Jan 21, 2022
Do You Trust HomelandSecurity And The FBI For Your Cyber Security?
What a week the FBI got hacked, Homeland Security supposedly issending out emails about hackers in your network. This is whatwe're going to talk about to start with today. What are these newemails and how are they trying to con you? And can we trust theFeds for our Cyber Security?
[Following is an automated transcript]
This is a little bit concerning. We know that the FBI's emailsystem got hacked. And for everyone that's sitting there sayinggee, if the FBI gets hacked, there's no way my business canpossibly survive an attack. Remember that the FBI is a huge target.They have so many systems, so many people and the bad guys reallywould love to send email out as though they are the FBI.
[00:00:47] And in fact, they did, they used the FBI's emailservers to send out some of these fake emails. I thought that wasfunny, but be that as it may, the FBI closed. But there are thingsyou can do to protect yourself, to protect your email. And my wifeand I have been working diligently on a guide.
[00:01:10] Now, that I protect businesses. I work closely withthe FBI, been doing cyber security for more than 30 years. I hateto admit that. But I've been on the internet for more than 40years. So I've been at this for a very long time and there arethings you can do.
[00:01:29] So we're making available a guide. So she's taken alot of my teachings and is boiled it down. It looks like it's goingto be 25 ish pages. And it's just the key things, the primarythings that you can do. To stop your email from getting hacked,your bank accounts, et cetera. There are some pretty simple thingsyou can do.
[00:01:54] So we're putting that together and we're also puttingtogether a bootcamp and both of these are free. Okay. Absolutelyfree. And in the bootcamp, again, this book isn't about selling youall of the, my services and stuff. It's giving you. Actionablethings you can do. Yes, you can do. You don't need to be the FBI ora cybersecurity expert to do them, but five things you can do thatwill, I don't know, 10 X, your cybersecurity, really?
[00:02:30] It's that big a deal. And it's going to take you lessthan an hour to do all of this stuff. So for those people who likethe boot camp, so we're going to have. And one of these zoom thingsand we're going to do it live and I'm going to explain it to you,spleen it. And you're going to have some homework before thebootcamp, because I want you to have some skin in the game too.
[00:02:56] You're not paying me or anything. So I want to makesure that you've done your homework so we can quickly. Go throughall of the stuff that we need to cover in the bootcamp and peoplewho are interested in being the example, which means they are goingto get more information than anybody else.
[00:03:13] You can also say, Hey, listen, yeah, please use mineas an example. So we'll look at all of these different things.We're going to focus in on that first bootcamp primarily on. Thestuff with passwords, what should you do? How should you do it? Howcan you tell if your password has been stolen? If your emailaccounts been compromised, all of that sort of thing.
[00:03:37] And you need to be on my email list in order to findout about this stuff. And in fact, when you sign. I've got threespecial reports that Karen and I wrote that are really going to behelpful for you. These are three that we've been using with ourclients for years, but again, actionable. To do right, is not somemarketing sales guy trying to sell you the latest, greatest pieceof antivirus software that doesn't work.
[00:04:09] So you can get that. If you go to Craig peterson.comright now slash subscribe. If you want the deep link, Craigpeterson.com/subscribe. We'll go ahead and sign you up. I have alittle automated sequence. It's going to send you the emails withall of the attachments. We got one, that's an introduction to Karenand I, you get to see both of us.
[00:04:35] And it's a really cool picture of when we're onvacation one time and you can get all of that again. It's free.This is the free newsletter. This isn't the paid newsletter. Craigpeterson.com. Slash subscribe. All right. So I can help you outwith all of that free content. And I have lots of it. I'm on theradio every week talking about free, right.
[00:04:59] And you can avoid these things. So I hate to bring upthis FBI hack because as I discussed again with Karen this week Idon't want people to feel like there's nothing that they can do. Ihave a friend, her name's Laura and she's in one of my mastermindgroups. And Laura is, was listening to me because anothermastermind member got hacked and it had what was it?
[00:05:24] $45,000 ultimately stolen from him. And we helped himout. And so I was explaining, okay, so here's the things you cando. And. Basically all she heard was I'm never going to be able todo this. And she's a technical person. She teaches people how tobecome business analysts, which is pretty technical, there's a lotof steps involved in doing business and analyst work. And so I wasreally surprised to hear from her that she had. The securingherself was just too hard. The FBI gets hacked, et cetera. And sothat's why when I came to this realization, the bottom line is,yeah. Okay. It can be hard if you're like me and you've been indoing this for 30 years, you've got the curse of knowledge,right?
[00:06:16] So all of this stuff, this isn't for you. If you knoweverything, okay, this is for people who. Quite understand what'sgoing on. Definitely don't understand what they should do. Don'tknow what they should buy. Don't know how to use the free stuffthat Microsoft and apple give you and how to pull it alltogether.
[00:06:37] That's what I want you to be able to understand, andwe spend time every. Going through this and every newsletter. Ihave a, an opening now that is a lot about three to five minuteread. If that it can be very quick read and is helping you tounderstand some of the things that you can and should do.
[00:07:00] So you'll get that as part of the newsletter. Again,Craig peterson.com. That's in my free newsletter. You should seethe paid newsletter. It's a big deal because it's your life. It's abig deal because it's your business. It's a big deal because it'syour job on the line. And most of the time, and when I pick up anew client, it's somebody who's the office manager.
[00:07:23] Frankly, more than your office manager, sometimes thebusiness owner, owner operator says to the office manager, Hey, wegot to do something about cybersecurity and then I get. Saying,Hey, can you do a cyber health assessment for us and that cyberhealth assessment, which we'll do for almost anybody out there willtell you the basic self.
[00:07:46] Okay. Here's what you got to do. You've got to updatethis. You should turn off this software or you should do this andthat with your firewall so that they have. I a little checklist,that they can run through. That's the whole idea behind one ofthese cyber health assessment. And then what happens is they say,okay let's talk some more and we go in and talk with them, talkwith the owner.
[00:08:12] Do they want to do, help them put together a moredetailed plan and then they are off and running so they can do itthemselves. They can hire someone, they can have us do it for them,whatever seems to make the most sense, but it's very important. Todo it, to do something because sitting there trusting the Google'sgoing to take care of you or apple or whomever, it is trustingNorton antivirus is going to take care of.
[00:08:43] I was reading a quote from John McAfee. He's the guythat started the whole antivirus industry. Now, of course, hepassed away not too long ago, under suspicious circumstances, buthe came out and said, Hey, listen, antivirus is. Because right nowthis year, these weren't his stats. These are stats published.
[00:09:04] You can find them online. Just duck, go them. Yeah. Idon't use Google for most things. And you'll find that theantivirus is ineffective 77, 0% of the time. What do you need todo? You need to listen to me here because I am going to help keepyou up to date here. Some people are auditory listeners.
[00:09:23] You need to make sure that you get the newsletter sothat you get the weekly updates and you find out about these freetrainings and special reports that we put together. Makes sense toyou and you can attend the boot camps where we cover the basicallyone hour meetings on zoom, just like you're used to, and we coverone or more specific topics and we do it live and we use yourinformation.
[00:09:54] The information you want us to have a, do you want usto share? So how could that be better? And it's the same sort ofstuff, but deeper dives and more interactive obviously than radio.And you can listen to me here every week. I think it's importantthat you do, and you understand this stuff. So anyways ramble.
[00:10:14] It all starts with email. How do you keep your emailssafe? You might remember years ago, you, people were getting brokeninto and emails were sent out using their accounts. That happeneddecades ago and it's still happening today. Right now, Craigpeterson.com. I promise you. I am not a heavy marketer.
[00:10:36] Okay. You're going to get good, actionableinformation that you can put to use in a matter of minutes, Craigpeterson.com/subscribe. Hey, stick around. I promise. I'll get youthis department of Homeland security warning in just a minute.We'll be right back.
[00:10:59] Our intelligence monitoring indicates exfiltration ofseveral of your virtualized clusters in a fist sophisticated chainattack. Your, I am trying to put on this like official voice. Andit didn't do so well anyways, that's what we're going to talkabout.
[00:11:14] This is an email that came from the department ofHomeland security warning about hackers in our network.
[00:11:23] Okay. The subject line here, the one I'm looking at,and this is a justice week, urgent threat. In systems read theemail goes on. We tried to black hole, the transit nodes used bythis advanced persistent threat actor. However, there is a hugechance you will modify as attack with fast flux technologies. Idon't know if that ties into a flux capacitor or not, which heproxies through.
[00:11:53] Multiple global accelerators. So this is somebody whodoesn't really know what they're talking about. They're justthrowing up big words. We identified the threat actor to be.Somebody whom is believed to be in of course, whom wrong usage ofthe word here is believed to be affiliated with the extortion gang,the dark overlord, comma, uppercase.
[00:12:18] We highly recommend you to check your systems and IDsmonitoring. Be where this threat actor is currently working underthe inspection of the NCC. I see, as we are dependent on some ofhis intelligence research, we cannot interfere physically withinfour hours, which could be enough time to cause severe damage toyour infrastructure.
[00:12:44] Stay safe. USDA department of Homeland security,cyber threat detection and analysis network analysis. Total controlpanel. So this is classic when it comes to scammers. And theclassic part is that you could do. Is the grammars bad. The wordingis confusing, his punctuation is wrong and he's throwing out allwhole bunch of words that are used when it comes to hackers.
[00:13:20] There are things like advanced, persistent threats.That's one of the biggest problems in fact, businesses have today.But in reality, the way he used it, Incorrect now that's somethingI would notice cause I've been doing this stuff for more than 30years, but the average person is never going to notice somethinglike this.
[00:13:44] So it's been pretty, in fact, pretty successful now,a little different than usual here. These fake messages don't haveattachments. They don't have phone numbers. They don't have weblinks. Therefore what? Your email filter is not going to look atthem and say, oh, these look risky. These URL links are going torisky sites.
[00:14:11] I'm going to block it. That's what we do. We have theadvanced email filtering from Cisco that we use for our clients, orthat includes their amazing artificial intelligence for fishing andstuff. So an email like this is not go. To trigger those types ofalarms. So they're saying don't panic, avoid contacting the FBI forfurther details and ignore the accusations that are made in theemail.
[00:14:39] This is so focused though. So flows is acybersecurity company. They have a lot of stuff. They have somepretty good stuff. It's not there's not. But spam house is trackingit. Now, if you've ever been blacklisted, it's called black holingreally by people who might've used your domain to send spam, ormaybe you're a spammer, you've heard of spam house and I've beenblacklisted before inappropriately.
[00:15:07] The good news is my. That I use for emailing is about30 years old as well. So it's got a pretty good reputation over theyears, but spam house is saying now that this is a scam they'vebeen tracking it. It's a well-known scam and it's been widelycirculated. To those office managers that I said are often thepeople who call us when there's a cybersecurity problem, or we getcalls from office managers when something doesn't look right withthe emails.
[00:15:44] And we have a client that had been getting theseweird emails and. We were called saying, what's going on, have alook. We looked and we found all kinds of problems. So that again,an office manager approaching us and thinking everything's finebecause they had Norton and they had the more advanced Symantecstuff and it didn't catch.
[00:16:09] Any of this really nasty stuff, but that's part ofwhat Spamhaus does. And they're looking at it and saying, oh, okay,wait a minute. Now we're seeing these emails come out. They aredefinitely not coming from fbi.gov, which is what the returnaddress is. And so spam house tags, it spam. Assassin's going totag it and it's not even going to make it.
[00:16:37] Anything about a log on are our email filter. So anumber of people have received it. If you've received this email,I'd love to know it because they really are trying to go after thepeople who are a little bit more into this now, how do they findthem? Apparently? They have stolen the email addresses by scrapingthem from public sources.
[00:17:03] So databases published by Aaron, for instance, theAmerican registry for internet numbers. And I'm assigned my ownnumber is CP 2 0 5 because I was so early on by Aaron they're theguys that have been managing. The basic internet domain stuff herein the U S for very long time. And it also doesn't mean by the waythat Aaron had any sort of a breach.
[00:17:28] And really just showing that the crooks behind thisdisinformation campaign have really been focusing on people whoappear to be in network administration, because those are the emailaddresses and names that Aaron is going to have. So why are theydoing this? Why are they sending it out into it's frankly, it'skinda hard to tell some of the emails have a QR code in them.
[00:17:58] Now that is intriguing because here's how, again, howa lot of these basic email filters work, they look at it, they saywhat links are in there? How many links, how much of the email is agraphic? And they understand while it's going to internet badguys.com. There's the link right there. Forget about it.
[00:18:22] I'm not going to forward this email to the intendedrecipient, but if there's a QR code in that email to almost everyemail filter out through. It only looks like a graphic. So might'vebeen a picture of your mother as far as it knows. Most of them arenot very smart. So you getting an email, having a QR code in it andsaying, oh, that's interesting.
[00:18:47] Let's check out that QR code. That's where the hazardcom. All right. So be very careful fake news like this. It's notonly unfair to the people who are accused in it, which is whathappened here. They can be accusing your own it department. Theycan be accusing. People within your department, which is typicallywhat's happening and then what they may try and do now that youdon't trust your, it people, your security people, because they'rementioned by name in the email, but remember their names areprobably scraped off of a.
[00:19:27] That you don't trust them. And now they attack youand you don't trust that you've been attacked. So fake news, a termcoined by Hillary Clinton during hurricane campaign, but that'sexactly what it is entirely fake. So this email, if you get onefrom Homeland security about threat actors in your systems, almostcertain.
[00:19:51] Fake stick around. We've got a lot more coming up.Don't forget to subscribe. Get my weekly newsletter. I'm going tobe published and even more, I think probably starting next month.I'm going to be sending a couple emails out a week because I got toget you guys up to speed so that you're ready for the upcomingbootcamp.
[00:20:13] Stick around.
[00:20:15] Everybody knows about the chip shortage, right?Computer chips. They're just hard to find. I'm hearing all kinds ofads from Dell lately on the radio. And they're saying just buy now.They're not selling new high-end machines anymore.
[00:20:30] This is a story from the verge about who hasallegedly kinda stepped in about Intel's plans to increase chipproduction.
[00:20:42] And you'd think that the white house would beencouraging chip production. Considering the shortages, the justiceweek, it came out Tesla hasn't been delivering their electric car.Without USB ports. Other manufacturers are no longer providing youwith an electric window for your car. It's a crank window.
[00:21:05] Car manufacturers did it to themselves, frankly, bystopping orders for chips during the lockdown, thinking thatsomehow people wouldn't need cars anymore. And yet their sales ofcars went up and when they go. Yeah. Guess what happens to theprice? The price goes up, right? Inflation. You have more moneychasing fewer goods.
[00:21:29] So they really nailed themselves. Don't feel so sorryfor some of these car manufacturers. We need more chips. Imentioned one of the manufacturers of PCs, the many of us use inour offices and Jews in our homes. Dell is a good company. Theyhave been for a long time. However, you gotta be careful whenyou're buying computers because Dell makes very low end computersall the way up through good solid servers.
[00:21:58] Same. Thing's true with. P Hewlett, Packard, excuseme, Hewlett Packard. Remember those guys back in the day? Yeah.They also make everything from cheap computers that you never wouldbuy should not buy all the way up through really good ones. It'slike going to Walmart, you go to the Walmart and you don't want tobuy any of the computer sitting there with one exception.
[00:22:24] And that is the Chromebook. If you buy a mid tierChromebook at Walmart, you're going to get a good little computer.Doesn't run windows, doesn't run Microsoft office word, et cetera,but it can still edit those documents. And it's a very good machinethat is kept up to date. Just watch the price $110 Chromebook,probably isn't going to last.
[00:22:48] It doesn't have much storage on it, et cetera. A$2,000 Chromebook is probably major overhead. So go somewhere inthe $400 $500 range for a Chromebook, which is by the way wherethey're selling some of the laptops. Wouldn't those laptops, sameprice point. Now again, that's why I just wouldn't buy any ofthat.
[00:23:12] So we need more chips. We need higher end chips. Theyare very hard to get our hands on right now. We're talking aboutelectrification of everything. And if you've heard me on the radioduring morning drive time, I've been just bemoaning how thegovernment's putting the horse before the. They're out there sayingelectric, and shutting down pipelines and coal mining and coalpower plants.
[00:23:39] Although coal is one of the cleanest energy sourcesnowadays because of all of the scrubbing that's going on with theoutput of the coal plant. And also of course, they're, they've beenstomping. Most of the nuclear plants from coming online, eventhough the new. Technology in nuclear is impossible to fail.
[00:24:01] They use basic physics to make sure that these thingsaren't going to do a Jane Fonda China's syndrome thing. Okay. Soit's just crazy. We don't have the electrical. Even if we put up,it would take literally millions of wind farm, our turbines, andobviously millions of rooms and fields covered with solarcells.
[00:24:29] We would still need nuclear. We would still needother sources of power because the sun doesn't shine all the timeand the wind doesn't blow all of the time. This is just completelybackward. People aren't thinking it through. It's again, it's theknee jerk. And of course they're investing heavily. They being thecongresspeople of themselves, particularly those Congress peoplelike the Al Gore's of the world and Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer,because they are forcing a move to this technology that isn't readyfor prime time.
[00:25:05] And at the same time, we are trying to buy electriccars. How are we going to charge them? How are we going to run ourhomes? It's like Europe, people froze to death last winter inEurope. It's going to happen again this year. And the thing aboutwhat happened in Texas last year. Yeah. Some of that was becausethey weren't prepared, but guess what else happens?
[00:25:30] Sometimes the wind isn't blowing in Texas. So there'sjust all kinds of problems. So Intel is saying we got to increaseour chip production. Intel's main business right now, by the way,he seems to be moving towards making chips on behalf of otherpeople, other companies, rather than making their own chips.
[00:25:53] Isn't that kind of interesting. And the industry, thechip fab industry, the ones that fabricate the chips, make thechips are spending about $2 billion a week. According to the latestnumbers I saw to try and expand the manufactured. Apparently Intelwent to the white house because they want some of our taxdollars.
[00:26:17] The money they'd take at the point of a gun. Theywant some of that so that they can build their business, build itback better. And apparently some sources close to the situationtold Bloomberg that Intel. Posed making silicone wafers in aChinese factory, which could start production towards the end ofnext year.
[00:26:44] But in a move that I agree with had the Biden whitehouse, apparently Intel was strongly discouraged due to potentialsecurity issues. Yeah, no kidding. Some major security issues here.We don't want to give away our technology to make this leading edgestuff. Think about the us. We were always the country that peoplecame to for technology.
[00:27:15] I mentioned this week on the radio, the cotton ginway back when look at how much labor. That that cut look at theinternal combustion engine. And again the Teamsters, the horses,the cleanup crews in New York city. All of that went goodbye prettymuch because of technology and people got higher technology.
[00:27:40] Jobs and everyone became more efficient and that's,what's supposed to happen right now when right now waste, basicallywe have stagflation in other words, prices are going up, but we'renot getting any more productivity out of it. That's a real problem.And that's why they keep talking about the problems we were havingin the late seventies.
[00:28:01] And I remember those well, I remember gas linessitting there in California waiting to buy gas. It was incrediblewhat was happening out there. So Intel thinks it needs to securefunding from the federal government in order to ramp up theproduction. Bloomberg announced, Orwell said that Intel currentlyhas no plans to produce silicone wafers in China after discussingit with governor.
[00:28:31] Officials and it will instead consider othersolutions. Now I hope those other solutions are to make thoseplants, those chip fab plant here in the United States. Let's putourselves back on a leading edge footing here. Google moved itsartificial intelligence lab to China talking about. Anti Americanthing to do moved it to China, artificial intelligence.
[00:29:01] That's something we need. The us needs to be theworld leader in some of these technologies. And frankly, we're notthe leader anymore. It's it frankly, a. So you can check this out.It's on the verge. You'll also find it up on my website. CraigPeter sohn.com. Make sure you sign up for the newsletter so you canget all of these little trainings, five minutes a weekend can makea big difference.
[00:29:33] Craig peterson.com.
[00:29:35] Hey, I don't want to depress anyone, but Bitcoin isnow a 13 year old teenager. And back in January, 2009, Bitcoin waspriced at well. Wow. We'll get into this in just a minute.
[00:29:51] Bitcoin January 3rd, 2009 is when it was launched.And E Bitcoin was priced at you ready for this point?
[00:30:03] Zero 8 cents each. Okay. The and because of that, alot of people. I have been seen we've got to get into this and thatin fact, Elon Musk has been pushing up the price of another digitalcurrency. All of the initial price increases in Bitcoin were due tofraud.
[00:30:26] According to a lot of reports and we can get intothose if you'd like fraud. Yeah. That's a great way to launch awhole new product. And they also played some other games. Forinstance, the biggest driver of Bitcoin price for a long time wascrux. For ransomware. Yeah. People had to buy ransom and payransoms.
[00:30:54] How do you pay a ransom while usually it was withBitcoin and that meant you had to turn us dollars or other foreigncurrencies into Bitcoin. And as economists in the white house,don't seem to understand when there is more money tracing, alimited commodity, the price of the commodity goes up, whether it'sgasoline, food, or Bitcoin, and that's exactly what happened.
[00:31:27] Percentage wise, how much of an increase has therebeen in the value of Bitcoin? Let me see here. If I can figure thisout 7 billion, 750000000% increase. Isn't that something now ofcourse we don't all have these magical glasses that let us lookforward to figure it out. Out, but it's based on this peer to peerelectronic cash system that was written about by someone or a groupof people that went by the pseudonym of Natasha Nakamoto.
[00:32:07] And there've been a few people over the years whohave claimed that they are the person that started it and maybe oneof them is, and may be, none of them are who knows, but this wasfirst published, October 31st, 2008. So about a month later is whenit started to trade and it is just incredible here.
[00:32:29] Bitcoin was really perceived initially. Threat bygovernment and financial institutions. I think it's still perceivedas a threat. My government, they are able to track Bitcoin andother cryptocurrencies in many cases and the way they track it aswell. If you have Bitcoin, what good is it? Unless you can use theBitcoin to either buy something or to traded for us dollars oranother hard currency, that's how they're tracking.
[00:33:03] Without getting into a lot of detail here, but it'sinteresting to look at because the Bitcoin white papers proposing asolution to prevent what they were calling double spending. Andwhen you don't trust a third party necessarily, and that's where wegot these logs, if you will, the. Balance sheets that were beingused to track everything.
[00:33:29] And then you had the voting, you had to have 50% ofthese systems that were tracking all of the transactions, agree ona transaction, et cetera. And that's actually been a problem forBitcoin because of the. Intermediaries, you have to go through orget to approve your transaction. It's a, frankly, a problem that'sreally slowed down transaction.
[00:33:57] So you can't just go like with a credit card and payfor something that's done. It can take your day or more. Now it'sinteresting that we're getting close to the ultimate limit ofBitcoin offerings. The blockchain's mind blocked number 707,000.Which by the way, offered a mining reward of six and a quarterBitcoins.
[00:34:25] So think about that. It costs you more to mine,Bitcoins than they're worth. If you're trying to do it in theNortheast. Pretty much anywhere in the United States. So don't justrun out and start doing it. My son and I don't know, five, eightyears ago, something like that, we decided we'd start trying to dosome mining and we didn't find any Bitcoins and it was just cookingsome machines.
[00:34:50] And so we said, forget about it. And we gave out onit. It does have a hard cap. Then it's got a ways to go. I said,it's approaching. It is, but there's 21 million Bitcoin is the hardcap and the community that maintains the software and maintainsBitcoin because it is a committed. Has it been modifying the rulesas time went around at about how many Bitcoin you get when you'remining something, into solving these problems and how theblockchain works.
[00:35:26] And how many honest and dishonest mentions were inthe original Bitcoin white paper and how can they reject invalidblocks? So there's a lot of technical stuff going on and it'schanging. All of the time. And ultimately it's the consensusmechanism that has been slowing it. So when it costs you more tomine, a Bitcoin than you get for it.
[00:35:54] So let's do a little bit of math here. If we say thathow much is a Bitcoin worth right now? So we say current value ofBitcoin. I'm typing it in right now. So it's about $57,000. PerBitcoin, if say 57,000 here we go. 57,000 times. What did I say?Six and a quarter, right? So $362,000 equivalent is what they, theperson who mined this block was paying.
[00:36:32] That sounds pretty good. Doesn't it? Yeah, it reallydoes. It adds up quite quickly. But when you consider that it costsmore to mine, a Bitcoin than it costs, then you get to paid for it.350, $6,000. That's a lot of electricity on a lot of hardware. Andbecause of that, China has. Down Bitcoin mining operations, becauseit uses so much electricity and in the United States and in someother countries, but here in the U S and in the UK, some of theseBitcoin mining operations have been buying.
[00:37:11] Coal powered power plants, coal fired power plants sothat they can produce their own electricity so they can make itworthwhile to mine. So things are going to change. They're going tobe changing the rules. As I said, we've got a total of 21 millionBitcoin ultimately. And so far we've only just mined number707,540.
[00:37:38] So the interchange, the rules, I'm going to keep aneye on this cause that's an interesting one. Elon Musk, his quoteis Crip. Cryptocurrency is fundamentally aimed at reducing thepower of a centralized government. And that by the way, can be oneof the main reasons that Bitcoin hasn't been really adopted in themainstream yet.
[00:37:58] And Ilan has all kinds of tweets. Bitcoin and othercryptocurrencies, he says, Bitcoin is my safe word. Isn't that?Something he's been primarily the guy behind Dodge coin, which isyet another crypto currency, D O G. Coyne D O G E coin doge, coin.And you can find that online. I think it has new doge even publiclytraded while it's certainly traded as a crypto.
[00:38:28] Okay. So doge coin right now is worth 22 cents. It'sdown from its month, week, and day highs. I'm looking. Here. Yeah.Yeah. So it's gone up and down. It's been worth more. Yeah. Acouple of weeks ago. So that's part of the problem with it. If youdon't have money that you can absolutely waste, don't buy thisstuff and I'm not an investment advisor, but I've never bought anyBitcoin or any other cryptocurrency.
[00:39:01] And the problem is, and from my perspective that itis not real at all. Yeah, you can say, look at this, I could havemade 7000000% on that. You could do the same thing almost if youhad, instead of buying a brand new Tesla model as eight years ago,seven years ago, and paying $77,000 for that.
[00:39:25] If you had bought $77,000 worth of Tesla stock, you'dbe in the millions of dollars in value. And so we've got the Ravencompany out there. I don't know if you know these guys or not. Iwatched a motorcycle show. They're going from the tip of southAmerica all the way on up to San Diego. And they had this Rivy andelectric truck, which is really quite cool.
[00:39:52] They are public right now. They just won. And theyhave a market capitalization. In other words, a value of ribbon,which has only made a couple of dozen vehicles. That's it? Total.And they're owned by people who work for the company. Their marketcapitalization is 50% more. Then most of the major manufacturersout there, it's just crazy how much it is worth and why it'sbecause people are looking at it saying Tesla appreciated7000000%.
[00:40:30] Ravion's going to do the same. And by the way, theyare cool cars. I love the idea behind. Electric vehicles. It's justthat we got the cart before the horse who don't have theelectricity. We're not making the hard decisions. We're justripping stuff out. It's absolutely crazy. By the way, they had a15% drop in the value of their shares on Wednesday.
[00:40:54] It'll go up. It'll go down. But it's w it's somethingwe got to test remember? Okay. Cryptocurrency is not it yet ofTesla. Stock is worth something will probably always be worse.Something cryptocurrency is worth something, but tomorrow may beworth zero, and don't go crazy. These market caps of startupcompanies that have never done anything being worth 50% more thanmajor us auto manufacturer.
[00:41:26] What that's crazy. Visit me online. Craigpeterson.com.
[00:41:33] Clothing prices have been going up. In fact, apparelprices were up 4.2% in the last 12 months that as of August, we'vegot cotton going up. There's a whole bunch of things that are goingup and a company out there called dress X thinks it has a solutionfor all of these prices.
[00:41:58] Hi everybody. I'm Craig Peterson, your cybersecuritystrategist, and all around technology guru. And you're listening tonews radio w G a. I am five 60 and FM 98.5. I like to invite you tojoin me on the morning drive right here on w G a N Wednesdaymornings at seven 30. The clothing has been going up.
[00:42:26] Everything's been going up, I put some gas in my carthe other day. I have a, you might know, of course, a 1980 Mercedesand my wife drives a nice little Ford edge, not a particularly bigSUV, a, guest's a midsize SUV. And I put, I think it was about 15gallon Zan and it costs me more. 55, $0. I can't believe it.
[00:42:57] We used to have a little diesel little VolkswagenPassat diesel. We would drive around and we were getting prettyclose to 60 miles per gallon, around town. And diesel was about abuck, a gallon, and it cost 20 bucks to fill the silly thing up.And we could drive all the way down to New York city and backon.
[00:43:17] $20 worth of diesel one fill up. Okay. None of that'strue anymore, is it? And we're looking at some increases. It's notlike the kind of increase we've seen in certain foodstuffs orgasoline or eating oil. Apparel prices are up and there's a companyout there that thinks that maybe they have a bit of a solution foryou.
[00:43:41] It's called dress ex I found a video online of ayoung lady. Who's got a lot of followers, interesting lady. And shewas trying them out. She'd tried a different dress or differentclothes every day for a month. No, I did not watch all of thevideo, but I got the basic idea. And the idea is that people arebuying digital clothes.
[00:44:09] Now I think of that for a minute. Would you pay for adesigner? And maybe you wouldn't pay for designer dress, alreadyand AOC is dress that she wore, the lady of the people only cost.What was it? $30,000. Per seat for her to go to that banquet. And Ithink her dress was like five or $6,000.
[00:44:33] You can get a dress just like AOC. That's designed bya high-end fashion designer for somewhere between 40 and $60. Okay,but it's a virtual dress. It's not a real dress, not in the realworld. It's interesting what they're doing and trying to do. If youhave used some of these online sites like Instagram, they havevarious types of what they call filters.
[00:45:01] So you can put a filter on you and there's like amakeup filter, for instance, that makes you look like you're allmade up, it gets rid of all of the blemishes on. In, and there'sother filters that do backgrounds and do different things and makeyou look like you're a kitty cat or whatever. They'd all kinds ofcrazy things.
[00:45:22] This company called dress ex has now come out withfilters that you can use in their app. And they don't work too wellright now, but people have been buying these digital close to. Nowyou don't wear them out. Okay. There, this is really like theKing's new clothes. You might remember that story.
[00:45:46] And if all you have on are your digital clothes, youdon't have anything on. However, what it does is if you're usingtheir app and you're moving around and with their app, Paste theseclothes on you. And it's a little funky right now. It's not thebest, but you can bet that's exactly where it's going.
[00:46:09] And it reminds me of a blues, a Bruce Willis movie. Ican't remember the name of it. And it's I think really bringing upa whole type of. Dysphoria that I think people are going to havemore and more where you're living in this artificial life and thatartificial life that you're in now that's called SIRA gets, I wasjust looking up as we were talking that artificial life that you'rein is so nice.
[00:46:40] You don't want to live. In the real world. And I'mstarting to see this now with things like dress X, which you'llfind online, address x.com. You can now wear anything you want. Youcan use the filters that are available generally to change. Parentsto change your ethnicity, to change anything you want.
[00:47:04] And if you ever saw Sarah gets, it was a veryinteresting movie. I liked it. I watched it because I generallylike Bruce Willis and Rosa Mon pike, who were the two primaryactors in this movie. But in the movie, everybody was just sittingthere. And they were in these 3d chairs. And while you're in thatchair, you could be anybody anywhere doing anything and literallyanyone.
[00:47:32] And so you're sitting in the chair. If you can seearound you, it looks real. It feels real everything about it isreal, at least for the most part, but in reality, And none of it'sreal. And these people, they, some of them got out of those chairsand while they were out a nasty things happen to them. In fact, itwas, he was a cop and they were investigating some murders of thesepeople who were again, using what they were calling.
[00:48:05] Sarah gets nowadays with what our friends over atface. Or doing, you are going to see it called something else.Facebook, in case you didn't know Facebook changed its name. NowFacebook is still Facebook, but the parent company like Googlesplit off and change the company name Facebook did the samething.
[00:48:27] They're calling it. And the idea is to have this metauniverse where again, just like in surrogates gets nothing is real,just like on dress ex you can wear any fashion you want to, andinstead of paying thousands of dollars, you pay tens of dollars,basically. Now I mentioned that their video isn't very good.
[00:48:53] At least not yet over address X, but you can go todress X. You can take photos of yourself and send them to dress X.They will go ahead and put whatever clothes you want to be. On youit's basically. Yeah, it's Photoshopping, but they do a pretty goodjob in general. I looked at a whole bunch of them, but it it, itlooked pretty real.
[00:49:19] You don't have to consider the fit. You don't have toworry about how big you are because all of these clothes adjust,infinitely a store. Doesn't have to stock a bunch of them. So we'removing. This whole metaverse idea and these digital clothes, whichare really a thing nowadays has vice said, vice.com.
[00:49:43] We're moving more and more to this unreal world andsome real unreal fashions too. I'm looking at some of them and it'shard to even describe them. It looks like there's all of these.Things growing all over the clothes that are coming out and justdoing all kinds of weird things. So there you go.
[00:50:06] I'm note on fashion. I'm looking right now at apicture that's right in front of the metropolitan museum of art inNew York, and a lady is wearing one of the. Digital dresses. Nowthey tell you what you should be doing. And when you take thatpicture is aware of skin tight clothes so that they can match thedigital close to you a little bit better.
[00:50:31] But w we'll see, she's saying that in this. Tweet atthe, in front of the mat, she's saying I just can't wait for themet gala. What it will look like in 21, 21, because you know what,she's not wrong about this. It's really coined to change. There'ssome real cool stuff. Go to my website. If you want to see this,you can find it on vice, but I have a link to it.
[00:50:54] Just look for this. Show notes and you'll find itright there. In fact, you're getting even search for on my websitebecause I have everything transcribed. Just look for digitalclothes because there are thing now. Hey, I also want to talk alittle bit here about. The the next little article, which is what'shappening right now with apple.
[00:51:17] And you've probably heard about these ID cards inAustria right now, they are stopping people randomly and asking fortheir papers. They want your papers. If you are, have not been,they call it vaccinated. It's not a vaccine. Really. It's so funnyto see the CDC change to the definition of vaccine, just so itmeets their jab standards.
[00:51:45] But if you're not vaccinated, there's an immediate,it's about of $3,500 fine that the police officer will issue toyou. And of course, there's police everywhere. Just stopping peoplerandomly and asking for their papers. Apple is making various usstates that have decided they want to use a digital ID card.
[00:52:11] For customer support. And also for some of thetechnology. Now, the initial idea behind this and apple has beenworking on it for a while, is that you can have your driver'slicense in the iPhone wallet, app, more secure. It's certainly moreconvenient for most people. Sometimes you might forget your wallet,but most people don't forget their iPhones.
[00:52:38] Yeah. The feature when combined with Apple'sbiometric security measures really could also cut down on fraud. Sowe've got about a half a dozen states right now that have signed upwith apple and our pain part of the freight for these things. Andwhen they pull you over and ask for your papers, you'll have themright there in your iPhone.
[00:53:00] Isn't that handy stick around. We got more to talkabout. Thanks for joining. Today and visit me online. Craigpeterson.com. Stick around.
[00:53:11] I had more than a little guilt installed in me when Iwas a kid. And I still hear to this day, there's a lot of peoplewho had that right. There was your mother, maybe your father, butman this scammers are using it.
[00:53:26] This new scam is an interesting one.
[00:53:29] It's a consumer complaint, email scam, and it reallyis building on your fear of getting in trouble. At work, right?It's your fear of just basically getting in trouble? And man, my,did my mother ever beat that into me as a child. So the bad guysare using this now. Great article over at Sofos and they're nakedsecurity blog here.
[00:53:59] But the goal of these criminals is really to make youfeel guilty, to convince you that if you don't excuse me, that youhaven't done anything, you skip doing something, you, maybe you didsomething wrong and you've caused a serious inconvenience, not onlyto the company as a whole, but to someone more important than youinside the organization.
[00:54:26] Hey, I'm looking at an email right now. It's too PaulDeklan. It says, doc, I'm on my way to the sofa post office. Whydidn't you inform us about the class customer complaint in PDF onyou? Please call me back now. The main manager assistant is howit's signed. And it's got a link right there to what looks like acustomer complaint for.
[00:54:51] Supposedly in PDF. So technically this is calledspear fishing. It's a targeted attack and this greets you by nameand it pretends to come from a manager in your company. So they'vedone a little bit of research on you and on the company, and thatmakes it something that really pops out. And because we're all usedto ignoring the Nigerian prince scams and I helped to design asystem.
[00:55:23] In fact, that got rid of those Nigerian prince scamsand found some of the scammers. But have you ever had an angrycustomer who was yelling at you and said something like just youwait, I'm going to report you to your manager. It's scary. I'mgoing to ask like this, what did I do? I was at a McDonald's thisweek grabbing a double cheeseburger and the people who were runningthe drive-through were amazing.
[00:55:54] Simply amazing. And the guy who handed me the bagwas, again, really great. These, you don't see this type of personvery often in so many of these lower end, if you will, jobs. And soI asked to speak to the manager. And so the guy called over hismanagers says, I don't know what's up. And she came over and Icongratulated her on how wonderful per team was that the lady thattook the order was just as pleasant and helpful as can be.
[00:56:27] And the young man who handed me the food again,Greeted me nicely and just took care of everything. It was justabsolutely amazing. But I could tell that he was worried about whatI was going to say. Is he going to get in trouble because ofsomething he did or didn't do with his manager? Cause he doesn'twant.
[00:56:49] Fired obviously, but doesn't want to get down ontoher bad side. How about if you got one of these types of messagesin your mailbox, because if you're feeling guilty and you're afraidof what's going to happen, they have now activated a center in yourbrain. Basically the lizard level of the brain that is going tocause you to make mistakes.
[00:57:15] And you are going to hurry and feel guilty and clickthe link. It's just like that customer of ours, where he clickedthe link in an email thinking it was from the better businessbureau. It's the same sort of thing worried about, oh my gosh,what's going to happen here. Oh, no. Operations manager, thebusiness.
[00:57:34] It can be a lot of trouble. The owners are reallygoing to be upset with me and he opens it up. And what is it? It'sransomware now the good news is we were protecting them and sincewe were protecting them, the ransomware was stopped. In its tracksand that's what you want to have happen. But they were using thesame psychological tactic.
[00:57:56] So we've gotta be careful, right? This is morebelievable than a dear colleague or hello. It's got your name init. And when you look deeply in the headers, you'll see that it'sfake. But from the basic text alone, Not so much so interesting.Interesting. Here's another one attention and your name dearyou.
[00:58:21] You're in big trouble. I suggest you bring your coat.When you come to the meeting, yours sincerely, and it's got theoutsourcing manager's name. As a signature. So yeah. Okay. Thejunior staff in these outsource jobs, like the frontline support,the pressure's high, you're getting these, you're going to makemistakes.
[00:58:43] So I just want to warn everyone. Watch for mistakes.Watch what you're doing. The these PDFs that they're sending youare not necessarily legit. You'll click on the link. It's going tohave something that usually says something like a customercomplaint PDF. You're going to download the thing. And then you'regoing to click on view my file.
[00:59:06] And of course, preview PDF is not really going topreview the PDF. In fact, in this particular case, Sofos is sayingthat it was a Microsoft app bundle. Okay. It's like a PKG format.So be very careful. The other thing that we've seen a lot of, andit's still happening now is aimed at Adobe.
[00:59:29] Now Adobe has had some horrible software from acybersecurity standpoint, such as flash. You should no longer haveflash on your machine at all. Apple has never directly supportedflash. They never shipped it because of the major security problemsand because of the issues that apple and Adobe had back and forthwith each other, that's a kind of a separate thing.
[00:59:55] The PDF. Component Adobe reader that so many peoplehave, you don't need it on a Mac is really rare. You need topreview the built-in Mac reader works great. And you can fill outthe forms using just preview on a windows machine that doesn't havethat feature. So you've got to get the Adobe PDF component knockyourself out and get it, but be careful because.
[01:00:23] It is one of the top things people are doing or usingto lure you into downloading bad socks. So you can see in thisparticular case from Sofos, sometimes a trusted app with the checkmark and it's totally bogus. Okay. If you click on trusted app,you'll see what purports to be a software bundle from Adobe in theus and the digital signals from an accounting firm in SoutheastEngland.
[01:00:56] So it's all stuff to look at. Here's the bottom line.If you get an email like this and you're not. If it claims be fromyour bank, the IRS, you name it, reach out to them directly. Callthem look them up. Do not use a phone number that's in the email.Do not use a phone number. That's in a link page, linked page fromthe email.
[01:01:22] Find out what their number is, call their customersupport and find out if it's legit or con. Your security people tofind out if it's legit, it's really that simple. Okay. Very simple.So check it out online again, this was a sofa article, but you'llsee it at my website. Craig peterson.com. I also want to remindeverybody in case you haven't heard, maybe it wouldn't be areminder, right?
[01:01:48] That we're doing some boot camps starting up here inabout them. Free cyber-security bootcamps are goon to teach youthings you can do over the course of an hour that are going to 10X, your cybersecurity stance. That's the whole goal of the bootcamps and workshops stick around. We'll be right back.
[01:02:11] Craig peterson.com.
[01:02:13] What are the features these secure email providersare providing? What are the costs? Which ones might you want toconsider? We're going to run through the top three right now. Whatare their features and why would you want to use them?
[01:02:30] We started talking a little bit about proton mail,some of the real basics here, and it is still the kind of 800 poundgorilla when it comes to secure email, finally they had tocapitulate to the Swiss court because they are located inSwitzerland.
[01:02:49] So just goes to show that even being Swiss doesn'tmean that it is. Completely secured, then there's a difference too.I want to point out between having a government issue, a subpoenaand a court order to have your information revealed. There's a bigdifference between that and a hacker who's trying to hack you andget into your life.
[01:03:16] So I think most of us understand that we need to besecure in our documents. We need to have that privacy is guaranteedto us from the constitution, but we also need to have one morelevel of security, which is okay. How. The hackers. So having ahack free life means you there's a lot of things that you have tobe concerned about, email being one of them.
[01:03:43] So I'm not too worried about proton mail and the factthat they had a court order to. Provide IP addresses for a specificgroup of people. And it was a very small group and I can see that.I can agree with that. Proton mail does have a free version. That'sthe one I have because I want to try it out.
[01:04:06] And it has a 500 megabytes of free. The storage, youcan get up to 20 gigabytes and proton mail starts at $4 a month. Ithas end-to-end encryption, which is really important. Again, itmeans from you all the way to the recipient, all three of thesethat I'm going to talk about have end-to-end encryption.
[01:04:32] They also all have. Two-factor authentication.Remember when we're talking about two factor authentication, a lotof places try to pass off this thing where they send you a textmessage with a number in it. They try and pass that off as twofactor authentication. Yeah, it is a type of two factorauthentication, but it's not a.
[01:04:53] If you're already doing something like maybe you'vegot cryptocurrency, you are potentially not only under attack, butI'm very hackable. If you're using a text message in order toverify who you are. So that's an important thing to remember.Proton mail has self-destructing messages, which is a very bigthing, very positive.
[01:05:18] It tends to be expensive. Proton mail being the 800pound gorilla kinda dictates what kind of price they want to chargeand they are on the more expensive. Side the web client is a littlebit on the outdated side. It does not support pop three, which Idoubt is an issue for any of you guys out there because nowadaysthe modern email clients aren't using.
[01:05:45] Anyways, any more now proton mail has PGP support. Iuse PGP, I have a built into my Mac mail and it allows me to sendand receive end to end encrypted messages. And that's something youmight want to look at a plugin that uses PGP or GPG, which iseffectively the same. Which allows you to send and receiveencrypted email using your regular email client.
[01:06:15] However, the person who's receiving it the far endhas to have that PGP client or GPG client as it is. So it might notbe the best idea in the world to use that. I use it and I use itfor. People within the organization that I know have PGP, becauseagain, we're dealing with third parties information.
[01:06:38] We have clients and the clients trust us. So we haveto be pretty darn careful with some of that stuff. So that's ourfirst one, proton mail. It's something I've used. I know a lot ofyou are using it. I had so many responses to that email that I sentout to everybody talking about secure email and specifically protonmail.
[01:07:00] And you guys were all telling me, Hey, listen, I'mswitched on I'm away from Google forever because Google is by farthe least secure of anybody you could be using out there. Now, thenext one is called Tata. To U T a N OTA. So it gets just what Tatancall 10 town, tow hours, something like that, but a N O T a I'msure you guys are gonna all send me pronunciation guides and it hasagain, a free version, one gigabyte.
[01:07:34] So twice as much as proton mail and it doesn't reallyoffer quite as much storage, but it starts at a dollar 18 month.Down from proton mail's four bucks a month. It also has end to end.Encryption also has two factor authentication. It has an encryptedsearch function, a calendar function, and aliases. I use aliasesnot only for my hack free life, but I use aliases because Iwill.
[01:08:04] To use a different email address for pretty mucheverybody I'm dealing with. So these, this way to do that is withan alias. One of the problems here with top I, this is a Germancompany. I bet you it's a German word. Somehow Tottan TOA is thatit is injured. Germany is one of those 14 eyes countries. Thatmeans it's one of the 14 countries, large countries that shareinformation about people online and spy on each others.
[01:08:42] Citizens. See, that's how the government's gottenaround it. The government have preclusions from monitoringcitizens. So what did they do while they all get together, servewith the five eyes now once twenty-something eyes, but they're partof the 14 eyes agreement. So Germany, for instance, would spy on uscitizens while they're in the U S.
[01:09:07] And the U S will spy on German citizens while they'rein Germany and all over the world. Okay. So that's a negative,however, as a general rule, the European union has pretty goodprivacy laws, so you're probably safe. And then the third one,which is again, the third in my priorities here too, is calledcounter mail.
[01:09:33] Now it has. Interesting features, for instance, theyhave what are called Ram only servers. So the server boots up,obviously it has to boot off of some sort of a device, but onceit's running, everything's in memory. So if that server losespower, it loses everything. Now that's an interesting thing to doand can be a problem if you're trying to store emails, right?
[01:10:01] It has men in the middle attack protection, which allof these due to one degree or another, but counter male makes thata kind of a big deal. They have a safe box and anonymous paymentsystems that you can use. And it starts at $3 and 29 cents a month.They have a four gig storage limit. They do not have a freeversion.
[01:10:23] So I liked this one counter mail, but I do use protonmail, at least for testing. Some mothers also rans here that allowyou to send and receive encrypted mail. Secured mail is Zoho mail,Z O H O mail. The X, Y Z is another one post steel. So I've usedZoho before, by the way post geo P O S T E O.
[01:10:51] You might want to look@mailbox.org and start mail. Sothere you go. Top three proton mail. That's still myrecommendation. If you want some secure email and it'll cost you abit, if you want cheaper, look at this two U T a N O T. T U T a N OT a. All right, everybody make sure you spend right now about aminute.
[01:11:16] Go to Craig peterson.com and sign up for my weeklynewsletter and training.
[01:11:22] Is there no such an example of Silicon valley andthey're a attitude of fake it until you make it, or is it thereality of Silicon valley? What's happening out there? We work inanother.
[01:11:43] Hi, I'm Craig Peter Sohn, cybersecurity strategist.And you're listening to me on news radio, w G a N a M five 60 andFM and 98.5. You can listen to me anytime, anywhere, just grab thetune in app and type in w G a N, or pull out your smartphone. It'sall there. Theranose. How many of you guys know about therum knowsthey had a really great idea and it was started in 2003 by a 19year old young lady named Elizabeth Holmes.
[01:12:24] That is pretty young, but her idea was why do we needto have a whole tube or more of blood in order to do blood? Withthe technology we have nowadays, we should be able to just use adrop of blood and be able to test for hundreds of diseases withjust a pinprick of blood. It seemed pretty incredible at the time,but she was able to.
[01:12:51] Been a yarn that got a lot of people right intoinvesting in her company. We're talking about nearly a billiondollars in capital that was put into their nose. How could she havefooled all of these people or was she fooling them? Was she doingwhat you expect to have done in Silicon valley? That is in fact theargument that her attorneys are using right now.
[01:13:21] She is on trial because this company Theranose wasnever able to produce and tests. They could just take out a drop ofblood and run hundreds of tests on it. And there's a lot ofevidence that has come out that has shown in fact, a great littledocumentary that I watched not little on her and the companyTheranose.
[01:13:47] That showed that they had in fact, been taking vialsof blood and using other people's equipment, not the Theranoseequipment to do the valuations of the blood, to look for diseases,to look for things like vitamin D deficiency that is in fact,something that could have helped with this whole COVID-19thing.
[01:14:10] A real quick. Check a vitamin D levels in your blood,but what happened? Elizabeth Holmes was really a great talker. Shewas able to convince a lot of people and a lot of businesses,including Walgreens to invest in her. Not only did she haveWalgreens invest in her, but some of the biggest names that you canthink of in the investing community, including Rupert Murdoch, heinvested in fairness.
[01:14:41] Now her argument in her, or at least her attorney'sargument is, Hey, listen, we're not doing anything differently thanany other Silicon valley company that's out there. It's this wholecreed that they have of fake it until you make it. Is that legit.Is it just one more live from Silicon valley? There's a greatarticle that was in Forbes, talking about some of these, what arecalled unicorns.
[01:15:11] These are companies that are startups and are takenunder the wing by investors, starting with angels, and then movinginto venture capitalist, actually, even before angel. Friends andfamily and moving into venture capitalist positions, and theneventually public companies, all of these businesses reallyrequired proof before they got any funding.
[01:15:37] So here's an example from Forbes, Airbnb. Obviouslythey, hadn't what we consider today to be a rather unique businessmodel. But it had been tried before. The whole assumption was thatpeople would rent rooms in their homes on this huge scale, but theydidn't have any. They were the first to make it in this globaltrend, they built up this whole idea of becoming a hotelieryourself with your home.
[01:16:08] But when the founder, Brian Chesky tried to get angelcapital, he did not get a dime. He had to prove that renters wereinterested and people were interested in renting out their homesand that he could pull them together. Once he proved that, then hewas able to get the money and prove is you. To have a viablebusiness.
[01:16:34] First, it's really rare that you don't have to,Facebook was started by Zuckerberg now, all of those stories, butthe whole idea was having Harvard students connect with the. Andthen he expanded it to students and other universities and thenexpanded it to the world at large, his natural initial investors,like most are friends and family, people who give the money to youbecause they want to see you successful.
[01:17:01] Eventually. Zuckerberg was able to prove it and getmoney from Silicon valley. And then VCs, I'm not getting into anyof the ethics of how he did it or any of these other people thathad Google. Google was started by these two Stanford students pageand Brin, and they got angel capital from investors.
[01:17:24] And, but these investors were different than most theinvestors into Google, where people who were already verysuccessful in the computer industry and could understand the ideasbehind the algorithm and believed in page and Brynn and that theycould grow this company. Microsoft. Again, another company thatstarted with a extremely questionable methods was started bygates.
[01:17:52] And now. They didn't have any VCs, either. Theystarted by running programs for other people. They convinced IBMthat they needed to license an operating system from Microsoft andMicrosoft didn't even have the rights to, and then they went outand acquired it on a non-exclusive basis. IBM acquired it fromMicrosoft and non-excludable exclusive basis.
[01:18:15] Then they got VC money after they started to takeoff. Okay. Amazon was started by bayzos with funding from hisfamily and small investors from Seattle. He got a VC from Siliconvalley after he launched and was already earning thousands inrevenues. Bezos had real proof. Walmart was started by Sam Waltonwith 25 grand from his father-in-law.
[01:18:43] He built this business and financing strategy andused his skills to become one of the world's most successfulcompanies as he grew. We work. I don't know if you've seen these.There's a great documentary out there. And we work that I watchedtoo, but again, like Elizabeth Holmes, he was a great guy atstanding in front of a group and getting investors to putmoney.
[01:19:08] And he was even great at getting people to buy from.We work that he even started this whole, I think it was called weelife thing where he had people who would move into the building.That they were renting this office space from, and they'd all livedthere. They all had their own little units and they'd get togetherevery night and they'd eat together and have community andeverything again, collapsed when they couldn't sustain themomentum.
[01:19:38] And it was like a Bernie Madoff thing where he neededmore money coming in order to support it. And he got incredibleamounts of money from this big Japanese investor. And then we'vegot Theron. Elizabeth Holmes. She failed when this investigativereporter questioned whether the technology really works, theinvestigative reporter said, Hey, can you really do hundreds oftests reliably with just a drop of blood?
[01:20:10] Why did this report, or even have to ask the questionat all? How about all of these investors? Huge companies? My,including my medical field companies. How did all of them get builtbasically into spending about a billion dollars with her in aninvestor? It is a real problem. And it's a real question becauseultimately what we're talking about is companies and Silicon valleythinking you fake it till you make it, who are bilking investorsand everybody else out of it.
[01:20:46] Now you have to have a certain amount of that. Nomatter what the company is. Do you. Faith in yourself. You've gottabe able to stand up and make a presentation to customer or to aninvestor, an angel investor or friends or family, whatever it mightbe. But how could you have sold value to customers that convincethem?
[01:21:09] To pay the rent that's needed before you've evenshown her profit. And that's a big question. Things have notchanged in Silicon valley because of what we work did. And becauseof their failure, things have not changed because of ElizabethHolmes and Theranose and the major failure there. These people areinvesting money.
[01:21:30] They hope that two times out of 10, one times out of10, they will actually make money from their investments. We'retalking about the venture capitalists and they are jumping on allof these things that are, maybe. Quite legal. That was actually thepitch that was used by the founder of Uber.
[01:21:52] Yeah. We don't really know if this is quite legal ornot, but we're going to let people use their own vehicles to drivetheir own cars, to pick up strangers and take them places. And itwas obviously not legal, especially in big cities where they hadlaws about all of this. And then all of a sudden now Siliconvalley.
[01:22:14] Really listening closely and say, oh, not quitelegal. Okay. That means you are going to completely overturn thewhole industry. And that means we could make a whole lot of moneyon you again, just the knee jerk. So we've got to be careful. Theother side of the point and coin is the secret sauce, which is manycompanies are being careful to not disclose things for very goodreason.
[01:22:40] They don't want an employee to leave and take withthem. Their secrets. Look at the lawsuits that have been out therewith Google and some of the other self-driving companies. You stolean executive, the executive brought all of this knowledge. Them.And maybe even some documents, this should not be legal.
[01:23:01] And now you've got the Biden administration issuingan executive order, trying to change this whole thing by saying,while you cannot lock people in to not disclosing or to yoursecrets or to not compete with you. How well to Silicon valley orany business anywhere. To keep their secrets, their secret sauce,the recipe to Coke.
[01:23:28] If you will, how are you going to keep it secret ifyou cannot hold people to these non-disclosure agreement? And so Ithink again, the Biden administration is going the complete. Wrongdirection. I'm going to keep an eye on this whole Theranose thing,this trial that's going on. I didn't have an idea how it's going toturn out, but we do have to change the fake it till you makeit.
[01:23:54] Ideology of Silicon valley. Hey, take a minute andsign up online. Get my free special reports and trainings. Craigpeterson.com. Your cybersecurity strategist.