Welcome!

A lot has gone on this week with the installation of new US leadership and the ramp-up of security theater by the Democrats. That aside we have lots to talk about on the technology front. We will begin with the NSA and their warning to businesses in relation to DNS resolvers. Then we will talk about Law Enforcement and Smart Phone encryption, New safety regulations for automated vehicles, WhatsApp and Facebook, Signal secure messaging, Warren Buffett's thoughts on cryptocurrency, and More so be sure to Listen in.

For more tech tips, news, and updates, visit - CraigPeterson.com.

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Tech Articles Craig Thinks You Should Read:

The NSA warns enterprises to beware of third-party DNS resolvers

How Law Enforcement Gets Around Your Smartphone's Encryption

Trump team modernizes car safety regulations for the driverless era

WhatsApp clarifies it’s not giving all your data to Facebook after surge in Signal and Telegram users

Signal recovers from a day-long service outage

Warren Buffett blasted Bitcoin as a worthless delusion and 'rat poison squared.'

The Guy Who Built The World Wide Web Is Building A 'New Internet', Where You Control Your Data

Superfast 5G in the US still a work in progress

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Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] We all want to have a little privacy. So what should you be using? What are the apps that you can trust? We're going to talk about that. WhatsApp, Signal. iMessage, messenger, all of that stuff. That's our focus for today.

We have really gone around the bend here.

Just as far back as the federal government has been trying to get access to encrypted communications. This has been going on forever. Look at our constitution. Look at the amendments to the constitution, also known as a bill of rights. Trying to protect us. We're supposed to be secure in our papers among other things.

So what does that mean? Why was that put into the constitution? It was because an authoritarian government is always trying to look over our shoulders and at the time that authoritarian government was their British monarchy and frankly parliament as well. And they just waltz in, they would break in a door if they had to.

And they would start grabbing papers, trying to find someone that was an insurrectionist who was going to overturn the government. And of course, it didn't stop there. That's just one example here in America of what happened to us when we had a boot on our neck is what it's called. And so we established part as part of our country here in the constitution.

Prime right to privacy, the absolute right to privacy. And over the years, we've had all kinds of invasions of our privacy. Of course, you know what happened with Wiki leaks and leaking of Hillary Clinton's emails, at least to some of them. I'm not sure we saw all of them. We saw the break into the NSA and the leaking of the tools that the national security agency had, that they were using to spy on us.

You might even remember the Church commission back in the early seventies. And they found that the federal government had been given a direct pipeline, this massive pipeline since I think it was the late forties.

But after the second world war ended, they had a direct pipeline from A T and T directly to our intelligence agencies. They had access to all of these conversations that were going on and who knows what they were doing with it. And so that's what the Church commission found out, frankly. I think we need another church commissioned to look into this.

You remember J Edgar Hoover and what was happening with the FBI where he was using it to spy on people he perceived as enemies. I think he was even spying on mistresses and things, too, trying to figure out who was sleeping with whom and how might that be used in order to gain control over someone, to extort them. This has gone on again and again, and now we have the findings that came out of the house. From a subcommittee where the house Republicans released the findings on this Russia probe and that Russia probe ended up showing a: Hey, nothing happened. There was no collusion between Trump and Russia.

In fact, The collusion existed on the left, on the Hillary Clinton campaign, which was basically something she had put together in order to use it against some other people. It wasn't originally intended to be used against Trump apparently. So now we fast forward to bill Clinton, the next, really big thing that happened.

And that was, he was pushing our government to force people who made devices that use encryption to use something called the Clipper chip. And this Clipper chip was going to guarantee security guarantee privacy. And the idea was, by the way, there's a backdoor in there and we could not inspect the source code for this chip.

We could not inspect its innards if you would. We had no idea what was going on, but it did come out. Yes, indeed. There was a back door, the back door was only there for law enforcement. Don't worry about it. People it's not, it's not going to be misused, but any time there is a back door, there's a hacker trying to get access to that back door, correct?

Yeah. Yeah. Very correct. It happens all of the time. Our information that we are sharing with anybody just isn't safe. Look at the federal agencies that have been breached almost every one of them, including the federal agency that maintains all of the employee records for all the people that work and worked overtime for the federal government that was hacked. China apparently stole that. And that was the records of, for everybody, including their background check information, you name it. And of course, when the FBI is doing a real background check, they really dig. So what information did they get from that?

Our information is not secure. And with this Clipper chip that was being pushed. I don't want to blame bill Clinton here. I'm not pointing a finger at Bill Clinton. Okay. Get me, right guys. But. W what happened was, again, the government's obsession with gaining access to our private materials.

I'm not trying to hide something. I just don't have anything I want to share. I love that saying and it is so true. I am not trying to hide anything.

Now, there are people that are trying to hide something. So what do you do about those people? That's always the argument, isn't it. And has been for. Ever, frankly, I'm sure it goes way back to the first community of two caveman families, right?

Trust yet verify and verify means sneak in, look through the iPad, the iPhones, right? Look through anything they want to. Now I've got some information on that too, coming up. So that was the next, really big thing. Here was the Clipper chip and we're all gonna use the Clipper chip. Fast forward.

We had, of course, the terrible incident in New York City on September 11th. I remember it. I had the news on, I could not believe my eyes watched it happen in real-time. Live. It was just shocking what had happened. And so in response, we pass something that we called the Patriot act and that Patriot act was there to protect us, but it gave these agencies more and more power.

And we found out later on, they had been collecting all kinds of information on US citizens illegally. Illegally, not just unconstitutionally, which is, bad, very bad, but against the laws that were in place, the rules or regulations. They started ignoring them. So we just put it into, we codified it in law with the Patriot act, right?

They can spy on us because heaven forbid, we talked to someone in another country without it being monitored. Now I want to make it clear. I am not against monitoring someone if you have a court order. And it's a legitimate court order, not one of these kangaroo courts where you don't get to represent yourself.

No one in fact represents you. And as it turns out, lies are told. This whole Russian collusion thing where they started spying on the Trump Administration now that the transcripts are out from shifts committee, where he came out every day and bald-faced lie to everybody about how they had found all of this stuff on Trump and how terrible it was and how a lot of people were going to prison.

Looking at the transcripts, now we see he was absolutely lying and knew he was lying and he still he's still in Congress. Oh, two cycles later. I don't understand these people, but they had testified to these FBI officials and others that if they had known then what they know now, they would never have signed off on having this.

Kangaroo court effectively, this court that has minimal oversight, they would never have signed off on these applications to the court. In order to track the movements of the Trump campaign, what they said, what they did, everything you might remember. Soon after Trump came into office, he was informed that he was being spied on that he has his offices were tapped, et cetera.

Do you remember that? And they had set up a skiff there for him, which is one of these secure Faraday cage things where you can't monitor electronically through this thing. So they had to set it up. And then they told the president that other agencies were spying on him. Continuing to spy on him nothing was ever found.

When you can read transcripts now that came out of that committee and yet somehow they managed to impeach him anyway. Completely political process. It's just. It's insane where we have gotten. And so I am concerned because how many times are we going to say I have nothing to hide. I don't care if they have access to this information because a lot of this information could be used against us.

And if the government has it or the government can collect it. The bad guys can too. That's what I was just saying that the federal government, I think pretty much every agency, certainly, all of the major ones have been hacked. So if they have our information, it's now in the hands of the bad guys, it's in the hands of China.

We know that. Our backgrounds are out there. Even the people that got secret clearances and higher, it's all out there now. So how can we make sure our data has a modicum of success and being secure in private because privacy is guaranteed to us in the constitution.

You're listening to Craig Peterson.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, the rest.

We're taking a little time to talk about privacy and security. What kind of rights do we actually have when it comes to privacy and security? And what does it ultimately mean to all of us? It's getting crazy out there.

I just read a little bit from the fourth amendment and we talked in the last segment. About what does this mean? Why were we trying to protect ourselves? And of course, things have changed a whole lot since those days. You had people who might break in the government, might steal, sneak a peek, et cetera.

We know from some of these hearings we've had in Congress that all envelopes were steamed open and their contents examined. Okay. We had people who were being examined by the FBI for no reason. Other than that, their political views. It gets very difficult over time in history. After nine 11, they started spying on us even more and they started collecting more and more information about us.

And part of what they set up was this secret court where they could get a court order. Too spying on you. And it was a secret order. You wouldn't know. No one would know, and they are spying on you. Now it's supposedly the FBI or whoever it is who's presenting this case to the court is supposed to represent your interest as well.

They're supposed to present evidence that might show that you, in fact, are not guilty. You couldn't be guilty of what they're accusing you of. But we now know how that went. At least in some of these cases, it didn't go well. And in fact, people were charged and considered effectively guilty and warrants were issued without anybody knowing now.

Oftentimes warrants are issued without people knowing anyway, whether or not it has to do with terrorism, whether or not you're a US citizen. Obviously, you're going to find out that there's some sort of a warrant and then you'll have a right to defend yourself. No, unfortunately, you probably don't have the resources that the federal government has in trying to defend.

Defend yourself. The federal government effectively has unlimited money. The same thing's true for state government. They can spend $10 million investigating you. Look at what they did with the Russia hoax, where they spent $35 million investigating, just investigating President Trump and his team.

Not finding any. Evidence of Russian collusion and it came out with, what was it, two indictments, neither of which had anything to do with Russian collusion. It basically trapped that were set up. We have less right. To be secure in our papers. Then we had not too many years ago and certainly not since when I grew up, but we do have the technology today.

And that's where there is a bit of a win. You know that I have continually said, don't use Android if your phone is lost or stolen, but that phone can probably be pretty easily hacked into depends on how old it is and what version of the software you're running. But we're now. When our computers and our phones adding something called a TPM.

And I discussed those in some detail in one of my more advanced security courses. But this module is designed in hardware to help protect. Everything on that computer. So it isn't just an encrypted desk. So the machine starts to boot up, asks you for the password, and now it can finish booting off of that encrypted desk and keep your data relatively safe.

As long as it computer's turned off. If the computer is on that data is accessible and hackers can still get into your computer remotely and get it all to that data. So there's the whole thing of data at rest. Then data in flight that we deal with all of the time in the business community. And frankly, we have that same problem as individuals, but most of us can't do anything about it.

So these manufacturers have included in their higher-end computers, these TPMS, and they're not that expensive when you order a computer. If you're buying it from Dell or some of these other places, you're going to pay less than $30 for this little module. If you buy an Apple computer, It's already there.

It's been built in for quite some time into Apple models, but most of the stuff, if you're buying it from a big box, retailer is not going to have this module, but this modules designed to keep the secrets, like your secret keys, et cetera, in the module and that module. Cannot be broken into physically or electronically.

The hackers cannot get into it. That is a very good thing. And the same, thing's true with some of our cell phones. So if it's an Apple phone, Yeah, it's built-in, if it's an Android phone, it depends, right? Android, isn't Android, isn't an Android, right? They all use different hardware. They may use the same central processor, but they also have controllers and then device drivers for those controllers, et cetera.

So it's out of Google's hands as to how secure your phone is going to be. And then you're lucky. Consider yourself lucky if you get actual updates for your Android phone. For security problems, because most people cannot get them, even if they wanted to get them, it says serious problem. So you are now more likely to be able to have the hardware.

That's going to keep things safe for, and you see some evidence of this with the thumbprint readers nowadays, you've got the facial recognition technologies, again, depending on the tech, you're using a lot of the Android devices, easy to fake the thumbprint thing on also on a lot of Android devices, easy to fake the facial records.

Ignition much harder on some of these others, but some of these TBMs, some of these security hardware modules have been hacked, and that is now true of Apple equipment. If they can get your hand, their hand on that equipment, they may be able to break the way into it. Now Apple's continually improving the equipment, you go to a country and let's say you go to China and you are trying to get something manufactured there.

You have your intellectual property from your company in the us. Some of it's there on your laptop. And you're thinking you're safe. There have been numerous documented instances where China gets their hands on your laptop or your phone. Whether you know it or not, sometimes they sneak in fact there's a whole security term just based on the evil maids.

But they'll get into your room and then they will hack into your computer and they'll steal your intellectual property it's being done even in the United States. Look at what's happened here. Representative stall wall out in California has been carrying on a long-term relationship. Physical relationship with a female Chinese spy.

We had both senators from California, who we had senators, Feinstein and Boxer, both had Chinese spies on their payroll, including one who was her driver for 20 years, was listening in on her conversations and relaying them back to China. Stonewall, believe it or not, is still not only in Congress, but it is on a secretive committee.

If you can believe this. I'm, my mind is I'm rubbing my head here. I had to go to explode. And in this improving windows security course, I have and in fact, a slide when I had in duct tape so that it just doesn't explode because it's just unbelievable to me. So Apple is equipment, some of the newer, slightly older equipment.

Is hackable. If they can get their hands on it. So what should you be doing? I want to get into, cause we're going to lose some of our listeners here. So when we come back, I'm going to get into WhatsApp and signal and I message and messages. I go into a great deal of depth in the improving windows security course, make sure you're on my email list. Craig peterson.com. So you get all of this training.

So I think we've established the government spying on us means they're collecting data anywhere. There's data. You're going to find bad guys trying to get at it. And that means our data gets exposed when there is the inevitable government hack.

I have been talking here about really constitutional rights.

Should the government be able to spy on us? When do they have the right to examine our papers? Our homes, our persons, our effect as is under the fourth amendment, I'll leave that to a legal show, but we do have that right. And it is guaranteed to us. For very good reason. So ultimately, what can we do to stay safe?

Because it isn't the government. That's a big worry, frankly. The big worry is the bad guys. It's the hackers. This is like a really good friend of mine. He just turned 76 right now. In fact, this last week. And he makes money by drugs, driving for Uber eats. And I think he does one other as well, but that's how he makes money.

And he came to me with a problem because of his last paycheck. Which I believe was about $700 for one week. That's a lot of work, right? That's a pretty big paycheck. His last paycheck did not end up in his bank account. So he did some investigation. I did some investigation. He called up the company. He was doing some of this work for, and.

It found out that the money that he had earned had gone into a hacker's bank account. Yeah. So there he is working really hard. He gets this paycheck and it doesn't show up and it's in the hands of a bad guy. The money has been transferred. They couldn't scrape it back. And here he is stuck. Now in his case, the problem was that he was not using secure passwords.

So I set him up with one password, which is a password manager and we used it to generate. Passwords for his bank account. And also for these apps, he was using in order to get the orders for the food, et cetera. So we locked them down and I helped him on the phone when he called up the company because the bad guy had also grabbed his email account.

So anytime you try and do an account reset the reset. Code was sent to the email that he no longer had access to an email he had for better than 20 years, a Hotmail email address, something I told him also should get rid of. So we had to play those games and then. And we went to Google and he didn't have a secondary reset ability here because his Google email account was tied into his Hotmail.

So any reset for Google went to Hotmail. He didn't have access to the Hotmail account. And so he lost access to the Google account. See the problem here that was created all because he knows, we can tell he was using the same password on a bunch of different accounts. One of those businesses that he was using had been hacked.

And that information was then used to break into his email account. And they found from his email account that he was delivering food on the sidewall, heck he's retired his only way to generate any extra income. And so they then took over his account. They changed his bank account number. In the Uber eats app and they changed it to one of theirs.

And the account number was for one of these places that will issue you a debit card. No questions asked. And once the money hits that debit card, they pulled it out and moved it overseas. It's it is a bad thing to have to happen. And by having that information, they were able to take over his identity, at least in this case, and start receiving his paychecks.

This is happening every day. What do we do? Already, I tell you, you got to use a password manager. It's just so important. And we go into that and I talk about them in my improving windows security course, because you've got to do it. You got to understand how to do all of that sort of stuff.

But there are other ways that you can be spied on. For instance, sending text messages, we're seeing more and more a technique that's been used by police for years now being used by bad guys, they've set up something that's generically now. Called a stingray device. It's actually a device made by one company.

There's multiple these types of devices, but it pretends it's a cell tower. It doesn't have to be up on a tower or anything. It just pretends it's a cell tower. So anybody's cell phone in the area is going to try and relay through them and they do literally let you relay through. So it goes from your phone to this fake cell tower.

And then from the stage. Fake cell tower. It forwards it to the real cell tower. So now they have access to information about who you're calling, but they also now have access to your text messages, your SMS messages, and they're using that to commit scams. What do you do really? These prescriptions I'm giving here are pretty darn straightforward.

They're not that difficult to do, but I understand they, they can be difficult to figure out. So that's why I'm doing these courses. I have these free courses, these emails I send out pretty much every week also had this free information in them. And then I had the more advanced courses too, but If you're using an end-to-end encrypted did messaging app.

These stingray devices cannot pick you up at all. Okay. Yeah. Okay. They're going to see there's data being transferred, but they're not going to be able to get their hands on the actual messages they'll just see some data. So what do I recommend you use? I'm going to make this quick because we are almost out of time here on some of these stations, but here's what I use, but let's just leave it at that for now.

We're going to get into more detail a little later on. If you get cut off of the show gets kinda off, make sure you go to Craig peterson.com. You can see the podcast there. You can listen to the whole thing. But what I use is an app called signal and. That's Signal. If the police have a warrant and they're coming for you, it's not going to really stop them.

And in many cases, okay. There's other ways to get access to your data, but it is going to stop the bad guys, which is who we are really trying to stop here. We want to stop the casual viewing of our person's paper's effect. From the federal government and state and local governments, because unless they have a valid warrant, They have no right to monitor us.

Okay. So it's going to stop that, but it's probably not going to stop them if they have a warrant, which is fine, because if they have a legit warrant, that's all well, and good. I am not against that at all, but it is going to stop. 99.99, nine, 9% of the bad guys, because they don't have the technology. They don't have the ability to decrypt or to put special malware on your phone or other things.

So signal, it's an app that had an outage. We're going to be talking about that this last week because so many people started using it after Elon Musk advised people to start using it. So how's that for something right. It's just absolutely amazing. It's worth doing, let me tell you in the course, I go into some more detail on how to set it up and what to do and why it is the best option.

Make sure you are on my newsletter that I send out pretty much every week. Craig peterson.com/subscribe.

What are our options when it comes to some of these messaging apps? So we're going to talk right now about how they work. What's the bottom line SMS versus some of these apps. What should you look at? What should you use? You know what I use.

I use something called signal, which is an app that's been out there for a little while. Moxie Marlinspike is the name of the guy that put it together and designed really the most secure messaging interface earlier. I mentioned how you can with some, something like a stingray. Intercept cell phones and cell phone signals.

And one of the things that you can intercept is what's called SMS, which is a simple messaging system. Now to my surprise, in the course of the window, improving windows security that I have, I go into some detail about how SMS came about and where it is, but for now, let's just talk about the basics of SMS.

It is obviously. Text message. That's what we call it. Very typically it's a very small message limited in the number of characters that you can send. In fact, that's what Twitter did. Twitter's a limit of the number of messages is based on the length of these SMS messages. Okay. I get that. And Assa mass was just designed as an afterthought as part of the new cellular technology.

It really wasn't an integral part and they were smart to say, Hey, wait a minute, we've got a little bit more bandwidth here. And so they took that bandwidth and used it for messaging apps. When you send a. Text message from your cell phone, your sending it in the clear, which means that anyone can intercepted and that's no surprise.

Anyone can pretty much intercept anything. But your message is not encrypted at all. So if your message is being intercepted, it is at that point now completely vulnerable to being read so bad guys that decide they're going to set up a sting raid type device can now listen into your conversations, frankly, they can inject things into it.

The other thing about it is the. Phone company is also listening in. So remember how much I've complained about people, businesses, government agencies that collect our data. And one of the reasons I complain about it is they've got the data, that means they are going to be targets of the bad guys.

Think about Sutton, right? Robbing banks. Why did he Rob banks? And the answer of course is supposed to be that because that's where the money is. Why would you Rob a bank? If there was no money, it doesn't make much sense. So why would they not go then and try and break into telephone companies or other places that have your messages stored?

Remember? How my friend here just a couple of weeks ago, had his paychecks deposited into a hacker's account. If they can gain access to your text messages, they now have the ability. To potentially use that to recover an account. Now recover an account. Isn't really what they're doing. They're recovering your account.

They're pretending they are you. So when you get that two factor authentication message coming in from whatever website it is out there that you've been using that two factor authentication messenger message is. Yeah, going to them because they can see it. So it really is that easy. I hope that's not too confusing.

So you send a message to somebody using SMS using regular text message. It can be seen. It can be read. It is stored by everybody in that route. And they can include bad guys that are sitting there watching what you're sending. Then when it gets to the other side is still in the clear and that person goes ahead and reads it.

So that's the basics of messaging, right? That's your very basic, your bottom line text message. If you move upscale a little bit. You now have some apps that can be used for messaging. And I don't want you to confuse Facebook messenger here because Facebook messenger of course, is used by Facebook.

They are watching what's going on and what you're saying, and it's not a secure platform. I was going to say at all, it is secure, but it's not really secure enough for messages you want to send back and forth to friends. And it's definitely not good for account recovery because most of the account recovery stuff, and two factor authentication.

Is not two factor authentication. So make sure you keep an eye out for my improving windows security course, which should be released and knock on wood in about another week or so I had said January, and I think we'll make the January deadline here of having it out there. Yeah. But in that I explained two factor authentication.

Why you don't want to use SMS or text messages for it. And also some workarounds, including a free workaround that you can use. So that's all in the course, but let's stay basic here right now. Messages from Facebook or not considered secure what's happened is something that about 2 billion people in the world that is pretty dramatic.

Yeah. And it is designed as an end to end encrypted. Did communications channel. It can be used for little short text messages, longer messages. You can have voice calls on it. You can have video calls on it, et cetera. We use at the office, a WebEx phone system. It's made by Cisco. It is encrypted. It is what on the president of the United States desk right there.

Although he has a net, an extra encryption module on it. Just really cool. Plus he can turn off physically disconnect the microphones and things makes a whole lot of sense to be able to do that, but it set up so we can have secure communications. We have one that's called compliant and we use it inside the business and it has cameras on the phones and displays and stuff.

It's really quite cool and ties into the computers. So that's probably not something you guys are going to be able to have. So a lot of people use WhatsApp. And the WhatsApp app has been known to be quite secure. It is also using that algorithm, that software that was developed by Moxie Marlin spike. So it is end to end encrypted.

So when you send a message from your smartphone using WhatsApp, It's encrypted on your phone and then it is transmitted over the regular internet. So that internet connection may be coming from the phone company. It may be over, a 5g or 4g or 10 G in the future, whatever it might. Be over their network and then against to the other side, by bouncing around in a whole bunch of networks, remember internet is interconnected networks.

It's a whole bunch of them. So it'll bounce around. It'll get to the other side. And once it's on the other side, it will be decrypted and there are. Session keys. There are. When you're using signal, there are keys specifically for individual conversations, individual users, and even individual packets.

It's really quite involved. You might have noticed about. Two weeks ago, as I did that, WhatsApp came up with a message and you read that message. And to me, it was scary because it looked like Facebook who bought WhatsApp for what was it? A couple of billion dollars. It was over a billion, I think about eight, nine years ago.

They bought it. And they gave people until 2016 to opt out of having Facebook take copies of all of their WhatsApp contact. So the message you got from WhatsApp via, or from Facebook via WhatsApp here a couple of weeks ago said okay. So we are going to be basically gathering information about you.

Now that really worried about a lot of people, myself included. So I made sure I had signal set up with everybody that I'm planning on talking to. Because signal is much more secure than what's happened. Some of these others. Don't know, a lot of people jumped ship. The stats that are out there right now are saying that we had millions of people sign up for signal.

They left WhatsApp because of the, what Facebook is calling confusion over this message they sent out. And Facebook is saying, Hey we're not breaking encryption. We're not going to watch what you're saying, but we are going to keep track of information about you and about your contacts and who knows how far they're going to go with it.

Odds are that they'll start pushing in. Advertising into your stream and other things, which also really concerns me because all they need is a bug and that bug could potentially allow bad guys offers to get into your machine into the app. When I say offers, it There could be a bug in the advertising interface that allows now access to private messages.

So I would be cautious about it. And a lot of people have apparently about 25 million people over the course of just three days signed up for signal. On the app store, which is just amazing. Oh no, excuse me. That was telegram, which is another secure communications piece of software. I'm not a big fan of telegram, much bigger fan of signal.

That's the only one I really trust out there. Hopefully this was clear enough for you. I do go into this and I have some diagrams and other things in my improving windows security course. Put together that helps you, of course improve security on your windows, computer. But because windows computers now are also tied in with surface tablets, which are people are using.

And I understand why if you're stuck in the windows world, why you'd get a surface tablet and those surface tablets have built into them cell modems. I had to go and do the two factor authentication, more and messaging and how that all go. So hopefully understand all of that. Make sure you are on my newsletter list.

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The internet phone book, if you will, or address book is beyond repair right now. It's not beyond repair. There are some things going on right now to make you more secure. We're going to talk about that. So stick around.

When we go online, use something known as a URL, right?

You're familiar with that. That's that part of the bar up at the top of your browser, it's got the name of a site. It might have a slash and. Slash subscribe, like when you subscribed to my newsletter@craigpeterson.com slash subscribe. That first part of that URL, the Craig Peter sawn.com known as the left-hand side.

And it's the part that comes right after the HTTPS colon slash. So that's the domain name? Craig peterson.com. Easy enough to just type that in. How do you end up at my website? DNS is something that's been a mystery of black box for a lot of people, but it has been hitting the tech news lately because of some problems, basic problems. One of them is that requests, that DNS requests, they request your turn. Craig peterson.com into an internet address is transmitted in the clear. The other problem is many times our ISP are taking that DNS request and fulfilling it themselves. Those are both problems. So the first problem where we have our ISP PS intercepting, our DNS requests means that they know what we're looking for, where we're going online.

So your ISP, it could be Comcast or Verizon, or who knows who, depending on where you live. Your ISP sees that DNS requests and those Oh, okay. He's going to Craig peterson.com or Google or TD bank or whatever might be. They know it. Okay. That's some problem enough. The other problem I mentioned is it's in the clear, because it's sent in the clear your ISP can intercept it.

No problem. Some RSPs are not only intercepting them. They are changing things and they're giving you different results. Which to me is very frustrating. So if you're trying to do a search, for instance, instead of sending it to duck, duck could go or whatever your favorite search engine is. Your ISP is going to grab it and fulfill it itself and give you advertising different advertising as part of the search results.

And in some cases as well, if you try and go to a website that does not exist rather than telling you. Oh, Craig Peterson without an O a doesn't exist. It will send you to their own webpage that has advertising on it. So all of those things are rather annoying. Bad guys can also mess around with your DNS settings.

Most small businesses and home users have a router at the edge of the network that handles a protocol called DHCP. It's DHCP is a protocol that hands out IP addresses. So for instance, if you look at the IP address for your machine, the odds are pretty good. It saying the one nine two.one six, eight.one dot something range.

That's the most common address on the internet is called a non round-table address and they use nav at the network edge and stuff. But that server that is sitting in your router slash firewall is. Providing data to your computer or your other devices like your television, the Roku, et cetera.

It's providing information to your devices, telling it which DHCP server to use. So if you're on your web browser and you type in Craig peterson.com, it knows your web browser, your computer knows what the IP address is too. Resolve that name, the DNS server it should be using. So another thing bad guys have been doing is they break into your router slash firewall at the network edge.

And then they change the DHCP servers address in your router slash firewall. So you can imagine what happens now, if you're trying to go to a website, the bad guys can send you wherever they want. And in some cases, they are sending you to their own version of your bank's website, or they're sending you to their own version of Google three.

They are completely hijacking your computer by just changing these DNS settings in your Rotter and firewall at the edge of the network. That's all they have to do. So yet another reason to make sure your router firewall has the latest firmware in it. Hopefully it doesn't have security problems. They're going to nail you.

I have this in my course as well, more advanced networking course on what to do, how to do it, et cetera. How do you solve these problems? Some of these companies and organizations have decided they're going to use their own protocol, their own way of doing it. So instead of sending out the name request to the standard DHCP server that your computer was told, when it was powered on to use it, you're going to use theirs.

And here's how they're doing it. They have in Mozilla, for instance, Firefox product. If you're using the Firefox browser, it is ignoring the DNS settings that are on your computer. And it's opening an encrypted session to a DHCP server that Firefox knows and loves. That can be a problem. It's not necessarily a problem.

It's probably a better thing to do than what most people are doing in their homes right now, which is just leaving everything at the default and letting their ISP kind of decide which DNS server to use and how to use it and everything else. So I'm not going to blame them for that. I think from that aspect, it's a pretty good idea.

But because it's encrypted, it's called deal H by the way, which is short for DNS over TLS, which is meaning it's encrypted. And DNS traffic is sensitive traffic. So why not encrypt it because they. The default protocol doesn't have encryption. So they now send the request directly from your browser to one of these cloud services that are out there.

One of the common ones is one.one.one.one. Which is a very common nowadays site that you might see CloudFlare. There are some others as well. So the, your ISP cannot see the DHCP request. The bad guys can change the settings on your firewall. All they want. They're not going to be able to redirect your you via DHCP.

And they cannot spy on where you are going online. All very good, right from that aspect. So for regular people using this inside of Firefox great idea very easy, very simple. The other nice thing about this system, because CloudFlare is looking at the records of DNS records and identifying potentially.

Banned websites you don't want to go to it can, and it does filter them out. So you have that extra layer of protection. If there's a website, that's a bad site. It is getting filtered out. When you're trying to go there. However it doesn't do any good to a cause it can't filter applications that you're running.

If there's malware on your computer, trying to phone home, not going to help with any of that. I do cover all of this, by the way, in the introduction to windows security course, that's coming out here. Of course you can sign up@craigpeterson.com and I'll let you know what's going on with it. But I do cover that.

And how do you do it? However, here's the problem. If you are a business that is trying to stay secure, this is going to make you less secure because a business like mine or my clients that have information, that's valuable, they have bank accounts, they have intellectual property that they don't want to have stolen.

So their information is valuable. They want to intercept. These DHCP requests, because you don't necessarily want your random user inside your business network. The sales guy or gal going to the dark areas of the web and you know what those are, where there's a whole lot of bad stuff without your knowledge, because you don't know.

If they try and type in playboy.com and it gives them the IP address and they can get their you're none, the wiser. Because that request is encrypted. So one of the best things to do in a business network is to use something like Cisco's umbrella that we explained in the introduction to windows security course.

And we also explained some free versions that you can get and you can use. So this is actually. Dangerous in some situations, DOH, it is much more or secure another situations, but I think there are better ways to deal with this and we covered in the course. So make sure you keep your eye out for the introduction to windows security course.

That is coming your way very soon. And if you are on my newsletter list, you'll find out about it as well as weekly. Little micro trainings that we're doing. Craig peterson.com.

The internet phone book, if you will, or address book is beyond repair right now. It's not beyond repair. There are some things going on right now to make you more secure. We're going to talk about that. So stick around.

hello everybody. Craig Peter Sohn here. You're listening to us on news radio five 60 am and 98.5 FM w G a N. And you can listen also on your Google home device. Just say, Hey, Google play. W G a N. And it'll take care of the rest for you. It makes it easy. We, when we go online, use something known as a URL, right?