Facebook Has No Idea Where Your Data Is and What They Do With It?!

Facebook's about 18 years old coming on 20 Facebook has a lot of data. How much stuff have you given Facebook? Did you fall victim for that? Hey, upload your contacts. We'll find your friends. They don't know where your data is.

[Following is an automated transcript]

[00:00:15] This whole thing with Facebook has exploded here lately.

[00:00:20] There is an article that had appeared on a line from our friends over at, I think it was, yeah. Let me see here. Yeah. Yeah. Motherboard. I was right. And motherboards reporting that Facebook doesn't know what it does with your data or. It goes, no, there's always a lot of rumors about different companies and particularly when they're big company and the news headlines are grabbing your attention and certainly Facebook can be one of those companies.

[00:00:57] So where did motherboard get this opinion about Facebook? Just being completely clueless about your personal. It tamed from a leaked document. Yeah, exactly. So we find out a lot of stuff like that. I used to follow a website about companies that were going to go under and they posted internal memos.

[00:01:23] It basically got sued out of existence, but there's no way that Facebook is going to be able to Sue this one out of existence because they are describing this as. Internally as a tsunami of privacy regulations all over the world. So Gores, if you're older, we used to call those tidal waves, but think of what the implication there is of a tsunami coming in and just overwhelming everything.

[00:01:53] So Facebook, internally, their engineers are trying to figure out, okay. So how do we deal with. People's personal data. It's not categorized in ways that regulators want to control it. Now there's a huge problem right there. You've got third party data. You've got first party data. You've got sensitive categories, data.

[00:02:16] They might know what religion you are, what your persuasions are in various different ways. There's a lot of things they might know about you. How were they all cat categorize now we've got the European union. With their general data protection regulation. The GDPR we talked about when it came into effect back in 2018, and I've helped a few companies to comply with that.

[00:02:41] That's not my specialty. My specialty is the cybersecurity. But in article five this year, peon law mandates that personal data must be collected for specified explicit and legitimate purposes and not further processed in a manner that is incompatible with those purposes. So what that means is that every piece of data, like where you are using Facebook or your religious orientation, Can only be collected in use for a specific purpose and not reused for another purpose.

[00:03:19] As an example here, that vice has given in past Facebook, took the phone number that users provided to protect their accounts with two factor authentication and fed it to its people, feature as well as. Advertisers. Yeah. Interesting. Hey, so Gizmodo with the help of academic researchers caught Facebook doing this, and eventually the company had to stop the practice because, and this goes back to the earlier days where Facebook would say, Hey, find out if your friends are on Facebook, upload your contacts right now.

[00:03:54] And most people. What did you know back then about trying to keep your data private, to try and stop the proliferation of information about you online then nothing. I think I probably even uploaded it back then thinking it'd be nice to see if I got friends here. We can start chatting, et cetera.

[00:04:12] According to legal experts that were interviewed by motherboard who wrote this article and has a copy of the internal memo this year, PN regulation specifically prohibits that kind of repurposing of your phone number of trying to put together the social graph and the leaked document shows that Facebook may not even have the ability to live.

[00:04:37] How it handles user's data. Now I was on a number of radio stations this week, talking about this. And the example I gave is just look at an average business from the time it start, Facebook started how right? Wildly scraping pictures of young women off of Harvard university. Main catalog, contact page, and then asking people what do you think of this? This person, that person. And off they go, trying to rate them. Yeah. Yeah. All that matters to a woman, at least to Courtney, to mark Zuckerberg girl, all the matters about a woman is how she looks. Do I think she's pretty or not?

[00:05:15] It's ridiculous. What he was doing. It just, oh, that's zackerburg who he is not a great guy anyways. So you go from stealing pictures of young ladies asking people to rate them, putting together some class information and stuff there at Harvard, and then moving on to other universities and then open it up even wider and wider.

[00:05:42] And of course, that also created demand because you can't get on. If you're not at one of the universities that we have set it up for. And then you continue to grow. You're adding these universities, certainly starting to collect data and you are making more money than God. So what do you do? You don't have to worry about any efficiencies.

[00:06:02] I'll tell you that. Right? One thing you don't have to do is worry about gee. We've got a lot of redundant work going on here. We've got a lot of teams working on basically the same thing. No, you've got more money than you can possibly shake a stick at. So now you go ahead and send that money to this group or that group.

[00:06:24] And they put together all of the basic information, that they want. Pulling it out of this database and that database in there doing some correlation, writing some really cool CQL queries with mem credible joins and everything else. And now that becomes part of the main code for Facebook.

[00:06:45] And then Facebook goes on to the next little project and they do the same thing. Then the next project, then the next project. And then someone comes along and says, Hey, we. This feature, that feature for advertisers and then in that goes, and then along comes candidate Obama. And they, one of the groups inside Facebook says, yeah here we go.

[00:07:09] Here's all of the information we have about everybody and it's free. Don't worry about it. And then when Trump actually bought it and hired a company to try and process some of that information he got in trouble. No but the. The whole campaign could get access to anything they wanted to, again, because the data wasn't controlled, they had no idea who was doing what with the data.

[00:07:34] And according to this internal memo, they still don't know. They don't even know if they can possibly comply with these regulations, not just in Europe, but we have regulations in pretty much all of the 50 states in the U S Canada of course, has their own Australia and New Zealand think about all the places.

[00:07:57] Facebook makes a lot of. So here's a quote from that we build systems with open borders. The result of these open systems and open culture is well-described with an analogy. Imagine you hold a bottle of ink in your hand, the bottle of ink is a mixture of all kinds of user data. You pour that ink into a lake of water and K and it flows every year.

[00:08:22] The document read. So how do you put that ink back in the bottle? I, in the right bottle, how do you organize it again? So that it only flows to the allowed places in the lake? They're totally right about that. Where did they collect it from? Apparently they don't even know where they got some of this information.

[00:08:43] This data from reminds me of the no fly list. You don't know you're on it and you can't get yourself off of it. It's crazy. So this document that we're talking about, it was written last year by. Privacy engineers on the ad and business product team, whose mission is to make meaningful connections between people and businesses and which quote sits at the center of our monetization strategy.

[00:09:06] And is the engine that powers Facebook's growth. Interesting. Interesting problems. And I see this being a problem well into the future for more and more of these companies, look at Twitter as an example that we've all heard about a lot lately. And then I've talked about as well along comes Elon Musk and he says wait a minute.

[00:09:29] I can make Twitter way more profitable. We're going to get rid of however many people over a thousand, and then we are going to hire more people. We're going to start charging. We're going to be more efficient. You can bet all of these redundancies that are in Facebook are also there. And Twitter also has to comply with all of these regulations that Facebook is freaking out about it for a really a very good reason.

[00:10:00] So this document is available to anybody who wants to look at it. I'm looking at it right now, talking about regulatory landscape and the fundamental problems Facebook's data lake. And this is a problem that most companies have not. As bad as Facebook does the button. Most companies you write, you grow. I have yet to walk into a business that needs help with cybersecurity and find everything in place as it should be because it grew organically.

[00:10:32] Do you started out with a little consumer firewall router, wifi, and then you added to it and you put a switch here and you added another switch behind that and move things around. This is normal. This is not total incompetence on the part of the management, but my gosh, I don't know. Maybe they need an Elon Musk.

[00:10:52] Just straighten them out as well. Hey, stick around. I'll be right back and sign up online@craigpeterson.com.

[00:11:02] Apparently looting is one of the benefits of being a Russian soldier. And according to the reports coming out of Ukraine, they've been doing it a lot, but there's a tech angle on here that is really turning the tables on these Russian Looters.

[00:11:19] We know in wars, there are people that loot and typically the various militaries try and make sure, at least recently that looting is kept to an absolute minimum.

[00:11:32] Certainly the Americans, the British, even the Nazis during world war II the the socialists they're in. Germany they tried to stop some of the looting that was going on. I think that's probably a very good thing, because what you end up with is just all of these locals that are just totally upset with you.

[00:11:57] I found a great article on the guardian and there's a village. I hadn't been occupied for about a month by Russian troops and the people came back. They are just shocked to see what happened in there. Giving a few examples of different towns. They found that the alcohol was stolen and they left empty bottles behind food wrappers, cigarette butts, thrown all over the place in apartments in the home.

[00:12:26] Piles of feces blocking the toilets, family photographs torn, thrown around the house. They took away all of the closes as a code from one of the people, literally everything, male and female coats, boots, shirts, jackets, even my dresses and laundry. This is really something. The Sylvia's didn't do this, but now Russia.

[00:12:49] The military apparently does. So over the past couple of weeks, there have been reporting from numerous places where Russian troops had occupied Ukrainian territory and the guardian, which is this UK newspaper collected evidence to suggest looting by Russian forces was not merely a case of a few way, word soldiers, but a systematic part of Russian military behavior across multiple towns.

[00:13:17] And villages. That's absolutely amazing. Another quote here, people saw the Russian soldiers loading everything onto your old trucks. Everything they could get their hands on a dozen houses on the villages. Main street had been looted as well as the shops. Other villagers reported losing washing machines, food laptops, even as sofa, air conditioner.

[00:13:41] Being shipped back, just you might use ups here or they have their equivalent over there. A lady here who was the head teacher in the school, she came back in, of course, found her home looted and in the head teacher's office. She found an open pair of scissors that had been jammed into a plasma screen that was left behind because if they can't steal it, they're going to destroy it.

[00:14:07] They don't wanna leave anything behind. They found the Russian to take in most of the computers, the projectors and other electronic equipment. It's incredible. So let's talk about the turnaround here. You might've heard stories about some of these bad guys that have smashed and grabbed their way into apple stores.

[00:14:27] So they get into the apple store. They grab laptops on iPads, no longer iPods, because they don't make those anymore. And I phone. And they take them and they run with them. Nowadays there's not a whole lot of use for those. Now what they have been doing, some of these bad guys is they'd take some parts and use them in stolen equipment.

[00:14:52] They sell them on the used market, et cetera. But when you're talking about something specific, like an iPhone that needs specific activation. Completely different problem arises for these guys because that iPhone needs to have a SIM card in order to get onto the cell network. And it also has built in serial numbers.

[00:15:15] So what happens in those cases while apple goes ahead and disables them. So as soon as they connect to the internet, they didn't say they put them on wifi. They don't get a SIM card. They don't. Service from T-Mobile or Verizon or whoever it might be. So now they just connect to the wifi and it calls home.

[00:15:33] Cause it's going to get updates and download stuff from the app store and they find that it's been bricked. Now you can do that with a lot of mobile device managers that are available for. All kinds of equipment nowadays, but certainly apple equipment where if a phone is lost or stolen or a laptop or other pieces of equipment, you can get on the MDM and disable it, have it remotely erase, et cetera.

[00:16:00] Now, please have had some interesting problems with that. Because a bad guy might go ahead and erase a smartphone. That's in the evidence locker at the police station. So they're doing things like putting them into Faraday cages or static bags or other things to try and stop that. So I think we've established here that the higher tech equipment is pretty well protected.

[00:16:25] You steal it. It's not going to do you much. Good. So one of the things the Russian stole when they were in a it's called a, I think you pronounced. Melad Mellott DePaul which is again, a Ukrainian city is they stole all of the equipment from a farm equipment dealership and shipped it to check. Now that's according to a source in a businessman in the area that CNN is reporting on.

[00:16:56] So they shipped this equipment. We're talking about combine harvesters were 300 grand a piece. They shipped it 700 miles. And the thieves were ultimately unable to use the equipment because it had been locked remotely. So think about agriculture equipment that John Deere, in this case, these pieces of equipment, they, they drive themselves.

[00:17:23] It's atonomous it goes up and down the field. Goes to any pattern that you want to it'll bring itself within a foot or an inch of your boundaries, of your property being very efficient the whole time, whether it's planting or harvesting, et cetera. And that's just a phenomenal thing because it saves so much time for the farmer makes it easier to do the companies like John Deere.

[00:17:49] Want to sell as many pieces of this equipment as they possibly can. And farming is known to be a what not terribly profitable business. And certainly isn't like Facebook. So how can they get this expensive equipment into the hands of a lot of farmers? What they do is they use. So you can lease the equipment through leasing company or maybe directly from the manufacturer and now you're off and running.

[00:18:16] But what happens if the lease isn't paid now? It's one thing. If you don't pay your lease on a $2,000 laptop, right? They're probably not going to come hunting for you, but when you're talking about a $300,000 harvester, they're more interested. So the leasing company. Has titled to the equipment and the leasing company can shut it off remotely.

[00:18:41] You see where I'm going with this so that they can get their equipment in the hands of more farmers because the farmers can lease it. It costs them less. They don't have to have a big cash payment. You see how this all works. So when the Russian forces stole this equipment, that's valued, total value here is about $5 million.

[00:19:02] They were able to shut it all off. And th the, obviously if you can't start the engine, because it's all shut off and it's all run by computers nowadays, and there's pros and cons to that. I think there's a lot of cons, but what are you going to do? How's that going to work for? Isn't going to work for you.

[00:19:22] And they were able to track it and had GPS trackers find out exactly where it was. That's how they know it was Tara taken to Chechnya and could be controlled remotely. And in this case, how did they control it? They completely. Shut it off, even if they sell the harvesters for spare parts to learn some money, but they sure aren't gonna be able to sell them for the 300 grand that they were actually worth.

[00:19:48] Hey, stick around. We'll be right back and visit me online@craigpeterson.com. If you sign up there, you'll be able to get my insider show notes. And every week I have a quick. Training right there. New emails, Craig Peterson.com.

[00:20:05] If you've been worried about ransomware, you are right to worry. It's up. It's costly. And we're going to talk about that right now. What are the stats? What can you do? What happens if you do get hacked? Interesting world!

[00:20:20] Ransomware has been a very long running problem. I remember a client of ours, a car dealership who we had gone in.

[00:20:31] We had improved all of their systems and their security, and one of them. People who was actually a senior manager, ended up downloading a piece of ransomware, one of these encrypted ones and opened it up and his machine all of a sudden, guess what it had ransomware on it. One of those big. Green's that say, pay up and send us this much Bitcoin, and here's our address.

[00:21:00] All of that sort of stuff. And he called us up and said, what's going on here? What happened? First of all, don't bring your own machine into the office. Secondly, don't open up as particularly encrypted files using a password that they gave. And thirdly, we stopped it automatically. It did not spread.

[00:21:20] We were able to completely restore his computer. Now let's consider here the consequences of what happened. So he obviously was scared. And within a matter of a couple of hours, we actually had him back to where he was and it didn't spread. So the consequences there, they weren't that bad. But how about if it had gotten worse?

[00:21:47] How about if the ransomware. Also before it started holding his computer ransom, went out and found all of the data about their customers. What do you think an auto dealership would love to hear that all of their customer data was stolen and released all of the personal data of all of their customers?

[00:22:08] Obviously not. So there's a potential cost there. And then how long do you think it would take a normal company? That thinks they have backups to get back online. All I can tell you it'll take quite a while because the biggest problem is most backups don't work. We have yet to go into a business that was actually doing backups that would work to help restore them.

[00:22:35] And if you're interested, I can send you, I've got something I wrote up. Be glad to email it back to you. Obviously as usual, no charge. And you'll be able to go into that and figure out what you should do. Cause I, I break it down into the different types of backups and why you might want to use them or why you might not want to use them, but ransomware.

[00:22:58] Is a kind of a pernicious nasty little thing, particularly nowadays, because it's to two factor, first is they've encrypted your data. You can't get to it. And then the second side of that is okay I can't get to my data and now they're threatening to hold my data ransom or they'll release. So they'll put it out there.

[00:23:22] And of course, if you're in a regulated industry, which actually car dealers are because they deal with financial transactions, leases, loans, that sort of thing you can lose your license for your business. You can, you lose your ability to go ahead and frankly make loans and work with financial companies and financial instruments.

[00:23:45] It could be a very big. So there are a lot of potential things that can happen all the way from losing your reputation as a business or an individual losing all of the money in your operating account. And again, we've got a client that we picked up afterwards. That yes, indeed. That lost all of the money in their operating account.

[00:24:09] And then how do you make payroll? How do you do things? There's a new study that came out from checkpoint. Checkpoint is one of the original firewall companies and they had a look at ransomware. What are the costs of ransomware? Now bottom line, I'm looking at some stats here on a couple of different sites.

[00:24:29] One is by the way, Conti, which is a big ransomware gang that also got hacked after they said we are going to attack anyone. That doesn't defend Plaid's invasion of Ukraine, and then they got hacked and their information was released, but here's ransomware statistics. This is from cloud words. First of all, the largest ransom demand is $50 million.

[00:24:55] And that was in 2021 to Acer big computer company. 37% of businesses were hit by ransomware. In 2021. This is amazing. They're expecting by 2031. So in about a decade, ransomware is going to be costing about $265 billion a year. Now on average. Ransomware costs businesses. 1.8, $5 million to recover from an attack.

[00:25:25] Now that's obviously not a one or two person place, but think of the car dealer again, how much money are they going to make over the year or over the life of the business? If you're a car dealer, you have a license to print money, right? You're selling car model or cars from manufacturers. And now you have the right to do that and they can remove that.

[00:25:48] How many tens, hundreds of millions of dollars might that end up costing you? Yeah. Big deal. Total cost of ransomware last year, $20 billion. Now these are the interesting statistics here right now. So pay closer attention to this 32% of ransomware victims paid a ransom. So about a third Peter ransom demand.

[00:26:12] Lastly. It's actually down because my recollection is it used to be about 50% would pay a ransom. Now on average that one third of victims that paid a ransom only recovered 65% of their data. Now that differs from a number I've been using from the FBI. That's a little bit older that was saying it ends it a little better than 50%, but 65% of pain victims recovered their.

[00:26:41] Now isn't that absolutely amazing. Now 57% of companies were able to recover their data, using a cloud backup. Now think about the different types of backup cloud backup is something that can work pretty well if you're a home user, but how long did it take for your system to get back? Probably took weeks, right?

[00:27:05] For a regular computer over a regular internet line. Now restoring from backups is going to be faster because your downlink is usually faster than your uplink. That's not true for businesses that have real internet service like ours. It's the same bandwidth up as it is down. But it can take again, days or weeks to try and recover your machine.

[00:27:28] So it's very expensive. And I wish I had more time to go into this, but looking at the costs here and the fact that insurance companies are no longer paying out for a lot of these ransomware attacks, it could be credibly expensive for you incredibly. The number one business types by industry for ransomware attacks, retail.

[00:27:59] That makes sense. Doesn't it. Real estate. Electrical contractors, law firms and wholesale building materials. Isn't that interesting? And that's probably because none of these people are really aware or conscious of doing what a, of keeping their data secure of having a good it team, a good it department.

[00:28:24] So there's your bottom line. Those are the guys that are getting hit. The most, the numbers are increasing dramatically and your costs are not just in the money. You might pay as a ransom. And as it turns out in pretty much every case prevention. Is less expensive and much better than the cure of trying to pay ransom or trying to restore from backups.

[00:28:52] Hey, you're listening to Craig Peterson. You can get my weekly show notes by just going to craig peterson.com.

[00:29:00] You and I have talked about passwords before the way to generate them and how important they are. We'll go over that again a little bit in just a second, but there's a new standard out there that will eliminate the need for passwords.

[00:29:16] Passwords are a necessary evil, at least they have been forever. I remember, I think the only system I've ever really used that did not require passwords was the IBM 360.

[00:29:31] Yeah, 360, you punch up the cards, all of the JCL you feed the card deck in and off it goes. And does this little thing that was a different day, a different era. When I started in college in university, we. We had a remote systems, timeshare systems that we could log into. And there weren't much in the line of password requirements.

[00:29:58] And, but you had a username, you had a simple password. And I remember one of our instructors, his name was Robert, Andrew Lang, and his password was always some sort of a combination of RA Lang. So it was always easy to guess what his password was. Today. It has gotten a lot worse today. We have devices with us all the time.

[00:30:22] You might be wearing a smart watch. That requires a password. You course probably have a smartphone that also maybe requiring a password. Certainly after it boots nowadays they use fingerprints or facial recognition, which is handy, but it has its own drawbacks. But how about the websites? You're going to the systems you're using in you're at work and logging in.

[00:30:49] They all require password. And usernames of some sort or another well, apple, Google, and Microsoft have all committed to expanding their support for a standard. That's actually been out there for a few years. It's called the Fido standard. And the idea behind this is that you don't have to have a password in order to.

[00:31:15] Now that's really an interesting thing, right? Just looking at it because we're so used to have in this password only authenticate. And of course the thing to do there is to make sure you have for your password, multiple words in the password, it should really be a pass phrase. And between the words put in special characters or numbers, maybe.

[00:31:41] Upper lower case a little bit. In those words, those are the best passwords, 20 characters, 30 characters long. And then if you have to have a pin, I typically use a 12 digit pin. And how do I remember all of these? Cause I use a completely different password for every website and right now, Let me pull it up.

[00:32:03] I'm using one password dot coms, password manager. And my main password for that is about 25 characters long. And I have thirty one hundred and thirty five. And trees here in my password manager, 3,100, that is a whole lot of passwords, right? As well as software licenses and a few other things in there.

[00:32:30] That's how we remember them is using a password manager. One password.com is my favorite. Now, obviously I don't make any money by referring you there. I really do like that. Some others that I've liked in the past include last pass, but they really meant. With some of their cybersecurity last year and I lost my faith in it.

[00:32:51] So now what they're trying to do is make these websites that we go to as well as some apps to have a consistent, secure, and passwordless. And they're going to make it available to consumers across all kinds of devices and platforms. That's why you've got apple, Google, and Microsoft all committing to it.

[00:33:15] And you can bet everybody else is going to follow along because there's hundreds of other companies that have decided they're going to work with the Fido Alliance and they're going to create this passwordless future. Which I like this idea. So how does this work? Basically you need to have a smartphone.

[00:33:33] This is, I'm just going to go with the most standard way that this is going to work here in the future, and you can then have. Passkey, this is like a multi-factor authentication or two factor authentication. So for instance, right now, when I sign into a website online, I'm giving a username, given a password, and then it comes up and it asks me for a code.

[00:33:57] So I enter in a six digit code and that code changes every 30 seconds. And again, I use my password manager from one password. In order to generate that code. So that's how I log into Microsoft site and Google sites and all kinds of sites out there. So it's a similar thing here now for the sites for my company, because we do cyber security for businesses, including regulated businesses.

[00:34:24] We have biometrics tied in as. So to log into our systems, I have to have a username. I have to have a password. I then am sent to a single sign-on page where I have to have a message sent to my smart device. That then has a special app that uses biometrics either a face ID or a fingerprint to verify who I am.

[00:34:49] Yeah, there's a lot there, but I have to protect my customers. Something that very few it's crazy. Actual managed security services providers do, but it's important, right? By the way, if you want my password. Special report, just go to Craig peterson.com. Sign up for my email list. I'll send that to you.

[00:35:13] That's what we're sending out right now for anyone who signs up new@craigpeterson.com. And if you'd like a copy of it in you're already on the list, just go ahead and email me. At Craig peterson.com and ask for the password special report where I go through a lot of this sort of thing. So what will happen with this is you go to a website and I might come up with a QR code.

[00:35:37] So you then scan that QR code with your phone and verify it, authorize it on your phone. You might again to have it set up so that your phone requires a facial recognition or perhaps it'll require a fingerprint. And now you are. Which is very cool. They fix some security problems in Fido over the last few years, which is great over the coming year.

[00:36:02] You're going to see this available on apple devices, Google Microsoft platforms, and it really is simple, stronger authentication. That's sort of Fido calls it. But it is going to make your life a lot easy, easier. It is a standard and the passwordless future makes a whole lot of sense for all of us. Now, I want to talk about another thing here that just bothered me for a long time.

[00:36:30] I have a sister. Who is in the medical field and gives prescriptions, doctor thing. And I think she's not quite a doctor. I can't remember what she has. She's an LPN or something. And anyhow, so she. We'll get on a zoom call with someone and they'll go through medical history and what's happening right now and she'll make prescriptions.

[00:36:57] And so I warned her about that saying, it is very bad to be using zoom because zoom is not secure. Never has been, probably never will be right. If you want secure. To go and pay for it from one of these providers like WebEx, that's what we use. We have a version of WebEx that is set up to be secure.

[00:37:20] So I talked to her about that and said, Hey, listen, you can't do this. You've really got to go another way here. And so she started using one of these mental or. Medical health apps. What I want to talk about right now specifically are some checks that were just performed some audits on mental health apps.

[00:37:45] That's why I messed up a second ago, but what they looked at is that things are a serious problem there. And then fact, the threat post, just calling it a. Frankly, just plain old creepy. So they've got some good intentions. They want to help with mental health. You've probably seen these or at least heard them advertise.

[00:38:06] So you can get on the horn with a mental health professional, a doctor or otherwise in order to help you here with your psychological or spiritual wellness. And people are sharing their personal and sensitive data with third parties and have 32 mental health and prayer mobile apps that were investigated by the open source organization.

[00:38:32] 28, 28 of the 32 were found to be inherently insecure and were given a privacy not included label, including others here. So this is a report. That was released here by the open source organization, tied into Mozilla. Those are the Firefox people. They have what they call their minimum security standards.

[00:38:56] So things like requiring strong passwords, managing security, updates, and vulnerabilities, et cetera. 25 of the 32 failed to meet. Even those minimum security standards. So these apps are dealing with some of the most sensitive mental health and wellness issues people can possibly have, right? Depression, anxieties, suicidal fonts, domestic violence, eating disorders.

[00:39:23] And they are being just terrible with your security Mozilla researchers spent 255 hours or about eight hours per product pairing under the hood of the security, watching the data that was going back and forth, right between all of these mental health and prayer apps. It was just crazy. So for example, eight of the apps reviewed, allowed weak passwords, that range.

[00:39:52] One digit one as the password to 1, 1, 1, 1, while a mental health app called a mood fit only required one letter or digit as a password. Now that is very concerning for an app that collects mood and symptom data. So be very careful. Two of the apps better help a popular app that connects users with therapists and better stop suicide, which is a course of suicide prevention app have vague and messy, according to Mozilla privacy policies that have little or no effect on actual.

[00:40:30] User data protection. So be very careful. And if you're a mental health, professional or medical professional, don't just go and use these open video calls, et cetera, et cetera, find something good. And there are some standards out there. Again. Visit me online, get my insider show notes every week. Get my little mini trends.

[00:40:56] And they come up most weeks. Just go to Craig peterson.com. And I'll send you my special report on passwords and more.

[00:41:06] We know the Russians have been attacking us. I've talked a lot about it on the radio station, all kinds of stations. In fact, here over the last couple of weeks, and I am doing something special, we are going through the things you can do to keep safe.

[00:41:23] Last week we started doing something I promise we would continue.

[00:41:27] And that is how can you protect yourself when it comes to the Russians, right? When it comes to the bad guys, because the Russians are definitely the bad guys. There's a few things you can do. And there's a few things, frankly, you shouldn't be doing. And that's exactly what we're going to talk about right now.

[00:41:45] So last week he went over some steps, some things that you can look at that you should look at that are going to help protect you. And we are going to go into this a whole lot more today. And so I want you to stick around and if you miss anything, you can go online. You can go to Craig peterson.com, make sure you sign up there for my email.

[00:42:08] And what I'm going to do for you is. Send you a few different documents now where we can chat back and forth about it, but I can send you this. Now I'm recording this on video as well as on audio. So you can follow along if you're watching either on YouTube or. Over on rumble and you can find it also on my website.

[00:42:32] I've been trying to post it up there too, but right now let's talk about what we call passive backend protections. So you've got the front end and the front end of course, is. Stuff coming at you, maybe to the firewall I've mentioned last week about customers of mine. I was just looking at a few customers this week, just so I could have an idea of their firewalls.

[00:42:59] And they were getting about 10 attacks per minute. Yeah. And these were customers who have requirements from the department of defense because they are defense sub subcontractors. So again, Potential bad guys. So I looked up their IP addresses and where the attacks were coming from. Now, remember that doesn't mean where they originated because the bad guys can hop through multiple machines and then get onto your machine.

[00:43:28] What it means is that all, ultimately they ended up. Coming from one machine, right? So there's an IP address of that machine. That's attacking my clients or are attacking my machines. That just happens all the time. A lot of scans, but some definite attacks where they're trying to log in using SSH.

[00:43:48] And what I found is these were coming from Slovakia, Russia, and Iran. Kind of what you were expecting, right? The Iranians, they just haven't given up yet. They keep trying to attack, particularly our military in our industry. One of the things we found out this week from, again, this was an FBI notice is that the Russians have been going after our industrial base.

[00:44:15] And that includes, in fact, it's more specifically our automobile manufacturers we've already got problems, right? Try buying a new car, try buying parts. I was with my friend, just this. I helped them because he had his car right. Need to get picked up. So I took him over to pick up his car and we chatted a little bit with this small independent automotive repair shop.

[00:44:40] And they were telling us that they're getting sometimes six, eight week delays on getting parts and some parts. They just can't. So they're going to everything from junkyards on out, and the worst parts are the parts, the official parts from the car manufacturers. So what's been happening is Russia apparently has been hacking into these various automobile manufacturers and automobile parts manufacturers.

[00:45:10] And once they're inside, they've been putting in. A remote control button net. And those botnets now have the ability to wake up when they want them to wake up. And then once they've woken up, what do they do? Who knows? They've been busy erasing machines causing nothing, but having they've been doing all kinds of stuff in the past today, they're sitting there.

[00:45:31] Which makes you think they're waiting, it's accumulate as much as you possibly can. And then once you've got it all accumulated go ahead and attack. So they could control thousands of machines, but they're not just in the U S it's automobile manufacturers in Japan. That we found out about.

[00:45:50] So that's what they're doing right now. So you've got the kind of that front end and back end protections. So we're going to talk a little bit about the back end. What does that mean? When a cybersecurity guy talks about the backend and the protections. I got it up on my green right now, but here's the things you can do.

[00:46:10] Okay. Remember, small businesses are just getting nailed from these guys, because again, they're fairly easy targets. One change your passwords, right? How many times do we have to say that? And yet about 70% of businesses out there are not using a good password methodology. If you want more information on passwords, two factor authentication, you name it.

[00:46:37] Just email me M e@craigpeterson.com. I want to get the information out now. You got to make sure that all of the passwords on your systems are encrypted are stored in some sort of a good password vault as you really should be looking at 256 bit encryption or better. I have a vendor of. That I use. So if you get my emails every week, when them, there's the little training.

[00:47:06] And so I'll give you a five minute training. It's written usually it's in bullet point for, I'm just trying to help you understand things. That provider of mine has a big database and there's another provider that I use that is for. So the training guys use the database of my provider.

[00:47:27] In using that database, they're storing the passwords and the training providers putting passwords in the clinics. Into the database, which is absolutely crazy. So again, if you're a business, if you're storing any sort of personal information, particularly passwords, make sure that you're using good encryption and your S what's called salting the hash, which means.

[00:47:53] You're not really storing the password, just joining assaulted hash. I can send you more on this. If you are a business and you're developing software that's, this is long tail stuff here. Configure all of the security password settings so that if someone's trying to log in and is failing that, and you block it, many of us that let's say you're a small business.

[00:48:15] I see this all of the time. Okay. You're not to blame. You, but you have a firewall that came from the cable company. Maybe you bought it at a big box retailer. Maybe you bought it online over at Amazon, as hurricane really great for you. Has it got settings on there that lets you say. There's 20 attempts to log in.

[00:48:38] Maybe we should stop them. Now, what we do personally for our customers is typically we'll block them at somewhere around three or four failed attempts and then their passwords block. Now you can configure that sort of thing. If you're using. Email. And that's an important thing to do. Let me tell you, because we've had some huge breaches due to email, like Microsoft email and passwords and people logging in and stealing stuff.

[00:49:06] It was just a total nightmare for the entire industry last year, but limit the number of login retries as well as you're in there. These excessive login attempts or whatever you want to define it as needs to lock the account. And what that means is even if they have the right password, they can't get in and you have to use an administrative password in order to get in.

[00:49:31] You also want to, what's called throttle, the rate of repeated logins. Now you might've gotten caught on this, right? You went to your bank, you went to E-bay, you went to any of these places and all of a sudden. And denied you write it blocked you. That can happen when your account is on these hackers lists.

[00:49:51] You remember last week we talked about password spraying while that's a very big deal and hackers are doing the sprain trick all of the time, and that is causing you to get locked out of your own account. So if you do get locked out, remember it might be because someone's trying to break. Obviously you have to enforce the policies.

[00:50:16] The capture is a very good thing. Again, this is more for software developer. We always recommend that you use multifactor or two factor authentication. Okay. Do not use your SMS, your text messages for that, where they'll send you a text message to verify who you are. If you can avoid that, you're much better off.

[00:50:36] Cause there's some easy ways to get around that for hackers that are determined. Okay. A multi-factor again, installed an intrusion. system. We put right at the network edge and between workstations and servers, even inside the network, we put detection systems that look for intrusion attempts and block intrusion attempts.

[00:51:02] A very important use denied lists to block known attackers. We build them automatically. We use some of the higher end Cisco gates. Cisco is a big network provider. They have some of the best hardware and software out there, and you have to subscribe to a lot of people complain. I ain't going to just go buy a firewall for 200 bucks on Amazon.

[00:51:24] Why would I pay that much a month just to to have a Cisco firewall? And it's like praying pain for the brand. I've got by logo chert on here. Oh, I wouldn't pay for that. No, it's because they are automatically providing block lists that are updated by the minute sometimes. And then make sure you've got an incident response plan in place.

[00:51:50] What are you going to do when they come for you? What are you going to do?

[00:51:55] Now we're going to talk about prevention. What can you do an order to stop some of these attacks that are coming from Russia and from other countries, it is huge. People. Believe me, this is a very big problem. And I'm here to help.

[00:52:12] We've reviewed a number of things that are important when it comes to your cyber security and your protection.

[00:52:20] We talked about the front end. We talked about the backend. Now we're going to talk about pure prevention and if you're watching. Online. You'll be able to see my slides as they come up, as we talk about some of this stuff and you'll find me on YouTube and you'll also find me on rumble, a fairly new platform out there platform that doesn't censor you for the things you say.

[00:52:44] Okay. So here we go. First of all, enabling your active directory password protection is going to. Four's password protection all the way through your business. Now I've had some discussions with people over the months, over the years about this whole thing and what should be done, what can be done, what cannot be done.

[00:53:09] Hey, it's a very big deal when it comes to password protection and actor directory, believe it or not, even though it's a Microsoft product is pretty darn good at a few things. One of them is. Controlling all the machines and the devices. One of the things we do is we use an MDM or what used to be a mobile device manager called mass 360.

[00:53:34] It's available from IBM. We have a special version of that allows us as a managed security services provider to be able to control everything on people's machines. Active directory is something you should seriously consider. If you are a Mac based shop. Like I am. In fact, I'm sitting right now in front of two max that I'm using right now, you'll find that active directory is a little bit iffy.

[00:54:04] Sometimes for max, there are some work around and it's gotten better mastery. 60 is absolutely the way to go, but make sure you've got really good. Passwords and the types of passwords that are most prone to sprain the attacks are the ones you should be banning specifically. Remember the website? Have I been poned?

[00:54:28] Yeah. It's something that you should go to pretty frequently. And again, if you miss anything today, just email me M e@craigpeterson.com. Believe me, I am not going to harass you at all. Okay. Now, the next thing that you should be doing is what's called red team blue team. Now the red team is a group of people, usually outside of your organization.

[00:54:54] If you're a big company they're probably inside, but the red team is the team that attacks you. They're white hat hackers, who are attacking you, looking for vulnerabilities, looking for things that you should or shouldn't be doing. And then the blue team is the side that's trying to defend. So think of, like war games.

[00:55:12] Remember that movie with Matthew Broderick all of those decades ago and how the, he was trying to defend that computer was trying to defend that it moved into an attack mode, right? Red team's attack, blue team is defend. So you want. To conduct simulated attacks. Now w conducting these attacks include saying, oh my let's now put in place and execute our plan here for what are we going to do once we have a.

[00:55:44] And you darn well better have a breach plan in place. So that's one of the things that we help as a fractional chief information security officer for companies, right? You've got to get that in place and you have to conduct these simulated attacks and you have to do penetration testing, including password spraying attacks.

[00:56:04] There's so many things you can do. The one of the things that we like to do and that you might want to do, whether you're a home user, retiree or a business is go and look online, you can just use Google. I use far more advanced tools, but you can use Google and look for your email address right there.

[00:56:23] Look for the names of people inside your organization. And then say wait a minute, does that data actually need to be there? Or am I really exposing the company exposing people's information that shouldn't be out there because you remember the hackers. One of the things they do is they fish you fish as in pH.

[00:56:47] So they'll send you an email that looks like. Hey let me see. I know that Mary is the CFO, and I know that Joe's going to be out of town for two weeks in The Bahamas, not a touch. So while he's got. I'm going to send an email to Mary, to get her to do something, to transfer the company's funds to me.

[00:57:06] Okay. So that's what that's all about. You've got to make sure, where is our information? And if you go to my company's page, mainstream.net, you'll see on there that I don't list any of the officers or any of the people that are in the company, because that again is a security problem.

[00:57:24] We're letting them know. I go to some of these sites, like professional sites lawyers, doctors, countenance, and I find right there all, are there people right there top people or sometimes all of them. And then we'll say, yeah, I went to McGill university, went to Harvard, whatever my B. It's all there. So now they've got great information to fish you, to fish that company, because all they have to do is send an email to say, Hey, you remember me?

[00:57:56] We're in Harvard when this class together. And did you have as a professor to see how that works? Okay. You also want to make. That you implement, what's called a passwordless user agent, and this is just so solely effective. If they cannot get into your count, what's going to, what could possibly go wrong, but one of the ways to not allow them into the count is to use.

[00:58:24] Biometrics. We use something called duo and we have that tied into the single sign-on and the duo single sign-on works great because what it does now is I put in, I go to a site, I put it into my username and. Pulls up a special splash page that is running on one of our servers. That again asks me for my duo username.

[00:58:48] So I've got my username for the site then to my dual username and my duo password single sign on. And then it sends me. To an app on my smart device, a request saying, Hey, are you trying to log into Microsoft? And w whatever it might be at Microsoft, and you can say yes or no, and it uses biometric.

[00:59:11] So those biometrics now are great because it says, oh, okay, I need a face ID or I need a thumb print, whatever it might be that allows a generalized, a password, less access. Okay. Password less. Meaning no pass. So those are some of the top things you can do when it comes to prevention. And if you use those, they're never going to be able to get at your data because it's something you have along with something, it works great.

[00:59:45] And we like to do this. Some customers. I don't like to go through those hoops of the single sign-on and using duo and making that all work right where we're fine with it. We've got to keep ourselves, at least as secure as the DOD regulations require unlike almost anybody else in industry, I'm not going to brag about it.

[01:00:09] But some of our clients don't like to meet the tightest of controls. And so sometimes they don't. I hate to say that, but they just don't and it's a fine line between. Getting your work done and being secure, but I think there's some compromises it can be readily made. We're going to talk next about saving your data from ransomware and the newest ransomware.

[01:00:36] We're going to talk about the third generation. That's out there right now. Ransomware, it's getting crazy. Let me tell ya and what it's doing to us and what you can do. What is a good backup that has changed over the last 12 months? It's changed a lot. I used to preach 3, 2, 1. There's a new sheriff in town.

[01:00:58] Stick around Craig peterson.com.

[01:01:02] 3, 2, 1 that used to be the standard, the gold standard for backing up. It is no longer the case with now the third generation of ransomware. You should be doing something even better. And we'll talk about it now.

[01:01:19] We're doing this as a simulcast here. It's on YouTube. It is also on rumble.

[01:01:27] It's on my website@craigpeterson.com because we're going through the things that you can do, particularly if you're a business. To stop the Russian invasion because as we've been warned again and again, the Russians are after us and our data. So if you missed part of what we're talking about today, or.

[01:01:50] Last week show, make sure you send me an email. me@craigpeterson.com. This is the information you need. If you are responsible in any way for computers, that means in your home, right? Certainly in businesses, because what I'm trying to do is help and save those small businesses that just can't afford to have full-time.

[01:02:15] True cyber security personnel on site. So that's what the whole fractional chief information security officer thing is about. Because you just, you can't possibly afford it. And believe me, that guy that comes in to fix your computers is no cyber security expert. These people that are attacking our full time cybersecurity experts in the coming from every country in the world, including the coming from the us.

[01:02:44] We just had more arrests last week. So let's talk about ransomware correctly. Ransomware, very big problem. Been around a long time. The first version of ransomware was software got onto your computer through some mechanism, and then you had that red screen. We've all seen that red screen and it says, Hey, pay up buddy.

[01:03:07] It says here you need to send so many Bitcoin or a fraction of a Bitcoin or so many dollars worth of Bitcoin. To this Bitcoin wallet. And if you need any help, you can send email here or do a live chat. They're very sophisticated. We should talk about it some more. At some point that was one generation.

[01:03:29] One generation two was not everybody was paying the ransoms. So what did they do at that point? They said let me see if they, we can ransom the data by encrypting it and having them pay us to get it back. 50% of the time issue got all your data back. Okay. Not very often. Not often enough that's for sure.

[01:03:49] Or what we could do is let's steal some of their intellectual property. Let's steal some of their data, their social security number, their bank, account numbers, et cetera. They're in a, in an Excel spreadsheet on their company. And then we'll, if they don't pay that first ransom, we'll tell them if they don't pay up, we'll release their information.

[01:04:10] Sometimes you'll pay that first ransom and then they will hold you ransom a second time, pretending to be a different group of cyber terrorists. Okay. Number three, round three is what we're seeing right now. And this is what's coming from Russia, nears, everything we can tell. And that is. They are erasing our machines.

[01:04:31] Totally erasing them are pretty sophisticated ways of erasing it as well, so that it sinks in really, it's impossible to recover. It's sophisticated in that it, it doesn't delete some key registry entries until right at the very end and then reboots and computer. And of course, there's. Computer left to reboot, right?

[01:04:55] It's lost everything off of that hard drive or SSD, whatever your boot devices. So let's talk about the best ways here to do some of this backup and saving your data from ransomware. Now you need to use offsite disconnected. Backups, no question about it. So let's talk about what's been happening.

[01:05:17] Hospitals, businesses, police departments, schools, they've all been hit, right? And these ransomware attacks are usually started by a person. I'll link in an email. Now this is a poison link. Most of the time, it used to be a little bit more where it was a word document, an Excel document that had something nasty inside Microsoft, as I've said, many times has truly pulled up their socks.

[01:05:45] Okay. So it doesn't happen as much as it used to. Plus with malware defender turned on in your windows operating system. You're going to be a little bit safer next step. A program tries to run. Okay. And it effectively denies access to all of that data. Because it's encrypted it. And then usually what it does so that your computer still works.

[01:06:09] Is it encrypts all of you, like your word docs, your Excel docs, your databases, right? Oh, the stuff that matters. And once they've got all of that encrypted, you can't really access it. Yeah. The files there, but it looks like trash now. There's new disturbing trends. It has really developed over the last few months.

[01:06:31] So in addition to encrypting your PC, it can now encrypt an entire network and all mounted drives, even drives that are marrying cloud services. Remember this, everybody, this is really a big deal because what will happen here is if you have let's say you've got an old driver G drive or some drive mounted off of your network.

[01:06:57] You have access to it from your computer, right? Yeah. You click on that drive. And now you're in there and in the windows side Unix and max are a little different, but the same general idea you have access to you have right. Access to it. So what they'll do is any mounted drive, like those network drives is going to get encrypted, but the same thing is true.

[01:07:20] If you are attaching a U S B drive to your company, So that USB drive, now that has your backup on it gets encrypted. So if your network is being used to back up, and if you have a thumb drive a USB drive, it's not really a thumb drive, right? There's external drive, but countered by USP hooked up.

[01:07:45] And that's where your backup lives. Your. Because you have lost it. And there have been some pieces of software that have done that for awhile. Yeah. When they can encrypt your network drive, it is really going after all whole bunch of people, because everyone that's using that network drive is now effective, and it is absolutely.

[01:08:10] Devastating. So the best way to do this is you. Obviously you do a bit of a local backup. We will usually put a server at the client's site that is used as a backup destiny. Okay. So that servers, the destination, all of the stuff gets backed up there. It's encrypted. It's not on the network per se. It's using a special encrypted protocol between each machine and the backup server. And then that backup servers data gets pushed off site. Some of our clients, we even go so far as to push it. To a tape drive, which is really important too, because now you have something physical that is by the way, encrypted that cannot be accessed by the attacker.

[01:09:03] It's offsite. So we have our own data center. The, we run the, we manage the no one else has access to it is ours. And we push all of those backups offsite to our data center, which gives us another advantage. If a machine crashes badly, right? The hard disk fails heaven forbid they get ransomware. We've never had that happen to one of our clients.

[01:09:29] Just we've had it happen prior to them becoming clients, is that we can now restore. That machine either virtually in the cloud, or we can restore it right onto a piece of hardware and have them up and running in four hours. It can really be that fast, but it's obviously more expensive than in some.

[01:09:51] Are looking to pay. All right, stick around. We've got more to talk about when we come back and what are the Russians doing? How can you protect your small business? If you're a one, man, one woman operation, believe it. You've got to do this as well. Or you could lose everything. In fact, I think our small guys have even more to lose Craig peterson.com.

[01:10:16] Backups are important. And we're going to talk about the different types of backups right now, what you should be doing, whether you're a one person, little business, or you are a, multi-national obviously a scale matters.

[01:10:32] Protecting your data is one of the most important things you can possibly do.

[01:10:36] I have clients who had their entire operating account emptied out, completely emptied. It's just amazing. I've had people pay. A lot of money to hackers to try and get data back. And I go back to this one lady over in Eastern Europe who built a company out of $45 million. By herself. And of course you probably heard about the shark tank people, right?

[01:11:07] Barbara Cochran, how she almost lost $400,000 to a hacker. In fact, the money was on its way when she noticed what was going on and was able to stop it. So thank goodness she was able to stop it. But she was aware of these problems was looking for the potential and was able to catch it. How many of us are paying that much attention?

[01:11:34] And now one of the things you can do that will usually kind of protect you from some of the worst outcomes. And when it comes to ransomware is to backup. And I know everybody says, yeah, I'm backing up. It's really rare. When we go in and we find a company has been backing up properly, it even happens to us sometimes.

[01:11:59] We put them back up regimen in place and things seem to be going well, but then when you need the backup, oh my gosh, we just had this happen a couple of weeks ago. Actually this last week, this is what happened. We have. Something called an FMC, which is a controller from Cisco that actually controls firewalls in our customer's locations.

[01:12:26] This is a big machine. It monitors stuff. It's tied into this ice server, which is. Looking for nastiness and we're bad guys trying to break in, right? It's intrusion detection and prevention and tying it into this massive network of a billion data points a day that Cisco manages. Okay. It's absolutely huge.

[01:12:48] And we're running it in a virtual machine network. So we. Two big blade. Chassies full of blades and blades are each blade is a computer. So it has multiple CPU's and has a whole bunch of memory. It also has in there storage and we're using something that VMware calls visa. So it's a little virtual storage area network.

[01:13:15] That's located inside this chassis and there are multiple copies of everything. So if a storage unit fails, you're still, okay. Everything stays up, it keeps running. And we have it set up so that there's redundancy on pond redundancy. One of the redundancies was to back it up to a file server that we have that's running ZFS, which is phenomenal.

[01:13:40] Let me tell you, it is the best file system out there I've never ever had a problem with it. It's just crazy. I can send you more information. If you ever interested, just email me@craigpeterson.com. Anytime. Be glad to send you the open source information, whatever you need. But what had happened is.

[01:13:57] Somehow the boot disk of that FMC, that, that firewall controller had been corrupted. So we thought, oh, okay, no problem. Let's look at our backups. Yeah, hadn't backed up since October, 2019. Yeah, and we didn't know it had been silently failing. Obviously we're putting stuff in place to stop that from ever happening again.

[01:14:27] So we are monitoring the backups, the, that network. Of desks that was making up that storage area network that had the redundancy failed because the machine itself, somehow corrupted its file system, ext four file system right then are supposed to be corruptible, but the journal was messed up and it was man, what a headache.

[01:14:51] And so they thought, okay, you're going to have to re-install. And we were sitting there saying, oh, you're kidding me. Reinstalling this FMC controller means we've got to configure our clients, firewalls that are being controlled from this FMC, all of their networks, all of their devices. We had to put it out.

[01:15:07] This is going to take a couple of weeks. So because I've been doing this for so long. I was able to boot up an optics desk and Mount the file system and go in manually underneath the whole FMC, this whole firewall controller and make repairs to it. Got it repaired, and then got it back online. So thank goodness for that.

[01:15:33] It happens to the best of us, but I have to say I have never had a new client where they had good backups. Ever. Okay. That, and now that should tell you something. So if you are a business, a small business, whatever it might be, check your backups, double check them. Now, when we're running backups, we do a couple of things.

[01:15:57] We go ahead and make sure the backup is good. So remember I mentioned that we have. Backup server that sits onsite. Usually it depends on the size of the client. But sits onsite at the client's site. So it will perform the backup and then tries to actual restore of that backup to make sure it's good.

[01:16:18] And we can even. Client, depending on what they want. So a higher level, if a machine goes down, let's say it catches fire, or disk explodes in it, or completely fails. We can actually bring that machine online inside our backup server or the customer. Yeah, how's that for fancy and bring it back online in just a matter of minutes instead of days or weeks.

[01:16:48] So that's true too. If that machine had been a ransom had this data, you raised whatever might've happened to it. We can restore it now. We've never had to knock on wood, except when there was a physical problem with the machine and as. Starting from scratching it, that machine, the new machine online in four hours or less.

[01:17:12] And it's really cool the way it works. If you like this stuff, man, it is great. Okay. Protecting your data. I'm rambling a little bit here. You need an archival service there's companies out there like iron mountain, you can at your local bank, depending on the bank. It ain't like it used to be, get a box, right?

[01:17:33] A special box in the vault that you. The tapes and other things in nowadays there's cloud options, virtual tape backup options, which is a lot of what we use and we do. Okay. We also use straight cloud at the very bottom end again. It's not located on the network. It's up in the cloud. It's double encrypted.

[01:17:57] It's absolutely the way to do now if you're going to have a backup and if that backup, you want to be secure, it must not be accessible. To the attacker, you've got to put some literal air space between your backups and the cyber criminals. It's called an air gap. So there's no way for them to get to it.

[01:18:21] Okay. Now I want you to consider seriously using tape these a LTO. These linear tape drives. They've been around for a long time, but their cartridges you can pull in and out. And they're huge. They they're physically small, but they can hold terabytes worth of data. They're absolutely amazing. There's some great disk based backup systems as what we do.

[01:18:46] Some of them are been around a long time and they can be quite reasonably. Price. All right. So it's something for you to consider, but you've got to have at least that air gap in order to make sure that you're going to be protected. What should you be looking for in a backup system? This is called 3, 2, 2 1, which means maintain at least three copies of your data store the backups on two different meters.

[01:19:15] Store at least one of the copies at an offsite location store, at least one of the copies offline, and be sure to have verified backups without air. Okay. Does that sound a little complicated? 3, 2, 1, 1 0 is what it's called. Just to be 3, 2, 1. Now it's 3, 2, 1, 1 0. I can send you Karen put together a special report on this based on our research.

[01:19:41] And I can share that with you. Absolutely free. Hey guys, if you want it, you got it. But you got to ask me, just email me M e@craigpeterson.com. This is absolutely essential. If you're a small business, a tiny business to do it this way. Let me tell you, okay, this is just huge. Physical backups should be stored off site.

[01:20:02] I mentioned the bank fault. A lot of people just go ahead and take them home with. That might be a desk. It might be a tape. It can be a little bit complicated to do. And I've picked up customers that thought they were backing up. They were using a USB drive. They were putting it in due to flee every Monday.

[01:20:24] And then every Wednesday, what happened? Every Wednesday they bring in Wednesdays desk and then they bring that disc home and then Thursday, they bring in the Thursday disc. And none of them had been working. Okay. So be very careful. All of your backups should be encrypted. We encrypted at the customer site and then we reencrypt it when we bring it over to us.

[01:20:50] Okay. Keys are essential. Particularly if you're using a cloud-based backup, don't use the same keys across multiple backups. Very important there. You should have some good procedures that are well-documented test, test your restores because very frequently. We find they don't work. In fact, that's the number one problem, right?

[01:21:14] If they had just tried to restore, even once from their backup, they would've known they had problems. And get those backups scheduled on a regular schedule. Okay. So there's a lot more offline backups and more that we can talk about another time, but this is important. If you want any help, send me an email, just put backups in the subject line.

[01:21:39] I'll send you some stuff. Email me, M e@craigpeterson.com. Now I am more than glad to help. Pretty much anybody out there. I'm not going to help. What about blah, blah, Amir Putin. But anybody else I'll help, but you got to reach out. Okay. You listen here. And I know some of this stuff is over some of our heads, some of your heads, you're the best and brightest.

[01:22:04] That's why you're listening and I'll help you out. I'll send you some information. That's going to get you on the right track. Me Me@craigpeterson.com. That's Craig Peterson, S O N have a great day.

Facebook Has No Idea Where Your Data Is and What They Do With It?! 01:22:20 Share

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

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Facebook Has No Idea Where Your Data Is and What They Do With It?!