Welcome!
Craig explains why you should be extra careful about shopping online. ISIS set up shop selling PPE.
For more tech tips, news, and updates visit – CraigPeterson.com
—
Read More:
Huawei’s expired US license is bad news for phone owners
Security Jobs With a Future — And Ones on the Way Out
NSA & FBI Disclose New Russian Cyberespionage Malware
FCC beats cities in court, helping carriers avoid $2 billion in local 5G fees
Business Email Compromise Attacks Involving MFA Bypass Increase
NSA and FBI warn that new Linux malware threatens national security
How Fast Is SpaceX’s Satellite Internet? Beta Tests Show it Hitting Up to 60Mbps
ISIS Allegedly Ran a Covid-19 PPE Scam Site
—
Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:
Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] We’ve got a new warning from the NSA and the FBI. If you are running Linux. this is a very big deal. We are now looking at some bypasses for multifactor authentication. So if you’re using MFA, I got some news for you and some tips about what to do.
This is Craig Peterson. Thanks for joining me today. You can find me online as well. On my website craigpeterson.com and every week we go through a whole bunch of articles. In the thousands to come up with the top seven or eight that we think everybody needs to know, that’s what we’ll be talking about today.
We’ll be talking about ISIS and some of these PPE scams, a phenomenal announcement here from SpaceX about satellite internet. If your internet is really slow. I might be able to point you in a direction here. That’ll get you. Internet 50 megabits for a buck for the first month, then two bucks after that, we’ll be talking about that.
And the FCC here has been beating these cities in court that is trying to overcharge really some of the internet providers. And they’re avoiding $2 billion in fees. So that’s going to help with local 5g rollout, which is again, going to get you better, faster internet. We’ve got new Russian cyberespionage malware out there.
Security jobs. If you’ve been thinking about going into it. This means geeks as well as all of you, other guys. A guy who actually went through a training program to become a cybersecurity professional and he’s doing that now. Which jobs have a real future, which ones don’t, what’s going to be impacted by artificial intelligence, if it ever really gets here.
Huawei in the news again, If you have a Huawei device of any sort, you need to keep listening. Looks like they are absolutely going to be knocked out of business, whether they want to or not. So we’re going to start with, ISIS. I was going to say our friends, but yeah, they’re not exactly our friends now.
You know who ISIS is right there. They are what President Obama called the junior varsity team. They had no idea what they were doing. It’s a good thing that we can ignore them because ISIS just isn’t there. It’s not a big deal. as it turns out, of course, it was a very big deal.
President Trump drove them back something that hadn’t been able to happen before. If you consider them the varsity team and they’re really some serious bad guys, you might not be going after them the way you should. Politics aside, ISIS needs money. If you go back to the roots of ISIS and bin Ladin, and where did he get his money from? It came from his rich family in Saudi Arabia. Another, self-loathing liberal, frankly, who wanted to kill everyone that wasn’t the same as him in so many ways, all of these people that just hated themselves. And of course, yeah. A project that outward, read Freud, if you want to find out what that’s all about, transference is what it’s called, but here’s the bottom line here.
The justice department has been getting complaints. Now, if you have a problem, when you’re online, Oh, you should really go and check out, the FBI has a website. The internet complaint center is what it’s called and it is run by them. You can file complaints. IC3.gov is where you’ll find it online. I see three.gov, just those letters, the internet crime complaint center.
So if you have been ripped off online, that’s where you should go. You don’t need to call the FBI or the secret service right away, file it there. They compile it all together. Sometimes they will go and try and help you out. And as part of that help you out, they will get ahold of the local police.
They’ll tell you what to do, but you can file a complaint right there. In fact, they even have instructions before you file a complaint. Figure out what the details are, what happens after you file it. They’ve got all that stuff there. So have a look at that. IC3.gov. apparently a lot of people have been filing complaints about companies offering personal protective equipment PPE, right?
And that’s a real big deal, a real big problem because some of this stuff has been absolutely and totally fake. Look at what’s been happening around the country where we’re really getting, what’s the best word to put it? I guess confused. And so much of it comes from our friends over in China.
They, you might remember went ahead and frankly cornered the market. They were buying personal protective equipment from the United States, depleted all of our stockpiles here. They depleted their own stockpiles. It’s a really bad thing. And California. You might remember what happened here with, again, Gavin Newsom and what did Gavin Newsom do?
What was the big problem? they went ahead and bought a whole bunch of them. Rumors are that they wired, this is an article from Cal matters, by the way, a mask dealer, a half a billion dollars. The masks shop. These are supposedly PPE and it was a deal with this medical supplier called blue flame.
It’s interesting here because we had a whole deal fall apart. the stuff that was delivered was way substandard. Rumors are California’s governor Newsom was involved in this, and there might’ve been some kickbacks here and there, but the deal died, frankly, within hours. This initial deal that they had wired $456.9 million, which is half of what legislature had allocated for California’s pandemic response.
Then they canceled it about six hours later and they tried to pull the money back. They were actually able to get most of it back, which is a little bit surprising. Why did California make such a large purchase for a hundred million face masks from a brand new untested company?
You just don’t know. But it does show us again how desperate so many people are. So when people found this website called face mask center.com. You can go there right now if you’d like to check it out and you’ll see a seizure notice and it’s been seized, has got the treasury and the FBI and Homeland security’s logos on there.
There was a seizure warrant that was issued by a DC, a district of Columbia judge. They apparently received it because ISIS has been using it to raise money, to conduct terrorism around the world. People are just absolutely desperate for things like masks, Tyvek suits, goggles, face shields, you name it right.
These N95 masks, even thermometers. They were selling all of them on the face mask center.com website. Now, one of the things that really sticks out to me is apparently they wanted to be paid in Bitcoin. Now Bitcoin is not totally anonymous. And I can cite cases where the secret service has pierced the whole Bitcoin thing and was able to seize the money, arrest people, everything else.
All right. So it doesn’t think the Bitcoin is a hundred percent secure because it isn’t right. But bad guys use Bitcoin a lot. It goes back to the prisoner’s dilemma, which you won’t explain right now, but basically, how can a thief trust a thief? The answer is, they can’t. So what do they try and do?
So they’ve been trying to use Bitcoin. I’ve seen some great articles written how about the value of Bitcoin has been directly related to the success of criminals. As they’ve been able to ransom more data where they might’ve encrypted it, they might’ve stolen it. They might be threatening to release it unless you pay the ransom.
Whenever that’s been happening. The value of Bitcoin has been going up. yeah, I don’t give investment advice, but I know some people that follow that advice pretty darn closely, and some people that have been recommending people do that. So the justice department recently seized hundreds of Bitcoin and Ethereum accounts, which is another type of cryptocurrency.
By the way, when we say cryptocurrency, we don’t mean that it’s encrypted and it’s hard to get at it. It’s a basic classification of occurred currency or currency exchange. It was millions of dollars four websites it’s from known Islamic. Extremist groups included ISIS, the ELCA, some brigades, and Al Qaeda.
This is the government’s largest-ever seizure of cryptocurrency in the terrorism context, according to the department of justice.
So be very careful because the bad guys are out there trying to rip you off. Now, in this case, most of the materials were not delivered. you ordered it, you paid your Bitcoin, or maybe in some cases, they took credit cards.
The articles are unclear about that, but. There’s a company called dark owl that has been tried. These WuHan virus-related scams online for months and their chief executive officer Mark Turnage said that we’ve seen a massive volume of illegitimate materials like PPE being sold. I never delivered the fact that ISIS decided to get into the business. Isn’t too surprising. Even they are capitalists. Now that’s my comment. This is from an article on wired by Andy Greenberg. You might want to look it up.
There’s lots of great information in there as well. The article goes on and talks a little bit more, but yeah. Be very careful when you’re buying online.
Now, I talked about this a lot this week. Listen to my podcast, talking with various radio stations, including this one. We talked about what do you look for to help avoid PPE scams, so have a look at that.
Craig peterson.com/podcast. You’ll be able to see them right there and listen to them.
All right. Stick around. Because when we come back, we’re going to talk about some ways that you’re going to be able to save a lot of money on the internet in the near future.
You’re listening to Craig Peterson, stick around. Cause it will be right back.
—
More stories and tech updates at:
Don’t miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating:
Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:
For questions, call or text:
855-385-5553
