Jun 13, 2018
A larger problem that first thought -- Yes its the Routers. Craig goes through with Ken and Matt how big this router problem really is, why people are not taking it seriously and why they should, and what to do.
Maine Elections were held yesterday. Craig, Ken and Matt discuss technology and voting and hacking.
USBs are not necessarily safe. Craig talks with Ken and Matt about the different tactics that are being used to infect your computer.
Find out more on CraigPeterson.com
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Transcript:
Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors.
Airing date: 06/13/2018
Routers, Hacking, Electronic Voting, & USB Drives
[00:00:00] All things technology, tech guru, Craig Peterson is on right now on the WGAN Morning News With Ken and Matt.
[00:00:17] All right we're back again at 738 on the WGAN Morning News With Ken and Matt, Craig Peterson is with us as usual at 738 on Wednesday and Craig, How are you this morning Hey, Doing good man How are you guys doing great and welcome back from North Korea.
[00:00:31] Craig was very successful you had. I want to congratulate you on that. And by the way thanks by the way. And while you were there did you have any discussions with Vladimir Putin about malware or what's going on with Malware now.
[00:00:45] This is this is absolutely crazy. First of all, you know President Trump and I had a great time, we had a little bit of a beer summit afterward but they didn't televise that. So, you guys might not be aware of it. But here's the issue we're having right now with the latest information all this is coming from the FBI working with Cisco Talos and the issue is that this whole malware thing on routers is worse than we thought it was initially. In fact, it's a whole lot worse. They're able to not only just basically take over your routers and look for information but they've developed a very powerful platform that they've been using to capture all kinds of banking information personal information. OK so we knew about that. But they can go to the next step. Now if you visit your site and they remove money from your account as you go through a pink site the next time it's capable of actually modifying the bank site's pages to show your correct balance before they stole all the money from you. So, this is going on and on. It's getting worse and worse and we're finding out more as time goes on. Now the thing to do. You know the FBI came out with a statement about rebooting your routers and now, it's gone a little further.
[00:02:07] And what we really need to make sure happens, if you have some of these lower-end routers that are used in homes and are used in small businesses you need to do factory resets on these things and you need to upgrade the firmware that's in them because the bottom line you could be infected in a power cycle is not necessarily going to clean things up for you. Now if you have a router from for instance your cable company or one of these other providers Internet providers you're probably OK. We're talking about the types of routers that you might get if you go to a local Staples store or Wal-Mart etc. You might have ordered online. And so, people are kind of scrambling trying to figure it out. I'm surprised many people haven't done anything about this because it's a very real threat. We're talking about more than half a million devices that are being compromised. And, it's your personal information that your financial information. I think we have to be very careful of that. And you know that ties in. Also, we were talking about Russians and the hacking and the accusations about Russian collusion ties into yesterday. Of course yesterday we had a primary here in the state and there we were voting and we're using electronic voting machines and I know Matt you and Ken were talking about having a box sitting there that you could shove your ballot, right.
[00:03:31] You know, yeah I'll take that 1920’s technology. No question, but having our paper ballot is ultimately very important because not just the Russians but many other entities I'd say are trying to get into some of our voting systems. We had an examination of what happened during the last presidential cycle here in 2016. And they found that Connecticut was the only state here in New England that actually had attacks against it that we know about. So being able to fill out a piece of a paper ticket into the machine have that machine count the vote is a very reasonable thing to do because that Matt can be audited you can spot audit and make sure that the counts pretty much match up right. I don't think anything is perfect don't think any person's perfect. But in this day and age where we've got Russia we've got China coming after us. I pick up a new client that had Chinese backdoors in their systems, this is a small military subcontractor. In this day and age, we've got to be cautious so I'm not so sure having that box there is the worst thing that could happen.
[00:04:45] Craig Peterson our tech guru joins us on Wednesdays at this time, just talking about the world of technology.
[00:04:51] Craig, this isn't the stuff you sent us every week, but I had to ask you about this Korean summit happens and of course journalists go to cover it because it is a historic occasion and the press kit for the for the people who went to this thing included a you know it's hot. It's hot in Singapore so they included a little USB fan and this USB fan you know you could plug into your computer and then it would use the electricity inside of it and activate the fan and it keeps it cool. I was sitting there typing away on your you know your journalistic laptop there.
[00:05:23] How stupid, how stupid, are reporters to plug that into their computer
[00:05:26] I mean seriously, up here at a North Korean summit is a USB thing you can plug into your computer. Go ahead. It's fine. Don't worry about it.
[00:05:36] Exactly. It is in this day and age it's absolutely crazy. And here's why you are Matt. You know this obviously but when you're plugging something into that USB Port you may just be using the power because you can. You can design things just actually only pull power leads to data leads in the USB connector are used. But if you plug something into your computer there's a very real possibility that something bad could happen. Now it can be anything from there. Our USB drives that are designed to destroy your computer physically, like to getting smoke to come out. OK. Be careful too when you're at an airport for instance or you at a coffee shop and you want to plug in your phone to that USB charger that's sitting there. Because again many of those have been hacked. So, you can plug it in thinking you get a great charge and in fact it is hacking your computer it's downloading malware there are all kinds of things that can be done. So yes, when in Singapore China or certainly North Korea they'll plug anything be into your devices. IBM just announced about two weeks ago that they are banning all removable devices from any of the computers that any of their employees have or use. So that's everything. So, think about that when you are thinking about the dangers of using a USP drive you don't know about. And we just had yet another case, Matt, where you must be drives who were shipped from the manufacturer in China and contained a virus right on them.
[00:07:19] We are don't know Craig Peterson, our tech guru by the way you can get a quick response to a company you want and get all of his great information. You know I always use Firefox and I changed Chrome because I think my daughter told me to and I hate it. I'm not sure I remember exactly why I hated it, but I got rid of it and went back to Firefox. Was there a preference for one over the other one?
[00:07:44] Yeah. Here's the problem that we're facing. It's a bit of a dilemma. First of all, if you're using a Microsoft product Windows product you definitely don't use an explorer anymore. There are a number of browsers that are certainly better, but the features that are present in websites, for instance, are available typically in chrome. Chrome has all these wonderful plugins you can put on it to do different things, in fact, it can be kind of an operating system in another cell. So, a lot of us have moved towards Chrome as fast. It was efficient, but the problem was chrome, of course, is the Google really is tracking pretty much everything. So, there is a little bit of a compromise and we're talking about Chrome there's a browser called Epic's BP. I see an epic version of Chrome that was taken by some guys over in India and had all of the tracking code removed from it. For the normal person, however, Firefox is presenting now a really good option for you so using Firefox first of all they've completely redesigned it. It is designed with security in mind security first design in fact and it is now fasters and chrome is which takes away that excuse and there are again many plugins available for it. So, I've taken to using more and more. I have Firefox in fact even on my iPhone and I have it on my iPad as well. It's a really great option for people.
[00:09:21] All right Craig Peterson, our tech guru joins us every Wednesday this time to give us an eye on technology. CRAIG, We've, got a lot of election stuffed breakdowns we're going to go now. We will talk again next week sir.
[00:09:31] All right take care guys. By the way, I have a list of the bad routers that are going to be very hackable up on my Web site as well. Craig Peterson dot com and you can go in there you can look at the list. I've got instructions for how to reset and restore to factory restores on the routers etc.. All of that right there on my Web site.
[00:09:52] Awesome Thanks, Craig.
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