Saving 79% on Prescriptions - Microsoft Outlook Attack in Progress! - Does Your Business Use eMail? FBI Warning

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

Saving 79% on PrescriptionsMicrosoft Outlook Attack in Progress! Does Your Business Use eMail? FBI Warning

About one-third of Americans are taking a prescription drug -- And this is kind of the scary part. The average person who is on a prescription has four prescriptions and we're paying dearly for it. But mark Cuban has an answer.

[Following is an automated transcript]

Well, you know, I do a lot of stuff in cybersecurity and I've got a few different courses coming up.

[00:00:22] And of course, we do a little bit of weekly training for anybody who's on my email list, you know, on the free list. Absolutely free as well as you get my insider show notes. And if you got my show notes, you probably noticed this. Tidbit here on Tuesday when I sent it out. And that is mark Cuban. Now for those who don't know mark Cuban, he started way back in the internet.

[00:00:48] Boom days he lucked out. He had a, a company called broadcast.com. and he was able to turn that into, I think it was well over a billion dollars. I don't remember the exact amount, but it, it was a very, very big chunk of money. And then he's gone on to become an investor. You might know him as the owner of a basketball team.

[00:01:10] You might have seen him on a TV show called shark tank. He's been out there and he's a bright guy. He's been helping a lot of people and causing a lot of problems too. Right. But he has a new business that he has started with his billions of dollars only. He has at least 1 billion and it's called. Cost plus drugs.

[00:01:35] Now this is where it comes into affect every American, because I mentioned, you know, how many Americans are on various prescriptions? Well, many of the prescriptions that we could be taking are actually generics. So for instance, if you go to the Walmart pharmacy or Walgreens or wherever it. Be you'll find that they have options for you.

[00:02:00] If the doctor says, yeah, generic's okay. They'll say, Hey, listen, I'll give you the generic and you can save a whole lot of money. I don't know if you've looked at good RX at all. But good RX. I have saved a ton of money with that. And what they do is help you find free coupons. Compare the prices at, at Walmart Walgreen, CVS Rite aid, you know, at the major pharmacies.

[00:02:24] And we'll tell you where you can go to get your best deal. Plus. They also have some really cool discounts. So it, it acts kind of like a discount card. So I'm on their site right now. Good rx.com. And I look, I'm looking up their number one drug, which is Lipitor, apparently it's used for coronary art or coronary disease and high cholesterol.

[00:02:51] So they're saying, well, wait a minute. Now here. You can get a few different, uh, options. I'm looking now, for instance, CVS pharmacy nor normal retail, by the way is $126 at CVS. You can get it using a good rx.com card. 76% off for $30 instead of $126. Walmart, $15. Uh, Walmart neighborhood market, $15 now, Walmart, that's what they consider to be their retail price.

[00:03:27] Although, as I mentioned, some of these other ones have much, much higher retail prices. So you can see that going. For instance, for Lipitor, you might be. Paying a premium for a brand name. Now there, there's a good reason for that. There's a reason why prescription drugs can be expensive and, and they're called patent drugs.

[00:03:48] And the reason they're call patent drugs is they've put a lot of money in. They've put a lot of research time. They've, they've put up with a whole lot of regulation and going back and forth with various government agencies. And they finally were able to come forward with a drug that works. Put all of that together.

[00:04:09] And you've got a very expensive research and development product, right. Or project, frankly. So I don't, I don't really hold it against them. If we're having some of these drugs being rather expensive. You might remember that, uh, epi epinephrine a few years ago, this guy got a hold of the company that made epinephrine and the, um, You know, the, the whole problem with I'm looking it up right now, like EpiPens, they used to be expensive and then they became crazy expensive.

[00:04:44] So let me see here, EpiPens, EpiPens, and who needs it? There's a whole lot of information. It's not telling how much they are, but he raised the price. Like what was it? 2000% or something insane, again, a prescription drug and one that some people really need in order to save their lives. You know, I'm a beekeeper, right.

[00:05:08] And I used to have a really bad reaction to be stings, wasp stings. Now we just. Reaction, right. We thought at the time I was allergic, but no, it was just a bad reaction, which I still have. Right. It gets stung multiple times a year, but, uh, it still swells up. When, when, uh, our friend mark Cuban started looking at this, he said that this is kind of crazy.

[00:05:31] So what he's done now is mark Cuban has built, uh, I think it's all up and running just outside of Dallas. Let's see here. Yeah. Okay. Just outside of Dallas, a huge, huge building. It's a 22,000 square foot plant. Now most of the pharmaceuticals are actually easy to make and. To make. And that's what kind of gets confusing because you've got all of the R and D and the government regulations, everything else that's expensive, but actually making them is pretty cheap, but he's built this $11 million plant near downtown Dallas.

[00:06:14] And he says right now, looking at what the expenses are that Medicare could have saved as much as are you ready for this? 3.6 billion per year. Now that's where we're talking about everybody. Because if you pay taxes, you are paying for some of this Medicare money, 3.6 billion per year in savings. By buying it from cost plus drugs.

[00:06:46] So there's something else I want you to check out. So the first one was good. rx.com. The second one is cost plus drugs. They have over a hundred generic prescription medications right now. And what they're doing is they're taking the actual cost of production. And I'm sure that includes right. The loan on the building, et cetera, but the cost of production, plus a 15% margin because you need to keep the lights on.

[00:07:13] You need to be able to expand. Profit is not a bad word. That's how people save for retirement by investing in companies, buying stocks, and that profit then becomes their money for retirement. I think that's an important thing. So. 15% margin and an $8 pharmacy dispensing and shipping fee. That is absolutely cheap.

[00:07:41] So this is, uh, Husain Liani who did the research on this? And he published it in the annals of internal medicine. Looking at that just absolutely amazing. And that's something you can do too. One third of Americans, again, we are on prescription drugs and the average person is on four. Wow. So researchers compared the price charge by cost plus drugs for 89, generic medications to the cost for the same drugs paid.

[00:08:17] Medicare in 2020, they found the government program could have saved 37% on 77 generic drugs by buying from Cuban's company cost plus drugs. Once in January drug to consumer bypasses, wholesalers bypasses, pharmacies bypasses, I PA passes insurance. All of those are driving up the cost of medicine. So direct to consumer.

[00:08:43] Uh, how easy could that be? And I'm on their website right now, looking at a couple of things here. Let me see, let me go back there. Cost plus drugs, and I'm believing this go to cost plus drugs.com. Yes you can. I am there as we are talking. So he's got, oh, here's one tib. Uh, which is the generic for gleek I'm.

[00:09:08] Now I'm not familiar with that myself retail price, $2,502. cost. Plus, are you ready? $14. Can you believe that that is crazy. Yeah. Wow. And it'll look, it'll look different obviously, cuz it's a generic. So you saved $2,488 for a 30 count supply. That is just amazing. So when I, I, I was talking about the savings here, where.

[00:09:41] Okay. They could have saved 37% on 77 generic drugs. But when you start getting into these really expensive drugs, that's where the 3.6 billion really, really starts to add up in savings. This is something so what you can do once you're on cost plus drugs.com, you can contact your doctor for a prescription.

[00:10:04] They've gotta get started button. They have the strength that you want in this case, a hundred milligrams or 400, the quantity you want. And then all that has to happen is your doctor has to approve it. You pay $14 instead of $2,500 and it gets shipped straight to you. Wow. Now, is that cheaper than Medicare part B right?

[00:10:28] Or your regular insurance? Wow, sure. Is just absolutely amazing. So you can find all of this stuff. This is mark Cuban doing this, and I gotta say, I am impressed. He is going to help a whole lot of people. Yeah, I'm, I'm just looking at this. Wow. Here's another one retail price. $9,600. And at cost plus drugs, you can get it for 39.

[00:10:57] So there you go. Two options, mark Cuban's new venture, which is online now at costplusdrugs.com and goodrx.com. Wow. It's just amazing, right? This world. What's it coming to? Great little great little drug company. So we're gonna talk if you are a user of outlook, this is important to you because a major attack is underway.

[00:11:26] Major scam underway. If you are an outlook customer, you are in the crosshairs of a very successful credential stealing campaign. So I'm gonna tell you about that, what it means, what you can do and, uh, how you can stay safe.

[00:11:43] This is a very big problem for people who are using Microsoft 365, that is really common, used to be called office 365 and you pay a, a flat monthly fee, 20, 25 bucks.

[00:11:59] It kind of depends on what level you get. They have some real cheap ones as well, and it lets you use all of what Microsoft used to call Microsoft office applications. And one of those applications is outlook. And I've never particularly liked. they have gotten better in recent years. And I actually do use it right now, as well as MacMail I use both of them, but there is a hack going on against Microsoft 365 and outlook customers in the us.

[00:12:34] Here's what's happening. They are sending you an email and the email really does look like it's ti voicemail that somebody left. This is called a voicemail fishing attack and it follows, what's kind of a classic fishing flow. If you will, the ways they've been doing fishing here over the years, and what fishing is, is basically.

[00:13:02] Getting you to bite at something that you shouldn't bite on. You, you will respond to an email. You'll click on a link. You might call a phone number. You might click on a text message. That's another one that's going around right now. How do you tell a fake text message from a real text message? And I'm afraid to say nowadays you tell by just not clicking on the links that are in text messages.

[00:13:30] It's, it's so disappointing. I was talking on the radio this week. It, it, it, because it just, it bothers me so much about this very thing. I've been on the internet for decades now. Right? I, I started back in 81. I think it was maybe 80. Two and we had email and it was the best thing ever. If you had somebody's email address, you could send them a note and you'd be pretty darn sure they'd get it.

[00:13:58] In fact, they probably would get it within just a few minutes and respond to you. And there, there wasn't any spam. Back then the idea was, Hey, listen, the internet is for research government research, university research, and that's the way it should stay. And indeed, we were kind of keeping it that way for, for quite a while.

[00:14:21] And then some people who were marketers got on the internet. And they would start to advertise, Hey, we have a special session for you at, uh, UC Berkeley this week only $500. And of course that went be beyond what the internet was for. In fact, at the time you could not use it legally. For any sort of financial purposes.

[00:14:47] So what we would do back then is we would send the script to the Monty Python routine of spam. Remember that spam, spam, and egg spam, and hands spam, spam. Uh, yeah, we would send them the whole. And they, sometimes, if somebody sent out a little thing that was trying to sell something that they should not be selling online because it was illegal to use the internet for business in case you didn't know until about 1991.

[00:15:20] And that's when I started. Putting businesses online and really started focusing in on cyber security because almost immediately the bad guys started getting on there. So this is, uh, this is really what happened. This was the script, right? Uh, well, what have you got waitress? Well, there's egg and bacon, egg, sausage, and bacon, egg, and spam, egg, bacon, and spam, egg, bacon, spam, sausage, and spam spam, bacon sausages, and spam spam eggs, spam spam, bacon spam.

[00:15:51] Do you remember that? So. We would send this to people who kind of broke the rules written or unwritten on the internet. And sometimes somebody would get just a hundred of these things, maybe even more. And what would happen back then of course, is it would fill up your mailbox and it would slow down your check connection.

[00:16:10] Cuz a lot of us were just connected to the internet via dial up modems. So it, it really kind of hurt you to get all kinds of spam. Emails coming in. That's where the term comes from. I remember it well, so I don't care what they say on some of these websites or they're trying to do little research on it and figure it out.

[00:16:31] Well, now things have gotten a lot worse because it isn't just marketers that are trying to solve something. And I don't have a problem with marketers, I guess, in a way I am one myself. Right. I, I have a business and I provide cybersecurity services. For a high net worth individuals and for businesses.

[00:16:50] And if you are a regular person, you have a question. Please ask, just send an email to me, me Craig peterson.com, no matter who you are. And I will try and answer the question for you. And I have a lot of stuff that I've written over the years. That'd be more than glad to forward to you. There are some training courses that I.

[00:17:10] Put together that I will be more than glad to share with you. And you probably know I did all of the training for the FBI's Ingar program for a couple of years. I, I ran that online, all of their webinars. So I've been doing this for a long time and I'm more than glad to help. That's why I am here. Right.

[00:17:31] But now we got bad guys. and the bad guys are trying to get you to do something against your best interest. So in this case, what happens is you get a missed voicemail notification via email, and a lot of times it'll look pretty legitimate. It might even be coming from someone inside your company, whose account they have hacked.

[00:17:57] Now on that email, there is an HTML attachment. Now HTML attachments can get past a lot of email gateway filters because they aren't in and of themselves malicious. So they're not raising big red flags for users in a, in a voicemail notification setting because that's how office Microsoft office sends you legitimate notifications.

[00:18:24] Anyways. Now, these from fields are set up specifically using the organization's name. As I said, sometimes even a valid email address. Now, if you go ahead and click on that attachment, it will run a program on your computer using a language called JavaScript and that's embedded in every browser out there nowadays.

[00:18:47] And that JavaScript code is going to redirect you to an attack. Controlled website. Now this website set up to get you to give up your credentials. So, what they'll do now is as you go to the website and the website might look like it's Microsoft office and it might look like it's your business website, and it'll ask you to log in.

[00:19:15] It might ask you for other information as well. It is trying to get your username and password that it can then use to go after other people. You see what's happening here. So each of the URLs, these guys are creating these websites that they're sending you to are created to match the targeted company.

[00:19:39] It's it's incredible how good they're getting, and they even have one of those Google recapture. Pop ups. Now this is a, an increasingly popular technique to evade these auto mail, automated URL analysis tools. So for instance, with my client, an email comes in, it goes through Cisco's. Email filter. We have an advanced email filter from Cisco, but we run our client's emails through.

[00:20:10] And what happens is they look at the URLs, they visit the website that the URL PO points to, they try and verify if it's legit or not. And you you've had captures, you know, it's, um, click every box that has a bicycle in it, sort of a thing. It's kind of a touring test, test puzzle. So once this is solved, We'll tell you what happens next, cuz we're out of time right now.

[00:20:36] Uh, make sure you visit me online. Craig Peter son.com. I'll keep you up to date. You can get my free newsletter and trainings. Craig Peter son.com. And I want to talk too about businesses in the, the big business of email compromise.

[00:20:55] Yeah, I think most of us know what a big business is. Well, how about a business, an industry that has racked in 43 billion, according to the FBI. That's what we're talking about right now and what you can do about it.

[00:21:11] We were talking about, what's been happening with Microsoft outlook users right now, a major campaign underway that has been extremely successful because these bad guys are using some rather advanced technologies. Absolutely crazy. So they get you to click. HTML link that is there while filed that is there as part of what looks to be a voicemail notification for you.

[00:21:43] And then it takes you to a website that's specially crafted for you and your company. So you [e-mail] and you click on that HTML and it'll take you to big co.com. Well, at least that's what it looks like, but it distracts you now because it wants to give you this capture as well. So this Google captures, you know, these things, these little mini touring tests, click on all of the trees in the picture, sort of a thing, right?

[00:22:18] And you've got the nine things well with, uh, or maybe it's some blurred or distorted text and you have to type that in. And the whole idea behind that is normally to weed out these bots on eCommerce sites, online account sites. But what they're doing here is. They're making sure that the email, the, the software that checks the emails to make sure they are legitimate, that is going out to the big co dot or big co fake.com website.

[00:22:54] They wanna make sure that that email checker does not find out that it's not the real site that you wanted to go. So the computer that's doing the checking will go to the site and it'll say, oh, there's a capture on there. And then it'll stop because it can't solve the capture. It needs you, it needs a human, right.

[00:23:15] So this is kind of cool here. Uh, Eric. K. He's a security awareness advocate with no before. No. Before is a company that does training for people, for employees here about some of these, uh, these hacks and things are going on. When faced with a login prompt, it looks like a typical. Office 365 login. The person is likely to feel comfortable entering their information without looking at the browser's URL bar to ensure they are at the real login site, this familiarity and the high odds in an attended victim regularly uses office 365 for something in the Workday makes this a great Lu.

[00:24:02] For attackers, this is from an article over on dark reading.com. This isn't, uh, a new technique, but let me tell you, it is B a very successful one. They have seen a resurgent, uh, resurgence of this starting a couple of years ago, back in July, 2020. And it is really targeting human nature. And of course, Microsoft 365 is quite the target.

[00:24:29] So I mentioned. $43 billion industry. I'm looking right now at a public service announcement from the F FBI and they are calling business email compromise the $43 billion. Scam. This is crazy. A sophisticated scam. It targets businesses and individuals who are performing legitimate transfer funds requests.

[00:25:00] It's carried out by people who are compromising legitimate businesses and individuals. Now, what they're trying to do with this business email compromise is get someone who has. Control of funds to do a transfer. What happens is they will do a little research on the business that might go to the website and see on the website.

[00:25:25] Oh, let me see here. Okay. The president's name is Craig Peterson. Uh, the CFO is Mary Jane and, uh, the accounting department head is manly. And, uh, so now they got that information. So they'll go online. And to look at LinkedIn, find out who all else is at the business. Maybe things have changed, you know, maybe try and find an email address by doing an open source search for the email address of people there at the business.

[00:25:57] You see where this is going here? Yeah, it, it gets pretty bad. So, uh, let's say they befriend the CEO on Facebook or on LinkedIn, but Facebook more likely, uh, and now. They're they can see on Facebook or maybe they don't even have to because your Facebook profile and posts are not hidden from the public.

[00:26:20] So they just go there and, oh, let me see. Okay, great. He's gonna be out of town next week. And then what they'll do is they'll get into somebody's email account at the business. And once they're into somebody's email account, they can start looking through the emails and sending emails that look perfectly legitimate to other people within the organization.

[00:26:43] Now, I, I did a whole story on television about this one on news program, and one of the people on staff, one of the talking. received an email like this, and it asked him to, uh, to buy some gift cards. This is very, very common scam right now, the gift card scam, and they try and get you to go ahead and. Buy gift cards for other people in the office are gonna have a little party and we don't want anybody else to know about it.

[00:27:15] It's supposed to be a surprise. And I had some real fun with him. One of these days, I should probably share all of this in one of my newsletters. I think you guys would really appreciate it, enjoy it a little bit, but, uh, we really led them on and sure enough, you know, it was a total scam and we kept playing with them and it, it was something, any.

[00:27:38] That was one thing. This is another because they will eventually get to the CFO, somebody who has the authority to transfer funds and get them to transfer funds to. Them. And then they use mules to move the money around these, uh, useful idiots who will sign up. And yeah. Yeah. It's kinda like the Nigerian scam.

[00:28:05] All I need is access to your bank account and I'm gonna wire in, uh, $10,000. And I, and what I need you to do is transfer 8,000 of it over here to this PayPal account because my grandmother's dying and she needs the money. There's similar scams that are going after lonely people and getting them to send money because somebody needs an operation, et cetera.

[00:28:33] So in this case with the business email compromise and the 43. Billion dollars that have been stolen from businesses. They'll usually get to the CFO and send a story like, Hey, uh, we have this new vendor and we've had 'em for three months and we haven't been paying them and we gotta make sure we pay them.

[00:28:54] And, uh, we need to wire 43 million to this account that actually happened. And they did wire the money. It happened to Barbara cran, another person who wa is on shark tank. Uh, it, it happens to a lot of companies out there. And I've got a couple in the last month that we've worked with the FBI on the, these companies hear me on the radio.

[00:29:21] They sent an email to [e-mail] and they had had their operating account. Emptied. Uh, the latest one is a, a lady 77 years old who had her retirement money stolen from her over $70,000. This stuff's real people. We've got to pay attention. We can't let this continue to happen. Make sure you sign up online.

[00:29:48] Craig peterson.com so that you can get my insider show notes and we can keep you ahead of the bad guys. When we come back, we're gonna talk about this row overturned and what senators are asking the FTC.

[00:30:05] We've got some senators who are saying they were spurred on by the row overturned. And they're asking the FTC to probe, apple and Android, and what's happening with tracking. Now I have a suspicion. That's not really right.

[00:30:21] We've got, of course the recent overturn of Roe. You, you of course heard about that. it was pretty much impossible to miss if you pay any attention to the news.

[00:30:36] Well, we've got three Democrat, us senators and a Democrat us representative that asked. The federal trade commission to investigate apple and Google for engaging in unfair and deceptive practices by enabling the collection and sale of hundreds of millions of mobile phones, users, data, the FTC should investigate apple and Google's role in transforming online advertising into an intense system of surveillance that incentivizes and facilitates the UN.

[00:31:11] Train collection and constant sale of Americans' personal data. These companies have failed to inform consumers of the privacy and security dangers involved in using those products. It is beyond time to bring an end to the privacy harms, forced on consumers. Buy these companies. Now I have been talking about this on the

[00:31:38] radio for 20 years. Because do you remember when Congress forced telephone manufacturers and cell phone companies to put GPS coordinates into the receivers, into the phones? Do you remember that you could no longer use your analog phone? You had to use digital phones under federal law. right. It, it's just amazing.

[00:32:09] We can go into all of the reasons that they've given for that in the past, but anyhow, that's what they did. So immediately decades ago, now, many years ago, they started collecting data. Now it's okay for the government to collect it, even though it's illegal. For them to collect this data. So what's happening here?

[00:32:30] Why have the Democrats for so long? Well, and frankly, a lot of Republicans been big on collecting data on all of us. Now, I I've gotta say when I've looked at the stats, the biggest. Purveyors of the surveillance society have been president Obama followed by president Biden. Now you could argue that president Bush was won too, because of course they passed an act that allowed for all kinds of changes in surveillance.

[00:33:02] So, okay. So we'll put him in there too. So we got a Republican in there. Obama put that program that president Bush had put in place on steroids and then president Biden did the same thing. President Trump tried to cut it back because he was a victim of some of the surveillance that they were doing. So what's going on here?

[00:33:25] Well, these Democrat senators are saying, uh, we don't want people who are trying to get abortions to be. okay. I can see that. Uh, I can also see that I don't want to be tracked and you don't want to be tracked. And it's one thing to have an advertiser know a little bit about us, you know, Hey, we just visited the Ford dealer and the Chevy dealer and the Honda dealer.

[00:33:52] So maybe he's looking for a car let's let's try and advertise a car. Right. So Honda and Chevy and Ford all start putting ads up for you. Okay. So that's. Thing if I'm in, if I'm interested in buying a truck. Okay, great. Show me ads on a truck, but we've seen already misuses of this data over the years, one of the earliest ones I talked about here on the radio was this guy who went to an emergency room and all of a sudden started seeing ads for what you might call ambulance, chasing lawyers saying, have you been injured?

[00:34:30] right. You've seen those types of ads before, but once he was in the emergency room and he was geolo geolocated in the emergency room, they started selling advertising to lawyers. I, I, I'm not real fond of that one either, but I think there's an ulterior motive here behind what these Democrats are saying.

[00:34:52] If you have seen the movie 2000 mules, you understand what I'm talking about here? what ended up happening here is they looked at trillions of data points. You see, they went out and bought databases of smartphone data where these smartphones were located. And then they started doing some serious analysis on it and they were able to say, okay, this smartphone went to.

[00:35:28] Different Dropboxes for the election for ballots. And in between each visit to the Dropbox, they went to a left wing organization where they did something. Right. So they, they go to a Dropbox drop off ballots and they're on video doing this, dropping off ballots. And then they go to a left wing organization and then they go drop off more ballots at a different Dropbox, and then they go back again and then it's on video.

[00:36:02] And some of these people are taking pictures of them, stuffing the ballots into the box, supposedly, so they can get paid. So now there are some criminal investigations that have been started. I don't know how far they've gotten yet over some of this information that was gathered. And that was documented in the film by Danes.

[00:36:24] Dusuza called 2000 mul. And if you haven't seen it, no matter what side of the aisle you want, you need to see it. Absolutely need to see. And whether you believe or not, when president Biden said that we have the best, uh, what was it? Um, election stealing organization that's ever been made? I can't remember his exact words right now.

[00:36:49] Uh, he was serious about it, right? So now all of a sudden, the Democrats are concerned that people who visit abortion clinics might be tracked, cuz they could be. Right. You could buy data geotagged with an abortion clinic's location, GPS coordinates. You absolutely could do that, but that's been true for a long time.

[00:37:15] Why now? Well, maybe because of Roe V Wade, but I look, of course it wasn't just that one decision that was overturned, but I, I look at some of this and really, really do wonder because it really looks like some number of people were caught illegally stuffing ballot box. So it's, it's fascinating to me that all of a sudden now out, they come with this.

[00:37:45] Now apple has stopped enabling the tracker identifiers. By default, if you have an apple smartphone, it is much more. Private than the Android phones are by far, right? Google makes its money by selling your information. That's how they make most of their money. Apple makes its money by selling you services and selling you hardware.

[00:38:13] so that should tell you something right there. And the fact that Senator Elizabeth Warren is one of the ones who is proposing this legislation makes you think even more about this. Now, Google, uh, this is an article from ours. Technical apparently responded to this whole concept in an article that ours was writing, saying that it's had all kinds of efforts to block apps and violate Google play policies.

[00:38:41] And. the bands it's imposed on companies that are apparently sold user data, and they say Google never sells user data in the play at Google, strictly prohibits a sale of user data by developers and, uh, goes into the advertising ID. So it it's fascinating to me that all of a sudden, now the Democrats are interested in stopping the data collection.

[00:39:08] It really is. I don't like it. As I said, I've talked about this for more than 20 years now on the radio. It, I think it's a real problem. This data collection, because also the federal government, even though it's illegal for them to collect information on American citizens, they do it every. And some of the largest, like the, um, immigration people, Homeland security are the biggest collector.

[00:39:37] They have more information about you than anyone else. Even if you're here legally, you were born in the United States, et cetera, etcetera, because they are buying all of this information from what are called data broker. So, yeah, they say, yeah, we're, we're not collecting it. You we're forbidden by law to collect it, which is absolutely true.

[00:39:59] But what they are doing is buying it from private businesses. So I think we've got to completely. Reconsider how this all works. Apple has been working on it. You can go into your apple phone and make a change, share identifier if you want to, which makes it harder to track apple also. And Google has this, as I believe is an option.

[00:40:25] But apple also will give you a different Mac address every time you're connecting to wifi networks so that you can't be tracked that way. Because just, if, if you connect to the network at target the wifi at target, for instance, they will know when you return because your phone has the same Mac address that's used for the wifi.

[00:40:49] So they know. They know where you go in the store. They know what you're looking at in the store, in some cases, depending on how the tracking works. So it's fascinating to me, this is a, a real privacy issue that could easily turn into something much worse because this data, this same data that's available to marketers is available to government is also available to bad guys.

[00:41:17] and you talk about the ability to potentially frame someone and it, it, it just gets extremely, extremely scary. Right now, last month, more than 40 members of Congress called on Google to stop collecting and retaining customer location data, the prosecutors could use to identify women who obtain abortions.

[00:41:37] Again, tied into this, uh, abortion anytime any day. Uh, and as the governor of Virginia said, even after the baby is born and delivered it, you should be able to abort it. Uh, so wherever you fall in that spectrum, obviously the Democrats in the us want abortions far more than the Europeans that every European country I can think of has much tougher restrictions on abortion than we have here.

[00:42:05] But. Privacy is not an abortion issue. Hey, join me online. Craig peterson.com. Make sure you are on my email list. And, uh, you can ask any question you want. Just email me,

[00:42:20] [e-mail].

[00:42:26] I really appreciate all the emails I get from you guys. And it is driving me to do something I've never done before now. I've always provided all kinds of free information to share on my email list. Great stuff. But now we're talking about cyber punch lists.

[00:42:43] So they know what's hot because who really, really tracks technology, not too many people. And I get, uh, you know, a little off put by some of these other radio hosts that call themselves tech people, and they're actually marketing people, but you. That's me. Right. And that's why, if you are on my list, you've probably noticed I'm not hammering you trying to sell you stuff all of the time.

[00:43:09] It's good, valuable content. And I'm starting something brand new. Never done this before, but this is for you guys. Okay. You know that I do cybersecurity. As a business and I've been doing it now for more than three decades. I don't know if I should admit that. Right. They say, never say more than 17 years.

[00:43:30] Okay. So I've been doing it for more than 17 years and I've been on the internet now for. Oh, 40 years now. Okay. Back before it was even called the internet, I helped to develop the silly thing. So over the years, we've come up with a number of different strategies. We have these things that are called plan of action and milestones, and we have all kinds of other lists of things that we do and that need to be done.

[00:44:01] So what we're doing right now is we're setting it. So that you can just email me, me, Craig peterson.com. And I will go ahead and send you one of these punch lists. Now the punch lists are around one specific topic. You know, we got these massive. Punch list with hundreds and hundreds of things on them. And those are what we use when we go in to help clean up the cybersecurity in a company.

[00:44:28] So we'll go in, we'll do scans. We will do red team blue team where we're attacking. We do all, all kinds of different types of scans using different software, trying to break in. We use the same tools that the hackers use in order to see if we can. Into your systems and if the systems are properly secured, so we do all of this stuff, so, and, and then it goes into all of the paperwork that needs to be done to comply with whatever it might be.

[00:45:00] Right. It might be, they accept payment cards. It might be that they have hip. Information, which is healthcare information. And it might be also that they're a government contractor. So there are hundreds and hundreds of things that they have to comply with. Most of them are procedural. So we have all of this stuff.

[00:45:18] We do all of this stuff. And I was talking with my wife here this last week about it and said, you. So much of this could be used by small companies that can't afford to hire my team to come in and clean things up. Right. And I don't want them to suffer. So here's what we're doing. We're starting this next week.

[00:45:42] We have a punch list for you on email. So what are the things you can do should do for email? Just very, very narrow on email so that you can recognize a fishing. Email, what you might wanna do to lock down your outlook, if you're on windows or your Mac mail. So we're taking these massive spreadsheets that we have and we're breaking them up.

[00:46:10] So the first one that's available to you guys, absolutely. A hundred percent free. Is the one on email. So just send me an email. Me M E Craig peterson.com. Now, remember I am, my, my business is a business to business business, right. But almost everything in these various. Punch lists applies to individuals as well.

[00:46:34] So I got an email this last week from a guy saying, Hey, I'm 80 years old and, uh, retired and I don't know much about computers and that's kind of what got us thinking about this. You know, we need to be able to help him. We need to be able to help you out. Okay. And if you're a small business and we've dealt with a lot of them over the years, and as a small business, you just don't have the funds to bring in an expert, whether it's me or somebody else, although yeah.

[00:47:03] What you want the best. But anyways, , it, it, uh, it is gonna allow you to do it yourself. Okay. So absolutely free. All of these punch lists on all of these topics, we're probably gonna end up with more than a hundred of these punch lists. And all you do is email me, me, Craig peterson.com. Just let me know in there what you're interested in.

[00:47:29] So even if we haven't got that punch list broken down for you yet, we will go ahead and put that on the. To do right. We need the priorities. What kind of a priority should we have as we're putting these things together for free for people. Right. Uh, and the only way we know is if you ask, so the first one's on email, you can certainly ask for email.

[00:47:50] We've got, as I said, more than a hundred others, that we think we're gonna be able to pull out of the exact. Plan of action worksheets that we use so that you can go through this yourself, whether you're a home user or you are a small business or even a big business, right? We we're talking with, uh, a gentleman who's probably listening right now, who has a business.

[00:48:17] They have three offices, they have some requirement because of the military contracts for high level. Cyber security and it would work for him too. All right. So they, this is all of the punch list stuff. You probably know what a punch list is, right? It's using the construction industry a lot, but in our case, it's you need to do this.

[00:48:39] You need to do this, you need to do this. Okay. So that's what that's all about. So enough rambling on that. It's gonna take us some time to get 'em all together. I'm also. We're gonna do more video stuff again, training. So just like on the radio show where we're talking about what's in the news, we're gonna talk about what's what's in the news.

[00:49:01] When it comes to small businesses, what you should be paying attention to with of course, an emphasis on cybersecurity and we're. Putting those up on my [e-mail]. In fact, we've already got some up there already, and then we are going to also be putting them on YouTube and rumble. So if you don't like YouTube and Google, then you can certainly go to rumble.

[00:49:25] You'll see them there. But if you're on the email list, I'm I'm. Starting to put links in the bottom of the emails. So you can go and watch those videos. If you are a video type person that you know, more visual. So it's, I think all good. And it's good news for everybody. And this is what happens, I think, as you get more mature, In the business.

[00:49:48] Right. Um, as I said, I've been on the internet for more than 40 years, helped develop some of that software that, uh, some of it's still in use today and now it's time to do more give back. And I really am trying to give back, okay, there's this isn't. This isn't a joke. So, uh, no joke. Right. So go ahead. Email me at Craig Peterson.

[00:50:12] Tell me which punch list that you would like. And I can also put you on my email list so that you get my insider show notes, and you can just do that yourself by gonna Craig Peterson dot. Com you'll see right up at the top of the page. If you scroll down a little bit, it'll kind of pop up. It's a big red bar that goes across the top.

[00:50:32] I try not to be too intrusive and you can sign up there for the newsletter. So you'll get some of these trainings automatically. You'll get my insider show notes, all of this stuff. It it's absolutely free. Okay. This is my giveback to help you out. It really is. Okay. I, as I mentioned at the very beginning, I, I.

[00:50:52] Peeve by some of these people that represent themselves as tech experts. And in fact, all they are are marketers. We've got a client that decided that, uh, I was too expensive. My team. So they went out and shopped around, tried to find the cheapest company they could. And so now the, the company that they're bringing in is saying, you're saying, uh, Hey, um, uh, so how does this work?

[00:51:15] How do you do zero trust? Uh, why do you have a firewall here? Uh, why do you bother to have a direct fiber link between the offices? All this stuff? Well, because they need it. Okay. I get it. You use. Barracuda spam firewalls and Barracuda firewalls. It, it, yeah, this is a different league. Okay. So you are gonna be getting these punch lists from me that are really gonna help you understand and secure your systems.

[00:51:47] Right? This isn't your average run of the mill so-called managed security services provider or managed services or break fix shop. You are getting it from the guy that the FBI. Ingar program went to, to do their trainings. That was me. Okay. So for two years I set up the program. I ran it. And if we ever are sitting down having a coffee or beer, sometimes I'll tell you why I left.

[00:52:13] Okay. Uh, but think about FBI and I, I think you might have a clue as to why I decided not to do that anymore, but I trained thousands of businesses, government agencies, state local. Federal, you name it. So you are getting what you really need, which is another problem. I keep hearing from people, you do a search for something on YouTube or Google and you get what a million, 5 million pages, right.

[00:52:43] As supposedly that it says are available and they give you, okay, here's the top one, but what you need is an integrated single way. To do things where everything works together. And that's what I'm trying to do for you guys, because there's so many little products, different products that just don't work so well together.

[00:53:06] So we'll, we'll be covering that as well in these, but you gotta be on that email list. Craig peterson.com. Craig Peterson. So n.com/subscribe will take you right to the subscription page. And I'll keep you up to date. This is not my paid newsletter. All right, stick around. We'll be right back. And I promise I'll get to Russia, Russia, Russia.

[00:53:33] Some of the high tech companies and others pulled out of Russia after the Ukraine invasion, but one stayed Google. What is going on with Google? And now they're in big trouble with the Russian government. Wow.

[00:53:50] Here's a list of companies according to CNET that have pulled out of Russia because you remember Russia invaded Ukraine, February 24, we had Adobe, these are the guys that make Photoshop, Adobe reader. Airbnb, Airbnb has kind of an interesting story too in Ukraine because a number quite a number of Airbnb customers went ahead and rented rooms and homes from Ukrainians, even though they had no intention of going and they told the Ukrainians, Hey.

[00:54:23] I'm not gonna show up, just take this money. I'm sure you need it. Can you, can you imagine that that's fantastic. Good for them, Amazon, they suspended shipments of all retail products of customers in Russia and Bella Russ, and also suspended prime video for users in Russia. Apple stops selling its product in Russia's it's halting online transactions, including limiting apple pay.

[00:54:50] It's also disabled. Some apple map features in Ukraine in order to protect civilians, Amazon web services. They don't have data centers or offices in Russia, but it's allowing new signups for the service in Russia. BMW four GM Honda. Have all scaled back their operations or stopped them. Ford suspended its operations in Russia effective immediately until further notice.

[00:55:19] GM is suspending business in Russia. Honda has suspended exports to Russia, Disney halted, all theatrical releases in Russia, including the new Pixar film, turning red, also pause content DJA. The drone company that's gotten in trouble here in the us for some of its practices of sending GPS information to China while they're not doing it over there.

[00:55:45] Uh, electronic arts. They make a bunch of very popular, uh, games, epic games, another one Ericson FIFA body band Russia from this year's world cup formula one canceled its plan planned Russian ground pre Fujitsu, Goldman Sachs. Now Google that's where I want to go. We'll stop at Google here for a minute.

[00:56:10] Google. Suspended their ad network in Russia. And the idea was okay. Uh, we're not sure how payments are gonna work because Russia of course has had this kind of this lockdown by foreign countries on their banking system. We're not sure we can get the money out. Right. Um, uh, that's what they're apparently doing now.

[00:56:36] They're still there. Google's YouTube. It's search engine on and on still running in Russia. Now that is really disturbing. If you ask me, why did they not pull out? It doesn't make sense. So Google did stop accepting new customers for Google cloud. In March. YouTube said it's removing videos at denier trivial trivialize, the Russian invasion, but what finally got Google.

[00:57:09] Out of Russia, Russia seized their bank accounts. They froze, they transferred their money out of the main bank account in Russia. We're talking about a 2 billion per year business, Google Russia, that that really upsets me. So I did a little more research online about all of this, and I was really surprised to see that Ukraine now has given the Ukraine peace prize to Google.

[00:57:40] and it says, uh, quote on the behalf of the Ukrainian people with gratitude for the support during this pivotal moment in our nation's history. So what is it? I, I, I'm not sure. Right? So there, uh, one of their foreign ministers, I guess, and, uh, Koran. Baha I think, uh, said thank you from the beginning of the war, Google has sought to help.

[00:58:05] However, however we can through humanitarian support of our tools will continue to do as long as needed. So I dug in a little more and tried to figure out what's up. Well rush or Google left its Russian search engine online and YouTube online and was using it in Russia in order to. Control the narrative in Russia.

[00:58:31] Now, unlike what they've done here in the us, where Google has been caught, many times controlling the narrative in various elections and taking certain ads and not taking others and taking certain business and not taking others, apparently in Russia, it has been. Blocking a lot of the stuff that Russia itself has been putting out.

[00:58:55] So the, the federal government there in Russia. Interesting. Hey, so they also have helped Ukraine out by providing them with mapping GPS and rumor has it satellite services. Yeah. Interestingly to track Russian troop movements, uh, Al also Ukraine saying the Google news component has also been tremendously valuable.

[00:59:24] Google's also helping to raise money for the cause of Ukraine. Like many companies are doing right now to help people displace due to the war and Poland. Wow. They've been doing Yemen's work and, and bringing. People in, by the millions, into Poland from Ukraine. It reminds me when I lived in Calgary, Alberta, my Cub, one of the Cub masters Cub troop leaders was a woman who came from Poland many years ago.

[00:59:52] This was back during Soviet occupation of. Poland. And I, I remember talking to her about what was happening over there. Why did she leave? And it is just so, so impressive. The polls have done so much impressive stuff over the years. So they're also saying that Google's done a lot of other things in order to.

[01:00:13] Help protect Ukraine, including Google's block domains. They've prevented fishing attacks against Ukraine. They've warn targeted individuals that they are being targeted. It's really something what they've done. So my first knee jerk was why is Google? Still doing business in Russia. Well, now it's become clear because they have a special page for Russians that gives correct information, at least, you know, Google's claiming it's correct.

[01:00:47] Uh, I don't know which fact checkers, checkers they're using, but. That gives Russians real information about the war what's going on in Ukraine. What's happening with the Russian soldiers. Did, did you see this just this last week, apparently Russia removed the age limit for volunteers for the military. It used to be, I think it was 40 years old.

[01:01:12] If you were a Russian citizen and 30 years old, if you were foreign national, now the Russian military will take anybody. Any age from anywhere. In other words, Russia is really getting kind of hard up if they want people like me, right. To fight, to fight their wars. I'm sure they don't really well. I don't know.

[01:01:32] Maybe they do want me, right. That every, every war needs cannon fodder. So it is fascinating to see good job Google. I am quite impressed. I did not expect them to be doing that. They've also. Uh, uh, provided over 45 million in donations and grants to various groups. They've done pro bono work for various organizations over there.

[01:02:01] So this is really, really cool. So that's it. That's what's happening over there in you? Crane and Google, you can of course, find out a lot more. Get my insider show notes. So you had all of this on Tuesday morning. You could have digested it all and be ahead of everybody else out there. And then also don't forget about my new offer here.

[01:02:27] Free, absolutely free for. Asks by emailing me Craig peterson.com. I'll go ahead and send them to you, which is I think a pretty cool thing now. What am I gonna send you? Well, you gotta ask first, right? You gotta ask. And what we're gonna be doing is taking what I have been using for years to help secure my customers.

[01:02:54] And we're making available for free my cyber punch lists. Craig peterson.com/subscribe.

[01:03:02] Bit of a hubub here, a B Biden's infrastructure bill $1.2 trillion. And, and it's in there is this thing that Bob BARR is calling an automobile kill switch. Well, I did some more research and we'll tell you the facts right now.

[01:03:19] What are you supposed to do? If you are trying to pass a bill to stop drunk driving deaths, and you've got all of the money in the world, you know, well, I guess 1.2 trillion, isn't all of the money in the world.

[01:03:33] What are you gonna put in there? Well, I did a search on this and I I'm chuckling because this is craziness. This is the AP associated press. And they've got this article claim. President Joe Biden signed a bill that will give law enforcement access to a kill switch that will be attached to all new cars in 2026 APS assessment false.

[01:03:59] Okay, so we've got fact checkers here while the bipartisan infrastructure bill Biden signed last year requires advanced drunk and impaired driving technology to become standard equipment in cars. Experts say. Technology doesn't amount to a kill switch. Hmm. Let me see. So I can't start the car. If the car's computer thinks I might be drunk or impaired in some other way, but that's not a kill switch.

[01:04:31] What, what is that? Then if I can't start the car, because I have a disagreement with the computer. How about these people that I don't know, maybe their eyes can't open all of the way. Maybe they have problems with eyes on nystagmus, the eyes kind of jittering back and forth. Right. And now what are they gonna do?

[01:04:50] Argue with the computer? That's a kill switch. I can't believe these crazy people that are like AP here, coming up with fact checking on things. So, yeah, I'm sure there's some distortions in some articles out there, but they contradicted themselves in two paragraphs. I guess they figure people are just gonna see false.

[01:05:14] Okay. I'm done. They're not gonna bother reading the rest of the article. Yeah. Kind of crazy, isn't it? So according to an article written by remember former us representative Bob BARR in the infrastructure bill, is this kill switch. Now the, the big question is what is the kill switch? How far does it go?

[01:05:39] So I decided, well, let's look up something I remember from years ago and that is GM GM has the OnStar system it's yet another reason I won't buy GM, there are a number of reasons, but this is another one. OnStar system, you know, they've got an advisor, isn't that great. And if your car is in a car accident, a crash that advisor can hop on and ask if you're okay.

[01:06:08] And if you want emergency services coming, they'll come, uh, OnStar will call them for you. And if you are just fine, they won't bother calling. I mean, if there's no answer at all, they'll they'll call emergency services and let them know where the vehicle is. Cuz the vehicle has with OnStar built in GPS.

[01:06:30] Well, one of the features of OnStar is that it can send a signal to disable cars, engines, and gradually slow the vehicle to an idle speed to assist police in recovering the vehicle. Now they will only do that at least right now for vehicles that have been reported stolen and have been confirmed by the police.

[01:06:58] So in, in reality, that's kind of cool, right? It slows down. Hopefully the bad guy, if he's on the highway, makes it over to the side of the road and while the car slows down and eventually stops. So, uh, all of this stuff sounds good. This kill switch. Sounds good. Doesn't it? Because you know, we're gonna keep drunk drivers off the road.

[01:07:24] Now in reality, of course, they're not gonna be able to keep drunk drivers or other impaired drivers off the road. I really don't care what kind of technology they put in. And they're not talking about putting in one of these blow in the tube, things that checks your blood alcohol level. They're talking about having a camera facing you as the driver and probably other occupants of the vehicles and that internally facing camera.

[01:07:53] It's going to evaluate you. It's gonna look at you. It's gonna look at your face. Is something droopy. Are, are you kind of slow to respond? It might have a little test that it has you take right there. The, the law is very loosey goosey on any details. There really aren't any, so it's gonna be up to the manufacturer.

[01:08:15] So they put this in the car step. Just like OnStar, step one, put it in the car and they'll tell you when to turn. Remember how cool that was the GPS with OnStar. And you'd say, yeah, I want to go to this address. And then the, uh, the assistant goes ahead and sense programming to your car. And now you can go and if you lock your keys in the car, they can unlock the car for you.

[01:08:41] All, all kinds of cool stuff. And then next up what happens. Well, but they can stop the vehicle. So there's another technology story related to OnStar. And this is from 2009 from Kelly blue book book, OnStar stolen vehicle, slow down forts its first carjacking. So again, doesn't that sound fantastic. This was a Tahoe OnStar.

[01:09:10] And, uh, the driver and his passenger forced out of the vehicle robbed by a shotgun wielding perp who then drove off in the SUV. And the OnStar dispatcher was able to locate the vehicle using GPS advised police of exact location. And as soon as the police established visual contact, the stolen vehicle slow down system is activated available on a number of GM cars and trucks.

[01:09:36] Right? So this was over a decade ago. That this happened, but the technology's evolved hasn. so we initially have all of these car companies trying to decide, okay. So we've got this kill switch law, which AP says is not a kill switch law. Cuz they talk to experts just like the, what was it? 52 people, uh, heads of intelligence.

[01:10:01] Committees and agencies said that this wasn't a collusion hoax, right? So they talked to experts who said, no, no, no, this isn't a kill switch, but that's today you can argue, it's not a kill switch. I would completely disagree with you. Day one. It's a kill switch cuz you can't start your car. Right. It's a kill switch.

[01:10:21] A kill switch is often something you hide somewhere on the car so you can kill the engine. So it can't be stolen. It's a kill switch. Come on. People fact checkers aside. This could potentially allow law enforcement again, to shut down your car, remotely track the car's metrics, location, maybe the passenger load, because remember now cars are tracking all of this.

[01:10:46] They've already been. Tickets issued by police that did not see anyone speeding. The car was not caught on a traffic camera, but they hook up a device to your car's port that talks to its computer. And the computer says, yeah, he was doing 80 miles an hour or, uh, five minutes ago. And all of a sudden you got a ticket, right?

[01:11:08] Massachusetts wants to go ahead now and say, uh, yeah, yeah. Let's charge by the mile that you drive and mask. Because of course they're not getting enough revenue from gasoline because of the electric cars, right. Electric cars are not paying their fair share when it comes to road taxes. So let's do it that way.

[01:11:27] So how are they gonna collect the information while. They're gonna hook up to your car's computer. The next thing coming down the road, and it's already in most cars is wireless data connectivity. You might have found already. If you have a Nissan, a Honda, many other cars that. You have to get a major upgrade.

[01:11:49] It varies 600 bucks up to a few grand for an expensive car, but the two G data network, we talked about this on the show already is being completely shut down by the end of the year. So we've gotta replace it and switch you over. To the LTE data network, which of course eventually will go away as well, or at least 3g what happens once it's all hooked up?

[01:12:16] Well, the next easy step is just feed all of that information straight to the government. Craig, Peter son.com.

[01:12:27] If you've been afraid of ransomware before I I've got a good example for you where a whole country now has been ransom. Absolutely crazy. So we'll talk about that. What is the state of ransomware? And the NSA is asking us to trust them again.

[01:12:43] Of course staying up to date means that you get my insider newsletter pretty much every Tuesday morning and, and the only way to get that is to go to Craig peterson.com/subscribe.

[01:12:56] And I will keep you up to date. You'll get even more insight information. The Costa REAN government has declared a state of national emergency. And to the best of my knowledge, this is the first time a government has done this because agencies of the Costa Rican government have been hit so badly by the K ransomware.

[01:13:22] That the new incoming president immediately declared a state of emergency. So now the country has expanded law enforcement powers and they are trying to go after the KTI ransomware group. Now between you and me. Good luck on that one. They are based in Russia. There's a number of different articles out this week.

[01:13:44] This one from ADV Intel at tech target. But according to their research, the Kati ransomware groups attack on Costa Rican government was part of a rebranding effort. So this ransomware gang has seen a lot of their payments, just dry up. Because it's harder to get the money in. Right. And what are you gonna do with cryptocurrency?

[01:14:09] If you are the KTI group, can you turn it into anything useful? Well, it kind of depends on the country you're in, but for most people, no. Okay. Absolutely. No. So we were able to knock the KTI ransomware groups. Offline. And we talked about that before here. The us government did that, but now this is marking a new chapter for the cyber crime landscape.

[01:14:37] Interesting. Isn't it? So there are some investigations that have been going on. They've been trying to figure out what happened. What was the cause of the downfall of the county ransomware group? Are they really gone? Why did they pull their website offline and also. They declared publicly support for Russia in its invasion of Ukraine.

[01:15:00] And so now the Canti ransomware group got hacked and held ransom. They suffered major leaks. As a consequence. So other hackers went after KTI, which is a hacking group and they, they showed here from internal in documents that were stolen, that the KTI ransomware gang's primary Bitcoin address, which was found in the leak, showed that they had taken in over 2 billion in cryptocurrency over the last five years.

[01:15:34] Isn't that just amazing and anonymous leaker has published more of the gangs communications, but you know, that can help that's for sure. But you think with that much money, they'd be able to protect themselves right now on top of it, because of the hack of Costa Rica and the major damage it's caused, the us government has offered a couple of bounties here.

[01:16:00] Against the KTI ransomware group. So there's $10 million available. If you can provide the feds with information about the leaders of the KTI ransomware group and $5 million that you can get leading to the arrest of anyone involved with a cont ransomware attack. Isn't that something. So ransomware has been really outta control for years.

[01:16:25] There's no signs that things are actually slowing down. Definitely been enhanced law enforcement efforts to track them down. But ultimately here, the core members of these groups have been escaping these law enforcement activities. They've been using mules kinda like 2000 mules. Have you seen that movie?

[01:16:46] But the idea is they get people primarily in the us cuz that's where most of the money comes from. They do ran. Of people and businesses information here. In fact, last year, it's estimated that 60%, six, 0% of small businesses were hacked, which is just crazy. Right? Well, no wonder it's got $2 billion, but.

[01:17:09] What are, what are we supposed to do? What are they doing to, to, uh, really come after us? Well, they're doing many of the same things. These mules will, uh, be hired saying, Hey, I just need to, uh, use your PayPal account. And, uh, all you have to do is transfer some money. You can keep. 5%, 10% of the money I put in there.

[01:17:29] And they've always got these excuses, you know, think the Nigerian email scams from years past, and frankly still kind of go around a little bit here, but large bounties are really becoming a part of the toolbox, a law enforcement's been using in the us and abroad to try and track them down. And that's really what they're hoping for down in Costa Rica, because what are they gonna do?

[01:17:57] You know, frankly, really? What are they gonna do? Well, I don't know. And they obviously are relying on the United States to help them out with this. The internal structure of the K group has been highly organized. They've got the same type of structure of a legitimate corporation would have it takes its work that needs to be done.

[01:18:18] They hire contractors that may not even know who they're actually working for to write small pieces of, of, uh, code here that gets tied. so it's not too surprising that a KTI affiliate is going to go far enough to cause a national emergency to be declared. Uh, one of the things that KTI has done in some of these other ransomware companies have done companies, gangs is.

[01:18:47] They have ransomware as a service. So there's all of these people that are affiliated with KTI and all you have to do is get the KTI ransomware onto someone's computer and Taha. They will pay you. It's really that simple. They've got tech support for the people that are ran that got ransom to help them, uh, supposedly pay, right?

[01:19:13] How do I buy Bitcoin? And they'll walk you through. and then they will help you with restoring your files. Hopefully they can be restored. They, they can't always be restored. I think right now the latest number I saw. about 60% of people who have their data encrypted and ransom are in fact able to get that data.

[01:19:39] There's 60% of the data back. So that's not too, too, uh, big a deal, but KTI operates on affiliate model. and this affiliate that went ahead and ransom, our friends in Costa Rica is called UN C 1 7 56, uncle 7 56. They're also suspected in other attacks on government servers, including a theft of intelligence materials from.

[01:20:07] Peru. And this attacker has already leaked information stolen from Costa Rica and it's on the K ransomware dark web portal, which is online. And after the former president of the country refused to pay a $10 million ransom demand, they started leaking the data. So in this case, focus has been on the national government agencies.

[01:20:31] They are potentially looking at what might you might call espionage, but these K ransomware affiliates have become famous for really quickly exploiting new vulnerabilities as they're published and being indiscriminate in who they attack because $2 billion. Right. And then the other part that I think is really kind of interesting here.

[01:20:55] Well, the we're talking about money. We're talking about real money. Obviously KTI deals almost exclusively in Bitcoin, which can be hard to turn into hard currencies, but that our friends in Costa Rica said no, we're, we're not going to pay. Knowing what has been stolen and what they no longer have access to.

[01:21:18] In fact, the president said that the comp the country Costa Rica is effectively at war. Now. They got a foothold KTI did in 27 agencies at different levels of the go. And the, uh, yeah. Okay. So KTI is, see, I'm looking at an article in the register here. KTI is apparently is made more than 150 million from a thousand plus victims while we know it's actually 2 billion, but it depends on the timeframe that they're talking about.

[01:21:50] Uh, And, uh, the, the cont says that they are determined to overthrow the government by means of a cyber attack. We've already shown you all the strength and power. You have introduced an emergency. It it's, it's really quite something. Now I mentioned earlier today that I am now. Taking all of the cybersecurity stuff that we have been using here over the years.

[01:22:14] Things like our plan of action and milestones documents and, and all of this stuff we use to run our projects for our customers. It's the real stuff, people. And remember, I've been doing the cybersecurity. Since the early nineties, so we know what we're doing, I know what I'm doing and I'm making it available for free.

[01:22:40] Okay, guys, you just have to send me an email [e-mail]. So the first cyber punch list that we have that a available and all you have to do is ask for it again. Me, me, Craig peterson.com is the. Email punch list. So with this punch list, I go through the things that you need to do. In order to secure your email and be more or less secure in your email.

[01:23:14] Now, I don't know about you. I do not like these long diatribes. I, I have a book behind me that is hardening windows 10 and it is in a four inch binder, double. Sided. There are thousands of recommendations in there from Microsoft. There's a lot that needs to be done. So what I've done is boiled it down to the most important things.

[01:23:43] And as I said, it's available for absolutely. Free for you. It really is. If you're a listener, just email me, me, Craig peterson.com. You can ask me to add you to my insider show notes and my little three minute trainings that we do every week. Uh, you can also ask for a cyber punch list that you might need, so it's just, okay.

[01:24:07] Need to do this. You need to do that. You need to do this. You need to do that. So it makes it very straightforward. I'm trying. To be OBT accused about any of this, but we have had amazing feedback on this from companies over the years, and now it's available to you for $0. Okay. So make sure you check it out.

[01:24:28] Craig peterson.com and you can always email me, [e-mail] as well. Thanks for taking a little time with me today and look for me online. Look for my emails and if you would please give. Thumbs up on your favorite podcasting platform, YouTube or rumble or subscribe. Thanks.