Tech Friday with Dave Hatter - Sponsored by Intrust IT - 6/28/2024

Episode Transcript

(00:01):
Just shy I six thirty one.Ifif you have airc detalk station and interust
its where you find Dave Hatter andhis crew there to help you with all
your business computer needs, including safety, security, best practices, and keeping
you out of trouble. Intrust itdot Com appreciate you sponsoring the segment here.
Always enjoy our conversations as frightening asthey can be. Dave Hatter,
Welcome back. Always my pleasure,Brian, good to be here, and

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you know I love to chat aboutthis stuff with you. Did you watch
your debate last night? Uh?No, I did not, Brian,
you didn't. That's okay, Idid not. I did not. It's
quite all right because I knew Iwould just be frustrated. No, actually,
I think you might walk away withgoing okay. Uh yeah, I
kind of figure that's what it was. He is not with it one hundred

(00:44):
percent, Joe Biden. Anyway,don't have to press you on politics right
now. Steering clear of that,let us talk about Hey, look it
says right here, quoted in Foxnineteen local reporting by Brenda or Dondez tech
expert Dave Hatter, Well, thatjust confirms it for me. Well,
I appreciate that. Thanks, Brian. Yeah, this was a wild week

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with this particular story. And sadly, Brian, we just see this same
stuff over and over and over,and it's so frustrating for me as someone
in the business trying to help peopleprevent these kind of things because so often
and now this is just my opinion, and I'll speculate on what happened there
based on what they've released so far, but I think so many organizations just

(01:30):
don't take this stuff seriously. Imean, I understand you see, you
know, okay, I got allthis technology and it's just an expense.
You know, it doesn't produce revenuefor me. But unfortunately, as we
talk every week, and you justsee these examples, case after case after
case where businesses have extensive downtime whichcosts a lot of money. Some don't

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recover from these sorts of attacks,or they you know, just have money
stolen straight up. So with thiswes Claremont School District, from what's been
reported so far, you know,they've lost almost two million dollars. It
appears to be per they are pressrelease some kind of social engineering attack,
and you know, I speculated inseveral TV interviews on this that if I

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had to guess based on what they'vesaid, information was stolen or found on
the line, they impersonated someone,they used spoofing, you know, it
could be email, could be phonecall, could be text, any of
the above to get information they neededto get into someone's accounts. In this

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case, I'm assuming their bank accountsfrom the way this is described was Claremont
Local School District's bank account. Yeah, because at one point seven million dollars
are gone now. It could alsobe fraudulent invoices or something like that.
I mean, because the thing wesee all the time, Brian, if
you just take this straight out,I mean, I have firsthand knowledge of

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many companies who've lost tens of thousandsto hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars
where they have bad passwords, theydon't have multi facture authentication turned on.
The bad guys get into their account, get into an account, okay,
and they lurk around. And here'sthe thing that's often I think misunderstood or

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overlooked. If you're in a countrysomewhere where there are no jobs, no
money, and no opportunity, butyou have the Internet. You've got plenty
of time on your hands, andany money you can steal is a win
for you. Yes, And inmany of these countries, there's no law
enforcement who is going to extradite youto, no extradition treaties, right,

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yeah, good luck trying to getsomebody in that you even identify them,
you're not going to have them uphere in front of a quart or anything.
And in many cases, you know, these countries turned the blind eye
to this or possibly facilitate in it. Yes, that's the Chinese Communist Party
for you right there. Korea.You know, the FBI claims North Korea
makes about two billion dollars a yearin cybercrime to run their government. So

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if I have a lot of timeon my hands and I can just get
in, if it takes me ninemonths to steal one point seven million dollars
from you, it's worth nine months. You know. In the business,
we call it dwell. Time theyget in, they lurk, they dwell,
they look, they probe, theyfind a vulnerability. And in many
cases it's once I'm in, I'min people's mail, I see who they're

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talking to. Oh, you sendinvoices regularly to these customers. Now,
I'm going to take your invoice,I'm going to make a copy of it,
I'm going to change the payment information. I'm going to send your invoices
to your customers. But it nowhas my bank information on it. I've
seen this dozens of times, andI'm sure something like that happened here because
they claim it's not ransomware. Theyclaim no information was stolen. So the

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most likely thing is either A it'ssome sort of fraudulent payment like that,
or B they were just able toaccess accounts. They said, sophistic dedicated
social engineering. I convinced someone I'myour IT department, I need certain information
you have the same password on yourbank account or something like that. And
now two million dollars and it's gonemaximizing the return on investment just through some

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little lurking efforts. It makes perfectsense to me, Dave. Let's pause
for a minute and find out whythe Surgeon General wants to put warning labels
on social media that snects with excuseme, Tech Friday's Dave Hatter six forty
walking about KRCD talk stations still saybusiness career says interest it is the best
in the business. Your businesses computerneeds sponsoring this segment, we call tech

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Friday, Dave hat Er. Dave. Finally, this sounds to me something
like the Surgeon General is properly doingcall on Congress to put warning labels on
social media platforms because they have sucha profound negative impact on young people.
Yeah, you know, Brian,I'm generally against this kind of thing,
me too, about regulation of thissort of stuff for a long time.
And even though this isn't regulation,I agree with you. It feels to

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me like it's probably well past thetime. You know, study after study
after study keeps coming out talking aboutthe negative impact social media has on young
people, and I think, toa large extent, it probably has somewhat
of a negative impact on all ofus. But you know, when you
look at young people and you know, I know your kids are older like

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mine. My youngest is sixteen.He doesn't spend a ton of time on
this stuff. But when you seekids with their face in the phone all
the time, just doom scrolling away. And you know we've talked before.
There's a guy whose name is escapingme at the moment, but he
was one of the original Twitter people, and he came up with the idea

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of this scrolling to update the feed, and you know, he talked about
how the whole idea of it wasbased on pulling a handle on a slot
machine. I mean, if folksgo out and search, you'll you'll find
this guy. He's sort of awhistleblower, and saying that, you know,
he actually felt bad about it,seeing the impact this had on people
over time, but that it wasreally designed in order to keep people on

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there as long as possible. Andyou know, you pull that handle on
a slot machine, you get thatlittle dope, I mean hit waiting to
see what's going to happen. Thatwas the whole idea behind it. So
yeah, I'm glad to see theSearch and General come out and say there
should be warning labels. Do Ithink it'll make a difference. I don't
know. Did warning labels make adifference on cigarettes. I think there are

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people that argue that it has overtime. Over time, Yeah, it's
over time. It needs to beaccepted widely that it's a bad thing in
terms of the general the general population. And then gradually, you know,
because people will frown upon the smokingand you were rejected by society if you're
a smoker. People tend to notgo down that road anymore, and it's

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taken many decades to get there,but a very small percentage of the people's
smoke. Now, we just needto get the idea that all these literally
tens of millions of people on anygiven social media platform finally come to the
realization it's not doing them or theirlives any good and quit participating. You
know, there's two things, Brian. You know, thankfully I never smoked

(08:07):
tried cigarettes back in the day,and I was like, this is terrible.
Why would anyone do this? Soyeah, but it had nothing to
do with that label. And youknow, it's funny because I almost feel
hypocritical when I say I think thisis a good idea, because increasingly,
if the federal government says something isgood, I just assume it's bad,
or vice versa. You know whatI'm saying. It's a little hypocritical for

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me, But in general, Ithink this idea probably makes sentence well,
at least to talk about it.Yeah, you know, whether you want
to force any given social media companyto put some specific label like they did
with the cigarette companies, that's that'smaybe a different topic of conversation. But
the idea that the Surgeon General wouldbring this up to people's attention and initiate
a conversation among people who might nototherwise have one, I think is an

(08:52):
important step in the right direction.I agree. I think that's good.
And before we are around of time, you know what really needs to happen
with this stuff my opinion, it'sthe surveillance capitalism model that makes this stuff
bad. If you know, theymake money by collecting your data, They
make money by keeping you there aslong as possible. They make money with
privacy washing and dark patterns to makeit difficult for you to get out.

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If the model weren't quote this isfree. If you paid some nominal fee
to use these things where they couldmake money and they didn't have all these
perverse incentives to collect your data andfeed you bogus stuff and keep you on
there and give you click paid andso forth, I think it would be
a lot less dangerous to people's mentalhealth and more of a tool. It's

(09:39):
it's the model that's screwed up inmy opinion. You know, but I
don't know how that gets fixed becausepeople are addicted to it. Well,
it's free it's free, that's right, And to make it not free,
you have to charge of service.They're making money off the data collection,
so if you take that out ofthe equation, there's no incentive for them
to offer the platforms. So willyou pay for it? It's like going
to a news site. You know, Hey, that used to be free,

(10:00):
and now I got to pay fora subscription to that online newspaper.
Wait a second, sometimes you quitgoing there. Anyway, we'll continue one
more Tech Friday's Dave Hatter digital sharing, a warning to couples out there about
sharing passwords and a like. That'sone more with Tech Friday's Dave Hatter six
forty five. Right now, ifyou have Kcite talk station six if you
want, if you buy a Karositetalk station, plenty of time to talk
in the seven o'clock hour. Getsyour response to the presidential debate last night,

(10:24):
rather embarrassing for Biden speaking of that, Alex Chiranta Filo eighth five with
the Ohio chair or to the RepublicanParty. He is going to give his
comments, and then we'll hear fromBrett Baker and Mike Morgan about their book
Tanked in Cincinnati without further ado onemore with Tech Friday's Dave Hatter don't share
your passwords on Dave. Yeah,Brian, it might come back to bite

(10:46):
you. I thought this was someinteresting research. So Nowwhare Bikes is a
cybersecurity company. They make primarily thenfor antivirus software. But they did a
study. They surveyed five hundred peopleand they found out thirty percent of them
said they regretted sharing location tracking withtheir partner, twenty seven percent worried their
partners, worried about their partners trackingthem through location based apps and services,

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and twenty three percent worthy their currentpartner had accessed their accounts without their permission.
I think this is pretty interesting.Like you, I've been married for
a long time. My wife knowsall my passwords. I got nothing to
hide. You know. I willfrequently if my phone is sitting by her,
say hey, you know, doX, Y or Z. I
don't care, but I can understand, like if you're in a new relationship

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everything is going well and you saylike, hey, you know, let's
let's share the Netflix account, orlet's share access to the ring doorbell,
or yeah, sure you can.You can unlock my phone. I could
see where over time, especially ifthings go bad, that could be problematic.
Yes, Let's say, let's say, for example, you break up,
well, if you have shared accessto all the accounts, who gets

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the account and as they point outin here, because they go from this
might be mildly inconvenient to downright badin some kind of domestic violent stalking type
situation over time, you know,and they point out out a story which
this is something I hadn't thought of. A woman gets divorced, ex husband
bought the car, the car wasin his name originally. She can't turn

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off the location tracking, So nowyou know, is that a problem?
Maybe, especially if you have astalker type situation. I mean, you
know, we've talked before about howpeople will plant air tags on someone to
track them. Imagine if if youhad a household full of these smart items
and then you get divorced and yourprevious partner had access to all that stuff,

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would you even know how to turnit off? Most people don't.
That's one of the problems, oneof the reasons why I hate this IoT
stuff to begin with. People don'tunderstand how to set it upright, they
don't understand how to update it whenthey know how to evoke someone else's access,
you know, and they quote inthis story. According to a reporting
for The New York Times, sevestersof I'm Sorry, survivors of domestic abuse
began calling support lines with a bedof new concerns and they say, quote

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One woman had turned on her airconditioner but said it switched off without her
touching it. And another said thecode numbers of the digital locket her front
door changed every day and she couldnot figure out why. Still another told
in the abuse helped one she kepttring the doorbell, ring, but no
one was there. Now, Ithink we've talked about Black Mirror before.
Black Mirror, if you haven't seenit Brian ass a Netflix show. Yeah,

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it's so disturbing. I hate it, dude, I get you,
I get you. I can't reallywatch either, the one with the robot
dog, which you know, we'realmost there now. It's like being suffocated
with a pillow. But there's aBlack Mirror where a woman has a smart
house and they set you up likeshe's got all these great amenities and it
does all this cool stuff and thenit just goes bad and like everything you

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know, the burglar arm will stopgoing off, and of course it goes
downhill from there. So when Itell people that the Internet of things,
so called Internet of things, oras my guy Miko Hipponent says, the
insecure Internet of Things is a privacyand security dumpster fire, it is.
And this just goes to show onemore example. Now, in this case,
you know, it's about giving accessto people. I can remember my

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wife arguing with my kids, like, okay, I want to track your
phone, you know. And andnow that the three older ones are,
you know, full grown adults,some of them still have that turned on.
Some don't you know me, Brian, My answer has always been,
I don't care if you know whereI am, call me and I'll tell
you. I'll take a picture ifyou want to see it. But you
know, I turn off the locationtracking, but I'm not using it,

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as we've discussed. So it hasnothing to do about me trying to hide
what I'm doing from her. Ithas everything to do with Apple doesn't need
to know where I am every secondof a day, nor do any of
the apps on my phone. Soyeah, before you just willing nearly give
access to folks, and you know, I'll post all this at my usual
notes. This is worth reading forpeople. It's worth sharing with your kids.

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I'm not saying it's bad or wrong, but you should at least think
about it and consider the consequences ifthings go bad and you have shared everything
with someone else. Definitely sound advice. Dave Howard always is appreciate you joining
the program every week and trust it. Dot com'sary you find Dave and the
team and you can confidently get reachout to them for again your business computer
related issues. Tech Friday, Dave, I'm off next Friday, taking the

(15:13):
day after Independence Day off so Ican fully enjoy my Independence Day. So
I'll look forward to talking with youin two weeks. It's sad blame you,
Brian. Will enjoy your time offand I will chat with you then.
Thanks, brother, have a greatweekend. Thanks six fifty six.
Stick around, take your calls.I'd love to hear from Get your reaction
to the bait last night. Fiveone, three, seven, four nine
fifty, five hundred, eight hundredeighty two to three talk go with Pound

(15:35):
five fifty on AT and T phones. I'll be right back after the news