Identity Theft Protection in 2020 – CF062

This week on Cyber Frontiers Jim and Christian explore how identity theft monitoring services continue to evolve in 2020 to include protection beyond traditional monitoring capabilities. We evaluate how effective these services have been historically, how the business model is shifting, and what the average consumer can expect in trying to increase overall security. We line up the discussion with historical anecdotes on social security, FTC litigations, and statistics on consumer theft at large. It’s a new spin on an old topic with many touch points to previous episodes, and contains food for thought on effective measures to increase security diligence.

 

 


Cyber Frontiers is all about Exploring Cyber security, Big Data, and the Technologies Shaping the Future!   Christian Johnson will bring fresh and relevant topics to the show based on the current work he does.

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Full show notes and video at http://theAverageGuy.tv/cf062

Podcast, Cyber Frontiers, Christian Johnson, lifelock, bitdefender, identity theft, insurance, scammers, Maple Grove Partners


An Overview of Identity Theft from FTC

https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0235-identity-theft-protection-services

The Insecure Legacy of Social Security

https://arstechnica.com/science/2009/07/social-insecurity-numbers-open-to-hacking/

FTC Litigation of Lifelock Circa 2015

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2015/12/lifelock-pay-100-million-consumers-settle-ftc-charges-it-violated

Lifelock Offerings Today We Analyze on the Show

https://www.lifelock.com/#howcspworks

Identity Theft Statistics

https://www.identityforce.com/blog/identity-theft-odds-identity-theft-statistics

https://www.consumeraffairs.com/finance/identity-theft-statistics.html

Sample Scams Taking Advantage of COVID-19

https://www.identityforce.com/identity-theft/coronavirus-scams

FTC COVID-19 Response

https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/features/coronavirus-scams-what-ftc-doing

Do I Always Have to Give my Social Security Number Out?

https://www.allclearid.com/when-you-can-say-no-to-providing-your-social-security-number/

 

Jim Collison  [0:00] 
This is the Average Guy Network and you have found Cyber Frontiers, show number 62 recorded on April 20, 2020.

Jim Collison  [0:19] 
Here in Cyber Frontiers we explore cybersecurity big data and the technologies that are shaping the future. If you have any questions, comments or contributions you can always send us an email send it to me Jim@theaverageguy.tv you can always track down Christian Christian@theaverageguy.tv find me on Twitter @jcollison and of course you can get Christian he’s got a way better handle than me @Borgwhisperer. Don’t forget the average guy TV powered by Maple Grove Partners get secure reliable high speed hosting from people that you know and you trust. Okay over their head out plan start as little as $10 a month web and media hosting available Maple Grove partners. We do it here at theAverageGuy.tv lightning fast MapleGrovePartners.com stay up to date with everything we do live trying something new. I know it’s crazy. But head out to the average guy TV dot Eventbrite and everything we do for the next three or four weeks. I’m going to try and keep that up to date out there. So you kind of want to know who’s the guest What’s going on? What are we doing even cyber frontiers made it this time, the average guy dot event bright calm if you register and follow me over there, you’ll get a notification every time I post something new. So if you always want to be in the know, you can do it that way. And then there’s another way to do it too. If you go to the average guy.tv slash subscribe. There’s a newsletter signup and I know I’ve joked you a couple times by having you sign up and then not sending anything kind of committed to do it. It will give weekly updates or mostly weekly updates will be available for again, the average guy.tv slash subscribe because I knew you’re writing that down. Christian Welcome back to another cyber frontiers. Good to see you.

Christian Johnson  [1:50] 
Thanks. It’s good to be back. We’re on a we’re on a roll of quarantine recording.

Jim Collison  [1:54] 
I feel like we got to take advantage of the quarantine because it’s right I mean, it’s a pink The other day I’m like, Hey, we could do this in four weeks instead of six. That’s right. And what actually what what tipped me off we’re going to talk about digital identity protection. Tonight what tipped me off is I got an email from bitdefender there. I kind of use them for my antivirus I have the bitdefender box which like a pf sense box or untangle or any of those right it kind of helps me manage the security of my network here. It’s one of the easier ones bitdefender boxes drop dead simple plug it in, they kind of manage everything for you. I like it for me because I don’t have to mess around with it. That doesn’t mean I haven’t built my own pf sense box from time to time just to see what’s going on there. But got this email from them. Which is interesting. They have been kind of getting more into this space but this defender digital identity protection. Normally Christian we would see this from like lifelock right, some of those companies that are doing this, they’re offering it for 60 bucks a bunch of you know they’re offering a bunch of services digital footprint visualization, continuous identity monitoring real time alerts that are out there. I don’t think anything new 60 bucks a year pretty much in line, I think with some of the other digital services. But I wanted to get your take tonight like, we have talked about this before and in your philosophy is reduced your digital footprint, you’re never going to get it completely wiped out as far as being but do we need to think about are we in? You know, where are we at today? So give me some if 60 bucks, is it worth it? Do I need to go down that route? Give us your opinion.

Christian Johnson  [3:36] 
So it’s kind of interesting. I’ll actually start with a totally unrelated question. Are you familiar with life locks kind of sorted history before they were bought by Norton? No, no, not so. The FTC back in 2015 had a settlement with lifelock where lifelock was quote, will pay 100 million dollars to settle FTC contempt charges that it violated the terms of a 2010 federal court order that requires the company to secure consumers personal information and prohibits the company from deceptive advertising. This is the largest monetary award obtained by the Commission and an order enforcement action. So this completely, this kind of little historical nugget, I think is mostly lost on the average person that hears lifelock. Right. The lifelock that you are familiar with from a branding and consumer today looks very different. Well, what’s the number one reason why it looks different today? Because it’s no longer a parent company. lifelock was bought out by Norton in subsequent action, kind of as a series of results of the original enforcement action, but the original enforcement action alleged four things. The first thing it alleged was that From October of 2012, through March of 2014, lifelock had failed to establish and maintain a comprehensive information security program to protect users sensitive personal information, including the things they’re supposed to be protecting their social security number, credit card and bank account numbers. Second, it alleged that lifelock had falsely advertised that it protects consumer sensitive data with the same high level safeguards used by financial institutions. Third, the FTC alleged that from January 2012 through December of 2014, lifelock falsely advertised that it would send alerts quote as soon as possible, as it received it, an indication that a consumer may be a victim of identity theft. Finally, the FTC alleged that the company failed to abide by the orders record keeping requirements. So that was an excerpt from one of the FTC press releases back in December 17 of 2015 It was kind of an interesting reminder to me how quickly people place their trust in things that claim to be protecting your best interests. Clearly, since that time, lifelock has had to do a 180. They were bought by Norton. They’re pretty much for all intents and purposes, a completely different company from the company that I described to you in that forcement action. But the fundamental truth doesn’t change, which is that these tools in general, are going to help at most, do two things for you. One, give you a glimpse into your current state of affairs. And what I mean by that really is what is your current digital footprint or your digital surface area as it pertains to your personal PII. Second, it’s going to be a reactive safety net so to speak, if you fail at your primary mission, which is to reduce your footprint and not be a target, so if you fail, maybe there’s this hypothetical, you know, net that, you know, keeps you from falling over the cliff, and it may not be enough to actually prevent the damage. When I looked at the statistics on this, I was actually even more surprised. So, in 2017 6.64% of consumers became victims of identity fraud, which, quite honestly is quite a bit higher than I would have thought. Typically when we talk about the odds of an identity theft happening, we’re talking about more vulnerable populations, people who are less technically savvy, elderly, or people who are just more generally susceptible to social phishing. And this was a study done by identity force. So if Of course, they themselves and putting out these metrics have a endgame here of why you should read these metrics. What I found more interesting, though, was the second metric, which is overall 33% of US adults have experienced identity theft, which is more than twice the global average. So, that could mean a whole bunch of things, it could mean that the US is like, more unintelligent on these matters, which

Christian Johnson  [8:31] 
maybe, but maybe more likely, is that us persons are much more targeted for identity theft and fraud, which in and of itself, I think has some interesting implications. So, if you live in the United States, and you have a social security number, chances are according to these statistics, if you were to roll the dice in a poker game and hedge your bets against not having some type of identity theft problem in your life, You could be surprised. Now it’s not a majority of people. But a third is, I would say beyond statistically relevant when we’re talking about these types of things. And, of course, kind of the unsurprising statistic of it all, how they measure this exactly remains unclear is that, quote, emotional distress is reported by 77.3% of identity theft victims. I think that number is probably higher. I feel like no one goes, Oh, that was a great experience. Let’s do it again. So I don’t really know what the value of that statistic is, unless you’re really just not concerned about it. Maybe because even though you have and identity theft situation happen, maybe you have good protection, maybe you’re not worried about it, I don’t know. But the backdrop of this whole thing is that I think what has changed is not the problem statement. What has changed is the solution space. So when you look at identity Services back five, six years ago, around the time of this settlement, they were predominantly focused on what I call like your data trail. And, and I wanted to find that a little bit better. So when I’m talking about your data trail, I’m talking about kind of the things that show up that put together your life with words to maybe paint some fuzzy, hazy picture of like who you are, where you’ve lived, what your socio economic status is, what companies you’ve placed your trust in or do business with. What addresses are considered billing addresses for you, living addresses for you? What phone numbers have you been associated with over the course of your life, etc, etc, etc. It has not traditionally been the role of an identity theft protection service to care in the slightest about how you secure your personal technology. Which is really interesting, right? So, here we’ve been talking about, you know, on the show, we’ve talked about ad nauseum, Equifax breach. We’ve talked about dozens of breaches on this show where you know, the compromise of your PII with your social security number. And all these other factors. Pretty much make it a moot point, that quote, somehow your data isn’t already out there. But those traditional services that have focused on protecting those things, like inherently, it seems that the majority of Americans who do the right thing, take the right preventative steps and lose their data anyway, are losing their data, because the online services and systems that they’re using are inherently insecure. So there seems to be this interesting trend forming where rather than just focusing on protecting the data elements itself, which is what these identity protection companies have done as their historical legacies. They have now moved to being integrated with your antivirus. Which, on the surface, honestly sounds legitimately bizarre, right? Like, what are the odds that you running a particular antivirus that is somehow integrated with your identity theft prevention system is going to prevent the scenario where you go download something bad, that something bad gets onto your computer is smart enough to steal your PII in a reproducible way. And then your service is going to a either neutralize the virus itself be maybe not neutralize the virus but know something went wrong. So that see, it can take some type of preventative action to either alert you freeze your credit or do another action. So

Christian Johnson  [12:50] 
I gotta be honest, on the surface of it. It’s a repackaging exercise I think, right? Like, why is bitdefender suddenly emailing This two hot take because Norden now owns lifelock. Right. So these these two industries that were once related, but somewhat separate, are now just kind of collapsing, right? Think about how this used to work with antivirus, or with Quicken for this matter, that that digital advertising aspect of it is really just truly fascinating. So you used to be able to go to a shelf, whether it was a Best Buy, or you bought it on Amazon or whatever, up through 2016. I want to say, you could buy quick and once it could do everything you wanted it to do, and he’d be like, sweet, my life’s good. I can manage my finances. I don’t need to buy Quicken 2017. Why? Because 2016 works just fine. They send me security updates. They send me bug fixes. The data shows up in the register the same way. Like I’m good. I don’t need to upgrade this year, right. So then imagine the people who are like that eight years. years later, and they’re like Quicken. still great. Marks exactly the way I need it. I don’t need anything else. So in the advent of moving to cloud,

Christian Johnson  [14:12] 
software systems and businesses have had to move to what I call the cloud money model, which is, cloud computing runs on a fundamental tenet of pay as you go. What does that mean? It means it’s virtually impossible to buy a cloud service that you buy once and use for the course of your lifetime doesn’t happen. What is quickens bottom line and Norton’s bottom line in every other antivirus product that you use? We’re used to just be able to pay for it once you had unlimited license keys and you were rocking and rolling. What happened to their bottom line with all these other business models move to subscriptions. It started to drop So what was the answer? Well, we’re gonna force you to upgrade. Never forget, you know, the day I opened my Quicken and the window comes up and it says We’re no longer going to give you those updates. It’s now time to, you know, buy that annual subscription with Quicken. What is Norton doing? What is bitdefender? doing? So, I postulate we take it one step further, which is to say, it’s not enough to maybe entice someone to buy a subscription for one service. But what if I can bundle these packages to make you feel like you’re getting a really sweet deal from just buying your antivirus, right? It’s the same concept as when you have to buy a home and auto insurance? Well, chances are, you might be able to get it cheaper over the course of the year if you bundle your home in auto. So now what I start to see happening in that digital identity service is we’re bundling your computer’s Internet Security with your digital identity security. And I’m not necessarily saying that it’s a scam or the technologies are bad or they’re ineffective. In fact, I’ve made no statements to or against that point, yet. But what I will say from it just a purely a marketing and a presence standpoint, why did Jim get this email about bitdefender because I am somewhat convinced just based on early hunches and feelings, that this is a direction a lot of antivirus or digital identity based companies are going to move in where they’re going to want to offer kind of that all in one converged capability for us the consumer to feel like you’re protected physically, online, digitally with your consumer and you know, what would the next logical stretch be? I don’t think we’re there yet. But what is the next thing? Then these companies start bundling and partnering with people that provide you your physical security, so your wise cams or your ring doorbell or whatever. And you kind of see what the natural illustration is. Joseph out in live chat brings out a great point, which is that like, he still has clients that are using Office 2007 ha, why is that number one It still works. There’s nothing like it still works, minus the fact that they really don’t security patch that anymore. So I highly don’t recommend downloading files from an outside source because you will get owned, especially if it’s a macro. But that’s besides the point. Reason number two is that most people can use Office completely like Microsoft Word is the classic example of this. Why would someone still use Office Word 2007 and be happy as a peach? Because at the end of the day, like, what are the features you really use? typing and whatever 200 some fonts you want, setting your margins and your page with writing whatever the letter or the memo or the thing is, hitting File, Save and hitting File Print. After that, everything else is just 100% complete, utter gravy. And so look at how, like reluctant Microsoft has been to move away from the thing that made them King for the last Three decades, right? license keys for Microsoft was a, you know, arguably, what made their initial company, you know, grow to the levels that it was able to purely from a revenue standpoint, right. And with Office, it followed that same model as the Windows operating system up till around office 2013 when you started noticing suspicious integrations with OneDrive and with Microsoft live sign in, and now by the time we’re here in office 2019 I don’t even think you can buy a license key for office 2019 without signing into Microsoft, you got to like pay for the download. It gets the license key gets LinkedIn associated with the account, etc. But the real answer for most users has now become office 365. Think of how many laptops where you’re bundled into Yeah, we’ll give you the first six months three and then start paying the subscription because which one earns you more money in the long run? subscriptions. And what’s the biggest maybe hold back for Microsoft to keep doing license keys. Interestingly, in this case, it’s the enterprise because for a lot of people that have offline installations where talking to an internet activation server is like not a thing. You have Microsoft kms, where it’s an offline Key Management Server that does those activations, but I enlarge their physical installations done on the boxes in a particular organization. So even

Christian Johnson  [19:32] 
these paradigms are somewhat of a precursor to seeing some of these other I guess, different types of bread and butter applications moving away at the subscription. Now, this is kind of a far line of thought off of the original topic about identity theft services, but at least it should hopefully paint a high level summary of like, how we got here and how the consumer is getting bombarded with all of these types of money making decisions with these products,

Jim Collison  [19:59] 
you know, You’re right. I’m a bitdefender customer, I already have the bitdefender box, right? I have this router that manages my Wi Fi and my physical network. It gives me a level of protection. There’s some smarts built into it to help even if I don’t have software installed, it keeps phishing attacks and some of those kinds of things down. I get with the subscription I get unlimited, any virus in the antivirus is a wallet, right? Or I could keep passwords, you know, think of like LastPass they used to be a sponsor of the show. And, and so I can keep passwords and they have wallets in there that allow me to kind of it when I’m going to banking sites and things like that. It adds an ultimate another layer of security on top of that. Yeah, so it made sense to me. In fact, I considered it you know, when that email came in, that’s what got me thinking about it. I was like, well, another 60 I’d actually like it if they just throw it in with the bitdefender box. At this point. I’m already paying 99 a year for all those unlimited Don’t have a bunch of a bunch of PCs, including my my mom’s, which, you know, I get the value out of the antivirus. And she definitely needs it right. So I don’t mind paying that. But yes, you’re right, we’re seeing this, we’re seeing these companies begin to, I shouldn’t say begin, they’re mature. And in the space of playing end to end. From a security standpoint, I had never really thought about the physical security, but coming out of bitdefender, all of a sudden offered some kind of like, hey, attach your cameras in here, and we’ll keep we’ll help you keep track of that, too. I’d kind of go, Hey, I can get it all in one place. Maybe not maybe not a bad way to go. Right

Christian Johnson  [21:36] 
now. Absolutely. So you know, now, I mean, let’s just kind of walk through some of the top three services that are in this area. So top three is somewhat arbitrary, I suppose. You know, this is just my intuition on the on the subject. Yeah. We’ve talked about lifelock kind of the, I would say one of the first players on the block and you No, let’s let’s read the website together. So first one, why you need Norton 360 with lifelock after a data breach. So that’s interesting advertising right there as after data breach, which makes you wonder what you’re supposed to buy before the data breach. But that’s a whole nother issue. One putting a freeze on your credit may not be enough, one and two customers have been notified of a data breach, and identity theft can happen for years to come. All inherently true statements. I think one argument that they have to make is why purchase them when you almost always get some type of free protection service after one of these data breaches.

Jim Collison  [22:43] 
Now, you could just stack those up couldn’t like, as many of them as offered, are they any good though? Um, something other

Christian Johnson  [22:51] 
than others. I mean, I’ve been signed up for, I think, at most three at once, which was a truly start. spiritual experience. But I mean, the notifications were interesting. I would say the most notifications I got out of anything was sex offenders in your area, which, okay, like, interesting, but how it was relevant to like protecting my digital identity. Like a whole different can of worms, but I feel like, you know, it’s the warm and fuzzy features that make people feel happy. To Yeah, right. But like, yeah, that’s one of those things where that data is just sitting publicly, and you could go look it up anytime. You’re not going to you’re easy, but when some computers like Oh, hey, this guy moved in next door. It’s like, oh, man, this service, it’s top notch stuff. But honestly, the statement you know, putting a freeze on your credit might not be enough. I that that is a very true statement, right. There’s a lot of other things you can do to someone besides trying to squeezed their credit, right? The season we’re on right now is normally a prime time ripe moment to convince someone that they need an identity theft protection service. Why? Because it’s tax season, or at least it was until people are like JK You have until July 15. So maybe we have this prolonged window of being able to scam people over the course of three months. Because for a lot of Americans having to file your tax returns is like a high stress thing. A lot of people don’t know if they’re owing if they’re returning. Maybe some people choose to go to a tax firm, some don’t. So there’s a lot of kind of commotion that takes place during tax filing and it’s an annual opportunity for people to basically say, Hmm, let me figure out how to take advantage of that fear or that stress of someone trying to do something in a panic In a hurry, where logical thought really doesn’t go into it, it’s a ripe opportunity to get a quick win. And that’s actually one of the points that I want to stress in all of this, which is that the notion of reducing your surface area is much is as much about being in control of the realm of rational common sense thought as it is in the realm of things that you can’t control. Right? So for many of these cases, the victim is being victimized because there is a stressor or an emotional response or something that becomes an easier target for an adversary to be like, I’m going to spend way less time and get way more payout by going after this person. And so one of the things that I think people should Look at that maybe goes beyond even what any of these services are is like, if you were to have a stranger approach you, what would be some of the things they could profile about you? And when I say a stranger approach you, I don’t only mean in the physical sense, I also mean in the digital sense, right? Like if I were to log on to see your Facebook profile for the first time, what could I learn about you? Is there enough for me to learn about certain stressors in your life, or certain indicators that you might not even be aware of, in the course of your normal day to day that makes me think, Hmm, this is a person that I have a higher likelihood of targeting than the next guy. And so when we talk about kind of the two realms of protecting this data, one I think, by and large is absolutely How are you conducting yourself online? What are the things you’re doing, etc. The second has everything to do with how are you hardening yourself against social engineering, which sounds weird, but guess what? Your human brain is the only firmware that you have to upgrade in that process in order to eliminate or significantly reduce the odds of that second category being a problem. And I think that one goes largely under luck, because we’re willing to quickly say, you know, don’t do this. Don’t do that. Here’s the common flyer of things not to do. A lot of people just don’t get that information. It doesn’t get circulated widely enough. But to I don’t think a lot of people take it seriously. I think they legitimately expect I can buy this product and it will make the problem go away. As opposed to I will learn the right security mindset and as a result, I will be less likely to be an interesting target to someone trying to make a quick buck.

Jim Collison  [27:53] 
Yeah, no, I I echo your sentiment about this idea of false census. Security. In other words, I’m going to pay for this problem to go away. When in all actuality you may be leaving the door open. Even though you have a service like this, you may be leaving the door open, if you haven’t enable two factor on everything that you can use to factor on. I mean, I almost you know, I mentioned in the beginning of the show, I spent the weekend going through broken links on my website, I almost need to spend some time in an audit of going through passwords and security sites and what what security are they offering that I may not be taking, because if I, I can have one of these protection services on there, but someone gets access to my bank account doesn’t really stop them. If I’ve, you know, if I’ve, if I’ve left the door open, are I giving them access and then I have noticed, you know, like on the banking sites, they’re changing stuff pretty constantly to keep up with what’s going on. If you haven’t reviewed kind of your account details on them. You may be missing some new security that they’re offering. That’s not that have enabled on your account or whatever. And so really those, there’s those kind of those two factors, right? There’s that one of reducing my footprint, but knowing where I’m at, do I have a good grasp on all these accounts every time? You know, when when LastPass used to sponsor us and, and they come on the show, I always feel super guilty at the end of the show, because I’m like, Oh, my gosh, I got way too many accounts, and I haven’t done a, like, I haven’t done an account audit on everything that I have out there or those sites that I even still need to have accounts on, you know, things like that. So I do I do appreciate you kind of bringing up that point of like, are we buying the services? One, is that an insurance policy or are they actively because I think, I think lifelock started as an insurance policy, hey, we’ll we’ll guarantee you up to 100,000 or whatever. It was a million dollars in losses, whatever that false advertising was, and we bought it more like an insurance policy instead of instead of a helpful partner making sure we’re secure, don’t you think?

Christian Johnson  [30:06] 
Yeah, absolutely. And you know, again, and everything I’ve stated so far, I’m pretty sure I’ve done a good job of not being a proponent or an opponent of should you go buy these products? Because I think if you use them the right way, correct? Sure, it absolutely is going to help you reduce because just the act of buying it means you’re more aware of consumer than someone who is not even evaluating whether or not I should buy the product, right. So yeah, in and of itself, having that, you know, buddy, so to speak, whatever that thing is, is making you less likely somewhere in the realm of statistical probability to be a victim of one of these things. Yeah, that said, I can’t tell you how many people who I know who are definitional tinfoil hats. I think Jim’s met some of them. And they’ve had some of the most the most horrendous This scary you wouldn’t believe it identity theft breaches that just make your jaw drop. Like, there was nothing they could have done. There was literally, I mean, these are people that, you know, here’s the rock. Yeah, here’s the realm, here’s the breach, and you’re like, Oh my gosh, like, this is the model person in my life for how to be identity conscious, and they and they still got powned. So, you know, I I don’t think that is the common case, but it is the outlier to say that, like all things security, you can do and do and do and it’s adversary versus adversaries. So kind of keeping up with the likelihood of this happening is a fool’s errand. You can reduce you can practice common sense at the end of the day. You absolutely need to be prepared for the contingency that it wasn’t enough. And I think that’s what now I’m going into the area of why you should consider buying an identity theft protection service anyways. The in another life, I would be a lawyer segment of the show, I would tell you that, you know, these types of identity protection programs, many of them offer like identity insurance or other things that like if you need to go into crisis mode, and you need a very inexpensive way to get yourself out of the hole that you find yourself in not of your own choosing these services that you’re paying little amounts of money to over time, or maybe giving you really big insurance or big defense mechanisms that you aren’t aware of. A great example of this is when you go to buy a home, right? Like what are one of the things you get to decide well, typically, in a conventional home you buy where you are conventionally finance mortgage, the mortgage company or the lender requires that you buy a lenders title insurance to protect the bank, but Guess what they leave optional for the consumer to choose consumer choice. It is optional for you to buy your own buyers insurance to protect the title and the property. So if someone makes a claim against your home saying, Hey, I own that part of your land, or, hey, this property is mind because you never paid this $20,000 construction Bill 20 years ago? Well, that’s a problem, right? Because now all of a sudden, you have to go find monies to pay lawyers to make that problem go away. As opposed to having insurance that’s going to swoop in from all directions to try and protect you from that, right. So the lifelock services and the related identity services themselves might not necessarily be so much about the actual protection, they have to prevent it, which we all want. But in the case that you do find yourself with one foot in the mud, it might be about the contingency plan to get back on level footing. That’s more important.

Jim Collison  [34:00] 
So what you’re saying what you’re saying Christian, it may be pure insurance is what you’re thinking. Right? Absolutely. From that, from that standpoint,

Christian Johnson  [34:06] 
and you should look, I mean, I have not looked in depth at lifelock to see what they’re offering by way of bundled in insurance or otherwise. But here you go, reimbursements and expense compensation, each with limits of up to $1 million for ultimate plus up to 100,000 for advantage and up to 25,000 for select. So if you get this standard bundle thing where you get the antivirus, you get the lifelock, etc. you just bought a million dollar insurance policy for this type of stuff, and you had no idea, right? So if someone came in swooped all your assets out and your bank account was drained and life was no longer peachy man. Well guess what? Because you decided to spend 10 bucks a month to get your antivirus taken care of. You also bought an insurance policy. And I feel like that is a very underlooked fact like look at this. Look at this subtext on this website of like reimbursements each with $1 $1 million limit for the ultimate plus, right? Like, if I was an advertising or marketing guy at lifelock. I would be like, what’s wrong with you people like put the big $1 million number somewhere big right? Because people like big numbers. I would absolutely want to see if you scroll up a little bit to the four different plans that they offer. The squares Yeah, right here. Oh, see, they didn’t do it. I’m not crazy. See, their advertising guy told you exactly what I said they should be doing. You know, to put that big Look, look at the advertising queue here. It’s so great, like human cues. It is a person with a hand giving you dollars in an amount of $1 million. Like this is a this is an advertising trigger if there ever was one. But totally underlooked. I think when we talk about people want to know how they’re going to be protected from it happening. They rarely look at like what’s the contingency if I get hacked anyway.

Jim Collison  [36:04] 
Yeah, it gives us a right kind of gives us a rundown of you know, the the features, it really is I mean, it is when you start comparing now there’s so many services, it can be difficult to compare apples, you know, apples to apples, apples to oranges, if you want to put it in that context. And Christina, you know, I don’t know about you, but sometimes, you know, you’ve bought you buy an insurance policy, like, you buy a fridge, you know, and so you buy the, you know, you buy the extended warranty, only to find out after the fact like, Oh, no, you can only file these every third Wednesday when the year ends and nine, you know, and you start getting these kinds of all kinds of kind of exceptions and what turns out what you thought was kind of some blanket coverage. Oh, no, no, we don’t cover it if it’s a Russian Hacker, you know, in Europe. Wait a minute, like, you know, what are your thoughts on that as far as not asking you to give legal advice?

Christian Johnson  [37:06] 
Yeah. But no, I think I will say there’s generally a big divide between insurance policies that ensure equipment and insurance policies that ensure people’s livelihoods. And generally they’re two very, I would say, different, differently crafted documents. I would hedge that you’re going to have a slightly better chance, proving that you’re a victim of identity theft under some broad or very specific legal clause, then you are going to be able to prove that this refrigerators truly broken and falls under warranty clause, right. There are different scopes of impact. So for example, if you have flood insurance and your house gets flooded, well there’s probably not going to be many clauses that say it had to come from the sky or if it was rain that came from Kansas and then came into Washington DC well, that water that can flood you all night and we won’t, you know. So, from that perspective, I think it’s harder for them to hide and duck behind that type of thing with these services. That’s not to say you shouldn’t read the fine print. But I am really more bullish on these being more protective than equipment.

Jim Collison  [38:31] 
We won’t and we won’t dwell on this, but we had some incidences here in Nebraska. Last spring, we had some bad floods and we had individuals who had insurance they were not in a floodplain now they had water damage insurance. So in other words, if the house flooded, it would be covered but it would had to come from the inside of the house. Right? It couldn’t have been from a flood because they weren’t in a floodplain. Right. And so There was, you know, we had some major issues with them getting, you know, things fixed, because they weren’t necessarily in a recognized floodplain. So what is it? What’s the FTC have to say on this? I mean, certainly they’ve got to have some prescriptive advice. thinking through this. This is the government involved in this. I mean, certainly, from a legal standpoint, they back in 2012, they put the SmackDown on on lifelock. But they stay engaged in this.

Christian Johnson  [39:28] 
I don’t know if they have a big skin in the game when it comes to insurance enforcement, they’re much more focused on. Like, for example, the reason why FTC would have been involved in enforcement action against lifelock is because false or misleading advertising is a communications issue. It clearly falls in the jurisdiction of FTC. But an insurance related thing a bit murkier, you would expect that a DOJ type department would have to go after something like that. Maybe there’s a consumer finance Protection Bureau involved or maybe there’s another government agency more aligned to insurance specific issues. For example, your bank insurance is heavily regulated by the FDIC is kind of the classic financial insurance example. I don’t know specifically, who is pulling the strings and protecting enforcement of identity theft insurance, although I will say you have to imagine that it’s pretty well scrutinized, given that the government breaches that have happened where they’ve had to extend identity theft, protection to people, you know, they have to understand those insurance policies pretty well in order to be able to offer them to people as a free thing. So if you go to the FTC website that you brought up, Jim, it will overview like what is identity theft insurance, should you get this insurance etc. I don’t believe it goes into at great depth. You know, what are the things you should look out for for a good insurance policy versus a bad insurance policy? other than to say that, you know, typically, they cover these realm of things. And if you need to get extra protection, they’ll cover these realm of things. They do make an interesting note that says the insurance generally doesn’t reimburse you for any stolen money or financial loss resulting from the theft, which is a pretty important thing. Like what does that what does that really mean? Does that mean if someone empties your bank account that Yeah, you’re probably gonna go to the FDIC to get that insurance, investment versus the identity theft insurance. So it really is focused on kind of this illustration that I gave earlier, right where someone comes and says this plot of land that you have your house on, I own it. And here’s my claim to that land and you’re like, oh, wait a second, I got to go find the legal team. And then before you know it, it costs you $50,000 to go defend yourself in court. That’s what the identity theft insurance is protecting you. It’s protecting you from the bailout of putting people and resources in motion to get you back on level footing, the actual monetary things that are covered such as you know, I had $200,000 under the pillow. And, you know, someone figured out my social security number and my PIN code to my door and got it or got into my bank account and took it not covered.

Jim Collison  [42:41] 
Identity theft.org is right now today, because I did all these broken downs this weekend. I’m sorry, God, God, what do they say at work? Yeah. okay.gov Thank you. Identity theft.gov. It could change. I did all these broken links this weekend. And it’s amazing things we said just four or five years ago. have already changed, especially in the area, you know, you and I did a show on when you first started college, we did this show on all the services available scholarship, how to apply for student loans, a lot of those kinds of things. That’s all. It’s all changed, like none of those were all broken. So for today, identity theft. gov. This document we’re showing off a link in the show notes actually pretty helpful. And I think in one of the areas where there are free services that are available now, you know, the government makes them available, they got a lot of pressure on them to do this, you know, 5678 years ago and this started getting out of hand. I’ve had to use them I’ve had some you know, I had somebody come in through TeamViewer and and set up some you know, set up some withdraws going to other accounts were able to get all but about 50 bucks back so it wasn’t that bad of a deal. But so I fall in that category by the way I’ve and since then I’ve deleted every every team year does not They even though they’ve patched it logged me in TeamViewer rescue any of those never stay on my computer very long, right? They they come and go pretty fast. But there are some free services available that the government provides for you as well. One of the things, FDIC right, you mentioned that earlier, I have a banking background, FDIC covers you when the bank fails, not when your money gets stolen. So it’s not a it’s not an insurance policy against those kinds of things. It was really, you know, FSL IC, which was the savings and loan arm of that that was set up way back in the 60s and 70s to or maybe 50s and 60s and 70s to protect savings and loans and then eventually failed itself and had to be bailed out and all that was, you know, the US government came in in the late 80s, early 90s and bailed them out and then lumped that all back into savings and loans went away. They all became savings banks, they all fall under FDIC that was when those institutions failed, not necessarily the failure of you to protect the funds or the bank protecting those funds there. But But Christian, there’s big, there’s big incentive now for these companies, we think, especially in the United States, because the US government has put such a heavy hand on credit card companies to to accept or to put the onus of responsibility on them, not on the consumer, like so in the United States, for the most part, if you have fraud on your credit card, lots of times that’s covered by the credit card company as opposed to you taking the loss for that. I don’t know how long that’s gonna stay around for or how long that’s gonna actually last.

Christian Johnson  [45:44] 
Well, I think I want to dig a little further because most bank policies will protect you against funds being stolen in a savings account as long as you the consumer responsibly reported. So for example, if you tell your bank right In a way that there was a fraudulent charge issue that you picked up, no liability, if you notify them within two days, $50 worth of liability, etc $500 if it’s within, you know, after two business days before 60 days, and then once you fall off that two month cliff, you have unlimited liability, meaning like, if you didn’t notice that $100,000 is missing

Jim Collison  [46:20] 
from your bank account, guess who’s gonna be repaying that 100,000 you, but that’s not Fs that’s not FDIC, that’s their own. They have their own fraud policies associated. Yes.

Christian Johnson  [46:30] 
Correct. good observation.

Jim Collison  [46:33] 
Yeah, yeah. No, and not that that nobody cares. That’s like saying, well, who’s paying for that the hospital or the insurance company and nobody cares,

Christian Johnson  [46:42] 
right, Peyton? Yeah, I don’t know if the bank considers that insurance. And if they pay insurance to offer that type of protection, I think most of them do.

Jim Collison  [46:50] 
Right to cover those losses associated with it. It’s been a while I haven’t been in banking a long time. But you know, there are they have policies and it’s an expensive business. I remember, you know, I’ve been out of banking for 15 years, and it was expensive. 15 years ago, before, we had all everybody online back then it wasn’t it wasn’t as many and it wasn’t as much. But point being right. I think in all of this, just as we discuss it is, as a consumer, I think it’s important to dig in and be like, if you’re gonna have a significant amount of money in your bank, it might be a good idea to understand because I bet those policies have changed in the last 10 years. What are you responsible and what aren’t you? And how do you have that protected? Right? And a lot of times, they’re not going to come in and rob it from the bank. It’s gonna it’s going to be an online transaction of some kind. You left the door open, you know, a Christmas time I left my cars open. Somebody came through them. They didn’t steal much cables. I got lucky. But sometimes you leave the door open, right? And it’s good to know what those policies are. You might want to check in with those individual organizations that you have that money at and say, Hey, what is your theft policy on that? And just at least understand it, it does seem to me to be one of those things that if you just check it once, or maybe once a year, just follow up with that to say like, what are your policies? Right?

Christian Johnson  [48:10] 
Yeah, no, I think that’s straight on. I mean, I would say when it comes to the identity piece, how often should you be checking in your identity? I think six months is the sweet spot, right of doing that kind of holistic review of everything. But if you remember, towards the beginning of the show, I said, you know, one of the other cases of why it might not ever be your fault. And why, you know, why does the US have, you know, twice the global average of identity theft? Well, it might be because the system that you inherited was designed to fail. And what do I mean by that? Our entire government built a national identity tracking service, for lack of a better word for every citizen based off something that was not supposed to do anything more than track your history of payroll and wages. And that’s the social security number If you think about the weird fact that a social security number came into existence in 1935, long before the internet, you know, almost let’s do math 35 years before, you know, fundamental notions of God, ARPANET were coming into into view. And even then they didn’t really know what it would turn into today. So you’re really talking close to 50 years before the age where identity theft online becomes an issue, right? That’s a long time for a system to be designed that inherently was never meant to be the digital ID of a citizen period. And Carnegie Mellon dug this fascinating study back in 2009. And it’s an article that probably would be lost on most of all of us today because it was published 11 years ago, but you can go back and find it in their archives and or an Ars Technica. Quote, new algorithm guesses social security numbers using date and place of birth. So, you know, what do we know, the first three digits are based on this, you know, birth criteria, the second two digits are based on a group number. And then the last four digits are supposedly handed out at random. Well, guess what? Now they’ve built this machine that’s honing in on the likelihood the numbers that it could be. Now I live in a digital error where I can put the kind of other elements into play as to how might I find the related information for making that probability go even higher to my favor that I’m going to get the right demographic data, etc. I’m sure since these articles came out the you know, social security administration did a little scrambling did a little thinking about the how they issue numbers. They’re probably feeling good about whatever the modern state of affairs is. Truth be told, at the end of the day, there’s still plenty of social security numbers issued that even if they had redone everything, thing the day after that article came out, it doesn’t matter because you still have, you know, millions of Americans that are based on the old way that you issued numbers.

Christian Johnson  [51:10] 
And then on top of that, I just don’t know how to tell people that, you know, nine digits is not like a Aes 256 bit GCM encryption, it just isn’t. So the likelihood of not only coercing that number through the means of, you know, understanding the algorithm that produces it, but much more likely coercing a human to provide you that number is a very easy thing to do. And we see it all the time. I mean, it’s, what do you type into a one 800 number when you don’t have your four digit pin for your account.dot.or the last four digits of your social security number be and so I think think if we thought about identity very differently today, right? Like if you had a smart card that you were required to present to anyone you did business with in this country where you had to send your digital hardware certificate to a representative in order to do any transactions, that fraud would be cut by numbers like you wouldn’t believe and all these identity services as great as they are, and like helping reduce your visibility and footprint. At the end of the day, the number one, you know, big, big key in to social engineering. Anyone on the phone is your social security number because all the rest of it as soon as I get it, man, and I got a great story behind why I’m just missing that one little thing and I sound like a really nice guy. And the customer is always right. And I’m not a jerk about it. I’m well spoken, I’m patient. I can keep them on the phone as long as I want. I can ask to speak to the supervisor, man. You put on the hot seat and you got 90% of the right data, and you’ll watch the policy exceptions fly out of the other end of the phone. And so none of that would happen. If, you know, for example, please enter your smart card, you know, please plug in the smart card in your computer to digitally validate who I’m speaking with before moving forward. And then of course, people would say, well, all I would have to then socially engineer is, oh, I lost my smart card. I don’t have it. Well, it would a kind of be the equivalent of saying I lost my social security number, like we can probably engineer some solutions around that. But moreover, I mean, think about what the, whatever that backup factor is, that maybe is a significantly complex as a smart card. I don’t mean complex in terms of how it works, I mean, complex in terms of the cryptographic information required. You know, my backup method isn’t going to be telling the agent on the other phone 256 characters sequence of A through G with numbers, it just isn’t or at

Christian Johnson  [54:04] 
I appoligize.

Christian Johnson  [54:07] 
It just isn’t. And so

Jim Collison  [54:11] 
but but how great would it be if your social security number had to factor?

Christian Johnson  [54:15] 
It would be fantastic. No. But I mean, this is the point, right? Like maybe we can’t fix the underlying broken system, but maybe we can build better systems around it until the underlying system becomes meaningless and shut down. I mean, it is the same concept is, I hear these horror stories about you know, how the IRS basically still runs on cobalt and some really amazing assembly language. And you guys think I’m joking, but like, the fundamental mainframes that run these types of things are still like, go look at job ads on Google for you know, all of a sudden they need to find Coronavirus hits and all of a sudden they need to find cobalt developers. Well, why is that because the systems they need To go cut and edit to give you a stimulus check and do all that validation and and compare it against your tax returns is sitting in some COBOL source code somewhere that is processing that data. You know, this was the same thing we talked about back when, you know, I was in college where we would do the IBM master the mainframe challenges. Why? Because you’d be shocked how much still runs on the IBM mainframe and like, they’re, they’re not the mainframe that your grandfather worked on by any means. They’re modern day mainframes. But they are in the mindset of how those machines were developed. And you just, you look at some of the stuff they’re doing and it’s like, oh, that’s pretty that’s pretty illuminating. And so when you think about just how many systems we still have that are in that, you know, pre cybersecurity mold. It seems to me much easier to build new systems around. The old ones and then eventually turn off the old ones. Yeah.

Jim Collison  [56:04] 
It’s, it’s April 2020. We’re in the midst of a pandemic. There’s, this is just a perfect world for scams. Like when we think about, you know, we often were just worried about getting sick and go into the hospital. And of course, there’s folks out there scamming. As we kind of wrap things up, Christian, I want to throw this up, you threw this in the show notes. And I just kind of want to remind folks that the scammers are alive and well out there and really in reducing your digital footprint from a from a scammer. Now it sounds like right, the emotions are running high. People want to help, right? They want to help be a part of these things. But we definitely have some things going on. Can you kind of just briefly go through I think, just to remind everyone like, Hey, watch for these things that are coming out. What would you tell?

Christian Johnson  [56:57] 
Yeah, I mean, I put this year because while I use tax season as the original example of why this is a popular identity theft season Coronavirus is the equivalent of when people come out of the woodwork for natural disaster right? How many people were scammed into giving their money to something that didn’t go towards Hurricane Katrina? I can tell you it was a lot. And so this is kind of the same thing where it’s like you’re gonna go there’s been a deluge of calls you kind of see it up on the screen right? There are a lot of people getting texts that were disinformation number one, just being like, you’re gonna there’s gonna be a mandatory lockdown in your state etc. And that may in and of itself, not have been a scam so much as to kind of so the discord needed to then pull off a scammer otherwise, but these are pretty obvious ones listed here. know who you’re donating to. Don’t just randomly wire money somewhere. Watch for emails that claim to be a government, entity or website. Hang up on calls you don’t recognize with people asking you for information. Ignore offers for vaccinations and testing kits and don’t respond to text emails or calls about checks from the government. This website says because the details are still coming together, but we’ve probably should update that page, right? I mean, the details are pretty much there. But like when the checks weren’t really when people were like, Oh, I’m getting a check, but how, who, what, where, when, why, how? There are plenty of scammers that are willing to tell you who, what, where, when, why, how. And, you know, my very simple advice that transcends this that I practice all the time is I can’t tell you how many phone calls I get where I have stopped I don’t answer with my name anymore even like how many times can I pick up the phone and call someone and they say, you know, Hello, this is Jim or this Christian or whatever, you know, even that little bit of information, if I’m, you know, 90% there and building your profile and the last thing I want to do is verify that this is in fact, your phone number. And all I have to do is pick up the phone call, you tell me and then I hang up. It’s kinda not good. So the quickest way to not become a victim of a phone related scam is to say, Good morning or good afternoon. Who am I speaking with? Because that puts all the onus back on that person on the other end of the line to start explaining why this phone call is taking place. And if it doesn’t sound right, chances are it isn’t. So ask more questions. And typically, while most things will advise you to hang up, which is why sage advice if you’re a little bit more academically, into the art and sociology associated with scammers You will find the more questions you ask the more you learn about how they think. And so I love asking questions, I will ask questions to the death. It’s quite exciting. I think it’s exciting for them as it is for me and I feel like at least if they’ve wasted my time, we can have a mutual experience wasting each other’s time. So I suppose maybe someday on cyber frontiers, we’ll have to do this experiment live. It’s quite fun. I guess john says it best Why are you even answering the phone? I suppose that in the area of Corona Corona virus when you are conducting business or transactions that go to third parties. Fallen sadly is still the way you get all the people. Yeah, plenty hundreds we live in we die.

Jim Collison  [1:00:46] 
Well or you’re in a situation where time is of the essence you’re expecting some phone calls. You may not they may be coming from numbers you’re not familiar with, you know, you don’t want to let those drop or go to voicemail because you’re It’s gonna be hard to get ahold of that person again. So there, there’s probably some of those situations where you do want to I’m I’m with john to be honest with you, I don’t answer my phone anymore, which is terrible. You know, in fact, I think I even say in my voicemail if you don’t leave a message, I won’t call you back, you know, or something like that. I just don’t. I just don’t actually I’m not even sure what my voicemail says. To be honest, I don’t even know maybe one of those I don’t get I don’t I get a lot of robo calls. But that’s about it. They just kind of go I think I put my personal cell number on a Do not call and that that did a pretty good job of cutting that one off, no work. whole different ballgame I ended up on I ended up on lists somewhere and I get three calls a day that just just go to voicemail, and I don’t even worry about them. Christian, anything else before we wrap it?

Christian Johnson  [1:01:52] 
Now? I mean, I think that pretty much sums it up for me. I’ll just say that kind of in the conclusion of what we set out. To answer has his identity services changed meaningfully in the last few years? And should you care? I would summarize it as the fundamentals haven’t changed the way they’ve bundled and marketed them to you have changed. Oftentimes, if you find yourself paying for a VPN service and an Identity Service and an AV service, you should probably look into that bundle because chances are if you want those services Anyway, you can get it for cheaper by using the modern economy of how these things are sold. The underlying technologies have not fundamentally changed in the last few years. They are not a bulletproof mechanism by which you will protect yourself from identity theft. They certainly can help educate the consumer, reduce your surface online and give you some tools and mechanisms if you are a victim of identity theft, to not have to pay a lot of money to dig yourself back up.

Jim Collison  [1:02:50] 
Yeah, and I think I use a triple A I’m a triple A member and I think they offer some as part of their plan that works. Okay, I signed up for it. Go out and check it out from time to time. Does it hurt to have more than one? If you had more than one?

Christian Johnson  [1:03:07] 
I don’t think so. Again, it just comes down to like, the economy of scale thing. For example, if you have two free services, don’t cancel them there, they can only help you. Yeah. If you want to pay for two services that have the specific features, all the more power to you. I wouldn’t advise I wouldn’t my go out strategy to someone would not be like you need these two services, it would really just be it would really just be like, you know, if these are the types of things like for example, I think it’s a great thing for people to have VPNs. And if you don’t have the ability to implement your own, or you want a lot of VPN to connect to, I think it’s totally reasonable to advise someone to go get Private Internet access and a VPN and if they don’t already have that service, and they’re not already paying for identity theft service. It’s a great opportunity. To say, Hey, have you looked at this service it’s gonna give you all three things in one that you’re missing so that’s that’s kind of how

Jim Collison  [1:04:08] 
I see it and that’s an area I use bitdefender they haven’t bundled them yet. So their VPN services one charge their you know, their AV is another the bitdefender box is a third and now this identity protection is a fourth. It was a good it was a good subject I got that in the mail I pinged you I was like, Hey, can we talk about this like this? This sounds pretty interesting. Somehow I always figure like, how are we going to come up with an hour of material and we always do a couple comments, john instead I use the last pass credit alerting switch to this when I was using the one I was using didn’t catch me opening up a new credit card and LastPass alerted me, even though I hadn’t signed up. So that’s pretty great. I didn’t know by the way I didn’t know LastPass. I’ve got them. I’m one of their premium guys. Maybe I should look into that. We were talking about answering the phone, Dennis said or Joe said I like that. Keep a soundboard at close reach to answer scammer questions. You know, the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie quotes is always helpful. You’re talking about keeping them on the line Christian? Yeah. Doing some of that. I think some of them have gotten kind of savvy to that and hang up pretty fast. But Dennis says and welcome Dennis, thanks for coming out tonight. I have a police whistle that works great for scammers as well. I do kind of when I do answer, and I don’t do it very often. But when I do and I get a person on the line. It is a little bit of a thrill to continue to just hold them on you and I didn’t didn’t we do a live like that?

Christian Johnson  [1:05:32] 
Yeah, that was fascinating. It was fun. It was it was fun. It brought joy to my

Jim Collison  [1:05:38] 
heart and we had a good time doing it. Well, a couple reminders on the way I don’t forget. The average guy TV powered by Maple Grove partners, both web and media hosting. So if you’re a budding podcaster maybe you’re thinking about creating a podcast. Nobody does that better than Christian over Maple Grove partners get secure, reliable, high speed hosting from people that you know you trust. For more information and plans to start as little as 10 bucks a month. Maple Grove partners, I think you got a little bandwidth Christian to take on some new customers, you got some bandwidth,

Christian Johnson  [1:06:05] 
lots of storage, lots of bandwidth. The newest pipe we opened up is four millisecond latency to all the data centers that you know and love. So we’re, we’re continuing to expand redundancy, right? We now have some redundancy in

Jim Collison  [1:06:20] 
the system. So yeah, well, so

Christian Johnson  [1:06:21] 
most shared hosting providers or providers in the tier service cost wise that we offer, I think we offer a far superior service for the price point what we ask for people now it’s not your one 800 number experience, it’s really curtailed to you and you’re working with people like me, so hopefully that’s not a pain in the ass experience. And if it is, I’m sorry, that’s, that’s what you’re gonna get. But we offer with the direction we’re moving in, we’re going to be offering live DNS Failover for free, which typically is not a free, anything that you get in a in a shared hosting or VPS like environments. That means it is something What someone might be like, Oh, isn’t that what I pay CloudFlare to do for me? Yeah, kind of, but they do much more like caching as a mechanism to protect you from going down. Our solution is actually if our, if one of our sites goes out your DNS records are auto failed over to the other site. So it is the equivalent of kind of disaster recovery type engineering that you would see in much larger scale websites and companies that are, you know, running their website and maybe five or 10 different geo diverse locations. So it’s a nice way to get higher availability without paying extra for it.

Jim Collison  [1:07:37] 
Yeah, if you’re thinking of starting something new contact Christian head up to Maple Grove partners comm check it out. It’s worth it. capacities there. We’ve been there forever. I think the average guy that TV has been hosted there in some form or fashion for all 10 years. We’ve been doing this and so check that out today. Don’t forget, if you have a question like I did, you could send that to us and Chris would probably answer it send us an email. You can send it to me but why would you send it to Christian Christian at the Heaven’s Gate TV? Again, you can track me down on twitter at J. Carlson. This is at Borg whisper across from me over there. Don’t forget, stay up with everything we’re doing live you can now follow us on the new event bright page, the average guy, all one word, the average guy.eventbrite.com. You can also sign up for our weekly or I’m calling it mostly weekly. That gives me a little slack Christian, that’s legalese. Right that mostly weekly, mostly. And I’ll send you kind of what’s coming up and every once in a while something cool is going on in my life. I’ll share it with you sign up at the average guy.tv slash subscribe. By the way, all our RSS feeds everything you ever want to connect any way you want to is on that page. It’s just all there. It’s all available for you. Lots of great stuff Christian it works great because it’s hosted in Maple Grove partners. We want to remind you if you enjoyed this share, it can be back on a regular basis over time I say that a jinx that someone’s not done yet. figured out. We are live whenever we feel like it and I will be posting Monday about my event, right. If you’re listening live, stay around for a little bit

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

 


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