John Sileo - Cybersecurity in the age of COVID-19 {Keep your data and your privacy safe!}

Hi, Jim Bouchard from the Sensei Leader Movement. As always, we've got another fantastic guest for you today, and this is a particularly timely subject. Our friend John Cilio, he's one of the best in the world when it comes to talking about cybersecurity and keeping your data safe. You know, leaders, we've got to be cognizant of this in this time. You know, it's not just about protecting your business assets as well. It's about protecting the security and the privacy of the people who work for you, the people who you serve as customers and clients. So this is a big world, and I'll tell you what, I'm going to keep quiet through most of this and let John do the talking, because like I said, he is really one of the best in the world, and I really enjoy listening to him. As always, comments, questions, suggestions, please bring it in. We're watching the comments coming in from YouTube and from Facebook Live. So Join the conversation, and when we see you pop in there, we'll be, we'll be sure to, to bring it over and put you up, and we'll try our best to respond to you in real time. Okay, so without further ado, here's my good friend John Silio. John, how are you doing out there? What a beautiful view out your window.

Thank you very much. Yeah, I'm very lucky to be here. It's, uh, we're in Colorado. It's— the snow is starting to melt. It's going to get up into the 60s and 70s today. So, right.

Yeah, well, I'm about sick of the snow. We've had plenty of it here too. But anyway, it is pretty to see that. So yeah, yeah. So what are the biggest— you know, every time a crisis like this happens, man, it brings out the worst. It brings out the predators, right? And in your world, I suppose you're seeing it probably more than anyplace else.

Yeah, they, uh, just read a, uh, a briefing this morning that COVID-related, uh, internet scams have increased by 6,000%, uh, in about the last 3 weeks.

How can you even wrap your head around that, that kind of a leap, man? That's—

it's unbelievable. And what, you know, it's the same thing we've talked about before, which is the scammers, the cyber criminals, the fraudsters, they follow the headlines. If there's a headline, they want to exploit it because, you know, we're panicking, we're not thinking straight, and we tend to give out information. And that's, man, that's how they're getting into our systems.

Right, absolutely. Hey, thanks for joining. We've got a lot of people joining the stream now. Please make sure if you got questions or comments for John, uh, pop them into either on YouTube or Facebook. If you're not watching live, if you're watching on the replay, that's cool too. Put your comments there anyway. We'll do our best to get him those, uh, those things afterwards. And John, before we get too much further too, why don't you talk about— because I know, like myself, you, you know, you did— much of your living was out there right, talking about this stuff in person with people. And you've got one of the most exciting and engaging programs I've ever seen. You take a topic that could be extremely dry and you really make it entertaining and engaging. But you've made the leap to online, and tell people how they can get in touch with you.

Yeah, absolutely. I— probably the easiest way is through my website, which is just my name, Silio, S-I-L-I-O. It's up there in the corner. You can see it spelled. Www.sileo.com. Every time I cough, I feel like everybody's gonna—

I know it, I know it. There's the stare that happens now, right?

Hang on, let me throw my hands. Yeah, so—

I have Lysol here somewhere.

We, uh, thank you for putting that graphic up. That's an easy way. It's got our phone number, it's got— you can email. It's been a, you know, what an odd time for us all in the speaking world. We have crash-coursed in and all of these tools. And luckily, I'd done a bit of it before and actually don't mind the virtual stuff. You know, I travel, and as do you, we travel a lot, and it's kind of nice to do some of this stuff remotely.

Yeah, you know, I'm a hugs and handshakes guy, so I really miss being in the room. But it is a blessing that we have these tools and we're able to still connect with people. So, so I'm going to put in an endorsement for you too, because, you know, like I said before the show, John is one of the best, absolutely one of the best in the world. And and entertaining and engaging, which to me makes it stick. You know, if I'm listening to it, it's hard for me to retain any information. So John really makes this stuff go all the way in. So make sure you access his, his, uh, his wonderful online programs that he has now, right? Okay, so let's get back to the nasty, gruesome stuff we're facing.

Oh, come on, let's talk about the fun stuff.

We should, right? Yeah, we need to talk about some of that too. Gotta have some sunshine. But what are the greatest threats you're seeing to business right now? What are the— how are they getting— you know, we've heard about the Zoom problems because so many companies are moving to Zoom meeting, but Zoom just released an update. I know we had to upgrade today because there was some kind of a bug fix for the security parameters anyway.

Yeah, Zoom definitely was not built with security in mind, and as we have all flocked to it it has caused problems first with Zoom bombing and naked people and racial epithets coming onto our screen when we didn't plan them. And then actual hacking in through some of the virtual camera functions that, you know, we are all using now. So yes, Zoom has been a major expansion of the threat platform.

Right.

The others, you know, quite like we started the day with, the scams that they come up with that follow the headlines. So a 6,000% increase in essentially in spam, right? You're getting emails, you're getting texts that are saying you're infected or your Medicare benefits aren't coming through, or here's your stimulus check or whatever.

That's a big one. All false.

Yeah, they're huge. And what does is you then click on links that download malware on your machine, propagate through your organization or your home, and you're done for.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Kerry, thank you so much. Thanks for your encouragement, your support. Nice to hear from you. Kerry is also a sensei, a real one, right? That's the, you know, I get that question. This is off to the side, but people say, yeah, that's a nice branding thing. Well, no, I did my time, about 30 years as a sensei. So yeah, that's the real thing. Though those threats, it's amazing, right? The IRS threats, and I think this is a more personal one than probably the workspace, but you talked to me about this earlier. You said a lot of times people get into a work platform because somebody's, I guess, on a lunch break, right, or a coffee break, and they're doing personal stuff on the machine at work, right? And then bang, it comes in and infects the entire system, right?

Yeah, so that's, that's kind of the pre-COVID way that, you know, you're doing personal work on your work computer, generally at work or at home.

Well, now at home, yeah.

Our work computer and our home computer are often the same. Because so many of us are working from home. So, it's actually taken what is personal and it has made it incredibly professional and workplace-oriented.

What are some of the systems people can put in place? Because I know, especially, I know some of the bigger organizations, well, some of them had troubles too. But small businesses in particular, maybe they weren't that concerned about this. And now, you're right, they've got, let's say you've got 20, 30 people suddenly working from home, a real estate firm, an insurance firm or something like that, what are some of the things that they can get into right away that would help them? Is firewall even the right word for this, or how do they—

Yeah, so firewall, what this crisis is exposing is we have lost what is called the perimeter. It used to be perimeter security, so you had a server in your office with laptops and computers in your office, and there was this perimeter around it called a firewall that kept everything bad out, or mostly bad. Well, then we started to get mobile phones. We used, you know, we'd compute from the café. That perimeter has slowly started to erode. Then we take this pandemic and we're all now so much working remotely that the perimeter has disappeared. So a firewall, yes, it is one tiny portion of the solution. But really, at this point, user education, good, like you said, entertaining stuff that sticks and that's engaging and humorous and get your people to not click on that link, to not download that software when they're prompted to, to not answer that person's questions on the phone when they call and are pretending to be your IT department. That's really— we are now the humans, truly the weakest link and the biggest risk if we're uneducated.

You're the only one doing this really in an entertaining fashion that I've seen. So I don't want to move people anywhere off of your platform. Tilio.com, man. That's where you go to find out about it. But no, that's really cool. And one of the things that you talked about, and you do it in your presentations, I think is one of the most engaging— I don't want to call it trick— but that you do is actually going into someone's purse and showing how much information you can get from just what you're carrying around with you, right? Now, what was interesting, one of the things I was thinking about before we talked is now that with all this social distancing, people, I mean, people don't want to get near each other. They look at you, right? We just talked about the look, right? Right? People get too close. But there are still ways that what you have, what you carry on you, is vulnerable, right? And one of the ones that I heard about recently was more break-ins in cars because people leave a wallet or something or a purse in a car, and there's been a lot of that going on, or even phones, right?

Yeah, I'd say the purse, you know, personally, the purse is still a threat, the wallet and so forth. But really, we've kind of moved beyond that in sophistication. Criminals want far more than just your credit cards and your license. So the phone has become the holy grail. That's why now on stage I hack an iPhone because I can demonstrate live how much information and how many connections to our banks and so forth that we keep there.

With consent, I'm going to add to that. He does this, he gets the consent.

Well, at least with the client's consent. The audience member has no idea that when I ask to see their phone, yeah, that I'm about ready to hack into it because they have a 4-digit code. You know, people are still using 4-digit and 6-digit codes, and, and for somebody who's been trained, which I haven't, but I still have enough to be dangerous, it's pretty easy to hack into a phone with a 4-digit code. And then, you know, think about it, on that phone you do a down swipe and you type in the word bank, and now you have all the apps and the emails and the websites that that person has visited. And you, to get into it, you send a password reset from the bank and it comes to the email that's on the phone or the text that's on the phone, and now suddenly you're in control of the bank or of the organizational information. Those phones, uh, are, are critical.

Yeah, yeah. Oh, you know, you just scared the hell out of me because, yeah, 6-figure code. So what should people use other than that? I mean, I thought the 6-figure one was great. What's that? I talked over you.

You can, you can do a long and strong code on a phone just like you can on a computer. It's just in your settings, there's an option to use a longer alpha numeric code. It exists on every Android, it exists on every iPhone. It's, it's just you haven't gone in and done it because by default they're making you set a 4 or 6 digit.

I'm gonna do it as soon as we hang up. I'm writing it down. Yeah, yeah. How about the thumbprint thing? How secure is that if people are using that? Is that—

it varies between Apple and, and Google devices. So just conceptually, Apple is a hardware company, right? They want to sell you more hardware and they want to sell you their Apple services.

Okay.

Google is an information company. They want to collect everything about you and sell it to others. That's how their business model works. So on an Apple device, I trust the fact that that thumbprint stays directly on that device. It is not loaded into the cloud. On a Droid, I don't have that confidence. I feel like they are loading your, the converted thumbprint or face print, which is just a series of numbers and digits into the cloud. That's where it's at risk.

What's the, what's the biggest rip-off you see? Well, you know what, you should talk a little bit about, because some people I'm sure tuning in today, they haven't heard your story. I mean, you got used hard. That's a good example of what can happen to you, right? And twice. That, you know, we first talked, I knew you got ripped off once, but when you told me you got ripped off twice that way, oh my God.

Yeah, so the, the first one was the garden variety, out of my trash, woman bought a home in my name Several hundred thousand dollars.

Yeah, just somebody bought a home in your name, no big deal.

That one was simple compared to my second one. But, you know, I went bankrupt because of her. Well, I didn't, I fought it, but she declared— it was a woman— she declared bankruptcy in my name. It was, you know, several years of recovery. And then it happened in my business where an insider used my identity to embezzle from all of our clients. I faced a criminal trial, 2-year criminal trial, because it looked like I had done it. He embezzled as me. What happened to me, my business partner and best friend who had some habits that he was covering up by using our money, that one is the one that killed the business. I lost a $2 million software company and virtually had nothing left but other than my family. That's when I wrote my first book, and that's what led to speaking and to everything I've got now. So yeah, you know, we're joking here, but you've gotta understand that this stuff is dead serious because when you lose a piece of your identity personally, or you lose corporate information, it can completely change your life. I spent 5 years battling out of that, lost hundreds of thousands of dollars, spent tons of money in legal fees, and it was about enough to put me under.

I've got a good question I want to bring up in just a second, but before we get that, Jeffrey, thank you again for your support and all the encouragement you've offered all this time. We'll get your question up in just a second, but so many people right now are kind of dismissing, uh, you know, the dangers of continuing the lockdown, the shutdown, and I hear, continually hear comments like, oh, you're more worried about getting a haircut than you are about getting sick and whatnot, and for, you know, a lot of times I think people have to I wish people were more sensitive to the fact that there's somebody behind that haircut who's depending on providing those services to survive, you know, and that we do have to have some sensitivity to that. Because these situations like this— and the reason I'm couching it that way is, um, you know, I was so inspired when I heard you tell this story the first time. And if you don't mind sharing how serious this is, you know, when, when people face something like this, like identity theft or, uh, the idea of bankruptcy, I mean, this destroys your life, destroys your family. People consider suicide, people consider all, right? It is much more profound than most people— it's not just about the money, is it?

It's almost barely about the money.

Barely about the money.

Yeah, it's the money. You quickly realize how much of your life isn't money and how much of it is how you spend your time. It's really a time and emotional strain.

Yeah, no, the money's just, you know, that's, that's a, uh, how would you say, it's a measurement of what we've been devoting our time to. But But the emotional content, I mean, my God, I can't imagine going through, especially the betrayal with that business person that you were with. But that's a big one, right? And I've heard you talk about this, and I've heard other people talk about this right now. You can't overlook that. I mean, there's certain people that are in your life that you trust, right? But you still have to be vigilant. I mean, right, like I said, in your case, you had no idea that this guy was posing as you.

And you know, I didn't have any idea, but the people around me, you know, I was awash in business success. Because we were making a ton of money legitimately, right? We were, we were making the money legitimately. He was stealing it illegitimately to fund some gross habits that he had that he wanted off book. And that's what he needed the money for.

Right.

But the, the emotional toll, you know, number one, of having it been inside, it's, it's absolutely devastating and it makes you reevaluate how you judge people. I mean, I have to say, I trust in a completely different way. It's not that I don't trust, Jim. I mean, you can't live that way. And it's not that I don't use technology.

And it's not healthy.

Yeah, no, it's not. It's, it's a balance like everything else. But man, did I learn that how you evaluate people and judge them and let them into your life and your privacy and your, your data makes, makes a huge amount of difference because they're going for the the low-hanging fruit. They want the easy stuff, and if you're not the easy stuff, then they move on to the next person.

Yeah, no, I'm glad you said that. That's something that we talked about in self-defense, you know, always is that, you know, don't make yourself a likely target, right? Let's get to Jeff's question. This is a good question, a long one. Thanks for all your great information. I have 10 and 12-year-old sons who enjoy group video games online. I want to ensure they're not interacting with potential predators. What kind of stranger danger practices do you recommend? He's got a little follow-up to that too.

But yeah, uh, Jeffrey, uh, Jeff, Jeffrey, thank you for your question. I'll tell you, online gaming, um, is exceptionally difficult to police, as are kids. Number one, when we, when we ban it or we monitor it, they find a way around it.

They want to do it even more.

They do. It's, you know, don't think of the elephant. I mean, it's, wow, okay, there, there's something interesting here. So as with all things social media, online connections, chat rooms, and so forth, I recommend talking to your kids. First of all, maybe not allowing it until they're at the age that they can process a conversation, and then talking openly about the risks that are there and how they can minimize them. There's a group out of, gosh, I think they're out of Palo Alto called Common Sense Media that has great tips on how to talk and deal with your kids on things like online gaming and so forth. I highly recommend them. My expertise is more on the corporate side, and I hate to pretend that I know something on that gaming side. That's, you know, that's not my area.

Yeah, but you know, you brought up a couple of really important points there too. And, you know, we're talking about leadership, you know, with the Sensei Leader Movement. We're not just talking about business leadership. We're talking about leadership in your home, leadership of yourself, right? And for years, you know, I never had my own kids, uh, you know, worked with kids for most of my life and still do. And it's interesting how many times, uh, the parents— and I'm not disparaging anybody, I know it's a, it's a tough, tough gig, there's no manual until you get into it— about how many times parents would come to me with situations like this and say, how do I talk to my kids? How do I, right, prohibit something? And, you know, I'll just offer this really quickly. You got to pick your battles, but make sure you pick some, right? Because your children will look to you for leadership, and they will respect you more when you set some clear parameters, set some lines. You want to do it compassionately, and I really like what John said. Involve them. Talk to them, right? Tell them what the threats are. You don't have to be sensationalizing about the threats, but explain to them why you're concerned. And 9 times out of 10, I found that kids are much more cooperative when they, when they know, when they have the information. Geez, what I just said, we should send that to Congress and some of our political leaders, right? Right. Because they're making the same mistake with us right now. We're going to do a program on that, right? What are some of the mistakes some of our political leaders are making communication-wise? Well, they're not giving us all the information, not telling us, you know, what we need to know. Yeah, we're working on it. It's not a very good, uh, public statement if people don't trust you.

No, no. And to expand on it, get involved with your kid. If they're sitting in the basement playing games all the time, you know, there's— we're still the parents, right? We're not their friends. And that may mean that you put limits on it. That may mean that you join in the gaming at times so that you can see what's happening and you understand their attraction to it. So many parents are trying to do this without getting involved with what the kids are doing, the social media or something. And that, that's something we have to do.

No, I couldn't agree more. If you want to be— believe me, if you want to be friends with your kids when they're grown up, be the parent now. I mean, that's the sure way to do it. I've worked with a lot of people who, you know, they wouldn't— they, like I said, they wouldn't choose their battles. They wouldn't fight any battles. And all that does— and I've seen it many, many times— it causes the children to lose respect for you. And, uh, yeah, it's not good. Not good at all. But we've got to be careful, though, with this gaming thing. I got hooked on Madden a few years ago, and I'm telling you, you can lose a week of your life to Madden football.

Yes, you can.

Yeah, I'm glad I got off of that pretty quick. All right, let's, let's turn it back to the business and corporate world. Okay. So I know you have a bunch of great tips, and I think that'd be a good segue for that. What are you, what are you kind of your top 5 things that really business leaders, business managers should be looking at? I'm not going to say right now, because I think your tips are pretty much evergreen, right? But there are some, some things that move. I think the threats move and the technology moves. But I really like the way that you couch these things. There's still things that from a human level, from a human-centric leadership perspective, we should just have our eyes and ears open about.

Yeah, so You're right. I mean, it has not changed that much. It's kind of shifted as we've changed our work model a bit, but they're the same thing. So by far the number one, when we go in and we see a company that has been breached or had cybercrime or lost data of any type, it's the people, it's the lack of training of the people, it's the security awareness, it's the automatic reflexes. The humans, you know, they will always hack the humans first. So number one, without question, is I can almost bet your people are not trained properly to use the technology in a way that keeps you and your data secure.

And continually, right? I remember you saying that. This isn't a one-off, right? Because the criminals don't change, their tools do. And you have to be up to date with what they're using, right?

You bet. Like this. I mean, you know, the clients I work with are desperate for, okay, what does COVID-19 mean to my security posture, and they have that stuff out in days so that their people see it before they click on the link or download. I'd say probably the next one is because people are clicking and downloading, the biggest risk right now is ransomware, which loads on your system, freezes it up, moves throughout the household, moves throughout the organization, freezes those computers, and then— sorry about that.

Somebody's Zoom bombing us and we're not even on Zoom.

That's my daughter Zoom bombing me. What happens when you don't turn your FaceTime off? So with ransomware, the really the only solution you have got other than not clicking on the links that loaded on your system is a backup, a sophisticated, robust backup of your data that is offsite and offline. Most businesses do not have that. It's called a 3-2-1 backup and you can Google it or we've got information on our site. But it is imperative that you've got your data in multiple places that are not in the cloud, because when it gets hacked, it also moves to the cloud and the ransomware freezes that up.

And even for small business, we learned that lesson several years ago. It's— there's a lot of platforms that are readily available and they're not very expensive.

So they're not, they're not. And they're incredibly sophisticated. Now, you may need to bring somebody in and spend a couple hundred bucks to have it set up properly. That's fine. You can do this all at once, kind of all the things we're going to talk about. You know, an IT person can come in. They're still working. They're critical workers. They can still come in during this time. Of course, you're smart. You have masks and so forth. But having a person in to lock down your, your new workspace is critical.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So we've got the people, we got backups to prevent— well, to recover from ransomware too, right? Because a lot of times from what I'm hearing, and tell me if I'm wrong, because if even if you do get infected with ransomware, if you're backed up properly, you can just tell them to go pound sand, right?

Yeah, mostly. So it depends on the sophistication level. For small businesses, generally you're going to restore your data and you're going to be fine. For the larger corporations out there, they're much more crafty. So they'll take a piece of ransomware in a little packet that is attached to this, you know, email that says, hey, the latest news on Tiger King, or on how to get free toilet paper.

Hey, I didn't tell you that I was watching Tiger King, man.

I knew it. And when they do that, you know, they download it into your system, but they put a— it's called a time bomb. So for corporations, they put a time bomb in there, they embed it in your system, and it doesn't light up for a week or two weeks. So all your backups have the time bomb already built into it. That's why it's a little more sophisticated. When you're a corporation and you have ransomware and you have backups, you need to have somebody come in and cleanse the backup, restore it, and then you, you go forward.

What's, what's the, what's the factor that really makes a business a more attractive target? I know they're after the data. Is, is it that some of these bigger corporations are, uh, you know, they, they have such critical data in their systems? Is Is it the intellectual property? What's the big tell? What are they really going after for the whales?

Yeah, you know, we all want to think, and we got to talk about whaling next because that's number 3. We all think that we're more important than the next and that our data is important. They don't care one bit who they're doing this to. They are spamming out millions and millions of businesses at a time. It's completely arbitrary. They're spamming everybody. And when they get a, you know, it's like fishing. When they toss it in, they don't care which fish they're going for. They're just going for a fish. So now that's not true if you're in the defense industry. If you're in the financial industry, they're going after you because they want, you know, those bank account credit card numbers. But for most of us small businesses, it's just a shotgun approach. And they are, it's a statistical game. And 6% of us are loading that stuff through the click, through the ad, through the movie we watch.

Which takes us back to the training. Jeff McCluskey's weighed in. Before we get to the next step, let's check out what Jeff is saying. What percent— that's a good question. What percentage of cybercriminals actually get caught and prosecuted? You have some firsthand experience with that.

Yep.

I'm thinking it's small. And the other question, how do we bridge the gap between the technology growing exponentially and the user needing to stay educated and up to speed? Well, and I'm going to pitch John Sileo again. That's one of the ways to do it. I'll put his website up again in just a second, yeah. Go ahead, John.

Yeah, Jeff, the percentage that we know of is less than 1/10 of 1%. So 99.9% go free. However, it's way less than that that get caught because so many of the crimes never get prosecuted in any way. They don't get brought to court. Nobody reports it. They just go forward. They have ransomware. The FBI never knows about it. And, you know, they pay the ransom or they don't, or they solve the malware. So in my case, my business partner who did all of this, he was literally, you know, one in hundreds of thousands that gets prosecuted. And the only reason that happened was because we— we can get into the details of it, but we saw from some of the metadata of the files that he was sending that he had created them live. They weren't created years before, um, as he had presented in court. And we knew that he was doing it before, uh, it was reported. And so we were able to, um, to collect that information before he, you know, before he stopped doing it. And that's the reason he, of, of so very few, uh, get caught. So it's, it's a tiny portion.

Well, of course it's very hard to chase these people down anywhere for the nuisance stuff. Like, uh, you know, I told you about— and I'm still trying to solve this problem, it keeps coming up— the browser hijacker, the search engine hijacker, right, that keeps coming up. It's not, you know, I found out it's nothing criminal. Well, it is because it's stealing my time, but it just brings me to this browser, uh, another search, uh, thing that has ads and whatnot that I guess people have paid for. I don't know how the hell that's legal, but I was told that somehow they're kind of under the radar, but it's a, it's a horrible waste of time.

It is. And 99.5% of them are overseas where, you know, international law doesn't, uh, there's no way to prosecute them. So, you know, what are you going to do when somebody from Russia or North Korea or Iran, um, Eastern Europe are doing this? There's, there's no legal way to catch them. It's, you know, a majority of it happens from out of country.

There you go. Now, I think if I remember right, you were going to talk about whales.

Whales, yes. Let me address Jeff's second question though, which was, yeah, let's get— how do we keep up with the technology?

Okay.

Um, and the security. So really, the, the reason that we are behind on this, and if I try and keep it as apolitical as possible, um, because it's happened in multiple administrations, um, is that we haven't legislated in a, in a timely way to keep up with the technology. So consequently, Facebook is out there gathering everything they can in a land grab, and Amazon and every corporation, and there's no regulation of that data. I'm not a huge fan of massive regulation, but I am a fan of really smart regulation. You know, I don't want people driving 150 miles an hour on, on my side street where my kids play. So we all are used to certain amounts. Well, there's no regulation on our privacy or the collection of data like there is in Europe and most other countries. We have got to have that in order for the law to keep up with the technology.

No, I agree with you. As much of a devotee of John Locke as I am, uh, people that know me know I'm pretty much a disciple of John Locke. It's, it's still this difference. We created government, we created these regulations allegedly to protect us and our individual rights and our privacy, not to protect, you know, the companies or the corporations that are exploiting that. So I agree with you 100%. If there's any regulation, it's to protect our privacy. And yeah, so we're—

well, I'm going to see your lock with Alexis de Tocqueville, and there you go, and say, you know, enlightened self-interest. Yeah, sometimes what keeps the overall community safe is best for the individual, right? And that's absolutely the place that we're at with security and privacy. These companies should be building in, you know, when, when Ring makes it, when Amazon makes a Ring doorbell, they should have security built into that before they start selling that thing.

Yeah.

And it should be approved just like when we put an airplane in the, in the air or a nuclear submarine. These things have got to be safe when we put them on our door so that we're not getting hacked, our cameras getting hacked into like happened with Amazon.

Yeah, there you go. All right, so how about whales?

Okay, so whaling Whaling is just a version of social engineering, right, of human manipulation. It's also known as business email compromise. It's also known as CEO fraud. This is where they get a little information on you from your Facebook or your Instagram. They use it to call, generally to call and to ask you to wire transfer money. So in COVID times, it might be, listen, 'You're going to get your IRS check, but we need you to send this fee payment, uh, to get it to come.' Well, it's reasonable enough that we give information. They then cash out our, our stimulus check or our bank account or whatever. So it's, it's an actual phone call where they're going for the big whale, the person with the money. So it's instead of a phishing scam, it's a whaling scam, right?

If I remember what you said to me before, it Really, we shouldn't be giving any of that information through that type of a conversation anyway, right? Responsible companies, especially in finance, you're going to call into them, you're going to log into them, right? They might send you a message that says, give us a call, but then you're calling a legitimate number. They're not going to start, right, they're not, they're not going to call you, open up the phone, and bang, all of a sudden start asking you for this information. Nope.

Yeah, the, the thread we use is initiate or terminate if you didn't initiate the call. If it's a charity calling into your house, if it's the IRS calling about a stimulus check, which they will never do, or email or text, if it's, um, the IT department calling you at your desk in your home— none of that until you have verified that it's legitimate by hanging up that phone, calling back on a published number that you know is legitimate, and taking control of the situation.

That's important. We're going to put that up there so So people can remember that. And any more steps that people should know about?

More steps with just in general, are we back to the big 5?

Yeah, why not? I know I don't want to be— I want to be respectful of your time and keep you around.

Yeah, you know, one that's such a simple one, and this works at home and business, third-party spam filters that get rid of a lot of this problem, the ransomware, the malware, the crimeware. The adware that you've been hit by or spyware. We rely on Outlook and Apple Mail and, and Gmail to do it. To some degree, Gmail does a— Google does a better job of filtering out stuff. But a third-party spam filter that you, you get at the ISP level, at your internet provider level, that's called gateway spam protection. Those filters are far more robust. And if you spend even a couple of weeks training them on what's good and what's bad. That is probably the number one way to get all of this crud out of your email box and out of your corporation before somebody clicks on it.

And do you buy those directly from your, your provider, or is that something that— okay, yeah.

So if let's say Comcast is your provider, you can call them and say, listen, I want to— your business provider, um, you call them and say, I want to add, um, you know, spam filtration at that level. Okay, relatively easy to do. You can also do it with your email company. So if you're, you know, an AppRiver customer, you can call them and add it. You can do it with your web hosting company, whoever hosts your website. It just is so much more sophisticated at that level than what Apple and Outlook can do at that lower level.

And that brings us to number 5, I guess, huh? Or was that number 5? Did I lose count?

I told you, I don't think that was 5, but man, we got to protect our protect our phones. Let's talk about privacy just for a second.

Yeah, please.

Veering off of security, but with all of this contact tracing that's going to start to come up, right, because we're going to have to trace who has COVID, where it goes, where they've been, and there's going to be a lot of discussion around do we want to give access to governmental agencies to our phones. And to the data in our phone so that they can see that Jim and John got together, they were within 6 feet of each other, one has COVID, and now they have to trace the other one. And it brings up a larger point, which is most people don't know what their phone is giving away on them at all. And they've never gone in and changed their location settings. Absolutely vital that you spend the time to go into settings, privacy, location, and you look at every app that is tracking you. Maybe when it's running, maybe all the time, maybe never. Most of them, you never need to track you. Maps and so forth, you need when they're running. That little thing will make a huge difference to your overall privacy and also start to make you aware of whether or not we want this tracking for the benefit of contact tracing in the epidemic.

How well does it work, for instance— you just scared the hell out of me again, because I use one of those automatic mileage trackers all the time for my business miles, right? Yeah. I've set it so that it's supposed to only be tracking me when the app is on. Is that effective or is—

Again, on Apple, that's effective. Now, always know that whoever's device you are utilizing and whatever service, AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, that you're using, they're always tracking you because they're the ones that have the access to the cellular tower data of where you are going. So no matter what, they're going to be tracking you, whether they share that with the app. Again, in Apple, I'm— I'm, uh, they're, they're a privacy-based business at this point. They want to gain your business because of privacy. Google, we're not able to tell because there's hundreds of different versions of, of Droid, of Android operating system. So it's customized by phone by provider, by cell provider. Um, so when you, you know, you have an iPhone and you switch that off, they're not tracking your location. Apple is, and your, your, uh, cellular provider still is.

George Orwell had no idea.

We live in a state so far beyond what Orwell predicted, it's unbelievable. And the funny part is most people don't know it. They don't understand it. When they have a Zoom now, that information— and, and here's the answer, which is read the data policy. You got to read the data policy. Well, if you read Zoom's data policy, they have a right to, with your cloud recording, to scan that information and sell your information based on that. So if you're talking intellectual property, stock pricing, or whatever, they have the right to sell that information.

I don't know how many more times you're going to scare the hell out of me. I know.

Here's the good news, though. When you take some of these steps, again, it's, it's changing your defaults. When you, when you know this and think, okay, Zoom is, is accessing this, I think I won't load to the cloud. I'm going to load that recording directly to my machine. You're taking steps to lower your footprint. And again, they're going after the easy the easy hits.

And, oh yeah, and so are we, right? Because those things are very convenient for us. I mean, I always had the default on let it record to the cloud because then I can share, you know, share it with my folks too. But I suppose I should be so lucky that if Zoom is ripping off my webinars and selling them, maybe that'll get my name out even more.

That's true. You and I being public like this stuff. Yeah, go ahead, everybody take it, whatever. We want that. It's when we're having the board of directors meeting. It's when a Fortune 50 company calls me 3 weeks ago and says, oh my gosh, we had a competitor on our Zoom conference call with the board that had named themselves the same as a board member. It looked like they were on twice. It was just a photo of them, which they had gotten off of a social media page. So it looked totally legitimate. And a competitor listened to the entire strategic strategic board meeting. That's when it starts to become really important.

And personal finance, like, you know, our friend Jeff there who popped in, you know, working with clients in his field and investing in insurance and things like that. You know, those are important. You expect those conversations to be confidential, right?

You bet.

Yeah. John, thank you so much. And hey, thanks everybody that's popping in and out of here today. Really appreciate you guys. And if you're, like I said, if you're watching on the replay, play and the discussion raised some more questions, please just send them to us. I'm sure, John, do you want to give your email for people to— no, you never do that, do you? Anyway, you want people to reach out to you directly with questions too.

Uh, you bet. Uh, just go to the, the website, there's a Contact Us form. It gets, uh, to me and my entire staff. We'll answer you as quickly as we can and, uh, point you to some resources. The other one is, you know, cilio.com/blog. Just my blog. That's where we put articles on virtually everything we've talked about. We try and give away as much as free. I'm just about ready to upload one on coronavirus scams right now, so that's, that's really current information.

Please let us know when that happens. We'll help get that around too. John, thank you so much. Uh, one little quick commercial for Sensei Leader Movement. If you haven't already, if you're watching this before May 31st— I think May has 31 days in it, could be wrong— but Uh, our Black Belt level membership is free right now. That's usually about $30 a month. And the best feature— you're going to get a lot of stuff. You're going to get some PDF downloads of some books. You're going to get 2 online courses, uh, that you can access, uh, right away, uh, self-study courses. And you get on the live monthly call. And I think that's probably the best feature of it. We get a nice conversation going with, with people that are involved in the movement now. And the next one, we're going to be talking a lot about uncertainty and how not only just how to deal with it, but how to really We find the opportunity that's there in uncertainty. So don't miss those calls. So just go to thesensileader.com and you'll find the links there to get that membership. John, thanks again. We'll have you back again soon, huh?

Sounds great. Thank you so much. Always fun talking with you.

Oh, absolutely. All right.