I love his voice. I just take a space left 7 46 time to talk to our tech guru. And the Internet of things World in which we live. This is the guy. To give you Admonitions, warnings and things to look for. He's rarely on 55 KRC on Friday mornings at 6 35, and hopefully we can kind of make this a semi regular thing. He's on the nightcap quite often. By nighttime show that appears with some regularity on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nights here on 700 wlw needs with us this morning, Dave Hatter. How are you? I'm good, Jeff. How you doing? I'm tuned. Pretty good. I mean, considering there's only five days left of the country, But other than that, I'm great. Uh, So you were talking about this solar winds thing that I had not even heard of. So first explains what solar winds is and where there's danger. Yes, The solar winds is a company that makes software that other companies used to manage their environments. So, for example, you're a company you have Computers, servers, etcetera that you want to manage. So you use the solar winds. Orion software. So you're administrators your nerves to manage this network, right? So Very powerful software. It's designed for administrators to use to manage other systems, and that's part of the issue with this. So thousands of companies tens of thousands of companies have solar winds of Ryan products installed in their networks that their ministers is using to manage your network. And unfortunately, um around October of 2019. Perhaps earlier. There's some speculation about this. Someone. It appears to be Russian hackers, although you know it's really hard to attribute this stuff. And what you often find with these hacking stories is Whatever you think happened when it first started is not what really happened, But it appears Russian hackers were able to like the Wuhan virus. Yeah, it's always hard to attribute this stuff, you know, and again, this story is still sort of breaking so The hackers have broken into solar winds. They modified the solar wind software so that when the customers of solar winds download updates to the software, the hackers now have access to these networks. A to least 18,000 Cos. Got the downloads with the bad software. Um there's a least 250 federal agencies and businesses that have been identified so far. That have been hacked through that bad software. It includes the department. Treasury includes department Justice, the State Department, the Commerce Department Energy Department. And literally. Hundreds of private businesses, including Microsoft. Microsoft a couple weeks ago, came out and said, it looks like these guys were able to access. Our software doesn't appear that they changed anything. But you always find out where these hacks of the scope that It takes a while to figure out exactly what happened. But the real the real big problem with this is so another cyber security company told solar winds they've been hacked solar winds put out a patch to fix it so that an update But here's the problem. Even if you install that patch, you don't know how long the bad guys were in your network. You don't know what else they might have done to give themselves back doors to get into your network again. So I mean, this is At least 250 companies have been identified. I predict it will be much more than that. At least 18,000 of their customers got this bad software so and it's more stories come out, you're starting to find again like with the Department of Energy. Okay. The Department of Energy has an elaborate plan called Black Start if the grid ever went down in the United States, black start is a detailed plan for how to bring it back up. If you were an enemy of the United States, and you wanted to knock out the grid, and you had the plan for how they were going to bring it back up. How we were going to bring it back up again. I should say that would be fairly bad news, you know? So yeah. This is it's called a software supply chain attack because again the bad guys modified software from a vendor that other companies are using fan, you know. Sadly, I think we'll see more of this kind of thing. It's it's very tedious and, frankly, pretty ingenious for the bad guys. But it's bad news for anyone that we use in the software and then frankly, bad news for society simply because so many companies are using this stuff. I have a have a question from Ray from the village grocery and I know we didn't talk about this prior to There are our conversation on the air Dave, but he wants to know about Proton encrypted email. Do you have any information on that? Yeah. Proton Mail is a email provider like a female or yahoo Hotmail there in Switzerland. It's it's encrypted, and my advice would be if you're looking. I use it personally. If you're looking for a free email platform, right low cost, you can pay a subscription fee and get some additional features and so forth. It's a good platform to use now, you know? You gotta understand that anything you put in digital form is theoretically. Never going to be private, but versus someone like Google and Gmail, where they scan all of your email on and use it to send you ads and so forth because folks have to remember. Google. Their entire model is built upon your data. Yeah, you're you you are. The product of your data is how they make most of their money. S Oh, yeah. Proton male. I'm a fan. I would recommend folks check it out if they're looking for an alternative to something like female or Yahoo or Hotmail or other Well known email platforms, All right, and tell me real quickly about WhatsApp. WhatsApp is a messaging and it started out as a private company. Facebook bought it in 2014. For something around 2 $19 billion. I think. And you know Facebook again like Google. That common pattern here. You they make their money from your data. You are the products, not the customer and the Morey of your data. They can capture the more money they can potentially make from itself. Facebook and WhatsApp. They announced. They're changing their privacy policy and it since it boils down to this, if you have, what if you use what that for messaging, think, texting sort of stuff. If you use what's that, and you don't agree to their new privacy policy. Which says that they're going to collect things like this is a list device model operating system. Actors and browser information. Mobile Network phone number, language in Time zone I P. Address device operations information. Facebook identifiers battery level on signal strength, simply everything. Everything they can get about you. Then.