Welcome!

Good morning, everybody. I was on the Jim Polito show this morning. Jim and I discussed securing your remote workforce and the number one problem, VPNs,  Then we got into facial recognition being used by Police in these rioting cities to round up the criminals. Here we go with Jim.

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

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Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Make sure you’re managing your VPNs correctly. These virtual private networks, if you got them. In some cases, you have to have them. But don’t let that remote computer at somebody’s home, where there are teenage boys on the network. A wink, nod, nudge.

If you’ve never heard me on one of my soapboxes before today’s the day. I had a great little, chat with Mr. Jim Polito here, and ways to keep your remote workspace safe. I am very upset with all of these companies that are lying to you about what their software and hardware can do. Here we go with Jim, of course, find me online. Craig peterson.com.

Jim Polito: [00:00:44] Yeah, here we go. We’ve got a lot on the agenda. You know why that poll may not be scientific. It’s always scientific with our tech talk guru, Craig Peterson.

Good morning, sir.

Craig Peterson: [00:00:57] Hey, good morning,

Jim Polito: [00:01:00] Craig. I want to talk to you about quite a few things. I think the most important we should start with. So, we don’t run out of time and try to get to it was very interesting.

You shared with me seven ways to keep your remote workforce safe.  I also think that applies to some of the things here I read people can do themselves to keep themselves safe while they’re working remotely.

Since so much of the audience is doing that, Craig, I thought it would be a good opportunity for you to share your expertise.

Craig Peterson: [00:01:34] Sure. I appreciate that. Yeah, there are, there’s a website that I read and if you aren’t totally into security or you’re just trying to keep up on security, this is a site you should probably pay a little bit of attention to, and it’s called dark reading and it’s not taken from a point of hackers or anything.

It really is about what can happen to all of us and the things to do. So they came up with this great little article here running through the different ways that you can use to help keep yourself safe. Now, as a business person, you have to realize that having your workers working from home has increased what’s called your attack surface.

The attack surface is the way, the means the bad guys can get in. So it might’ve been at one point you had one door on the building and in this case, the door might’ve been into your email server, perhaps your web server or something else. Now that attack surface has expanded dramatically because you’ve got three, four, or five people working from home or a hundred, 200, a thousand people working from home. Every device that’s connecting now remotely increases your attack surface.

We’re finding that businesses are seeing better than a 300% increase in the attacks. The efficacy, the ability of the bad guys to attack successfully has gone way up. That’s a real problem. Number one, VPNs.

If you’ve been on my VPN webinar and I’m going to be holding more of them. Make sure to watch my emails about it. VPNs, Jim, are not a panacea. In almost all cases, a small business using VPNs, almost all cases, it is making things worse.

Jim Polito: [00:03:36] Oh

Craig Peterson: [00:03:39] yeah.

Jim Polito: [00:03:40] Was that? Dramatic enough. All that. Yeah.

Craig Peterson: [00:03:44] You’ve got all of these computers that people at home, and they might be using one computer, which may not be a business computer. In other words, the company does not own it. The company does not have its advanced malware protection on it. All they have is one of these things that drive me crazy. People put Norton and other crap on the computers thinking it’s going to keep them safe. It doesn’t.

It doesn’t and that’s why the FBI and the NSA keep warning. I get warnings every day. now from them about how bad things are and how we have to pull up our socks because people are losing their businesses.

Make sure you’re managing your VPNs correctly. These virtual private networks, if you got them. In some cases, you have to have them. But don’t let that remote computer at somebody’s home, where there are teenage boys on the network. A wink, nod, nudge, who are going to sites that are dangerous sites from a security standpoint. Don’t let that computer straight in. The same thing with the remote desktop, you’ve got to teach your workers at home, how to segment networks.

Now, this is very complicated stuff and it’s something that we do. Pro-sumer hardware, for instance, Cisco Go has the ability to do real segmentation.

So keep that in mind. You’ve got to teach them that. You’ve got to look at all the data that you have. Do we even know what data are your business is keeping? Jim, I walk into businesses all the time, that really have no clue. They have a general idea. They really don’t know where it is. Who has access to it because these systems grow organically over time.

Even if you’re a home user, where is my data? How do I protect that? You need to focus on the applications you have, get rid of them if you don’t use it all the time if you haven’t used it in awhile. Applications are one of the ways that bad guys have been getting in, and getting in a very big way. Make sure that data that’s inside all of these apps are protected.

There’s just a whole bunch and I’m going to be doing a training on this starting in September. These pieces of training are free. They’re open. You’re going to learn stuff, whether you’re a home user or whether you’re a business user on how to protect yourself. How to avoid these nasty people who are trying to sell you stuff that’s supposedly going to protect you, that’s useless.

Jim Polito: [00:06:15] I got it. We’re talking with our good friend, tech talk guru, Craig Peterson.

You heard that. As we get closer to September, which is actually next week, but into the month and Craig has these seminars, we are going to pass that information along to you, so that you can do that.

Craig, I want to, I want to shift gears a little bit because this is interesting. We all worry about facial recognition. yeah, cops in Miami and New York City have arrested protestors. Now I wouldn’t call them protesters. I call them criminals because why would they be arrested? They’re not being arrested for peacefully protesting. They’re being arrested for destroying things. Okay, committing crimes. but we’ll just generically call them protesters, but they used facial recognition to do it.

Craig Peterson: [00:07:05] This is an interesting approach. You know how you’ve heard these, these protestors quote, unquote, the Marxists, who are in Portland and other places saying, Oh, the police are coming in and they’re just picking people off of the streets randomly. What’s actually been happening is the police have been taking photos, videos of what’s been going on and they’re not arresting just protesters.

We have a right to protest, generally speaking. What they’re trying to do is find, who are these people. That is burning down buildings. Look at what happened last, just last night and Wisconsin, are you kidding me? Who are these people? What are they doing? A lot of them feel very comfortable in committing major crimes because they’re wearing a mask, and they can never be identified. They can identify you just based on the upper portion of your face. They then track of people and they wait for these bad guys to get away from the crowd because you don’t want the police going in there and getting pummeled like that police officer, apparently was last night there in Wisconsin hit by a brick in the head, down on the street. It was crazy.

Jim Polito: [00:08:20] Yeah. I saw that.

Craig Peterson: [00:08:21] They didn’t want that to happen. So what they do is they track, they identify who they are, they track them, and then they arrest them, when they’re away from the violent areas. And they’ve been continuing to do that where they’re identifying them. And then they are basically going out and arresting them days later, in some cases.

At this point, we have already got hundreds of arrests of some of these people that are going after the very violent people. They’re trying to find some of the leadership because what they’re doing is by every definition, illegal and should not be happening.

Jim Polito: [00:08:57] So here’s the question this goes to court and the argument is made, that’s not me, you have to prove that your facial recognition is worthwhile. Do you know what I mean? okay. That’s not me. And then you have experts. Competing experts on the stand saying that’s not that person. No, that is that person. Am I right?

Craig Peterson: [00:09:22] Yeah. there’s somebody who’s been following a few cases that have gone to court. Absolutely. That’s why they like tracking them the whole time.

So they have an overhead camera. Sometimes they have helicopters in the air. Nowadays. All they have to do is use drones. And it tracks them.

Now we’ve had this technology for a long time. We’ve used it in Somalia and other places as much as a decade ago. There were companies that sell small airplanes think of a kind of a Cessna and records everything going on in the city, everything.

So they fly above major cities and there’s a crime committed, Jim, so they can track you backward. So where did you go? So the crime was committed here when you took off your hiding. They can now run it backward in time and track you back to your house and everywhere you went in between because everything happening in some of these major cities is recorded in super high def. So it can be played back.

I love the way your mind works. You’re so logical when you’re thinking that through.

Jim Polito: [00:10:35] Yeah.

Craig Peterson: [00:10:36] No it’s true. And that voice of experience speaking there, Jim, from following some of these cases,

Jim Polito: [00:10:44] Listen, don’t give me that much credit. it’s just, from being a reporter. Thinking about these things and how we’d go to a court and what would happen. How the case would proceed.

But that’s what you do whenever you bring in technology. That technology can be picked apart. Look, we saw it in the OJ trial about the DNA and it went well, how did you collect it? How did you collect the DNA? Where was it kept? They pick it apart, and by the way, you get people on a jury who don’t completely understand it. And they glaze over and they invariably say, I, yeah, I don’t know if I can trust that technology and there you go. That’s all you have to do. Reasonable doubt.

Craig Peterson: [00:11:26] Or on the other side this is just too confusing for me. I’m going to follow the expert. Whatever expert smiled at me when I was on the stand.

There is a good argument for having a professional jury. I was an expert for a guy who was accused of having some pretty nasty stuff on his computer. Now computers are hacked every day and many of these computers, including businesses, computers are used for spreading Al Qaeda, ISIS, beheadings of Americans, kiddie porn, you name it. It’s on your computer. But did you put it there? For a regular jury its getting too complicated?

Jim Polito: [00:12:10] Oh boy. All right. So look, you’ve got this great stuff coming up in September for folks to be able to protect themselves while they work from home.

There’s always this information with Craig Peterson every week. Right here at this time, he joins us, gives us some of his time. Craig, how can folks get in touch with you now if they want to reach out?

Craig Peterson: [00:12:34] The best thing is to make sure you’re getting my weekly newsletter. That’s how you find out about the training. All of this stuff. Jim was just talking about, go to CraigPeterson.com/subscribe. That’s Peterson SON, Craig peterson.com/subscribe. And I will keep you up to date and you will learn a lot more since you’ve been, you ever thought you needed to know and believe me, we need to know this stuff.

Jim Polito: [00:13:02] Yeah, we do. We absolutely do. Craig. I want to thank you so much for your time. It’s always great. Always informative and I wish we had more, but we got to, we gotta pay some bills and, we got to wrap up the show, so thank you. Okay. Take care.

Craig Peterson: [00:13:17] Thanks, Jim. Take care.

Jim Polito: [00:13:19] All right. When we return, we have a web poll for you and a new one for tomorrow.

 

 

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