How To Check Your Passwords And Why It Matters – WSJ Article About Russian Attacks On US: AS HEARD ON: WTAG: [02-12-19]

On This Episode…

Craig is on with Jim on the Jim Polito Show. They talked about the Google Chrome feature and website that can help you check if your password has been compromised. They also talked about how hackers are doing to infiltrate US utilities.

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TRANSCRIPT

Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors.

Airing date: 02/12/2019

How To Check Your Passwords And Why It Matters – WSJ Article About Russian Attacks On US

Craig Peterson: 0:00

Hi everybody, Craig Peterson here. Hey, I hope you’re enjoying this training I’m doing this is invaluable I think. I’m giving away my best stuff absolutely free. This is just phenomenal. It’s up to this week that will be taking it down because I don’t want to present information that’s out of date or old. So I may do something in the future again about this, but we are going through the basics this week. Stuff you need to know to keep your small business or even your home safe. But I’m really trying to help out the small business people and it’s all free. It’s absolutely free. The training is there. I’m not upselling anything. On Thursday, we’ve got a live Q and A live webinar so make sure you check it out if you haven’t already. http://CraigPeterson.com. It’s right there on the homepage.

Hey, this morning I talked about a couple of really cool password checkup techniques you can use some free stuff and I’m sending that out in fact everybody that’s on my SMS list. If you want to be on that by the way to get the alerts about the latest hack when it’s really important. I don’t send out, there’s hacks every hour every minute in fact. Just the big ones that might affect you. Make sure you text me just text the word Craig or your message or your question or anything because this is me This is my phone number 855-385-5553. So just text Craig to 855-385-5553.

If you do that you’re not going to be even letting me know that you did anything because guess what? It’s automated if you say Craig but if you say something else then it’s not automated but we’ll get back to you. We’ll answer your questions or problems. I’d love to do that again. Just text my name Craig.

Now I will also send you this information if you want it so let me know, on the password checkups stuff. And that’s the main thing we talked about. But we also talked about an article in the Wall Street Journal that just came out about the hackers and, and some implications of it that I really hadn’t thought of before until I was discussing it with one of the guests that’s going to be on my FBI infra guard webinar this afternoon. So lots of great stuff today. Have a great day. We’ll be back tomorrow. And don’t forget. Get that training. http://CraigPeterson.com.

Unknown 2:37
Here he is Ladies and gentlemen, the man who helped invent the internet. Now like Al Gore, who took credit for it. He actually wrote code that you don’t realize is helping you while you’re on the internet. Our good friend tech talk guru Craig Peterson. Good morning, sir.

Unknown 2:56
Good morning, Jim. Waiting for some snow. Winter is coming.

Unknown 3:00
Yeah, you love you love that. You. You. You Canadian you. You love it. You don’t care. You know, it makes no difference to you Craig Peterson whether it’s you know what I mean. Like when you hear that forecast, you’re like, Okay Yeah,

Unknown 3:18
It’s like the winter vortex, right, that came down. All the complaints about. I remember days were not high when I was walking to school is 40 below zero. Come on people. Grow up.

Unknown 3:35
That’s true. Hey listen, I’m with you. Suck it.

Unknown 3:37 
Well you get used to it. I have a friend who works with me who is now down in Florida. And he’s he’s actually from right outside Boston, and it gets to 60 degrees and he’s dressing in layers now. So I guess it’s just a time thing you know, we were down there with our kids and school was still open. No one was coming in and our kids are out there running around and bathing suits every everybody else’s all bundled up. So I guess it can happen.

Unknown 4:13 
I will never, I would never acclimate to Florida. I could never do it because I’m. I’m always hot. I mean, but that’s just me. But hey listen it is it is what it is. Pretty soon we’ll have virtual reality. You want to feel what it’s like and where Craig Peterson went to school. You just press a button put on your headset and your suit and it will be like you’re walking to school barefoot in the snow with little Craig Peterson. So.

Unknown 4:37
Yeah, that’s coming. You’re right because we’ve we’ve already got some of this stuff it isn’t where I had hoped it would be by now but when you’re talking about things like the Oculus and these 3d virtual reality glasses and and now there’s suits you can wear it or have you seen the gamers use things but they’re thinking chairs for quite a while that that will kind of you know vibrate and stuff when stuff happens. Now there’s a suit. It’s kind of like a vest they can wear and it squeezes them. If they got get shot, they feel it hit them in the back, or wherever it hits them. It’s coming. But it’s really slow. I guess most people really aren’t that interested in it. And I’ve tried it before. And, kind of a whole home, at least for me. But, you know, us 30 year olds, we’re just not as interested as the kids does.

Unknown 5:27
I love that. We’re taling to Craig Peterson. And at the end of this segment, I’m going to give you will Craig’s gonna give you a number and if you text my name, you’ll get a lot of great information from Craig free, no obligation. He doesn’t sell your name, and he doesn’t try to sell you anything. And standard data in text rates apply. Okay, this caught my attention Chrome, the browser, Chrome can tell you if your passwords have been compromised. Is this difficult or could the average person like me figure out how to use this because I’d like to know if my passwords have been compromised.

Unknown 6:00
Yeah, it’s a really good idea to use some of these password check up programs. You know, I’ve recommended one password many times to a lot of people. And in here on your show as well. It has this built in so it when you generate a password or you type on in it, double checks to see if it’s been hacked or not. And there’s a website out there, I’ll text it out to everybody. After we get off the air. Everyone on my text list called Have I Been Pawned and that now allows you to type in your password and see if it’s a known password that’s been stolen before. Now why would you want to know that right? If you have a bad guy that’s trying to break in what they do is they use these huge databases. We talked about one a couple of weeks ago, 750 million records in the database. And now by the way, there have been more of those databases released over the last two weeks, and were over 2 billion now. So what happens is the bad guys grab a copy of a database from some website that they’ve stolen it from. And oftentimes, it’s encrypted. So your password has some protection on it. So what are the bad guys do they use the passwords that they have seen before out there and they try them all because it doesn’t matter if they’re trying to log into the website yet they’re just using their computers to figure out what your password is.

So if you’re using a password that is known to have been stolen previously they will test that against the database then they’ve got your password and now they try and login. So that’s how it all works. So when you’re talking about using something like Have I Been Pawned I think it’s important to do that but having something like this is called password checkup. So I’ll I’ll put together a little thing. And I’ll send it out here to everyone on my text list afterwards on password checkup, and the other website to have as many times and what happens is you you install that on to your Chrome browser. And it will now tell you if you’re using a username and password combination that Google knows to be unsafe and using the same database. Yeah. Isn’t that great?

Unknown 8:31 
That is good. That is good. Right up front, you’ll know. Right up right up you’ll know.

Unknown 8:37
Yeah, like so what will happen is it’ll, it has a little pop up, it’s going to be in your browser bar and it’s going to warn you if you’re using a password that’s been known to be compromised, it’ll have a pop up that comes up when you visit the website and try to use that password it will say change your password and it’ll allows you right now you can say I ignore the site or you can go ahead and change your password on that site. But Google saying they have a database of 4 billion credentials that they know have been compromised, and various data breaches. And it uses those to check and see if you’re legit or not. So I love that that’s so important Jim.

Unknown 9:17
We’re talking I’m with Craig Peterson, our tech talk guru. He is the man with the plan. And again, we’re going to give you a number at the end of this segment. If you want to get more information about what he’s talking about today.

Let’s go to US utilities. We when we worry about hackers and cyber war, I guess I guess our utilities are Ground Zero. You knock out the utilities you don’t need to roll tanks down Main Street. You’ve had a major impact on a country. I mean, you could defeat them in a war. So Russian hackers I guess are going after the electrical grid. Wall Street Journal had a report Friday that talked about their techniques. I know you’re concerned about this. Why don’t you elaborate?

Unknown 10:08 
Yeah, it’s a very big deal. In fact, I’m holding a webinar this afternoon for the FBI Infragard program, talking about some of this stuff. But yeah, critical infrastructure. So important. So think about what could happen in a power failure situation. And what we’re gonna be talking about this afternoon is it goes beyond much beyond what most people think about because obviously, you’ve got hospitals, but you’ve got first responders, but you’ve also got the guys and gals that that drive the trucks, it’s scheduled the loading of the trucks. If there’s no power the phone’s not going to get shipped, right? It goes on and on.

And when we’re talking about these types of hacks, there’s another thing that can happen. Think about what we apparently did along with the Israelis to the Iranians we went ahead and we got a virus into the the Iranian plant that was manufacturing the necessary steps to make a nuclear bomb and all of these devices that were in there, but what are we gonna do? We’re gonna just shut them down because all they have to do is turn them back on, right? If we shut off the power to the plant, then they just restore the power Yeah. So what we did is we made cold understood the centrifuges and understood how to play with the centrifuges and play with a monitoring system. So the Iranian operators were sitting there and everything looked normal Jim. It looked like it was doing its thing it was making this powder cake that was going to be used for nuclear war. I mean, you know, power plants not they’ve never done that.

And what we did is we made it look normal and we had those centrifuges, very expensive, very fancy, not like we had in our chemistry lab. We made them self destruct. So we destroyed thousands of these things. So when you’re talking about the Russian hackers and what the Wall Street Journal was talking about him and what we’ll be talking about later on today, in the Infragard webinar, we’re talking about not just turning off the power but destroying the infrastructure Yeah, getting it to self-destruct.

Unknown 12:30
Yeah. Getting it to self destruct.

Unknown 12:37 
And if we lose, like these big transformers we have, and we talked about EMP, is the electromagnetic pulses before that happens naturally, as well as man made, it could take 30 years for us to restore all of our power here in the United States. So it’s Yes, it’s a very, very big deal. It’s something we need to be conscious about.

It’s something we need to pay attention to and I’m going to send out a text after we get off the air as password checkup plugin for Chrome and also the website you can go to detect your passwords . And then if you go to my website as well I sent out a text I think it was yesterday morning I have four training sessions this week absolutely free about Do It Yourself cyber security if your business yeah if your business here’s exactly what you need to do. So I talked yesterday about securing your Wi Fi and that video’s up you can watch that. I talked today about your firewalls what you need to do there. I’m talking tomorrow about the right kinds of backup, 3-2-1 backups and also what you need to do for disaster recovery. This is my best stuff, Jim. It’s absolutely free. I’m trying to help people out businesses out because this is really happening Jim.

Unknown 14:00
That’s why we have you here, folks. Craig Peterson. Get ready to write this number down and get ready to text my name to get this information and more from Craig Peterson. Craig. The number is?

Unknown 14:12 
855-385-5553. That’s 855-385-5553.

Unknown 14:21
Just text Jim to that number. Jimmy if you like. He’ll answer to both. Standard data and text rates apply. He will not sell your name. He will not try to sell you something. You’ll get great information like this. And as Craig said during this segment updates when things are going on, and things are happening out there. You will know first, Craig, thank you so much for your time. We look forward to talking with you next week.

Unknown 14:50
Hey thanks, Jim. Take care.

Unknown 14:52 
Take care. Bye bye. All right, when we return a final word.