Theresa Payton | Scattered Spider strikes again with PayPal/Crypto scam

Cyber Security Expert Theresa Payton joins Bo and Beth to discuss the latest cyber scam by Scattered Spider and President Donald Trump 's "A.I" Challenge" to schools nationwide. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is Good Morning Beat with both Thompson and Beth
trout Man. Wednesday August sixth Boeen Beth in the Tyboid Studio,
or actually today it's the Bernie Bowls Studio. Ty would
be okay with that. I would say happy birthday, Bernie.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
Ty would love you, Bernie.

Speaker 1 (00:22):
He loved here. I'll expen well. You know what else,
it's the Bernie Bulls Tye Boyd Studio. It's the Teresa
Payton cybersecurity segment that we do at least once a week.
Last week it was two because we had sort of
an alert on Friday with the FBI warning about the
scared spider. And by the way, maybe we should start there.

(00:43):
News Talk eleven to ten WBT welcoming the great Teresa
Payton back to the show. Hi Teresa, Hi, good morning.

Speaker 3 (00:50):
How are you.

Speaker 1 (00:50):
We're very very well today. So we talked to you
on Friday, a special cameo appearance by Teresa about the
scared spider warning from the f Anything new on that
front today.

Speaker 3 (01:04):
They just continue to basically all businesses need to continue
to be on high alert. I know that cyberliability insurance
companies are kind of just checking in with their clients
making sure they're doing everything they can to be safe,
but they are still out and about and they're really

(01:26):
creating challenges for information technology helped USK because that is
a big part of how they're getting into companies. Right now,
now as we all lock that down, they're just going
to come back with the new scheme. But their current
most popular used scheme is either tricking you Beth and
Boone to thinking your help desk is calling you, or

(01:46):
trying to trick your help desk into thinking it's Beth
or bo who needs to get their password reset.

Speaker 2 (01:51):
You know, Teresa there, I was part of or I
got a scam email, I should say, And I wanted
to tell you and everybody else about this because I research,
because I've talked to you so much that I know
exactly what to do. But there is a scam that
comes from an email that looks like it is legitimate.
It looks like it's from someone that you potentially know,
and it's a PayPal invoice saying that you have purchased ethereum.

(02:17):
I guess what is that some kind of like website
or some kind of internet access and you get what
did you say, Steve, It's crypto. Oh so I'm nowhere
close crypto. So I got this invoice, and here's the
thing that the trouble. Here's the thing that troubled me
is if you go through emails and you see an
email and you open it on your iPhone, for example,

(02:41):
sometimes iPhone will download a link on its own, you
know it. Just as soon as you open the email,
it starts downloading whatever that link is. And then the
invoice popped up, which is how I even saw the invoice.
And then I got freaked out, thinking, oh my gosh,
this has now infected my phone, and I immediately did
the Teresa thing where I just cut my phone off,
just shut it down. But there's this kind of new

(03:02):
scam out there that the invoice itself is asking you
to call an eight hundred number if you didn't purchase
this crypto purchase. And it's all through PayPal, and suddenly,
for some reason, now I can't even get into my
PayPal account.

Speaker 3 (03:15):
Oh that's a problem. Yeah, So and it could just
be it's just like a moment of panic or somebody
might have been trying to get into your PayPal account
and that's why it's locked up, you know, out of
safety because it's too many password resets, so maybe just
sit tight. But you did the right thing, which was Okay, wait,
this all feels really really wrong. I'm going to go

(03:37):
to search. I'm going to look it up. Okay, this
is definitely a scam. Now what do I do next?
You reset your phone. That's usually a good thing to do.
Some of the other things that people can think about
doing is actually fording or reporting the phishing attempt to
report fraud dot FTC dot gov. There is also the

(03:57):
IC three dot gov, which is the FBI Internet Crime
Complaint Center, And then the other thing you could do
is report phishing or report spam, depending on who your
email provider is inside the email and what they'll end
up doing is sort of taking what you reported. They
will scrub it out of your inbox, your outbox, and

(04:18):
they will take a look at it and then they
will block it from hitting everybody else's in basket. So
that can be a really helpful thing to do as well.

Speaker 1 (04:26):
I just realized that Teresa was being very polite and
not correcting me a minute ago. But it's it's scattered spider.
It's not scared spider.

Speaker 3 (04:34):
Well, they should be scared.

Speaker 1 (04:37):
But Scattered Spider is what you need to be looking
out for. And like she says, if you get a
prompt to change your password, when usually we say change
your passwords and keep them, you know, keep the scamster's guessing.
This is not one of those cases. Scattered Spider, he said.

Speaker 2 (04:55):
You know, if she was being polite with you with
Scattered Spider and with me saying ethereum was a website,
not cryptos, She's just rolling along with us exactly.

Speaker 1 (05:03):
But here's something that I do want to get your
take on. And Beth and I've been talking about. We
had a story a few weeks ago about the the
jobs that are in most danger of AI taking over,
and unfortunately, you know, broadcaster was in the top ten
of that list. Now you can sort of parse that
out as to what exactly you mean by a broadcaster.
Is that a talk radio person or is that a

(05:24):
newscast or whatever. But at any rate, I want to
go the other direction because there's a story out this
morning that says one of the most AI proof jobs,
Kristin Bernard is going to like this a realtor. That's
pretty interesting.

Speaker 3 (05:40):
It is interesting because you know, there was this move
for a while there of like do you really need
the real estate agent? We could do everything on the internet,
and then we realized that that that a lot could
go wrong there not having a trained professional, license professional
helping us with these transactions. This gets back too, we

(06:01):
really are craving the human personal touch on many transactions.
And you know, for many people, buying a home is
something you do maybe once in your lifetime. You know,
it is a huge dream of so many Americans. And
I think what Americans are saying is I don't want

(06:22):
to buy a home from a bot. You know, I
want to work with somebody who hears what my personal
or my family's requirements are, thinks about us, can visualize us,
you know, where we want to be, and I want
people very much in this transaction. So I thought that
was very interesting as well though, that that is going
to be one of the occupations potentially predicted to be

(06:46):
leased at.

Speaker 2 (06:47):
Risk and really really quickly. Sticking with AI, the President
has launched an AI challenge to schools. Tell us about that.

Speaker 3 (06:56):
Yes, and so everybody, you know, this is the time
to talk to your principles about this. This is really
really important. So student teams around the United States will
be able to complete a project that involves either the study,
development or use of an AI method to address community challenges.
So the quote from the Presidential Challenge website is, this

(07:22):
program seeks to inspire young people and educators to create
AI based innovation solutions to community challenges while fostering AI
interest and competency. So they want this to be a
project that makes the world a better place. And this
is something that has to be educator driven, So that
means the principal, the administrative staff, the faculty, they have

(07:48):
to work with the students sponsor the projects. That these
projects will be due by January twentieth of twenty twenty six.
There will be a nationwide competence and there's more information
at the Presidential AI Challenge site.

Speaker 1 (08:05):
Teresa Payton you can follow her on Twitter or to
most of us now x, but you can follow her
Teresa or at track or payton It's or handle And
a lot of times we run out of time to
talk about certain subjects here or elaborate on them, and
Teresa a lot of times we'll answer your follow up
questions online if you go that route. We appreciate your
expertise as always and hope you have a great rest

(08:26):
of the week.

Speaker 3 (08:27):
Yes, Beth and Bo. The time does go by so fast,
and be safe out there.