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Welcome! Craig discusses What Google is up to and how they are trying to steer the Election. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Read More: Average Cost of a Data Breach: $3.86 Million The Future's Biggest Cybercrime Threat May Already Be Here Election Interference: Google Purges Breitbart from Search Results Google Has Been Purging Breitbart Content from Search Results Since the 2016 Election Heads roll at Intel after 7nm delay Out-of-Date and Unsupported Cloud Workloads Continue as a Common Weakness Three people have been charged for Twitter’s huge hack, and a Florida teen is in jail Remote Work Isn’t Working? Maybe Your Company Is Doing It Wrong FBI Releases Flash Alert on Netwalker Ransomware Electric car startup Lucid is challenging Tesla’s anti-lidar stance --- Automated Machine-Generated Transcript: [00:00:00] Hey right now, we're going to talk about election interference. What's really going on with Google, not Russia. They're the ones that are interfering and we got evidence Hey everybody, Craig Peterson here on WGAN. Thanks for joining me today. I really appreciate it. I appreciate your time and all of the emails that I've received. Yeah. If you heard the first hour, you know, I have received a lot of them and many of them were questioning. Why did you send me this email about not opening your emails? Cause I love your emails. Don't drop me, please. Um, yeah. Well, it turns out, due to circumstances beyond my control. We've just been so busy. We had the wedding, we had to go to Kentucky and then there's the whole COVID thing, other family issues, and just stuff going on. Including the all-new video [00:01:00] stuff that I've been working on that we're going to be doing some pieces of training and everything. It's just been crazy. So I apologize. I apologize, apologize. I think we're going to be able to get this all into control. So if you've got one of those emails from me, you can ignore them. If you did click on the link for the surprise bonuses for reactivating your account. You got some very cool stuff. And I want to mention too, if you're not on my email list where you get my newsletter and you will get indications about the upcoming pieces of training and stuff if you want to get on that, I have even more surprises for you. One of them, I guess it wouldn't be a surprise if I told you, I'm going to tell you, because I'm excited about this, right? One of them is the security, reboot guide, something everybody needs. It's great for home users. It is great for, or businesses as well, small and large. I focus on small and medium businesses. That is out there and you can get that [00:02:00] easily by going to Craig peterson.com/subscribe, Craig peterson.com/subscribe. And you will get my, hopefully, back to normal, weekly newsletter, plus a bunch of bonuses. So keep an eye on email box for a couple of weeks afterward, cause I'll be dropping some things off to you. Appreciate you guys. That's how I'm letting you know we put a lot of work into the show and a lot of work into everything we do, because we care. Right. Well, that's what it's all about here. I do need to obviously make money to keep the lights on. But most people don't need the types of security services that I offer. So I'm offering all of these free services that I possibly can to help people out. The services that I offer, a lot of businesses need them that are in government contracting. So the new CMMC regulations. [00:03:00] Those are the guys that I help and I help them every day and help them get along and move forward. By the way, the federal government now has decided, I think this is kind of a great idea that since they are requiring our small businesses to comply with the CMMC regulations, which have, by the way, criminal penalties, including 10 years of jail time and millions of dollars in fines. Well, they're putting that sword of Damocles over your head. They're also saying, "Hey, we'll pay for it. Just pass on your cost upstream." Keep that in mind if you're interested in that. If you're not sure send me a note. M E@craigpeterson.com me@craigpeterson.com. And I can send you a couple of records. You can probably find it if you Google it as well, but I think that's a great idea. They are putting costs. No, it, it [00:04:00] depends, but basically it can be a hundred thousand dollars a year, fairly easily on these small businesses. And the federal government said, Hey, you can pass these along and we'll pay him so good news there. So let's get into our next topic here. And this is fascinating. You know, we heard for years that Russia was interfering with our election years. And it always really bothered me because there was no evidence of it. And now we found out that those same people that we're walking out of congressional testimony meetings, you know, the secret hearings that were held by representative Schiff down in the basement, in a skiff and in a secure room that no one could, could listen in on. Well, now those transcripts have come out. And it turns out every last one of those people who were on [00:05:00] TV, the saying, uh, yeah, president of drama, he's colluding with the Russians. We have absolute proof of it. Including chairman Schiff himself. We have absolute proof of it and people are going to go to jail and everything else. In the, in the closed-door hearings, when they were sworn in and giving testimony, all of them denied that there was any evidence that the administration was colluding with Russia. So, what has Russia been doing? Well, they, I definitely have been trying to interfere in the elections, but they've been really mess something awful. One of their biggest ads on Facebook by the Russians was after the election was over. If you can believe that. Oh, what good did that do? Right. And really what they're trying to do is just stir things up and really confuse people. So they had ads supporting Trump. They had ads supporting [00:06:00] Clinton and just really kind of mixing it up. So that's what they're into, that's their game. And they had relatively little impact on the election. Then there are social media sites. And what we're going to talk about right now is a claim from Breitbart news. Now, if you don't know who Breitbart is, they are a conservative website that has reporters and just all kinds of great stuff. Breitbart himself passed some years back, but it has continued on and a few days after the 2016 election, and the internal meeting was leaked to Breitbart news. So there were top Google executives, including Sundar P Shai, Sergey, Brin, and Kent Walker. And they were just horrified that president Trump had [00:07:00] won and the top Google executives were comparing Trump voters to extremists and they discussed in the meeting, how they could make Trump's election and the populist movement, a blip in the history. Now. This is all documented. Now Google top executives on record saying, uh, yeah. We're, we're just, uh, yeah. Yeah. We're gonna make sure that Trump doesn't get reelected basically. So now it's four years later and Google is now deliberately working to interfere with the reelection of President Trump. And apparently there are several ways that Google's interfering. Now. This is all from Breitbart. I checked on some of these stats they do appear to be correct. Okay. But the, uh, the article call that I'm referring to here that you'll find on my website is focusing primarily [00:08:00] on political search bias. So if you're a business or you're a political campaign, how are we going to get the word out? What are you going to get the word out by putting up a website, maybe doing some advertising, trying to drive people to your website, all of the big political campaigns I'm doing that for a long time. Of course, smaller ones can't necessarily afford some of those things. So, what does Breitbart do? Well, they do the exact same thing. They have a website and they have run some ads in the past. I don't think they're running them right now for reasons. I think that will become apparent to you as we go through this a little bit more, but there are search results are King here. Now, remember Google owns the two top search engines in the world. Yeah. You heard it right. Google owns not just Google, [00:09:00] but YouTube. How much of the market do they have? When it comes to searches, it is absolutely amazing. It is absolutely huge. So they have a collective share between Google and yeah. YouTube of about nothing. 92% of all searches performed in the world. Can you believe that? Absolutely amazing. 92%. So if you want to go online and you want to find out about, well, let's say, vice president, Joe Biden, who's running for the Democrats this time around, you're going to get all kinds of results on Joe Biden. And if I look them up right now and just type in Joe Biden here into Google, I get an ad from old Joe Biden, official team Biden, and another one, Joe [00:10:00] Biden for president donate. Now, this is from the act blue website. I get some top stories. Uh, let's see, Washington post Republicans are still trying to frame Joe Biden with Ukraine, uh, political. Even further left than the Washington post-Biden, Latino community is diverse. Unlike the African American community K N surprisingly enough, Fox news Ben Shapiro Warren's Biden falling apart after bizarre interview. Maybe that's because they know my leanings here. Okay. And then they give a few different things on Twitter here for Biden, Joe Biden for president official campaign website. So you're going to come into this. You're going to look at it and say, Oh, there's a Wikipedia entry, which by the way, Wikipedia is political as well. Very left-wing. Uh, CNN is coming up here. New York Times. Facebook's uh, Joe [ 00:11:00] Biden's homepage on Facebook, the Hill, uh, political and another one. So that's the first page of web results for Joe Biden. When we get back, we're going to talk, talk more about this, and look at the statistics from Breitbart. When it comes to searches for Joe Biden. You're listening to Craig Peterson. We're talking about political influence here, interference in fact, in the election. We'll be right back in a minute. Make sure you sign up. Craig peterson.com/subscribe and stick around. You're listening to WGAN. --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553
Big tech companies have remade the workplace in recent years with creative offices designed to stimulate disruption. Now Google and Twitter are telling employees they can keep on working at home — indefinitely. What does that mean for the workplace as a hub of ideas and socializing?
And just like that, coronavirus smartphone tracking made it to the big leagues. The announcement today, April 10, that Apple and Google are stepping in to make sure this is done properly is the game-changer. There was some debate beforehand as to which tracking method would win out—network pings, GPS databases or dedicated apps. But now it’s clear that the Bluetooth system adopted in Singapore and then picked up in Europe and elsewhere looks likely to dominate. As I reported on April 7, relying on your smartphone to warn if you’ve risked possible infection is set to become a reality for most of us some time soon. There has been so much traction in such a short space of time, making it difficult to manage this properly, prompting Europe’s privacy watchdog to call for an international solution. Now Google and Apple are making sure that happens. https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2020/04/10/coronavirus-phone-tracking-apple-and-google-just-took-over-heres-what-that-means-for-you/#1842075988db StemFood https://inspire.stemcellholistics.com DONATE: https://paypal.me/RocciStucci Rocci Stucci: http://StreamingTalkRadio.com STEM CELLS (CODE: Rocci or Rocky for discount): https://www.stemlightcenter.com/ https://www.southernstem.com/ KickAss Beef Jerky (Code: meatball for 10% off) https://kickassbeefjerky.com Verve Forever (CBD): http://bit.ly/2QIDBJN Larson's Quality Jigs: https://www.larsonsqualityjigs.com/ My Patriot Supply - http://bit.ly/2U9eTDL
And just like that, coronavirus smartphone tracking made it to the big leagues. The announcement today, April 10, that Apple and Google are stepping in to make sure this is done properly is the game-changer. There was some debate beforehand as to which tracking method would win out—network pings, GPS databases or dedicated apps. But now it’s clear that the Bluetooth system adopted in Singapore and then picked up in Europe and elsewhere looks likely to dominate. As I reported on April 7, relying on your smartphone to warn if you’ve risked possible infection is set to become a reality for most of us some time soon. There has been so much traction in such a short space of time, making it difficult to manage this properly, prompting Europe’s privacy watchdog to call for an international solution. Now Google and Apple are making sure that happens. Link: https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2020/04/10/coronavirus-phone-tracking-apple-and-google-just-took-over-heres-what-that-means-for-you StemFood https://inspire.stemcellholistics.com DONATE: https://paypal.me/RocciStucci Rocci Stucci: http://StreamingTalkRadio.com STEM CELLS (CODE: Rocci or Rocky for discount): https://www.stemlightcenter.com/ https://www.southernstem.com/ KickAss Beef Jerky (Code: meatball for 10% off) https://kickassbeefjerky.com Verve Forever (CBD): http://bit.ly/2QIDBJN Larson's Quality Jigs: https://www.larsonsqualityjigs.com/ My Patriot Supply - http://bit.ly/2U9eTDL
Welcome! The Holidays are almost here -- Hannakah begins tonight and the middle of next week is Christmas - Boy this year has flown by. There is a lot of Tech in the News so let's get going! For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Related Articles: Signature Anti-Virus does not adequately protect you from today's Malware Lessons We Failed To Learn and Therefore Are Doomed To Repeat Business Computers Should Only Be Used For Business 5G - Not Ready For PrimeTime...Yet! Are You At Risk from Your Outsourced Software Provider Security - Knowing What You Have Is Essential Chrome 79 will continuously scan your passwords against public data breaches Getting the Perfect Tech Gift for Your Special "Techie" --- Automated Machine-Generated Transcript: Craig Peterson Hey, hello everybody, Craig Peters on here on w GAM and online at Craig peterson.com. Hopefully, you're able to join me on Wednesday mornings as well as I am on live with Ken and Matt, we always talk about the latest in technology and news and of course in security since that's primarily what I've been doing for the last 20 plus years here in the online world, man, just thinking back, it's, you know, I first got on the internet. Of course, it wasn't called that. But way back in the early 1980s. And I remember in fact when I first started doing networking professionally back in 75, and there was no worry about anything with you know, yeah, okay, we didn't want people to hack into so you'd have leased lines for your business and I was doing a bunch of work. from banks way back when right, one of my first jobs, and I was really enjoying it, I just learned a whole lot up to today. And we're going to cover this here because my gosh, it's it has changed. The Internet used to be very libertarian, everybody on it was very libertarian or conservative. Of course, that's because there were a whole ton of government contractors on the ARPANET as well as some colleges and universities. And you look at it today, and you think that really it's changed dramatically which it has. But I think the ratio is probably still about the same. You've got the silent majority that just doesn't say much about anything, right. And then you've got this hugely vocal minority who's just yelling and screaming all of the time. And then some of these tech companies that are trying to straddle somehow in the middle and not get everybody all upset with them. It's really a Much different world. But when we're talking about security, it is nothing at all like it used to be. You used to go online, and you'd have some fun you, you know, exchange emails with people, you'd share some files and some fun things. I remember this one whole thread on chases. That was just absolutely amazing. I think I came up this time of years while it was all these puns about different cheeses. It was a lot of fun. Now today, we've got a whole different internet out there and a great article by Robert Limos and he is looking at WatchGuard Technologies' latest quarterly report that was published just last week. And this network security firm found that the percentage of malware that successfully bypassed anti-virus scanners IT companies network gateways has increased Significantly, watch guard technology is saying that the amount of malware that signature-based antivirus software catches, has plummeted to about 50%. Now, I think their numbers are high because I think it's more like 20%. But they're getting specific here. They're talking about the amount of malware that comes into a network via an external source. In other words, people are accidentally pulling it from a website they visit, or perhaps it's been injected into their systems through someone who's visiting their network and using another vulnerability. But they're saying that antivirus software This is signature-based stuff, that's what you get from Norton Antivirus. That's what you get from, you know, the Symantec people from McAfee from all of these different antivirus companies out there. It is just horrific what's happening because of what's known as zero-day now you might have heard of this before you might not have but basically what zero-day malware is, is malware is nasty software and malware includes things like viruses, worms, Trojans, etc. It is this type of malicious software that has not been seen in the wild before. And what it used to me is they would, you know, some brilliant person who as my mother would say, Why don't they do something useful with their time, some brilliant PR person would come up with a piece of software, no one had ever seen a way of attacking that no one had ever seen before. And they would attack us and they would get through because there was no signature for it or the engines in the antivirus software just could not manage to handle. You know malware like this new piece of malware that just came out the problem we're having today is that the majority of malware act just like zero-day. So here's what happens with a signature-based attack. You can think of it just like your body's anti-virus system night than what you have in your body. And your body looks at something that it sees and says, Have I seen this before. And if it has seen it before, it knows to attack it before. It grows really big and kind of starts to get out of control, and then the body has to attack it after it's already really, you know, it's taken the beachhead if you will use a military term. I've been watching a lot of world war two movies lately, but it's taken that beachhead and now has control of the beach and is starting to get in further and it's very difficult to get out versus it recognizes it almost right away as a nasty virus. And goes ahead and end the Jackson You know you have more cells in inside your body inside your skin there are more cells that are foreign to your body then there are body cells when you start counting all the bacteria and everything that's in your system and on your skin. It's just incredible. So our body relies on a lot of these things. In order to keep us healthy, if we had no bacteria, you be in trouble. It's like you know if you go on antibiotics, which is an anti-bacterial, what does the doctor tell you to do? Well, you know, start eating yogurt and, and other things. Maybe take some Kombucha or various other things in order to try and stay healthy. Get that good bacteria going in your gut again. Well, when your body is attacked by something that hasn't seen before. That's what we would call in the computer world as a zero-day virus has never been seen by Your body or in the case of a computer's never been seen by this signature-based antivirus software. So what the bad guys have been doing is they figured out how Yes, indeed we are trying to block them. And they figured out that the majority of us are using these signature-based antivirus software packages. So they've designed the viruses and the malware to change itself every time. So no longer can the antivirus software, just look for certain signatures. So for instance, if you were always attacked by blonde-haired blue-eyed Norwegians, you might be cautious next time you see a blonde-haired blue-eyed Norwegian approaching towards you maybe with a baseball bat or whatever it is, they might have in their hands, right? So you get worried about it. What's the old expression? Once burn shame on me. You twice burn shame on me. Right? So we learn we respond based on how we've been attacked before. And so does the antivirus software now it can take them days or weeks, even months to get a signature out and get it all dispersed. You know, I'm talking about the old software, not the newest stuff, not the enterprise stuff we use for our business client. But the stuff that you use as a consumer and Heaven forbid if your business and you're using stuff like Norton Symantec, or McAfee or any of these other a VG antivirus software packages that are based on signatures because they just don't work. So what happens is they change themselves constantly. So it might be a Norwegian, but they dyed their hair they put on colored contact lenses, and they change their clothing. That's effectively what's happening with our computers nowadays. It may be that Viking that's approaching you but you Don't know it because it just doesn't look like they change everything about themselves at least most everything except the malicious intent and what they end up doing once they've got control of you. So watch guard is saying that this is a major change here. Now I'm going to quote directly from them. The big change is that more and more malware is becoming evasive. So the signature-based protection is no longer sufficient. There's nothing wrong with having it because it will catch 50% to two-thirds of the traffic but you definitely need something more. And that's why I've been recommending you guys do a few things you can do the free stuff. If you are not a business, you can go to my favorite right now. Open DNS and sign up for an account. They have some paid stuff. I think it's $20 a month per computer, for business to get the basic business service. It's free. For a regular home user, but it does not allow you to do any customization. And then there are a few packages in between open DNS. Now we use a commercial version of is an enterprise version called brawler. That's where the calling it now, but it's the highest level where we can, you know, watch it and maintain it. So that's step number one of what you need to do get open DNS so that if you do get one of these pieces of nastiness like ransomware, and it tries to call home, it can't get the phone number, right. He can't call home because there's another phone number. And I think that's a very important thing to do. It's free if you're home user, you might want to pay for the family plan would block certain scary sites and certain things you probably don't want your kids to see pornography and other things open dns.com and then the other thing to do, I had it in my big course this last year and that was how to harden Windows machine. It's rather involved. And I'll probably do a course early next year on this. But make sure you harden your machine, you're going to want to turn off stuff you don't need, you're going to want to make sure your firewall is set up properly to do the types of blocks that you need. You're going to want to make sure that you've got Microsoft's new malware software installed properly and running properly. So I'll have a course on this early next year that you can get. Because when you're talking about 50%, and I've seen numbers as low as 20% effectiveness with anti-virus software, you have to do something. Hey, if you're looking to buy some gifts, I'm going to be talking about some of them in today's show, including five g should you get that phone, you're listening to Craig Peterson on w GAN and online. Greg peterson.com. Stick around. We'll be right back. Craig Peterson Hey, are you thinking about buying a mobile phone? We're going to talk about that right now. You're listening to Craig Peterson on WGN and online at Craig Peterson calm. Now you've heard about 5g. You're probably using 4g LTE right now, on your phone and maybe mobile devices you may be your iPad or a tablet that you might have. Amazon has its Kindles. They do not, by the way, have 4g LTE on them, at least, for the most part, they're using some of the much older technology because frankly, all they're doing is sending books right? Which are pretty small. But it is that time of year that we're buying presents and there are only a few days left here for that holiday season, purchasing time. And we've got a lot of competition in the 5g world. So let's talk about what this is. And I'll give you some tips. But what is going on? 5g holds a lot of promise. Now I don't know if you remember I remember how shocked I was at how fast 4g was. I bought a phone. And it had 4g LTE in on it. It was an Android phone. And I vowed never again for so many reasons. And you've heard them on the show here before, but I had bought an Android phone, and I didn't have 4g up where I lived. And I drove down. We were heading down. I think it was till Pennsylvania take one of the kids to camp. And I was going through Valley and I noticed Wait a minute. There's a big city right there. I got 4g so I immediately went to speed test.net and I ran the test to see just how fast is for G. And I was just shocked. I was getting like 20 megabits a second, which was absolutely amazing. Because I've been using cell phones since they first came out. And you know, back in the day it was 14 for right? Oh, cell phone so fast. And now just to see 20 megabits was absolutely mind-blowing. But there are some major limitations to the 4g LTE network that we are using today. And those limitations are speed for one. And then the other thing is the number of devices that can be supported. And then the cost of the data and the data transfers. So 5g has been under development for quite a while. And this is not we're not going to get into Huawei and how they stole all their technology. It really appears to be from our friends up at Nortel and put the whole company out of business because of the spine that they did. And thank goodness finally, we've got a president who's trying to do something about it. But five G's real promise for us right now is that we will get two things will get a gigabit worth of data bandwidth, which means by the way, that we may not even bother with Wi-Fi in our homes if you live in an area that has full 4g or 5g coverage because it's just going to be just as fast as your cable is right now. Now the cable companies are probably going to try and compensate by lowering their prices and giving you faster and faster and faster internet. But for a lot of people, it's going to make economic sense because the cost isn't going to be high. And then the second thing that 5g is going to give us is the ability to have billions of devices connected to the 5g network. That means that everything from our cars Which really the next generation of cars self-driving cars really do need 5g so they can talk to each other. So they can continually upload data to the cloud to let all of the routing computers know about local weather conditions and, and road and where the potholes are and everything is just, it's going to be amazing, right? On the one hand, on the other hand, well, there might be some data leakage that we might not want. So the cars are going to have it but so is pretty much every device that you have. A couple of years ago, I talked about the new jacket, the new trucker jacket that Levi's hat out. And that trucker jacket was designed specifically to connect your phone to your phone and allow you to control your phone. So it had Bluetooth in it. You could touch these little wires that were embedded into the sleeve with your hand and use that to control your cell phone. You know, listen to music and Suddenly things are just kind of cool. So our clothes are going to have the internet in them. Our computers, of course, everything you buy a laptop, it's going to have 5g built-in, you're not going to need to have an external device anymore. Just list goes on and on and on. I've everything that's going to happen is going to be phenomenal. But it is not there yet. And Apple did not include 5g with the iPhone 11 this year, it will include it with the iPhone 12. That's coming out next year. And I saw a very, very good summary of what's probably going to be coming out of Apple in September next year. The guy that published it has been spot on with most everything that Apple was coming up with. And they are he's saying that they are going to be having 5G on the phone and it would make a lot of sense. But right now you can put in orders for the Samsung Galaxy Note 10 plus the one plus 70 that's There are other phones that are claimed to have 5g. But listen, everybody, it is still too early to buy a 5g phone. That is really my big tip when it comes to 5g right now, these networks have not fully standardized, they are not running, none of them are running full 5g anywhere except in a couple of major cities. The biggest problem with building out the 5g networks is that they need to have basically what we've come to know as cell towers everywhere. I mean, everywhere. These are little micro things that are not big towers like we have right now. You know, those fake trees that you see that are actually cell towers. Now, these are going to be small boxes and they're going to be on pretty much every street corner in the big cities. They'll be on the sides of buildings. They'll be on the sides of people's houses. Cell companies are going to pay us to put these on our homes so that we can now provide 5g to us and to our neighbors. And then there's going to be people who will be upset because of the radiation, even though it's non-ionizing, and it's not known to cause any harm, people will be upset about it. But these things are going to be everywhere. And that's because remember, I'm talking about one gigabit worth of bandwidth coming down to your device. Well, you cannot do gigabit service on lower frequency so they have moved to higher frequencies. The old UHF TV channels are pretty much I think they're all gone now throughout the country. And the FCC has bought back the bandwidth and has auctioned it off to all of these different companies that wanted to buy it. And it's just everything is going to change and with the high frequencies that they need in order to deliver these beads, they now have a problem and that is these higher frequencies do not penetrate glass. They don't penetrate walls very well at all. And they just don't penetrate metal at all basically, it's really bad. So it T Mobile has announced nationwide 5g available as of last Friday. That is pretty darn cool. It's got a 600 megahertz 5g network which is going to cover most of the country. That is pretty impressive. But the trade-off is it's using low band 5g which means it is good at providing slightly boosted speeds inside buildings and is available in a lot more places than what competitors offer 18 T and Verizon are offering the opposite. They have ultra-wideband networks right now superfast speeds, but very, very small footprints very small pocket, and you got to be standing near one of these towns This is kinda cool T Mobile is expecting with theirs. That actually is p mag is PC Magazine, you can expect a boost of about 15 megabits with their new 5g nationwide. And you might see 150 megabits if you have a new 5g phone or 700 megabits if you have 4g LTE. So not a huge right now, but just wait. Okay, wait until next summer next fall, when things are really going to start happening. All right, stick around. We got a lot to cover still we're going to be talking about some guests who will talk about some of the big hacks of the year. What does it mean to us? What can we do? I'm going to give you some tips and some tricks, what not to do on your work computer third party security risks and some lessons from the National Security Agency. You're getting it right here from Craig Peterson on WGA and Craig Peterson Hello, welcome back. Greg Peterson here on w GAN will be enjoying the show today. We got a lot to cover here. Awesome. Good news, some gift ideas. I've got a very cool article from Ars Technica, about nine gift ideas for the tech enthusiasts in your life. And frankly, I am totally into this. It gave me a couple of ideas in fact of things that I'm going to be getting for people. So you might want to stick around and listen to that for the enthusiast in your life. And we're going to start right now with something that I think pretty much everyone's can be interested in. If you are, you know an employee, if you work at a company, and you use computers, there is a couple of words of caution here. In this segment, Now, first of all, the business computers are owned by the business. And that's kind of where this Bring Your Own Device thing has gotten everything a little bit fuzzy, you know, so if you are using your phone, for instance, your smartphone, and you're using it for work purposes, it's not the businesses phone. So there's not a whole lot that they can say about your phone and how you use your phone. However, the business has an absolute right to its data, and kinking troll, frankly, how you use your phone for the business data, right? Well, how about the computers that are actually owned by the computer? What can you do legally? And what can't you do? What can the business tell you that you should do with it and what can they not tell you what to do? Well, the bottom line is it depends. It depends on the business and what their policies are. So overall, that's kind of the first place you should check your employee handbook. Now we've provided a lot of businesses with employee handbook sections on this and you can certainly get them from your attorney from your corporate attorney, or from HR if you're an employee there. But if you're using a work-issued computer, now that includes a desktop computer includes a laptop, it's going to include things like iPads, even phones, you've probably checked your personal email on that device, you might have stored some files on there. You, you might have used it for a number of different things. Now in many cases, it's not a big deal as far as the company is concerned. You know, if you've got kids right to have a life outside the office, so for you to be able to send an email to the BBC. Or to make a few phone calls because babysitting didn't show up or a kid is sick or whatever. Most employers say that's absolutely fine if I died personally would not work for an employer. That said, That's not fine. I think that's a very, very big deal a very bad thing, the right companies that are like that. But when you start to store your private files on the company's computer, or maybe the company's Dropbox or Google Drive, or you are maybe going down a rabbit hole, as you started with something on Cora or you started with something somewhere else, and all of a sudden before you know it, it's an hour two hours later, or heaven for Ben, you are going to Facebook or some of these other sites to poke around. Then things change. Now many of us use messenger on Facebook in order to keep in contact with family and friends. So is it legit to have a messenger window open? Is it legit to do that, right? Well, the bottom line is you probably shouldn't do any of this on a computer provided by your employer. You're not necessarily breaking the law, but you could get fired if it's against your company's policies. And also, you need to remember that employers can install software to monitor what you do on your work-issued laptop or desktop. Now we do not monitor employees and what they're doing on a computer, except to watch for things that the employees might be doing that might harm the business directly. In other words, if an employee's bringing in a file from home, we're going to check that file. If they're downloading something from the internet. We're going to check that download. We're going to check their emails are going to clean them up, we're going to stop the ransomware we're going to stop the zero-day attacks that I talked about earlier. As well as all of the known types of vulnerabilities. But remember that not everybody is like us, right? We are not interested in getting involved in the businesses Workplace Relations, a lawsuit that a business might want to bring to against an employee, right? That's not what we do. Although we've certainly been pulled into those before in the past. And you need to keep that in mind as an employee because they can monitor what you do, they might put keyloggers on there to see what you're typing, they might have a software that takes a random screenshot. We've done that before with these workers that are doing a specific project. So we outsource something, there might be a graphic or might be writing an article or something, and we're paying by the hour for that contractor to do the work. So as part of the agreement, we have software that sits on the computer and randomly takes screenshots So we have an idea that yes, indeed, they are actually working on our stuff. And it took them five hours and we spent it to take one hour. And it's because they're slow, not because they were out wandering the internet and doing research on the party that's going to be coming up next week at the office or at their home, right. So be very careful about it. And the type of surveillance and security software that's installed on the company computer is usually based on two things, one, how large the company is, and what kind of resources they have to dedicate to watching you, and what type of information you deal within your role. Now, almost all of our clients in fact, now I think of it I think all of our clients are in what are called regulated industries. So if you're a car dealer, you're in a regulated industry, because you have payment card information, you have financing information on all kinds of personal information. So that has to be monitored, right? We have doctors' offices that have HIPAA requirements personal again, personally identifiable information, healthcare information. So security numbers, phone numbers, email addresses, and under the new regulations that are coming out right now, January one in California and Massachusetts in the European Union right now, and they are working on similar regulations on the federal level, even an email address is considered to be personally identifiable information. Until the list goes on and on if you have government contracts, we have clients that have DFARs or Defense Department requirements or FINRA, which is for financial organizations, right? That's what we do. So all of these heavily regulated businesses need to have software that is going to detect that someone is trying to exfiltrate data, shut it down immediately. We need to know that employees are trying to steal information. And in many of these cases, we will work with the company if there are lawsuits and ensue because of the regulation or because of other reasons out there. So if you're working with a company like this, which is frankly, in this day and age, every company, right, what, what employer does not have security numbers of employees? How do you pay them if you don't have the social security numbers, those are all falling under the regulations nowadays. And unfortunately, a lot of businesses don't pay attention to that. So a very small company, they're probably not doing this. But larger companies are definitely going to be doing this. And there's a great little quote here from Jesse crims. He's an Information Security Analyst over the New York Times and he said Without supporting evidence at this scale, at scale, it's pretty rare that people are not doing heavy surveillance and tends to generate a lot of useless data, roped employee into liability issues and generally make the team that monitors the surveillance systems miserable. In other words, you probably don't want to know. And that's the standard we take. We make sure that all of the regulations are complied with, but whether or not someone's sending an email to the babysitter or whatever, it's just not worth it. We're worried about espionage. Okay, so there you go. There are some tips for you. And using business security or using a business computer at work. Stick around. We'll be right back. We got some more stuff to talk about, including some major updates to the Google Chrome browser. Should you be using it anymore. We'll be right back. Craig Peterson Hello everybody, Craig Peterson here. Welcome back. We're listening Of course on WGAN or online at Craig Peterson dot com, you'll find me on pretty much every podcasting platform out there. And if you really enjoy the show, you know one of the best ways to let me know is to share it. I love to see all of the people who are listening and getting feedback from everybody so send me a note as well. But here's where you can go if you would like to give me a five-star review, just go to Craig Peterson comm slash iTunes. And right there, you can give me a five-star review. on Apple, they're still kind of the 800-pound gorilla in this space. Rumor has it that the next release of iOS is going to have some major improvement to this whole podcasting stuff. Apple really kind of started it with the iPod, which is where it got the name from. I still have one of my original iPods kicking around. It was frankly, it was my favorite device for listening to music. Anyhow, let's talk a little bit about some of the browser issues that are out there right now. Many people are concerned about the web browsers you're using. We know we're being monitored. We know we're being watched right now, by these big companies. Google makes its money by what? By selling our information. Facebook's the same way. Now Google is going to sell us advertising, and so is Facebook. And frankly, I would rather know about cars and see advertisements for cars. When it is the time I'm looking to buy a car right? And I'm never going to buy a lot of from Russia, right? So why would I want to see ads for that? So I am Pro, the monitoring in that space. Right. I, you know, you kind of go back and forth about that. You look at what President Obama's team did back when he was running for election the first time where they grabbed all of Facebook's data about everyone. And then they used highly targeted advertising. And then you saw what happened eight years later with President Trump and while the Cambridge Analytica scandal that was Child's Play compared to what President Obama's team did, but somehow President Obama's team didn't get in trouble for it. But President Trump's team certainly did even though Trump's don't get into that right now. But the browsers that we're using are tracking us. And remember, again, this old adage, it's old now, right? It's relatively new frankly. But if you do not pay for service, the odds are you are the product. And Google certainly considers that. And so does Facebook, that you are the product. So when you're looking at browsers, what should you be using the biggest browser out there right now the one that any software developers going to aim at is the Google Chrome browser. Because that's what most people use. It is really a great browser. From a functionality standpoint, people are using Google's Of course search engine, which has been very, very good here over the years. They, they've just done some wonderful things. And Google has added more and more features to their browser. Now, people ask me constantly, what is it that I use? What is it that I recommend? Well, I can tell you that Craig recommends that you don't use the Chrome browser when you can avoid it. Now I do use Chrome. When I am on a website, and I'm trying to do something and one of these other browsers doesn't work quite right. I go over to Chrome because it's not the worst thing in the world. It's not as though it has a direct backdoor into Russia, at least not that we're aware of, or into the CIA or the NSA. We know that Google doesn't like to cooperate with the US military, in some of its research projects, but Google also loves to cooperate with China and has three artificial intelligence labs in China. So it's giving China our next generation of computing technology for free but won't share it with our government. Yeah. Well, anyway, I guess I do get kind of political sometimes on the show. Google's Chrome version 79 just came up with a new feature. Now you know, when it comes to password, That I highly recommend you use some software called one password. They have some free stuff, they have some paid offerings. And what one password does is it keeps all of your passwords keeps them secure. You only have to remember one password, which is, frankly a huge win. And it was great in the business environment where you can set up vaults of passwords so that you know HR can have their own vault and this software development teams can all have their own vaults, and you can have your own personal vault, and it'll create passwords for you that are highly secure, that conform to the requirements for different websites and, and you can share them within vaults. There are just all kinds of wonderful things that you can do using one password. And then if you've been around a while, a couple of years ago, you know I offered a service that we were doing internally. We did this for free for over 1000 People, but we double-checked their password to see if not passwords but email address to see if their email addresses and passwords are out on the dark web. And you know, we checked it at least a month and generated reports for people. And that might be something we decided to do in the future. Well, there is a huge database out there that we've talked about on the show before. Google has now adopted in its Chrome browser. So Chrome 79 has what they're calling as a password checkup extension. So that was what how it all started. It was for desktop versions of Chrome, and it audited your passwords when you entered them, and took a look at them to see if those passwords were known to have been breached. Now, it's not necessarily that your account was breached, although it might have been it the password in the Heres why. Here's why they looked at the password itself. What the bad guys are doing nowadays is they are comparing your password against millions, hundreds of millions, in fact, billions of known passwords that people have used. And they start with the most common passwords and then work their way out from there. So if you're using a password that has been known to been breached in the past, it isn't something you should use. So I thought that was great. They had this password checkout extension. So now what they've done is they've integrated into every Google account and on-demand audit that you can run on all of your saved passwords. And in version 79. Google has a password checkout integrated into both the desktop and mobile versions of Chrome. So what will happen now is that if you are using Chrome to save your passwords, which I do not do as a rule, except for a few accounts I don't really care about because again, I'm using one password to keep my passwords and can keep them all straight? So it is built-in now. And anytime you enter in a password, it's going to check to see if that password has been breached anywhere online. Google is calling this private set intersection, which means you don't get to see Google's list of bad credentials. And Google doesn't get to learn your credentials. But the two can be compared four matches and basically what it's doing is it's doing mild encryption on your password and comparing it against this known setup password. So it's very, very good to do. One password has this feature already built-in password will warn you if I website that you're going to has been known to have been compromised. And Google's figuring here, that since it has a big encrypted database of all your passwords, I might as well compare against, compare them against this 4 billion strong public list of compromised usernames and passwords. They've been exposed in all kinds of security breaches over the years. And little on little later on today, we're going to talk about the top half dozen or so big security breaches, what caused them and then you might want to pay attention to to see if your information was exposed. But the main reason I like to talk about this stuff is so that you can look at your position, you know, at home or at work and ask yourself, hey, listen, there is this breach something that would have worked against us, right? I think it's very, very good. So Here we go. I'm not going to get any details here on what exactly what Google is doing and how they're doing it. If you are a chrome fan, you might want to use it. So let's talk about what the alternatives to Chrome or opera is a big one. And I have heard rumors that the Opera browser, which is kind of my primary browser, I have another one will tell you about in just a second, but opera very fast. It's designed to be secure. It also blocks a lot of spyware out there. Very good. But the rumors are that it is now in the hands of the Chinese government apparently owns it. I'm not sure that's entirely true. But, you know, it's up to you whether you want to take any risks. I'll tell you also about an extension I use in all of my browsers, which makes it much more secure much safer for me. We'll probably have to wait until after the top of the hour to get into that, but I'll tell about that. So what do I use the most? And what do I trust the most? Well, Netscape, the Netscape browser. Mozilla is the next one that I use opera is number one, at least for the time being. I use Firefox as well. Both of them do a lot of blocking, oh, I have a lot of privacy enhancements. Those are the two I use the most. And then I also use Apple Safari. Apple, again, is not selling your information as Google does. So it's considered to be a little bit safer. So far, we haven't known Apple to really leak information. They've been relatively safe, they certainly aren't selling it to anyone. And that's what I use. And then if I have to all fall back to Google Now, if I wanted to be extra safe online, there is another browser out there that I do like, and it's called epic EP, I see the epic browser. And it is actually based on Google's Chrome browser underneath the hood, just as Microsoft's browser is based on Google's Chrome browser. And Google is actually using a base form from Apple's Safari browser, which is kind of interesting. They all share code nowadays. But the epic browser is the browser if you absolutely want to keep your data safe. It even has a built-in privacy VPN. So check it out as well. When we come back, I'll give you a little clue here. A couple of tips on what you can do to keep every browser just a little bit safer. We'll get into some gift ideas and more. So stick around you're listening to Craig Peterson on WGAN and online at Craig Peterson dot com. Stick around. We'll be right back. Craig Peterson Hello, everybody, Craig Peterson here. Welcome back and listening to me on WG A in an online, Craig peterson.com. Hey, if you are a new listener, I just want to let you know a little bit about my background I've been helping to develop the internet, they in fact, just called a pie in the air you the other day, which is kind of interesting to think about. But yes, indeed, I designed and made some of the very first routers and some of the very first firewalls and load balancers and stuff back in the day. Let me tell you back in the day, we had to write these things from scratch because they just didn't exist as commercial products. And, you know, there's a lot of products I could have sold over the years but I'm just wasn't that kind of guy. Anyhow, so now I do a lot of cybersecurity for businesses, government agencies, most particularly really, for anybody in a regulated business, which today in this day and age means any business because we are all regulators I talked about in the last segment. Well, we have some gift ideas. And let me just start with one here. And then we'll get into some more articles from this week. We've we're going to be talking about the NSA here and what their top recommendation is for businesses. But you know, I am a techie guy, and I love tech and tech gifts and it's all just a pretty darn cool thing. When you get right down to it, just like, you know, I just love playing with this stuff. I guess that's the way to put it. And using it and making my life a little easier and faster, more efficient, effective, etc. But I want to talk about the high-end tech gifts that you might want to give, and you might want to give for yourself. In fact, that's exactly what I'm doing with one of these this year. Well, if you have somebody who's a gaming enthusiast, there are so many things out there that you can get for them. There's this one particular mouse that is very highly rated for gamers. It's called the razor Viper. It has some very, very fast, maneuverability stuff built in. Because of course, when you're playing some of these video games interactive, you need to be able to move very quickly so anyhow, we'll leave it at that because I am not a game type person. I used to play some, some games way back when you're in a dungeon with twisty mages, mazes, remember right how things started. But let's get into this. Now. This is one of the things I think would be a great gift for almost anyone, it's great for a computer that has the USBC which is the newest version of the USB cable. It is what the new Mac books come with the new max do as well. It's the next generation of the high-speed stuff that the last generation max had. But it also works with regular USB cable has a little adapter that you can use with it. It's called SanDisk extreme portable SSD. This thing is very, very nice. It's a good option for data you need to have with you wherever you go. It's surprisingly small. It is rated for the extremely high shock it's like 500 G's or something crazy like that. And it will withstand water and dust as well as vibration. You can drop it from six feet in the air without suffering any damage at all. This thing is amazing. And right now it is half price. Over on Amazon. Just look it up there. SanDisk is the name of the company S-A-N-D-I-S-K, it's their extreme portable SSD fits in the palm of your hand that you're going to love this. It's available in 250 gig 500 gig one terabyte and two terabytes now, I would not get the 250 gig, not that it's too small. But for an extra $10 you double your space up to 500 gig. Now when you go up to the one terabyte, which again is twice the space, it's twice the cost. So the one terabyte you're gonna have to ask yourself what makes sense and two terabyte options. But this thing is so fast, or what I love this for is to have different virtual machines on it. It's the one I use when I am doing a demo or for when I need to do a client-side install. I can have every version of Windows on my need to use Mac OS all the different versions of that a few versions of Linux all right there on the drive. It's very very convenient. And very, very fast you're going to love this thing. In fact, that's one of the fastest portable storage solutions that has ever been tested. It's kind of similar you know you can get Samsung T five SSD, they have very good SSDs. Okay, don't get me wrong here. The Samsung t five is more affordable but the SanDisk extreme SSD is better. Now I got to tell you that the cost right now on Amazon for this portable drive, there's no moving parts in it. As I said it fits in the palm of your hand. The cost on that is lower on Amazon right now. It's half price is lower than I can buy it from my distributors at So just to give you an idea of what a great value that is, coming up, we're going to talk about, I think the coolest gift you can give to somebody that is truly a hobbyist in the computer world, you're going to love it. And then if you are that person when you go to someone's house for Hanukkah, Thanksgiving, Christmas birthdays, whatever it is, and they say, hey, Craig, come over here for a second. my computer's not working right can you have a look at it will will tell you about the best gift for somebody like that and maybe some need to get get for yourself as well. So I'm going to talk right now about some of the biggest security breaches we'll go over one and then we'll get to some others little later on in this our last hour. And by the way, if you want to listen to the whole show, my podcast and everything. You can just go to Craig Peterson comm slash iTunes or slash tune in if you'd like to listen to it. On tune in or slash pretty much anything well actually if you type in slash pretty much everything you need an error page right? But you'll find me Craig Peters on on most of the major podcast sites that are out there by just going to Craig Peterson comm slash, whatever it is like Sasha Hart or slash SoundCloud or slash tune in, etc, etc. Well, data aggregators are big targets that are out there and who is a data aggregator? Well, let me tell you about what happened when I was at a wedding last week I was staying with my sister in law my wife and I, and there we got home and there was a card in the door and there's from an insurance company members like all state or something and, and it asked for one of my sisters in law, who had been living in that house to call so we thought okay, well, it's just a hoax thing. You know, they're they're trying to sell some insurance or something. So we just ignore that fact, I think we just threw the card in the trash. Well, the next night, we were sitting there at home and there's a knock at the door. And it's the same insurance agent. And she wants to talk to my deceased sister in law. And we get into this a little bit more and talking and talking to her trying to figure out what, what, what, why, what's going on. It turns out that someone was involved in a fatal car accident. And that person gave my deceased sister in-law's identity as her own. Yes, indeed, the dead are, quite frequently in fact, a victim of identity theft. Now we know about the dead voting right particularly in Chicago, and but in other places around the country. Well, in this case, apparently according to the report - she had been involved in a fatal car wreck about six months after she had died, and someone was dead. Obviously, this was a case of mistaken identity, but the insurance lady who's at the door, and she's obviously, some sort of an investigator used one of these skip trace databases in case you're not familiar with those. These are databases that are put together by data aggregators and data aggregators are these companies that suck up data from every public source they possibly can. And even some paid sources. And it includes records from credit card companies, and you name it, they pull it all together, they try and make heads or tails of it. So she had this report from a data aggregator and listed my long-deceased father in law's name is part of this and, and my kids, couple of my kids that had at one point staying for a visit with their grandmother, for a few months, while going to school, etc. and include my wife's name, my name just kind of went on and on. They got a lot of data wrong. And that's what I found to typically 25 to 50%, sometimes even more the data they have is incorrect. But enough of it was correct that she could kind of start piecing things together. And she was able to figure out that this was insurance fraud. Well, these data aggregators have massive databases as frankly, you might imagine. And they have these databases online. Yeah, you know where I'm going. This was a Mongo DB Mongo database, which is used, it's kind of it's called NO SEQUEL. It's an unformatted database. It's perfect for these data aggregators, and a company called verifications.io. That provided email verification services, had a Mongo database Continued over 800 million records publicly accessible to anyone in the world with an internet connection. And they had four sets of data. They'd had email addresses, dates of birth, phone numbers, physical addresses, employer information, IP addresses, business leads and other information. Not everything was sensitive. So when we get back we'll talk about what lessons should be learned what you can pick up from this a couple of tips for you. If you are a business person of any sort, or if you have data that might be in one of these databases, so we'll talk about these big verifications Mongo DB breach from this year and some more gift ideas right area listening to Craig Peters on online and here on WGAN terrestrial radio. Craig Peterson Hello everybody Greg Peterson back here on WG and online at Craig peterson.com. If you enjoy my show, by all means, make sure you subscribe to the podcast. Pretty much everything that I do goes up there my Wednesday mornings with Matt and can during their drive time show Wednesday morning that goes up there Other appearances go up there the whole radio show goes up there as well. Craig Peters on comm slash iTunes and do leave me a review if you wouldn't mind. You know those five-star reviews help get the message out. And we just passed another hundred thousand downloads, which is kind of cool. I appreciate it. Every one of you guys for listening. We try and get as much information as we can. So let's get back to our Well actually, you know There's something I forgot to button up from the last hour. Let's get to that. And then we'll get to some, some gifts and some more risks and what the NSA is saying right now, I had been talking earlier in the show about web browsers, and which browsers you should be using, which ones I recommend, then, you know, if you missed all of that, again, you will find it at Craig peterson.com, slash iTunes, you can listen to the whole thing right there. But I was talking a little bit about a plugin that I use. This is a plugin that works with pretty much any browser out there and works differently than any plugin that you might have been familiar with before. This is from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Now I've had my disagreements with them in the past. Overall, I agree with a lot of what they're doing. But this is a plugin that goes into Chrome Opera or Firefox or pretty much anything that is called Privacy Badger Privacy Badger. So think about badgers if you know these things, they you'll find them a lot over in England, but they're over here too. They burrow underneath hedges and they like to live in the ground. And they are mean they will fight anything way bigger than they are. They don't care. They're going to win because they go all in. Well, that's what this is all about Privacy Badger. So I am on a website. Right now I'm looking at my browser and the Privacy Badger plugin, and it's got a nine on it right now. So what that means is that Privacy Badger detected nine potential trackers on this web page that I'm on right now. And it has sliders for them up there and it says you shouldn't need to adjust the sliders unless something is broken. So what Privacy Badger does is it watches you As you go to different websites, it looks at the cookies that are placed on your browser from these websites and determines, Hey, wait a minute. Now, this is a cross-site tracker. This is another type of tracker that we probably don't want to have. So it's showing them all to me. So here we go. Here's what I have right now on this website that I'm on. And the website is otter in case you don't use otter it is phenomenal transcription service, very inexpensive. 600 minutes for free every month. otter.ai but it turns out otter is using some tracker. So the first tracker showing me that Privacy Badger blocked is graph.facebook.com. So this is Facebook gathering data about me what I do where I go, the next one that's marked yellow, which is it has three different indications here on the slider. One is a blocks it entire The next one is that it could block cookies and then the far right one is to allow a domain to do it. So graph.facebook.com was blocked automatically static.facebook.com was allowed the regular facebook.com was allowed Google Analytics completely blocked API's Google com was allowed stripe checkout was allowed stripe as a payment service. JavaScript on stripe com was allowed and stripe network usually m dot means it's a mobile site. So that was blocked and Q dot stripe com was allowed but those are tagged the one these all of the ones I mentioned that were tagged, are considered to caution level. So by adding Privacy Badger as a plugin to any of your browsers Basically is going to stop sites from tracking you and it does a very good job. It learns as you go. It is not something that is prefixed with I'm going to block this site or that site. It is absolutely dynamic. I really, really like it. So check that out. This is kind of a flashback, as I said to an earlier segment where I was talking about which browser to use, what the considerations are. And this will work with any of them out there. So just do a search for Privacy Badger, it should come up near the top of your DuckDuckGo search. And it's five the Electronic Frontier Foundation e FF, check it out online. Okay, so now let's get into gifts again. I mentioned my top gift recommendation in the last segment. This one is for total geeks. Now we are using this for actually keeping timing tracking It's called raspberry pi. So we have a special card that goes along with this that has a GPS antenna attached to it and GPS readers so that we can track the satellites in the sky. We use the timing that they provide us with, we do some advertising. So that one of the things we do for our clients is we have to track their logs and keep real detailed records on their logs. We need to know exactly when Did something happen? So that if after the fact heaven forbid, someone gets in, some piece of malware gets in when did it come in? Where did it go? What did it do, right? Because you want to be able to know after the fact Well, what does it get access to? unlike so many of these companies that have no idea what they lost? In fact, most businesses don't even know until six months later that they were even the hack versus what the best in the biz are doing right now is about six hours, not just to detected but to remediation, which is where we sit well, usually within that six-hour time frame. Well, this is called a Raspberry Pi. And they've got the newest version of Raspberry Pi four. This is a small Linux computer. So if anybody that you know likes to hack together science projects or you know, do a little bit of experimenting, this is phenomenal, absolutely phenomenal. You can turn it into a retro game console, it'll play a lot of these old video games. A smart speaker that's a DIY thing. You can build it into your Legos to make a real fancy remote-controlled car. Anything your hobbyist mind comes into mind. This is phenomenal. You can for 100 less than 100 bucks, you can get a complete kit. Okay? The Raspberry Pi fours a lot faster and the older Raspberry Pi three Model B plus faster CPU you can put up to four gigs of ram in this thing. It is a phenomenal USB 3.0 port. So if you are or you know somebody that's really into DIY hobbies, this is the way to go. Okay? The Raspberry Pi four does get closer to your general and genuine desktop PC performance. But it's not really there yet. It's not one running Windows, it does run Linux, as I mentioned. And you can write basic programs for it, which is a programming language Python. If you have a kid that wants to learn Python, this might be a nice way for them to learn because they can kind of hack it together but it's just it's basically just a motherboard, you're gonna have to put it in a case by a case forward, you're gonna have to put a keyboard on it. A mouse, you have to put a display on it, okay, all kinds of stuff, but you can get just the basic Raspberry Pi four For someone that that really, really is a total hacker here, for like 4050 bucks, it's absolutely amazing. Okay, plenty of power for your money. Very versatile. In fact, it's more versatile in many ways than your Windows PC is. And for the budding engineer in your life, they will love you for it. So stick around, we're going to come back, I've got some more ideas for tech gifts that you might like. And we're going to talk about a couple more big hacks this year, and what it means to you. We've got third party security risks, the NSA has some advice for business and we'll tell you about that too. When we get back, you're listening to Craig Peterson right here on w GAN and online at Craig Peter song.com. That's Peterson with an O. Stick around because we'll be right back. Craig Peterson Hello, everybody, welcome back, Craig Peters on here on WGAN. And we're talking about stuff we usually talk about, you know, some of the security things, some of the latest technology that's out there. We're also doing a bit of a recap here some great gift ideas for the techie people in your life, even frankly, some of the non-techie people. And the security side, which is, I think, very important, can't talk enough about that. Because it could destroy your company, it could ruin that, frankly, the rest of your life could be a bit of misery, depending on what the bad guys do to you. Oh, it's absolutely crazy. told the story a little earlier of what happened with my deceased sister in law's identity, and how it was used in a fatal car accident and it's just it's amazing what some of these people are. Doing nowadays. And by the way, one of the most valuable segments of our population. We are know already about the retired people, the older people, right, who might be a little confused, hopefully, have some assets. But one of the most valuable identities out there online is that they have a child because their social security number and their identity are going to be very useful for at least a decade, if not longer because those kids probably not going to use it until they get their first job. So keep that in mind as well. Well, I want to get into these two things before the last half hour, so we'll cover these fairly quickly. But the big one, and that is waking up to third party security risks. Now one of the big attacks this year was Capital One and that's on my list of the ones I wanted to talk about today. They had personal information blog into overall hundred million US individuals and 6 million Canadian residents. Now, this was exposed. And when a former employee at Amazon Web Services inappropriately accessed the data, we could get into all of the real details behind this but the compromised information included names addresses, dates of birth, credit scores, payment history, contact information, and other information on people who had applied for Capital One credit card dating back to 2005. also exposed where the social security numbers of 140,000 individuals and bank account data blogging belonging to 80,000 secured credit card customers. So think about this for a little minute here. How many of us are using a service like Amazon Web Services, how many of us are relying on cloud services to keep our information safe? Right? Frankly, that's most of us, isn't it? And when you're talking about somebody like Amazon Web Services, or now there's Microsoft Azure, those are kind of the two really big players. IBM also has its cloud online that they sell access to. Most businesses look at it as a way to save money. Most businesses consider, hey, I don't need to keep track of the security, because my vendor is keeping track of it for me. And what we found out is, that's not true. So the lessons learned here. We'll start with that here from Capital One is that cloud service may be attractive because it's cheaper than doing it yourself. And that's particularly true, frankly, throughout the whole range, but it's particularly true for large businesses, but even for small business. businesses, can you really afford the right kind of server? Now I know a lot of small businesses go to the local staples store and buy a computer and call it a server, right? And maybe $800,000 later, they're out of there. Whereas a real server that's going to be really reliable is going to last years, you should be looking at more like 15 to $20,000 for. So businesses say, well, I'll just do it in the cloud. I'll use Amazon Web Services for this and we'll hire a consultant who's going to help us set it up. And we're going to use maybe Dropbox for that and maybe office 365 for this and now all of a sudden, I'm safe. Well, you're not. And companies, you guys are putting your data at risk, because you haven't adopted a security infrastructure, with the vigor that you need to apply. It should be at least as good as what You're using for your on-premise stuff. But you know what so many SMEs aren't even doing it right for on-premise stuff. Okay? So you're ending up with all of the financial cost of the penalties that you rack up, and the lawsuit and the cost of those lawsuits, which will vastly outweigh any it savings that you might have down the road. So keep that in mind. And that's what Capital One just learned this year. The Why? Because we're not taking third party security risk to heart Ponemon Institute did a study here 2018 founded 60% of customers surveyed, had suffered a data breach caused by third parties or vendors in the last 12 months. So what's causing it? Well, these applications are being built very different than they were a decade ago. They are online. They're using APIs. And they are not considering the security risks. So all services are connecting internally and externally via these APIs, popular finance websites load on your browser mobile apps, you can see the results. Dozens of third party services, okay, web apps, middleware, other code. This is a real problem. So, protect your own infrastructure, Step number one. Step number two demanded the others protect their infrastructure, okay. And trust yet verify. What we do is we wrap special security software around all of these third party infrastructure Software-as-a-Service sites that are out there, okay. So be very, very careful and you have to test even more for third party sites and you know, businesses just aren't testing as much as they should. So there you go. There's a couple of tips here three tips on what to do. When you are talking about third party security risk, and that is with all of these guys, Okay, number one, make sure your infrastructure is protected that you have the right kinds of firewalls and you have the right kind of malware treatment that's in place. All the other security controls, make sure they're configured right? If you're using something like Amazon Web Services, or Sure, or office 365, make sure you have the right settings. You know, it's difficult I get it, Microsoft has over 10,000 skews 10,000 products that are available in they're all software and services. There are dozens and dozens just for office 365 based systems. So make sure you have the right stuff. Make sure that they have proper compliance and certifications. And remember too that the certifications they have just represented a point in time. Do they still have the right kind of security? And because we are running our technology in this new type of infrastructure, make sure, frankly, that we keep track of everything because a breach can happen quickly do millions of dollars of damages right away. And 20% of businesses will file for bankruptcy the very next day. All right, well, let's talk about another gift here real quick before we go to a quick break. And this is for those of us that we go to a family event, and we go anywhere, and it's a Craig come over here for a minute, I need some help and you go over there and of course, it's questions and problems about their computers. So here's what I recommend. Get that person in your life if they're fixing the computer for that for you. I fix it. Great site painting Go online to find out how to fix physical problems. But they have something called the I fix it pro tech tool kit. I have one of these my kids have one of these. My technicians in my business have one of these. It's a 64-bit driver set that has all these weird types of sockets and everything on them. Because these parts and the computers that have the special locking screws and everything else, you need this Okay, the I fix it pro tech tool kit. Stick around. We'll be back with a wrap up for today's show. And we'll talk a little bit more about some gifts right here. You're listening to Craig Peterson on w GN. And the course online Craig Peterson calm. Stick around because we'll be right back. Craig Peterson Hello everybody Craig Peterson here WGAN and online at, of course, Craig Peterson dot com. Hope you've enjoyed the show today we have covered a lot of different things we talked about third party security risks for businesses which web browser you should be using. If you want to keep safe and some of the updates that Chrome has from Google, they'll keep you safer online. What not to do on your work computer. Why it's still too early to buy a 5g phone and signature antivirus and how it is at best catching 50% of the malware out there. It's getting really, really bad. And we've talked a little bit about some of the top breaches this year and there are some pretty scary Ones out there. But how does it apply to you? And how does it apply to your business as well? And we got one more that was brought up on the website at Craig Peterson calm, you can see all of these up there, a little bit of mind commentary and links to other articles online. But this is about the NSA and what the NSA, the National Security Agency is saying that we should be doing as businesses, but this applies 100% as well, to you as an individual. And the basics are to focus on your assets. And this is a very, very big deal. W
Nick D'Amelio, Director of CRM at Slice, shares his passion for CRM and pizza! He also gives us look under Slice's martech hood to see how they're creating interactive emails with Google AMP. Search functionality, feedback forms, browsing… all within an email!! TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:18] PJ Bruno: Hello again. Welcome back to Braze For Impact, your MarTech Industry discuss digest. So thrilled to have with me today Gurbir Singh, Product Manager and good friend here at Braze. How are you doing Gurbir? [0:00:31] Gurbir Singh: Good. How good of a friend are we? You still don't play video games with me, so. [0:00:35] PJ Bruno: That's true. Also, he's my Rocket League compatriot that I haven't been able to get a game with yet, but now apparently he's a higher level and I'm a little nervous. To my right, your left, I have with me Nick D'Amelio, client of ours, Senior Manager at CRM at Slice. Nick, how are you? [0:00:56] Nick D'Amelio: What's up guys? It's very great to be here. Beautiful new Braze office,. Very impressive. I need to get in on this Rocket League situation. [0:01:04] PJ Bruno: Oh man. [0:01:05] Nick D'Amelio: If anyone's ever done for some Smash Brothers, I'm definitely the guy to go to. [0:01:08] PJ Bruno: Wow, wow. [0:01:09] Gurbir Singh: You know what? Forget the podcast. [0:01:11] PJ Bruno: We're done. So for all you listeners today, our focus is Google AMP. AMP is accelerated mobile pages. So we're going to talk a little bit about what that means, what that is, how it affects email, and Nick was willing to give us some of his time to show us how he's using it at Slice. So email has been largely the same for the past 40 years or so. People constantly talk about the decline or death of email, but it's still the standard for customer communication. But in the past few years, email has experienced a big level up in terms of interactivity, and no surprise, one of the leading trailblazers is Google as they released Google AMP. Gurbir, you're our resident expert with Google AMP. Can you tell us a little bit about what this is, how it came about? [0:01:59] Gurbir Singh: Yeah. First of all, I hate that I'm the resident expert. I hope I'm not marked that way. But ... [0:02:07] PJ Bruno: You mean a lot more to me than that. You're not ... [0:02:08] Gurbir Singh: Thank you. [0:02:12] PJ Bruno: ... Just an SME. [0:02:12] Gurbir Singh: So Google AMP, as you said, is the accelerated mobile pages. So Google launched this initiative more than five, six years ago. The goal was to have mobile pages render faster, right? So websites that are being shown on a mobile device, just render it faster. One of the big things about this particular initiative was to get rid of JavaScript because JavaScript was viewed as bloat on a website. It caused a lot of loading issues and a lot of server to server exchange of data. So that's how AMP kind of started. Then from there, very recently, I would say in the last two years, Google basically created a AMP for email version of this. So it takes a subset of this overall project. This is all Opensource now and it creates an email version of this. A lot of the functionality that you would normally want to do an email, a lot of that interactivity, which people would do around, that they would want for JavaScript reasons, they now can leverage AMP HTML to do this, right? So that's how AMP email got to be born. Google basically pioneered this. They led the way and made it Opensource, so huge community behind this. Now you're seeing other vendors kind of attach themselves and say, "We also want to support this. This is great." We have a lot of clients who are super excited about it and they see the power that this can have. [0:03:43] PJ Bruno: So the impetus for AMP pages was more about size, I guess, right? But for email it's less about size or ... [0:03:52] Gurbir Singh: It still is about size. So as the mobile device came and people started using more and more of it, it became like, okay, anything I load on a device, the faster it is, the less bloated it is, the better it's going to work on my devices. So we live in a great country where we have fast access to internet, some really powerful phones, but if you think about globally, that's not always true, right? People still have older phones, older 3G systems that they connect to, so Google's attempt was to say I want information spread throughout the world. That's their mission and they want to make sure that can happen regardless of where you are. So AMP was kind of born through their mission statement and said I want to make sure that people can figure out how to get websites loaded on an older phone, things like that. So from their email kind of benefits because email can have a lot more information shown in it, but using this more lightweight newer technology so you can actually send in things like Java forms or carousels and you can have all this interactive cool features that email marketers always wanted to do, but have always been fearful for because it requires a lot more coding, a lot more specialized skills. Now Google's like here's a template. Here's basic components that you can use. Here, just do it. It's kind of cool. [0:05:13] PJ Bruno: Very cool. Also just considering like so many times a blocker is not having the engineering resources to get something done, just putting the power in a marketer's hand, I think it's a beautiful thing. Nick, any hot takes on Google AMP as far as the origin story that Gurbir just gave us? Is it total BS or is it ... [0:05:34] Nick D'Amelio: Lies and forgery, all of it. Yeah. No, 100% correct. Yeah. I only really started paying attention to it when it was announced for email since that's kind of my specialty. But yeah, everything Gurbir said, totally correct. I'm really excited about the speed benefits. You have about maybe three seconds of an email loading before a user just says, "Oh, this is blank. I'm going to close out, delete it." Also the functionality is just going to be incredible. It's a total step change in email. [0:06:08] PJ Bruno: Nick, let's hear a little bit more about your story before we jump into all the facets of Google AMP and the functionality. So you're pretty excited about interactive email obviously. [0:06:18] Nick D'Amelio: Yep. [0:06:19] PJ Bruno: And I read on your LinkedIn passion for CRM and pizza, and I've learned now that you are also a pizza maker. [0:06:28] Nick D'Amelio: That is correct. Yeah. So that actually came before my time at Slice and I think resulted in my time at Slice, but always been a big chef, but pizza I developed a serious love for. I've got a ton of equipment in my apartment. I have a baking steel, which is kind of like an enhanced version of a baking stone. I once hacked my oven to get to temperatures that probably were not safe for a Weehawken, New Jersey apartment. [0:06:58] PJ Bruno: Hacked the oven. [0:06:58] Nick D'Amelio: Yeah, very irresponsible, but all in the name of good pizza. Yeah, and I've always just been really passionate about kind of the craft and artisianry of pizza making. [0:07:08] PJ Bruno: So a passion for CRM, a passion for making pizza, and you play Smash Brothers. Are you single? [0:07:16] Nick D'Amelio: No. [0:07:18] PJ Bruno: See there's the rub. [0:07:19] Nick D'Amelio: I have a very wonderful girlfriend. [0:07:19] PJ Bruno: There is the rub. [0:07:20] Nick D'Amelio: There you go. [0:07:21] PJ Bruno: Well, I hope she plays Smash with you. [0:07:22] Nick D'Amelio: Yep, she does. [0:07:25] PJ Bruno: Awesome. Well dude, why don't you just take us through your journey because it looks like you got a lot of really cool things that you've had on your plate. [0:07:31] Nick D'Amelio: Yeah, totally. It's been kind of an interesting little journey. So I majored in Media Studies and Communications and German in college, so a bit of a weird combination. Where that landed me was a little German medical publisher actually in the same neighborhood my office is in now, Flat Iron District. So yeah, they said basically, "Hey, you're a child and you know about the internet. Why don't you handle our content management system? Why don't you handle our social media and why don't you handle our email marketing?" And not knowing anything about any of these things I said, "Sure, that sounds great." Yeah. So I kind of learned as I went and of those three kind of components I really kind of honed in on email marketing. That was where I saw the most impact. At the time at that company it was really the channel that was most trackable so I could directly see the impact I was having on the business, how many textbooks we sold as I was sending out these emails. So pretty exciting for a young kid. That led to my next role, which was purely email marketing, email marketing specialist at Macmillan Publishers, a little bit bigger of a publisher. They had a really interesting program. I was kind of in charge of the technical aspects. We had a grand total of around 20 users in our ESP at the time, which was exact target, none of whom had any coding experience. So I was on kind of QA duty, cleanup duty, so I got to learn a ton about kind of the ins and outs of email and email coding in particular and really kind of coming to grips with the frustrations that Google AMP, is actually going to address in terms of layout, in terms of functionality, stuff like that. So eventually I got a little tired of dragging a very ancient industry behind me in terms of trying to do new things and digital marketing, so I moved over to the startup world. I was at an ad tech company in the travel space called Intent Media. That was mostly B2B focused, which wasn't quite as exciting to me. I was still kind of longing for that kind of interaction with a customer. So eventually that led me to Casper, the mattress guys. That was a really exciting phase. [0:09:58] PJ Bruno: I have a Casper actually. [0:09:59] Nick D'Amelio: Oh nice. How do you like it? [0:10:00] PJ Bruno: I do like it. Great mattress. [0:10:01] Nick D'Amelio: How do you like their emails? [0:10:03] PJ Bruno: I ... [0:10:05] Nick D'Amelio: Tread lightly. [0:10:06] PJ Bruno: Yeah. You know what? Are they a client? Are they a client? Do we know? They're not. It doesn't matter. You know why? Because I love the branding. It's all over the subway. Simple. Beautiful. Sold me on the branding and sold me at the end of the day, the product. Big fan, Casper. [0:10:21] Gurbir Singh: And if anybody from Casper is listening, you should come join Braze. [0:10:24] PJ Bruno: Yeah, come join Braze. Why not? We'll take good care of you. [0:10:26] Nick D'Amelio: Yeah. Go for it. [0:10:27] PJ Bruno: We'll take your email marketing campaigns. We'll make them beautiful. [0:10:29] Nick D'Amelio: It's funny. We're on a podcast right now and maybe we could get them to sponsor us considering that's kind of what they do. [0:10:36] PJ Bruno: That is what they do. [0:10:37] Nick D'Amelio: This is brought to you by Casper Mattresses. [0:10:40] PJ Bruno: I may or may not edit that out. So from Casper then, I guess how long have you been at Slice now? [0:10:47] Nick D'Amelio: A little over two years now. [0:10:49] PJ Bruno: Okay. So about two years ago made the jump from Casper to Slice. Pizza's your passion. Everything was starting to coalesce. This makes sense. What was the email programming like when you inherited that at Slice? [0:11:06] Nick D'Amelio: Needed a little work. It was at a period of time where they were struggling to find an identity. They had just rebranded from an entirely different experience a couple of years earlier. Slice was formerly known as My Pizza and then kind of brought in some new people and rebranded. Yeah, so still trying to find their identity in terms of the branding, and then in terms of the technical aspects of the email program, very limited. Not much in the way of engaging email templates. Their audience size was incredibly small. They had limited it for effectively no reason. I had the suspicion that the IPs actually had not been properly warmed because we were seeing incredibly low open rates that really shouldn't have been like that. [0:11:58] PJ Bruno: You didn't find out whether it was improperly warmed or not? You just were like, All right, well let's just find a solution. [0:12:03] Nick D'Amelio: Yeah, kind of the assumption based on what I knew at the time about engagement levels and now based on kind of the improvements we've seen, I think there was definitely some behind the scenes stuff wrong with the deliverability. [0:12:15] PJ Bruno: You got got to warm those IPs. [0:12:17] Nick D'Amelio: Yeah. Yeah, Very important. [0:12:19] PJ Bruno: Like a pizza. [0:12:20] Nick D'Amelio: Exactly. [0:12:21] PJ Bruno: You're going to eat cold dough? [0:12:23] Nick D'Amelio: The difference is pizza is still good cold. IPs are no good when they're cold. [0:12:26] PJ Bruno: You've got to preheat. Get those IPs up. [0:12:29] Nick D'Amelio: Yeah, that's true. [0:12:31] PJ Bruno: For those of us who don't know what Slice is, why don't you explain what Slice is for those sad, sad folks that don't have it in their lives. [0:12:39] Nick D'Amelio: Oh yeah. We've got to correct that. So yeah, Slice is basically online ordering for pizza. People have used online ordering platforms for their favorite restaurants before. We are exclusively focused on pizza, which lets us do a couple of things. We can provide an experience that's explicitly tailored to pizza. So a lot of other places, getting half pepperoni and half peppers and onions involves writing out special instructions that the shop may or may not see. We kind of have a little bit of a pizza builder within the app so you can choose which items you want on each half, which is technology that local pizzerias have been kind of slow to adopt. [0:13:27] PJ Bruno: Because that's the charm of the mom and pop set up, right? [0:13:31] Nick D'Amelio: Exactly. Yeah. It's kind of low tech. It's very homey, very local, but the problem is these guys are kind of getting killed in the space by some of the larger pizza players. So we really want to kind of get them into the digital age and get people ordering online because that's where our customers want to be. Yeah. [0:13:53] PJ Bruno: So what's the differentiator for Slice? What makes you guys stand out above the rest? [0:13:58] Nick D'Amelio: Yeah, so there's a couple of things. A lot of the other places you can get pizza online, you've got the big chains and then you've got kind of the, what we call aggregators, kind of the big, big online ordering companies. Main difference between us and the larger chains, you're getting that mom and pop quality, which is really important. Main difference between us and the big online ordering companies is that those companies actually take kind of an enormous cut out of the restaurant's pocket when a user orders online. Basically what we do is provide marketing and technology and online ordering, paid search, a ton of services to these pizzerias for a very small flat fee on every order, which really allows them to grow their businesses and keep local pizza alive. [0:14:52] PJ Bruno: God, I love that. Gerb, you're a pizza guy I've got to assume. [0:14:55] Gurbir Singh: I do. I love pizza. [crosstalk 00:14:57]. [0:14:57] PJ Bruno: What's your type? What's your poison? [0:14:59] Gurbir Singh: I actually just like a nice, good margarita pizza. [0:15:02] PJ Bruno: Oh yeah. [0:15:03] Gurbir Singh: If you can do that well, I'm a customer. [0:15:05] Nick D'Amelio: Oh yeah, absolutely. Did you know that yesterday was the official birthdate of the margarita pizza? [0:15:11] Gurbir Singh: I did not know that. [0:15:12] PJ Bruno: What year was that? [0:15:15] Nick D'Amelio: 1889. Queen Margarita of Italy visited a small Focacceria in Naples and he kind of adorned the pizza with the traditional tomato sauce, but also basil and mozzarella to represent the colors of the Italian flag. She apparently wrote a letter kind of praising this creation and yeah, that was the birth of the margarita pizza. [0:15:38] Gurbir Singh: I'm surprised you didn't order some margarita pizza today for this podcast. I'm kind of disappointed now. [0:15:43] PJ Bruno: Well, you know what? You guys just ruined the surprise because when we wrap up, guess where we're going? [0:15:48] Nick D'Amelio: Oh man. [0:15:48] Gurbir Singh: Margarita pizza. [0:15:50] Nick D'Amelio: Nice. [0:15:50] Gurbir Singh: Or is it just Margaritas? [0:15:52] PJ Bruno: When was the birthday of buffalo chicken slice? [0:15:54] Nick D'Amelio: Oh, I do not know that. [0:15:56] Gurbir Singh: It was like 10 years ago. [0:15:57] Nick D'Amelio: Yeah, probably. [0:15:58] Gurbir Singh: It doesn't matter. It's not real pizza. [0:16:00] PJ Bruno: Not my slice, man. Not my slice. [0:16:02] Nick D'Amelio: Yeah. Yeah. [0:16:04] PJ Bruno: All right, cool. Let's jump back into your time at Slice because you take the reins. You had to clean house a little bit with IP, with deliverability. Obviously you have to create some of kind of like your first onboarding user journey things. When did interactivity become a priority for you? [0:16:23] Nick D'Amelio: So yeah, we've always wanted to provide kind of a delightful experience to the user because pizza is inherently delightful, so we explored some other vendors for interactivity a couple of months into my time, but none of them were really a great fit. But now with Google kind of putting this out there, basically giving it away for free, we're really excited to start jumping into it again. [0:16:49] PJ Bruno: It's just free then. [0:16:51] Nick D'Amelio: Pretty much. I mean, Gurbir, correct me if I'm wrong, but there's no charge to use it and yeah, it's just ... Yeah. [0:16:58] Gurbir Singh: Yeah, AMP's free. You just have to basically register with Google right now. But I believe that's also going to change in the long run as it becomes a more community-focused initiative. [0:17:10] PJ Bruno: Of course. They're probably looking for champions and then eventually it's like ... [0:17:12] Gurbir Singh: Yeah, I think right now it's like you get registered so your email can render within Gmail, but as soon as some of the other ISPs like Yahoo and Outlook who have signed on make this change on their end, I think that process is going to slightly get updated as well. [0:17:30] Nick D'Amelio: Right, makes sense. [0:17:32] PJ Bruno: Let's get into the nitty gritty details. How is Slice leveraging Google AMP for email? [0:17:37] Nick D'Amelio: Yeah, so we've got a couple of use cases lined up. We have a working prototype of our AMP emails right now, which is awesome. We have an email coder out in Macedonia on my team. His name's Arso. Arso, if you're listening, you are the man. He basically was able to ... [0:17:53] PJ Bruno: Shout out to Arso. He is the man. [0:17:55] Nick D'Amelio: He is the man. He was able to put this thing together in no time flat. So we are ready and raring to go once we have everything in place for him. But yeah, there's a couple of use cases that we've gotten really excited about. One as we've kind of alluded to is just the layout and design options that you get. Anything just as simple as an accordion menu or a sidebar or an image carousel, who doesn't want to scroll through a bunch of images of delicious pizza? It just kind of gets people in the mood. [0:18:26] PJ Bruno: I'm starving right now actually. [0:18:28] Nick D'Amelio: Yeah, I know me too. [0:18:29] PJ Bruno: Just talking about it I felt my salivation gland just start going insane. [0:18:33] Nick D'Amelio: This is my life every day by the way, is just stock imagery of pizza and photo shoots from pizzerias just constantly on my screen. Oh, it's torture. [0:18:44] PJ Bruno: All right, so what else? Other functionality. [0:18:47] Nick D'Amelio: Yeah, other stuff that we're incredibly excited for, gathering customer feedback just directly within the body of the email. So Google AMP will have form submission available for emails. I would love to just have a user review a pizzeria just right in their inbox. Just make it incredibly easy so we can surface that data up to all our other users and continue our mission of just being the authority on pizza. [0:19:11] PJ Bruno: That's exciting, man. You guys are on that. That front wave. [0:19:14] Nick D'Amelio: Yeah, exactly. It's exciting times. As we've talked about email hasn't changed in, you know, basically since the inception of HTML email. So this is the first real turnabout in a very long time. [0:19:27] Gurbir Singh: I'm curious how this change for you guys, because I've heard this comment from other email marketers where a lot of the attribution they do today is driving traffic towards a website and a lot of the functionality you're actually talking about right now will allow customers obviously to remove that friction and just do it within the inbox, but now you're not going to be able to track website traffic. [0:19:48] Nick D'Amelio: Exactly. [0:19:49] Gurbir Singh: Email budgets when they're handed out at corporations, they're typically on what can you drive to the website? Now all of a sudden you're going to lose that. I'm wondering does Slice have a strategy for that or any thoughts on that area? [0:20:04] Nick D'Amelio: We have not gone into it yet. You're right, just because this is such a step change, it's going to be kind of difficult to explain this to a lot of folks, especially when there's money involved. But if we can prove out the ability to kind of interact and eventually hopefully even transact in the body of an email, I think things will start to change slowly over time. [0:20:29] Gurbir Singh: Cool. [0:20:30] Nick D'Amelio: So no plan yet, but thank you for putting that in my head because I'll probably need to plan for that. [0:20:36] Gurbir Singh: I just want to make sure Arso gets paid. That's all. [0:20:38] Nick D'Amelio: Oh yeah. [0:20:40] PJ Bruno: Well guys, this has been awesome. Nick, thanks so much for coming in. [0:20:42] Nick D'Amelio: Yeah, absolutely. [0:20:44] PJ Bruno: Gurbir, thanks for giving me some of your time, bud. Always appreciate it. [0:20:46] Gurbir Singh: Anytime. [0:20:47] PJ Bruno: And Rocket League. [0:20:49] Nick D'Amelio: Yeah, let's do it. [0:20:50] Gurbir Singh: Rocket League and pizzas? [0:20:51] PJ Bruno: Rocket league and pizzas. [0:20:52] Nick D'Amelio: Boom. [0:20:53] PJ Bruno: Thanks for listening, guys. Come back again and see us. [0:20:55]
Welcome! Today we are going to discuss a top tactic preferred by cybercriminals and that is the use of what is known as Impersonation fraud or more commonly as Business email compromise (BEC). Since these rarely involve malware, it is especially hard for traditional security software to catch them. Listen in to find out more. For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Related Articles: Sophisticated Email Attacks Against Businesses Are Up Exponentially --- Automated Machine-Generated Transcript: Hey, here we go Craig Peterson here. And shout out to everybody who is watching this live on video up on YouTube and on Facebook, which is kind of cool. Actually, we're going to be doing some hopefully some cool stuff here over the next little while as we get some of the newer technologies into the studio going to be doing live interviews and, and putting the videos up and everything else. So you can you can see me if you just go to Craig Peterson comm slash YouTube, for instance, you can see the video will make sure it gets saved up there, in case you're listening, and you want to go back and see what my little studio was like. So this is part of it. One of these days, maybe we'll give you a tour of the studio and all the equipment that we have here. But anyways, it is primarily an audio show a lot of people getting on podcast, we've been thinking about maybe putting up some of the podcast as video podcasts as well. But that's a whole separate thing. So for now, YouTube and Facebook. And you can find all of those just by going to Craig Peterson comm slash Facebook. And for those of you who are watching this, you'll see at the bottom, we've got a special offer for this week. Last week, we gave out this quick start guide. And the Quick Start Guide is really designed for people who wanted to get their businesses going. And this is it here I printed it up. I've got it in my hand, you can see it on the cameras if you're watching live or the replays. But we I go through a whole ton of stuff in here never given this away for free. So that was last week, we got a house flying here. And this week, we are doing something a little bit different. We have our password cheat sheet. And we're going to be making some more of these things. Hold fully, you got all the security summer stuff, if you had signed up for the security summer. And you know, I've sent out 28 of these cheat sheets, almost 100 pages of information about what you should be doing as a home user, as a business user, as someone who's retired etc. If you missed any of them, let me know when I'll be glad to get those out to you. And the easiest way to get ahold of me is just email me at Craig Peterson calm. If you're the type of person who really loves to use texting, you just pick up your phone, and you can text me directly at 855-385-5553. So let's get started. Today we've got a number of articles, we're going to talk about this massive spike that is costing businesses here in the US and around the world, over $12 billion dollars in the last couple of years. It is really, really, really huge. And what I'm going to do, as we through this, if you're watching live or watching in the replay, I'm going to put up the article up on the screen that I'm talking about. So you can kind of see it, and you can follow along a little bit at home. But business email compromise. This is something where the bad guys are going and sending typically phishing emails. And nowadays, it's not just regular phishing, we're talking about spear phishing emails. And spear phishing emails are when someone does a little bit of research on you. So they find the name of your company, they find out what kind of business you're in, they go to your web play website, and they find out who the CFO is who the CEO is who the bookkeeper is, right? So many of us put all of that stuff up on the website. And now they have enough information to do a very targeted marketing campaign. Right? It you want to talk two people as individuals. And what better way to do that than to switch from Hey, jury in print, I need to get out of jail. So I'll send you some money. And you just send some of it back to the point of today where it is a lot more complicated because they know about you. Now I gotta talk about a friend of a friend here. Her name is Laura. I'm sure she's still around. She might even be listening. Hi, Laura, wave to her there on the camera. But here's what's happened with Laura. She had a great little business doing photography, and she got an invite to do some photography for somebody out west. And that was she lived in the East Coast at the time. No, actually, she lived in the mountains, the Midwest, Colorado, I think maybe. And they the person wanted her to do a photoshoot for her on this beach in California. So this person says, Okay, so here's what I'm going to do, how much you're going to charge and you set it all up, basically. And she says, Well, I'm going to charge whatever was three grand, I can't remember the number. And so the other guy on the phone said, Man, I already got a check written out here. For five grand Would it be okay? If you just refunded me the difference? Do you see where we're going? Yeah, the difference is the Prophet the bad guy was going to make because that check that they were going to send Laura wasn't any good. And it takes a week or two for checks to clear when you're talking about international tech checks. It takes even longer. So they'll often ask you, as they did with Laura, what can just wire me the difference. Now they're playing these games with cars as well, I was looking for cards. In fact, I was looking for another Ford truck. And we found a great deal on a Ford truck. So we thought, Oh, hey, this is going to be good. We're going to make you know this deal. And, man, this is such a cheap price. What I did and what I would advise you to do if you're kind of stuck in this same thing is I took the pictures from the ad, I think it was on eBay, if I remember right. So the pictures from the ad on eBay. And I took them to Google. Now Google has an image search feature, you've probably used it before to look for images of celebrities or other people. But you can also upload a photo. And you can ask Google, where else does this photo appear? Now one of my son's was doing some volunteer work for this dating site. And what he was doing is taking pictures that people were posting for their profiles. He was running them through the Google image search search and seeing if it was really them. And much of the time, it wasn't it was some celebrity or some other person who knows what these people looked like. In many cases, these accounts were fake accounts that they were using for these types of scams. Now, when this scams are for end users like you and me, and that's one thing and and I was smart enough to double check, you know, thank God I knew, right? Who knows this stuff. And I did a search, I found that they had taken some pictures from a car dealers website, who actually had this truck, they were the ones with the truck, and the truck that the car dealer website had there was the same use truck. But it was $10,000 more than the scammer wanted. So what happens a lot with these truck and car scams is they have this scam going right. And they get people to bite, they get them to pay them the money. And they've set up these fake accounts on YouTube or elsewhere. So they wire the money. And while they don't wire they send them a check, right? Or the car shows up and they have to pay, but there's always a refund involved. And the refund is you refunding the money. So they may sell say while the shipping cost is only going to be $500 I thought it was 1500 dollars. So I overpaid you because you'll get a check and it's for too much. And you'll you might contact them and say well, what's going on here, this is more than I thought you were supposed to pay me. So some people will do that. Some people who are a little dishonest won't. But at any rate, the scammers going to ask for that money back and then people send them the money. And so now the scammer just made 1500 bucks. Now in this case, what we're starting to see is a major problem. This is a report out for mine cast. And it's talking about how the business email compromise scam has ramped up 200 hundred and 69% from last quarter to this quarter. And this is an article we're talking right now on June or July, October right mid October. So a massive spike in emails that had dangerous business email compromise stuff in it. So what they're doing is they're finding out about you, they're getting your email address. And then they're sending you dangerous file types. It might be PDF, it might be a.xz, it might be a.ba T might be a.com. And they are sending them to people's inbox. Very, very dangerous malware attachments are in these things spam and target inbox is. This quarterly report by line cast reviewed more than 216 million emails from a half a million users. So think about how many spam emails these guys are getting. So all the emails that were scanned by these different emails security systems, and successfully delivered 28 million or spam, and 28,000 contain malware attachments. And 28,000 had can dangerous file types. So 60,000 was the bottom line of the messages contained business email compromise stuff, impersonation, fraud, scammed, a lot of different words for them. So be very careful, one of the biggest ones and we picked up a new client over this one. This is called a vendor email compromise. This is kind of a new technique that's been discovered. And it involves the intruder sitting on a target network and observing communications. They get a hold of the emails that might be coming out from the billing department might be from a manager and they now know who they're sending emails to what the what they're talking about how much is normally built. Very interesting article, it's up on dark reading. There are some links to the original, you know, articles that were talking about this, and you'll see all of this up. But Craig Peterson calm Of course. And you also should have gotten this in your weekly email. Now if you didn't get that. Go ahead and right now to Craig peterson.com. Right on the homepage, there's a sign up. And when you sign up today, you will get my password special report. This is a 10 page special report going through the pros and cons of different password managers. The cost, what you might want to look at why you would use them what kind of passwords all of that stuff. So just go right now. To Craig Peterson calm. Of course you're listening to Craig Peterson you're watching me live Facebook, YouTube, and on the radio WGAN so stick around We'll be right back and talking about line to your bank. Transcribed by https://otter.ai --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553
Transitioning with your customer in the digital realm before it’s too late – businesses, prepare for voice search by @vickiemaris #teachinspireconnect #agiledigitalbiz Agile Digital Business Episode 12 featuring news, references and commentary about the voice platform and voice search From the Resources Handout prepared for a conference session talk in June 2019; revised for a talk in September 2019 2:56 Articles and blog posts on voice search Voice Search is Coming. Is Your Business Ready? How voice search will revolutionize your business – Article in Inc. https://www.inc.com/magazine/201906/amy-webb/voice-search-optimization-alexa-smart-speaker-retail-shopping.html 3:08 Why Tech Giants Are So Desperate to Provide Your Voice Assistant An HBR article by Bret Kinsella about why Amazon, Google, Microsoft and others are investing in voice technology. “Voice assistants represent the third UI and technology platform shift of the past three decades, following the web in the 1990s and smartphones about 10 years ago…The shift to voice doesn’t require any training. Users simply ‘speak’ as they do naturally.” 3:20 Voice Search Statistics, Facts and Trends 2019 for Online Marketers “Voice search and SEO is not the next big thing; it is today’s big thing.” In this blog post by Bradley Shaw, learn more about voice search predictions and data, from voice accuracy to audiobook data to uses of searches prior to a visit to a local business. https://seoexpertbrad.com/voice-search-statistics/ 3:35Hey Google, Alexa, Siri and Higher Ed Impact on how we deliver, search for and market higher education. An article in Higher Ed by Ray Schroeder, Dec. 12, 2018 https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/blogs/online-trending-now/hey-google-alexa-siri-and-higher-ed 3:46 The holidays ushered in a smart speaker explosion starring Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant: Smart speaker sales grew 78 percent in 2018. Rani Molla wrote this blog post on Vox on Jan. 8, 2019 to review the statistics surrounding the explosive growth of smart speakers in the market. https://www.vox.com/2019/1/8/18173696/amazon-alexa-google-assistant-smart-speaker-sales-npr 4:04 Foursquare wants to know how creepy you think its new “Hypertrending” feature is The above is the title of a blog post on 9To5Mac from March 10, 2019. It addresses the approach taken by the Foursquare app company to test how readers feel about the app’s ability to heat mat the locations of people at restaurants and other businesses in Austin, Texas. https://9to5mac.com/2019/03/10/foursquare-hypertrending-feature 4:17 Who’s listening when you talk to your Google Assistant? This is an article in Wired in July 2019 that covers the topic of “who is listening to your conversations” from your Google Home Assistant. Google has made a statement about its process of having contractors review .2 percent of the recorded conversations. They say the data is not associated with an individual user of the assistant when it is being reviewed. To read more: https://www.wired.com/story/whos-listening-talk-google-assistant/ Alexa FAQs For instructions about the commands to use when talking to Alexa on a Smart Speaker, and its many capabilities, visit this FAQ page in Amazon. https://amzn.to/2ZAnQFS To review your voice recordings in the Alexa app: https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201602040 Google Voice Search FAQs For instructions on how to manage your Google Voice and Audio Activity, visit the “Data and personalization” link in the left-hand navigation of your Google Account. Books 4:27Marketing Rebellion: The Most Human Company Wins by Mark W. Schaefer – I read this book in Spring 2019, and took copious notes. Mark was the closing keynote at Social Media Marketing World conference in 2019. I recommend that every marketer and every business leader who has a marketing leader reporting to them should read this book. We are in a different marketing environment today than even just a few years ago. Years of marketing experience in business (or academia) and old methods for buying and placing digital advertising, and ways of engaging with customers are causing customers to block ads and/or to seek education and entertainment that is ad-free. If you aren’t already changing your plans currently to align with the new marketing revolution, this book will cause you to re-think what you’ve been doing in your marketing efforts. Podcast Episodes 6:27Book Marketing: Voice Search For Authors With Miral Sattar – The Creative Penn Podcast Joanna Penn, author and podcast host, interviews Miral Sattar about the steps you can take in 2019 to help voice-activated assistants find your book upon request. In this episode, they touch on a variety of subjects from updating meta data on your web pages so that the snippets are answering the questions that people are asking in their attempts to find your books, to the importance of the audiobook format, to the differences between on-screen searches that are typed in a search engine such as Google, to asking a voice-activated assistant for a result. 7:179 Ways That Artificial Intelligence (AI) Will Disrupt Authors and the Publishing Industry You don’t have to be a book author to benefit from this episode of The Creative Penn Podcast. Joanna Penn tracks through a list she has created that indicates we’re on the cusp of disruptions for authors and the publishing industry. Penn runs a multi-six-figure business as an independent author and speaker. She is published in 86 countries. Her energy and enthusiasm about AI is contagious. The insights she shares as she outlines the ways that authors and the publishing industry could be effected can provide ideas for your own business plan for the future. 9:30 Understanding Voice Search and the Future of SEO For interesting insights in to how voice is changing the “search” industry and what we might need to be expecting as businesses of the future, take a listen to this episode of Skill Up podcast. This is another episode that I’ve played more than once so that I could take notes on my second time through. Epsiode 7: https://www.hubspot.com/podcasts/skill-up/s01/e07-voice-search-future-seo 10:08 Measuring Position Zero’s Impact on Your Business – Searchmetrics Podcast, Episode 7 This is a discussion on the difference between rich snippets and featured snippets. There is no process for submitting for featured snippets. Are you optimizing your content? Are you formatting your content in a way that it can answer a specific question? https://blog.searchmetrics.com/us/podcast-voices-of-search-rich-and-featured-snippets/ 10:38 Businesses – Prepare for Voice Search – Agile Digital Business podcast You may have heard of voice search, or use of voice-activated assistants such as Alexa which is the assistant for the Amazon Echo smart speaker. There is also the Google Home Assistant or Microsoft’s Cortana, Apple’s Siri, and others. As people gravitate towards voice for search, it has brought about a marketing niche that is often referred to as voice search marketing. Voice has been referred to as the next big thing. The data is showing that it IS the big thing we need to be preparing for in business and marketing of our products and services. Vickie Maris, host of Agile Digital Business podcast, discusses trends and definitions related to “voice,” in Episode 10 of the show. Season 2 of the podcast is focused on voice and voice first searches, and how businesses can prepare for the platform. Find all episodes at the blog: https://vickiemaris2.libsyn.com 12:05 Voicebot.ai For a look at the research available about voice, and to learn more about the technical side of the platform, I highly recommend viewing the website and the white papers available from Bret Kinsella and the team at Voicebot. Bret is also the host of the Voicebot podcast. Take a listen to an episode and visit the website. You won’t regret it. https://voicebot.ai/author/bret/ 12:44 Reminder about the homework assignment for taking steps to update your website for "voice." It is available for download at my Patreon account, https://patreon.com/vickiemaris Sample of recent tweets around the hashtags: #voiceactivatedsearch and #voicesearch SEMrush - @SEMrush - Sept. 10, 2019 #VoiceSearch started off as a hit-or-miss concept. It’s now a hugely popular way of helping us go about our daily lives. @himanshurauthan uncovers 7 strategies of how you can optimize your site to return more answers from voice searches.* Audeliss Search - @AudelissPeople – June 17, 2019 Voice-activated systems are a $49 billion market. Now @Google is using #AI to make #voice recognition work for #people with #disabilities: (link: https://buff.ly/2FaQjKr) buff.ly/2FaQjKr @Forbes #inclusion AIMC Biz Solutions @aimcbizolution – June 14, 2019 As of 2019, 20% of all Google searches are voice-activated – a number that’s expected to leap to 50% as early as 2020. Voice search is here to stay. It’s growing – and businesses who don’t embrace it now are going to be left scrambling in the very near future. 13:46Webinar Replays Podcasting in the Age of Voice Webinar – Aug. 26, 2019 Pragmatic and WIT Lingo hosted an webinar with several guests that provides interesting insights to the “voice” scene in Q3 2019. https://youtu.be/C2uY1dGRIZE 14:31Glossary of Terms AI – Artificial Intelligence Sample tweet from @Capgemini (Intelligent Automation Platform) about AI: Explore how #AI based insights enable wealth and #AssetManagement firms to leverage the strengths of the advisors, uncover areas of improvement and promote best practices. 15:20CCPA – California Consumer Protection Act Starts Jan. 1, 2020 - https://ccpa.jebbit.com/ “By its terms, the CCPA protects the private information of California residents even when they’re outside the state. This means that, if you sell anything to or market anything to or gather any data on California residents, you’re subject to the CCPA’s provisions and need to be ready.” Kerry O’Shea Gorgone (guest post on the Grow blog by Mark Schaefer) 16:05 Flash Briefing – A Flash Briefing is a term related to Amazon Skills for Alexa-assisted devices. It’s a short (10 minutes or less) news update that Alexa can read or play. 16:25 GDPR – General Data Protection Regulation Enforced May 25, 2018 In statements on the EU GDPR website it says that the GDPR is “designed to harmonize data privacy laws across Europe and to protect and empower all EU citizens’ data, and reshape the way organizations across the region approach data privacy.” https://eugdpr.org/ 16:57 Intent – The meaning of whatever a user has verbalized to a voice-activated assistant. 17:04 Machine Learning – It’s an offshoot of artificial intelligence. Machine learning makes assumptions that machines can learn from data. As patterns are determined, decisions get made with little or no human involvement. 17:18 Position Zero – The top search result in a screen-based, keyword search in a search engine such as Google. It’s above the ads; it’s above the snippets. It’s the position used in voice search. 17:35Screen Search – A screen search is the type of Internet searching that was previously thought of as traditional. It involves typing of questions, key words or phrases in a search engine such as Google or Bing. A method of typing and a screen are involved. The search results are displayed in multiples per page. 17:58SEM – Search engine marketing 18:02 SEO – Search engine optimization SERP – Search engine results page* 18:05 Skill (Amazon), Action (Google), Capsule (Bixby for Samsung) – Amazon calls these “voice-driven capabilities” that can run on their respective platforms. Google calls these Actions. For Bixby, they are capsules. Consider the Amazon Alexa Skill for an example. I’ve created an Alexa Skill for my podcast, Agile Digital Business, to make it easy for Amazon device users to ask Alexa to play my Flash Briefing for the podcast. The Alexa Skill can be found on search in the Amazon Skill store. If a user knows the name of the Skill they are looking for, they can request it of the assistant by saying, “Enable [name of Skill].” For the podcast, I set the Alexa Skill up with the blue print provided for a Flash Briefing. It saved me from having to code, and it enables a user to search in their Alexa app for the specific Skill to add to their Flash Briefing.* 19:05 Smart Speaker – A smart speaker is also known as a voice-activated assistant, and several other terms. Examples include the Echo by Amazon (assistant is Alexa) or the Home by Google. Sonic Branding – Phrases such as “tone of the copy,” “find your voice,” and “it should sound like our brand,” have a literal meaning in this era of voice search. Sonic branding is what your brand sounds like as it is responding, verbally, to your customers.* 19:22 Utterance – This is the term used to describe the vocalizations a user has with a voice-activated assistant. 19:31 Voice – Any interaction that allows you to control a computer program using natural speech. 19:40 Voice Commerce – Transactions for goods and services conducted via voice search and commands given to the assistant in the smart speaker. Users can connect their accounts such as Amazon. 19:55 Voice First – The phrase, voice first, refers to the first in a string of searches, starting with a voice search, that a user conducts. They may go to a screen search after getting an initial response from an assistant. 20:11 Voice Search – A voice search is a question asked by a person talking to their digital assistant (voice-activated speaker or voice-activated assistant) such as Siri or Alexa. The assistant uses meta data to return one result that best aligns with the question that was asked. 20:46 Voice User Interface (VUI) – This is an interface that allows a person using voice for search to interact with a device when there isn’t a screen involved. 21:00 BIO – Vickie Maris Voice first, voice platforms and preparing content so that it is more discoverable in voice search are topics that have the focus of Vickie Maris, author, speaker, digital marketer and idea coach. Vickie is the host and producer of Agile Digital Business. Season 2 is devoted to the fast-moving adoption of smart speakers and uses of voice-activated assistants in a variety of forms. Through her podcast and conference talks, she helps business owners and marketers plan their transition of content for improved discoverability in voice search. Vickie has also studied and taught social media marketing and engagement, and development of online learning experiences in scalable business models for executive education units. Her career spans over 30 years in industry and academia. At the university, she is responsible for the sales, marketing and evolution of non-degree programs for business people in leadership, supervision, and business analytics. She has also held roles in marketing and business development in the fields of agriculture and engineering at Purdue University where she led a team that developed and marketed online certifications in Lean Six Sigma and project management. The online courses attracted over 1,400 business professionals per year. Vickie has served as a communications director for a non-profit and as an account manager for an advertising and public relations firm. She holds her Black Belt in Lean Six Sigma. Her degrees from Purdue include a B.S. degree in Agricultural Communications and MS Ed in Learning Design and Technology. Vickie is a published author and a recording artist. Her books, podcasts and music can be found in Amazon, Apple Podcasts, Apple Music, Google Podcasts, iHeart Radio, Spotify, Pandora and other digital locations. She and her co-writer/musician husband, Scott Greeson, reside on their farm with their llamas, Connemara pony, and cat, Frank. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 23:04 To find the resources that I mention in my conference sessions, search on #teachinspireconnect and/or #agiledigitalbiz. You’re invited to connect with me in LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/vickiemaris; emails = vmaris@nd.edu or vickiemaris@gmail.com * Indicates a content reference that was added after this document was audio recorded as part of Episode 12 of Agile Digital Business podcast. If you’d prefer to listen to my recommendations about these resources, plus my added commentary, check out Episode 12 of the podcast. The episodes of the podcast are available here: https://vickiemaris2.libsyn.com
For the latest Kaspersky Daily podcast, Dave and I dive into some of the biggest security stories that may have passed your radar this week. To kick off episode 107, we head to Kazakhstan. A while back, the government asked its citizens to install a certificate so they could track all traffic. Now Google, Apple and Mozilla have blocked that tracking on their browsers. We then head over to the twisting saga of Valve and their bug bounty program and a researcher dropping two zero days. This is an interesting tale and one that seems to encompass some of the issues with current bug bounty programs and what is a bug that is needed to be fixed. After that, we head to the all-to-messy tale of a T-Mobile customer who had her information given over to a bill collector creep. This person, in turn harassed her in a serious manner. If you read one story this week, this one is the one to read. The next story takes a look at how Xbox contractors had been listening into some customers voice commands – joining the long list of other companies guilty of this. We end out the podcast with a pair of PSA’s from Facebook. One is a new data deletion feature, or should we say disconnection feature. The other is simply a Please STOP for those posting copyright texts to Facebook and Instagram – they do nothing.
Realogy Holdings Corp the largest full-service residential real estate services company in the United States, announced a couple of weeks ago a collaboration with Amazon. The new program is called TurnKey, a new homebuying program that simplifies the process of finding and settling into a new home. Now available in 15 U.S. cities, TurnKey combines Realogy's real estate expertise across its brands, including Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate, Century 21, Coldwell Banker, ERA and Sotheby's International Realty, with the ease and convenience of Amazon's Home Services and smart home products. The program has two parts. The first is the connection with a real estate agent who is one of the designated TurnKey agents, and who are affiliated with one of Realogy's trusted residential real estate brands. The second part of the program involves a free move-in benefit for the customer. Upon closing on a home, Amazon connects the buyer with services and experts in their area to help make the house a home. Amazon is playing the long game. Imagine for a moment that Amazon is actually registered as a Real Estate brokerage that is entitled to the broker referral fee. Let’s imagine for a moment that Amazon credits 100% of that referral fee back to the customer in the form of Amazon credits that the home buyer can use to furnish their new home. What they’re building is a new set of habits. Imagine, you’ve got $5,000 to spend on new stuff for your house. What are the chances that you’re only going to spend $4,999 dollars and stop, never to spend money with Amazon again? Chances are good that you’re going to establish a new set of buying patterns at a time when you are already facing disruption and need to establish a new set of buying patterns. You’ve moved into a new area and will probably change grocery store, hardware store, furniture store. Imagine that Amazon is disrupting that process and you’ve got $5,000 to spend. You’re probably going to continue to use Amazon beyond the first wave of spending to use up your credits. Amazon wants you to think of Amazon first when you need to buy something. By sending you on a shopping spree, they’re helping establish a new habit. There is a fundamental conflict when a platform owner competes with its customers. Some people think that the end consumer are Amazon’s customers. But the users of its platform who sell through the amazon marketplace are also its customers. Competing with your customers can be considered an anti-competitive activity because it not a level playing field. Numerous companies have encountered this problem over the years and this has been the subject of numerous justice department probes into anti-competitive practices. When a single company becomes dominant in the marketplace, it becomes a target for accusations of anti-competitive behaviour. This happened to IBM when it dominated the computer industry. Microsoft has been the target of a probe. Now Google, Facebook and Amazon are increasingly under the microscope. Certainly, the EU has put the dominant platforms under the microscope and they are in jeopardy of facing billions in fines from EU regulators. So what does this mean for us as real estate investors? The most difficult part of any marketing funnel is the wide part of the funnel. It’s not the fulfillment end of the process. Those who control the widest part will achieve dominance, since that’s where the majority of the eyeballs are looking. For now, Amazon is not at all involved in the world of commercial Real estate. They’re focused on the retail consumer end of real estate. But this is a shift of massive proportions that stands to tip the balance in the world of real estate brokerage. You can assume that Amazon will bring a lot in the way of consumer analytics that few other companies can match.
I am planning a Security Summer for my listeners. I will have some free courses. I will also introduce you to some of the software that I use for my clients and how you can use it too. So watch out for announcements on those. Is our society changing? What part is social media playing? Listen in today for more on this. What can Open Source do for you? Why Open Source may change your life. More on this today. Are we really ready for Autonomous Cars? or Is the technology expected to perform faster than it is actually ready? Interesting questions we will be discussing today. What is going on with Google? G-Suite and Titan are both having issues. Microsoft has another problem and it is a big one. More on this. Do you have a Mortgage? You need to hear this! For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Transcript: Below is a rush transcript of this segment; it might contain errors. Airing date: 06/01/2019 Cyberbullying, Security summer free courses, First American Hack, Google Bluetooth titan hijacking ---- Hello, everybody, Craig Peterson here. We have ignition and boy do we have a show for today and then some. You know a little bit about cyberbullying, I am sure. Well, I'm going to tell you about something that I experienced this weekend, something that your kids may be experiencing in a much more critical way. You know, we mentioned last week about the suicides and tied into this Netflix show. Well, we'll get into this a little bit more. For those of you who are wondering how software is getting developed, nowadays and what you might want to do for your business for software development. We'll talk a little bit about GitHub and this whole open source revolution and how It has come into the mainstream, now. We have some security warnings from our friends at Google. A massive hack. I don't think I saw this anywhere. Frankly, we'll talk about what Krebs on security had to say about this. Tesla. Got to throw this in because what's a week without talking about Elon Musk. Consumer Reports is calling the automatic lane change feature on Tesla's navigate on autopilot, far less competent than a human driver. So, it kind of makes you wonder, should we be messing with this? Is this the right thing to do? Frankly, I think it's an excellent question. Well, I commented last weekend in one of the articles up on the website, and as you know, I post articles every week. It's usually just a real quick synopsis of like the first couple of sentences from the article, and then I'll give you a link to it. However, this last week, really, for the first time in a couple of years, we sat down and wrote some articles. We had mentioned something because again, I select the pieces that I am going to cover. I go through what the strategy is with my team and talk about the salient and essential points, and then they go off and write the article. So, this particular one was about anonymous, and it's still up on the website. And we take those articles, and we tweet them, we put them up on the social media sites as well. Well, the guy that we had mentioned in the web article claimed to be part of the hacking group Anonymous. He spent time in prison because of some of his activities, and he was a little miffed with me. So I got a little bit of a whiff of him not being pleased about me and what I said in that article. I thought that it was rather interesting because this is the first real hater I've had in quite a while, frankly. Well, I've got to tell you, this feeling I had in my gut was, you know, people describe this, this feeling of butterflies and things and here, I was wondering, what did I do? What did I do to hurt this guy's feelings? Or, what, right. I can only describe it as a Wow thing. Well, in reading a little bit further into what he had said was that the that he remembers, I think it was in his warrant, it mentioned the FBI infragard program. And I'm an infragard member. He probably looked me up, and I'm easy to find after seeing the article, which was perhaps triggered by a Google search or maybe a Twitter search or something. And that made me feel a little bit better. But man, brought back all the feelings of the first time there was an attack on my systems. And that was again, you might remember in the early 90s. And I had these questions running through my mind, what should I do? How do I do it? How do I respond? What? What's going on? I remember when I discovered the hack, who do I call, right? What do I do? And what's going to happen, Right? In my case, it's what's going to happen to everything that I have built, right? Here I am sitting there with a company that I had founded years before, and remember it's the early 90s and I was still a relatively young guy. But I'd been working on this company for over a decade by that point in time. And that feeling I had could only be described as horrendous. It was quite something, and it reminded me of this by having this guy from anonymous, you know, going after me kind of the cyberbullying thing, right? Hey, they're not sitting there trying to wait around for any logic or reasoning or anything else. It is a type what you feel without thinking reaction. Think about people that you've had to deal with probably yourself before. So what do you do? Well, that made me do a little bit of re-evaluation, you guys know, if you listen to the show, for a long time that I do a lot of training, I offer a lot of free training for people on cybersecurity. And just thinking back again, made me remember helped me and let me just put it that in perspective. Remember, that feeling I had in my gut when my first hack attack occurred. When I realized someone had violated my trust, someone had broken in. Someone was potentially going to take my entire business away from me. How helpless I felt, and I had no idea what to do. Questions like: What should I do?, How can I do it?, Who do I call?, What's going to happen to my business?, What's going to happen with my clients?. Of course, that was almost 30 years ago now. But this brought all those feelings back. So here's what I'm going to do for everybody out there. Because I know I'm not alone. Some of you are maybe 30-40 years behind me on this journey. I admit I was a pioneer out there. I got arrows in my back, right? I was out there on the Internet early, getting people online, when it was first legal to do so. I was one of the very first people. You weren't, Okay, I understand. You were running a business, and maybe you were not even born yet, okay. But I am committing now to build what I'm calling a security summer. And the idea is that throughout the summer, and I'm probably not going to be able to start this until late June, early July. But throughout the summer, I'm going to offer a course. So you know you know what to do, and you'll know how to protect yourself, right? Because you have to start at the beginning, before the bad guys get in, how to detect it, once they are in what to do about it, the forensic analysis that you're going to have to do after the fact, to clean this thing up, right? I don't want you to have that feeling in your gut that I had before. Thirty years ago, when my first hack happened. I've had a couple of times since and not nearly as dramatic, okay. Because I had dealt with it before and I knew what to do. I had moved into a position where I was pretty much at the forefront at the time in security. But then I went on to run my business. But I don't want you to have that feeling your gut. Right? What do you do? I am sure some of you have had it before. I know you've come into the office in the morning, the computers aren't working. And your first reaction is there in your gut. Your first thought is -- Oh my gosh, what do I do now? Then that turns into anger. It's anger towards your vendors. Right? Well, I have Norton. I bought that Sonic wall. How did this happen? I should be all set, right. And so now you get on the phone, and you start yelling at vendors, you start yelling at your people who are supposed to be taking care of the IT side. I don't want you to feel that way. We're going to have some free pieces of training this summer. If you're interested, send me an email, and let me know what security subject you're particularly interested in having me cover. That I can make sure we have some free training for you on that during the summer. I want to make it a summer of security. It's our security summer. Brought to you by Craig Peterson, my team and I am getting to work on it, as we speak. My wife is going to put her heart and soul into this effort. I think I know what you need, and I think I know what you want, but it is essential to hear from you so that I can give you what you feel you need. So, email me at Craigpeterson.com Craig Peterson. com. We're also going to be talking about it on this radio show on these podcasts and on YouTube side, etc., etc. I got my first real hater this week in a long time. And it brought back memories and made me more determined to help you guys out. So, What was one of the first things I did. I shut down my website and made sure everything was patched up, right? Because I didn't want him to try and hack into my site. After all, anonymous is a hacktivist group, and that's what they do. So, that's what I'm going to do for you guys. We're going to have a security summer this year. Okay, so let's get into a couple more of these articles before I run out of time. This one, I thought it was just totally appropriate. I got a couple of articles that are appropriate for this week, and you'll see those up on my website, and one or two of these articles were written up with my team. My wife does a lot of this stuff too. So, kudos to her. You will find these up on craigpeterson.com, This is from an article that initially appeared in Pro Publica, and I found it on Ars Technica myself. It is a fascinating article and written by a couple of people here, Renee Dudley and Jeff Cow. It's talking about the some of these companies here in the US that you can hire to help you out of ransomware, tight spot. Think about some of these we have read about, lately, The city of Atlanta, Georgia, Newark, New Jersey, the Port of San Diego, Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in LA. Atlanta, online water service requests and billing systems were down for over a month. Colorado Department of Transportation, they called in the National Guard, all because of cyber attacks. Apparently what has happened here is that the companies and in these cases, government institutions and hospitals, went to professionals and said, hey, what should we do now? The response from the FBI from the government, in general, is don't pay ransoms. Well, guess what happened here? The FBI said that the criminal actors were out of the reach of US law enforcement. But they were not apparently and out of the reach of this American company called Proven Data Recovery out of Elmsford, New York. It appears that these guys regularly made ransom payments to Sam Sam ransomware hackers over more than a year, according to Jonathan Storfer, who is a former employee who dealt with these ransom payments. Now, Bitcoin transactions are somewhat anonymous and difficult to track. But I know in talking with some secret service agents that they have tracked people through public records and got convictions because of being able to track down some of these Bitcoin coin payments. Pro Publica was able to trace four of these payments, and this article goes on and on. Another US company, Florida based company, Monster Cloud also professes to use their data recovery method, but turns out they were paying ransoms sometimes without informing law enforcement or the victims, this is bad. Again, from Pro Publica, both of these companies charge their victim's substantial fees on top of the ransom amount, and they offer other services such as sealing breaches to protect against future attacks. Well, that's what I do for a living, Right? I don't try and do the recovery and no do I pay any ransom. There are many pieces of free recovery software out there that work in most cases. But, sometimes if you don't have a good backup, you're just out of luck. So, keep that in mind. Going to one of these companies, if you have ransomware on your computer is not going to solve the problem of ransomware. Because, some of these account companies, at least two of them in this case, according to Pro Publica, are making deals with the ransomware criminals, which is, in my opinion, not right. So, we talked a couple of weeks ago about our friends over at Equifax and how they took a huge hit here. It cost them over a billion dollars, probably I would guess close to one and a half billion, but I don't know for sure. They haven't disclosed all of the numbers. This week, they did reveal that they had to do a bit of a write off of about a little more than half a billion dollars. But there's another one out there, and It is crazy. It is the one, I mentioned, from Krebs on security, concerning the website for First American Financial Corp, a Fortune 500 real estate, title insurance giant. I mean giant, billions of dollars in annual revenue. First, America Corp leaked hundreds of millions of documents related to mortgages going back to 2003. Krebs on security found this leak, and they went ahead, and they fixed it. Isn't that nice of them, after the horses got out of the barn. So, these are digitized records that included bank account numbers, bank statements, mortgage statements, tax records, social security numbers, wire transaction receipts, driver's license images, were all available without authentication to anyone with a web browser. I find that incredibly unbelievable that a company that employs 18,000 people, you'd think they'd have some security people on staff. And they brought in more than 5.7 billion. There you go. That's the number from Krebs article. Now Krebs found out a bit about it because of a real estate developer, out in Washington state, who said he'd had little luck getting a response from them. It just goes on and on, just like last week with what happened with Intel. And the reports of their colossal security problem. And they, it sounds like, literally tried to buy off the people who reported this massive bug in the Intel chips. It's just amazing. So it goes on and on the earliest document number available on the site wasn't document number 75. The dates and documents get closer to real-time each forward increment in the record number. I have the article up on my website, we've got a link to it if you want to see it. It's it is just stunning. So, who knows what happened has happened here, again, we have an example of a company that did not keep track of the security problems. And what do you want to bet they did not keep track of data x filtration, and what the criminals stole? Big deal. Big problem. Now Google's got a couple of warnings out this week too. Is this getting old to anybody? I hope you're learning from this, and I hope you can apply it in your own life and your businesses. Take time to learn from these things. But, Google exposed that their G Suite, which is the Google suite where you as a business, you can pay for Google Docs, Google Sheets, etc. If you're a business and you're trying to use it, they want you to pay for it. That's what the city of Atlanta found out when they got hacked. All of their email accounts were down, and they couldn't do spreadsheets, they couldn't do anything. So, they all signed up for Gsuite accounts. Google promptly shut them down two weeks ago for doing that, because they're supposed to pay. Then Google worked out a deal with them. However, it turns out they were storing plain text passwords on its servers for the last 14 years. It is a very, very big deal. So Google is saying that they have fixed the issue and that they've seen no other improper access or misuse of the affected passwords. They've got reasons why they did it. No, everybody makes mistakes in security, okay. I'm giving you that. But these two cases are for companies that should know better, they have big enough department, and they are going to lawsuits. And like Equifax, it's probably going to cost our friends over at First American Financial Corp over a billion dollars. It is something that they can maybe afford to pay a billion dollars in fines and fees. But how about you as a small business. So we've talked about two-factor authentication many times on my show. And we always set up two-factor authentication when it comes to our clients to keep their data safe. You know, some of them have to have to fall under the rules that are in place for federal military contractors, federal contractors, HIPAA records, etc., etc. So you have to have the right kind of two-factor authentication in place, you have to have the correct type of training, the right kind of databases, etc. And the people are getting ripped off right, left and center, these companies that are selling some of these things, they don't care. They are just trying to sell you something another point product and other point security, that is not going to help you out. Can you tell I am getting a little pissed today? Excuse, My French. But here's what's happening. Google has something they call Titan, and we've talked about it on the show before. It is a security key. It was leading edge, and I'm glad they did it. They've been using it internally for all of their logons. So, it's something you have along with something, you know. Now, you know. I have been promoting Yubikeys. I don't have an investment in any of these companies. We do use them when we are trying to get a company secured. The idea behind the Yubikey and Titan security keys is that it's a little USB fob, you plug it into your computer, you type in your password, you're off and running. Okay? Well, Google's warning that for the Bluetooth Low Energy version of the Titan security keys it sells for two-factor authentication are vulnerable to hijacking by nearby attackers. Google says if you have them, contact them. And they'll give you a free replacement device that fixes the vulnerability. It has to do with Bluetooth pairing protocols, and that means that anybody within 30 feet can carry out an attack, against you. These are $50, which is about the same cost as a Yubikey. I, personally, would go with the Yubikey. But there now you know about the Google Titan. There is nothing particularly wrong with it, except that it's one version is susceptible to hack. If you check the back of your Titan key, if you pull it out right now, it's probably on your key ring, it's a nice, small thing looks like your USB thumb drive, almost. If it starts with a T1 or T2, it is susceptible to attack and eligible for a free replacement. We're not going to have time to get into the rest of these things. So let's get into cyberbullying. I think this is an important one. And I want to talk about internet mobs because that's kind of what happened this week to me. And because I was reported on some security stuff, right, and they, they use almost anything they can against you. And recently we've seen real problems with cyberbullying against kids. According to a survey and a completed study, It reported online bullying affected 43% of kids. One in four has said that happened more than once. 70% of students reported seeing frequent bullying online. Over 80% of teens use a cell phone regularly. I think these numbers are probably higher than what this study showed, in 2014, I bet you they come close to 100%. Now, most of the teens ignore it. You know I talked about that terrible Netflix show "13 Reasons Why" where a teenage girl committed suicide and left behind 13 cassette tapes explaining her 13 reasons for killing herself. It has led to a 30% increase in teen suicides in the 30 days after that show came out. So there, there's been a correlation drawn on that it did not, by the way, affect adults, it was mainly the 10 to 18-year-olds that it touched. But, we have kids that are thinking about suicide and committing suicide because of cyberbullying. There have been well-publicized criminal cases about this. Now, how about an internet mob? How about if one of these groups decides to come after you, and the group is just the cheerleaders at school? There's a great story that CNN shared this week about a young lady, named Dominique Mora. She's from Southern California and went to school in St. Paul, Minnesota. She is 23 years old and was attending on a softball scholarship. So she thought it would be great to take a job at Chipotle to help make ends meet. Well, she was working at the store, and a group of teenagers came in ordered food, went to pay for it, and their debit card didn't work. That group of teenagers ran out of the restaurant with the food. They stole it, right. The manager gave them a little coaching and told them here's what they should do. What happened next was another day a group of teenagers came in, and she recognized two of them as being part of the group who had ordered food with the bad debit card before running off with the food. They never paid for it. They called the police and explained that these two teenagers were there and they did not want to serve them. We want them evicted from our store. Here is this young woman, 23 years old, and she asked them to pay first. They pulled up a cell phone, and she didn't realize they were videotaping her and started accusing her of racism because she was a white person caught in the act of doing something labeled racist. Which obviously, there's no racism involved in this at all, they had stolen food from this store, and it was on video, there's surveillance video, it had these two guys on it, according to what CNN is reporting. They dumped this video of her as a racist "B" online. The video of her November confrontation was watched at least 7 million times retweeted at least 30,000 times within two days, and media covered it. Chipotle fired her after it went viral. Now here she is, having done nothing wrong, the police not responding in a reasonable amount of time. It sounds like they never really did respond. It is a case of confirmation bias, these black guys were calling her a racist and the video they presented made it look like she may have been. It is now being used to paint her falsely as a racist. She lost her job and now is worried about what will happen, what she could or should do, and what she should not do. Those are the same questions I opened the show with today that went through my mind 30 years ago and ran through my mind again this week. Very, very, big deal. I think w have got to spend some time with our kids talking about this. Helping them understand the whole act of bullying, what cyberbullying is. That they should report it to the authorities at school, report it to your teacher, report it to the principal, I guess the vice principal is the one who's usually dealing with these types of things. The most common places where it's happening, and this is from stopbullying.gov, they have a lot of great information. Social media like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, SMS, you know, your text messages, instant messaging, which includes email provider, app services, social media, and of course, email at self. We've got to be careful because the content that we share online, you can get these internet mobs, this mob mentality where everyone jumps on board and starts attacking people. It can drive not just our teens, but almost anyone to suicide, and we don't want that to happen. Sit and talk with them. You know, I was severely bullied as a kid as well. But you know, I could leave it alone. It was happening on the way to school, at school, on the way back from school. At least there were brackets or definitions surrounding it. But nowadays, there aren't. All right, I want to send you to my website Craigpeterson.com, because you will find more information about all of these topics today. A very, interesting one on hackers. About anonymity that was once critical and how that's now changing. I might try and get into that next week. A little bit more here on the show. Also, the Consumer Reports thing about Tesla. Don't count on their autopilot people. Be very careful. The automatic lane change feature is reported to be far less competent than a human driver. So, don't use it. Be concerned about cyberbullying. I'm working here this summer. I'm going to make this a security summer. I'm going to be doing some free courses. We're going to help you guys out with lots of free information. I give these little webinars. They're not I'm not trying to upsell you or anything else. I'm trying to inform you so make sure you attend. Let me know if you're interested and what topics you think I should cover. So if you are interested, email me. me@craigpeterson.com That is P-E-T-E-R-S-O-N Peterson with an O. Until next week, everybody. Take care. Have a great week. Bye-bye --- Related articles: Our New Society: Social Media Results In Judgement By Mobs Open Source Is Changing The Way We Approach Everything Autonomous Cars — Are they ready for Prime Time? Why Are We Still Trusting Google? Running Windows? Be Sure You Patch! You Need Two-Factor Authentication Even If Google Screwed It Up Got a Mortgage? Your Information Might Be Included In Massive Hack --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553
Google Plus, meet MySpace. Almost eight years ago, Google launched its own social media site: Google Plus. Now Google is quietly shutting down the site. Google Plus had been struggling with low ad revenue. How will the closure affect businesses that used it?
Google Plus, meet MySpace. Almost eight years ago, Google launched its own social media site: Google Plus. Now Google is quietly shutting down the site. Google Plus had been struggling with low ad revenue. How will the closure affect businesses that used it?
Three years ago Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress, advised developers to "learn JavaScript deeply", and it's proven be to solid advice. Now Google is suggesting the same thing if you want to stay on top of the search engines. See full show notes at: https://www.mickmel.com/podcast030/
New Cyber Security Rules going into effect for the Federal Agencies next week. Financial Accounts are going to be Hacked. It is time to set up all your financial accounts like you are going to be hacked. Infant Social Security Numbers are worth the most on the Dark Web -- this is because they are unused for 10-15 years during which time someone can use their identity. DOD Weapon System cybersecurity and how the DOD, just isn't grappling with the scale of these vulnerabilities. Do you know what data you have? If you don't know what or where the sensitive data is then how do you know what you need to protect. That is why it is important to have a Cyber Liability Assessment done. The Importance of Changing and Managing Passwords can't be stressed enough. Have you guys heard about Deep fakes? This is quite terrifying what the future of AI and fake news may bring. Where was Microsoft's QA department? Can you believe Microsoft released an update that deletes your documents folder? They have pulled the Windows 10 update now. Have you rented an Airbnb lately? Apparently some Airbnb Hidden cameras in your Airbnb rental Did you hear what students are willing to exchange for free coffee? Wow! It is downright dangerous for them. Craig is putting up a new insider site (Yes, it is free, but you have to sign up) On it will have all his special reports that he puts out and you will be the first to get them. These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit -CraigPeterson.com --- Transcript: Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors. Airing date: 10/13/2018 The Importance of Cyber Liability Assessments, Changing and Managing Passwords, Deep Fakes, Microsoft pulled the Windows 10 update, Digital IDs, Hidden cameras in your Airbnb rental, The danger of no Cash options at Coffee Shops Craig Peterson: 0:00 Hey, Good Morning, everybody. Glad to have you here. We've had a very busy week. This week, we managed to do our three webinar series. Hopefully, you had a chance to attend. This as part of our master class, for small businesses, about security and the types of security things you need to be doing and paying attention to, kind of being careful of. So, if you didn't get it, we will be having other little series as time goes on. And, you know, I keep trying to do this, maybe one a week, maybe less, maybe more. But you know, time will tell. So, keep an eye out, we'll be doing more. We had a lot of great feedback. We've started doing some of these cyber liability assessments. Again, these are free things we're doing for listeners of the show, and people who attended the webinar. So, that we can tell them where they're starting. Isn't that the biggest problem? How can you get to where you want to go, if you have no idea where you're at, right. So, that's the whole idea behind this cyber liability assessment. And those are underway, we just did one for one lady that was really quite a shocking, at least to her I'm sure, a listener to the radio show, where there was well over a million dollars in liability if the data got out. So, we're thinking maybe one of the things we should do in the very near future is put together a little special report on how to keep that data safe. Especially, with the new regulations that are starting to go into place now. That is kind of following the whole GDPR thing over in Europe. So, that you know, the protection if you will, of your personal information. California already has them in place, they're moving over to the federal side. And it looks like the Department of Homeland Security is going to be adopting those some going into effect next week. In fact, federal agencies are special, and want to be compliant already, but, apparently, about 50% of them is all that really is ready to comply. So, we will be talking about this as time goes on. Probably put together a little master class on some of that stuff. What you have to do in order to comply with these new regulations. We've already been doing some stuff for GDPR for those businesses that are trying to do stuff, internationally. So, today we are going to talk about some of the articles up on my website. We do curation every week in fact, it's me going through a lot of articles hundreds of them every week, really we kind of skim through try and find the best. Some of the best this week that you'll find up on the site, everything you should do before and after you lose your phone. I had a conversation this week with a gentleman who just two weeks ago got ransomware in his computer and ended up taking it into the local Geek Squad over at BestBuy trying to get them to fix a few things up. Hopefully, that's all going to work out for him, but it really brought to mind that I've got to put together a little masterclass and special report on this very topic. How do you prepare yourself for the inevitable? And, that is one of our articles for today, let's see if we can find that there's so much stuff here. Election security is a mess. Microsoft pulled the Windows 10 update, the October update. and we'll talk about that and why really bad news, frankly there. Digital IDs extra harmful here way worse than you might suppose. Finding hidden cameras in your Airbnb rental. No cash at this cafe - What students are doing in order to get free coffee? 3:48 Terrifying future. Deep fakes. Have you have you guys seen this article? It's up on my website. Deep fakes 2.0, the terrifying future of AI and fake news. 3:59 Weapon System cybersecurity, The DOD, just isn't grappling with the scale of their vulnerabilities. The breach that killed Google Plus, wasn't a breach at all. I want to talk about this today. We'll get into it a little bit of detail. But, what's a breach? What's a vulnerability and what's in between? At what point do they have to report. Right now they have to report when they have a breach of personal information. Well, how about 4:25 if they don't know if they've been breached? If they found and closed some sort of a 4:29 vulnerability. As I was just talking about. You'll see this up on my website, as well. And this is how to set up your financial accounts like you are going to be hacked. Because you will be hacked, right. Isn't that kind of the bottom line? Isn't that what we've been finding. It's it's bad news, but it's the news, right. It's a real thing, frankly. 4:54 So let's get into this now. Your financial accounts and what to do about it. 5:05 Now, you might want to spend a little time looking at this article up on my website. In the past week. And I'm talking about right now, October 2018. We have more reports about hacks. So, the big companies. Now the small companies, as I explained in the master classes this week, those free master classes. The small companies, we don't hear about, because who cares, right. But bottom line, it's a big deal. Well, in the past week alone, we've seen Experian, Facebook, and Google, have all had hacks. Now Google's case and we'll talk about this a little bit more, here but it's kind of interesting because the hack happened seven months ago. And, that brings up some other privacy problems, but now you know there have been thousands of hacks over the last 12 months. It just continually going on. I mentioned a guy who was on my masterclass this week who was hacked. Who got ransomware. It's it's just absolutely crazy about how that all happens. So, I went through the anatomy of a hack and the Anatomy of an attack, just because what you got was a virus, for instance, and that infected your computer and spread to other computers, doesn't mean it wasn't a hack. A hack is kind of a broader term we're starting to use. We're using the term hack because of doxxing. Now doxxing made the news again this week and the reason doxxing hit the news again this week had to do with a couple, apparently here, of Senate staffers, Democrats Senate staffers who were getting the personal information the home phone numbers, etc. of congressmen who were voting for President Trump's nomination to the Supreme Court Brett Kavanaugh. They were posting home phone number cell numbers addresses, everything information about the senator's spouses about their kids. The just crazy stuff they were doing. By the way, yes indeed, they got arrested for all of that. But doxxing isn't just reserved for democratic senate staffers. Doxxing is also used by the bad guys to find out information about you, about your family, so that they can then use that to manipulate you into doing something they want you to do. And that, as it turns out, has been a $12 billion dollar business over the last 24 months, according to the FBI. That is huge, huge money. 7:45 So, we know that hacking occurs. We know that we are getting targeted. Every week I help companies and even individuals who have been hacked and help them understand what's going on, what to do about it. But, I much prefer this and in case you're wondering, listening on the radio, I am doing this also online. If you go to my website, you can watch the video of me here on the air. But, at Craig Peterson dot com, of course. But this, why not set everything up in advance as though that cloud service, that vendor, that customer, is going to be hacked. Because the odds are, with thousands of breaches that they could be. This is based on an article from Shira Frankel over the New York Times, and she goes through it as well. This particular article I put up is from life hacker that sometimes has some excellent stuff. And this is one of those cases, starts with the obvious stuff. I had I think it was about 70 people this week, Text me asking for my password special report. Because we had this Facebook hack this week. I spent some time going through that during this week's master class, I may try and post that up on my website. And I'll let you know if that ends up going up. On how to tell if your Facebook account was hacked this last week or if it has been cloned or if there's something else fishy going on with your Facebook account. So, we covered that in this week's master class. But, if you really want to protect yourself, obviously change your passwords, and make sure you're using a good Password Manager, pulling it all together. And if you did not get a copy of my special report on passwords. Where I go through everything about how to create them, how to choose a really good Password Manager for yourself for your business and how to use that. If you didn't get that make sure you text me, just send me your name and email at 855-385-5553 you can just text me right there. 855-385-5553. So, number one, use a great day password use something like last pass or one password, we use one password really great for businesses the last pass has some great features as well. But I like one password with the integration to DUO, you know two-factor authentication. So number two, make sure you check your credit report, look up your banking statements, maybe tie all of your accounts together or something like mint dot com. So, you can kind of keep track over all of this. And we had Mint's CEO on the show some time ago. You're going to want to freeze your credit too. Your kids, you know, nowadays they are issuing social security numbers, when the child is born, the government wants to track them from day one. You know, back in the day we applied for them. When we got our first job, right. Now you're born you get a social security number. One of the most valuable social security numbers out there is social security numbers of infants. Why infants? You might ask, why? Why would anybody care about an infant social security number? Well, the answer is actually rather straightforward. That infant is not going to notice, the social security number has been stolen for what, 10-20 years. So, they have that period of time to misuse and abuse that so security number, maybe the name, the date of birth, all of that sort of stuff, but the date of birth, they can manipulate, right. They're just going to lie about it. And now they have a way to work in the US and bank accounts and get it all of this stuff. So, one of the things they're advising is not only checked your kid's credit report but make sure you put a freeze on their accounts, as well, at the three main credit bureaus. Now, I mentioned what was this about a few weeks ago that freezes are about to be free, thanks to a bill, President Trump signed a number of months back. Those should be in place already, and double check with the credit agencies, but they should not be charging you for freezes or, un-freezes anymore, which is actually a really good thing because Equifax didn't seem to care, right, that they lost all of our personal information. And then kind of the last thing is two-factor authentication, if all you can do is two-factor authentication with your phone, getting a text message. Okay, I get it. I understand. It's complicated to do it with other devices. We have physical Yubikeys. We also have the one password that we can use and use that to do validation with one time passwords, using one password. So all of that again, up on my website. 12:50 This next one that brings up some interesting questions. And this is about a breach that killed Google Plus. Now, you might remember Google Plus when everyone was worried, you don't know it's going to take over from Facebook, because Google Plus is a social network and well, Google's behind it, right? So why would it not take over? Well, very few people ended up using Google Plus. And it turns out there was a major problem with the security on Google Plus. Now, this is where the interesting question comes in. 13:23 They had an API on Google Plus that could theoretically be used to access the personal information of as many as about a half a million users of Google Plus, actual hits. That's probably the total number of users of Google Plus, there just weren't very many of them. I had an account, but I never really used it. It never got traction, 13:44 right? They really never did. 13:47 So, this vulnerability would allow people to get in and get all this private information. But, there were only 432 people who ever registered to use the API on Google Plus. How's that for a slap in the face for Google? You know, Come on, guys, obviously, people just aren't using your platform. So why keep it up? Well, about seven months ago, they found this vulnerability and they fixed it, in March of this year. Now, did you notice, they didn't tell anybody? This vulnerability was never reported. Because the Google lawyers apparently looked at this. And this is a great article, from the Verge, that I put up on my website. But they apparently looked at it and said, The law requires us to report data thefts, data breaches. In this case, we don't know if anyone used this API, this programming interface. We don't know if anybody used it to steal personal information. Therefore, we're not going to tell anybody about it. We're just going to close the hole and not bother mentioning it. The Wall Street Journal found out about this when it got its hands on some memos. And that's what got this particular ball rolling. So Unknown 15:14 what here? Where's the 15:16 disconnect? What do you call something like this? Is it a bug? Is it a breach? Is it a vulnerability, the laws that are in place right now, and California has one of the strictest ones, none of them address this type of a problem? So, companies are kind of confused over, What they have to tell regulators? What they have to tell their customers? Because, Would you like to know that your data might have been lost? Unknown 15:47 You know a company doesn't really want to tell you your data might have been 15:50 lost. Because, if your data might have been lost, you're not going to be very happy with them. You know, we're looking at statistics right now, that says, 60 plus percent, in some cases, as much as 80% of people do not want to do any business at all with a company that had a data breach. So, if you're a small business, and you're not sure if you had a data breach, because small businesses, how often do you have loggers in place, that track things like potential data breaches? potential data losses? Right? Small businesses don't usually have those now, we've helped a lot of small businesses put those systems in place because they're required to by law. So, depending on what business you're in, you may or may not be mandated to have those systems in place. But, you probably don't know if you were breached. And if you were breached, and you found out which, by the way, on average, is six months if you found out six months later, and could you tell them what was lost or what might have been lost. So, businesses are just keeping silent about all of this, understandably, right, because most people will not do business with you again if you lost their data. 17:05 So, that makes all you know, a lot of sense, I think you probably feel the same way as 17:09 I do. I wouldn't want to be doing business with somebody that lost my personal private information. So, when we're talking about this, as the Project Zero guys over at Google, they're looking for zero-day attacks. We've got white hat bug hunters, who are out there looking to build the reputation. What, you know, Facebook just fell from grace, just a few weeks ago, 50 million-plus accounts were hacked, they were exposed. Look at what happened last week with, Did my account get hacked? I got this weird message. It said I should forward this and a friend did not accept my friend request, you know what's going on right 17:55 Industry is still trying to figure it out. It's yet another example of how we just I don't have the laws to keep up with 18:03 the technology, nowadays, 18:05 right? I guess that shouldn't be a surprise to anybody. 18:09 I've got to bring this one up. We've got a lot of weapons systems that are being developed, nowadays. I was reading some interesting stuff about World War Two technology and what was being done by the Germans and the Russians and others. And, you know, and it was very mechanical, right? The torpedoes back in the day had wires they ran all the way back to the submarine. 18:33 Interesting stuff. Today, wow, the Department of Defense now is trying to protect everything. We have some Department of Defense sub-subcontractors, as clients trying to help them out these huge reports they have to do. The training they have to do? Physical security, as well as computer security. So they're trying to tighten it up, but if you look at something like this and I'm holding up to the camera just a quick picture showing one particular weapon. And all of the computers are on board we're talking about something that's really a computer, right? It's not a missile it's a flying computer on a, you know, on a flight platform, frankly. In operational testing the DOD has routinely found, what they're calling mission-critical cyber vulnerabilities, in these systems that were under development, absolutely huge. Great article from gao.gov. They found that using simple tools, simple techniques that the whole - Are you familiar with the Red Team, Blue Team thing - Where you have a competing cyber team, someone's trying to defend the network while another team is trying to break into the network? The military does this all the time. We do this with private businesses, where it's intended external scan is kinda like a penetration test, but you, you're actively trying to defend, actively trying to hack, so that you can see how effective both tools are and you can't defend properly if you don't know a hack right isn't that kind of the bottom line, here. So they were doing it and they found that most of the time the bad guys quote unquote could get into these different and pass these defenses in these defense systems without even being detected. Now that's a very bad thing so the DOD has recently taken some steps are trying to improve the weapon system cybersecurity. They've got new policies, new guidelines, out there to incorporate cybersecurity. We found that some of our clients are there just manufacturers of widgets, basic widgets, things like wires or you know modules that might go into one of these DOD systems. Even down to that level where there's there's nothing active. There's no computer systems active at all. So even at the level of a wire, the cables and connectors the DOD is now going to those people and saying, hey listen you need to up your security, here are the new standards, and they have to meet these new NIST standards and others. A very big deal, very scary deal frankly. And we've we've got to pay attention to these systems and now we know why. The GAO the General Accounting Office has found that the DOD systems are severely lacking in security. Which is scary when you consider that we have potential adversaries, such as China or Russia or even North Korea, in Iran Who all are are very good at hacking all know how to get into systems and it couldn't be very bad frankly. Could end up being very bad. 21:57 next article 21:58 real quick you're going to want to go online and have a look at this. This articles from Wired and I have it up on my website as well, at least a link to it, at Craig Peterson dot com, but everything you should do before and after you lose your phone. It's really great. It goes through the features that you can use, from remote tracking, exactly how to do it. Where the settings are, protecting your lock screens, backing up data, face ID, passcodes, thumbprint readers, their preemptive measures, and what to do, contacting your carrier. Very good advice. Something that you probably should have a look at out there. 22:42 This is terrifying, 22:46 frankly. And, this is the future. 22:53 Now, we know about AI, 22:55 right? Artificial intelligence, machine learning, which is kind of the precursor to artificial and machine learning is kind of where we're at now. There's no real artificial intelligence by the strictest of definitions, but 23:09 it's coming 23:10 In this article is about something called Deep fakes. Have you heard about this before you've heard about the fake news, right? So what's a deep fake, a deep fake, as it turns out, is a video in this case that looks like it's someone doing something else. And these deep fakes were discovered over on Reddit, which is a bulletin board, some really interesting stuff. But, what they had done is they had taken some porn video and had a computer, analyze it, and had taken some video of Emma Watson and had the computer analyze that. And, of course, when it comes to celebrity, there are lots of videos, you've got all of the facial tics, the way they express themselves away, they move. The computers are analyzing their gate, you know, as they're walking, their vocal patterns, etc, etc. And these deep fakes, now have gotten so good that they've been able to take Emma Watson's face and stick it on another body and create a whole new video. One that never existed before. So, Emma Watson never did any of this. Remember, Watson was not videotaped performing any of these acts. Obviously, somebody was, today, but it looks like it was her. Absolutely amazing. Now, I went on to Reddit. These have been taken down, its against Reddit policies to have that type of stuff up online. But deep fakes, are only the first step in a chain of technology that's coming our way, and coming our way fast. We can now do all kinds of stuff. Think of Gollum for instance, from Lord of the Rings. There was an actor that was moving, did you see that any of the behind the scenes stuff on this, he was moving, he had these kinds of balls all over him, so the computer could track his movements, and it did very coarse movements. If he'd move his arms, the computer can move his arms and you saw the computer animation with this kind of turned him into a stick figure so that they could make Golem move basically the same way. And then they went in afterwards. And then they tried to do the face, make the face just write a move just right, don't have to do any of that today. Today, you can just take a video, just a regular video. And from that regular video, put it on top of another regular video. Within its expected here. And this is an article from Daily Dot. And it's quite fascinating. But it's expected that within the next 10 years, this sort of thing will be extremely easy to you to do. 26:03 It's this article goes on for about eight pages. But this technology will end up being used for producing clones. You'll be able to use these in when with a psychiatrist where you got issues with your mom or your dad or someone else they can in a virtual world, today eventually, maybe not even a virtual world but today they can bring that person in and have you chat with them. That you know barely, right 10 years from now. It will be pretty, darn good. And 20 years from now it may be indistinguishable from reality. Just like you're talking right now with some of these chatbots, online. Where it's just you typing back and forth without really a computer the other end. In the near future it's going to be like you're on Skype with someone but then the person at the other end isn't a person. It's a computer, a computer program. So there's a few more we did not get to today. I hope check them out online. What students are doing to pay their tab. Hidden cameras at Airbnb rentals. Digital IDs, very scary things. Do not install Windows 10 updates, before you have a good backup. They are, Windows 10 updates I've been deleting all your documents. And not fun and election security is an absolute mess. But we can't get today so visit me online Craig Peterson dot com. Make sure you sign up for my next master class. Sign up for my email list just Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe. Love to see you there. We'll keep you up to date. Every week we send out these articles to everybody that is a subscriber. Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe or text me anytime. Any question. 855 385 5553. Have a great week. We'll be back next week and in fact we will be podcasting on Monday again. Take care bye-bye. --- Related articles: Face It! You’re Going To Be Hacked, So Set Up Your Financial Accounts Like You're Going To Be Hacked Breach, Bug, Hack. When Does A Business Have A Responsibility To Inform Its Customers? Weapon Systems Cybersecurity: Looks Like Our Weapons Are Easy To Hack Election Security Is A Mess, And The Cleanup Won't Arrive Until 2021 Millennials Will Give Away Their Personal Information In Exchange For A Cup Of Coffee DEEPFAKES 2.0: Computers Can Already Create Convincing, Fake Videos Of Anyone Everything You Should Do Before—And After—You Lose Your Phone Use Airbnb? How To Find Hidden Cameras In Your Airbnb Rental Microsoft Update Has Been Deleting Documents Digital Ids Are More Dangerous Than You Think --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Message Input: Message #techtalk Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553
AdEspresso is one of my favorite Facebook marketing tools. Listen as I interview the founder Massimo Chieruzzi. Digital Advertising Made Easy, Fast & Effective. Start driving results across Facebook, Instagram and Now Google with a free 14-day trial of AdEspresso. https://adespresso.com
Today our guest expert is Jeff Elder who works in inbound marketing. Jeff will cover two topics today: • a general understanding of inbound marketing, as well as • his journey from programming to becoming a marketer via web design. Jeff describes his journey to his work as an inbound marketer from way back when. He formed a web design company with a close friend in 2008. Their goal? Commitment to being the best. Eventually during his web design journey, he realized that other factors were entering into the internet, especially with regards to the generation of revenue. This included social media. Jeff began an in-depth study of buying behaviors and how that would work on the internet. He focused on HubSpot's content. Eventually, HubSpot reached out to him and asked if he wanted to become a partner, and he did. Jeff contrasted this approach with traditional outbound marketing where mass mailings are performed or ads are broadcast on TV, radio, et cetera. Jeff goes on to describe how with inbound marketing you position yourself to be found on a search engine, as users try to find solutions to problems that they experience. He talks about how this approach, inbound marketing, is also referred to as permission-based marketing, because the prospect has complete control of the conversation, and you as a provider only deepen your relationship based on gaining that permission. The way to do this is by being the authority and teaching rather than selling. Jeff described the three step approach that he uses with his inbound marketing approach. The three steps comprise: • awareness, • consideration, and • decision The perspective customer first becomes AWARE that they have a problem, which they may or may not be able to define. So they proceed to go to the second stage, consideration. Then they do research to see what's available to both define their problem and find a solution. Consequently, when this research is completed, the perspective customer is 75% through the decision-making process. This leads to the third and final step, decision-making. As an inbound marketer, there are three steps in your sales process: • listen • diagnose • prescribe. Jeff goes on to describe how HubSpot has changed the function of the sales person to now be more of a guide. The best way to be this guide is to create content, content that helps the perspective client define their problem as well as define a solution. This approach works well with Google's current frame of mind, where Google is working to be more human. Google wants to provide content created by providers to help Google's clients get the best results and the best solutions. The question is why would Google do this? The answer is this is how they're able to show credibility with Google's advertisers. Jeff goes on to describe the relationship between the pillar page and the content page. In the old days, searches were driven by keywords and really were context-independent and consequently could make a search difficult. Now Google reviews content based on intent as well as specifics in a piece of content. This allows Google to tailor searches for an individual user's needs. The pillar page is basically a long document on your website that defines your intent, context within which you work, and the specific content that you provide. Links are made to specific content, creating a web of solutions that shows the site visitor both your authenticity and authenticity. You can reach Jeff at: jeff@syncthree.com https://www.syncthree.com/ or in Instagram at jeldera For more information on the “8 Steps From Chaos To Clarity and Calm: CEO Advanced Training” go to https://www.ctrchg.com/ceo-advanced-training/ Your feedback is important. Choose from the following options: • place a review in iTunes, • click on “leave a comment” below, • send any comments along with your name and the show number to support@ctrchg.com or • call us at 614-388-8917 and leave a message including your name, the podcast number and podcast title. Listen to future episodes for our reply.
In this week’s VIP, Nelson and James are joined by Rob Minault from the AT Banter podcast. They discuss the top stories from Cool Blind Tech and give you some Cool Picks to think about. News Flash Google launches disability answer desk. Apple and Microsoft already have dedicated staff who are made available to help customers with accessibility related questions. Now Google will do the same in a limited capacity. The disability support team is available Monday through Friday, from 8:00AM to 5:00PM PST by email only. The team will respond to your questions within 72 hours. Top Stories 68 Top Scoring Companies That Are The Best PLACES to Work for Disability Inclusion US Business Leadership Network (USBLN) and American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD) have released the 2017 Disability Equality Index (DEI) the third year measured by the Index. 110 companies participated in the 2017 DEI, with results indicating where companies are excelling in their commitment to inclusive environmental, social, and governance policies. Bionic Lens Improves Eyesight Beyond Normal Vision Ocumetics Technology Corporation is developing a replacement for the lens found in the human eye. Called the Bionic Lens, it could radically improve eyesight, prevent cataracts, and provide new ways to see the world. LG’s Robot Lawn Mower Works with Alexa and Google Assistant At the IFA consumer electronics trade show, LG showed off a robot lawn mower that they first announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this year. The robot can be controlled with your voice via the Amazon Alexa or Google voice assistant. You need to setup a perimeter wire around your lawn, so that the mower will know where to stop mowing. But after that, everything is easy. The mower also comes equipped with GPS, so if it is stolen, you will be able to track it down. Cool Picks YouTube Kids by Google, Inc. Nelson has a great recommendation for parents who want their kids to have a safe place to play on the internet. TuneIn Premium For just $9.99 per month, James has found more audio-books, podcasts, news broadcasts, and sporting events than he could ever listen to. Marty's Blindfold Games Rob is blown away by the number of audio-games a blind person can play on the iPhone.
In this week’s VIP, Nelson and James are joined by Rob Minault from the AT Banter podcast. They discuss the top stories from Cool Blind Tech and give you some Cool Picks to think about. News Flash Google launches disability answer desk. Apple and Microsoft already have dedicated staff who are made available to help customers with accessibility related questions. Now Google will do the same in a limited capacity. The disability support team is available Monday through Friday, from 8:00AM to 5:00PM PST by email only. The team will respond to your questions within 72 hours. Top Stories 68 Top Scoring Companies That Are The Best PLACES to Work for Disability Inclusion US Business Leadership Network (USBLN) and American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD) have released the 2017 Disability Equality Index (DEI) the third year measured by the Index. 110 companies participated in the 2017 DEI, with results indicating where companies are excelling in their commitment to inclusive environmental, social, and governance policies. Bionic Lens Improves Eyesight Beyond Normal Vision Ocumetics Technology Corporation is developing a replacement for the lens found in the human eye. Called the Bionic Lens, it could radically improve eyesight, prevent cataracts, and provide new ways to see the world. LG’s Robot Lawn Mower Works with Alexa and Google Assistant At the IFA consumer electronics trade show, LG showed off a robot lawn mower that they first announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this year. The robot can be controlled with your voice via the Amazon Alexa or Google voice assistant. You need to setup a perimeter wire around your lawn, so that the mower will know where to stop mowing. But after that, everything is easy. The mower also comes equipped with GPS, so if it is stolen, you will be able to track it down. Cool Picks YouTube Kids by Google, Inc. Nelson has a great recommendation for parents who want their kids to have a safe place to play on the internet. TuneIn Premium For just $9.99 per month, James has found more audio-books, podcasts, news broadcasts, and sporting events than he could ever listen to. Marty's Blindfold Games Rob is blown away by the number of audio-games a blind person can play on the iPhone.
In this week’s VIP, Nelson and James are joined by Rob Minault from the AT Banter podcast. They discuss the top stories from Cool Blind Tech and give you some Cool Picks to think about. News Flash Google launches disability answer desk. Apple and Microsoft already have dedicated staff who are made available to help customers with accessibility related questions. Now Google will do the same in a limited capacity. The disability support team is available Monday through Friday, from 8:00AM to 5:00PM PST by email only. The team will respond to your questions within 72 hours. Top Stories 68 Top Scoring Companies That Are The Best PLACES to Work for Disability Inclusion US Business Leadership Network (USBLN) and American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD) have released the 2017 Disability Equality Index (DEI) the third year measured by the Index. 110 companies participated in the 2017 DEI, with results indicating where companies are excelling in their commitment to inclusive environmental, social, and governance policies. Bionic Lens Improves Eyesight Beyond Normal Vision Ocumetics Technology Corporation is developing a replacement for the lens found in the human eye. Called the Bionic Lens, it could radically improve eyesight, prevent cataracts, and provide new ways to see the world. LG’s Robot Lawn Mower Works with Alexa and Google Assistant At the IFA consumer electronics trade show, LG showed off a robot lawn mower that they first announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this year. The robot can be controlled with your voice via the Amazon Alexa or Google voice assistant. You need to setup a perimeter wire around your lawn, so that the mower will know where to stop mowing. But after that, everything is easy. The mower also comes equipped with GPS, so if it is stolen, you will be able to track it down. Cool Picks YouTube Kids by Google, Inc. Nelson has a great recommendation for parents who want their kids to have a safe place to play on the internet. TuneIn Premium For just $9.99 per month, James has found more audio-books, podcasts, news broadcasts, and sporting events than he could ever listen to. Marty's Blindfold Games Rob is blown away by the number of audio-games a blind person can play on the iPhone.
The ad kings have faced criticism over questionable content. Now Google is in the hot seat as brands like L’Oreal pull their digital spending. Also, Lyft finds an opening as Uber hits roadblocks. Plus: Not all is copacetic between Goldman Sachs alumni in Washington. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
This segment was broken in two parts as the technical segment with Heather Mahalik happened in the middle of it. Heather is a senior digital forensics analyst at Basis Technology. As the on-site project manager, she uses her experience to manage the cell phone exploitation team and supports media and cell phone forensics efforts in the U.S. government. Heather is a certified SANS instructor and teaching the upcoming course Advanced Smartphone and Mobile Device Forensics. Ok, on to the stories of the week with Paul, Larry, Allison and Jack. What'd you do this summer? Disney? Six Flags? Big Data Land? After much chatter in the Twittersphere (logged here by Space Rogue) last week, Jack brings up the "Popping Penguins" article from Forbes. The article talks about this super vulnerable program that is going to be the downfall of Linux. It's called bash. Would you believe you can use bash to start a listener on your machine and then send some commands over telnet to have someone else's machine connect back to you? Uh oh. Also, beware of another application, one that runs from the desktop that lets you connect to other computers and pull down files from a machine you don't own. Yeah, that one's called a browser. Sounds equally dangerous, no? Should we uninstall bash as a security measure? Larry threw out there an article on 5 WiFi security myths to abandon. But Larry mentioned that some of these might not actually be very new. Things like don't hide SSID as some newer systems will see them anyway and digging deeper to find the SSID isn't that hard. Plus, if its owner took the steps to hide it, wouldn't that pique your interest that there may be something good running there? Sending out a weak signal may sound like a good idea as if someone can't reach it, they can't connect to it, right? But all that does is annoys its intended users and if someone really wants to get on the network, they'll simply use an antenna. The article ends with the non-myth that if you truly want WiFi security, make sure you use good encryption and a strong password. Simple, eh? Jack was looking forward to going on a good patch rant. He and Paul have done webinars about really stretching things and getting your patch cycle down to five days from the day of release. Jack said during the good old days, he'd challenge himself to getting his systems patched within 72 hours. Patch Tuesday was to be completed by Friday. In this article by Dr. Anton Chuvakin, he does indicate how it would be good for some big corporations to get their patch cycle down from 90 days to 30 days, but then argues if the bad guys only need 3, then what's the point of all that effort? Jack's feeling is that even the 30 days should be enough in many cases, but it's often politics and other "can't do" attitudes that prevent it from happening. Why is that? Get those patches in place people! One quick note on a tangent the team went off on. In their experience as pentesters, Larry and Paul mention that all to often the way they end up pwning a system is through some machine that no one knew was running, with services that no one knew were running, with an account that no one knows why it still exists. Do you have a good inventory of where your data is? What machines are in your data center? What services and accounts are on each? If those are gold to a pentester, who has to respect a customer's defined scope, guess what a malicious user is going to do to your network. Paul's looking for advice on what new phone he should get? Android? iPhone? What say you? Tweet him up with your suggestion at @securityweekly. Remember that Yahoo bug bounty program? $12.50 credit toward the Yahoo store? A little update from the rants and ridicule from last week, it was actually one guy , Ramses Martinez, Director, Yahoo Paranoids, who was very appreciative of people reporting bugs and was paying them out of pocket. He would send researchers a Yahoo tshirt but would then find out the recipient already had multiple Yahoo shirts. Martinez's idea then was to give the reporter a credit in the Yahoo store matching the value of the shirt, our of his own pocket. Since the uproar, Yahoo has installed its own bug bounty program and Martinez is no longer paying for the reports himself. Good on ya, Yahoo and even better, thank you Ramses Martinez for caring about security. Speaking of bug bounties, Google has started a bug bounty program for open source software. Repeat that, it's not just Google software that they're paying bounties for, it's software that there really is no organization behind and normally count on volunteers to fix things. Now Google is putting their money behind that effort. As Allison mentions, there hasn't ever been any motivation for anyone to report bugs and now there is. estrada-sm.jpgPaunch, the alleged author of the Blackhole exploit kit was arrested in Russia last week. Or at least we think so. Some unconfirmed reports have indicated this and Blackhole has not been updated since this time. Or maybe the guy just decided to take an extended vacation and threw the story out there himself. Either way, it might be time for Evil Bob to find a new exploit kit. (Note: Erik Estrada is not "Paunch", he's Ponch, as in Frank Poncharello) Microsoft has a new disk cleanup where it removes all the old and outdated updates. Jack gained more than 6 GB of space after running the cleanup but a word of caution, it take a concerning long time for the next reboot. You might think you killed your computer but no, it really does take that long. Check out "Tails" a security and privacy distribution and let us know what you think. Is it good? What makes it a better choice than some others? Though the number of security updates in recent versions is a little concerning. Yeah, I get it that it's good that security holes are fixed and that it's to software that the distro is including. But it's just a little concerning when you pitch it as being for security and privacy yet there are piles of security updates. It makes me wonder just how secure it is and whether it's any better than a secure version of your favorite distribution anyway. But you can certainly let me know and I'll post some comments from you in upcoming week. Tweet me at @plaverty9 There was also some discussion on iOS7 image identification, Larry has a colleague at Inguardians who wrote up an intro to using rfcat and Jack suggests taking a deeper look for yourself before jumping into the patch for MS13-81 and whether your system needs it. If it does, test thoroughly. It's got some deep stuff on it.