Never Pay Ransoms - Two Free Things You Can Do to Stop Ransomware

[A quick, automated transcript of my conversation with Jim Polito on WTAG, WHYN, and WHJJ on 2021-05-18] Good morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. I was on with Mr. Polito this morning, and we went through the colonial pipeline and why you don't want to pay a ransom. And then I went into the things you can do for free. That'll give you 90%, maybe a little higher protection. So some websites to go to some things to do on a windows computer. So it went a little deeper, I think, than I usually. Go into, but I think a lot of great info. So here we go with Mr. Polito.  If I ever got hacked, ransomware, whatever there's one guy had called, not the Ghostbusters. I would call our tech talk guru and good friend, Craig Peterson, who joins us every week at this time. Good morning, sir.  Hey, good morning, Mr. Jim.  Craig, why don't you just say, I told you so because they, it looks like colonial paid the $5 million ransom, the stories I'm reading say that then the Russian hackers gave them the key to fix the encryption, and it didn't work. And then they eventually figured it out themselves. Am I correct? Yeah.  Yeah. That's pretty much what happened.  Brilliant guy because that's called colonial pipeline. So you said, and you have said many times before, the easiest way to get yourself in the crosshairs of a cyber hacker, ransomware criminal is to pay the ransom. Then you have painted a bullseye on your back. Why don't you tell us about that?  Yeah, we have a whole country thing. You might remember. There was an organization called the United States Navy. And the United States Marine Corps. And you remember, the Marine Corps Anthem, right?  Oh yeah. From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli, the barber. Okay. And why did they form the Marine Corps? Why did the Navy come to be? It came to be in both cases to protect our merchants, our merchant leads; we were having some problems with some alumnus back 250 years ago. And we sent our Marines over. In fact, the whole thing about leather neck comes from that same period. So they wouldn't get their heads chopped off. I hate to talk about that, but we've been facing this—type of thing, extortion as a country forever. And now we've got president and Biden out there. Know  I'm trying to do a hairy imitation. There might've been the Russians, but it wasn't the Russians; it wasn't Putin. At this point, it seems very obvious that because of dark by the way, who shut themselves down over the weekend, along with two other major ransomware operations, it looks like they were at the very least under the protection of the Russian government. So they go out, and who do they want to target? It used to just go out there, spray and pray. See who you can find now it's, let's go after the people with the bigger pockets, as much as we can, at least these professional groups of which of course are present, colonial or act by. But these professional groups now go after people. Now, who are they going to go after? They want somebody with the big. Wallet, a big deep pocket. And they also want to have somebody that they know is going to pay. So let's take the city of Atlanta, for instance. This is a small city in the south, and Atlanta went ahead and got around somewhere and paid. And what happened again? A couple of weeks later, they got ransomware and paid. And then what happened about a month later, they got ransomware and they. Multiple times now compare that, for instance, with the metropolitan police department down in Washington, DC. Now in Washington, of course, again, a small town, and they have a metropolitan police department. And again, They didn't bother putting together the type of security they need. And we just did an audit in fact of a county who will go on named that their cybersecurity was almost completely non-existent, yet you talked to them, and they say it's absolutely there, but in Washington, DC, they got into the police department...