Feb 27, 2020
Good morning everybody!
I was on with Matt and Marty (who was sitting in for Ken.) We had a good discussion about election technology and what different states are doing to assure that they are secure. We also talked about the FBI and Homeland Security about Passwords and Passphrases and security. Here we go
These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com
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Automated Machine Generated Transcript:
Craig
If the Secretaries of State get hacked, I'm not sure we can feel
comfortable. Would they even know that hacking occurred? If they
did, it would be much after the fact.
Craig
So well, this morning, I was talking on WGAN in their affiliates
about some of the voting technology, you know, Super Tuesday is
coming up. I compared some of the election technology in different
states. What's good. What's bad. We talked about the new FBI press
release that came out, that is I hope going to have a significant
impact on security. It is fascinating stuff. So here we go.
Craig
By the way, I talked a little bit about our tutorials and coming
up. Yeah, man, You won't believe the work that went into these all
for you. It is part of my give back. I am not trying to sell you,
upsell you, or anything else with these. Anyways, here we go with
this morning on Ken and Matt more. Joe things technology.t tech
guru Craig Peterson is on right now on the WGAN Morning News with
Ken and Matt.
Matt
Alright, we're back ladies gentlemen it is 738 on the WGAN morning
news with Ken and also Matt. There is no Ken today. There is a
Marty Groman he is over there. He is still wearing the Mardi Gras
beads.
Marty
I am, Yeah, the party's just wearing off now. How many Mardi Gras
jokes Do you get to do? Is it a party for me?
Matt
You know, I should have a whole roster of them.
Marty
But you don't work out times in the early 90s. Back in the good old
days. The real Mardi Gras. Yeah, way down there. The crew of Baucus
indeed.
Matt
Well, I don't know if Craig Peterson's ever been to Mardi Gras, but
he joins us now to go over what's happening in the world of
technology. Craig, How are you this week?
Craig
Hey, I'm doing well. Yeah, there's a lot of party stuff. A Marty
McFly, Cartoon Network has one of their top shows right now as
Marty character in it to see. So yeah, he's getting around.
Marty
Everyone's getting on the bandwagon.
Matt
I don't know how to segue. So we're going to go ahead and just move
into the attack already. Well, we do have an election coming up.
Craig Peterson. Of course, in South Carolina, we've already seen a
few primaries as well. And they've all gone smoothly with no
trouble as we all know. There is an evolving question, though, that
every time we have an election, we sort of debate and talk about
and ask ourselves a very similar question? How can we make sure
that these things are on the up and up? How do we make sure that
our voting is secure? How do we make sure that it is all done
correctly, and that nobody hacking and changing votes and
manipulating things? On a more fundamental level? How do we protect
our elections in technology?
Craig
Yeah, real big question a big problem. There are a few states have
and, in fact, quite a few now that are using these election
machines that we've grown to know and love, where we have a piece
of paper effectively. And you fill in those little ovals there
using the pencil or felt tip pen, right. You guys are familiar with
those, right? Because you voted, right. Yeah. Those are right now,
anyway, the best type of technology used for voting. There are
other states and go all the way on the other side, and use these
touchscreen voting machines that are running Windows XP. Now
Windows XP hasn't been supported for many, many, many years, and
they are connecting them to networks. When you vote, you just you
touch the screen saying you're voting for so and so but some of
these machines, they've got configured steal tickets. So you say,
I'm voting Republican, or I'm voting Democrat. Or maybe you have
Libertarian in that in a state right. People have repeatedly
complained that the machines are improperly registering their
votes. They'll say I'm voting for President Trump but somehow was
recorded for Bernie Sanders. Right? That's, that's kind of the
nightmare scenario. We don't want to see this Fall. If you vote and
your votes not counted or correctly counted. When these things hit
the news, and there is no audit trail like in some of these states,
all you have is this computer that identifies that you voted for
Bernie Sanders, even though you meant to vote for Donald J. Trump.
They hit the news, all of a sudden everyone's all worried that
somehow maybe my vote didn't count. Maybe there's cheating going
on. Both of these could be true when using some of these types of
technology. So there is a $10 million contract that has been
awarded, it was awarded last year to come up with a secure voting
machine. It looks like it's going to be more of a secure method of
voting. There are so many ways that voting can be hacked. I just
mentioned the machines themselves. If they are connected to a
network ever, there is a potential for hacking. Optical Scanning
machines used in New Hampshire are never connected to networks.
They're loaded up, they put a little, basically a thumb drive into
them, and they dump what the load is all about. But ultimately,
there are multiple places that it could be hacked and could be
hacked at the Secretary of State's office, where they're compiling
all the votes from all of these machines throughout the state. It
could be hacked again at the Secretary of State's office but on the
website, where they post results, and where the federal government
goes to get the results from the Secretaries of State. There's
nothing fancy about how the votes are collected nationally. So your
question going right back to it, Matt, have Can we trust the
election? How can we trust the vote? Right now, I'd say here in
Maine we are in pretty good shape. In the majority of states are in
pretty good shape. There was a lot of money. I can't remember the
numbers, exact number but a lot of money that was set aside and
given to states to upgrade their voting machines. The temptation is
always as we talked to with Ken here about this a couple of weeks
ago. Should we buy the Betamax right or buy the newest, greatest
latest, and coolest technology? We see right now from the FBI and
Homeland Security reports, generally speaking at this point, it
doesn't look like there will be a lot of problems this year. There
was disclosed some significant issues in few states in the 2016
election with problems with hacking attempt, explicitly directed at
the Secretaries of States in several different countries. Those
Secretaries of State have been informed about it, those of them
that come out recently. Ultimately, I guess we won't know how good
it is until sometime after the fact. That part of it doesn't make
me feel warm and fuzzy, is that the average time to figure out a
hack occurred is your business is around six months. If the
Secretaries of State get hacked, I'm not sure we can feel
comfortable, would even know that they've been hacked. If they did,
it wouldn't be much after the fact. So just let's stick with the
old fashioned way for now, because it's the best way, the brand new
way, by the way, that $10 million award. It looks like they are
leaning towards a paper solution as well. So it's an electronic
voting machine. And you touch the screen so that you vote for
people you want. It spits out a piece of paper with your votes on
it, you then take that piece of paper with your votes on it, and
you give it to ever to whoever is, is running that little local
election, they run it through a scanning machine. That is not much
different from what we're doing today. And that's, that's a
suggestion as to what the most secure type of voting will be.
Marty
Craig, it's, it's Marty. So yeah, it fills in the Oval for you
then. But let me ask you if I may change topics on you a little
bit. These trackers kind of drive me bonkers, right. When I when I
visit, you know, the onion dot com or something the banner ads seem
like they take forever to load.
I added the DuckDuckGo extension to Google Chrome, and it cut that
right off. I mean, what is your take was was that a good idea? A
bad or bad idea?
Craig
Well, we've just had over 500 extensions removed from the Chrome
extensions store, store, even though they're free, right, you have
to pay for them. And as a general rule, I advise against using
those extensions. In about two weeks, Marty, I'm going to have some
training that I'm going to be releasing that's free. I'm not trying
to upsell you or trying to sell you anything about some of these
extensions that are going to keep your information safe. Now
DuckDuckGo is well known as one of the best guys out there when it
comes to blocking your tracking. Some of the others that I'm going
to be covering in training include Ghostery, and you should be
using HTTPS anywhere, which does something a little bit different.
pundants amazing. You block origin and others. I'm going to go
through those a couple of hours worth of training that I'll be
releasing here in a couple of weeks, but Marty, I think you're
right, use DuckDuckGo for your search engine. And there are more
and more these extensions that are trying to keep your privacy. And
I haven't looked at goes. But as a rule, those guys have been great
and make sites load faster. Over to you.
Marty
That's what it does.
Craig
Ultimately, you know, all of these different extensions that I just
mentioned in there, we're going to be doing this training on all of
them will make it load faster. And you take a site like forbes.com
that just has a crazy number of trackers on it. And the ads that
you mentioned, like the ads, loading, and taking time, it makes
Forbes go from about it took four minutes for me the other day to
completely load everything on Forbes homepage. It was that bad.
Then when I turned on these blocker extensions, it went from four
minutes down to five seconds. So they're not only tracking us, but
they're making our lives miserable. Trying defined to stuff we're
looking for on the page. Right, Marty kids are there cluttered with
all this junk too, right?
Marty
Yeah, it's awful. I frankly, I don't miss it. But it does make it
all a little bit
cleaner. But back over to Matt, I think you had a question.
Sure.
Matt
I got one more quick one for you before we let you go, Craig. The
password that I am going to be required to change in like, I think,
a couple of days here at the radio station is among the 8000
different passwords that I have to change all the time. And there
are no new recommendations. I understand it from the FBI that we
are using passphrases instead of complex passwords. So like instead
of d3, 724 dashes, but you know, period, whatever, some crazy
combination of letters, whatever we should be using passphrases Why
don't you explain that a little bit.
Craig
Yeah, well, get this quick. I'm going to go into this more on my
show on Saturday at 1 pm So you can tune in there. And it's a
two-hour show, and we go into quite a bit of depth on some of these
things. But I'm glad you brought it up because this is one of the
essential pieces of advice in the security world in the last five
years. About five years ago, a study came out saying that rather
than those types of complicated passwords that you just mentioned
is not practical based on today's technology. Here's the bottom
line recommendation from the FBI and from the research that's been
out there, use a string for random words together, and just put a
dash in between each of the terms, or space, whatever you'd like. A
passphrase is something that might make sense to you, something
that might not make sense at all, but something you can remember,
and that's the essential part. Now, if your business, like for
instance, Matt, your business might require some more company
passwords, you might want to share this article with them. So you
still might have to have those crazy ones or numbers, letters,
uppercase, lowercase, special symbols, etc. But in reality, those
are not the best passwords nowadays, make sure it's at least 15
characters long. Throw a few non-related words. For instance,
making America great again would be a lousy password.
Marty
I thought I was going to use I can't drive 65. So there you go.
That's probably not one to use now that you mentioned on the air
Marty, that's true.
Craig
Yeah. But those types of passwords are the best.
Matt
All right, well, Craig Peterson He is our tech guru. He joins us at
this time every Wednesday to go over what's happening. Excuse me in
the world of technology. Craig one more time promo for the show,
when is it? What time where can you listen to it? What are you
going to be talking about? Give me that one more time before you go
and then, and then we'll say thanks.
Craig
Okay. I'm not the automaton that Marty is when you ask that
question.
The show this Saturday, every Saturday from one till three, I
talked about the latest in technology with an emphasis on security.
We're going to be talking about some of the cloud services that
businesses are using thinking that somehow they're safer, right?
But how to make it safer. We'll talk a little bit more about the
passwords. Ransomware is on the rise right now. Apple Macintoshes.
It turns out there's more malware out there and get a few more
things as well. But this weekend shows Saturday at one we're kind
of focusing on cloud software.
Matt
All right, his name is Craig Peterson. He is our tech guru. He
joins us at this time every Wednesday to go over what's happening
in the world of technology. Today was no exception to that, Craig,
thank you very much. And we will talk to you again next week,
sir.
Craig
Gentlemen, take care. Bye-Bye. All right. Appreciate it, Craig.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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