Podcasts about erian

My set recording taken from The Trance Empire Live event in Birmingham at the Zumhof Junkyard 30.11.24.   Choose your player

My Best of November mix compilation looking back at my favourite tracks I was playing on The Trance Empire during November 2024. Turn it up and enjoy :)   Choose your player

New music from Minicied, Giuseppe Ottaviani, State72, Dean Purise, Fabio Solazzo, Amar N, Fabio Franco, UDM, Ashandra and many more.   Choose your player

A special mix I put together featuring my favourite vocal Trance releases over the last few months. If you like singing along to your tunes, you're going to love this!   Choose your player

New music from Jake Crooker, Woody Van Eyden, Jardin, Dermot Kirby, Adam Reece, Matt Rogers, Diago, Josie Sandfeld, Kohta Imafuku and many more.   Choose your player

In episode 90 we talk with Neil Erian, a former math teacher who has discovered perhaps the true cause of school shootings; the schools themselves - specifically their curriculum. Don't miss this hard-hitting exposé on the massive failure of our government schools ("indoctrination centers")!Call-to-Action: After you have listened to this episode, add your $0.02 (two cents) to the conversation, by joining (for free) The Secular Foxhole Town Hall. Feel free to introduce yourself to the other members, discuss the different episodes, give us constructive feedback, or check out the virtual room, Speakers' Corner, and step up on the digital soapbox. Welcome to our new place in cyberspace!Show notes with links to articles, blog posts, products and services:Neil Erian's article, Product Safety Alert: Progressive Education - Capitalism MagazinePeter Langman's site, School Shooters dot infoJohn DeweyHorace MannHoward ZinnEric Harris and Dylan KleboldColumbine High School massacreDealing with Troubled Writers: A Literacy Teacher's Dilemma by John SimmonsCharles WhitmanThe Third Wave (experiment)Interview with Kerry McDonald on homeschooling - episode 36 of The Secular FoxholeInterview with Marsha Enright, President and Program Director of Reliance College - episode 83 of The Secular FoxholeRandsDay Boostagram of 221,905 Satoshis - episode 65 of The Secular Foxhole (February 2, 2023)Austin Scholar on Twitter (X)Episode 90 (43 minutes) was recorded at 2200 Central European Time, on October 18, 2024, with Ringr app. Martin did the editing and post-production with the podcast maker, Alitu. The transcript is generated by Alitu.Easy listen to The Secular Foxhole podcast in your

The Dangerous Impact of Progressive Education on School Violence: An Interview with Neil Erian In today's episode of The Rational Egoist, host Michael Liebowitz sits down with Neil Erian, a former math teacher and current engineer in the aircraft industry, to discuss a controversial yet pressing issue: the connection between progressive education and the rise in school shootings. Drawing from his recent article for Capitalism Magazine, titled "Product Safety Alert: Progressive Education," Erian argues that the erosion of discipline, merit-based evaluation, and individual responsibility in schools has fostered an environment where violence is more likely to occur. Together, they explore how educational philosophies that reject objective standards and emphasize collectivist ideals have far-reaching consequences on young minds and, ultimately, on the safety of schools. Tune in for an in-depth conversation that challenges the conventional narratives surrounding both education and school violence. Michael Leibowitz, host of The Rational Egoist podcast, is a philosopher and political activist who draws inspiration from Ayn Rand's philosophy, advocating for reason, rational self-interest, and individualism. His journey from a 25-year prison sentence to a prominent voice in the libertarian and Objectivist communities highlights the transformative impact of embracing these principles. Leibowitz actively participates in political debates and produces content aimed at promoting individual rights and freedoms. He is the co-author of “Down the Rabbit Hole: How the Culture of Correction Encourages Crime” and “View from a Cage: From Convict to Crusader for Liberty,” which explore societal issues and his personal evolution through Rand's teachings. Explore his work and journey further through his books:“Down the Rabbit Hole”: https://www.amazon.com.au/Down-Rabbit-Hole-Corrections-Encourages/dp/197448064X“View from a Cage”: https://books2read.com/u/4jN6xj join our Ayn Rand Adelaide Meetups here for some seriously social discussions on Freedom https://www.meetup.com/adelaide-ayn-rand-meetup/

Bloomberg Opinion Columnist William Dudley discusses the Fed's current stance of patience. Dudley speaks with Bloomberg's Jonathan Ferro, Lisa Abramowicz, Annmarie Horder and Mohamed el-Erian.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Geprüfte Gebrauchtware anbieten – das ist die Mission von rebuy, dort ist Marcel Erian als COO tätig. Zusammen mit Franz diskutiert er das Konzept des Unternehmens, die Bedeutung der Kreislaufwirtschaft und wie man als Führungskraft wahrgenommen wird. Erfahren Sie, welche Routinen ihm im Alltag helfen, wie er an die Unternehmensführung herangeht und wie er mit Fehlern umgeht. In dieser Podcast-Episode erzählt Erian auch, wie er durch einen Klickfehler zu einer C-Rolle kam, was sein Tipp für gute Zusammenarbeit im Team ist und ob das C-Level oder seine vier Töchter herausfordernder sind. Darüber hinaus spricht er über das Rudern und wie ihn diese Sportart geprägt hat. Themen: - C-Level - Wahrnehmung - Kreislaufwirtschaft Über Atreus – A Heidrick & Struggles Company Atreus garantiert die perfekte Interim-Ressource (m/w/d) für Missionen, die nur eine einzige Option erlauben: nachhaltigen Erfolg! Unser globales Netzwerk aus erfahrenen Managern auf Zeit zählt weltweit zu den besten. In engem Schulterschluss mit den Atreus Direktoren setzen unsere Interim Manager vor Ort Kräfte frei, die Ihr Unternehmen zukunftssicher auf das nächste Level katapultieren. ▶️ Besuchen Sie unsere Website: https://www.atreus.de/ ▶️ Interim Management: https://www.atreus.de/kompetenzen/service/interim-management/ ▶️ Für Interim Manager: https://www.atreus.de/interim-manager/ ▶️ LinkedIn-Profil von Marcel Erian: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcel-erian-88750549/ ▶️ Profil von Franz Kubbillum: https://www.atreus.de/team/franz-kubbillum/

The SB Cubs pitching staff gave up 3 runs in 2nd inning then held the Captains to no more run in the rest of the contest. The South Bend lose a tough fought battle tonight against Lake County Captains by a score of 3 to 1 in South Bend tonight. Erian Rodriguez made his High-A Cubs debut with seven strikeouts a career high for Erian. Aaron Perry came in relief and struck out six more Captains. This contest ends the 1st Half of Midwest League of High A baseball. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

DOWNLOAD: https://mega.nz/file/4d8SAZgb#E3AY97he9zQxl4tbNet40MBu00PKWNJiTmWPXgwZMQc 01.Intro / [CDR] 02.Lange Feat. Skye - Drifting away (Marsh extended remix 2023) / [Armada] 03.Solarstone - 4Ever (Photographer extended remix) / [Pure Trance] 04.Bryan Kearney - Te amo (Cold Blue extended remix) / [Kearnage] 05.Yelow & Spy - The remedy (Extended mix) / [Subculture] 06.Angelus - Parley Pt 2. (The bassline will bring me home) (Original mix) / [One Forty] 07.Daxson & Xijaro & Pitch - The awakening (Transmission theme 2023) (Extended mix) / [Coldharbour] TRACK OF THE WEEK 08.Gareth Emery & Annabel & LSR CITY - House in the streetlight (Extended mix) / [Create Music Group] 09.Spencer Newell Feat. Sarah De Warren - History (Extended mix) / [AVA] 10.Jimmy Chou & Violet Dolivo - The universe is listening (Extended mix) / [AVA] 11.Fros7novA & XLM - Looking forward to it (Original mix) / [One Forty Rise] 12.BIXX & Ana Criado - I belong (Extended mix) / [Amsterdam] 13.Erian & XLM - Hear your inner voice (Extended mix) / [One Forty Rise]

Download my official Android App: djphalanx.com/getitongoogleplay Official Uplifting Trance Sessions Spotify Playlist: spoti.fi/3jyMmX0

No episódio 07 do programa Gestão de Produto na XP Inc, Erian (Head de Produtos) e Victor (Design Lead) da XP Inc discutem os desafios e oportunidades de inovar em um setor tão tradicional como o bancário. Como a XP, uma gigante dos investimentos, está se reinventando para oferecer produtos de crédito? Neste episódio você vai conhecer: - A decisão da XP de entrar no mundo bancário: motivações e estratégia. - O equilíbrio entre manter a essência de investimentos e inovar em produtos bancários. - Os desafios da inovação em um setor tradicional e a superação da XP. - Segmentação e propostas de valor para diferentes públicos: da oferta de crédito ao investidor ao atacado. - Insights e aprendizados ao desenvolver produtos de crédito para diversos segmentos. - O impacto do lançamento do Financiamento Imobiliário e como a XP garantiu sua relevância. - A reestruturação do Crédito com Garantia de Investimentos: adaptando canais e experiências para melhorar a conversão. - Lições valiosas dos recentes lançamentos e a visão futura da XP no mundo do crédito. Se você é um product manager ou tem interesse no mundo dos produtos bancários, este episódio é imperdível! Acompanhe as experiências e estratégias da XP Inc, e obtenha insights valiosos para sua carreira e negócios. Siga o Erian e o Victor no LinkedIn.

Yet again, the studio is in pieces, and the cast come together to have a great round table convo on the game and the Assimilation Pt 2 Arc

Attention!! This is the audio from our Video version, if you are not intending to watch the video, we suggest you go and listen to the Audio Version! In the most northern part of the world, Winter reigns. But one town, Erian, holds within its walls, the Winters Hearth, burning bright to keep the world safe from the monsters of the dark, frozen North. Our Story begins as 2 junior members of the Frozen Watch, the Twins Hermey and Yukon, take on their first proper mission - Hunting for Ghosts! Come hang out in the Irish TTRPG Space Discord Server: https://discord.gg/x58yPeg4be Check this episode out over on our Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@HearthfireTales

Attention!! This is the audio version of our MidWinter Special! If you would like to check out the video version, you can watch it on spotify by going to the video version, or if you aren't a spotify user, you can go to our youtube Channel and watch there. If you're looking for the normal podcast experience, you're in the right place! In the most northern part of the world, Winter reigns. But one town, Erian, holds within its walls, the Winters Hearth, burning bright to keep the world safe from the monsters of the dark, frozen North. Our Story begins as 2 junior members of the Frozen Watch, the Twins Hermey and Yukon, take on their first proper mission - Hunting for Ghosts! Come hang out in the Irish TTRPG Space Discord Server: https://discord.gg/x58yPeg4be Check this episode out over on our Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@HearthfireTales

Join Alex and I as we chat before he literally has to finish packing and catch a plane for Despised Icon's European Tour. We talk about aging technology and how a lot of times there's nothing really wrong with the old thing, we just tend to move on. That led way to discussing how bands now a days have the tools and resources to learn how to be better musicians than Alex and others of our age had to figure it out through trial and error. We talk about the beginnings of the Deathcore genre, how the Despised Icon guys were one of the first to start using the term, and printing it on merch, but not THE first to coin the phrase, and how it was trying to get on tours when you're not really shown love in either of the scenes you're putting together for not being enough of one or the other. We also talk about Alex's transition in life to working in the hospitality field and how he's found success doing that and much more in this chat with the Despised Icon frontman. Intro Music: “Remember This Night” (Podcast Edit) by Chae Hawk “Pretty Lights" by Heartsick Show Sponsor: Rockabilia (www.rockabilia.com) USE OUR CODE BREWTALLY AND GET 10% OFF YOUR TOTAL ORDER!! Starving Artist Brewing Co (www.starvingartist.beer) Links: Facebook: www.facebook.com/despisedicon www.facebook.com/rockabiliacom www.facebook.com/starvingartistbeer www.facebook.com/brewspeakpod Instagram: @despisedicon, @alexerian514, @rockabiliacom, @starvingartistbeer, @brewspeakpod, @jbeatty616 Twitter: @AlexErian514, @despisedicon, @rockabiliacom, @brewspeakpod, @jbeatty616 Website: www.despisedicon.com www.brewspeakpod.com Patreon: www.patreon.com/brewspeakpod Email: Brewtallyspeaking@gmail.com RATE/REVIEW/SUBSCRIBE!!! --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/brewspeakpod/support

20 years. What a ride it's been for Canadian-based deathcore stalwarts Despised Icon. Frontman Alex Erian sits with us to reflect on the personal journey he has endured since 2002. There's a feeling of nostalgia when looking back on a band that has been around for 2 decades, so much that the latest release “Deterre,” is an EP that was recorded back in 2004. In a way, it's as if this was also a feeling of re-ignition for Despised Icon, as they begin this new chapter of their decorated timeline. This EP is also a salute to the die hard fans, while bringing in the newcomers who have been exposed to the modern hardcore genre. A big part of what makes this unit stand out is the presence of two frontmen, two vocalists, and Alex talks about his chemistry with fellow bandmate Steve Marois and the unique challenges on composing songs that gameplan around the two. We also talk to Alex about his own Montreal-based brewery called Messorem Bacitorium Inc., from how it started to where it is today, what the future holds for this growing company. Plenty to unpack in this episode with Alex, tune in now and be sure to buy and stream the new EP, “Deterre,” out now worldwide via Nuclear Blast Records.Stay connected with Despised Icon, visit: https://www.despisedicon.com/, https://www.facebook.com/despisedicon/ and https://www.instagram.com/despisedicon/Stay connected with IUF, visit: https://interviewunderfire.com/

Your Crypto Is Being Tracked - Your Passwordless Future - How Safe is WhatsApp? - Business Email Compromise - Facebook Lost Your Data - Ransomware Prevention Cheaper Than Cure Cryptocurrencies were thought to be like the gold standard of being secure. Having your information stay private. Maybe if you don't want to use regular currency and transactions. But it's changed. [Following is an automated transcript] We have had such volatility over the years when it comes to what are called cryptocurrencies. [00:00:23] Now I, 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, crypto, uh, assets at all. Most people look at crypto currencies and think of a couple of things. First of all, an investment. Well, an investment is something that you can use or sell, right? [00:00:46] Typically investments you don't really use. It's like a house. Is it an investment? Uh, not so much. Uh, it's more of a liability, but people look at it and say, well, listen, it went from, uh, you know, 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. [00:01:10] 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, um, in most places anyways. [00:01:33] Well, that sounds like a good idea. uh, 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. [00:01:54] 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 kind of cool too. When you think about it, you know, what is, so what are you gonna do? Latin American country? Uh, I'm trying to remember what it is. [00:02:16] Oh yeah. It's all Salvador. The first country in the world to adopt Bitcoin is an official legal. Now there's a number of reasons they're doing that and he can do it basically. You know, 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. [00:02:42] 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, 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 kind of every day buying and selling based on what the movement is. [00:03:11] I know a guy that does exactly that it's, he's a day trader basically in some of these cryptocurrencies, you know, good for. But in reality, is that something that makes sense in a long term? Is that going to help him long term? I, I don't know. I, I really don't because again, there's no intrinsic value value. [00:03:33] So some of the cryptocurrencies have decided, well, 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 kind of stable. So for instance, one that really hit the news recently is a stable coin that is tied to the us dollar. [00:04:01] 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, you know, it has since come back up, some are tied to other types of assets. Some of them say, well, we have gold behind us. [00:04:24] 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, our us dollars, no matter which country it was to buy and sell oil. Well, things have changed obviously. And, uh, we're not gonna talk about. The whole Petro dollar thing right now. [00:04:46] 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. [00:05:14] 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. Right. 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. [00:05:41] Does that make sense to you? So you use a currency. So you say the chicken is worth five bucks. Well, 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. [00:06:10] 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, uh, 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. [00:06:42] Is a, again, a separate discussion. They, 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, kind of makes sense if you're Russia. Now we have a lot of criminals that have been using the Bitcoin for ransoms businesses. [00:07:07] 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. Well, 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. [00:07:33] Now this was a fake 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, uh, talk and kind of fall in love. Right. 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. [00:08:05] You, you know the story, right. So he was conned out of the. What's interesting to me is how the investigation and investigative ability has changed over the years. Uh, 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. [00:08:42] 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 you know, 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. [00:09:13] 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. Well, it is tracked is a hundred percent guaranteed to be tracked. And once it's tracked, well, government can get in. [00:09:37] 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, the, uh, national security agency, a local district attorney in Santa Clara county, California, not a particularly huge county, but. [00:10:07] Uh, 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. [00:10:26] 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. [00:10:58] 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? Well, 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. [00:11:24] There have been a lot of efforts by many companies, Microsoft, apple, Google, to try and get rid of passwords. Well, how can you do that? What, what is a password and what are these new technologies? Apple thinks they have the answer. [00:11:41] Passwords have been kind of the bane of existence for a long while. And, and if you'd like, I have a special report on passwords, or I talk about password managers, things you can do, things you should do in order to help keep your information safe, online things like. [00:11:59] Bank accounts, et cetera. Just email me, me, Craig peterson.com and ask for the password special report and I'll get it to you. Believe me it 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. [00:12:22] Well, you know, 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 kind of hard to crack. Then Unix came along. I started using Unix and, uh, when was that? [00:12:47] 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. [00:13:14] 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 problems in fractions of a second. Even that traditional computers cannot solve it. [00:13:40] It's a whole different thing. I want you to think. Something here. I, if you have a handful of spaghetti, uh, 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? [00:14:08] Which ones were the shortest? Well, there's kind of 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. [00:14:27] 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? [00:14:54] Uh, 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 kind of 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. [00:15:17] 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 embassies worldwide. [00:15:43] 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. [00:16:06] We have a pretty good idea of how quantum computers are going to work in the future, how they kind of work right now, but this really gets us to the next level, which is kind of cool. Franklin. That's a, a little bit here about cybersecurity. Well, how about you and your password? How does this all tie in? [00:16:26] Well, 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. Right? You remember those? And you should change it every 30 days. [00:16:45] And those recommendations changed about three or four years ago when the national Institute of standards and technology said, Hey guys, uh, 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 like, I have some pass phrases I use that are 30 characters or more. [00:17:09] 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. [00:17:40] And so that gets to be a real problem. Well, how do you make all of this work and make it easy for people? One of the ways that, uh, that. They're looking at using is something called the Fido alliances, um, technique. And the idea behind Fido is actually similar to what I do right now. Cause I use one password.com. [00:18:03] 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 it's really quite cool. [00:18:28] Well, Fido is a little different than that, but kind of 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, uh, one time pass key, you know, those six digit keys that change every 30 seconds. [00:18:54] And so now you, you, uh, on your phone, you say, yeah, yeah, 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. [00:19:17] 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 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. [00:19:42] 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. [00:20:08] 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. [00:20:31] 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, I'll keep you up to date on this whole password technology stick around. [00:20:51] There are ways for us to communicate nowadays easy ways, but are, are the easy ways, the best ways, kind of the question here, frankly. And part of this answer has to do with WhatsApp and we'll talk right now. [00:21:07] Many people have asked me about secure messaging. You probably know by now that sending text messages is not secure. [00:21:18] 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 kind of the industry's standard. [00:21:45] 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. [00:22:06] 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. So, you know, avoid that. [00:22:28] 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. You know, private messages, things you say and do online with friends and family are not necessarily things there are for public consumption. [00:22:51] So the answer that I gave was, well, yeah, kind of, you might remember Facebook getting, uh, 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. Well, how are you going to effectively advertise? [00:23:15] 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, so. 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, well, yeah, that's what you've been talking about. [00:23:45] Well, 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 kind of a fun name, the bloom in this case, but he started a company called signal. [00:24:21] 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 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. [00:24:49] 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, 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, you know, the company's begin off. They can run themselves. [00:25:12] He's still on the board of direct. And the guy who's currently the head of signal is also a very privacy kind of 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, very nice piece of software. I like what they've done. [00:25:34] 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, uh, and the let's talk about some of the reasons for the concern. [00:26:06] Basically what we're seeing is a cryptocurrency that Moxi himself helped to put in place now, you know, I guess that's good cuz he understands it. It's supposedly a cryptocurrency that is privacy. Focused. And that's a good thing. Well, what type of crypto is it? That's privacy focused. And how good is it going to be? [00:26:33] You know, 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, and other products. We're seeing that from a lot of these communication systems, cuz they can skim a little off the top legally, right. [00:26:55] Charge you a fee and then make their money that way. But. What happens when you put it into an encrypted messaging app? Well, 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. [00:27:34] Here's our signal account. And go ahead and send us crypto. it's called mobile coin by the way, this particular cryptocurrency. Uh, 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. [00:27:59] 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 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. [00:28:28] This is no longer just a messaging app. You are using it to send money. We wanna track all money transactions. Right. And so what does that mean? Well, 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. [00:28:56] 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. [00:29:24] 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. [00:29:56] Yeah. Yeah. Kind of cool. Greg Peterson here on online, Craig peterson.com and really you are not alone. [00:30:14] 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, uh, just this week from someone who had in fact again, had their operating account emptied. [00:30:31] Ransomware is a real problem, but it, it's interesting to watch it as it's evolved over the years. [00:30:40] 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. [00:31:15] 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 kind of get up to speed on some of the articles I'm talking about during the week that I talk about on the radio. [00:31:43] 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, uh, at the RSA conference, they're saying that law enforcement crackdowns try cryptocurrency regulations. [00:32:11] 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 Albert Cross around our next for a long time. [00:32:36] 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. [00:33:06] It might find interesting, uh, 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, uh, Gdrive or something else on your computer that is being mounted from either another computer or maybe a server. [00:33:31] It will go ahead and do the same. 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, their backups fail. They haven't run. I, 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. [00:34:00] They were dutifully carrying home. Uh, 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. Well, so they they've encrypted your files. They've exfiltrated. In other words, they've taken your files and then they demand a. [00:34:24] So usually it's like this red screen that comes up and says, Hey, uh, you know, all your files are belong to us and you need to contact us. So they have, uh, 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, uh, what's hopefully a decryption. [00:34:50] 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. [00:35:14] 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? Well, that's where ransomware's a service comes in. The whole idea behind Raz is. [00:35:38] 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, you might try and mess with those people to get them to do something they shouldn't do. [00:36:03] 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. [00:36:25] They'll help them recover files, you know, to a certain extent. Right. Does this make sense to you? Yeah, it's kinda crazy. Now I wanna offer you, I 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. [00:36:52] 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. Uh, it's really is explaining the whole thing for you. I'm not holding anything back. [00:37:11] Well, 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. [00:37:40] These RAs guys just shutting. One of them down can shut down thousands of small ransomware people. Isn't that cool works really, 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. [00:38:06] Uh, blow to the whole industry, you know, 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. 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. [00:38:40] But now they're going after them. The feds. And I think that makes a whole lot of sense, right. 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, sometimes soon, too. So. 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. [00:39:14] At television appearance, where I was working with the, um, the, the newsmaker or whatever they call them, right. 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. [00:39:43] So this, this good old fashioned Grif is still working. And what happened in our case is it, it was actually one of the newscasters who got an email, supposedly from someone else saying, Hey, Uh, you know, 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? [00:40:10] And so we messed around with them. It was really kind of fun and said, okay, uh, you know, what denomination, how many do you think we need? Uh, 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. [00:40:30] 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, uh, that they were that newscaster and send emails to this trusted source. [00:41:01] 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 of this is a company that sent $45 million. To a scammer. [00:41:28] 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. Uh, an interesting story. We'll have to tell it to you sometime, but it 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. [00:41:56] Left and center because social engineering works. And frankly, business email compromise is a clear threat to businesses everywhere. I, 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. [00:42:25] And another one that had about $80,000 taken out of 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. [00:42:43] Facebook's about 18 years old coming on 20 Facebook has a lot of data. How much stuff have you given Facebook? You know, did you fall victim for that? Hey, upload your contacts. We'll find your friends. Well, they don't know where your data is.  [00:43:00] 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, you know, there's always a lot of rumors about different companies and particularly when they're big company and the, the news headlines are kind of grabbing your attention. [00:43:34] 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. well, it came from a leaked document. Yeah, exactly. So I, we find out a lot of stuff like that. Right. I used to follow a, a website about companies that were going to go under and they posted internal memos. [00:44:08] 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. [00:44:37] So Facebook, internally they're 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. [00:45:01] 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. [00:45:26] 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. [00:46:04] 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, you know, 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. [00:46:31] 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. Right. 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. [00:46:53] Right? I think I probably even uploaded it back then thinking, well, that'd be nice to see if I got friends here. We can start chatting, et cetera. Well, according to legal experts that were interviewed by motherboard who wrote this article and has a copy of the internal me, uh, 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. [00:47:28] 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, you know, Facebook started how right. Well, you scrape in pictures of young women off of Harvard universities. Main catalog, right. [00:47:52] Contact page, and then asking people, well, what do you think of this rate? This person rate that person and off they go, right. Trying to rate them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All that matters to a woman, at least according to mark Zuckerberg or all that matters about a woman is how she looks. Right. Do I think she's pretty or not ridiculous what he was doing? [00:48:13] 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. [00:48:37] 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, certain you're starting to collect data and you're making more money than God. So what do you do? Well, you don't have to worry about inefficiencies. [00:48:58] I'll tell you that. Right. 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. No, you've got more money than you can possibly shake a stick at. So now you go ahead and send that, uh, money to this group or that group. [00:49:20] And they put together all of the basic information, right. 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. Right. And now that becomes part of the main code for Facebook. [00:49:43] 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, uh, Hey, we. This feature, that feature for advertisers and then in that goes, and then along comes candidate Obama. And, uh, they, one of the groups inside Facebook says, yeah, yeah, yeah, here, here we go. [00:50:07] Here's all of the information we have about everybody and it's free. Don't worry about it. Right. And then when Trump actually bought it and hired a company to try and process some of that information he got in trouble. No, no, no, but, 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. [00:50:34] And according to this internal memo, they still don't know. They don't even know if they can possibly, uh, 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 Facebook makes a lot of. [00:50:59] 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. Okay. And it flows every. [00:51:22] The document red. Right. 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. [00:51:43] This data from kind of reminds me of the no fly list. Right. You don't know you're on it and you can't get yourself off of it. Right. It is kind of 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 monetization strategy. [00:52:10] And is the engine that powers Facebook's growth. interesting, interesting problems. And, 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, well, wait a minute now. [00:52:32] 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. and Twitter also has to comply with all of these regulations that Facebook is kind of freaking out about. [00:53:00] Well, 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, right. [00:53:25] You grow. I, 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. Right. You, 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. [00:53:48] 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. [00:54:04] Thanks for being with me today. I really appreciate it. And I'm honored, frankly, to be in front of this micro. , this is really something, you know, we, we know in wars, there are people that loot and typically the various militaries try and make sure, at least recently that that looting is kept to an absolute minimum. [00:54:27] Certainly the Americans, the British, even the Nazis during world war II, the, the, uh, the socialists they're in. Germany, uh, they, they tried to stop some of the looting that was going on. I, I think that's probably a very good thing, right. Because what you end up with is just all of these locals that are just totally upset with you. [00:54:56] 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 buts, thrown all over the place in apartments and homes. [00:55:25] 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, really something. The SIUs didn't do this, but now Russian. [00:55:49] 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. [00:56:16] 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. [00:56:41] Being shipped back, just like, you know, 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. [00:57:07] They don't only leave anything behind. They found the Russians had taken most of the computers, the projectors and other electronic equipment. It, it, 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. [00:57:27] 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. Well, nowadays there's not a whole lot of use for those. Now what they have been doing, some of these bad guys is, is they take some parts and use them in stolen equipment. [00:57:53] 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. [00:58:16] 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. [00:58:36] 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. [00:59:02] 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, 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. [00:59:26] You steal it. It's not gonna do you much. Good. So one of the things the Russian stole when they were in, uh, it's called, uh, I think you pronounce it. Uh, Mela me pole, uh, 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, uh, a businessman in the area that CNN is reporting on. [00:59:59] 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. [01:00:26] 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, right. Of your property being very, 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. [01:00:52] 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? Well, what they do is they. So you can lease the equipment through leasing company or maybe directly from the manufacturer and now you're off and running. [01:01:20] 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. [01:01:46] Right? 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. Right? You see how this all works. So when the Russian forces stole this equipment, that's valued. Total value here is about $5 million. [01:02:07] 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 you know, there's pros and cons to that. I think there's a lot of cons, but, uh, what are you gonna do? How's that gonna work for you? Well, it. Isn't going to work for you. [01:02:28] 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. Well, 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. [01:02:54] 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. [01:03:20] 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. [01:03:36] Ransomware has been a very long running problem. I remember a client of ours, a car dealership who we had gone in. [01:03:47] 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. [01:04:09] Greens that say pay up is send us this much Bitcoin. And here's our address. Right. All of that sort of stuff. And he called us up and said, what what's going on here? What happened? Well, 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. [01:04:32] 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. Uh, and within a matter of a couple of hours, we actually had him back to where he was and it didn't spread. [01:05:00] So the consequences there, they, 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. Right. 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? [01:05:27] Right? 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. Well, 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. [01:05:54] And if you're interested, I can send you, I I've got something. I wrote up. Be glad to email it back to you. Uh, 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. [01:06:18] Is a kind of a pernicious nasty little thing, particularly nowadays, because it's two, two factor, right. First is they've encrypted your data. You can't get to it. And then the second side of that is okay, well, I can't get to my data and now they're threatening to hold my data ransom or they'll release. So they they'll put it out there. [01:06:42] 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, uh, you can lose your license for your business. You can U lose your ability to go ahead and frankly, uh, make loans and work with financial companies and financial instruments. [01:07:06] It could be a very, 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 we, again, we've got a client that, uh, we picked up afterwards. That, uh, yes, indeed. They lost all of the money in their operating account. [01:07:31] And, uh, then how do you make payroll? How do you do things? Well, 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. [01:07:52] Uh, 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. Uh, 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. Uh, first of all, the largest ransom demand is $50 million. [01:08:20] And that was in 2021 to Acer big computer company. Uh, 37% of businesses were hit by ransomware. In 2021. This is amazing. They're they're expecting by 2031. So in about a decade, ransomware is gonna be costing about $265 billion a year. Now on average, uh, Ransomware costs businesses. 1.8, 5 million to recover from an attack. [01:08:52] 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? Right? If you're a car dealer, you have a license to print money, right? You you're selling car model or cars from manufacturer X. And now you have the right to do that and they can remove that. [01:09:15] Right? 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. [01:09:40] Last. it's 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 it's a little, little better than 50%, but 65% of paying victims recovered their data. [01:10:11] 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? [01:10:34] For a, 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, like, uh, ours. It it's the same bandwidth up as it is down. But it can take again, days or weeks to try and recover your machine. [01:10:57] So it's very, 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. [01:11:31] 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. [01:11:58] Uh, 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 so, 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. [01:12:24] 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. [01:12:42] You know, you and I have talked about passwords before the way to generate them and how important they are. And we 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. [01:12:59] I remember, I think the only system I've ever really used that did not require passwords was the IBM 360. [01:13:09] Yeah, 360, you know, 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. [01:13:38] You had a simple password. And I remember one of our instructors, his name was Robert, Andrew Lang. And, uh, his password was always some sort of a combination of RA Lang. So it was always easy to guess what his, what his password was. Today, it has gotten a lot worse today. We have devices with us all of the time. [01:14:01] 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. [01:14:31] 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, 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 kind of an interesting thing, right? [01:14:59] Just looking at it because we're, we're so used to having this password only authentic. And of course the, 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. [01:15:21] Upper lowercase a little bit. In those words, those are the best passwords, you know, 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. [01:15:43] 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, um, software licenses and a few other things in there. [01:16:11] 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, I really do like that. Uh, 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, lost my faith in it. [01:16:33] 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. [01:16:56] 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? Well, basically you need to have a smartphone. [01:17:16] This is, I'm just gonna go with the most standard

Solar Cells Are Polluting Our Groundwater The Resurrection of Coal Plans By MIT Latest Cyberattacks Will Elon Musk Beat Twitter? We all want a green world. I can't think of anybody that doesn't want one, but there are people with ulterior motives. That's a different thing, but California has really caused itself a whole lot of non green. Rooftop solar, right? That's gonna be the solution to all of our problems. [Automated transcript follows.] Not the fact that the electric cars, people buy use three times as much electricity as our air conditioners yet. Not the fact that we have rolling blackouts because we don't have enough. Power cuz we've shut down plants before we were actually ready to replace that power. Not that Texas is right now having blackouts as is California having blackouts because of this stupidity. [00:00:52] Of some of these regulators. It's absolutely crazy. You know, we are the greenest country in the world. All of our plants, our coal plants are cleaner than anybody else's anywhere in the world. And California's. Really got itself into a big problem here, because again of shortsightedness, I just don't get it. [00:01:16] You know, maybe it is follow the money, maybe, you know, Nancy Pelosi's husband making millions of dollars and, and, uh, using inside information is, is absolutely true. And, uh, maybe it. To do with that, right? It's not really green it's to enrich the politicians. How can you go to Washington DC on the salary? [00:01:37] Congress has as expensive as it is in Washington, DC and come out a multimillionaire. Uh, there's only one way that can happen. Right. I, I remember the, the trade that Hillary Clinton made, what was it? Beef or something. Right. And she made like $80,000. Well, you know, that sort of tip is a sort of thing. [00:01:58] That'll put Martha Stewart in jail, but not our politicians. It's absolutely crazy. I don't get it. So California, they have been a pioneer in push. For rooftop, solar panels. Now I get it. They're cool. I get it. It's really nice to have the grid buy electricity back from you when there is plenty of sun and when the grid needs it, but the grids aren't really set up for this sort of stuff. [00:02:31] But I, I know a few listeners that really love their solar panels. There's one guy. Who has put a whole bunch of panels up solar panels in a field, and he has some cattle and horses and stuff. And so they, they live with these solar panels in the field and he bought himself a couple of Nissan leaves. [00:02:52] These are these electric cars from Nissan. You might remember them. They've been around for a while and he's just tickled pink that yeah. He had to buy the solar panels. Yeah. He had to install of them. Yeah. He has to keep the snow off of them. Yeah. He has to clean the dust off of them. Yeah. He has to clean, uh, all of the bird stuff off of them, but it's. [00:03:14] Right. Yeah. Okay. So he gets to drive around and he says, you know, I don't usually go much further than the grocery store or maybe a quick under tractor supply. And it, it, it doesn't cost him anything incrementally. So California decided it was going to go green, green, green, green. Right. And what's one of the best ways to do that. [00:03:36] Well, we need more electricity. Let's go for rooftop. Solar in. California decided it would go ahead and subsidize these wonderful solar panels on people's roofs all over the place. Not, not like one big central farm, uh, out in the Mohave desert, that's collecting all of the solar. It can possibly collect and then turn it into electricity that can feed into the grid. [00:04:04] No, it's all decentralizes on all of these rooftops now. We're talking about 20 years later, there are 1.3 million rooftops estimated to have solar cells on them out there in California. And the real bill is coming due. It isn't cleaning the, you know, the bird increment off. Yeah. The real bill in California for the rooftop solar isn't getting the snow off of them. [00:04:32] Keeping them clean. No, it has to. With completely non-green stuff here. 90% of all of these solar cells that were put onto roofs in California that have been taken down 90% of them have ended up in landfills. Yeah, absolutely. Now the lifetime expectant, uh, lifetime of these solar panels is, uh, 25, maybe 30. [00:05:05] As long as they're not damaged, or if you really wanna keep up with the technology because solar panels are increasing in efficiency, as time goes on, might be a lot less, right. Might be like a 10 to 15 years cycle. If you have that much money out there. But many of these are now winding up in landfills. [00:05:25] And the real concern is that they could contam. Groundwater. I've talked about this before. If these solar panels crack, what could happen while they have heavy toxic metals in them such as lead, we know how bad lead is, right. Can't have lead in your house anymore. A selenium cadmium. Right? All things you don't want to have mercury, mercury vapor, you don't want to go anywhere near mercury vapor. [00:05:54] Uh, except for the fact that the federal government forced us to put them into our homes in the form of purely Q light bulbs. Remember those things? Yeah. Highly toxic breaking. One of those light bulbs, a fluorescent light makes your home a toxic waste site. According to EPA regulations. So I'm sure if you ever had a, a fluorescent light bulb break and that includes the bigger ones, right. [00:06:21] You might have in the roof, uh, up on the, the top of your office, uh, you know, wherever it might be, you, you, you must have, um, went out and you, you bought, maybe you even had standing by for you some really wonderful. Plastic that you could put up, you know, tape up so that you can isolate the room that has the toxic waste in it, from breaking that light bulb that the federal government made you buy, because you couldn't buy regular incandescent bulbs that you wanted anymore. [00:06:52] And, uh, they encouraged you and they gave you discounts on it and they subsidize. Yeah. Yeah. Those bulbs. And then, uh, of course you went in with a full respirator and a full suit on that, uh, you know, Tyvec and you taped it up, make sure that tape up around the gloves onto the Tyvec suit so that none of that mercury gets. [00:07:12] Onto your skin. And, and then you obviously used a specialized vacuum cleaner for toxic hazardous waste and, and vacuumed up like the carpet or the floor, maybe it got onto your couch. Right? You, you did all of that. And then you put it all into a sealed, uh, container of some sort, typically like a glass bottle or something. [00:07:36] So it's not gonna be able to. Out right. You, you must have done all of that because I I'm sure everyone knew what was going on with those fluorescent bulbs, those little curly Q bulbs. Right. Does that make sense to you? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So now, California. has 1.3 million rooftops with rooftops, solar power on them. [00:08:04] Now it isn't like it's out in, as I mentioned a great place, but it out in the Mojave desert, right. They got more sun than they need out there. And so it's all one place and they can take those panels and they can recycle them. No, no, because it's illegal to recycle them in California. Because of the heavy metals, the toxic metals. [00:08:26] So instead of that, people are just dumping them in their trash and taking them to landfills, et cetera, et C. We're talking about truckloads of waste, some of this stuff badly contaminated, and it really shows how short sight, uh, environmental policy can create incredible problems that were easily foresee right though, the industry's supposed to be green, but in reality, According to Sam Vanderhoff, who is a solar industry expert, chief executive recycled PV solar. [00:09:01] He says the reality about this industry. is not that it's green, but in reality, it's all about the money. Wait a minute. Isn't no, there's not what I just said earlier. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So California came early with solar power. They granted $3.3 billion in subsidies for installing solar panels on rooftops. [00:09:26] And yet, you know, barreling ahead with this renewable energy program, they are now at a point where they have rolling blackouts. They have problems with electricity generation. They have problems with the rooftop, solar, and as it is aged, getting rid of it. Have you seen those pictures of Hawaii with those windmill farm? [00:09:50] that are just sitting there rusting away. Cuz the windmills aren't turning you'd think Hawaii, right? A lot of wind isn't that a great way to do it, but it takes a lot of space kills some birds and uh, it takes a lot of maintenance. They're very expensive to maintain. So they just let some of these, uh, wind farms just totally rested away. [00:10:12] We need to elect people, send them to Washington, DC that don't touch things like this with a 5,000 foot pole. The, the reason is that you look at a great investor, a great business investor. That they make money, right? Oh, wouldn't it be great to be mark Cuban or one of the sharks, right? That are making money, investing money. [00:10:39] Well, yeah, it, it certainly would be, uh, they at best, at best make money out of one out of 10 investments, federal government, it bats pretty close to zero. Zero, right. Oh, oh no, that's not true. Right. Uh, we talked about the millions of dollars that Congress people make. Yeah. Yeah. So they don't bat zero, the Congress and, uh, this political crack class bats, a thousand in their own pocket. [00:11:13] Let's stop this stuff from Washington DC. It's insanity. Thank goodness California did this so we can see how insane these solar rooftop policies are. At least for the near future. [00:11:27] Well, we've talked about solar cells. We've talked about the new nuclear, which is incredible stuff. Well, there is a new MIT spinout that's tapping into a million year energy supply right here. [00:11:44] Government has been terrible about picking winners. It, it kind of reminds me of a quote from Henry Ford where you said, if I had asked people what they wanted, they would've said faster horses, and that's kind of the mentality of government, whatever they're investing in, or their friends, their buddies, their, their voters, their donors are investing in. [00:12:07] That's what they'll push. So we haven't had a fair shake of some of these technologies, really, you know, the hydrogen who knows what else we could be powering our cars with that hasn't come forward because government's been putting just literally trillions of dollars of support into electric cars. Okay. [00:12:29] And electric cars. Great. Don't get me wrong. They're the cool technology. I wouldn't mind owning one of them. The government should not be the one who decides the winners and losers. That's the communist way. That's central planning. Central planning does not work. I, I I'm really on a bit of a rampage today. [00:12:52] It's it? This is just crazy, but this, this is a reason right now. What I'm gonna talk about, why central planning has failed us yet again. Right. Just because it's a big problem. Doesn't mean it's a federal government problem. And the big problem is okay. All of us want green stuff, right? Not this green movement. [00:13:17] That's all about again, central planning, government control, not that stuff, but we want. Clean environment. We want good, healthy food. We want all of this stuff. That's going to make us healthy. The world healthy, the earth, healthy feed the population of the world. Everything everybody does. I don't get it. I don't know why they, well, anyways, we won't get into that. [00:13:44] Right. Here's this here's an example. Government has been moving us directly towards solar panels, which we've talked about and, and how they really can and do hurt the environment very, very badly. We talked about the disposal of them. We've talked before about the manufacturing of solar panels and how it is horrific when it comes to the health of our. [00:14:12] How about this one, this M I T group. These are, it's really kind of cool here. Qua energy is this company that they founded and it is a spin out from MIT. And what they're looking to do is use the power potential that's beneath our feet in order to create a literally a carbon free pollution, free energy source. [00:14:39] Absolutely amazing. Now we've talked about this for a long time. You, you look at some of these countries in the world that have a lot of volcanic activity. I'm particularly thinking about Iceland right now and how they are taking all of this geothermal thermal potential and turning it into electric. [00:15:02] Which is fantastic. Right? And when you look at the stability of geothermal, it is dead on it is there, it is always there. If you're looking at the stability of geothermal, for instance, doesn't think of a volcano. How often do the volcanoes move? It it's pretty solid, pretty long term. Certainly there's tectonic activity and the plates move, but it's at, at just an incredibly slow rate. [00:15:32] You're talking about inches a year. Well, they've looked at a couple of things. One is this abandoned coal power plant in upstate new. And as overall people are looking at it saying, it's just, it's worth nothing. Right? It's a Relic from ages gone by heaven. Forbid we burn coal and I, I would rather not burn coal personally, but get down and think about this. [00:15:57] Now you've got a cold power plant. What is planned? What does that have in it? That might be useful. It still has transmission lines that run to the grid, the power grid, it's a central producer of electricity, which is exactly how our power grid is set up. We're not set up for having every home or, you know, half of them or whatever it is, generating electricity with solar power or having windmills here and there we're set up for having centralized. [00:16:32] Power generation Nicola, Tesla aside, right? That's how we're set up. So this old cow coal power plant has transmission lines. It still has a power turbine. How does a coal plant work? How does a nuclear plant work? It generates heat and that heat creates steam. And that steam is used to drive a tur. Much like what happens at a hydroelectric dam, the water drives a turbine, and then that turbine, ultimately of course drives a massive alternator of some sort, some sort of a, a generator, if you will. [00:17:10] And that's hooked up to our power lines. Now, what's really interesting here. Is their technology. You might have heard about this place. I remember reading about this and all kinds of interesting stories, a about this hole that was drilled in, in Russia. I think it was, and they went down. What was it like 5,000 feet or something? [00:17:37] Um, Uh, and they abandoned it. Right? Cause they were trying to do the whole thing, but here's the interesting part of what the MIT guys are saying that the crust anywhere in the world about it kind of varies a little bit, but basically about, uh, 10 to 20 kilometers deep has the enough geothermal energy. [00:18:09] to drive something like this power plant, this old coal power plant in upstate New York. But the problem is how do you drill that deep? The Russians, a Soviet union had a hard time doing it and they didn't, they didn't reach their ultimate goal, uh, and interesting backs stories on all of that, that we don't have time for today. [00:18:30] what these guys are doing is they have created an approach that vaporizes the rock. So they're not drilling. And if you've ever seen drilling operations, watched it on the discovery channel or something, which I have, it's really cool. You, you realize that when they start hitting hard rock granite bedrock, they stop. [00:18:55] Cuz it becomes so slow. So they use the diamond. Tip drill heads and, and they drill and it's slow, but what's happening right now is they're using gyro trons to heat the material it's been done for years in nuclear fusion experiments, but they're taking that basic technology and using it for new geothermal drilling technique. [00:19:23] That is cool. So these gyal trons, haven't been well known in the general science community fusion researchers know about it, but what they're saying is this is going to give them the ability to drill. These massive holes, you know, depth wise. And right now 400 feet is kind of as far as we can usually drill, but this is gonna let them go kilometers into the earth. [00:19:52] They're gonna be able to tap into that, the energy here, basically, you're talking about what you get out of a volcano, right? That sort of energy, that heat bring it up and then boil the water and run it through that coal power. At least the infrastructure that's in there, the generators and everything else. [00:20:13] So very, very cool. And this is something that's being done right now. They expect within a few years to have an actual functional demonstration of this blasting its way through melt. Rock and some of the hardest rock on the surface of the earth. Hey, you should have received my insider show notes Tuesday morning. [00:20:38] If you didn't, you can get 'em for free. Just go to Craig peterson.com. And if you have any questions, just email me, me, Craig peterson.com. [00:20:53] Do you remember this moment from the fifth element? Old tricks are the best tricks? Eh, yeah. Well, we're talking about attackers right now, cybersecurity and the old tricks are the best tricks. No doubt about that. They're back to the old ways. Yep. Oh, well, [00:21:10] There are a lot of security firms out there. It's just absolutely amazing to me. [00:21:16] I get ads all of the time, as you can imagine, from dozens and dozens of startups and big guys, and I'm looking at a page right now and there was what, six different ads on here for cybersecurity stuff. This is a site called dark reading. It's one. Pay some fairly close attention to, because they are talking about cybersecurity stuff. [00:21:40] So I guess that makes sense. But attackers are doing things every day right now. What are they doing? That's what Robert Lamos is talking about. And he's looking at a report that was produced by yet another security firm called Tetra defense and they analyzed data from the first quarter 2020. Now, when you think about cybersecurity and the problems we have, what do you think about, what do you think of? [00:22:12] Is it ransomware, fishing, maybe? What, what do you think it is? Well, what this Tetra defense found is that 54% more costs. From compromises caused by user actions comes from drum roll. Pete, please. I, I don't know if I said that very, very well. Let me just do that one more time. Okay. Take two. uh, compromises cost victims 54% more. [00:22:47] When we're talking about unpatched servers. And vulnerable remote access systems like Microsoft RDP, remote desktop, 54% more. That is huge, absolutely huge. Who would've thought of that by the way, these unpatched vulnerabilities from the first quarter and exposing risky services, such as remote desktop protocol account for 82%. [00:23:17] Of successful attacks while social engineering employees. And that includes things like fishing accounted for just 18%. Of successful compromises that my friends is a very, very big deal. And as I said, at the very beginning, it is, uh, no trick that they've been up to for a long time. So what I'm trying to get at here, I know I'm kinda wandering a little about a little here mentally, but I'm trying to get at the point that we. [00:23:50] To patch our systems and we have to apply patches ASAP. We have to make sure those patches are in place because it's, it's an absolutely horrible situation out there. I know a lot of companies that use Microsoft's remote desk. Top. And it has been just a horrific battleground when it comes to hackers because of all of the bugs that have been found in there and major vulnerabilities, uh, the log four shell bug. [00:24:21] This is the one that's tying into Java has been reported on a whole lot, but it is used in about 22% of breaches. So that's not bad for one vulnerability. And it's a crazy vulnerability. This is a problem with languages like Java, where you have people writing code that don't realize what's happening in all of these libraries are pulling in, you know, in Java you just say, okay, uh, write this out to a file for me. [00:24:52] And don't realize that the code that's actually doing that is parsing what you send it, and it might have a command in it that you. To it and it'll execute the command and that's the basics of that particular problem. Okay. So we're expecting all of these tactics to continue. There are a finite amount today of vulnerable exchange servers, which is another problem that the attackers have been using to really cause a whole lot of problems for us. [00:25:24] There will be new problems in the future. There's always new software introduced and the new software always has more problems. And there are a lot of people in the cybersecurity business that say, we should just assume that systems are compromised. So instead of trying to protect them as much, let's look for the compromises, which is an interesting way of doing things. [00:25:46] Frankly. So cloud misconfiguration, that's another big one that's out there. And I'm seeing that all of the time right now, we're working with a client. That's using a lot of Microsoft Azure stuff and Microsoft Azure, Amazon. But in fact, Amazon S three buckets, which are a way to store files up in the cloud inside. [00:26:10] Have really been hit hard because of misconfiguration. You see, when it gets very difficult to configure something, people tend to take shortcuts, don't think it through. And in this case they have lost a whole lot, but. It's hard to estimate the damages, but looking at it, we're talking about major cybersecurity in incidents, accounting for about two to 10% of annual revenue cost wise. [00:26:40] So a company that has maybe a hundred million in annual revenue could be looking at as much as 10% of that. In other words, 10 million as a financial impact of a cybersecurity incident. Now it's probably not gonna cost them 10 million to secure everything, but it might cost them a million a year and they just don't do it. [00:27:06] It's just, they don't bother doing it. Look at the huge breaches that we've had from some of these, uh, credit reporting agencies. If you will, that keep all this personal information and data on. that have lost data for 200 million Americans. Right. Really? They cared and yet they, they just rake in money. [00:27:28] They just print money. It's it's absolutely crazy. By the way, there was another report that was released a little earlier this year from crowd strike and it has a report that's based on incident data. And the one they released earlier this year was from 2021. And it's showing the breaches related to ransomware attacks had grown by 82% and the data showed that mal. [00:27:58] Had only been used in 38% of successful intrusions and 45% of attackers were manually conducting the attacks. So if you thought early on, when we started talking here that ransomware was maybe the biggest problem, you're not entirely wrong because ransomware is the biggest growing problem that we're seeing out there right now. [00:28:22] So it's absolutely crazy. The average time to move from an initial compromise. Remember, they're doing these things automated up front to try and find vulnerable systems or to try and get the ransomware out into your hands. That might be through a fishing attack, which by the way, fishing attacks increased 29%, that cent, that, that, um, so from the time they get that initial compromise to the time they're attacking other systems on the network. [00:28:55] It's still about one and a half hours, according to the data that came outta CrowdStrike. Now that is concerning too, because that means you basically have an hour and a half after you've been compromised to detect it and do something about it. And that's why we use automated systems with our clients that really keep a close tab on everything. [00:29:18] Look for various types of compromises, et cetera, et cetera. And I think it's, uh, an important thing to do because if you can't tell if you've been compromised, you just can't defend yourself. Hey, if you sign up for my newsletter, I will send you my most popular. Special reports that includes password special reports, how to use password managers, what the best ones are absolutely free. [00:29:44] Right. I got a couple of others that I'll send you and you will get my weekly show notes that come out Tuesday mornings most weeks. And that will allow you to keep up to date on all of this. Be a little bit ahead, in fact of the radio show, because I'm talking about stuff that was in my insider show notes on Tuesday. [00:30:03] So you get it in. Of everybody else. Just go to Craig peterson.com, sign up right there and you will be well on your way. Hey, stick around, cuz we'll be right back. Any questions me@craigpeterson.com. [00:30:21] We've got a couple of things to talk about right now. We've got Elon. Mokis gotta be worried about this lawsuit. That's coming up and we'll tell you about that. And then also TikTok is in the news here. We've got two different problems with TikTok that talk about today. [00:30:42] Hi, you are not alone. At least when it comes to your security and privacy. Hi, I'm Craig Peter son, and you are listening to news radio, w G a N a M five 60 and FM 98.5. I'd like to invite you to join me Wednesday mornings at 7 34 with Mr. Matt, we'll keep you out to. You know, of course about this whole thing. [00:31:11] Elon Musk said he wanted to buy Twitter for a measly. What was it? 44. Billion dollars, right. Real money. And that's a, you know, a problem, especially when Twitter is alleged to be not worth as much as Twitter appears to be. You see, Twitter has had to file with the securities and exchange commission reports about. [00:31:39] Their income, obviously writing expenses and management, and they have forward looking statements about what they're gonna be doing in the future. And all of that goes into a pot and kind of gets stirred up. And once it's all stirred up the investors, look at it and say, yeah, okay. I, I wanna invest in Twitter. [00:31:59] One of the big variables that goes into the pot has to do with advertising revenue, which is based on eyeballs, how many eyeballs can Twitter attract? And of course that means Twitter wants to keep as many eyeballs as possible on this site at once. Right. And for the longest time possible. So that all makes some sense, but Twitter's been reporting in its public reports that less than 5% of the users slash postings there on Twitter, but less than 5% of the users are actually bots. [00:32:39] These bots are used by. Bad guys, evil companies. And, uh, there are a lot of those out there that are trying to promote themselves. Look at how great we are. Yes. Yes. Look at wow. We're trending on Twitter. You should buy our stuff. And in reality, what they're doing is they are paying people who have bought to post thousands of tweets from different accounts using the company's hashtag it, it makes me ill, frankly, to think about this stuff, but that's what they do. [00:33:17] So. If Twitter has a lot of these bots that are fake and are just trying to drive up the investors' price for some random product, or maybe it's what happened during the last few election cycles where Russia, China were Medling and getting people to vote for Trump against Trump, for Hillary against Hillary Biden, etcetera. [00:33:46] Is it worth as much as investors thought. So I've been worried about what's gonna happen here. Elon Musk. He he's got to be worried if he actually ends up buying it, what's gonna happen. Is the securities and exchange commission going to do an investigation? Are they already doing one? Frankly? Probably are. [00:34:08] And is he going to be liable for it? So Twitter's value has dropped. Now, it, it obviously went up when Musk made that, uh, that generous $44 billion purchase offer, but it has gone down since then. And since there are so many analysts saying, well, there's at least 10% bots, others saying it's 40%, it's 60%. [00:34:34] And, and that kind of is based on the traffic, right? The amount of traffic, the bots are generating versus the number of accounts that are bought accounts. What, what happens? What should they do? How should they do it? What, how should they account for it? And if, if it's that high and there's questions about how high it is, then Twitter stock value is going to go down. [00:34:55] So Musk pulled out of this whole thing and yeah, I can see why he did. However Delaware is where a lot of these public companies ha are incorporated. That's where their, you know, corporate headquarters are, if you will. That's where they get their authority to operate as a company. And the reason a lot of them do that in Delaware is Delaware has laws and taxes that are very favorable to publicly traded companies. [00:35:29] And that says something right there too. Doesn't it? Well, Delaware has this thing called the court of Chancery and the judge that's handling Twitter's lawsuit against Musk. Her name is Kathleen McCormick. She is the chief judge in this case is called the court's chance. Has what Reuters called a no nonsense reputation, as well as the distinction of being one of the few jus who has ever ordered a reluctant buyer to close a us corporate. [00:36:06] Merger. And specifically she ordered last year, an affiliate of a private equity firm to close its $550 million purchase of a holding company that makes cake decorating products. But because of the lockdown, the value of that cake decorating company drop. Pretty dramatically cuz people just weren't going out and buying this stuff to make cakes. [00:36:31] They weren't celebrating, they weren't having parties. They didn't have cake cakes. Right. So she forced them to buy. This other company at the original price, even though the value of the company that holding company had dropped. So this is going to be really rather interesting. If you look at her ruling. [00:36:55] She said the buyers lost their appetite for the deal shortly after signing it as government entities issued, stay at home orders around the country and the weekly sales declined dramatically rather than use reasonable efforts to work around a definitive credit agreement. The buyers called their litigation council and began evaluating ways to get out of the. [00:37:20] Without input from the management, they prepared a draconian reforecast of the projected sales based on uninformed and largely unexplained assumptions that were inconsistent with real time sales data. That's where Elon Musk may have an out. if he's played his card right now, what really kind of confused me about all of this is that they, the guys at Twitter have a pretty solid case because they were able to negotiate as part of this potential purchase or merger, whatever you might wanna call it really it's a purchase. [00:38:01] They have a pretty solid case cuz they got some amazing language into this agreement. I, I just can't believe that Elon Musk and his attorneys allowed it to go in there. Now these cases here in the Delaware court of Chancery are decided by the presiding judge and not a jury. Although a judge can get an advers, uh, advisory, excuse me, jury, to help consult, but the judge's decision can be appealed to the state Supreme court. [00:38:33] And then the decision is final and Twitter proposed a four day trial with a September 19th start. Date and the court, I believe said, we're gonna push it off to October. I'll try and keep an eye on this case, cuz I think it's fascinating to see what happens here as we go forward to our friend, Elon Musk now. [00:38:57] TikTok, Ugh, man, if you didn't get my newsletter this week, which you should have had my insider show notes on Tuesday morning and follow through and read these two articles on TikTok, you really missed something, but I'll, I'll give you a quick summary here. Right now. We spoke. About TikTok and what they have done here with this blackout challenge. [00:39:21] Now it's not TikTok. They, they're not the ones promoting the challenge, but they are making money off of it and they're promoting their site. It's just yet another challenge that to has. well, one of the things that's been happening in Ukraine with this Russian invasion is people have been making TikTok videos and they have been posting them and they include all kinds of stuff. [00:39:47] Uh, I'm sure there's dead soldiers in there. Russian tanks that have been completely blown apart. What a bad design, by the way, and many other things, and TikTok says, Hey, wait, wait a minute. We, we, we, okay. Well, we, we can't keep these, even though they have been asked to preserve the Ukraine content for warm war crime investigations. [00:40:13] What has come out recently, you remember orange man, bad said that, uh, TikTok needed to be shut down. They, they wanted it out. He wanted it out of the, and not just him, but other people, uh, out of the app stores, because it's being used by Chinese intelligence and they're doing all kinds of stuff. Yeah. Yeah. [00:40:34] Well, it turns out that our friends at TikTok have been in fact sending. All of the stuff that you are filming to China now, TikTok is illegal to use in China. So they're not sending it to China to show the Chinese because China is smart enough to not allow people to use TikTok. They're using it for ESP espionage TikTok, even just a few weeks ago, changed its usage. [00:41:06] Uh, document here, right? Terms of use saying, uh, oh, we we're going to use. The video that you submit, uh, we're gonna collect biometric information. We're gonna collect information about things and people in the foreground things and people in the background. In other words, they're now putting together what you might call a social matrix. [00:41:29] So they know who your friends are or what you're doing. They know about you. They're doing facial recognition of you. It goes on and on and on very, very bad, but because it's so popular with these young Ukrainians and even Russian troops who are posting footage of the war, they've got some stuff that would be great for the war crime investigators. [00:41:54] And re remember when president Trump said, oh no, we gotta cut out TikTok. And, and the left, his opposition was saying, no, no, you know, TikTok is great. It's wonderful. Oh. And TikTok said, yeah, we have, uh, us based servers, nothing to worry about here. I don't know what Trump is talking about. The guy an idiot. [00:42:13] Uh, well, as I just mentioned, we found out absolutely that yeah, they're saving it. They're sending it to China. And remember now, The Chinese communist party is a friend of Russia's. They're buying oil for very cheap prices. They're providing Russia with a number of different things. They're being a little cautious about it, but they will not allow war crime investigators to look at TikTok videos that have to do with the war in Ukraine. [00:42:48] Absolutely amazing. Absolutely amazing. Lot of data pulled from your device sent back to China biometrics, face prints, voice prints, keys, stroke patterns, rhythms, search, and browsing history, location information. Do not let your kids go to TikTok. And this week I got an email from a listener saying that one of her close friends. [00:43:14] Child died because of the blackout challenge. If that's not enough. [00:43:20] Facebook's about 18 years old coming on 20 Facebook has a lot of data. How much stuff have you given Facebook? You know, did you fall victim for that? Hey, upload your contacts. We'll find your friends. Well, they don't know where your data is. [00:43:36] This whole thing with Facebook has kind of exploded here lately. [00:43:42] 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, you know, there's always a lot of rumors about different companies and particularly when they're big company and the, the news headlines are kind of grabbing your attention. [00:44:16] 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? well, it came from a leaked document. Yeah, exactly. So I, we find out a lot of stuff like that. Right. I used to follow a, a website about companies that were going to go under and they posted internal memos. [00:44:49] 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. [00:45:19] 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. [00:45:42] 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. [00:46:07] 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. [00:46:45] 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, you know, 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. [00:47:13] 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. Right. 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. [00:47:34] Right? I think I probably even uploaded it back then thinking, well, that'd be nice to see if I got friends here. We can start chatting, et cetera. Well, according to legal experts that were interviewed by motherboard who wrote this article and has a copy of the internal me, uh, 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. [00:48:09] 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, you know, Facebook started how right. Well, you scrape in pictures of young women off of Harvard universities. Main catalog, right. [00:48:34] Contact page, and then asking people, well, what do you think of this rate? This person rate that person and off they go, right. Trying to rate them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All that matters to a woman, at least according to mark Zuckerberg or all that matters about a woman is how she looks. Right. Do I think she's pretty or not ridiculous what he was doing? [00:48:54] 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. [00:49:19] 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? Well, you don't have to worry about inefficiencies. [00:49:40] I'll tell you that. Right. 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, uh, money to this group or that group. [00:50:02] And they put together all of the basic information, right. 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. Right. And now that becomes part of the main code for Facebook. [00:50:24] 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, uh, Hey, we. This feature, that feature for advertisers and then in that goes, and then along comes candidate Obama. And, uh, they, one of the groups inside Facebook says, yeah, yeah, yeah, here, here we go. [00:50:49] Here's all of the information we have about everybody and it's free. Don't worry about it. Right. And then when Trump actually bought it and hired a company to try and process some of that information he got in trouble. No, no, no, but, 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. [00:51:15] And according to this internal memo, they still don't know. They don't even know if they can possibly, uh, 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. [00:51:38] 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. [00:52:00] Okay. And it flows every. The document red. Right. 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. [00:52:24] This data from kind of reminds me of the no fly list. Right. You don't know you're on it and you can't get yourself off of it. Right. It is kind of 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 monetization strategy. [00:52:51] And is the engine that powers Facebook's growth. interesting, interesting problems. And, 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, well, wait a minute now. [00:53:13] 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 kind of freaking out about. [00:53:42] Well, 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, right. [00:54:06] You grow. I, 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. Right. You, 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. [00:54:29] 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. [00:54:49] 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. [00:55:06] Thanks for being with me today. I really appreciate it. And I'm honored, frankly, to be in front of this microphone. , this is really something, you know, we, we know in wars, there are people that loot and typically the various militaries try and make sure, at least recently that that looting is kept to an absolute minimum. [00:55:29] Certainly the Americans, the British, even the Nazis during world war II, the, the, uh, the socialists they're in. Germany, uh, they, they tried to stop some of the looting that was going on. I, I think that's probably a very good thing, right. Because what you end up with is just all of these locals that are just totally upset with you. [00:55:57] 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. [00:56:26] 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, really something. Uh, it, the Soviets didn't do this, but now Russian. [00:56:50] 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. [00:57:18] 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. [00:57:42] Being shipped back, just like, you know, 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. [00:58:08] They don't only leave anything behind. They found the Russians had taken most of the computers, the projectors and other electronic equipment. It, it, 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. [00:58:28] 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. Well, nowadays there's not a whole lot of use for those. Now what they have been doing, some of these bad guys is, is they take some parts and use them in stolen equipment. [00:58:55] 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. [00:59:17] 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. [00:59:37] 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. [01:00:03] 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, 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. [01:00:28] You steal it. It's not gonna do you much. Good. So one of the things the Russian stole when they were in, uh, it's called, uh, I think you pronounce it. Uh, Mela me pole, uh, 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, uh, a businessman in the area that CNN is reporting on. [01:01:01] 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. [01:01:27] 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, right. Of your property being very, 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. [01:01:54] 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? Well, 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. [01:02:22] 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. [01:02:47] Right? 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. Right? You see how this all works. So when the Russian forces stole this equipment, that's valued. Total value here is about $5 million. [01:03:08] 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 you know, there's pros and cons to that. I think there's a lot of cons, but, uh, what are you gonna do? How's that gonna work for you? Well, it. Isn't going to work for you. [01:03:29] 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. Well, 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. [01:03:56] 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. [01:04:21] 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. [01:04:37] Ransomware has been a very long running problem. I remember a client of ours, a car dealership who we had gone in. [01:04:48] 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. [01:05:10] Greens that say pay up is send us this much Bitcoin. And here's our address. Right. All of that sort of stuff. And he called us up and said, what what's going on here? What happened? Well, 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. [01:05:33] 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. Uh, and within a matter of a couple of hours, we actually had him back to where he was and it didn't spread. [01:06:01] So the consequences there, they, 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. Right. 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? [01:06:28] Right? 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. Well, 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. [01:06:55] And if you're interested, I can send you, I I've got something. I wrote up. Be glad to email it back to you. Uh, 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. [01:07:19] Is a kind of a pernicious nasty little thing, particularly nowadays, because it's two, two factor, right. First is they've encrypted your data. You can't get to it. And then the second side of that is okay, well, I can't get to my data and now they're threatening to hold my data ransom or they'll release. So they they'll put it out there. [01:07:43] 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, uh, you can lose your license for your business. You can U lose your ability to go ahead and frankly, uh, make loans and work with financial companies and financial instruments. [01:08:08] It could be a very, 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, uh, we picked up afterwards. That, uh, yes, indeed. They lost all of the money in their operating account. [01:08:32] And, uh, then how do you make payroll? How do you do things? Well, 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. [01:08:53] Uh, 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. Uh, 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. Uh, first of all, the largest ransom demand is $50 million. [01:09:21] 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 they're expecting by 2031. So in about a decade, ransomware is gonna be costing about $265 billion a year. Now on average, uh, Ransomware costs businesses. 1.8, 5 million to recover from an attack. [01:09:53] 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? Right? If you're a car dealer, you have a to print money, right? You you're selling car model or cars from manufacturer X. And now you have the right to do that and they can remove that. [01:10:16] Right? 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. [01:10:41] Last. it's 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 it's a little, little better than 50%, but 65% of pain victims recovered their data. [01:11:12] 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? [01:11:35] For a, 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, like, uh, ours. It it's the same bandwidth up as it is down. But it can take again, days or weeks to try and recover your machine. [01:11:58] So it's very, 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. [01:12:32] 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. [01:12:59] Uh, 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 so, 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. [01:13:26] 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. [01:13:44] You know, you and I have talked about passwords before the way to generate them and how important they are. And we 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. [01:14:00] Passwords are kind of an, a necessary evil, at least they have been forever. I, I remember, I think the only system I've ever really used that did not require passwords was the IBM 360. [01:14:17] Yeah, 360, you know, 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. [01:14:47] You had a simple password. And I remember one of our instructors, his name was Robert, Andrew Lang. And, uh, his password was always some sort of a combination of RA Lang. So it was always easy to guess what his, what his password was. Today, it has gotten a lot worse today. We have devices with us all of the time. [01:15:09] 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. [01:15:39] 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, 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 kind of an interesting thing, right? [01:16:07] Just looking at it because we're, we're so used to having this password only authentic. And of course the, 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. [01:16:29] Upper lowercase a little bit. In those words, those are the best passwords, you know, 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. [01:16:52] 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, um, software licenses and a few other things in there. [01:17:19] 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, I really do like that. Uh, 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, lost my faith in it. [01:17:41] 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. [01:18:05] And you can bet everybody else is going to follow along because there's hundreds of other companies that have de

Do You Know Anyone Who Uses TikTok? Kids Are Dying Because of It! TikTok has been in the news for a lot of reasons. It is now confirmed. It is used for Chinese spy operations, but the big problem right now is the kids that are dying because of TikTok. [Automatic transcript follows] You are not alone. I'm Craig Peterson TikTok has been in the crosshairs for quite a while. This is a Chinese company. Tencent is the Chinese company that started them up and they really kind of got their foundation through what you'd call challenges probably. [00:00:37] Everybody remembers the ice bucket challenge and that ice bucket challenge was floating around. They were doing it on YouTube, TikTok everywhere, and it was to benefit really ALS. Which is absolutely kind of fantastic. And this was eight years ago, I guess. I don't know, 10 years, 2014, I think actually, uh, a long time ago. [00:01:03] I remember like it was yesterday and they raised apparently $115 million. The idea was that you would challenge someone else to do this ice bucket challenge and in, so doing, you would donate money to ALS. That is really kind of cool. What a great idea for ALS. So I would, for instance, get challenged by someone who dumped a bucket of ice water over their head. [00:01:34] To do the same and donate to ALS Lou Gehrig's disease. That's kind of cool. Obviously they're not supporting Lou Gehrigs are supporting the research and due stopping it. Right. And people did it. And as I said, $115 million later, ALS research is probably a little further along. You kind of hope so it's easy in a big organization to chew up $115 million. [00:02:00] That's for sure. But bill gates did it. Ton of celebrities did it. And ultimately people took that basic idea and, and tried to put it into other types of fundraisers. You know, that's all well and good, you know, it kind of kind of died down, uh, for a while. They did a whole bunch of other things I'm looking right now, by the way. [00:02:28] Uh, let's see. Yeah, it was ALS association. This is Wikipedia, which is, uh, sometimes to believe be believed most of the time not. And a, the ALS site was where I was quoing from before Wikipedia is saying that. There was over 220 million worldwide raised for ALS research. So it's probably the difference between worldwide and in the us. [00:02:54] So they wanted to make it kind of an annual event. It just didn't happen. And the cold water challenge. It started really in 1991. So they, they took it and they ran with it. Well, one of the things that TikTok has been doing a lot of is challenges and they they're different kinds of challenges. They have musical challenges where someone will. [00:03:20] Post, uh, some music usually by a star of some sort. And they'll go ahead and have a, maybe a dance challenge and maybe a, you know, a challenge for your kitty cat or your dog, whatever, what, whatever it might be. But it's been really good for TikTok to grow. And a lot of people are doing it. Different, crazy things that they've done. [00:03:45] You've got the gorilla glue girl. Do you remember her? she, she decided to use gorilla glue in her hair rather than I guess some sort of, uh, I don't know. Oil or something to hold her hair down. And it definitely held her hair down. She sued, she sued them. It's absolutely crazy what she did. So the gorilla glue girl, probably not really a challenge, but she, uh, this is CRA, this is when the New York post undoubtedly cemented her place on talk's most stupid Mount Rushmore. [00:04:20] Because she slathered her hair with gorilla glue and she had to go in and get it. Surgically repaired. It took four hours, $20,000 in donations came in hundreds of free air products, even a full-time agent. The DIY vampire fangs. Uh, this is crazy. This is in Halloween a couple of years ago. Super gluing costume vampire fangs to your teeth. [00:04:50] Uh, 9 million views on that one. Tooth filing. Oh, this is crazy, absolutely crazy. They I'm, I'm looking at a picture of it right now of the video, one of the videos. Anyway, anyways, it was on TikTok and, uh, you know, this is kind of the realm of toothless TikTok challenges, but. They, uh, they were attempting to fix their uneven smiles by using a nail file to sand their teeth down the incisors. [00:05:24] If they were, were a little bit too big. Oh, man, the dentist got upset about that for very good reason. You're destroying the enamel on the outside of your teeth. Irreparable damage, the face wax challenge. Oh, look at this picture. This is crazy billions of videos in counting. Uh, they they're putting wax, although wax all over people's face. [00:05:50] Oh, my goodness. So they caked the whole face, including the eyes with wax, like it's, you know, casting mold. Have you seen those things before they even have wax dip Q ticks tips stuck in their noses to get rid of those nasal hairs? Oh man. Very, very traumatic. Um, I'm not gonna talk about this one. It involves a sensitive body part, the corn cob challenge. [00:06:22] Uh, this is, uh, cons eating corn by attaching the cob. That or to a spinning drill bit. If you can believe that. Oh man, 22 hamburgers. Here's another one. The cereal challenge. Uh, a person pours milk and cereal into the open mouth of a person laying down and eats breakfast from the human bowl. Choking hazards. [00:06:50] Obviously there, the skull breaker challenge, this apparently started in Venezuela and it depicted three friends jumping next to each other as the book ending, Bud's kick in the middle guy's feet out from under him. So what ends up happening is that person crashes to the ground landing on their back, hitting. [00:07:12] The head in the process injuries reported Miami, New York, New Jersey, Arizona, uh, Dayton beach, Florida police have charged two high school teens with misdemeanor, battery and cyber bullying, Mexico. The penny challenge. Oh my gosh. Um, This involves. And I talked about this one here on the radio, too, taking a penny and putting it on a plug. [00:07:41] So you partially plug. A plug into the wall, into the socket and then you stick a penny behind it to shore out the leads. Yeah. So when the, when the penny or whatever coin you're putting in there hits those metal prongs there's sparks electrical system damage, and some cases fire, uh, them fire marshal down in, uh, one of the towns. [00:08:08] Ostro key, I guess it is in mass. Uh, has a photo of a scorched outlet in Holden. Oh, there you go. Reportedly caused by the viral prank. The Benadryl challenge, Chacha slide, pee your pants. Uh, [00:08:31] there's another one, the other side, verbal abuse challenge, mom and dads verbally abusing their kids. I color them a mistake in some cases mentioning the word abortion. Oh my goodness. Flash mobs. Uh, dipping challenge. Oh, that'll make you sweet eating and swallowing dip and the blackout challenge. That's the one we're talking about right now. [00:08:54] There there's so many of these things. If you don't know what's going on on TikTok, this is it, right. I, I just told you a bunch that are dangerous. Absolutely crazy. Nobody should be doing that sort of stuff, but they are, well, parents are saying now the TikTok failed to act after the first reported death in this blackout challenge, as you can guess, the blackout challenge is where kids black out. [00:09:25] They have to strangle themselves until they pass. This was in my emails this week, this whole thing, I've got a link to some of these articles. You'll find it@craigpeterson.com. If you didn't get it on Tuesday morning, make sure you go to Craig peterson.com and sign up right now. But parents of two girls, these are two of the seven kids that are known to have died from this blackout challenge. [00:09:53] Are suing these girls, their daughters that died were ages eight and nine nine. They're claiming according to ours, Technica that their kids became addicted to TikTok. They were fed a constant stream of seemingly harmless challenge videos, persuading them to participate and then died after attempting the blackout challenge. [00:10:22] So they're seeking damages from TikTok for the product design. Now remember TikTok, isn't the one coming up with these challenges. It's the users who are on TikTok that are coming up with them. Now TikTok did respond. He told the New York, they told the New York times the spokesperson that the, the company would not comment on continuing litigation. [00:10:45] And they also linked a prior company statement to people magazine about a 10 year old girl who also died after attempting the blackout challenge. At that time, TikTok said the disturbing challenge predated their platform and had never become a TikTok. Trend now we know TikTok just a few weeks ago. [00:11:06] Confirmed has been sending all of the videos, all of the user information, everything to China. So there you have it avoid TikTok and man, don't let your kids on it. Stick around. We'll be right back. [00:11:25] Hey, Microsoft is giving me nightmares again, and frankly, much of the cybersecurity community because of their change. They just change direction in a way that is much, much less safe. I, I don't know what's going on there. [00:11:42] We over the years have seen Microsoft be just kind of the bane of our existence. Anybody that's trying to stay secure, it's been terrible. [00:11:55] There's software, just horrible. It was not designed but frankly, find frankly. All it's just crazy. And then they brought Dave Cutler in and I worked on NT, the pre one, oh, versions, windows, NT, their new technology, which kind of underlines all of the modern versions of Microsoft windows. And what happens well, instead of doing things securely, really following in the footsteps of a. [00:12:28] Call print system, digital equipment corporation. They decided to just go completely different direction and, uh, rip things out and must make this compatible with anything that's ever been written, kind of the Intel philosophy. And by doing all of that, they lost all of the wonderful security that VMs had. [00:12:48] This operating system that Dave Cutler had kind of led up over in the deck world. we ended up with a piece of garbage, really? It was just terrible. Oh my goodness. And I I've been absolutely amazed since I got rid of bill gates and got rid of that other guy that was in there running things for a wild bomber, who was just incredibly, just terrible. [00:13:18] Uh, and they've really come a long way. Their new CEO, the last few years has done some. Wonderful things. Some really amazing things here to increase. Microsoft's not just productivity for the users, but their profitability and their cyber security, which is why now I am so. Puzzled, because one of the things that has been a killer for cybersecurity has been this whole concept that micro has Microsoft has of well had anyways of, well, let let's make it so that you can write programs and put them into this spreadsheet. [00:13:56] Visual basic visual C plus plus C. We'll make things ever so much better. And of course, what was visual basic used for in some of our word documents and our Excel documents, it was used to hack our computers. Yes, indeed. The bad guys used a programming language to cause. All kinds of havoc, who would've thought a, so Microsoft decided, well, Hey, listen, uh, we are going to turn off macros by default because they are too dangerous. [00:14:35] Boy, are they too dangerous? Whatever programming language you're using. Come on, look at Java. Java has just been a nightmare as well. Over the years for cybersecurity, it's gotten better. Of course they've tightened it. But I can remember what, 15, 20 years ago, first using Java and seeing all of the problems. [00:14:57] We still got them. I've got a new client that I've been helping. They're a startup and they are using Java for a lot of the stuff that they are writing. And it's a nightmare trying to get them to. Up to date on the Java engines that they're using and, and they're using some that have massive known vulnerabilities and that's kinda what happens with the macros. [00:15:23] It, yeah. Great. Look at, you can write files to desk. You can do all kinds of really cool things. Isn't this just wonderful. Yeah. If the whole world was kind and generous and wasn't trying to break into our computer computers. Uh it's. It's incredible. So in February, 2022, Microsoft announced a major change. [00:15:49] And it put this change in place to, as they said, combat the growing scourge of ransomware and other, uh, really malware attacks. So they're going to block the downloaded macros and office versions, going back to office 20. Team they're gonna be releasing patches for them. And you could still enable macros for these different files, PowerPoint, what, whatever you're doing here, but it's much more difficult to enable it because they are so dangerous. [00:16:24] Absolutely. Dangerous and, uh, well, we can get into all of the details behind it. You know, the zone identifier tag. And if you have an NTFS volume, it can be in there market, the web it's already used in office. They're kind of emulating what apple has been doing for quite some time in order to really try and focus you saying, Hey, listen, you downloaded that app from the internet. [00:16:50] Do you really, really. Really want to use it. Uh, you don't think this through a little bit and sure enough, you know, they decided, yeah, this is a bad idea. We can't let people just run macros willy-nilly uh, by the way, why, why were all these things happening? Well, if I was to boil it down, you probably could read between those lines. [00:17:11] When I was talking earlier really bad. Product management inside Microsoft. Now they've got some great programmers, but, uh, and some great minds there. I, I know a few people, well, I mentioned Cutler who went over there, but I know a lot of other guys that went over there to work for Microsoft, but they just don't have the product management that frankly they need to have. [00:17:35] And that is caused just all kinds of nightmares. So what's happened. Well, Microsoft made a very big announce. They have decided that they are going to let you know, nevermind. Nevermind. They have reversed course, and they're going to allow untrusted macros to be opened by default in word and other office applications. [00:18:05] So, uh, they also said here just a few days ago that, Hey, um, Um, you know, the, nevermind. We said that we are gonna allow macros, uh, just by default in everything. Um, yeah, well that that's gonna be temporary, I guess. It's, you know, temporary in passing just like inflation, right? Don't don't worry about it. Uh, nothing is here. [00:18:28] This is absolutely crazy. Make up your mind. Macros have been the bane of existence for so many. Of us cybersecurity people out there. And another thing too, that's just been really bad is their wonderful little scripting language, their, their power shell, which is being used all the time now by the bad guys to infect machines because your standard malware. [00:19:00] You know, this antivirus software that you buy, the, you know, not the really good stuff, but the stuff that you buy as a consumer would buy you'd get at staples or Walmart or online does not work against it. And again, it's just like, they're stealing again. This one's from the Unix world. We've had shells in Unix since the seventies. [00:19:25] and, uh, you know, they, they just, they do it, they do it wrong. They. And they make it, uh, just worse. I'm shaking my head. I, I, you can tell I am no Microsoft fan, right? Uh, people are using it mainly because businesses buy it. And why do businesses buy it? Because the purchasing guy. Looks for check boxes. Oh yes. [00:19:48] Microsoft windows checks all these boxes and the purchasing guy doesn't care about the user interface. The purchasing guy doesn't really care about how secure it is. It doesn't care about how Des well designed it is. It doesn't care about its network connectivity. So yeah, that's why we have so many copies of windows out there. [00:20:07] This is a sad decision blocking Microsoft office macros would do infinitely more to actually stop real threats out there than all of the Intel blogs that are out there that are telling us about the problems. I just don't get it. It's absolutely crazy. Everybody is criticizing the move that's in the cybersecurity space. [00:20:36] Bad decision again from Microsoft. So make sure your macros are turned off. You can find this article. I sent it out my show notes on Tuesday. Craig peterson.com. [00:20:52] There's been a lot of talked about Elon Musk, this whole Twitter deal. But I think everybody that I have read articles from is missing the boat here. So I'm gonna give you my view of what's happening as a business person, myself. [00:21:08] Elon Musk made a $44 billion bid to buy Twitter. You've I'm sure you've heard of this. [00:21:17] It's been talked about now for months and months and months. And I, I want to talk about what happened from my. Perspective with Elon Musk saying, no, um, this deal is over. I'm not gonna follow through on this. And again, this is my opinion. This is me doing a little bit of mind reading here of, of Elon MOS and maybe one or two of the things that. [00:21:43] That he thought about when he canceled this deal. Now, remember, initially he's put that offer out. And the Twitter board of director said, no, no, no, we're not gonna take it for whatever reason. Right. What's the real reason they might. They, they they'll say what. They want you to hear about what the reason is, but it's not necessarily the reason. [00:22:06] So initially Twitter said, no, we're not gonna do it. And then Twitter said, yeah. Okay. We'll do it because there was frankly, this is again, me, a lot of. People who were investors in Twitter that were pretty upset that this offer from Musk, that was a very good offer. He was offering more than the stock was trading for would go away. [00:22:30] They wanted it. They wanted to get out of Twitter. You know is not what you're supposed to be doing. Right. You're making money. Even if you keep your stock, you're, you're gonna be well vested. And that's what you're trying to do is make some money for yourself or your investors. So many of us have retirement money that's in the stock market. [00:22:52] Yeah. Like you haven't noticed that. Right. There's the, your retirement's gone down by 50% or more it's in the stock market. So you want the people who are running these companies to make good fiscal fiscal decisions so that your money that's invested in there, isn't going away. So you have some money for retirement. [00:23:15] So that pressure on the Twitter board is really what got them to move and say, yeah, we'll accept the offer. Now Elon Musk made that offer based on the valuation of Twitter and its stock, because really what Musk had to do is buy at least a controlling interest in Twitter stock in order to take it over. [00:23:42] So Elon's there saying, okay. I'm offering 44 billion and it is based on public information. How does this work? Public companies have to provide stockholders and investors and, and the general community out there in information about their company. So they'll have things you've probably heard terms like forward looking statements. [00:24:11] They'll say things that Elon Musk has certainly got in trouble before for saying things that weren't done through the securities and exchange commission. So, yeah. Okay, great. Uh, we're not doing, we're not doing as well as we thought we would. Uh, you know, when these companies are making announcements, the, all of these, uh, analysts are looking at what they think they're going to announce and how much of earnings per share they'll have, and whether they're gonna pay dividends. [00:24:45] You've heard about all of this. Well, one of the things that has to go into those security and exchange commission filings, the S E C is the number of actual eyeballs you have. So you see an advertisers interested in how many people are on Twitter and how many people are seeing the ads, cuz that's how they're paying. [00:25:10] Right? That's how they justify paying Twitter to run ads. Makes sense. I think, well, the same thing is true for the investors. They wanna know how many eyeballs are on there because that is what the ads are worth and based on what the ads are worth, that is exactly, uh, what we value the company had. Right? [00:25:35] So, so all of these things and of course more, but those are the core things that go into valuing a business such as Twitter. So Twitter's there, they're putting out the S E C filings and they're telling the securities and exchange commission. Yeah, we have 5% of our Twitter accounts are operated by bots as many as 5%. [00:26:04] That's what they're saying. Now various experts who have looked for the behavior, that would be a bot have said, the number may be closer to 15%. And I've even, I've heard numbers that are saying that the traffic on Twitter could be. Gen bot generated, uh, at 40 to 60% rates. So obviously you have count accounts that are bots, and then you have the traffic that they generate different numbers in both cases. [00:26:37] So you've got all of this traffic being generated by bots, and that means it's not legitimate traffic. now what's a bot, a, a bot is, and you know, I've explained this before. Apologize for people that have heard it, but a, a, a bot is a kind of a robot think of it that way. And these robots go ahead and they repost things. [00:27:06] They post things using hashtags and they're used by evil people. Uh, yeah, I I'm, I'm using that term now. Evil people, people who are trying to get you to do something and are manipulating. so very frequently, we have seen evil people out there who are trying to manipulate the value of a stock by going ahead and using their hashtag their keyword and having bots mention it thousands of times. [00:27:43] So now that keywords going up and you as a regular user on Twitter, you see that keyword, maybe you're doing some research based on that keyword. And you find that yes, indeed. Uh, these people really have, uh, got a great business and this is gonna be fantastic. So they get eyeballs. And hopefully you're clicking through to their website and maybe they're looking for investors. [00:28:10] And so you invest in them. You, you see what they're doing. So instead of getting it organically, instead of doing it the way I've done business, and my, I have a friend that says, Hey, Craig, if you were a, as unethical as these other people, like Zuckerberg, like bill gates, like so many others, if you were unethical, you'd be a billionaire too. [00:28:32] My ethics say that you should not be manipulating people, right? I, if I've got something to offer that you want great, but these bots are used for manipulation purposes only, only. So if it's 5% bots, as much as 5% Twitters has a certain value. And if it's 15%. It has a different value. And that's what Elon Musk has been saying. [00:29:03] What's the real value of Twitter. Now that it's come out, that the number of bots on Twitter is probably much higher than Twitter's been saying. While now you get the securities and exchange commission upset with you, and I bet you, there are investigations underway, criminal and otherwise against Twitter. [00:29:29] And more than we've even heard about. So Elon Musk would be a fool to buy Twitter. And when you buy a company, you inherit all of its problems, including its lawsuits and potential lawsuits. So can you imagine the tens hundreds of millions of dollars they're gonna be spent defending Twitter and its board of directors? [00:29:55] If indeed these things are true. Yeah. Hey, I've got a great article this week from the orange county register, talking about this, explaining. It all out, not as well as I did, but make sure you get my newsletter. My insider show notes, Tuesday mornings, Craig Peter son.com. [00:30:16] Our technology related businesses. Now this includes everybody from apple, all the way through, um, car manufacturers, like Ford or GM. They have a disaster scenario that we're gonna talk about right now. And hopefully it doesn't happen. [00:30:33] I have been kind of warning about this for a while. And I definitely been thinking about this for a long while and a great article that came out in nine to five Mac this week that I have a link to in my newsletter. [00:30:50] This is in my insider show notes newsletter that comes out Tuesday mornings. This is the, the same show notes that I use. For the radio show and for my radio and television appearances. So make sure you are subscribed to keep you up to date. And of course you can subscribe right@craigpeterson.com. So this is a great little article it's titled Apple's disaster scenario is a real possibility. [00:31:23] Say us and UK security services. What is the disaster scenario? It is the Chinese takeover of Taiwan, which would be very bad. We're about to explain why China, you probably have heard this before. Claims Taiwan is its own and Taiwan claims mainland China as its own, as they. Had, uh, the, the rulers, if you will, of China at the time of the communist takeover fled to Taiwan, basically a government in exile. [00:32:00] So good luck Taiwan taking over China again, that that just isn't gonna happen. But the other side really. Could happen. So the heads of both the us and UK security services gave an unprecedented warning. This is I five and FBI heads. And, uh, of course that's director Christopher Ray. They're very, very worried. [00:32:30] This is an unprecedented joint appearance in London. You probably did not hear about this anywhere else. This might be the first time you're hearing about it, but they said that China was quote the biggest long term threat to our economic and national. Security. They talked about how China's interfered in the politics, including recent elections. [00:32:55] Of course, I've talked about that here. And of course, Russia also does some of that, but China, China, excuse me, is the real threat. I five's had said that they have more than doubled the work against Chinese activity in the last three years. They're going to be doubling it again. I five is now running seven times as many investigations related to China. [00:33:21] Compared to 2018, uh, FBIs Christopher Ray warn that if China was to forcibly take Taiwan, it would represent one of the most horrific business disruptions the world has ever. Scene. And then China responded and said that the I five was trying to hype up the China threat theory, casting away imagined demon. [00:33:48] Think about what happened with the lockdown. Have you heard about any sort of shortage shortage in semiconductors in computer chip? Yeah, of course you have. We've got major automobile manufacturers that have had to shut down lines, shut down shifts because they can't get the computers to control the cars. [00:34:12] Cars are being shipped without seat heaters. They're being shipped without electric windows, even because they cannot get the chips. And that's because of a lock. Not a war, not China invading Taiwan. You see the problem is that Taiwan makes almost all of our chips that are used today in computers. and then China assembles much of the computer technology that we have today now. [00:34:49] Yes, the, the top quality, the top technology manufacturing devices for chips comes from the [00:35:01] United States, but it's sitting in Taiwan. So this becomes a very, very big problem. So let's talk about Apple's disaster scenario, cuz it's, it's absolutely horrifying because apple is hugely dependent on Taiwan. You've got the, a series M series S series chips all fabricated by TSMC that's Taiwan, semiconductor manufacturing company. [00:35:30] Almost all of the apple production takes place in the company's plants. Within Taiwan, an armed conflict would have a devastating impact on Taiwan and its people and would cause massive disruption to manufacturing operations. What kind of manufacturing? Semiconductor who needs semiconductors? Pretty much everybody in the United States. [00:35:58] Even if you are not reliant on high tech in your manufacturing, uh, you know, to include chips in your designs, which really light bulbs have computer chips in them nowadays, you are reliant on semiconductors for your manufacturing lines themselves, the controllers that are there, the robots that are. So the second point in this nine to five article is that it's inevitable that the us and most of the rest of the world would respond to the Chinese takeover of Taiwan. [00:36:36] The same way that the world has responded to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And that is sanction. So think about that. Let's say that China just marches in and takes over. No bloodshed, no buildings destroyed no problem with shipping, but we would all implement sanctions. Now, if the sanctions are as wide ranging as the ones that have been imposed on Russia, apple could no longer give any business to Chinese companies. [00:37:14] which is where the vast majority of the apple products are manufactured. That's your iPhones, your iPads, your apple watches, your Mac, you name. The greatest volume of every apple product is assembled in China with a lot of the components made there as well and made in Taiwan. So we just cannot overlook the threat that it's posing to apple. [00:37:40] And the facts that the fact that the, uh, heads of the MI five and FBI have chosen for the first time ever to raise this scenario as a real and present danger. So it's something that's gotta be terrifying, apple senior execs. Now we've been talking about apple here, but we're really talking about every. [00:38:03] Four GM Chrysler all have parts that are coming using just in time inventory techniques from China and from Taiwan. The same thing is true for our European partners. Look at VW. They're just in time manufacturing. Also relies on Taiwan and on China for the parts to arrive just in time. Now, many parts are coming from different parts of the world. [00:38:35] Many of our companies are smartening up saying, well, maybe we don't want to make everything in China. A lot of it's moving to different parts of Southeast. and it it's helping a lot of people in Southeast Asia. Some of this stuff is actually moved from China to different countries in Africa, particularly when we're talking about textile operations. [00:39:01] but you are not gonna be able to get your windows PC either because your windows PC needs those chips, whether it's made by Dell quote unquote made by Dell, right? Who, who gets parts and they're sitting in the parts bins, and they assemble your computer for you or HP or Cisco, or whoever makes your. So this is a huge, huge deal. [00:39:28] Absolutely crazy deal. The Chinese takeover of Taiwan. And I think that this war in Ukraine that was started by Russia has been a blessing in disguise for every last one of us, because China's ambitions to take over Taiwan, I think have been stalled. because of what they have seen in Ukraine, but also because Russia is a partner with China in so many ways, China and India have been buying oil and gas from Russia at substantially discounted prices because of the Ukraine war. [00:40:13] So China doesn't want to step on Russia's foot. They have seen what the sanctions have done to Russia. In some ways they've really helped the Russian economy because now they're getting people buying rubles so that they can buy the oil from Russia instead of using the us dollar, the petrol dollar that's been in place for so long. [00:40:36] So it, you know, sanctions are a two edge sword. Ultimately I think they. Us more than they hurt Russia and they would hurt China more than they hurt us. But what we're looking at is a short period period of time, relatively speaking, transitory, that we would be hurt pretty badly because of the sanctions. [00:41:00] I mean really badly. Oh, my goodness. The things that these, uh, modern administrations have been doing, right. Oh, I wish it was, was different. Uh, let's talk a bit about the Z. He has made what a ink magazine is calling a huge mistake and ink is predicting. It really could destroy meta and Facebook. [00:41:26] Zuckerberg came out and said in public, realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who should not be here. Zuckerberg said he's turning up the heat. And he's really adding some unnecessary pressure, making a bad situation, worse and prioritizing ruthlessly. As he said, with stricter management and monitoring of employee performance is moving a lot of. [00:41:57] People into second place, third place, it's prioritizing the bottom line while forgetting the people who are responsible for the company's success. So expect a real down environment as employees move, frankly, out of meta and Facebook. And then of course the whole thing that happened recently with Carol Sandberg over there a second in command. [00:42:25] I guess it's kind of a mess. Hey, visit me online. Make sure you get my newsletters. Craig Peter san.com/subscribe. [00:42:34] Facebook's about 18 years old coming on 20 Facebook has a lot of data. How much stuff have you given Facebook? You know, did you fall victim for that? Hey, upload your contacts. We'll find your friends. Well, they don't know where your data is. [00:42:51] This whole thing with Facebook has kind of exploded here lately. [00:42:56] 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, you know, there's always a lot of rumors about different companies and particularly when they're big company and the, the news headlines are kind of grabbing your attention. [00:43:30] 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? well, it came from a leaked document. Yeah, exactly. So I, we find out a lot of stuff like that. Right. I used to follow a, a website about companies that were going to go under and they posted internal memos. [00:44:04] 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. [00:44:33] 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. [00:44:57] 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. [00:45:22] 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. [00:46:00] 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, you know, 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. [00:46:27] 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. Right. 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. [00:46:48] Right? I think I probably even uploaded it back then thinking, well, that'd be nice to see if I got friends here. We can start chatting, et cetera. Well, according to legal experts that were interviewed by motherboard who wrote this article and has a copy of the internal me, uh, 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. [00:47:24] 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, you know, Facebook started how right. Well, you scrape in pictures of young women off of Harvard universities. Main catalog, right. [00:47:48] Contact page, and then asking people, well, what do you think of this rate? This person rate that person and off they go, right. Trying to rate them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All that matters to a woman, at least according to mark Zuckerberg or all that matters about a woman is how she looks. Right. Do I think she's pretty or not ridiculous what he was doing? [00:48:08] 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. [00:48:33] 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? Well, you don't have to worry about inefficiencies. [00:48:54] I'll tell you that. Right. 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, uh, money to this group or that group. [00:49:16] And they put together all of the basic information, right. 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. Right. And now that becomes part of the main code for Facebook. [00:49:38] 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, uh, Hey, we. This feature, that feature for advertisers and then in that goes, and then along comes candidate Obama. And, uh, they, one of the groups inside Facebook says, yeah, yeah, yeah, here, here we go. [00:50:03] Here's all of the information we have about everybody and it's free. Don't worry about it. Right. And then when Trump actually bought it and hired a company to try and process some of that information he got in trouble. No, no, no, but, 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. [00:50:30] And according to this internal memo, they still don't know. They don't even know if they can possibly, uh, 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. [00:50:53] 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. [00:51:15] Okay. And it flows every. The document red. Right. 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. [00:51:39] This data from kind of reminds me of the no fly list. Right. You don't know you're on it and you can't get yourself off of it. Right. It is kind of 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 monetization strategy. [00:52:06] And is the engine that powers Facebook's growth. interesting, interesting problems. And, 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, well, wait a minute now. [00:52:28] 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 kind of freaking out about. [00:52:56] Well, 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, right. [00:53:21] You grow. I, 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. Right. You, 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. [00:53:44] 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. [00:54:03] 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. [00:54:20] Thanks for being with me today. I really appreciate it. And I'm honored, frankly, to be in front of this microphone. , this is really something, you know, we, we know in wars, there are people that loot and typically the various militaries try and make sure, at least recently that that looting is kept to an absolute minimum. [00:54:43] Certainly the Americans, the British, even the Nazis during world war II, the, the, uh, the socialists they're in. Germany, uh, they, they tried to stop some of the looting that was going on. I, I think that's probably a very good thing, right. Because what you end up with is just all of these locals that are just totally upset with you. [00:55:12] 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. [00:55:41] 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, really something. Uh, it, the Soviets didn't do this, but now Russian. [00:56:05] 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. [00:56:32] 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. [00:56:56] Being shipped back, just like, you know, 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. [00:57:22] They don't only leave anything behind. They found the Russians had taken most of the computers, the projectors and other electronic equipment. It, it, 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. [00:57:42] 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. Well, nowadays there's not a whole lot of use for those. Now what they have been doing, some of these bad guys is, is they take some parts and use them in stolen equipment. [00:58:09] 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. [00:58:32] 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. [00:58:52] 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. [00:59:18] 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, 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. [00:59:42] You steal it. It's not gonna do you much. Good. So one of the things the Russian stole when they were in, uh, it's called, uh, I think you pronounce it. Uh, Mela me pole, uh, 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, uh, a businessman in the area that CNN is reporting on. [01:00:15] 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. [01:00:42] 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, right. Of your property being very, 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. [01:01:08] 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? Well, 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. [01:01:36] 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. [01:02:02] Right? 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. Right? You see how this all works. So when the Russian forces stole this equipment, that's valued. Total value here is about $5 million. [01:02:23] 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 you know, there's pros and cons to that. I think there's a lot of cons, but, uh, what are you gonna do? How's that gonna work for you? Well, it. Isn't going to work for you. [01:02:44] 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. Well, 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. [01:03:10] 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. [01:03:36] 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. [01:03:51] Ransomware has been a very long running problem. I remember a client of ours, a car dealership who we had gone in. [01:04:03] 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. [01:04:25] Greens that say pay up is send us this much Bitcoin. And here's our address. Right. All of that sort of stuff. And he called us up and said, what what's going on here? What happened? Well, 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. [01:04:48] 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. Uh, and within a matter of a couple of hours, we actually had him back to where he was and it didn't spread. [01:05:16] So the consequences there, they, 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. Right. 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? [01:05:43] Right? 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. Well, 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. [01:06:10] And if you're interested, I can send you, I I've got something. I wrote up. Be glad to email it back to you. Uh, 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. [01:06:34] Is a kind of a pernicious nasty little thing, particularly nowadays, because it's two, two factor, right. First is they've encrypted your data. You can't get to it. And then the second side of that is okay, well, I can't get to my data and now they're threatening to hold my data ransom or they'll release. So they they'll put it out there. [01:06:58] 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, uh, you can lose your license for your business. You can U lose your ability to go ahead and frankly, uh, make loans and work with financial companies and financial instruments. [01:07:22] It could be a very, 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, uh, we picked up afterwards. That, uh, yes, indeed. They lost all of the money in their operating account. [01:07:47] And, uh, then how do you make payroll? How do you do things? Well, 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. [01:08:07] Uh, 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. Uh, 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. Uh, first of all, the largest ransom demand is $50 million. [01:08:36] 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 they're expecting by 2031. So in about a decade, ransomware is gonna be costing about $265 billion a year. Now on average, uh, Ransomware costs businesses. 1.8, 5 million to recover from an attack. [01:09:08] 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? Right? If you're a car dealer, you have a to print money, right? You you're selling car model or cars from manufacturer X. And now you have the right to do that and they can remove that. [01:09:31] Right? 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. [01:09:56] Last. it's 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 it's a little, little better than 50%, but 65% of pain victims recovered their data. [01:10:26] 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? [01:10:50] For a, 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, like, uh, ours. It it's the same bandwidth up as it is down. But it can take again, days or weeks to try and recover your machine. [01:11:13] So it's very, 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. [01:11:46] 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. [01:12:14] Uh, 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 so, 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. [01:12:40] 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. [01:12:58] You know, you and I have talked about passwords before the way to generate them and how important they are. And we 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. [01:13:15] Passwords are kind of an, a necessary evil, at least they have been forever. I, I remember, I think the only system I've ever really used that did not require passwords was the IBM 360. [01:13:32] Yeah, 360, you know, 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. [01:14:01] You had a simple password. And I remember one of our instructors, his name was Robert, Andrew Lang. And, uh, his password was always some sort of a combination of RA Lang. So it was always easy to guess what his, what his password was. Today, it has gotten a lot worse today. We have devices with us all of the time. [01:14:24] 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. [01:14:54] 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, 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 kind of an interesting thing, right? [01:15:22] Just looking at it because we're, we're so used to having this password only authentic. And of course the, 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. [01:15:44] Upper lowercase a little bit. In those words, those are the best passwords, you know, 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. [01:16:06] 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, um, software licenses and a few other things in there. [01:16:34] 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, I really do like that. Uh, 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, lost my faith in it. [01:16:56] 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. [01:17:20] 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? Well, basically you need to have a smartphone. [01:17:39] 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 kind of 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. [01:18:03] 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 kind of a similar thing here now for the sites for my company, because we do cyber security for businesses, including regulated businesses. [01:18:31] We have biometrics tied in as. so to log into our systems, I have to have a username. I have to have a password. Uh, 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. [01:18:56] So, yeah, there's a lot there, but I have to protect my customer's data. Something that very, very few it's crazy. Um, actual so-called 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. [01:19:21] 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 lot of this sort of thing. [01:19:39] So what will happen with this is you go to a website and it might come up with a QR code. So you then scan that QR code with your phone and verify it, authorize it on your phone. You might again have it set up so that your phone requires a facial recognition or perhaps it'll require a fingerprint. And now you are in. [01:20:02] Which is very cool. They fix some security problems in Fido over the last few years, which is great over the coming year. You're g

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

In this episode we will be talking about some tools, tips, and techniques for full body system wellness that my special guest is using in her own life and business. Erian's journey to wellness began with her nutrition and the needs of her own physical body. She will be sharing with us how this led her to creating a thriving practice which includes all of the aspects of holistic health: physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional body health. This show is all about empowerment in many of its varied forms. My special guest and I will be taking LIVE CALLS from anyone who has questions, concerns, is looking for healing, or wants to be empowered. 1-800-930-2819

[18+] Erian must delve into dark, primal magic in service of They Who Asks for Advice Then Complains About It. Today's story is “Satan, Dearie” by B. P. Rugger. This story first appeared in the Dancing with Devils anthology. If you like their writing, their first novel, https://books2read.com/u/3yayYp (The Quantity of Desire), has just been released and the audiobook version is narrated by the incredible Khaki. Read for you by https://twitter.com/khakidoggy (Khaki), your faithful fireside companion. thevoice.dog | https://www.thevoice.dog/apple (Apple podcasts) | https://www.thevoice.dog/spotify (Spotify) | https://www.thevoice.dog/google (Google Podcasts) If you have a story you think would be a good fit, you can https://www.sofurry.com/view/1669084 (check out the requirements), fill out the https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1z81u5O2i8PWSfEpzaVhHeTjrp1kKP7TX?usp=sharing (submission template) and get in touch with us on https://twitter.com/voiceofdogpod (Twitter).

Central bankers from around the world are about to meet - virtually - to discuss challenging issues like inflation. We hear from Mohamed el-Erian, former chief executive of bond fund Pimco, about where we are in the global recovery. And a new study involving very young children in Mali and Burkina Faso suggests that a new vaccine combination developed by the UK-based pharma company GSK could reduce deaths and illness from malaria by 70% and millions of lives could be saved every year. We hear more from Dr Daniel Chandramohan, Professor of Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine; he co-authored the report on the trials. Plus, Canadians go to the polls soon to give their verdict on the last six years of minority government by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Liberal Party; we look at the issues at stake. And the English city of Liverpool lost its UNESCO World Heritage designation after 17 years; the BBC's Victoria Craig takes a look at why. And we're joined throughout the programme by Mitchell Hartman of Marketplace - he's in Oregon. And Rebecca Jones, Bloomberg's Managing Editor for Australia and New Zealand dials in from Melbourne. (Photo: shopfront in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Credit: AaronP/Bauer-Griffin /Getty).

Central bankers from around the world are about to meet - virtually - to discuss challenging issues like inflation. They were supposed to be getting together in person at the Jackson Hole resort in Wyoming in the US. But a rise in cases of the Delta variant of coronavirus means the event has been turned into an online affair. We speak to Mohamed el-Erian, former chief executive of bond fund Pimco, about where we are in the global recovery. In Sweden, the BBC's Maddy Savage reports on controversial proposals to abolish rent controls for new apartments built in the country. And the English city of Liverpool lost its UNESCO World Heritage designation after 17 years. The BBC's Victoria Craig explores why

Alex Erian & Marc-André Filion of Messorem Bracitorium & I have a conversation about how they coped with 2020, the brewery's identity, their 1st brews, the soundtrack to their youths, managing the their success, creating unique art under pressure, their 2 year anniversary, filling the void & their hangover cure. Throughout this chat, Marc-André was drinking Messorem Bracitorium's "SINGLE TOUCH: CITRA" the 6.5% ABV 100% Citra DDH IPA, Alex was drinking their "Il ÉTAIT UNE FOIS : SÉCHERESSE" the 5% Helles Lager while I enjoyed their "ONE HUNNA: SIMCOE" 100% Simcoe 8.2% ABV DDH DIPA. This killer brew poured out with a light yellow veil, smashed sweet honey melon on the nose & slapped an enjoyable bitter mandarin fueled finish. Make sure to check out Vox&Hops' Brewtal Awakenings Playlist which has been curated by the Metal Architect Jerry Monk himself on either Spotify or Apple Music. This playlist is packed with all the freshest, sickest & most extreme albums each week!!! Episode Links: Website: https://www.voxandhops.com/ Join The Vox&Hops Mailing List: http://eepurl.com/hpu9F1 Messorem Bracitorium: https://messorem.co/ Despised Icon: https://www.despisedicon.com/ Vox&Hops Brewtal Awakenings Playlist: Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/ca/playlist/vox-hops-brewtal-awakenings/pl.u-aZb0NJDC1Bo4bEV Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4MSgTiIYfhrfmaoX1tYY5I?si=79da13b927df415f Sound Talent Media: https://soundtalentmedia.com/ Vox&Hops Metal Podcast Merchandise: https://www.indiemerchstore.com/collections/vendors?q=Vox%26Hops

13th Rounder Erian Rodriguez signs for the $125,000 default. Trading Dillon Maples makes little sense. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/tim-huwe/support

With BTC shooting back up above $37K and a look into the aftermath of the GameStop moment, CoinDesk’s Market Daily is back with the latest news roundup. Add Markets Daily to your Alexa Flash Briefing here.This episode is sponsored by Nexo.io.Today's stories: First Mover: Elon Musk #Bitcoin Moment Adds to Dogecoin, GameStop WackinessThe GameStop-galvanized "bear raid" by retail stock traders appears to have terrified Wall Street, but crypto-industry marketeers are salivating over the prospect of new customer leads, and more demand.Coinbase says in Web post it plans to become publicly traded company via a direct listing (CoinDesk) Iran tightens grip on crypto miners while looking to them as a potential source of revenue as international sanctions crimp economy (CoinDesk) Cathie Wood’s ARK estimates bitcoin could climb to $400K if the cryptocurrency were to replace 10% of the cash on corporate balance sheets: Silver surges as GameStop day traders move into other assets (WSJ) Retail traders sue Robinhood over restrictions on meme stocks GameStop, AMC Theaters and Blackberry (CoinDesk) Private-equity firm Silver Lake converts $600M of AMC convertible notes into equity after retail-fueled stock-price pump (WSJ)U.S. Congress plans hearings on GameStop market pumps (CoinDesk) American Airlines, Southwest Airlines post record losses for 2020 after coronavirus-related travel downturn (WSJ) Emerging-market borrowing boom – $847B in 2020, with another $100B of bonds sold so far in January – sparks concerns over debt loads (WSJ)European Central Bank’s head of banking supervision worries that lenders in the region might not be setting aside enough money for loan-loss reserves (WSJ)“Investors have been continuously conditioned to buy the dip, regardless of its cause. FOMO (fear of missing out) and TINA (there is no alternative to risk assets) have turbocharged this behavior,” Allianz Chief Economic Adviser Mohamed el-Erian writes in column (Bloomberg Opinion) Although the U.S. economy shrank last year by the most since 1946, consumers have increased their spending on goods faster than before the coronavirus hit, as “resilient wages, buoyant stocks, low interest rates and stimulus gave most households ample spending power” while the pandemic limited payments for services, the U.S. Commerce Department reported Thursday (WSJ)Earn up to 12% APY on Bitcoin, Ethereum, USD, EUR, GBP, Stablecoins & more. Get started at nexo.io.

Alex Erian est le chanteur des groupes metal Obey the Brave et Despised Icon. De passage au Trou du Diable à Shawinigan, il est venu jaser de "Balance" le nouvel album d'Obey the Brave, de la composition de celui-ci, de santé mentale et consommation de drogues dans l'industrie de la musique et de beaucoup plus. Merci au label Hell for Breakfast d'avoir rendu ça possible et au Trou du Diable pour avoir prêté leurs loges lors de l'enregistrement. Pour me suivre : Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/FrancisLapointeperformance/ Instagram : https://instagram.com/francislapointe.performance/ YouTube : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCf_IzdE0WP9K7FRVF1EoxA/?sub_confirmation=1 L'épisode est aussi disponible sur Podbean, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify et Tout bon podcatcher Android. Pour suivre Obey the Brave : Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/obeythebrave Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/obeythebrave/?hl=fr-ca Site web : https://www.obeythebrave.com/ Pour suivre Despised Icon : Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/despisedicon/ Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/despisedicon/?hl=fr-ca Site Web : https://www.despisedicon.com/ ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Qui suis-je ? Mon nom est Francis Lapointe et je suis coach en psychologie du sport et de la performance. J'offre des services individualisés de coaching à des athlètes, artistes, regroupements sportifs (fédérations, ligues, équipes) et à toutes autres personnes ou organisations souhaitant optimiser leur performance. Mon angle d'approche se situe essentiellement sur le travail des émotions dans le but de favoriser une performance optimale de l'individu dans son domaine.

Alex Erian est le chanteur des groupes metal Obey the Brave et Despised Icon. De passage au Trou du Diable à Shawinigan, il est venu jaser de “Balance” le nouvel L’article Plein Potentiel – S01 – EP20: Alex Erian de Obey the Brave & Despised Icon est apparu en premier sur RadioH2O.

A conversation about the Heavy Montreal Festival, using in-ear monitors, the challenges of clean vocals, switching from drumming to screaming, the development of his stage persona, the upcoming Despised Icon Tour & a misstep he wishes he could take back. This episode was recorded on site at the Heavy Montreal 2019 festival in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Throughout the episode we drank Brasseur de Montreal's Griffintown Blonde Ale, which was graciously given to me to share with my guests by Marie-Mado Langlois from Brasseur de Montreal. Photo Credit: Tim Snow https://timsnowphoto.format.com/ Despised Icon: http://www.despisedicon.com/ Obey The Brave: https://www.obeythebrave.com/ Brasseur de Montreal: https://www.brasseurdemontreal.com/ Heavy Montreal: https://www.heavymontreal.com/en

While Graham works finishing his own Greek Odyssey, Steve gets lost in a Prime Odyssey all of his own! Along with these crazy tales, the boys look at a whole bunch of new ID@Xbox games, FOUR new Sniper Elites, cocaine, and what is soon to be Every Man’s Sky! Get it? Get it!?! Intro and Games: -> 37m32s News: 37m32s -> 1h1m46s Beginning of the End: 1h1m46s -> Full Episode Notes: http://shouldiplaythisgame.com/?p=771

  Alex Erian, vocalist for recently reactivated deathcore pioneers Despised Icon, guests on the podcast this week. In our exclusive interview we delve into the reasoning behind the band breaking up and moving on and then, after a short time, making the decision to come back together. We talk about their new record Beast and how recording with two bands at one time creates headaches for him. We find out there might actually be a hip hop beat behind one of the songs on the new record and about how they've been able to retain their fanbase despite what looked like the end for the band. Maybe all bands -- and couples -- need to break up and get back together. We also talk about the recent editorial on Decibel about "SJWs" in metal that turned the metal internets into a firestorm. With opinions ranging from "SJWs are tearing our scene apart" to "nazi metalheads must die," is there a real discussion going on right now, or are we all just picking sides while trying to reinforce whatever we believe already and refusing to hear anything that might challenge those opinions? Is there a real problem, a perceived problem, or are we missing the target altogether? Songs: Despised Icon – "The Aftermath" Be'lakor – "Roots to Sever"

We are so honored for this week’s distinguished guest, Mohamed el-Erian, whose list of accolades could go on for days.  He’s currently the Chief Economic Adviser at Allianz, chairs President Obama’s Global Development Council, a BloombergView columnist, and the New York Times best-selling author of ‘The Only Game in Town: Central Banks, Instability, and Avoiding the Next Collapse.’  He previously worked for the International Monetary Fund, Salomon Smith Barney, and served as the CEO of PIMCO, the world’s biggest bond fund.  He’s a brilliant mind, but as you’ll quickly learn, many of his early career moves were a matter of necessity.  But he’s gained a lot of valuable wisdom in his historic career and he shares a ton of that advice, which everyone can benefit from.  

This episode features a startling collection of predictions from David Stockman (Former Director of the Office of Management and Budget - Reagan Administration), Mohammed el-Erian (chief economic adviser at Allianz), Jim Rogers (Chairman of Rogers Holdings and Beeland Interests), Donald Trump. These are just a few of the experts, the "Smart Money" if you will, that are pointing to the same future predictions for the Global Markets.

In Episode 3, we hate on Dickens, fall in love (again) with Shakespeare and get angry about blies. If you don't know what a blie is, you're not alone. Listen and find out.    Reading Alicia Erian Towelhead Charlotte BrontëJane Eyre NPR Morning Edition “If Literature’s Great Characters Could Text, They’d Charm Your Pantalets Off” Thomas HardyTess of the D’Urbervilles Charles DickensPenguin Author Page Great ExpectationsOliver Twist cartoon from 1972 George EliotMiddlemarchJane Austen Official (?) Website Ellen Fein and Sherrie SchneiderThe Rules William ShakespeareRomeo and Juliet  

Esta semana en Hablemos en Bits: Alexis y Arquimedes se fusionan en un Panda, Fonchi llora, Erian tiene lagunas mentales y un cometa llamado Roles. Beyond Two Souls, Wolf Among Us, Plants vs Zombies 2, Playstation Now. Noticias, Recomendaciones, Top 6 Motivos para apagar la consola, Online vs Presencial, Comunidad y mucha más penka gamer con simulacro de coherencia

Esta semana en Hablemos en Bits: Fonchi se trauma con el rewind, Arquimedes es paranóico, Roles es un comprador compulsivo y Erian hace ejercicios. Forza Motorsport 5, Battlefield 4, Simpsons Tap Out, Luigi's Mansion 2: Dark Moon. Noticias, Comunidad, Recomendaciones, Opiniones de los VGX 2013 y mucho más cambute intergaláctico gamer.

Esta semana en GLEE: Los chicos de Hablemos en Bits nos deleitan con sus cánticos villancicos en acapela (que lindos!), Fonchi se cree Darth Vader, Alexis da la lista de palabras prohibidas, Arquimedes sufre con su fobia barata, Roles grita como siempre y Erian llega tarde. Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies, Star Wars Tiny Death Star, Entrevistas en ICON 2013, Noticias, Top 6 razones para estar con un hombre gamer, Nuevo segmento Glitch or Bits y mucha más penka armoniosa en acapella… Wa wa wa waaaa wa wa waaa!!!!!

Esta semana en Hablemos en Bits: A Fonchi se le sale el gallo, Arquimedes necesita RAM, Erian es profesor de matemáticas e Ian tiene barba. Noticias, Spelunky, Hotline Miami y The Wolf Among Us. Top 6 consejos para empezar la próxima generación, Recomendaciones, Comunidad y mucho chimichurri dulce dietético.

Esta semana en Hablemos en Bits: Edgar está de vuelta, Fonchi recae en Diablo 3 nuevamente, Arquimedes recibe bullying, Alexis llega tarde y Erian habla jamaicano.. Diablo 3, Tokyo Jungle, Sniper Elite, Sección de la comunidad, el lado oscuro de las consolas, Ofertas, Recomendaciones y mucha más Penka con calidad de exportación

Esta semana en Hablemos en Bits: Alexis baila jam, Fonchi dice Machinidad, Arquimedes hace un par de confesiones y Erian canta un remix. Juegos para Machos, Top 6 Sidekicks, Noticias, Comunidad, Recomendaciones y mucho más en este podcast lleno de testosterona gamer.

Esta semana en Hablemos en Bits: Es hora de combatir el crimen!! Fonchi habla en marciano, Arquimedes no habla de Peter Mollyneux y Erian muere. Análisis de las noticias del Gamescom 2013, Dragon's Crown, Mighty Switch Force 2, Hidden at Plain Sight y Fantasy Football. La voz de la comunidad, diciplina gamer, recomendaciones y las ofertas en el mundo del gaming.

Esta semana en Hablemos en Bits: Alexis es ninja, Fonchi usa pantalones pegados, Erian habla en arameo y Arquimedes falla en defender a Stephanie. Review del Ouya, The Swapper, Please Paper y el demo de Madden 25. Comerciales, Comunidad, Top 6 razones por las que Kojima tiene que hacer otro juego, Entrevista al falso Miyamoto y muchísima más penka en arameo o su idioma de moda preferido.

Esta semana en Hablemos en Bits: Alexis dice semala, Fonchi conoce al sr. moco, Erian no puede ensender el carro y Arquimedes se enamora de Peter Mollineux. Comunidad, Noticias, La bebida gamer Gamer-ade! Top 6 razones por las que EA no es la peor compañía, Recomendaciones y mucho más balbuceo gamer en este podcast 100% educativo y lleno de hemorroide auditiva gamer.

Esta semana en Hablemos en Bits: Alexis vive la vida loca, Erian garan.....tiza, Arquimedes siempre lleva la contraria y Fonchi se exalta. Nuevos servicios de Hombres Wuapos a Domicilio, Continuación de la CCA (Cazadores Compulsivos Anónimos), mercadeo en el gaming de pc, Tomb Raider, Comunidad y una pelea en el tema del día: Old School vs New School. - 2 Libras de Harina, 3 huevos (ayynn), 5 cucharadas de Chimichurri (delicioso), 4 litros de Roncheme (para ti, para mi, para todosss).... Ehmm nos equivocamos de Podcast (Mantengase sintonizado para el podcast de cocina).

One afternoon over Skype I chatted with the vocalist from Obey The Brave (and previous vocalist of Despised Icon) Alex Erian about misconceptions of himself, the intricacies of Montreal culture and his insane birth.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://news.iheart.com/podcast-advertisers