 Back to the cyber underground where our mission is to dig deep to find out our cyber security touches our lives in everyday life. I'm your host Dave Stevens and here with me today again is my exceptional guest and co-host just in case. Or fill in. Gordo detects our everybody straight in from Hibachi Takashi last week. It was great. Document management stuff. No that was the week before. So this week was on how much energy the tech industry consumes. 500 million barrels of oil a day. That's worldwide. Yeah. Wow. No in the US. Just in the US. 500 million barrels of oil a day in the tech industry. Does that count my house? It just counts this stuff. Wow. And the server farms and Google and Amazon web services and all and wireless and wireline and all of that stuff. And your refrigerator. Not your refrigerator itself but the technology in your refrigerator. Sure. The Internet of Things. So that was the show this week. I want to imagine recharging batteries as a huge. There you go. Recharging. Rechargable society now or dependent on batteries. Do you not cost more money to make this than it does to make a refrigerator? Get out of here. Energy-wise. No. Yes. Really. So think of that. You have a carbon footprint too. I know. It's crazy. Anyway we digress. This is your show. This is my show. We're going to attack Bitcoin and we're going to go into cryptocurrency but however we've had an event today that's worldwide covered 74 countries so far. Yeah. Over 45,000 plus computers have been hit with a ransomware attack. Yeah. Most. So what's ransomware. He explained for our audience what ransomware is. No. I'm the guest. Ransomware is usually delivered via email with an encrypted package and it looks like a regular old link like an attachment. You click on it. I think you're going to get an I love you letter or whatever you're going to get or your spreadsheet and it sets about encrypting everything on your hard drive and it goes and look for any mapped hard drives to the network. Right. Transfers itself to that computer and starts encrypting that computer. Right. And just keeps jumping from place to place until your entire network is encrypted. Then you get a message on your screen saying hey if you want this decrypted you got to give us some Bitcoin. Well you got to give us ransomware and Bitcoin or cryptocurrency is one of them and the thing about having today is like 74 countries. Right. Yeah. The US was the least hit which I thought was interesting. Russia was one of the largest hit. Yeah. They're they're a megaphone which M E G A F O N their telephone company is their biggest cell carrier over there. Got hit. One of our FedEx carriers got hit at a remote location but mostly the UK Russia and Italy. It literally shut down the UK health system today. People they they they stop surgeries because they couldn't bring up the patient record because it was being held in this ransomware attack that went on. That's probably very wise. I wouldn't want someone to operate me without my patient record knowing that you know is this the link we cut off or it could be my record that they could be assuming and then you're really in trouble. But so this is kind of a crazy thing. So you know this is this is I don't want to sound like Armageddon or whatever but this is like World War three. This is the world war three. Right. It's cyber is the new world war three. That is the vanguard of the assault. Right. Any world war scenario from here going forward. Yeah. And someone pulls a plug. So the question is who did this. That's a good question but it looks like the tool that accomplished this was an NSA tool called WannaCry. Right. Which was released via nefarious means months and months ago. In fact late last year. But it looks like Microsoft realized that there was a vulnerability in their software in their operating system and released a patch in March and told everybody hey run this patch. Right. Those who did not are susceptible to this ransomware attack and just goes to show you you need to pay attention to those. The patch Tuesday you have to do patch Tuesday. And that's you know one of the things that I read it today. So I'm just telling you what I read. The health system within the Great Britain. Yeah. The majority of the computers that are running on their desktops are running XP. Windows XP. Windows XP has not been supported for like I can't remember how long. There are no patches. They're not going to come out with a patch. But guess what because when you start doing budget constraints when the first thing gets hit is the IT department. And right now the most vulnerable is your IT department. Which this is ironic because you're right. When it comes to getting your return on investment you spend millions of dollars on your computers you're thinking I want to get five years out of that. Yeah. Right. But no one considers whoa. If you don't keep that up this is your biggest vulnerability. Therefore your biggest cost loss. If you get hit. And they're delaying these patches. And what I've seen in most companies and I've worked with companies like this too. And I won't mention them. Yeah. Me too. The budgets are made around how much effort and time will it take to do these implementations and will it break something. Now you remember Windows 7 days. Yeah. Did Microsoft patches and sometimes it would break software that you were running because they would change libraries in the dotnet framework and so forth. And so people were afraid and they wanted to test that patch before they pushed it out to the network. And people are still in that mode and it's too slow. Yeah. They're not testing those patches. And really when I tell people to upgrade and do these patches and they tell me that fear my response is look would you rather break one application or be responsible for the complete shutdown of your business. Yeah. You're the loss of business continuity. No income versus one application not working. And this is a perfect example. The entire essentially the entire health care system of Great Britain going shut down to the hall. And that includes the health care system that the physicians you know the clinicians the service providers like the radiologists and numerous ones all shut down because of this one attack that we don't know who's from yet. And I heard I hear mafia I hear all kinds of things going on every kid in his basement. It could be some kids. They want to eat his pie. So here's pay the ransom at three hundred dollars if you don't pay it three hundred bucks three hundred. We'll give you the key. If you don't pay it in one hour it jumps to four hundred. If you don't pay it in the next hour it jumps to five hundred. So this is not like we're not talking like that's not four hundred million. This is four hundred dollars. That sounds like a bookie. And probably in cryptocurrency. Now are you going to pay it now which can be traced. Everyone thinks cryptocurrency can't be traced. It can be traced. So it's it's I'm looking forward to seeing how this thing unfolds over the over the next few days. I'm hoping they we can recover in time to actually not hurt people. I mean if there's people that actually die because of this that could be well there was a guy that was scheduled I read it today in the paper scheduled for heart surgery today in Britain and he they postponed it. Oh that's tragic. I can't believe this chemotherapy patients had their chemotherapy sessions canceled. We should we should restate by the way for our audience. This is usually via email. Yes. Which means this is usually one careless employee. Yes. And I always go back to this perfect example when I was a programmer at this company in the Los Angeles area in 2000. We had the I love you virus. And it was it was a perfect kid for the programming department. The tennis star. We all saw. I love you on the subject line and every programmer all his geeks went Oh really. Double click. Yeah. And of course you know blanket. And it's so easy to fool people into clicking on things now. And so one person who's under trained or careless or a little apathetic one day or a little tired and your whole network goes down. And this one patch could have prevented it. And I tell everybody if you if in doubt about an email delete it. If it's that important someone will call you. If it's that real someone will call you. I mean delete it. It's not if it's even if it's if in doubt knock it out. I mean that's all I say just if in doubt and knock it out and don't even listen or don't even know what read it. Don't even open it. Nothing. You sound like my old football coach knocked out a few times. That could have some implications in the medical industry and knocked out too many times. I'm curious as to why it's not just the United States from what I see the the entire Western hemisphere was very lightly affected. Yeah. From Canada all the way down. And I think it's because there's a huge awareness of it here in this country whether it be because of what happened with elections or what we do is promoting this in shows like yourselves right shows like B-Botchy talk where we're always telling people to be aware be aware be aware. So I think that that's made it more forefront and you see in the news and things. So let's put us on on the edge. So that's a good thing. That is a good thing. You know last week on a week before last we had a show where we talked about cybersecurity certifications. Yes. And why it's important to have those certs and those people that have certs on on staff. When I looked at the distribution of how many of these say CISP certifications there were per country. The United States and Great Britain had the vast majority of them over 70,000 here in the U.S. 20 or so thousand. And that's a that's a say with that explain with a CISP certified information system security professional. Yeah. So that's a great career opportunity. Gold standard. Yes. You get that certification. Now those people on staff will know you need to cover your bases. You need to do patch Tuesdays you need to train your staff you need to not click on that. And it's funny that the country that has the most certifications of that kind is the least impacted. Yes. Attack. And that so that's kind of explains. Yeah. There could be a causality for connection. Oh I never used that word causality. This sounds like someone went to university. This is that word. Well maybe. Or teachers at university causality. Anyway. We're not allowed to say impossible anymore. Okay. We have to say computationally improbable. Oh Jesus. That's freaking impossible. It's impossible for me. It's impossible for me to say that. At least after we've had our water. Yeah. It's true. Okay. So anyway. So this so again I guess to the viewers and I hope they put it up as a PSA as you got to watch for these emails because they're going to keep coming because it's still propagating itself. It didn't end just because 74 countries were notified doesn't means it stopped. The funny thing is I heard that in Great Britain they had a general announcement to everybody to turn off your computers. Yeah. They sent it via email. If and don't knock it out. So guess what I would do as a someone who's maybe I ain't going to tell you what I'll do. But you can just you think about it right. I'll send out a similar email that might have something in it. Next thing I know I got the FBI knocking on my door. Most of people knew better. They shut down their wireless and pulled the plug out of the wall. Yeah. So you know no power no network no virus. You know interesting thing today is I never turned my PC today. You just left it off. I just I just said you know what I think I'll just take today and not turn it on. How are you doing with that. That's been a struggle. I got my new I watched. So I got to go in here and I got this into my phone. But I just decided I said you know what. And I've got I you know I patched the thing every the first thing I do before I get on the Internet is run scans. Yeah. On all my systems and everything and then I connect to the Internet. But I just said you know today I'm going to just let this thing sit. Just let it sit. Bring up a great point and one of the great defensive tactic to take just as a home user. Yeah. So our audience should know this is to run those scans even though it's an inconvenient thing to do. Run them at the middle of the night when you're not. Yep. When you're not on the computer. And what it does is it sets a baseline for your computer. So if something funky does start going on all the bells and whistles go on. Hey something is not normal. Is this supposed to be happening. And you get some warning messages about that. So I'll give you one of my my my my standard scenario in the morning is I get up in the morning and I don't automatically connect to the Internet. So I go on the morning and I run the scan. Then I go get my coffee and let it run. Run. Do what you ever got to do. So well it's inconvenient. Get up early. Get up early. Right. 15 minutes. Then I run the scans. I come back. Look what's going on. Then I connect to the Internet and then I move on with what I'm going to do. That's a great idea. I mean it's just it's it's it's sure it's inconvenient. But you know what I'm sitting there breathing comfortably that I think I've got to lose your system and after recovering the days and hours and the money. That's right. And I've been called in to um called in to organizations to help them get out from under. Oh and one last thing I'd ask. I'm not asked to say. The NSA if you go to their website they have a whole listing of all the keys to undo these encrypted documents. So if you go look at NSA look for their website for the keys you might be fortunate enough to find the key that will unlock your data and not have to pay the ransomware. Because they reuse keys sometimes. Yes. And they're doing the ransomware attack on multiple companies. They'll reuse the decrypt key to get out of the ransomware attack. And those keys might be published already. Yes. Go check that first. And we did that on one of our earlier Hibachi talk shows. We talked about that and gave everybody a heads up to go ahead and do that. That's why they should be watching you. They should be watching Hibachi talk because we give you a heads up. Hibachi talk by the way everybody is on Wednesdays at 2 p.m. 2 p.m. now. That's right. And then you guys go on YouTube by the next day. Well YouTube is within 24 hours or 48 hours. So you get your whole channel just go to YouTube look up Hibachi talk all the episodes. Or cyber underground. Or cyber underground. See how I got that right this time. You got that right it's not cyber underwear or underwear or underworld or whatever. I made it just for the audience. One day I made a slight full paw. They called it cyber underwear. We're going to take a little break. We'll be right back with you guys. Stay safe and we'll be right back to talk about cryptocurrency. Go back to the cyber underground. I'm your host Dave Stevens. This is my guest and co-host today. Cyber tech czar. Fill in Justin case. Just in case or just in time. So the whole first part of our show we neglected to talk about our topic because we were talking about something current and relevant and an emergency situation to tell people informationally. Stay away from this horrible ransomware attack. Don't click on that email. If in doubt knock it out. That's a good tip. So cryptocurrency. So I mean I knew you're happy and we got like 14 minutes to do this. So I'll preface this by saying if you go and look at Hibachi talk about a month or so ago I did a show that said understanding cryptocurrency in 28 minutes 101 where I did an example of what it is. I'm going to quickly with you right now. Okay. So assume you and I are playing poker. Okay. Okay. But we don't have money. That's usually the case with me. Yeah. Okay. So now we're in perfect. So we're playing poker and there's four of us at the table and we deal the cards and every hand that comes up we have to write down what happens. You're going to bet a dollar that you don't have. Right. So you say I'm betting a dollar. I'm going to write down Dave bet a dollar. So I'm kind of running a tab. You're running a tab. So and Susie's going to go Dave wrote a dollar. Also Johnny's going to write down draw a dollar. And as you oh wait Susie bet a dollar. Okay we're so we're all keeping track of those dollar bets or raise you a dollar. Okay. Write it down. And so at the end of that hand after we've done all of this you win. You win because of the cards that get dealt out. You win. Now we go back and we look at our ledger to see if like and John says well you know I never bet that dollar and you go wait wait no I got here I saw that you bet the dollar. You can say no I show you bet the dollar. So he says John you bet the dollar. You did be bet the dollar. So don't try to not get away with this. So we've now just confirmed in this confirmation I'll call it a hash. This confirmation of this all this stuff happened gets verified and boom we're done. So think of cryptocurrency as that on a global scale. A shared ledger. A shared ledger that goes oh thank you that shared a shared ledger that's around the world as we move this new form of currency not the U.S. dollar not the the I don't know what the yen or the ruple or whatever it's a new form of currency that has value based on supply and demand. Another comment. The U.S. dollar is based on what? It's not the gold standard anymore. I almost said gold and it's not silver anymore. It's not gold or silver is based on what the world thinks it's worth. It's a market value. It's a market value. Cryptocurrency Bitcoin is one of them is based on what the world thinks is worse. Worse. Worth. So I got new teeth. So you know so that's that's and Bitcoin is a one of those forms. You know Bitcoin is a type of currency because there's Ethereum, there's Litecoin, there's a new one now which I'm really following called Potcoin. No that sounds fine. Yes sounds fine. The reason Potcoin is being created is because the marijuana medical marijuana distributors or the recreational ones are not allowed to put their cash in the banks in the federal banks because it's still against the law federally federally. That's right. So they're moving hundreds of millions of dollars around this country. Cash. In cash because when you go into them and I know because I have in Colorado and went in there it's because I was doing some investigative reporting. Of course. And went in there and sure it's cash only industry. Oh yeah well yeah because they can't put the money in the bank. They can't they can't support how they got the money and how they got the money. So they've got to move it into some other form of currency. Potcoin. I love it. So this potcoin is now starting up and is very much in its infancy as you know this stuff is all high risk too. So it's starting up now as a way that the the marijuana industry and this includes the growers the doctors that write the prescriptions. You have to admit this is no more risky than the stock market or the US dollar or currency exchange in general. This is the same thing. Well derivatives. We let the banks do derivatives and look what happened to the economy in 2008. We went down the down the tubers and so there is a loss so risky okay but you trusted the banks. That's right and the banks got to do because they were deregulated. Yeah they got to do whatever they wanted. They got to do it. So and the beauty of cryptocurrency and please don't go buy cryptocurrency because I said it's your decision. Gordon said go get cryptocurrency. I did not. This is a command. You must go buy some. Actually you shouldn't because it's really expensive. If you it's not it's not for the fate of heart. If someone wants to go in and invest and purchase cryptocurrencies this is not for the fate of heart. But the beauty of it now as as opposed to when I first got into it is I can turn this into cash. I can turn this into US cash, Canadian cash. How do you do that? There's brokers out there. It's like a stock broker. It's just like a stock broker. There's brokers out there. There's distributors out there and I'll give you one that really peed me off. It's like one of the best in the US is in my opinion is an organization called Coinbase. They've got a lot of venture capital. They've really set up a great system and so on and I was using Coinbase as my method to. The state of Hawaii shut that down here. Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs said to Coinbase if you want to do business in Hawaii you have to keep the equivalent of what the value of Bitcoin is worth in US currency in a local in a local bank. Now local banks have to keep like 8% of what the currencies are going around. They want 100%. They want 100%. So I got a nice email. Careful what you'll read. Nice email. I got a nice email from from them and said you need to you got 30 days to close out your account. So what did you think I did? I went offshore. Come on. I went offshore and I did two things. I went offshore and then I bought a device called a keep key. It's about this size. This little size top up here. It keeps the crypto fees to your currency. Yeah so all my currency is sitting on there. So now it's DC Ciego say I can't buy this on Amazon. I bought it on Amazon. It came in. I moved on my Bitcoin to this and now I and every time I want to move Bitcoin around I just plug it in and I go through the other places. Now you said it on the air. The FBI is going to come and knock down my door. I doubt it. This is a new administration. DCCA just you guys are beyond fathoming. And all I can tell you is that I was a number of my friends that were in it. They got out and they're not in it like I am and they made for every 100 dollars they put in Bitcoin in one year they got 160 dollars back. That's not a bad return. Not a bad return. But it's not again I'm not telling you to do this because it's not for the faint of heart. You heard him Gordo said go out and buy a cryptocurrency. I'll tell you right now why. Right now this is how it's just so you know within the last day Bitcoin has gone down 153 bucks. So it's the last day. Well it wasn't at $1,200. It's $1,665 right now. Within the past hour it's gotten up 53 bucks. So this is the roller coaster. That's just Bitcoin. Ethereum it's gone up $2.05 in the past hour. In the past day it's gone down 4 bucks. So it's just a roller coaster ride. And then there's Litecoin and whatever. So I track all of these things but it's like the stock market on steroids. And it goes it just goes and goes and goes and goes. Do you believe that in the future this is our currency? I believe that this will be a currency of international trade. India now recognizes it as a form of currency within their country because it's more stable than their currency. It's based on size of line depend. So if I wanted to get a cab I could use Bitcoin. Yes you can. Really. I could buy a Starbucks with a Bitcoin on my iPhone. Right now. Right now today. Really. I mean I can go to Best Buy. On online on Best Buy I use Bitcoin to buy a PC. Oh that's great. So I've got a Walmart online takes Bitcoin. So I also noticed in our research on the dark web that everyone takes Bitcoin. Which is a little weird to me because you know you know I've been in the community industry for quite a while. And we know that there is nothing that can't be traced. Exactly. Right. So if I'm selling illegal weapons on the stock market or I might know on the dark web you come to me you give me your Bitcoin I send you a weapon. Now your address is traceable I have your personal information plus your crypto key. And that's what happened. That's what cleaned up the industry. It's like I go I'll use derivatives again the banking industry and derivatives. What cleaned up the industry was the fact that people were doing illegal things with it and people said we got to start tracking this. And every transaction is traceable. Is it easy to trace it? No but it is with good computer systems easy to trace it. You ain't going to do it with your laptop. And there's no way to hide it really because of the shared ledger. Exactly. We've got we've talked about the earlier. You got a ledger they got a ledger got a ledger it's all over the world millions of them. The biggest Bitcoin miner in the world right now is China. They got supercomputers processing and verifying every transaction. And you ask yourself why is China verifying every Bitcoin transaction around the world? Probably because they're taking Bitcoin. Because you every time you verify a transaction you get Bitcoin. Oh I got to start doing this isn't it. Is that mining? That's called mining. Okay. And you know and so mining Bitcoin is a way to make more Bitcoin. And I'm you know when I first got into this I could do it with my my PC at home but not now supercomputers because they got to verify the transaction and they verify it within. It used to be like within an hour now it's within seconds. Soon it's going to be within milliseconds. Oh so for me to be a miner of these bitcoins and to verify transactions I have to verify a transaction within a few seconds. Within yeah whereas before you had time. So way beyond my personal computing power. Yeah way back because I could have written an app for the phone and you know mine bitcoins. Well there was guys and girls that got together said let's combine all of our computers so we can process. And they found out that the graphic card graphics cards on their computers had more processing power so they're using that. Oh the GPUs. Yeah using the GPUs to help process the and authenticating the transactions. I haven't authenticated authenticated the transaction in a year. And it runs all day long. And you're still trying. Still trying. Hey at a thousand dollars a change. Well how do I get some. If I want some bitcoins how do I go get some. Well now you can't go to Coinbase you have to go offshore and there's there's out there and I'm not going to name the names of them but there's there's there's bitcoin exchanges out there and you can go there and set up an account and you can move money from your credit card or from your bank to those those organizations and from there then you can decide just like you're buying stock you can buy a particular cryptocurrency whether it be bitcoin ethereum litecoin. I haven't seen potcoin up on those yet but but there's a number of those different the number of those up there I don't say it's really inexpensive and I wouldn't mind dumping a hundred bucks on it. Is there a is there a fee when you make. Oh yeah there's all have transaction fees yeah but they're so the thing is that the transaction fees within the crypto currencies are very low lower than credit card. And you can go down eight decimal places in a huge in a bitcoin right you know I've just found one and let's start this up what would you tell people about bitcoin good bad or ugly should they get into it should they have. Oh I'm not going to tell you my first advice is don't I'm not telling you to get into it. You heard him he said get into bitcoin right now. No no no this is not for the faint of heart. I know I would tell me to say you know do your homework like you would do anything if you're going to buy any stock whether it be Amazon Google Apple whatever go do your homework and you can go to YouTube you can go to wherever and and and start looking and doing your homework and figuring out how to you need to understand this. Before you buy it before you buy it you got to go in there and understand it. I mean Bill Gates created his own version of a cryptocurrency for nonprofits purely so he could fund third world countries where they can do a twenty five dollar transaction for next to nothing they can't do a twenty five dollar credit card transaction in a third world country because the cost of that credit card transaction is more than they make in a week. So we're going to have to wrap this up. Okay sorry. Just so you know everybody Gordo saying go out there and buy a cryptocurrency right now. I'd like to. I'm not coming on the show anymore. Hello everybody stay safe.