Weekly Show #1158

We know the Russians have been attacking us. I've talked a lot about it on the radio and TV over the last couple of weeks. So I am doing something special; we are going through the things you can do to stay safe from the latest Russian attacks.

Last week, we started doing something I promised we would continue -- how can you protect yourself when it comes to the Russians? The Russians are the bad guys when it comes to bad guys. So there are a few things you can do. And there are a few things; frankly, you shouldn't be doing. And that's precisely what we're going to talk about right now.

Today, I explain:

- How to protect your back-end - Preventative measures - The new rules of backing up your computer

As usual, we'll cover the What, Why, and How's.

[Automated transcript follows]

[00:00:39] So last week he went over some steps, some things that you can look at that you should look at that are going to help protect you. And we are going to go into this a whole lot more today. And so I want you 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.

[00:01:01] 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.

[00:01:26] 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.

[00:01:52] 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.

[00:02:22] 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.

[00:02:42] 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.

[00:03:09] 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.

[00:03:34] 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.

[00:04:03] 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.

[00:04:24] 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.

[00:04:44] 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.

[00:05:03] 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.

[00:05:30] 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.

[00:05:59] 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.

[00:06:20] 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.

[00:06:46] 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.

[00:07:08] 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.

[00:07:31] 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.

[00:07:59] 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.

[00:08:25] 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.

[00:08:45] 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.

[00:09:09] 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.

[00:09:30] 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.

[00:09:56] 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.

[00:10:18] 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.

[00:10:44] What are you going to do when they come for you? What are you going to do? Bad boys. Bad. Stick around. We've got a lot more to talk about here as we go. I am explaining the hacks that are going on right now and what you can do as a business and an individual doubt. Protect yourself. Don't go anywhere.

[00:11:07] 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.

[00:11:23] hi, I'm Craig Peter Sohn, your chief information security officer. We've reviewed a number of things that are important when it comes to your cyber security and your protection.

[00:11:37] 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.

[00:12:01] 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.

[00:12:26] 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.

[00:12:51] 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.

[00:13:21] 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?

[00:13:45] 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.

[00:14:11] 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.

[00:14:29] 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.

[00:15:01] 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.

[00:15:21] 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.

[00:15:40] 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.

[00:16:04] 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.

[00:16:23] 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.

[00:16:41] 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?

[00:17:13] 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.

[00:17:41] 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.

[00:18:04] 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.

[00:18:27] 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.

[00:19:02] 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.

[00:19:26] 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.

[00:19:53] 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.

[00:20:15] Stick around Craig peterson.com.

[00:20:19] 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.

[00:20:36] We're doing this as a simulcast here. It's on YouTube. It is also on rumble.

[00:20:43] 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.

[00:21:07] 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.

[00:21:31] 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.

[00:22:01] 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.

[00:22:23] 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.

[00:22:45] 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.

[00:23:05] 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.

[00:23:26] 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.

[00:23:48] 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?

[00:24:11] 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.

[00:24:34] 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.

[00:25:02] 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.

[00:25:26] 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.

[00:25:48] 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.

[00:26:14] 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.

[00:26:36] 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.

[00:27:02] 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.

[00:27:27] 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.

[00:28:20] 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.

[00:28:46] 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.

[00:29:08] 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.

[00:29:32] 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.

[00:29:47] Protecting your data is one of the most important things you can possibly do.

[00:29:53] 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?

[00:30:23] 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?

[00:30:50] 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.

[00:31:15] 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.

[00:31:42] 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.

[00:32:05] 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.

[00:32:32] 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.

[00:32:56] 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.

[00:33:13] 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.

[00:33:43] 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.

[00:34:07] 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.

[00:34:23] 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.

[00:34:49] 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.

[00:35:14] 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.

[00:35:35] 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.

[00:36:04] 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.

[00:36:28] 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?

[00:36:50] 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.

[00:37:13] 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.

[00:37:37] 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.

[00:38:02] 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.

[00:38:31] 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.

[00:38:57] 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.

[00:39:19] 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.

[00:39:41] 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.

[00:40:06] 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?

[00:40:30] 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.

[00:40:55] 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.

[00:41:20] 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 M e@craigpeterson.com. That's Craig Peterson, S O N have a great day.

[00:41:35] We just got an email this week from a customer and they're saying, oh no, my email has been hacked. What does that mean was a really hacked, we're going to talk right now about email spoofing, which is a very big deal.

[00:41:51] Emails spoofing is being a problem for a long time, really? Since the 1970s. I remember when I got my first spoofed email back in the eighties and they was really a little bit confusing.

[00:42:05] I went into it more detail, of course, being a very technical kind of guy and looked behind the curtains, figured out what was going on. Just shook my head. I marveled at some people. Why would you do this sort of thing? The whole idea behind email spoofing is for you to receive an email, looks like it's from someone that it's not now, you've all seen examples of this.

[00:42:30] Everybody has. And those emails that are supposedly from the bank, or maybe from Amazon or some other type of business or family friend, this is part of what we call social engineering, where the bad guys are using a little bit about what they know about you, or maybe another person in order to. Frankly, fool you.

[00:42:54] That's what spoofing really is. There were a lot of email accounts that were hacked over the last what, 30, 40 years. And you might remember this people sending out an email saying, oh, my account got hacked because you just got emails. Back in the day, what people were trying to do is break into people's email accounts and then the bad guys after having broken in now knew everybody that was in the contact list from the account that was just broken into.

[00:43:29] Now they know, Hey, listen, this person sends an email. Maybe I can just pretend I'm them. Days it, the same thing still happens. But now typically what you're seeing is a more directed attack. So a person might even look in that email account that they've broken into and poke around a little bit and find out, oh, okay.

[00:43:52] So this person's account I just broken to is a purchasing manager at a big. So then they take the next step or maybe this tab after that and try and figure out. Okay, so now what do I do? Oh, okay. So really what I can do now is send fake purchase orders or send fake requests for money. I've seen in the past with clients that we've picked up because the email was acting strangely where a bad guy went ahead, found.

[00:44:25] Invoices that have been sent out by the purchasing person and the send the invoices out and changed the pay to information on the invoice. So they took the PDFs that they found on the file server of the invoices went in and changed them, change the account that they wanted, the funds ACH into. And once they had that happen, they just sent the invoice out again saying overdue.

[00:44:54] Off goes in the email and the company receives it and says, oh okay, I need to pay this invoice. Now. Sometimes it marked them overdue. Sometimes they didn't mark them overdue. I've seen both cases and now the money gets sent off and that invoice gets paid and then gets paid to the wrong person.

[00:45:13] Or maybe they go ahead and they don't send the invoice out, but they just send a little notification saying, Hey, our account has changed. Make sure you. Direct all future payments to this account. Instead. Now you might be thinking wait a second here. Now they send this email out. It's going to go into a bank account.

[00:45:33] I can recover the money while no, you can't. Because what they're doing is they are using mules. Now you've heard of meals before. He might've even seen that recent Clint Eastwood movie. I think it was called. But typically when we think of mules, as people we're thinking about people who are running drugs well, in this case, the bad guys use mules in order to move money around.

[00:45:59] And now sometimes the people know what they're doing. The FBI has had some really great arrests of some people who were doing this, particularly out in California, some of them cleaned. Yeah. I didn't know what was happening. It was just somebody, asked me to send money. It's like the Nigerian scam where the Nigeria in the Nigerian scam, they say, Hey I'm, I'm Nigerian prince, you've heard of these things before. And I need to get my money out of the country. I need to place to put them. And so if you have a us account, I'm going to transfer money into it. You can keep a thousand dollars of that 5,000 and I'm going to wire in just as a fee. Thanks for doing this. I, this is so important and it's such a hurry and I'm going to send you the.

[00:46:46] What they'll often do is send you a money order. It couldn't be a bank check, could be a lot of things, and then you go ahead and you cash it and oh, okay. Or cash just fine. And then you wire the $4,000 off to the bad guy. The bad guy gets the money and is off. Running in the meantime, your bank is trying to clear that bank check or that money order.

[00:47:14] And they find out that there is no money there because frankly what might've happened? I, this is one I've seen, I'm telling you about a story w we helped to solve this problem, but I had taken out a real money order from a bank, and then they made copies of it. Basically, they just forged it. And so they forged a hundred copies of it.

[00:47:36] So people thought they were getting a legitimate money order. And in some cases, the banks where the money order was, you mean deposited, did conf confirm it? They called up the source bank. Oh yeah. Yeah. That's a legit money order and then they all hit within a week or two. And now the, you are left holding the bag.

[00:47:58] So that's one thing that happens. But typically with these mules, the money comes to them in that account. They are supposed to then take that money and put it in their PayPal account and send it off to the next. And it might try jump to through two or three different people, and then it ends up overseas and the bad guys have gotten so good at this and have the cooperation of some small countries, sometimes bigger countries that they actually own.

[00:48:30] The bank overseas of the money ultimately gets transferred into. And of course there's no way to get the money back. It's a real. So with spoofing, they're trying to trick you into believing the emails from someone that you know, or someone that you can trust. Or as I said, maybe a business partner of some sort in most cases, it's some sort of a colleague, a vendor or a trusted brand.

[00:48:58] And so they exploit the trust that you have, and they ask you to do something or divulge information. They'll try and get you to do something. So there's more complexity tax. Like the ones that I just explained here that are going after financial employees, there might be some, an accountant, a bookkeeper, or bill payer and receivables payables.

[00:49:24] I've seen CFO attacks, but the really the spoofed email message looks legitimate on the surface. They'll use the legitimate logo of the company that they're trying to pretend that they're from. For instance, PayPal. Phishing attack. They have a spoofed email sender and typical email clients like you might be using for instance, on Microsoft outlook.

[00:49:48] The sender address is shown on the message, but most of the time nowadays the mail clients hide the actual email address, or if you just glance at it, it looks legit. You've seen those before these forged email headers. Yeah, it gets to be a problem. Now we use some software from Cisco that we buy.

[00:50:13] You have to buy. I think it's a thousand licenses at a time, but there were some others out there, Cisco again, by far the best and this, the software. Receives the email. So before it even ends up in the exchange server or somewhere else online, that email then goes through that Cisco server. They are comparing it to billions of other emails that they've seen, including in real time emails that are.

[00:50:41] Right now. And they'll look at the header of the email message. You can do that as well. With any email client, you can look at the header, Microsoft and outlook calls, it view source. But if you look at the email header, you'll see received. Headers that are in there. So say, receive colon from, and they'll give a name of a domain and then you'll see another received header and give another name of a machine.

[00:51:08] And it'll include the IP address might be IVF IPV four of your six, and you can then follow it all the way through. So what'll happen is partway through. You'll see, it took a hop that is. Not legitimate. That's where it comes in. Nowadays, if you have an email address for your business, man, a domain, you need to be publishing what are called SPF records.

[00:51:37] And those SPF records are looked at there compared to make sure that the email is properly signed and is from. The correct sender. There's a SPF records. There's a mother's too, that you should have in place, but you'll see that in the headers, if you're looking in the header. So it gets pretty complicated.

[00:51:59] The SPF, which is the sender policy framework is a security protocol standard. It's been around now for almost a decade. It's working in conjunction with what are called domain based message, authentication, reporting, and conformance. Heather's D mark headers to stop malware and phishing attacks. And they are very good if you use them properly, but unfortunately when I look, I would say it's still 95% of emails that are being sent by businesses are not using this email spoofing and protection.

[00:52:35] So have a look at that and I can send you a couple articles on it. If you're in trusted Craig Peter sohn.com.

[00:52:46] So we've established that email spoofing happens. What are the stats to this? And how can you further protect yourself from email spoofing? Particularly if you're not the technical type controlling DNS records, that's what's up right.

[00:53:02] Everybody Craig Peter sawn here, your cybersecurity strategist. And you're listening to news radio, w G a N a M five 60 and 98.5 FM. Join me on the morning. Drive Wednesday mornings at 7 34. Of course in the am. There's so much going on in the cybersecurity world. It affects all of us. Now, I think back to the good old days 40 years ago where we weren't worried about a lot of this stuff, spoofing, et cetera.

[00:53:36] But what we're talking about right now is 3.1 billion domain spoof. Emails sent every day. That's a huge thing. More than 90% of cyber attacks. Start with an email message. Email spoofing and phishing have had a worldwide impact costing probably $26 billion over the last five years. A couple of years ago, the FBI, this is 2019.

[00:54:07] Reported that about a house. A million cyber attacks were successful. 24% of them were email-based and the average scam tricked users out of $75,000. Yeah. So it's no wonder so many people are concerned about their email and whether or not those pieces of email are really a problem for them. And then anybody else.

[00:54:34] So a common attack that uses spoofing is CEO fraud, also known as business, email compromise. So this is where the attacker is spoofing or modifying, pretending to be a certain person that they're not they're impersonating an executive or owner, maybe of a business. And it targets. People in the financial accounting or accounts payable departments or even the engineering department.

[00:55:01] And that's what happened with one of our clients this week. They got a very interesting spoofed email. So even when you're smart and you're paying attention, you can be tricked the Canadian city treasurer. Tricked into transferring a hundred grand from taxpayer funds, Mattel tricked into sending 3 million to an accountant, China, a bank in Belgium, tricked into sending the attackers 70 million Euro.

[00:55:31] It happens and I have seen it personally with many businesses out there. So how do you protect yourself from email? Spoofing now, even with email security in place, there's some malicious email messages that are still going to get through to the inboxes. Now we're able to stop better than 96% of them just based on our stats.

[00:55:54] In fact, it's very rare that one gets through, but here are some things you can do and watch out for whether you're an employee responsible for financial decisions, or maybe you're someone who is. Personal email at work. Here's some tricks here. So get your pencil ready. Number one, never click links to access a web.

[00:56:19] Where you're asked to log in, always type in the official URL into your browser and authenticate on the browser. In other words, if you get an email from your bank or someone else, and there's a link in there to click that says, Hey oh man, here's some real problems. You got to respond right away.

[00:56:42] Don't do that go to paypal.com or your bank or your vendor's site, just type it into your browser, even though you can hover over the email link and see what it is. Sometimes it can be perfectly legitimate and yet it looks weird. For instance, when I send out my emails that people subscribe to that right there on Craig peterson.com, the links are going to come from the people that handle my email lists for me, because I send out thousands of emails at a time to people that have asked to get those emails.

[00:57:22] So I use a service and the services taking those links, modifying them somewhat in fact dramatically. And using that to make sure the delivery happened, people are opening it and that I'm not bothering you. So you can unsubscribe next step. You can, if you want to dig in more, look at the email headers.

[00:57:45] Now they're different for every email client. If you're using outlook, you have to select the email, basically in the left-hand side. Okay. You're going to control, click on that email and we'll come up and you'll see something that says view source. So in the outlook world, they hide it from you.

[00:58:06] If you're using a Mac and Mac mail, all you have to do is go to up in the menu bar email and view, header and cut off. There it is. I have many times in the past just left that turned on. So I'm always seeing the headers that reminds me to keep a look at those headers. So if you look in the header, And if the email sender is let me put it this way.

[00:58:31] If the person who is supposed to have sent it to you is doing headers proper, properly. You're going to see. A received SPF section of the headers and right in there, you can look for a pass or fail and response, and that'll tell you if it's legit. So in other words, let's use PayPal as an example, PayPal has these records that it publishes that say all of our emails are going to come from this server or that server of.

[00:59:04] And I do the same thing for my domains and we do the same thing for our clients domains. So it's something that you can really count on if you're doing it right, that this section of the headers. And that's why I was talking about earlier. If you have an email that your sending out from your domain and you don't have those proper headers in it, there's no way.

[00:59:31] To truly authenticate it. Now I go a step further and I use GPG in order to sign most of my emails. Now I don't do this for the trainings and other things, but direct personal emails from me will usually be cryptographically signed. So you can verify that it was me that sent it. Another thing you can do is copy and paste the text, the body of that email into a search engine.

[01:00:03] Of course I recommend duck go in most cases. And the chances are that frankly they've sent it to multiple people. That's why I was saying our Cisco based email filter. That's what it does, it looks for common portions of the body for emails that are known to be bad, be suspicious of email from official sources like the IRS, they're not going to be sending you email out of the blue most places. Aren't obviously don't open attachments from people that you don't. Special suspicious ones, particularly people we'll send PDFs that are infected. It's been a real problem. They'll send of course word docs, Excel docs, et cetera, as well.

[01:00:54] And the more. I have a sense of urgency or danger. That's a part of the email should really get your suspicions up, frankly, because suggesting something bad is going to happen. If you don't act quickly, that kind of gets around part of your brain and it's the fight or flight, right? Hey, I gotta take care of this.

[01:01:17] I gotta take care of this right away. Ah, and maybe you. So those are the main things that you can pay attention to. In the emails, if you are a tech person, and you're trying to figure this out, how can I make the emails safer for our company? You can always drop me an email as well. Me, M e@craigpeterson.com.

[01:01:43] I can send you to a couple of good sources. I'll have to put together a training as well on how to do this, but as individually. At least from my standpoint, a lot of this is common sense and unfortunately the bad guys have made it. So email is something we can no longer completely trust. Spoofing is a problem.

[01:02:05] As I said, we just saw it again this week. Thank goodness. It was all caught and stopped. The account was not. It was just a spoofed email from an account outside the organization that was act Craig peterson.com. Stick around.

[01:02:24] The value of crypto coins has been going down lately quite a bit across the board, not just Bitcoin, but the amount of crypto mining and crypto jacking going on. That hasn't gone down much at all.

[01:02:48] hi, I'm Craig Peter Sohn, your cyber security strategist. And you're listening to news radio, w G a N a M five 60 and FM nine. Point five, you can join me on the morning drive every Wednesday morning at 7 34, Matt and I go over some of the latest in news. You know about crypto coins, at least a little bit, right?

[01:03:15] These are the things like Bitcoin and others that are obstensively private, but in reality, aren't that private. If you receive coins and you spend coins, you are probably trackable. And if you can't spend that, the crypto currencies, why even bother getting it in the first place. One of the big drivers behind the price of these crypto currencies has been criminal activity.

[01:03:48] We've talked about that before. Here's the problem we're seeing more and more nowadays, even though the price of Bitcoin might go down 30%, which it has, and it's gone down in bigger chunks before. It does not mean that the bad guys don't want more of it. And what better way to mine, cryptocurrency then to not have to pay for.

[01:04:15] So the bad guys have been doing something called crypto jacking. This is where criminals are using really ransomware like tactics and poisoned website to get your computer, even your smartphone to mine, cryptocurrencies for. No mining, a Bitcoin can cost as much in electric bills that are in fact more in electric bills.

[01:04:43] Then you get from the value of the Bitcoin itself. So it's expensive for them to run it. Some countries like China have said, no, you're not doing it anymore because they're using so much electricity here in the U S we've even got crypto mining companies that are buying. Old power plant coal-fired or otherwise, and are generating their own electricity there locally in order to be able to mine cryptocurrencies efficiently, effectively so that they can make some profit from it.

[01:05:18] It's really quite the world out there. Some people have complained about their smartphone getting really hot. Their battery only lasts maybe an hour and it's supposed to last all day. Sometimes what's happened is your smartphone has been hijacked. It's been crypto jacked. So your smartphone, they're not designed to sit there and do heavy computing all day long.

[01:05:45] Like a workstation is even your regular desktop computer. Probably isn't. To be able to handle day long mining that has to happen. In fact, the most efficient way to do crypto mining of course is using specialized hardware, but that costs them money. So why not just crypto Jack? All right. There are two primary ways.

[01:06:09] Hackers have been getting victims, computers to secretly mine. Cryptocurrencies one is to trick them into loading. Crypto mining code onto their computers. So that's done through various types of fishing, light tactics. They get a legitimate looking email that tricks people into clicking on a link and the link runs code.

[01:06:30] Now what's interesting is you don't, even for cryptocurrency crypto jacket, you don't even have to download a program in. To have your computer start mining cryptocurrencies for the bad guys. They can use your browser to run a crypto mining script. And it runs in the background. As you work right, using up electricity, using up the CPU on your computer.

[01:06:58] They also will put it into ads. They'll put it on a website and your browser goes ahead and runs the code beautifully. So they're really trying to maximize their returns. That's the basics of crypto jacking what's been particularly bad lately has been the hackers breaking into cloud account. And then using those accounts to mine cryptocurrency, one of the trainings that I had on my Wednesday wisdoms has to do with password stuffing and my Wednesday wisdoms, you can get by just subscribing to my email over there@craigpeterson.com.

[01:07:44] But what happens here is they find your email address. They find. Password on one of these hacks that is occurred on the dark web. You weren't on the dark web, but your username or email address and password are there on the dark web. And then they just try it. So a big site like Amazon, or maybe it was your IBM also has cloud services can be sitting there running along very well, having fun.

[01:08:16] Life's good. And. Then they go ahead and try your email address and password to try and break in. Now, you know how I keep telling everybody use a good password manager and this week I actually changed my opinion on password managers. So you know, that I really like the password manager that you can get from one password.com.

[01:08:44] It really is fantastic. Particularly for businesses, various types of enterprises, one password.com. However, where I have changed is that some of these browsers nowadays, particularly thinking about Firefox Google Chrome safari, if you're particularly, if you're on a Mac, all have built in password managers that are actually.

[01:09:09] Good. Now they check. Have I been poned, which is a site I've talked to you guys about for years. To make sure that your accounts are reasonably safe than not being found on the dark web, the new password that it came up with or that you want to use. They check that as well. Make sure it's not in use. So here's an example here.

[01:09:32] This is a guy by the name of Chris. He lives out in Seattle, Washington, and he makes mobile apps for local publishers. Just this year, new year's day, he got an alert from Amazon web services. Now Amazon web services, of course, cloud service. They've got some really nice stuff, starting with light ship and going up from there, I've used various services from them for well, since they started offering the services over very many years and.

[01:10:04] They allow you to have a computer and you can get whatever size computer you want to, or fraction of a computer. You want to, he got this alert because it said that he owed more than $53,000 for a month's worth of hosts. Now his typical Amazon bill is between a hundred and 150 bucks a month. My typical Amazon bell is now 50 to maybe $80 a month.

[01:10:34] I cannot imagine getting a $53,000 bill from our friends at Amazon. So the poor guy was just totally freaking out, which is a very big deal. So I'm looking at an article from insider that you can find a business insider.com. They were able to confirm that, yes, indeed. He got this $53,000 bill from Amazon and yes, indeed.

[01:11:00] It looks like his account had been hacked by cryptocurrency miners. So these guys can run up just incredibly large charges for the raw computing power. They need to produce some of these digital cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin there's many others out there. But this isn't new. This is happening all of the time.

[01:11:23] Google reported late last year, that 86% of account breaches on its Google cloud platform were used to perform cryptocurrency mining. So make sure you are using a good password manager that generates good passwords. And I have a special report on passwords. You can download it immediately when you sign up for.

[01:11:48] My email, my weekly email newsletter@craigpeterson.com and it tells you what to do, how to do it. What is a good password? What the thinking is because it's changed on passwords, but do that and use two factor authentication. Multi-factor authentication as well. And I talk about that in that special report too.

[01:12:11] And visit me online. Sign up right now. Craig Peter sohn.com.

[01:12:17] We're moving closer and closer to completely automated cars, but we want to talk right now about car hacks, because there was an interesting one this week that has to do with Tesla. And we'll talk about some of the other hacks on car.

[01:12:33] Connected cars are coming our way in a very big way.

[01:12:38] We just talked about the shutdown of two G and 3g in our cars. We, it wasn't really our cars, right? Two G 3g. That was for our cell phones. That was. Years ago course now for four GLTE 5g, even 10 G is being used in the labs. Right now. It's hard to think about some of those older technologies, but they were being used and they were being used by cars, primarily for the navigation features.

[01:13:13] Some cars use these data links, if you will, that are really on the cell phone network in order to do remote things like remote start. For instance, I have a friend who's Subaru. Of course was using that. And now she's got to do an upgrade on her car because that 3g technology is going away depending on the carrier, by the way, some of it's going away sooner.

[01:13:40] Some of it's going away later, but it'll all be gone at the end of 2020. What are we looking at? As we look into the future, I'm really concerned. I don't want to buy one of these new cars at the same time as I do, because they are cool, but I don't want to buy one of those because of the real problem that we could have of what well of having that car.

[01:14:07] I need an upgrade and not been able to do it. I watched a video of a guy who took a Tesla that hadn't been damaged badly in a flood, and it was able to buy it for cheap. Why? Because Tesla will not sell you new motors and a new batteries for a car like that. So he got the car for cheap. He found a Chevy Camaro that had been wrecked, but its engine and transmission were just fine.

[01:14:37] He ripped everything out of the Tesla and went ahead after that, cause you got to clean that out, and water damage. You spray wash all to the inside. He got right down to the aluminum, everything that wasn't part of the core aluminum chassis was gone. And then he built it back up again. He managed to keep all of those Tesla systems working, that, that screen that you have upfront that does the temperature control, cruise maps, everything out.

[01:15:09] He kept that it was able to work. The, automated stuff, cruise control type stuff. And now he had a very hot car that looked like a Tesla. He took it out to SEMA, which is pretty cool. I'd love to see that, but it was a Tesla with a big V8 gasoline engine in it. He's done a, quite a good job on it.

[01:15:33] It was quite amazing to see it took them months. It was him and some of his buddies. These new cars are even more connected than my friend Subaru is they get downloads from the. Some of them are using Wi-Fi and 5g. Really one of the big promises of 5g is, Hey, our cars can talk to each other because now you can get a millisecond delay in going from one car to another versus what you have today, which can be a half a second or more, which can be the difference between having a rear end collision and being able to stop in time when it comes to these automated system.

[01:16:15] So they are more connected. They connect to the wifi in your homes. They connect to obviously the 5g network, which is where things are going right now. But what's happening with the hackers because really what we're talking about, isn't a computer on wheels. Oh no. Dozens of computers inside that car and your car has a network inside of it and has had for many years, this can bus network and even fancier ones nowadays that connect all of your systems together.

[01:16:50] So your entertainment system, for instance, is connected to this network. And that was used. You might remember a couple of years ago on a Chrysler product where the bad guy installed. Or using the thumb drive onto that entertainment system and had a reporter drive that car down the road. This is all known.

[01:17:13] It was all controlled. And was able to the bad guy right there, the demonstration in this case, I guess you'd call them a white hat hacker. He drove that car right off the road while the reporter was trying to steer otherwise because cars nowadays don't have a direct linkage between anything in any.

[01:17:36] That's why I love my 1980 Mercedes TESOL. You turn the steering wheel. It isn't actually connected to the wheels to that front end of the car. All it's doing is telling the computer you want to turn and how much you want to turn that brake pedal. Doesn't actually. Compress hydraulics and cause the brakes to engage that fuel pedal doesn't actually move the throttle on the car.

[01:18:01] The throttle is really being controlled and moved by the computers. So the car is completely electronic. It feels like a regular car, right? We're not talking about the Tesla's of today or tomorrow. We're talking about Volvos that have been sold for more than a decade. We're talking about a lot of different cars.

[01:18:22] So now you have a platform on wheels that can be dangerous because it can be, in some cases, remotely controlled, it can have software that may be crashes. We know that part of the infrastructure quote, unquote bill, which contains almost no infrastructure. It's amazing how they named these things. Isn't it.

[01:18:43] And what is it like 6% it actual infrastructure and the infrastructure bill? One of the things in there that is not infrastru. Is a demand, a law that says the car manufacturers have to include a remote. Button, if you will, so that a police officer could go ahead and say, okay, I'm pursuing this car and they're not stomping.

[01:19:09] I don't want to risk people's lives. As this bad guy tries to elude me here in backstreets. Kids can get hit, et cetera. So they push the button and the car stops that all sounds great. The problem is that you could potentially be opening some security problems by having this remote stop button that can be used by anybody really right.

[01:19:38] Since when is it going to be limited to just law enforcement? Isn't that a problem? According to Caren driver, I'm looking at their magazine right now. They're saying that there were at least 150 automotive cybersecurity incidents in twenty nineteen, a hundred and fifty incidents, part of a 94% year over year increase since 2016.

[01:20:03] In other words, every year. The number of automotive, cybersecurity and incidences has doubled. And that's according to report from a company called upstream security. So we're lost. So looking at what w maybe ransomware for a car. So that your car gets hacked. You can't hack my 1980 Mercedes diesel.

[01:20:26] It is impossible to hack into an unconnected car, but if you are driving a vehicle it's likely at risk from some sort of digital true. We've even seen from some of the bugs. We've seen cars from Japan that have decided to drive into the Jersey barrier because it misunderstands exactly what it is. We've seen cars from Tesla.

[01:20:55] Drive right into the back of a parked fire truck mentioned doing that at speed, right? And cause a fire truck full of water, et cetera. I've actually seen that one happened personally. So the more sophisticated the system is, the more connected your vehicle is. The more exposed you are in Detroit free press has a great little article on that right now.

[01:21:21] And in there he's saying we have taken. Whatever model car you think of. And we hack them through various places. I can control your steering. I can shut down and start your engine. Control your brakes, your doors, your wipers, open and close your. There's a lot of people who are trying to break into these cars.

[01:21:44] And there's a lot of people who are trying to protect them. That hacker duo back in 2015, who took control of that Jeep Cherokee, just think about that sort of. There's an Israeli based automotive cybersecurity company who told the free press that he expects the current trend of hackers, holding digital data on computers for ransom to also move to cars.

[01:22:10] So when this happens, the driver will not be able to start the vehicle until they pay off the rant. Or suffer the consequences, which could be wiping the cars systems operating systems could be Kenning the car to catch on fire. Think of what can happen with each generation with those batteries.

[01:22:30] There's no way around it. You're going to have to get it towed and get all of the software reloaded in the company. And now this week, it comes out that in 19 year old kid said that he was able to hack into over 25 Teslas that he tried via a bug in a popular. It's an open source tool that people are using to link into their Teslas to do various types of remote control.

[01:22:59] And he posted a tweet on this guy's name's David Colombo. You'll find them on Twitter, went viral and he reported the vulnerability to the people who are maintaining the software and they fixed it. In fact, the very same day and Tesla also pushed updates to their vehicle. That invalidated the signatures and the key exchanges that we're having.

[01:23:26] So this is a 19 year old researcher. He's able to hack into cars in 13 countries, 38, 13 countries. Yeah. Worth of Teslas without the owner's knowledge. No, he says I, I can not. Doors, I can turn off the security system. I can open windows. I keyless start and things turn on the stereo, honk the horn view, the cars location, and if the driver was present, but he doesn't think he could actually move the vehicle remotely, but that's a 19 year old.

[01:24:00] What's going to happen when we implement the law that was just passed that says our cars have to be remotely controllable by anybody basically. Yeah. It's scary. Hey, I want to invite you guys to take a minute, go to Craig peterson.com. Make sure you sign up for my newsletter there, and I'll keep you up to date on all of this stuff and you'll even get my show notes.

[01:24:26] Craig peterson.com.

Which Anti-Hacker Techniques Can You Use Against the Russian Hackers? 01:24:29 Share

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

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Which Anti-Hacker Techniques Can You Use Against the Russian Hackers?