Craig Peterson's Tech Talk

Are You Ready For Data Wiping Attacks? Yet another warning coming out from the federal government about cyber security. And this one is based on what's been happening in Ukraine. So we're going to talk about that situation, the whole cyber security over there and why it's coming here. [Automated transcript follows] CISA is the cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency. How's that for a name it's not as bad as what does that shield right over from the Marvel universe, but the cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency is the agency that was created to not just protect federal government systems, although they are providing information for. [00:00:41] People who protect those systems, but also for businesses and you and me and our homes. So they keep an eye on what's happening, what the various companies out there are finding, because most of the cybersecurity information that we get is from private companies and they. But it altogether, put it in a nice little wrapping paper. [00:01:05] In fact, y

Weekly Show #1158 We know the Russians have been attacking us. I've talked a lot about it on the radio and TV over the last couple of weeks. So I am doing something special; we are going through the things you can do to stay safe from the latest Russian attacks. Last week, we started doing something I promised we would continue -- how can you protect yourself when it comes to the Russians? The Russians are the bad guys when it comes to bad guys. So there are a few things you can do. And there are a few things; frankly, you shouldn't be doing. And that's precisely what we're going to talk about right now. Today, I explain: - How to protect your back-end - Preventative measures - The new rules of backing up your computer As usual, we'll cover the What, Why, and How's. [Automated transcript follows] [00:00:39] So last week he went over some steps, some things that you can look at that you should look at that are going to help protect you. And we are going to go into this a whole lot more today. And so I want you

Why Is Russia Password Spraying Hurting You? What Are They Trying to Do? And What Is It? This is one of the top topics I've had people ask about lately: How can you protect yourself and your business against Russian hackers? So I've got a presentation. We're going to run through it. We're going to talk about what you can do about it. [Automated transcript follows] This has been a long time coming. I have been doing a lot over the years of webinars of online meetings, trying to help people understand what's going on, what can be done. [00:00:28] And I got a great email this week from one of the listeners. Who's been a man on my email list now for years, I'm not even sure how many years. And he was saying, Hey, thanks for giving all of this information for free for small businesses. And afford it. And I got to thinking because there've been a lot of requests lately, for instance, backups how should I be doing them? [00:00:52] What should I be doing? And a number of other topics that really all go together into

What Can Be done About Russia?What Can You Do? There is a whole bunch going on when it comes to Russia, of course, the invasion of Ukraine. Why are people calling to have dot RU deleted? This is really a big deal. And if you're watching from home, I'm going to go full screen on this article. [Automated transcript follows.] [00:00:23] This is an article from ARS Technica, and I've been talking about it all week, which is that I can won't revoke Russian in Jeanette domains, says the effect. Devastating. This is frankly pretty darn fascinating to me because I can, as this international organization, it was put together in order to help make the internet international. [00:00:49] And I'm not talking about the data international, but control of it. A lot of countries work. Because of course the internet was created in nodded states. It was created by us tax payers, money for the DOD. And it was designed to be very resilient, in fact, so resilient that there could be a nuclear blast and that nuclear blast and. [00:

Did You Hear About the Latest Phishing Scams to Hit? Get the Latest Free Cybersecurity Tools This is a big deal, quite literally a big deal. Russian malware. We have been able to track it down now, track it down to a single site. All of these bad guys are in one building in Moscow. [Following is an automatic transcript] This is a very big story and it's a bit of a scary one as well. We've had a lot of ransomware over the years and a lot of ransomware. Have you had it yourself? I bet you, if you haven't, someone who has had ransomware because frankly it is pervasive in every aspect of pretty much everybody's life out there. [00:00:40] So when you get hit with ransomware, Lately something a little different has happened. It's really gone through three phases. The first phase was the ransomware would get on to your system. Usually it came as an attachment, probably embedded in like a word file it's been embedded in PDFs, embedded in all kinds of stuff. [00:01:03] Even drive by downloads on websites, have brought

Considering a change in employment? Apple/China/Green Army/Bitcoin seizure and Cybersecurity Jobs! Apple has upended a lot of industries over the years, and it is about to upend yet another one. Square is a company that has been making a lot of money and its run by same guy that ran Twitter. You know that Rasputen-looking guy? What's Apple doing to the finance industry? [Following is an automated transcript] This is a real big deal. Apple has been for a long time upending industries. [00:00:23] You might remember, of course, the music player. In fact, I still have an old MP3 player. You can't really see it very well from this angle, but it was right over there. And then. And it was a five gigabyte player. Just amazing thing was huge. It was actually designed by digital equipment corporation, licensed by this other manufacturer, put them together. [00:00:44] Great audio quality. They had these little costs, headphones that came along. I loved the thing. Absolutely loved it. And apple came along, they weren't t

Conservative/libertarian host Craig Peterson is heard throughout New England every week giving his opinion on Cybersecurity, new Technologies, and Government involvement. This week, Craig talks about the latest announcement from the Feds: "Shields Up!" They're warning about Cyber attacks against the US. Coming from Russia, they expect untold carnage. But how likely is it? Also this week: Senators trying to spy on all our digital information (including a RINO Republican). The "Right to Repair" backfires. Six reasons Meta/Facebook is failing. The top Cyber problems in 2021. More malware attacking Apple Mac computers. The five things businesses need to do for Cyber Security right now. We've got a big alert from this CISA. That's our cybersecurity and infrastructure agency to come down about a week or so ago. It's been going up and down and of course the tensions out there are causing problems. So let's talk about it.  [The following is an automated transcript.] [00:00:17] CISA is an agency of the federal governm

Is Your Email On The Dark Web? Let's Check Now! Do you know how to find out if you have had your private information stolen? Well, you know, the odds are probably that you have, but where was it stolen, when, and what has been stolen? How about your password and how safe that password is? We're going to show you real hard evidence. [The following is an automatic transcript.] [00:00:16] Knowing whether or not your data has been stolen and what's been stolen is very important. [00:00:24] And there is a service out there that you can go to. They don't charge you a thin dime, anything, and you can right there find out which of your account has been compromised. And. Out on the dark web. Now the dark web is the place that the criminals go. That's where they exchange information they've stolen. [00:00:49] That's where they sell it. That's where you can buy a tool to do Ransomware hacking all on your own. Far less than 50 bucks. Ransomware as a service is available where they'll do absolutely everything except infec

Are You Ready For the Latest Cyber Attack From Russia? Yet another warning coming out from the federal government about cyber security. And this one is based on what's been happening in Ukraine. So we're going to talk about that situation, the whole cyber security over there, and why it's coming here. [Automated transcript follows] CISA is the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. How's that for a name? It's not as bad as what does S.H.I.E.L.D mean? Over from the Marvel universe. But the cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency is the agency that was created to not just protect federal government systems, although they are providing information for. [00:00:41] People who protect those systems, but also for businesses and you and me and our homes. So they keep an eye on what's happening, what the various companies out there are finding, because most of the cybersecurity information that we get is from private companies and they. But it altogether, put it in a nice little wrapping paper. [00

Do You Know How Hackers are Spoofing You? All About Email spoofing! We just got an email this week from a customer and they're saying, "Oh no, my email has been hacked." What does that mean? Was it really hacked? We're going to talk right now about email spoofing, which is a very big deal. [Following is an automated transcript] [00:00:15] Email spoofing is being a problem for a long time, really? Since the 1970s. I remember when I got my first spoofed email back in the eighties and there was really a little bit of confusion. [00:00:30] I went into it more detail, of course, being a very technical kind of guy, and looked behind the curtains, figured out what was going on. Just shook my head. I marveled at some people. Why would you do this sort of thing? The whole idea behind email spoofing is for you to receive an email, looks like it's from someone that it's not now, you've all seen examples of this. [00:00:55] Everybody has. And those emails that are supposedly from the bank, or maybe from Amazon or some ot

Do You Trust Homeland Security And The FBI For Your Cyber Security? What a week the FBI got hacked, Homeland Security supposedly is sending out emails about hackers in your network. This is what we're going to talk about to start with today. What are these new emails and how are they trying to con you? And can we trust the Feds for our Cyber Security? [Following is an automated transcript] This is a little bit concerning. We know that the FBI's email system got hacked. And for everyone that's sitting there saying gee, if the FBI gets hacked, there's no way my business can possibly survive an attack. Remember that the FBI is a huge target. They have so many systems, so many people and the bad guys really would love to send email out as though they are the FBI. [00:00:47] And in fact, they did, they used the FBI's email servers to send out some of these fake emails. I thought that was funny, but be that as it may, the FBI closed. But there are things you can do to protect yourself, to protect your email. And my

Are You Ready For Your Car to Spy On You? It's Already the Law They pass the infrastructure bill, which means now it's time to figure out what is in the infrastructure bill. And we're going to talk about the technology that they decided to fund the technology that will win the game because it has billions of dollars of federal money behind it. [Following is an automated transcript] [00:00:16] This is disappointing, but it's normal, right? [00:00:20] It's absolutely normal because the federal government has always been one that picks winners and losers. If you're old enough, you remember, of course, VHS. Tapes right too. Do you remember beta tapes? Beta max tapes. Beta max was quite the standard for professional production for the longest time, a better technology, frankly, a lot better than VHS. [00:00:46] Same. The thing's true with beta, but beta lost. And, of course, we ended up with VHS tapes. That's an example of technologies that were backed by investors. And we've seen a lot of that. Look at what's hap

Do You Have a Smartspeaker? Another Danger Comes Your Way! By now, you've heard of tick talk. You might use Tik TOK. Many people do. It's their go-to site online, especially if you're a little on the younger side. Here is a danger of some of these tick talk challenges and combine that with Alexa. Oh my [Following is an automated transcript] This is a little bit on the scary side. We built our house some 25 years ago, we contacted a builder, and I put together all of the specs, and I made sure that the wood he used was better than average. [00:00:30] It's all plywood. It's not particle board or composite boards. And I made sure they were thicker than needed for all of the rules. Struts were closer together than the code required. And we had more oversized plumbing than what was needed through the house. And one of the things I did was I had him wire the house, actually the electrical contractor, with a heavier gauge wire than usually. [00:01:02] So that I had 20 amp sockets at every socket in the house. Now we

Have You Checked If Your Email Is On The Dark Web? Let's Do It Now! Do you know how to find out if you have had your private information stolen? Well, you know, the odds are probably pretty bad, but where was it stolen? When? What has been stolen? How about your password and how safe is that password? We're going to show you real hard evidence, and what you can do to fix things! [Following is an automated transcript] [00:00:16] Knowing whether or not your data has been stolen and what's been stolen is very important. [00:00:24] And there is a service out there that you can go to. They don't charge you a thin dime, nothing, and you can right there find out which of your account has been compromised. And. Out on the dark web. Now the dark web is the place that the criminals go. That's where they exchange information they've stolen. [00:00:49] That's where they sell it. That's where you can buy a tool to do ransomware hacking all on your own. Far less than 50 bucks. In fact, ransomware as a service is available

Are You Ready For the Next Hacker Wave? It's Going to Be Brutal! Right now, we're going to talk about this vulnerability, this huge vulnerability in almost the entire internet that will affect your life over the following number of years. And if you're a business, you better pay close attention. [Following is an automated transcript] [00:00:16] Well, we are looking at what is being called the single most significant, most critical vulnerability ever. [00:00:24] And if you want more information on this, have a look at last week's show, you'll find it up on my website. I talked quite a bit about it. You can email me M e@craigpeterson.com. I've put together a little cheat sheet that you can use to find out. What should I do? If you're an IT professional, this isn't something that you can do if you're a regular home user because you probably don't have any software your maintaining that has this log for J vulnerability. [00:00:59] But I do have to warn you that you probably do have a little bit of hardware that m

2021-12-18 1144 [00:00:00] Well, the tech world is all a buzz with this log for J or log for shell. However you want to call it because we are looking at what is probably the biggest security vulnerability the internet has had in a long time. [00:00:16] This is huge, huge, huge to chew. [00:00:19] I don't know how to express it anymore, but there are multiple problems here. And even the patch that was released to fix this problem was broken as being exploited in the last 24 hours. There've been no less than 30 different new. Variations of the exploit. So what is going on? There is a computer language that's used by many programmers, particularly in larger businesses called Java. [00:00:52] You might remember this, I've been following it and using it now, since it first came out very long time ago from sun Microsystems. Java is a language that's designed to have kind of an intimate. CPU processor. So think about it. If you have an Intel chip that is an x86 type chip, what can you use instead of that Intel chip

Did Your Computer Have "Intel Inside"? It Won't For long! We're going to talk a little bit about shopping right now. Then we'll get into our chip crunch, and why Intel is being left on the side of the computer road. [Following is an automated transcript.] [00:00:16] There's lots of fun stuff to do. And it's kind of fun getting out of the house. Isn't it getting out, going out, going around? There's a, an outlet store close by where I live and it's kind of one of these outdoor. Outlet things. And it was fun. Just walking around, enjoying the little bit of fresh air, no matter what the weather has. [00:00:40] Uh, I even enjoy going up there when there's some snow on the ground. Because again, it's a little bit of a, uh, it's, it's fun. It's a little bit of a change, which is not. Part of what I love about living in the Northeast. You really get all four seasons and they can be really, really nice. Well, black Friday of course came and went. [00:01:01] It was not a bad black Friday, but one of the questions I be

Do You Think There's Nothing You Can Do to Keep the Bad Guys Out? What a week. The FBI got hacked. Homeland security supposedly is sending out emails about hackers in your network. This is what we're going to talk about to start with today. What are these new emails, and how are they trying to con you? [Automated Transcript Follows] This is a little bit concerning. We know that the FBI's email system got hacked. And for everyone sitting there saying, well, gee, if the FBI gets hacked, there's no way my business can survive an attack. Remember that the FBI is a huge, huge target. They have so many systems, so many people, and the bad guys really, really would love to send an email out as though they are the FBI. [00:00:49] And, they did, they used, they used the FBI's email servers to send out some of these fake emails. I thought that was kind of funny, but be that as it may, the FBI closed. But there are things you can do to protect yourself, to protect your email. And my wife and I have been working diligent

Is Your Firewall Actually Protecting You? What Should You Be Doing? New stats are out this week. So what's the number one vector of attack against us? Our Firewalls. And they're failing. So, what's going on. And what can you do about it? [Automated transcript follows] [00:00:16] And of course, I'm always talking about cyber security, because if you ask me that is one of the biggest problems we have in business. [00:00:27] Today. Well, yeah, you got to find employees. In fact, uh, it's almost impossible to find them in the cyber security space as well. And it's been hard for years. So I try to keep you up-to-date here. We've got boot camps that are coming up and you are really going to like them. We've been working on some supplemental materials for it. [00:00:47] And of course these boot camps are always free, so you can join it. You can have your friends come and learn the. Basics. It's not one of these high sell things. Right. I, I got a little letter in the mail this week saying, Hey, you can come and get

If you follow my newsletter, you probably saw what I had in the signature line the last few weeks: how to make a fake identity. Well, we're going to take it a little bit differently today and talk about how to stop spam with a fake email. [Automated transcript follows] [00:00:16] Email is something that we've had for a long time. [00:00:19] I think I've told you before I had email way back in the early eighties, late seventies, actually. So, yeah, it's been a while and I get tens of thousands of email every day, uh, sent to my domain, you know, mainstream.net. That's my company. I've had that same domain name for 30 years and, and it just kinda got out of control. [00:00:46] And so we have. Big Cisco server, that exclusively filters email for us and our clients. And so it cuts down the tens of thousands to a very manageable couple of hundred a day. If you think that's manageable and it gets sort of almost all of the fishing and a lot of the spam and other things that are coming. [00:01:09] But, you know, th