CTV, offering a self-managed solution that combines direct media buying with comprehensive measurement and attribution, making it easy for businesses of all sizes to buy CTV inventory and deliver outcomes that are as measurable as digital ads.

This week: Streamers court advertisers.   Nielsen Ratings Show Notes Disney Strikes Deal to Put XFL on ESPN, FX, ABC - Variety   How The CW Sale Could Affect Its Future Schedule – The Hollywood Reporter   'Yellowstone' Spinoff '6666' Moves From Paramount+ To Paramount Network – Deadline   Helen Mirren, Harrison Ford to Star in ‘Yellowstone' Prequel ‘1932'   Disney CEO Bob Chapek Opens Upfront By Touting The Company As “The Most Powerful Force In The Industry” – Deadline   Disney Chiefs Deliver Stars and Muscle of 'Most Powerful Force in the Industry' at Upfront   Mindy Kaling Addresses 'Velma' Controversy: 'If People Freak Out About That, I Don't Care' – Deadline   Warner Bros Discovery CEO David Zaslav Positions Merged Company As Fifth Broadcast Network, Skips Any Talk Of Streaming – Upfronts   Amazon's ad-supported Freevee comes to Apple TV   A cheaper Apple TV could be happening   Comcast, Charter Recruit Cable Veteran Marcien Jenckes to Head Their Streaming Joint Venture   ‘League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' Reboot in the Works at 20th Century Studios, Hulu   'Bridgerton' Season 3: Francesca Bridgerton Recast With Hannah Dodd - Variety   Heartstopper Renewed for Season 2 at Netflix - Variety   DC Movie 'Wonder Twins' Shut Down by Warner Bros.   ‘Barry' Renewed for Season 4 at HBO   Matt Shakman To Direct & Exec Produce Apple's Godzilla And The Titans Series   Star Wars: Jon Watts to Helm Coming-of-Age Disney+ Series – The Hollywood Reporter   ‘Daredevil' Disney+ Series in the Works With Matt Corman, Chris Ord Set to Write (EXCLUSIVE) Recommendations Severance   The Lost City   The G Word with Adam Conover  

I was at a conference in Las Vegas a few weeks ago and I was so inspired by the people I met at the event that I recorded this episode there. What actually inspired me? A ton of opportunities. - To be around so many people in a short period of time - To meet them in person- To present them your ideas- To build important relationships- To take a relationship to the next level- To get a new idea that you'll work on in the future- To monetize the whole experience when the time comesThese are some of the points I'm diving into this episode.Tune in and find out why business conferences are so important and how you can take advantage of those events to find advertisers and publishers. You don't want to miss this one! Key Takeaways:Intro (00:00)How to plan a conference (01:05)Build relationships (02:57)A cost per minute (03:58)Don't lock yourself in the room (04:40)How to make an elevator pitch (05:28)Additional Resources:- Eric Beer's One Affiliate Offer Challenge- Sign up for the SurveyDetective VIP Waitlist (Coming Soon)---Connect with Eric!- Join Eric's Text Community: 917-636-1998- Eric's website: https://ericbeer.com- Follow Eric on Instagram.- Subscribe to Eric's YouTube Channel.---Follow the podcast on Apple, Spotify, Google, Stitcher, TuneIn, or anywhere else you listen to your podcasts.If you haven't already, please rate and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts!

“And all this science I don't understandIt's just my job five days a weekA rocket man” ― Elton John // Bernie TaupinDuring your podcasting journey, you're bound to feel a bit lost. Things have been a little crazy for me recently. After many close calls, COVID got my family last month. I've caught 6 mice in my house in the last 10 days. My dad just returned home after a stint in the hospital. (Being a self-appointed patient advocate is exhausting.) The stock market is correcting. I foolishly tried running across my retaining wall yesterday in the pouring rain, slipped, and fell 4 feet onto the wet grass below. I tried to gracefully execute a ninja roll, but I looked more like the victim of a ninja who had kicked me off the wall. My pipeline of podcast interviews went down to zero. None of this appeared in my social media highlight reel, by the way.  May is Mental Health Awareness Month so be sure to take time for yourself, if you need it. For me, https://youtu.be/KTXj2bEwYIs?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pg_51_falling&utm_term=2022-05-18 (guitar is my medicine). If you're in New Jersey this Saturday, come hear my friends and me play at https://hapifestnj.org/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pg_51_falling&utm_term=2022-05-18 (The Heritage of Asian Pacific Islanders (HAPI) Fest NJ). The hula dancers will be fab. If you fall, literally or figuratively, pick yourself up and hope the neighbors didn't see you. Lucky for me, karate men bruise on the inside. And mud washes out of jeans easily. Last week, I only had time to publish a https://youtu.be/lV5Un_Rtk80?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pg_51_falling&utm_term=2022-05-18 (5-minute solo episode).  Do what you can. If you cannot. that's okay too. Your podcast is valuable. If you want to monetize, it is critical that you create engaging content and drive audience growth. Many experts will tell you that it should be in that order. Podcast advertising is growing like a rocket defying gravity.  The sixth annual https://www.iab.com/insights/u-s-podcast-advertising-revenue-report-fy-2021-results-2022-2024-growth-projections/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pg_51_falling&utm_term=2022-05-18 (IAB U.S. Podcast Advertising Revenue study) by PricewaterhouseCoopers is out and the data is impressive. For the first time ever, the podcast advertising market surpassed $1B in 2021. Revenues increased 72% YoY to $1.4B and are forecasted to exceed $2B in 2022 and almost triple by 2024 to over $4B. Podcast advertising grew 2X faster in 2021 (+72%) than the total internet ad market (+35%). Podcast advertisers are not only seeing the benefits of brand-building and driving business outcomes, but they are getting more sophisticated. In 2019, dynamically placed ads made up less than half of the podcast ad market. That has changed. Last year, 84% of ads were dynamically inserted into podcasts.  Advertisers are using technology to manage campaigns that target listeners based on location, age, and gender. Further, there are better methods for advertisers to track the effectiveness of their ads. The rapid growth makes sense. If advertisers can better implement advertising on podcasts and measure the impact, they're inclined to spend more dollars.  For podcasters, this means that we must take advantage of dynamic content. We also need to deeply understand our ideal listeners and audience metrics in order to demonstrate value to advertisers. (I've been looking at https://podcastgym.com/link/captivate/ (Captivate's dynamic ad features) and like what I see.) * * * * * It's funny how the dark can make the light appear brighter. Contrast frequently helps us to see things more...

Connected TV ist ein Trendthema, welches aktuell im Hype um Metavers, Krypto und NFTs fast untergeht. Wie steht es um den Bewegtbildmarkt derzeit? Welche Trends gibt es? Was ist Connected TV CTV und welche Möglichkeiten bietet es? Wie funktioniert Werbung im CTV und was bedeutet das für Advertiser:innen? Darüber sprechen wir mit Ilhan Zengin von ShowHeroes.

Facebook Has No Idea Where Your Data Is and What They Do With It?! Facebook's about 18 years old coming on 20 Facebook has a lot of data. How much stuff have you given Facebook? Did you fall victim for that? Hey, upload your contacts. We'll find your friends. They don't know where your data is. [Following is an automated transcript] [00:00:15] This whole thing with Facebook has exploded here lately. [00:00:20] There is an article that had appeared on a line from our friends over at, I think it was, yeah. Let me see here. Yeah. Yeah. Motherboard. I was right. And motherboards reporting that Facebook doesn't know what it does with your data or. It goes, no, there's always a lot of rumors about different companies and particularly when they're big company and the news headlines are grabbing your attention and certainly Facebook can be one of those companies. [00:00:57] So where did motherboard get this opinion about Facebook? Just being completely clueless about your personal. It tamed from a leaked document. Yeah, exactly. So we find out a lot of stuff like that. I used to follow a website about companies that were going to go under and they posted internal memos. [00:01:23] It basically got sued out of existence, but there's no way that Facebook is going to be able to Sue this one out of existence because they are describing this as. Internally as a tsunami of privacy regulations all over the world. So Gores, if you're older, we used to call those tidal waves, but think of what the implication there is of a tsunami coming in and just overwhelming everything. [00:01:53] So Facebook, internally, their engineers are trying to figure out, okay. So how do we deal with. People's personal data. It's not categorized in ways that regulators want to control it. Now there's a huge problem right there. You've got third party data. You've got first party data. You've got sensitive categories, data. [00:02:16] They might know what religion you are, what your persuasions are in various different ways. There's a lot of things they might know about you. How were they all cat categorize now we've got the European union. With their general data protection regulation. The GDPR we talked about when it came into effect back in 2018, and I've helped a few companies to comply with that. [00:02:41] That's not my specialty. My specialty is the cybersecurity. But in article five this year, peon law mandates that personal data must be collected for specified explicit and legitimate purposes and not further processed in a manner that is incompatible with those purposes. So what that means is that every piece of data, like where you are using Facebook or your religious orientation, Can only be collected in use for a specific purpose and not reused for another purpose. [00:03:19] As an example here, that vice has given in past Facebook, took the phone number that users provided to protect their accounts with two factor authentication and fed it to its people, feature as well as. Advertisers. Yeah. Interesting. Hey, so Gizmodo with the help of academic researchers caught Facebook doing this, and eventually the company had to stop the practice because, and this goes back to the earlier days where Facebook would say, Hey, find out if your friends are on Facebook, upload your contacts right now. [00:03:54] And most people. What did you know back then about trying to keep your data private, to try and stop the proliferation of information about you online then nothing. I think I probably even uploaded it back then thinking it'd be nice to see if I got friends here. We can start chatting, et cetera. [00:04:12] According to legal experts that were interviewed by motherboard who wrote this article and has a copy of the internal memo this year, PN regulation specifically prohibits that kind of repurposing of your phone number of trying to put together the social graph and the leaked document shows that Facebook may not even have the ability to live. [00:04:37] How it handles user's data. Now I was on a number of radio stations this week, talking about this. And the example I gave is just look at an average business from the time it start, Facebook started how right? Wildly scraping pictures of young women off of Harvard university. Main catalog, contact page, and then asking people what do you think of this? This person, that person. And off they go, trying to rate them. Yeah. Yeah. All that matters to a woman, at least to Courtney, to mark Zuckerberg girl, all the matters about a woman is how she looks. Do I think she's pretty or not? [00:05:15] It's ridiculous. What he was doing. It just, oh, that's zackerburg who he is not a great guy anyways. So you go from stealing pictures of young ladies asking people to rate them, putting together some class information and stuff there at Harvard, and then moving on to other universities and then open it up even wider and wider. [00:05:42] And of course, that also created demand because you can't get on. If you're not at one of the universities that we have set it up for. And then you continue to grow. You're adding these universities, certainly starting to collect data and you are making more money than God. So what do you do? You don't have to worry about any efficiencies. [00:06:02] I'll tell you that. Right? One thing you don't have to do is worry about gee. We've got a lot of redundant work going on here. We've got a lot of teams working on basically the same thing. No, you've got more money than you can possibly shake a stick at. So now you go ahead and send that money to this group or that group. [00:06:24] And they put together all of the basic information, that they want. Pulling it out of this database and that database in there doing some correlation, writing some really cool CQL queries with mem credible joins and everything else. And now that becomes part of the main code for Facebook. [00:06:45] And then Facebook goes on to the next little project and they do the same thing. Then the next project, then the next project. And then someone comes along and says, Hey, we. This feature, that feature for advertisers and then in that goes, and then along comes candidate Obama. And they, one of the groups inside Facebook says, yeah here we go. [00:07:09] Here's all of the information we have about everybody and it's free. Don't worry about it. And then when Trump actually bought it and hired a company to try and process some of that information he got in trouble. No but the. The whole campaign could get access to anything they wanted to, again, because the data wasn't controlled, they had no idea who was doing what with the data. [00:07:34] And according to this internal memo, they still don't know. They don't even know if they can possibly comply with these regulations, not just in Europe, but we have regulations in pretty much all of the 50 states in the U S Canada of course, has their own Australia and New Zealand think about all the places. [00:07:57] Facebook makes a lot of. So here's a quote from that we build systems with open borders. The result of these open systems and open culture is well-described with an analogy. Imagine you hold a bottle of ink in your hand, the bottle of ink is a mixture of all kinds of user data. You pour that ink into a lake of water and K and it flows every year. [00:08:22] The document read. So how do you put that ink back in the bottle? I, in the right bottle, how do you organize it again? So that it only flows to the allowed places in the lake? They're totally right about that. Where did they collect it from? Apparently they don't even know where they got some of this information. [00:08:43] This data from reminds me of the no fly list. You don't know you're on it and you can't get yourself off of it. It's crazy. So this document that we're talking about, it was written last year by. Privacy engineers on the ad and business product team, whose mission is to make meaningful connections between people and businesses and which quote sits at the center of our monetization strategy. [00:09:06] And is the engine that powers Facebook's growth. Interesting. Interesting problems. And I see this being a problem well into the future for more and more of these companies, look at Twitter as an example that we've all heard about a lot lately. And then I've talked about as well along comes Elon Musk and he says wait a minute. [00:09:29] I can make Twitter way more profitable. We're going to get rid of however many people over a thousand, and then we are going to hire more people. We're going to start charging. We're going to be more efficient. You can bet all of these redundancies that are in Facebook are also there. And Twitter also has to comply with all of these regulations that Facebook is freaking out about it for a really a very good reason. [00:10:00] So this document is available to anybody who wants to look at it. I'm looking at it right now, talking about regulatory landscape and the fundamental problems Facebook's data lake. And this is a problem that most companies have not. As bad as Facebook does the button. Most companies you write, you grow. I have yet to walk into a business that needs help with cybersecurity and find everything in place as it should be because it grew organically. [00:10:32] Do you started out with a little consumer firewall router, wifi, and then you added to it and you put a switch here and you added another switch behind that and move things around. This is normal. This is not total incompetence on the part of the management, but my gosh, I don't know. Maybe they need an Elon Musk. [00:10:52] Just straighten them out as well. Hey, stick around. I'll be right back and sign up online@craigpeterson.com. [00:11:02] Apparently looting is one of the benefits of being a Russian soldier. And according to the reports coming out of Ukraine, they've been doing it a lot, but there's a tech angle on here that is really turning the tables on these Russian Looters. [00:11:19] We know in wars, there are people that loot and typically the various militaries try and make sure, at least recently that looting is kept to an absolute minimum. [00:11:32] Certainly the Americans, the British, even the Nazis during world war II the the socialists they're in. Germany they tried to stop some of the looting that was going on. I think that's probably a very good thing, because what you end up with is just all of these locals that are just totally upset with you. [00:11:57] I found a great article on the guardian and there's a village. I hadn't been occupied for about a month by Russian troops and the people came back. They are just shocked to see what happened in there. Giving a few examples of different towns. They found that the alcohol was stolen and they left empty bottles behind food wrappers, cigarette butts, thrown all over the place in apartments in the home. [00:12:26] Piles of feces blocking the toilets, family photographs torn, thrown around the house. They took away all of the closes as a code from one of the people, literally everything, male and female coats, boots, shirts, jackets, even my dresses and laundry. This is really something. The Sylvia's didn't do this, but now Russia. [00:12:49] The military apparently does. So over the past couple of weeks, there have been reporting from numerous places where Russian troops had occupied Ukrainian territory and the guardian, which is this UK newspaper collected evidence to suggest looting by Russian forces was not merely a case of a few way, word soldiers, but a systematic part of Russian military behavior across multiple towns. [00:13:17] And villages. That's absolutely amazing. Another quote here, people saw the Russian soldiers loading everything onto your old trucks. Everything they could get their hands on a dozen houses on the villages. Main street had been looted as well as the shops. Other villagers reported losing washing machines, food laptops, even as sofa, air conditioner. [00:13:41] Being shipped back, just you might use ups here or they have their equivalent over there. A lady here who was the head teacher in the school, she came back in, of course, found her home looted and in the head teacher's office. She found an open pair of scissors that had been jammed into a plasma screen that was left behind because if they can't steal it, they're going to destroy it. [00:14:07] They don't wanna leave anything behind. They found the Russian to take in most of the computers, the projectors and other electronic equipment. It's incredible. So let's talk about the turnaround here. You might've heard stories about some of these bad guys that have smashed and grabbed their way into apple stores. [00:14:27] So they get into the apple store. They grab laptops on iPads, no longer iPods, because they don't make those anymore. And I phone. And they take them and they run with them. Nowadays there's not a whole lot of use for those. Now what they have been doing, some of these bad guys is they'd take some parts and use them in stolen equipment. [00:14:52] They sell them on the used market, et cetera. But when you're talking about something specific, like an iPhone that needs specific activation. Completely different problem arises for these guys because that iPhone needs to have a SIM card in order to get onto the cell network. And it also has built in serial numbers. [00:15:15] So what happens in those cases while apple goes ahead and disables them. So as soon as they connect to the internet, they didn't say they put them on wifi. They don't get a SIM card. They don't. Service from T-Mobile or Verizon or whoever it might be. So now they just connect to the wifi and it calls home. [00:15:33] Cause it's going to get updates and download stuff from the app store and they find that it's been bricked. Now you can do that with a lot of mobile device managers that are available for. All kinds of equipment nowadays, but certainly apple equipment where if a phone is lost or stolen or a laptop or other pieces of equipment, you can get on the MDM and disable it, have it remotely erase, et cetera. [00:16:00] Now, please have had some interesting problems with that. Because a bad guy might go ahead and erase a smartphone. That's in the evidence locker at the police station. So they're doing things like putting them into Faraday cages or static bags or other things to try and stop that. So I think we've established here that the higher tech equipment is pretty well protected. [00:16:25] You steal it. It's not going to do you much. Good. So one of the things the Russian stole when they were in a it's called a, I think you pronounced. Melad Mellott DePaul which is again, a Ukrainian city is they stole all of the equipment from a farm equipment dealership and shipped it to check. Now that's according to a source in a businessman in the area that CNN is reporting on. [00:16:56] So they shipped this equipment. We're talking about combine harvesters were 300 grand a piece. They shipped it 700 miles. And the thieves were ultimately unable to use the equipment because it had been locked remotely. So think about agriculture equipment that John Deere, in this case, these pieces of equipment, they, they drive themselves. [00:17:23] It's atonomous it goes up and down the field. Goes to any pattern that you want to it'll bring itself within a foot or an inch of your boundaries, of your property being very efficient the whole time, whether it's planting or harvesting, et cetera. And that's just a phenomenal thing because it saves so much time for the farmer makes it easier to do the companies like John Deere. [00:17:49] Want to sell as many pieces of this equipment as they possibly can. And farming is known to be a what not terribly profitable business. And certainly isn't like Facebook. So how can they get this expensive equipment into the hands of a lot of farmers? What they do is they use. So you can lease the equipment through leasing company or maybe directly from the manufacturer and now you're off and running. [00:18:16] But what happens if the lease isn't paid now? It's one thing. If you don't pay your lease on a $2,000 laptop, right? They're probably not going to come hunting for you, but when you're talking about a $300,000 harvester, they're more interested. So the leasing company. Has titled to the equipment and the leasing company can shut it off remotely. [00:18:41] You see where I'm going with this so that they can get their equipment in the hands of more farmers because the farmers can lease it. It costs them less. They don't have to have a big cash payment. You see how this all works. So when the Russian forces stole this equipment, that's valued, total value here is about $5 million. [00:19:02] They were able to shut it all off. And th the, obviously if you can't start the engine, because it's all shut off and it's all run by computers nowadays, and there's pros and cons to that. I think there's a lot of cons, but what are you going to do? How's that going to work for? Isn't going to work for you. [00:19:22] And they were able to track it and had GPS trackers find out exactly where it was. That's how they know it was Tara taken to Chechnya and could be controlled remotely. And in this case, how did they control it? They completely. Shut it off, even if they sell the harvesters for spare parts to learn some money, but they sure aren't gonna be able to sell them for the 300 grand that they were actually worth. [00:19:48] Hey, stick around. We'll be right back and visit me online@craigpeterson.com. If you sign up there, you'll be able to get my insider show notes. And every week I have a quick. Training right there. New emails, Craig Peterson.com. [00:20:05] If you've been worried about ransomware, you are right to worry. It's up. It's costly. And we're going to talk about that right now. What are the stats? What can you do? What happens if you do get hacked? Interesting world! [00:20:20] Ransomware has been a very long running problem. I remember a client of ours, a car dealership who we had gone in. [00:20:31] We had improved all of their systems and their security, and one of them. People who was actually a senior manager, ended up downloading a piece of ransomware, one of these encrypted ones and opened it up and his machine all of a sudden, guess what it had ransomware on it. One of those big. Green's that say, pay up and send us this much Bitcoin, and here's our address. [00:21:00] All of that sort of stuff. And he called us up and said, what's going on here? What happened? First of all, don't bring your own machine into the office. Secondly, don't open up as particularly encrypted files using a password that they gave. And thirdly, we stopped it automatically. It did not spread. [00:21:20] We were able to completely restore his computer. Now let's consider here the consequences of what happened. So he obviously was scared. And within a matter of a couple of hours, we actually had him back to where he was and it didn't spread. So the consequences there, they weren't that bad. But how about if it had gotten worse? [00:21:47] How about if the ransomware. Also before it started holding his computer ransom, went out and found all of the data about their customers. What do you think an auto dealership would love to hear that all of their customer data was stolen and released all of the personal data of all of their customers? [00:22:08] Obviously not. So there's a potential cost there. And then how long do you think it would take a normal company? That thinks they have backups to get back online. All I can tell you it'll take quite a while because the biggest problem is most backups don't work. We have yet to go into a business that was actually doing backups that would work to help restore them. [00:22:35] And if you're interested, I can send you, I've got something I wrote up. Be glad to email it back to you. Obviously as usual, no charge. And you'll be able to go into that and figure out what you should do. Cause I, I break it down into the different types of backups and why you might want to use them or why you might not want to use them, but ransomware. [00:22:58] Is a kind of a pernicious nasty little thing, particularly nowadays, because it's to two factor, first is they've encrypted your data. You can't get to it. And then the second side of that is okay I can't get to my data and now they're threatening to hold my data ransom or they'll release. So they'll put it out there. [00:23:22] And of course, if you're in a regulated industry, which actually car dealers are because they deal with financial transactions, leases, loans, that sort of thing you can lose your license for your business. You can, you lose your ability to go ahead and frankly make loans and work with financial companies and financial instruments. [00:23:45] It could be a very big. So there are a lot of potential things that can happen all the way from losing your reputation as a business or an individual losing all of the money in your operating account. And again, we've got a client that we picked up afterwards. That yes, indeed. That lost all of the money in their operating account. [00:24:09] And then how do you make payroll? How do you do things? There's a new study that came out from checkpoint. Checkpoint is one of the original firewall companies and they had a look at ransomware. What are the costs of ransomware? Now bottom line, I'm looking at some stats here on a couple of different sites. [00:24:29] One is by the way, Conti, which is a big ransomware gang that also got hacked after they said we are going to attack anyone. That doesn't defend Plaid's invasion of Ukraine, and then they got hacked and their information was released, but here's ransomware statistics. This is from cloud words. First of all, the largest ransom demand is $50 million. [00:24:55] And that was in 2021 to Acer big computer company. 37% of businesses were hit by ransomware. In 2021. This is amazing. They're expecting by 2031. So in about a decade, ransomware is going to be costing about $265 billion a year. Now on average. Ransomware costs businesses. 1.8, $5 million to recover from an attack. [00:25:25] Now that's obviously not a one or two person place, but think of the car dealer again, how much money are they going to make over the year or over the life of the business? If you're a car dealer, you have a license to print money, right? You're selling car model or cars from manufacturers. And now you have the right to do that and they can remove that. [00:25:48] How many tens, hundreds of millions of dollars might that end up costing you? Yeah. Big deal. Total cost of ransomware last year, $20 billion. Now these are the interesting statistics here right now. So pay closer attention to this 32% of ransomware victims paid a ransom. So about a third Peter ransom demand. [00:26:12] Lastly. It's actually down because my recollection is it used to be about 50% would pay a ransom. Now on average that one third of victims that paid a ransom only recovered 65% of their data. Now that differs from a number I've been using from the FBI. That's a little bit older that was saying it ends it a little better than 50%, but 65% of pain victims recovered their. [00:26:41] Now isn't that absolutely amazing. Now 57% of companies were able to recover their data, using a cloud backup. Now think about the different types of backup cloud backup is something that can work pretty well if you're a home user, but how long did it take for your system to get back? Probably took weeks, right? [00:27:05] For a regular computer over a regular internet line. Now restoring from backups is going to be faster because your downlink is usually faster than your uplink. That's not true for businesses that have real internet service like ours. It's the same bandwidth up as it is down. But it can take again, days or weeks to try and recover your machine. [00:27:28] So it's very expensive. And I wish I had more time to go into this, but looking at the costs here and the fact that insurance companies are no longer paying out for a lot of these ransomware attacks, it could be credibly expensive for you incredibly. The number one business types by industry for ransomware attacks, retail. [00:27:59] That makes sense. Doesn't it. Real estate. Electrical contractors, law firms and wholesale building materials. Isn't that interesting? And that's probably because none of these people are really aware or conscious of doing what a, of keeping their data secure of having a good it team, a good it department. [00:28:24] So there's your bottom line. Those are the guys that are getting hit. The most, the numbers are increasing dramatically and your costs are not just in the money. You might pay as a ransom. And as it turns out in pretty much every case prevention. Is less expensive and much better than the cure of trying to pay ransom or trying to restore from backups. [00:28:52] Hey, you're listening to Craig Peterson. You can get my weekly show notes by just going to craig peterson.com. [00:29:00] You and I have talked about passwords before the way to generate them and how important they are. We'll go over that again a little bit in just a second, but there's a new standard out there that will eliminate the need for passwords. [00:29:16] Passwords are a necessary evil, at least they have been forever. I remember, I think the only system I've ever really used that did not require passwords was the IBM 360. [00:29:31] Yeah, 360, you punch up the cards, all of the JCL you feed the card deck in and off it goes. And does this little thing that was a different day, a different era. When I started in college in university, we. We had a remote systems, timeshare systems that we could log into. And there weren't much in the line of password requirements. [00:29:58] And, but you had a username, you had a simple password. And I remember one of our instructors, his name was Robert, Andrew Lang, and his password was always some sort of a combination of RA Lang. So it was always easy to guess what his password was. Today. It has gotten a lot worse today. We have devices with us all the time. [00:30:22] You might be wearing a smart watch. That requires a password. You course probably have a smartphone that also maybe requiring a password. Certainly after it boots nowadays they use fingerprints or facial recognition, which is handy, but it has its own drawbacks. But how about the websites? You're going to the systems you're using in you're at work and logging in. [00:30:49] They all require password. And usernames of some sort or another well, apple, Google, and Microsoft have all committed to expanding their support for a standard. That's actually been out there for a few years. It's called the Fido standard. And the idea behind this is that you don't have to have a password in order to. [00:31:15] Now that's really an interesting thing, right? Just looking at it because we're so used to have in this password only authenticate. And of course the thing to do there is to make sure you have for your password, multiple words in the password, it should really be a pass phrase. And between the words put in special characters or numbers, maybe. [00:31:41] Upper lower case a little bit. In those words, those are the best passwords, 20 characters, 30 characters long. And then if you have to have a pin, I typically use a 12 digit pin. And how do I remember all of these? Cause I use a completely different password for every website and right now, Let me pull it up. [00:32:03] I'm using one password dot coms, password manager. And my main password for that is about 25 characters long. And I have thirty one hundred and thirty five. And trees here in my password manager, 3,100, that is a whole lot of passwords, right? As well as software licenses and a few other things in there. [00:32:30] That's how we remember them is using a password manager. One password.com is my favorite. Now, obviously I don't make any money by referring you there. I really do like that. Some others that I've liked in the past include last pass, but they really meant. With some of their cybersecurity last year and I lost my faith in it. [00:32:51] So now what they're trying to do is make these websites that we go to as well as some apps to have a consistent, secure, and passwordless. And they're going to make it available to consumers across all kinds of devices and platforms. That's why you've got apple, Google, and Microsoft all committing to it. [00:33:15] And you can bet everybody else is going to follow along because there's hundreds of other companies that have decided they're going to work with the Fido Alliance and they're going to create this passwordless future. Which I like this idea. So how does this work? Basically you need to have a smartphone. [00:33:33] This is, I'm just going to go with the most standard way that this is going to work here in the future, and you can then have. Passkey, this is like a multi-factor authentication or two factor authentication. So for instance, right now, when I sign into a website online, I'm giving a username, given a password, and then it comes up and it asks me for a code. [00:33:57] So I enter in a six digit code and that code changes every 30 seconds. And again, I use my password manager from one password. In order to generate that code. So that's how I log into Microsoft site and Google sites and all kinds of sites out there. So it's a similar thing here now for the sites for my company, because we do cyber security for businesses, including regulated businesses. [00:34:24] We have biometrics tied in as. So to log into our systems, I have to have a username. I have to have a password. I then am sent to a single sign-on page where I have to have a message sent to my smart device. That then has a special app that uses biometrics either a face ID or a fingerprint to verify who I am. [00:34:49] Yeah, there's a lot there, but I have to protect my customers. Something that very few it's crazy. Actual managed security services providers do, but it's important, right? By the way, if you want my password. Special report, just go to Craig peterson.com. Sign up for my email list. I'll send that to you. [00:35:13] That's what we're sending out right now for anyone who signs up new@craigpeterson.com. And if you'd like a copy of it in you're already on the list, just go ahead and email me. At Craig peterson.com and ask for the password special report where I go through a lot of this sort of thing. So what will happen with this is you go to a website and I might come up with a QR code. [00:35:37] So you then scan that QR code with your phone and verify it, authorize it on your phone. You might again to have it set up so that your phone requires a facial recognition or perhaps it'll require a fingerprint. And now you are. Which is very cool. They fix some security problems in Fido over the last few years, which is great over the coming year. [00:36:02] You're going to see this available on apple devices, Google Microsoft platforms, and it really is simple, stronger authentication. That's sort of Fido calls it. But it is going to make your life a lot easy, easier. It is a standard and the passwordless future makes a whole lot of sense for all of us. Now, I want to talk about another thing here that just bothered me for a long time. [00:36:30] I have a sister. Who is in the medical field and gives prescriptions, doctor thing. And I think she's not quite a doctor. I can't remember what she has. She's an LPN or something. And anyhow, so she. We'll get on a zoom call with someone and they'll go through medical history and what's happening right now and she'll make prescriptions. [00:36:57] And so I warned her about that saying, it is very bad to be using zoom because zoom is not secure. Never has been, probably never will be right. If you want secure. To go and pay for it from one of these providers like WebEx, that's what we use. We have a version of WebEx that is set up to be secure. [00:37:20] So I talked to her about that and said, Hey, listen, you can't do this. You've really got to go another way here. And so she started using one of these mental or. Medical health apps. What I want to talk about right now specifically are some checks that were just performed some audits on mental health apps. [00:37:45] That's why I messed up a second ago, but what they looked at is that things are a serious problem there. And then fact, the threat post, just calling it a. Frankly, just plain old creepy. So they've got some good intentions. They want to help with mental health. You've probably seen these or at least heard them advertise. [00:38:06] So you can get on the horn with a mental health professional, a doctor or otherwise in order to help you here with your psychological or spiritual wellness. And people are sharing their personal and sensitive data with third parties and have 32 mental health and prayer mobile apps that were investigated by the open source organization. [00:38:32] 28, 28 of the 32 were found to be inherently insecure and were given a privacy not included label, including others here. So this is a report. That was released here by the open source organization, tied into Mozilla. Those are the Firefox people. They have what they call their minimum security standards. [00:38:56] So things like requiring strong passwords, managing security, updates, and vulnerabilities, et cetera. 25 of the 32 failed to meet. Even those minimum security standards. So these apps are dealing with some of the most sensitive mental health and wellness issues people can possibly have, right? Depression, anxieties, suicidal fonts, domestic violence, eating disorders. [00:39:23] And they are being just terrible with your security Mozilla researchers spent 255 hours or about eight hours per product pairing under the hood of the security, watching the data that was going back and forth, right between all of these mental health and prayer apps. It was just crazy. So for example, eight of the apps reviewed, allowed weak passwords, that range. [00:39:52] One digit one as the password to 1, 1, 1, 1, while a mental health app called a mood fit only required one letter or digit as a password. Now that is very concerning for an app that collects mood and symptom data. So be very careful. Two of the apps better help a popular app that connects users with therapists and better stop suicide, which is a course of suicide prevention app have vague and messy, according to Mozilla privacy policies that have little or no effect on actual. [00:40:30] User data protection. So be very careful. And if you're a mental health, professional or medical professional, don't just go and use these open video calls, et cetera, et cetera, find something good. And there are some standards out there. Again. Visit me online, get my insider show notes every week. Get my little mini trends. [00:40:56] And they come up most weeks. Just go to Craig peterson.com. And I'll send you my special report on passwords and more. [00:41:06] We know the Russians have been attacking us. I've talked a lot about it on the radio station, all kinds of stations. In fact, here over the last couple of weeks, and I am doing something special, we are going through the things you can do to keep safe. [00:41:23] Last week we started doing something I promise we would continue. [00:41:27] And that is how can you protect yourself when it comes to the Russians, right? When it comes to the bad guys, because the Russians are definitely the bad guys. There's a few things you can do. And there's a few things, frankly, you shouldn't be doing. And that's exactly what we're going to talk about right now. [00:41:45] So last week he went over some steps, some things that you can look at that you should look at that are going to help protect you. And we are going to go into this a whole lot more today. And so I want you to stick around and if you miss anything, you can go online. You can go to Craig peterson.com, make sure you sign up there for my email. [00:42:08] And what I'm going to do for you is. Send you a few different documents now where we can chat back and forth about it, but I can send you this. Now I'm recording this on video as well as on audio. So you can follow along if you're watching either on YouTube or. Over on rumble and you can find it also on my website. [00:42:32] I've been trying to post it up there too, but right now let's talk about what we call passive backend protections. So you've got the front end and the front end of course, is. Stuff coming at you, maybe to the firewall I've mentioned last week about customers of mine. I was just looking at a few customers this week, just so I could have an idea of their firewalls. [00:42:59] And they were getting about 10 attacks per minute. Yeah. And these were customers who have requirements from the department of defense because they are defense sub subcontractors. So again, Potential bad guys. So I looked up their IP addresses and where the attacks were coming from. Now, remember that doesn't mean where they originated because the bad guys can hop through multiple machines and then get onto your machine. [00:43:28] What it means is that all, ultimately they ended up. Coming from one machine, right? So there's an IP address of that machine. That's attacking my clients or are attacking my machines. That just happens all the time. A lot of scans, but some definite attacks where they're trying to log in using SSH. [00:43:48] And what I found is these were coming from Slovakia, Russia, and Iran. Kind of what you were expecting, right? The Iranians, they just haven't given up yet. They keep trying to attack, particularly our military in our industry. One of the things we found out this week from, again, this was an FBI notice is that the Russians have been going after our industrial base. [00:44:15] And that includes, in fact, it's more specifically our automobile manufacturers we've already got problems, right? Try buying a new car, try buying parts. I was with my friend, just this. I helped them because he had his car right. Need to get picked up. So I took him over to pick up his car and we chatted a little bit with this small independent automotive repair shop. [00:44:40] And they were telling us that they're getting sometimes six, eight week delays on getting parts and some parts. They just can't. So they're going to everything from junkyards on out, and the worst parts are the parts, the official parts from the car manufacturers. So what's been happening is Russia apparently has been hacking into these various automobile manufacturers and automobile parts manufacturers. [00:45:10] And once they're inside, they've been putting in. A remote control button net. And those botnets now have the ability to wake up when they want them to wake up. And then once they've woken up, what do they do? Who knows? They've been busy erasing machines causing nothing, but having they've been doing all kinds of stuff in the past today, they're sitting there. [00:45:31] Which makes you think they're waiting, it's accumulate as much as you possibly can. And then once you've got it all accumulated go ahead and attack. So they could control thousands of machines, but they're not just in the U S it's automobile manufacturers in Japan. That we found out about. [00:45:50] So that's what they're doing right now. So you've got the kind of that front end and back end protections. So we're going to talk a little bit about the back end. What does that mean? When a cybersecurity guy talks about the backend and the protections. I got it up on my green right now, but here's the things you can do. [00:46:10] Okay. Remember, small businesses are just getting nailed from these guys, because again, they're fairly easy targets. One change your passwords, right? How many times do we have to say that? And yet about 70% of businesses out there are not using a good password methodology. If you want more information on passwords, two factor authentication, you name it. [00:46:37] Just email me M e@craigpeterson.com. I want to get the information out now. You got to make sure that all of the passwords on your systems are encrypted are stored in some sort of a good password vault as you really should be looking at 256 bit encryption or better. I have a vendor of. That I use. So if you get my emails every week, when them, there's the little training. [00:47:06] And so I'll give you a five minute training. It's written usually it's in bullet point for, I'm just trying to help you understand things. That provider of mine has a big database and there's another provider that I use that is for. So the training guys use the database of my provider. [00:47:27] In using that database, they're storing the passwords and the training providers putting passwords in the clinics. Into the database, which is absolutely crazy. So again, if you're a business, if you're storing any sort of personal information, particularly passwords, make sure that you're using good encryption and your S what's called salting the hash, which means. [00:47:53] You're not really storing the password, just joining assaulted hash. I can send you more on this. If you are a business and you're developing software that's, this is long tail stuff here. Configure all of the security password settings so that if someone's trying to log in and is failing that, and you block it, many of us that let's say you're a small business. [00:48:15] I see this all of the time. Okay. You're not to blame. You, but you have a firewall that came from the cable company. Maybe you bought it at a big box retailer. Maybe you bought it online over at Amazon, as hurricane really great for you. Has it got settings on there that lets you say. There's 20 attempts to log in. [00:48:38] Maybe we should stop them. Now, what we do personally for our customers is typically we'll block them at somewhere around three or four failed attempts and then their passwords block. Now you can configure that sort of thing. If you're using. Email. And that's an important thing to do. Let me tell you, because we've had some huge breaches due to email, like Microsoft email and passwords and people logging in and stealing stuff. [00:49:06] It was just a total nightmare for the entire industry last year, but limit the number of login retries as well as you're in there. These excessive login attempts or whatever you want to define it as needs to lock the account. And what that means is even if they have the right password, they can't get in and you have to use an administrative password in order to get in. [00:49:31] You also want to, what's called throttle, the rate of repeated logins. Now you might've gotten caught on this, right? You went to your bank, you went to E-bay, you went to any of these places and all of a sudden. And denied you write it blocked you. That can happen when your account is on these hackers lists. [00:49:51] You remember last week we talked about password spraying while that's a very big deal and hackers are doing the sprain trick all of the time, and that is causing you to get locked out of your own account. So if you do get locked out, remember it might be because someone's trying to break. Obviously you have to enforce the policies. [00:50:16] The capture is a very good thing. Again, this is more for software developer. We always recommend that you use multifactor or two factor authentication. Okay. Do not use your SMS, your text messages for that, where they'll send you a text message to verify who you are. If you can avoid that, you're much better off. [00:50:36] Cause there's some easy ways to get around that for hackers that are determined. Okay. A multi-factor again, installed an intrusion. system. We put right at the network edge and between workstations and servers, even inside the network, we put detection systems that look for intrusion attempts and block intrusion attempts. [00:51:02] A very important use denied lists to block known attackers. We build them automatically. We use some of the higher end Cisco gates. Cisco is a big network provider. They have some of the best hardware and software out there, and you have to subscribe to a lot of people complain. I ain't going to just go buy a firewall for 200 bucks on Amazon. [00:51:24] Why would I pay that much a month just to to have a Cisco firewall? And it's like praying pain for the brand. I've got by logo chert on here. Oh, I wouldn't pay for that. No, it's because they are automatically providing block lists that are updated by the minute sometimes. And then make sure you've got an incident response plan in place. [00:51:50] What are you going to do when they come for you? What are you going to do?  [00:51:55] Now we're going to talk about prevention. What can you do an order to stop some of these attacks that are coming from Russia and from other countries, it is huge. People. Believe me, this is a very big problem. And I'm here to help. [00:52:12] We've reviewed a number of things that are important when it comes to your cyber security and your protection. [00:52:20] We talked about the front end. We talked about the backend. Now we're going to talk about pure prevention and if you're watching. Online. You'll be able to see my slides as they come up, as we talk about some of this stuff and you'll find me on YouTube and you'll also find me on rumble, a fairly new platform out there platform that doesn't censor you for the things you say. [00:52:44] Okay. So here we go. First of all, enabling your active directory password protection is going to. Four's password protection all the way through your business. Now I've had some discussions with people over the months, over the years about this whole thing and what should be done, what can be done, what cannot be done. [00:53:09] Hey, it's a very big deal when it comes to password protection and actor directory, believe it or not, even though it's a Microsoft product is pretty darn good at a few things. One of them is. Controlling all the machines and the devices. One of the things we do is we use an MDM or what used to be a mobile device manager called mass 360. [00:53:34] It's available from IBM. We have a special version of that allows us as a managed security services provider to be able to control everything on people's machines. Active directory is something you should seriously consider. If you are a Mac based shop. Like I am. In fact, I'm sitting right now in front of two max that I'm using right now, you'll find that active directory is a little bit iffy. [00:54:04] Sometimes for max, there are some work around and it's gotten better mastery. 60 is absolutely the way to go, but make sure you've got really good. Passwords and the types of passwords that are most prone to sprain the attacks are the ones you should be banning specifically. Remember the website? Have I been poned? [00:54:28] Yeah. It's something that you should go to pretty frequently. And again, if you miss anything today, just email me M e@craigpeterson.com. Believe me, I am not going to harass you at all. Okay. Now, the next thing that you should be doing is what's called red team blue team. Now the red team is a group of people, usually outside of your organization. [00:54:54] If you're a big company they're probably inside, but the red team is the team that attacks you. They're white hat hackers, who are attacking you, looking for vulnerabilities, looking for things that you should or shouldn't be doing. And then the blue team is the side that's trying to defend. So think of, like war games. [00:55:12] Remember that movie with Matthew Broderick all of those decades ago and how the, he was trying to defend that computer was trying to defend that it moved into an attack mode, right? Red team's attack, blue team is defend. So you want. To conduct simulated attacks. Now w conducting these attacks include saying, oh my let's now put in place and execute our plan here for what are we going to do once we have a. [00:55:44] And you darn well better have a breach plan in place. So that's one of the things that we help as a fractional chief information security officer for companies, right? You've got to get that in place and you have to conduct these simulated attacks and you have to do penetration testing, including password spraying attacks. [00:56:04] There's so many things you can do. The one of the things that we like to do and that you might want to do, whether you're a home user, retiree or a business is go and look online, you can just use Google. I use far more advanced tools, but you can use Google and look for your email address right there. [00:56:23] Look for the names of people inside your organization. And then say wait a minute, does that data actually need to be there? Or am I really exposing the company exposing people's information that shouldn't be out there because you remember the hackers. One of the things they do is they fish you fish as in pH. [00:56:47] So they'll send you an email that looks like. Hey let me see. I know that Mary is the CFO, and I know that Joe's going to be out of town for two weeks in The Bahamas, not a touch. So while he's got. I'm going to send an email to Mary, to get her to do something, to transfer the company's funds to me. [00:57:06] Okay. So that's what that's all about. You've got to make sure, where is our information? And if you go to my company's page, mainstream.net, you'll see on there that I don't list any of the officers or any of the people that are in the company, because that again is a security problem. [00:57:24] We're letting them know. I go to some of these sites, like professional sites lawyers, doctors, countenance, and I find right there all, are there people right there top people or sometimes all of them. And then we'll say, yeah, I went to McGill university, went to Harvard, whatever my B. It's all there. So now they've got great information to fish you, to fish that company, because all they have to do is send an email to say, Hey, you remember me? [00:57:56] We're in Harvard when this class together. And did you have as a professor to see how that works? Okay. You also want to make. That you implement, what's called a passwordless user agent, and this is just so solely effective. If they cannot get into your count, what's going to, what could possibly go wrong, but one of the ways to not allow them into the count is to use. [00:58:24] Biometrics. We use something called duo and we have that tied into the single sign-on and the duo single sign-on works great because what it does now is I put in, I go to a site, I put it into my username and. Pulls up a special splash page that is running on one of our servers. That again asks me for my duo username. [00:58:48] So I've got my username for the site then to my dual username and my duo password single sign on. And then it sends me. To an app on my smart device, a request saying, Hey, are you trying to log into Microsoft? And w whatever it might be at Microsoft, and you can say yes or no, and it uses biometric. [00:59:11] So those biometrics now are great because it says, oh, okay, I need a face ID or I need a thumb print, whatever it might be that allows a generalized, a password, less access. Okay. Password less. Meaning no pass. So those are some of the top things you can do when it comes to prevention. And if you use those, they're never going to be able to get at your data because it's something you have along with something, it works great. [00:59:45] And we like to do this. Some customers. I don't like to go through those hoops of the single sign-on and using duo and making that all work right where we're fine with it. We've got to keep ourselves, at least as secure as the DOD regulations require unlike almost anybody else in industry, I'm not going to brag about it. [01:00:09] But some of our clients don't like to meet the tightest of controls. And so sometimes they don't. I hate to say that, but they just don't and it's a fine line between. Getting your work done and being secure, but I think there's some compromises it can be readily made. We're going to talk next about saving your data from ransomware and the newest ransomware. [01:00:36] We're going to talk about the third generation. That's out there right now. Ransomware, it's getting crazy. Let me tell ya and what it's doing to us and what you can do. What is a good backup that has changed over the last 12 months? It's changed a lot. I used to preach 3, 2, 1. There's a new sheriff in town. [01:00:58] Stick around Craig peterson.com. [01:01:02] 3, 2, 1 that used to be the standard, the gold standard for backing up. It is no longer the case with now the third generation of ransomware. You should be doing something even better. And we'll talk about it now. [01:01:19] We're doing this as a simulcast here. It's on YouTube. It is also on rumble. [01:01:27] It's on my website@craigpeterson.com because we're going through the things that you can do, particularly if you're a business. To stop the Russian invasion because as we've been warned again and again, the Russians are after us and our data. So if you missed part of what we're talking about today, or. [01:01:50] Last week show, make sure you send me an email. me@craigpeterson.com. This is the information you need. If you are responsible in any way for computers, that means in your home, right? Certainly in businesses, because what I'm trying to do is help and save those small businesses that just can't afford to have full-time. [01:02:15] True cyber security personnel on site. So that's what the whole fractional chief information security officer thing is about. Because you just, you can't possibly afford it. And believe me, that guy that comes in to fix your computers is no cyber security expert. These people that are attacking our full time cybersecurity experts in the coming from every country in the world, including the coming from the us. [01:02:44] We just had more arrests last week. So let's talk about ransomware correctly. Ransomware, very big problem. Been around a long time. The first version of ransomware was software got onto your computer through some mechanism, and then you had that red screen. We've all seen that red screen and it says, Hey, pay up buddy. [01:03:07] It says here you need to send so many Bitcoin or a fraction of a Bitcoin or so many dollars worth of Bitcoin. To this Bitcoin wallet. And if you need any help, you can send email here or do a live chat. They're very sophisticated. We should talk about it some more. At some point that was one generation. [01:03:29] One generation two was not everybody was paying the ransoms. So what did they do at that point? They said let me see if they, we can ransom the data by encrypting it and having them pay us to get it back. 50% of the time issue got all your data back. Okay. Not very often. Not often enough that's for sure. [01:03:49] Or what we could do is let's steal some of their intellectual property. Let's steal some of their data, their social security number, their bank, account numbers, et cetera. They're in a, in an Excel spreadsheet on their company. And then we'll, if they don't pay that first ransom, we'll tell them if they don't pay up, we'll release their information. [01:04:10] Sometimes you'll pay that first ransom and then they will hold you ransom a second time, pretending to be a different group of cyber terrorists. Okay. Number three, round three is what we're seeing right now. And this is what's coming from Russia, nears, everything we can tell. And that is. They are erasing our machines. [01:04:31] Totally erasing them are pretty sophisticated ways of erasing it as well, so that it sinks in really, it's impossible to recover. It's sophisticated in that it, it doesn't delete some key registry entries until right at the very end and then reboots and computer. And of course, there's. Computer left to reboot, right? [01:04:55] It's lost everything off of that hard drive or SSD, whatever your boot devices. So let's talk about the best ways here to do some of this backup and saving your data from ransomware. Now you need to use offsite disconnected. Backups, no question about it. So let's talk about what's been happening. [01:05:17] Hospitals, businesses, police departments, schools, they've all been hit, right? And these ransomware attacks are usually started by a person. I'll link in an email. Now this is a poison link. Most of the time, it used to be a little bit more where it was a word document, an Excel document that had something nasty inside Microsoft, as I've said, many times has truly pulled up their socks. [01:05:45] Okay. So it doesn't happen as much as it used to. Plus with malware defender turned on in your windows operating system. You're going to be a little bit safer next step. A program tries to run. Okay. And it effectively denies access to all of that data. Because it's encrypted it. And then usually what it does so that your computer still works. [01:06:09] Is it encrypts all of you, like your word docs, your Excel docs, your databases, right? Oh, the stuff that matters. And once they've got all of that encrypted, you can't really access it. Yeah. The files there, but it looks like trash now. There's new disturbing trends. It has really developed over the last few months. [01:06:31] So in addition to encrypting your PC, it can now encrypt an entire network and all mounted drives, even drives that are marrying cloud services. Remember this, everybody, this is really a big deal because what will happen here is if you have let's say you've got an old driver G drive or some drive mounted off of your network. [01:06:57] You have access to it from your computer, right? Yeah. You click on that drive. And now you're in there and in the windows side Unix and max are a little different, but the same general idea you have access to you have right. Access to it. So what they'll do is any mounted drive, like those network drives is going to get encrypted, but the same thing is true. [01:07:20] If you are attaching a U S B drive to your company, So that USB drive, now that has your backup on it gets encrypted. So if your network is being used to back up, and if you have a thumb drive a USB drive, it's not really a thumb drive, right? There's external drive, but countered by USP hooked up. [01:07:45] And that's where your backup lives. Your. Because you have lost it. And there have been some pieces of software that have done that for awhile. Yeah. When they can encrypt your network drive, it is really going after all whole bunch of people, because everyone that's using that network drive is now effective, and it is absolutely. [01:08:10] Devastating. So the best way to do this is you. Obviously you do a bit of a local backup. We will usually put a server at the client's site that is used as a backup destiny. Okay. So that servers, the destination, all of the stuff gets backed up there. It's encrypted. It's not on the network per se. It's using a special encrypted protocol between each machine and the backup server. And then that backup servers data gets pushed off site. Some of our clients, we even go so far as to push it. To a tape drive, which is really important too, because now you have something physical that is by the way, encrypted that cannot be accessed by the attacker. [01:09:03] It's offsite. So we have our own data center. The, we run the, we manage the no one else has access to it is ours. And we push all of those backups offsite to our data center, which gives us another advantage. If a machine crashes badly, right? The hard disk fails heaven forbid they get ransomware. We've never had that happen to one of our clients. [01:09:29] Just we've had it happen prior to them becoming clients, is that we can now restore. That machine either virtually in the cloud, or we can restore it right onto a piece of hardware and have them up and running in four hours. It can really be that fast, but it's obviously more expensive than in some. [01:09:51] Are looking to pay. All right, stick around. We've got more to talk about when we come back and what are the Russians doing? How can you protect your small business? If you're a one, man, one woman operation, believe it. You've got to do this as well. Or you could lose everything. In fact, I think our small guys have even more to lose Craig peterson.com. [01:10:16] Backups are important. And we're going to talk about the different types of backups right now, what you should be doing, whether you're a one person, little business, or you are a, multi-national obviously a scale matters. [01:10:32] Protecting your data is one of the most important things you can possibly do. [01:10:36] I have clients who had their entire operating account emptied out, completely emptied. It's just amazing. I've had people pay. A lot of money to hackers to try and get data back. And I go back to this one lady over in Eastern Europe who built a company out of $45 million. By herself. And of course you probably heard about the shark tank people, right? [01:11:07] Barbara Cochran, how she almost lost $400,000 to a hacker. In fact, the money was on its way when she noticed what was going on and was able to stop it. So thank goodness she was able to stop it. But she was aware of these problems was looking for the potential and was able to catch it. How many of us are paying that much attention? [01:11:34] And now one of the things you can do that will usually kind of protect you from some of the worst outcomes. And when it comes to ransomware is to backup. And I know everybody says, yeah, I'm backing up. It's really rare. When we go in and we find a company has been backing up properly, it even happens to us sometimes. [01:11:59] We put them back up regimen in place and things seem to be going well, but then when you need the backup, oh my gosh, we just had this happen a couple of weeks ago. Actually this last week, this is what happened. We have. Something called an FMC, which is a controller from Cisco that actually controls firewalls in our customer's locations. [01:12:26] This is a big machine. It monitors stuff. It's tied into this ice server, which is. Looking for nastiness and we're bad guys trying to break in, right? It's intrusion detection and prevention and tying it into this massive network of a billion data points a day that Cisco manages. Okay. It's absolutely huge. [01:12:48] And we're running it in a virtual machine network. So we. Two big blade. Chassies full of blades and blades are each blade is a computer. So it has multiple CPU's and has a whole bunch of memory. It also has in there storage and we're using something that VMware calls visa. So it's a little virtual storage area network. [01:13:15] That's located inside this chassis and there are multiple copies of everything. So if a storage unit fails, you're still, okay. Everything stays up, it keeps running. And we have it set up so that there's redundancy on pond redundancy. One of the redundancies was to back it up to a file server that we have that's running ZFS, which is phenomenal. [01:13:40] Let me tell you, it is the best file system out there I've never ever had a problem with it. It's just crazy. I can send you more information. If you ever interested, just email me@craigpeterson.com. Anytime. Be glad to send you the open source information, whatever you need. But what had happened is. [01:13:57] Somehow the boot disk of that FMC, that, that firewall controller had been corrupted. So we thought, oh, okay, no problem. Let's look at our backups. Yeah, hadn't backed up since October, 2019. Yeah, and we didn't know it had been silently failing. Obviously we're putting stuff in place to stop that from ever happening again. [01:14:27] So we are monitoring the backups, the, that network. Of desks that was making up that storage area network that had the redundancy failed because the machine itself, somehow corrupted its file system, ext four file system right then are supposed to be corruptible, but the journal was messed up and it was man, what a headache. [01:14:51] And so they thought, okay, you're going to have to re-install. And we were sitting there saying, oh, you're kidding me. Reinstalling this FMC controller means we've got to configure our clients, firewalls that are being controlled from this FMC, all of their networks, all of their devices. We had to put it out. [01:15:07] This is going to take a couple of weeks. So because I've been doing this for so long. I was able to boot up an optics desk and Mount the file system and go in manually underneath the whole FMC, this whole firewall controller and make repairs to it. Got it repaired, and then got it back online. So thank goodness for that. [01:15:33] It happens to the best of us, but I have to say I have never had a new client where they had good backups. Ever. Okay. That, and now that should tell you something. So if you are a business, a small business, whatever it might be, check your backups, double check them. Now, when we're running backups, we do a couple of things. [01:15:57] We go ahead and make sure the backup is good. So remember I mentioned that we h