Protect Yourself in a Digital World

Andrew Rappaport's Rapp Report

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Play for free right now. Are you feeling lucky? Today, we're going to talk about how to protect yourself in the dangers of the digital world.

01:08

Welcome to The Wrap Report with your host, Andrew Rappaport, where we provide Biblical interpretation and application.

01:15

This is a ministry of Striving for Eternity and the Christian Podcast Community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

01:24

Welcome to another edition of The Wrap Report. I am joined by my host, Bud.

01:31

Greetings for this unusual podcast, topically.

01:37

That's right, because typically we deal with Christian topics, and this one is a little bit different for folks who don't know, because I think a lot of people probably don't know my background so much, but I have a background in IT, and I've had many years in cybersecurity using basically learning about how bad guys use the computer to do bad things.

01:59

And IT is insensitivity training? That's right, yes, exactly. Okay, good. I'm on board.

02:05

You know, information technology or whatever else you want. You could add... Okay. IT is...

02:11

wasn't that some movie about a clown? I don't know. I never saw it. I just remember seeing commercials for it. Oh, I don't know about that.

02:18

Some scary movie, I think. I don't know. But, you know, there are dangers, Bud, that people don't even think about.

02:25

Most people know of some of the dangers with computers and the Internet and having everything up in the cloud and having a digital world.

02:33

We're seeing some of that now, the effects and dangers even with big tech, seeing how they could just say, oh, we don't like certain books.

02:42

We're just going to erase, gone. You know, votes for elections, gone.

02:49

We don't like the outcome. And we're seeing how the technology can affect so much.

02:58

People are starting to realize the danger of this when we talk about big tech. We talk about how they have their algorithms that are able to change people the way people think.

03:07

They're able to keep certain things out of the news. So people think, oh, there's nothing wrong with Biden's son.

03:13

He didn't do anything wrong. Just keep that out of the news. You know, everything bad, just keep it out of the news.

03:20

Everything they want to have in the news, they keep in the news. You know, it's kind of like, you know, five minutes before that Georgia shooting,

03:28

Asians suffered from white privilege and they had whiteness. And then once the media and the liberals could use the

03:34

Georgia shooting because they didn't want to address the issue of pornography because that would be damaging to their business or with their pleasure.

03:44

So what do they focus on? They say, oh, it was about Asians and Asian hate. Suddenly Asians were no longer whiteness.

03:51

They no longer had white privilege. Just five minutes difference. Amazing. You know, we saw this and you sent me a thing with the guy who did the shooting, who, you know, the focus that they had in the article when they wrote it was that he was a

04:07

Christian evangelical and went to the, you know, after the Southern Baptist Church he went to. Oh, yeah.

04:13

Yeah. You know, not addressing why he did the shooting. The big thing was he was a Christian. That's what they could use.

04:20

So we understand that aspect. But there's other things I think, Bud, that I've done in my past in a professional sense in helping to identify how people use the

04:32

Internet to do things that shouldn't be done. And there's easy ways to protect ourselves.

04:39

And so what I wanted to do is talk about some of the dangers, some of the things that are ways of protection.

04:45

So this is going to be less of a theological podcast that we've done. Really, the reason is, is, folks,

04:51

I wanted something. I hate that every week Bud always sounds smarter than me. So I figured let me think of a topic where Bud has nothing to offer.

05:01

Because he's computer illiterate pretty much. Oh, thank you. Thank you.

05:06

So we're going to the doctrine of digital perseverance or something. This is okay. I'll work with this.

05:13

I've been searching the scriptures all day. I couldn't find anything. But that's fine.

05:20

I'm sure you could find something. But there are some things that are basic things that people are unaware of.

05:30

For example, passwords. It seems simple because most people think, well, they're just going to Amazon or they're just going to wherever, some website, and it wants them to log in.

05:41

And what a lot of people do is use the same login. Because how do we remember so many passwords? Think about how many, and in fact,

05:49

I actually, when I went to move from New Jersey, I had to go into every website to update the address.

05:58

And I realized I have hundreds of passwords on hundreds of websites. Oh, yeah.

06:04

And you think about how many websites you have logins to. You'll hear in the news where some website,

06:11

Best Buy, gets hacked, and now they have your email address and your password.

06:17

Well, they break those passwords down, and basically they're going to look for passwords that are simple.

06:22

Why? Well, A, the simple password is the easiest to crack. But the other reason is people who use simple passwords usually use the same password over and over and over.

06:32

And so what they'll start to do is go to the major sites like Amazon or eBay or things like that and try it out.

06:40

And now they start purchasing things on your account using your credit card. They ship to some other location.

06:47

Now, they're usually going to be skilled enough when they do that to know not to ship it to their own address.

06:52

Some people are idiots and don't do that. I had a password of mine that got cracked for egghead .com,

07:02

which is where you get computer software and there are computer parts and stuff. And the guy went and bought something.

07:08

I forget what he bought, but he made the mistake of shipping it, I think, to his real address. And it sent me an email saying

07:15

I purchased on. He then tried to cover it up by creating a bunch of spam -looking emails from egghead .com

07:22

so that it looked like it would be buried in there. But unfortunately, I was sitting at the computer when the email came up and quickly changed my password, first thing, went in and removed the order, second thing, and then deleted the 50 emails he had sent me.

07:38

Oh, my goodness. But passwords are a thing that a lot of people don't have a good memory to remember every password if you're going to change them all.

07:48

So most people do one of two things. They write it down. That's bad as well because if anyone finds that, they have your passwords, which was always in high school.

07:59

It was always interesting because the secretary kept the passwords for the school computers literally in her desk, like written on paper.

08:10

Yeah, it would be taped to the writing section that you'd pull out from the side of the desk.

08:15

Everybody could find it for the week. This week's bad word is pencil. There were so many people that hacked into the school computers and it's like you never figure out where the problem is.

08:27

But there's simple solutions to passwords, and there are tools you can get.

08:32

Now, there's a couple tools that you can get, like a 1Password or a LastPass.

08:38

Those are both in the cloud. In other words, you have a password stored at their location and you can use it on all of your other devices.

08:47

That's convenient. However, what would be the best place to go if you want to get a whole treasure trove of passwords?

08:54

Yeah, what if that gets hacked? Yeah, what if that gets hacked, right? That becomes a dilemma. So one thing you could get is a thing, there's a tool called

09:02

PasswordSafe. It's free, and PasswordSafe is not in the cloud.

09:08

So you can get something like that, although then you have to go have whichever computer you're running on to make sure that that's the one that you have your password.

09:18

So there are different things to do, but I would recommend people get some sort of tool to track all their passwords.

09:25

Now, most of the bigger companies like 1Password or LastPass, they're going to have good security because they know that there's plenty of people who are looking to hack them.

09:37

But don't believe that anyone is safe from being hacked. Even the federal government, where the federal government had all of the information from people who have top -secret clearances.

09:50

Well, the Chinese government had hacked that and got the names of all the people that have classifications with their home addresses, their bank accounts, all kinds of stuff.

10:02

And so it would be wise to realize that you are always susceptible to being hacked.

10:09

Everybody is. But one thing to do is just to have passwords, a password tool to track them.

10:16

Another thing to do is backups. Always keep backups. Now, Bud, do you backup your computer at all?

10:24

Yes, absolutely. I maintain our network at work, and I also do it at the house.

10:31

I mean, I don't know how many times people have lost things because they didn't keep a backup of it, lost plenty of data.

10:39

But there's a different reason why backups become essential. Now, this probably doesn't happen, Bud, at your house, but it could happen at your work.

10:46

A lot of companies deal with this. A lot of school systems actually deal with this, schools, medical places. A thing called ransomware.

10:52

And so what ransomware is, someone hacks into your computer, and then they encrypt your entire hard drive and tell you that you have to pay them to get it back.

11:02

You know what's always amazing to me, Bud, is the people that pay these people using a thing called Bitcoin, which is not traceable, and they pay the person, and the person never gives them the key to encrypt.

11:16

Well, let me think about this. You're trusting a criminal, to be honest. So, you know, an easy solution to that is just having a backup.

11:26

You know, there was one company that basically they had ransomware. What ended up happening was all their systems had come in.

11:35

They came in and found out that the computers that were left on were all hacked and encrypted.

11:41

So what they quickly did was take all the other computers off the internet, turn those on so that they had the information on those, but then basically just said, okay, we're restoring from backup, and ignored the ransomware.

11:54

So that's something that's less likely to happen to people, though. More likely to happen to people is people don't have virus protection on their computer.

12:03

Now, most Windows users have virus protection because, well, that's where you get most viruses.

12:09

And there's actually a reason for that, because it's an open system. It's more open than, say,

12:15

Mac OS, and because more people use it, they have more people to send a virus to.

12:25

And so there's a lot of different types of viruses out there, but you want to be running some kind of protection against viruses, what's called malware.

12:34

These are things where people are going to be putting something in to infect your computer, but some of them could be very malicious.

12:41

You know, I know that my sister used to think that it wasn't a big deal. She had a router that didn't have a password on it.

12:48

But it only went to her son's gaming computer. But her son's gaming computer was also connected to their house router.

12:56

And so, you know, where she runs her business. And so what ended up happening was someone parked outside the house, noticed an open router, no protection, went in there, from there, started to scroll their way around to look at what else they could find, and found some other systems, the other router, and started to be able to pull off information.

13:19

So you could have people that do that. You have people who might make your computer into a bot to act in a, to attack other people.

13:27

But one of the things that you end up seeing with viruses is the majority of them would be caught by virus protection.

13:34

Simple thing people don't realize. But I want to get into some things that are more insidious that most people fall for.

13:42

And, you know, one of the things I forgot to say also, but when I talk about passwords, is anyone that is using passwords, they should, should, if there's an option for it, use at least two -factor identification.

13:56

Some websites will say that they have that. If they have it, typically what they'll do is you put in your password.

14:02

It pops up and says, hey, I just sent to your cell phone a text message, put in the code that you just had, or to your email.

14:09

Why is that good to do? Because, well, like in my case, when my kids decide they want to try to use my

14:16

Netflix or something like that, I get a notification. And, but if anyone else was to try to get in, you get notification on that.

14:26

So that's a wise thing to do. But what a lot of people, what were you going to say, Bud? No, I was just going to say, a couple of the banking financial sites that I use, they actually do that.

14:40

That's part of the routine. So you've got a password to get into it, but then they're going to send you, you know, a text message or they can call you with it.

14:50

I mean, it's automated, but, so it's got that two -level kind of thing on a couple of the financial sites that I use.

14:57

And I like that. I mean, it's, you know, a little bit of an extra step, but that's okay.

15:04

It may be a little bit of an extra step, but you at least then know if someone's got your password.

15:11

Yeah, yeah. And then having multiple, having different passwords for every site prevents someone, if they get your password to one, it protects against another.

15:19

So if they get your eBay password, they're not going to be able to log into your Amazon account. But there are some times,

15:25

I got an email, oh, I forget how long ago, a couple of months ago, maybe like six months ago, actually even longer.

15:33

And it was interesting because what happens when these places get hacked, they find your password.

15:39

And so back when I first had, you know, when the internet was first starting, I didn't have a very secure password, very simple thing.

15:46

And I got an email that said, you know, I've been, I've logged onto your system and I know that this is your password.

15:52

Now, when they do that, it looks legit, right? Because you recognize that as your password. And what they're doing is they want to get credibility, like saying like, look,

15:59

I can really access your entire computer. I have control. That's their goal of sending these emails.

16:05

And then what they do is say, hey, I've been on your computer for six months and I've been checking,

16:12

I have all your passwords and your banking information. If you don't send me $5 ,000 in Bitcoin, you know,

16:19

I'm going to share this with all your friends. And typically, here's the thing, typically the emails, I just got one, I told you bud, this week, where it is funny, because English clearly wasn't the guy's first language.

16:29

Not that I'm much better in my English, but you know, the thing was, he asked for $100 in Bitcoin or he was going to release all the videos he took because he accessed the camera and he was able to watch everything that I did and all the sites that I went to.

16:46

And because he's going to release that to all my friends because he has all their email addresses. Well, there's a couple of things there.

16:53

If you're not going to sites that you don't, that aren't going to be the sites that, because the reason they always put that in is because unfortunately a majority of people do go to pornography sites.

17:04

And therefore that's probably true for most people. If you don't go to those sites, you know what you realize? There's nothing for you to show.

17:10

Right? Yeah. I got nothing. I got nothing. Yeah. And see, that's the whole thing is that they're banking on the fear.

17:19

A lot of the reasons this works for people is because there's a lot of people that do go to those sites and they wouldn't want all their friends to know.

17:26

And so their belief in the trust is the fact that they knew the password. Because they got that password, people actually believe them and try to figure out how to send them the money.

17:36

Okay? When they probably have nothing but the password. And so there's a lot of things that I end up seeing with that where I have seen people fall prey to that and send money.

17:47

And the majority of it, what it is, is you have your... Basically, you're going to have your email address and password.

17:54

With the number of sites that have been hacked, you're going to be out there. You know, they're going to have...

18:02

It's somewhere on the web. Your email, on the dark web at least, your email address has been out there.

18:09

Now, let me give you a website to go to to find out if you've ever been hacked. There is a site called haveibeenpwned.

18:17

Now, let me spell the word pwned because it's missing some values. So it's haveibeenpwned .com.

18:28

And what you do is you go in, you stick your email address in, and it'll tell you all the places that you've been pwned, where someone has your information.

18:37

And you can even set up to be notified. Yeah, so if your information comes up...

18:42

Actually, one of the credit bureaus that I look at, it tracks that.

18:50

And so I noticed several months ago that my email address was on the dark web.

18:56

I don't even know what the dark web is. I'm not that savvy. But, you know,

19:03

I did a little bit of looking, and what do I need to do? Well, instantly, I change all the passwords.

19:08

I don't know how that happens, but the fact is, everybody, just like you have a carbon footprint, allegedly, you've got a digital footprint.

19:16

You're out there. You've ever been online. There's information out there. Oh, yeah.

19:22

You know, I had one person who I know, this person was, like, convinced that they had an email address that wouldn't be traced back to them.

19:29

They don't really use it much, and it's just something that they had. And I said, well, give me the address.

19:35

They gave me the address. And I went to a couple sites that I know, and within about 30 seconds,

19:41

I gave this person their name, their birth date, their age, where they live, their

19:46

Facebook, their children's Facebook, and this person was so freaked out because, like, but I don't use that for anything.

19:54

But see, the thing is, that email that may not be used for anything is also tied to the same computer that's used for others.

20:01

So sometimes that stuff can get linked. Sometimes you use it for something, and there's enough correlation to be able to link those things together.

20:10

And so that ends up happening a bunch of times. And so this, again, is a thing where you want to be careful when you're clicking on emails.

20:19

Email scams are probably the biggest issue that people deal with and the biggest way that they fall prey to scams.

20:28

Like I said, because of the fact that people, unfortunately, a lot of people do watch pornography, they fall prey to not wanting anyone to know that, and so they give the money.

20:39

I think, as we were saying before we started recording, it might be that the guy that only wanted $100 of Bitcoin versus $5 ,000, the $100 probably gets paid more because people can afford that.

20:49

Yeah, probably so, yeah. But wait, I mean, so the $14 million that was not like malware, but it was an email, the $14 million that I won a couple weeks ago in the

21:01

Nigerian lottery, I mean, that's legit, right? Of course. Because I got plans for us.

21:07

I mean, we can do a lot with that. Well, you hold on to those plans. Don't go spending that money yet.

21:13

But like you were talking about, it's, you know, just pay attention to some basic grammar. And I always look at the return email address because that never seems to match when it's bogus.

21:27

It's always some obscure return address or sender address, yeah.

21:33

Whenever you get an email, what you want to do is look at, so if you get an email and it says they're from Apple and they'll have the

21:39

Apple logo and it might look like an official looking Apple email. And it says, you know, your account's been locked.

21:47

You need to click this link and log in. Yeah. Okay, first thing to do is look at who it's from because if it's not from, you know, apple .com,

21:57

now that doesn't mean that they might have, I've seen where it'll be apple .com dot something else.

22:03

Plus some other little nuance. Correct. Extension added to it, yeah.

22:09

What we call a domain name is that last bit where it would be the apple .com, that last part of it.

22:15

That you want to make sure is Apple, Amazon, wherever. The other thing is just hover over the link.

22:21

You could even do this, and I've done this at times, where something looks like it could be legit. What you do, because there are ways to send an email and mask what's called the header so it looks like it's sent from someone else.

22:35

So one of the things I always do before clicking on anything is I usually right -click either the button or the link and I can copy the link location.

22:45

And then I paste it somewhere else, not in a browser because I don't want to go there, but I'll paste it into a

22:51

Word document and examine where it was sending me. And if they're saying they're from apple .com,

22:56

but the link is taking me to Nigeria, maybe it's not really from Apple.

23:02

Yeah. I get those frequently, I mean frequently, two, three times a week from PayPal.

23:07

Your PayPal account has been compromised. You need to click here and correct your banking information and verify your data.

23:17

But it comes from some guy named Bob. Okay, no. We had one at church that was interesting.

23:27

We had someone that sent an email to the church and the email address,

23:33

I forget the name of it, but we'll just say Bob Curtis, that wasn't it, but let's say it was

23:38

Bob Curtis and the return address was like bobcurtis833 at Gmail.

23:44

But in the email, he's explaining and says Bob Curtis and then puts an email address for Bob Curtis at Gmail.

23:51

Well, the email came from a Black Lives Matter activist that I was able to figure out, where the other

23:59

Bob Curtis that's in the signature line was some older gentleman. Neither one of them were anywhere near our church.

24:05

So I don't know what they were trying to get from the church. I just decided we won't respond to that email.

24:14

Probably smart. Yeah. But the thing is that sometimes people will do that. They will put an email address even in the bottom with the same name and it's to deceive someone.

24:25

But a lot of the times what this email scams, the way to identify a scam is generally this.

24:32

One of the things they're going to do is they've got to get you to panic. There's something in it to cause panic.

24:38

Your account is locked. Someone hacked your account. We need you to change your password. Something, you know, or like that email

24:46

I was saying where they've been in your system for six months and they're going to share all your dirty secrets.

24:53

That's the advantage of not having dirty secrets. But the thing is it's a panic moment.

25:01

The email will try to convince you that they have more information than they have to get you to be concerned enough to follow through with whatever they do.

25:12

One of the things that you end up seeing with that is recognize, you know, when they're trying to enforce that panic and then take a step back and examine whether is this really an issue.

25:25

You know, your computer has a virus. It's going to be, you know, it's going to shut down the internet, which is actually what

25:31

I had a phone call. They don't do it anymore. I used to get phone calls. And I remember the guy calling and saying, your computer is, we've detected activity from your computer and it has a virus on it.

25:44

And I'm like, really? Yes, it's putting out a lot of traffic and it could shut down the internet. Really? Shut down the internet?

25:49

Wow. I said, and you're with who? He's like, Windows Company. I'm like, Windows Company?

25:55

Oh, so not Microsoft, Windows Company. I'm like, so me being me, I'm playing along with it. I should have recorded this because it would have been fun.

26:02

My wife was like, will you stop messing with these people? But, you know, I'm either going to share the gospel with them or I'm going to have some laughs.

26:10

At least I'm keeping them from another call. So I said, oh, wow, I'm concerned. What should I do? He goes, well, turn on your computer.

26:17

I said, okay, it's on. He's like, all right, what I need you to do is I need you to go to the little Windows logo at the bottom.

26:25

I said, I don't have one of those. He's like, you don't have one of those? I said, no. He's like, oh, okay, you have a

26:30

Macintosh. Click the little Apple icon at the top of your screen. I said, but I don't have one of those. He's like, what do you mean?

26:37

I said, I have Linux. But if you could read my computer to know that I'm sending out this much traffic, you would have known that already.

26:45

And so he ended up putting me on with his supervisor. And at this point, I'm laughing with my wife.

26:51

And the supervisor hears me laughing and goes, okay, I'm just going to hang up. Did either one of them repent?

26:58

I mean, did you get to that point? Usually by the time I say, do you consider yourself to be a good person, they hang up.

27:04

I don't know why. I get some that actually, I have had some people that call that, you know, because I like to use those opportunities to share the gospel.

27:12

And there are times when we've had where some people will dialogue. I've had some people that, now this is the problem.

27:18

If I had a window treatment company that a guy calls up and he let me share the entire gospel.

27:24

I mean, I spent about 15 minutes sharing the gospel with him. And so now I had to listen to his 15 minute talk on window treatments.

27:33

I told him, I said to him first, hey, first, before you get to what you want to talk about, you called me. So since it's my time,

27:40

I want to spend it on something I want to talk to you about. And so he let me. So I was like, okay. Your drapes look good behind you too.

27:48

They're very nice. But when email scams come, people make a mistake of thinking that what they see is accurate.

27:59

And you can spoof emails. You know, another thing that people make a mistake of, and I'm going to get into some ways of protecting your children as well, because a lot of parents don't think about their children online.

28:11

Their children are not going to have good secure passwords. What most hackers look for is the children accounts on computers.

28:19

Because from the children's account, they can get to your account because you're on the same network.

28:24

Unless of course, you're like me, that you'd segment your network so the kids were on their own.

28:33

You know, in my case, you think about all the IoT devices that you have, the Internet of Things devices, your smart

28:41

TV, your smart refrigerator now even. I'm waiting for the smart toaster. You know, you set it so when you come home, your toaster's ready.

28:50

I don't know. But you know, they have this where everything is connected to the internet.

28:56

And with that, those things are not that secure. People were able to hack into people's nest.

29:03

They had a nest thermometer. And you go, what's the big deal? You know, they have a nest thermometer.

29:10

So what? So you know the temperature in my house? Yes, but from the temperature in your house, someone can get to the rest of your network.

29:16

In fact, there was a company that ended up having an issue.

29:22

Their company was hacked. And they couldn't figure out, with all the security they had, how the hackers got in.

29:29

Well, this company had a farm. And all of the cows had collars that were connected with cellular to get to the

29:41

Wi -Fi on the farm. So if the cows were to get lost, they could find the cow. Digital bovine hacking, really.

29:50

And these, because people thought the collars, who cares where the cow is. There was no security on that.

29:57

But from that, they were able to get in. There was a restaurant that had a big fish tank.

30:03

They had a fish tank with a, the system to keep the water pure was connected to the internet.

30:10

So that if it had a problem, it would be able to order the, like if it needed different chemicals or whatever, the system would recognize that and automatically order them.

30:20

However, there was no security on that. And it was also on the network for the restaurant.

30:28

And so through the, I guess it was a thermometer in the fish tank, they were able to hack in to the computer network of the company.

30:37

And through that, they created a ransomware where they encrypted the company's computers and asked for money to get that turned back.

30:45

So these are the things that people don't think of. When we have kids, bud, kids, growing up with kids now, people have to be aware of the things that go on on the internet their kids are not wise to.

30:58

The two largest type of sites where you will get viruses and malware are pornography sites and gaming sites.

31:07

And if you have a child that's on a computer connected to the internet, they are on the gaming sites.

31:13

My children growing up for many years had a computer that was not connected to the internet for this very reason.

31:19

I also had them on Linux, which most hackers are not, means they can't play all the games, but most of their viruses don't work on that computer.

31:31

But the reason that they do the pornography sites and gaming sites is because those sites, you're either downloading video or you're downloading games, you're occupied in the game and you don't notice the slowing down of something else being downloaded with it.

31:48

And because of that, they can download things. So I tell parents not to let their kids play games from internet websites, because that's like asking for viruses.

32:00

And don't think that your virus protection is going to be enough because they're always going to find new places or new viruses, they're going to create new ones.

32:10

So with children, you have to be mindful. You have to be mindful not only of the websites they go to, and there is software you can get.

32:18

I recommend that there's software, for anyone who's struggling with pornography, there's software you can get to be able to make sure that your computer's locked down.

32:27

Now, my kids growing up, they knew that we had a thing, I think it's called

32:33

SafeEyes, was what we used. There's a couple different ones out there. I don't even know if SafeEyes is around anymore. But we had

32:39

SafeEyes, and SafeEyes, my wife had a password that she would log in, and that gave the kids 30 minutes of time on the computer.

32:46

And we had restrictions of what websites they could go to and things like that. But you know, kids are kids.

32:52

My son is a pretty smart guy. So what does he do? Well, he knows that my wife makes him turn around every time she puts the password in.

33:00

So what does he do? He set up his camera on video mode and left it on the bookshelf so that while she types the password in, he could figure out what the password is.

33:14

Smart kid. Okay? But here's the thing. What he didn't know at that time is

33:21

I also had a thing, they don't have anymore, there is a thing I used called eBlaster, but there's other products,

33:28

I'm sure, out there like it because corporations use it all the time. But I had something on the computer that they didn't know.

33:35

It didn't require a password. It didn't show that anything was running. But what it was doing was capturing every keystroke they typed, every website they went to.

33:45

And so I knew that my son knew the password because I knew he was going over time.

33:52

I also knew that with the password, once he had the password, he could bypass the securities we put in.

33:59

But I would get an email every day that told me everywhere that he had gone. So it also gave me all of his passwords because as he typed those in,

34:08

I knew those. That was something stealthful. Now, why did I do that? Well, to protect my kids against their own sinful natures, right?

34:19

I didn't trust that even though my kids knew that there was some software on there to do a protection,

34:25

I also knew that what I would do when I was a kid and try to find a way around it. And so that's what they do.

34:33

And so as parents, you want to have something on your computers. If your kids have phones, you want parent controls on your phones.

34:41

If you struggle with pornography, make sure your wife or someone else has parent controls on your phone, okay? Do not allow yourself devices that can connect to the internet that could lead you to sin or to put you in a position where something dangerous could possibly happen.

34:58

That's something you want to realize is people think like, well, it's not a big deal.

35:03

Well, I actually, this is many years ago when I first got a wireless router and I thought, what's the big deal if my neighbors use my internet, right?

35:12

Who cares? And so I didn't have a password on it. Why? Because then I didn't have to type it in all the time.

35:19

And so it was easy until I one day noticed that there was a lot of traffic going on my internet.

35:27

And I figured that's not normally what my, because my neighbor would sometimes use the, because he didn't have wireless. And so he would sometimes use mine.

35:33

I didn't think a big deal, but when I saw a bunch of traffic, I went, something seems wrong. Well, I ended up going in and using some tools to sniff the network to see what was the traffic.

35:44

Well, someone was logged onto my router and uploading child pornography. So, yes.

35:50

So I quickly unplugged the, you know, unplugged it. And the guy was parked right outside my house.

35:55

And I discovered back then that there are people who drive around looking for open channels where they can upload what would be illegal.

36:04

Now the, and something like that, what makes it illegal is the upload. If it's uploaded on your computer, you're the one that could go to jail.

36:12

And so after that, I put a very secure password that my kids hated because it's 64 characters long and very difficult to type.

36:25

So, but you, that is a protection. You know, never leave.

36:30

Also, if you have a wireless router, never leave the default password. You know, I don't think they send them now with default passwords.

36:35

I think now they have something to generate them, but. We just recently, eight months or so ago, upgraded our servers at work.

36:46

And so we, oddly enough, we're not online because 20 something years ago when we first set up the company, we had been online and we used our desktop both for our accounting and inventory as well as internet.

37:02

We do emails. We got hacked and we had security on there. You know, we had virus protection.

37:08

So we learned a lesson real quick. We really don't even need our corporate programs accessible by web.

37:15

We do everything in the building. We don't need to remotely log in or anything like that. So I took the servers off the internet.

37:23

Now you can't get the software upgrades that I get annually for the accounting except by download.

37:30

So when we install the new servers, I had hardware firewalls installed because we've got two servers.

37:41

So I had a hardware firewall and I forget, they each have like four channels or something like that.

37:46

But when it was, it was funny that you mentioned that because when they came in and I had, you know, my guru installing them,

37:54

I'm like, how did you get in there so quick? They all come with a password administrator. Everything's administrator.

37:59

You want me to leave that in there? I'm like, do you think you should? Or maybe we should come up with a different one. Because that's what people do.

38:08

They don't think to change that. And whatever your device is, people have all kinds of things that they have in their home.

38:17

They have their smart TVs that are connected to the internet. They have their DVR players.

38:23

You know, you think about how many devices that are connected. Now, if you know how to do things,

38:29

I mean, like I said, you're talking about firewalls. In my house, I have all of my things that are connected to the internet on one network.

38:37

And then I have a separate network for my computer. So if someone was to get into one, they can't get into the other.

38:43

So I limit that. Then I have guest networks. So when people come to my house and they want, hey, can stay in my house and they need the

38:48

Wi -Fi, I'm like, yeah, here it is. Here's the guest network. That's a limited network. I have that restricted.

38:54

And so there's certain things. So there's things like that you could do that would help.

39:00

But one of the other things when it comes to children, Bud, because children will look for ways to get around whatever rules you put in place, right?

39:12

So, but they think they're savvy and they often don't realize how unsavvy they are.

39:17

So here's what I did with my youth group many years ago when I was pastoring a church about a dozen plus years ago.

39:27

Oh, more than that now. So what I did was with the youth group was all the youth group thought they were so smart because they were creating

39:35

Facebook accounts, even though some of them were younger. I think you had to be 13 to have a Facebook back then. And some of them were younger than that, but they would use fake names.

39:43

They would use bogus birthdays, you know, things like that, say that they live in different places in the world.

39:52

And they would also, back then there was a website called, I think it was called Jenga or something. It's a journaling site, right?

39:58

So I had a friend of mine who used to be a private detective and he took my Facebook picture, created a

40:05

Jenga account. From my Facebook, he found one of the youth group kids and he spent three months figuring out, because they all had bogus names and addresses, things like that.

40:16

He spent three months creating what we call a community of interest. What community of interest is, so we had one girl said she went to Disney World with her brother and names her brother and puts a picture of the whole family.

40:29

Then he saw that here's the brother posting the same picture saying he was there with his sister and names the sister.

40:36

Okay, now he has the real names, right? Puts that connection together. He was connecting things, all these different dots where he could get everyone's real names.

40:45

Like there was one girl that she put a picture of herself. She was like 15 years old,

40:50

I think 16 years old and she said she was 93 from the Philippines. Things like that.

40:57

Within three months, he was able to build a community of interest to get all of their real names where they live roughly.

41:04

In fact, what I had him do is he came into the youth group and I said, okay, folks, how many of you guys have accepted me on Jenga?

41:11

Half the hands go up. I said, no, you didn't. You accepted a friend of mine who's a private detective.

41:16

Here's what he discovered about you guys. And he freaked them out because here's what he did. He said there's one girl that posted a story that every time she would get upset with her parents, she even named the park that she goes to.

41:30

He said, okay, she's given me a picture of herself. She's given me the name of the park and I know that she always goes there when she gets in a fight with her parents.

41:40

And then he said she also talked about a story of when she was a child and a bird landed in her hair and got tangled in her hair.

41:46

And ever since then, she's been freaked out by animals. The reason that story got worded was because we had prayer meeting one night and don't ask me how, but a chipmunk got into the building and we're all praying and she felt something crawling up her leg.

42:02

And she opened her eyes to a chipmunk sitting on her knee. And she screamed and we all screamed.

42:09

So she told that story. So he put together that he knows she's upset with her parents if she's there.

42:15

He knows she doesn't like animals. He concocted a story to build trust. And he said, so his story was that his parents forced him to sleep with a dog because a dog bit him and they wanted to get him over that.

42:27

This whole story that he created to make it seem like he has a fear of animals. His parents didn't understand him.

42:36

And at the end of the story, I said, would you trust someone if they told you that in the park? Knowing you're already in an emotional state being upset with your parents.

42:43

And she went, yeah. Another girl he turned to and said, she put out there that she isn't home for two hours at least every day.

42:52

She gets home from school. Her brother is on sports. Her parents are working.

42:58

She's got at least two hours every day she's home alone. Because of different things she mentioned, because she would talk about her walk home.

43:05

Because these different things she would mention, he figured out exactly because she mentioned the school she went to, he figured out exactly where she walked, how she went home.

43:17

He found out enough that he actually said, he gave an exact location with a map and said, at this location, there's no houses anywhere nearby.

43:26

He goes, someone could be sitting in a car right there, pick her up and know that no one will even know she's missing for at least two hours.

43:33

And so the thing is, I tried to teach them this, they put way too much information out there and our children do that.

43:40

They don't think about it. They put the information out thinking nothing bad can happen. They think they're talking to people maybe their same age and it could be an adult.

43:48

Unfortunately, much of the human trafficking that happens is through connections online.

43:56

Someone thinks they're talking to a girl their age and they're trusting the person and they find out, no, it's a 40 -year -old man.

44:03

And they say, let's meet. Parents, if you do not know where your children are going online, you cannot protect them.

44:13

My children knew that if they were going to use my computers that I paid for, I was going to know their passwords to every account they have.

44:21

As a parent, I required that. Why? Well, I mean, I could find it out my own way, but they didn't know that.

44:28

That was part of my ruse to make sure they didn't know. But I always had the passwords.

44:33

You should know your children's passwords. Why? So that you can know what they're seeing, what they're doing.

44:40

You want to be going in and they're going to try to clear the history of their browsers and different things like that.

44:46

But you want to make sure you know because there are people that are using the internet to prey on children, to earn trust, to get them out of your protection.

44:57

Maybe someday, Bud, we'll do an episode on some of the things I did to protect my children.

45:03

For parents, that at least would be more in line with our show on Christian topics, parenting.

45:09

But there are things I did. I've always told my kids, if anyone tells you not to tell me something, they mean to hurt you.

45:15

That's the very thing you should tell me. You have to train your children for the things that people might look to harm them.

45:24

And the internet is a place that is very dangerous for children. We find it, there's a lot of good things that we can find on the internet.

45:31

There's also a lot of dangers. One thing, Bud, that you can find on the internet that's helpful is our new sponsor.

45:39

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45:45

You're wrong. You thought it was going to be MyPillow. You are wrong, my friend. What you want to do is you want to go, and I have created a, there's a link in the show notes, but I've created a link on Bit .ly

46:01

that will make it easier for you to get to our page. But we have partnered with Logos Bible Software.

46:07

And so if you go to bit .ly, B -I -T dot L -Y slash S -F -E

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Logos, L -O -G -O -S. If you go there, if you want to upgrade your

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Logos, or you want to get Logos for the very first time, Striving Fraternity will give you not only the discounts that Logos provides, but we will give you five free digital books.

46:31

And this is something you can get on the Internet. Logos is a Bible software package that I use heavily.

46:36

I think it is probably one of the best. It will increase your ability to do study in God's Word.

46:43

It is something where you have tons of books. I happen to have about 60 ,000 books that all sit on my phone.

46:50

So, you can get access, I don't suggest that you get that many books, but it has all the reference materials you would want to use to do studying of God's Word.

47:00

You can have that all at your fingertips. And organized in such a way that if you are studying the

47:05

Bible and you just right -click on a word, you can get to the Greek or the Hebrew to understand what the original language is said.

47:12

You can have all your commentaries there. You can be able, in just simple clicks, to be able to do a lot of research.

47:18

They have a thing called a Factbook. You are studying about a city. You are studying about Jerusalem. You just type in Jerusalem, and it will go through your whole library that whatever books you have, anywhere where you have

47:28

Jerusalem, and show you different things about Jerusalem that could help and enhance your study of God's Word.

47:35

So, if you are someone who is planning to be a pastor, if you are someone who is teaching Sunday School or teaching a

47:40

Bible study, you might want to consider getting Logos, and a way to partner with us to get it.

47:47

That will get you five free digital books. Maybe you want Spurgeon's Commentary on 1 Peter.

47:52

I am going to start a Bible study on 1 Peter here soon. So, with that, that would be a good one for me to get.

47:59

We have a whole bunch of books you can select from. To make it easier, because Logos has this long partner page,

48:05

I made it easier for you. Just go to bit .ly slash sfelogos, and you will be able to upgrade your

48:15

Logos and get new packages. If you want to upgrade to Logos 9, that would be a way of doing that.

48:21

Actually, you know, Bud, your pastor used this, and he got five free books.

48:27

He was very happy for that. Oh, wow, nice. But we upgraded him. I think actually we upgraded him to 8.

48:33

I don't know if 9 was out back then. But that is a new sponsor that we have.

48:40

So, if you want to study the Bible more and dig deeper, go check out Logos Bible Software, and use our link to do so, and you will get the five free books.

48:51

If you are going to go out there, they do have different discounts.

48:57

So, that's something to make sure that you check that out.

49:05

So, I like to throw Bud off whenever I do that, and he was not expecting that one. No, that's not what

49:11

I was expecting. That's exciting, though. Yeah, that's great. I'm not as savvy with Logos as you are, but I do use it, too.

49:20

And I do need to upgrade. But I'm waiting on the co -host special to come through.

49:26

So, when you get the link for that, maybe I'll be a candidate. I don't know what that special is, but when it comes through, we'll let you know.

49:35

Well, I'll tell you about it afterwards. Hey, listen, the reality, though, is this isn't our typical type of show.

49:42

We're talking about a lot of different things that are not in the realm of Christianity, but realms where I know that a lot of people have gotten themselves into trouble with things online, falling prey to scams and things like that.

49:56

And we want to just highlight some things for you so that you would be more savvy when you're on the

50:03

Internet. One of the things I didn't get to that would help to protect you is what's called a

50:09

VPN. Let me explain what this is and tell you at least which one I use and why.

50:16

But there's a VPN. A VPN, what that does is it is something, it stands for Virtual Private Network.

50:25

And what a Virtual Private Network is is it is something that will basically take whatever is, it puts something on your computer that when it's going to send something over the

50:36

Internet, it's going to encrypt it. And before it goes to wherever, so say you're going to go to Logos .com

50:43

and you want to go out there. I'm going to type in Logos .com and then what it does is it goes, what it sends over the

50:51

Internet, it encrypts and sends it to another server. That other server knows how to decrypt it.

50:57

And that other server is the one that will actually go to Logos .com. And then when it gets back its response, it will encrypt it and send it back to me encrypted.

51:06

Why is that important? Well, for very simple reasons. Everything you're sending through the

51:12

Internet, people are trying to spy on. So they're trying to do what I said earlier, building these community of interests and trying to see where you're going.

51:23

And so it's like a website like Facebook. Facebook is known for trying to see where else you're going.

51:30

So they have things running on your computer or on your phone where they're trying to listen on your phone. They're listening to your microphone on your computer.

51:38

They're trying to figure out what other websites you go to. Google's trying to figure out all the sites you go to. They want to figure that out for their own marketing.

51:45

But other people want to figure it out because they want to build a community of interest to see how they could get you to fall prey to their scams.

51:54

And nowadays, we don't want big tech knowing what we're doing. So a thing around that is to use this

52:01

VPN. Now, I use one called Hotspot Shield. There's many of them out there. Whichever one you want to look for, there's a couple things you want.

52:09

One, you want to make sure you get one that says that they do not have a log history.

52:14

Because what good is it if you're going to places and they're keeping a log of it so that they can do the tracking?

52:21

Now, of course, you have to trust that they are... They may say they do no log history, but if you do a search on VPNs, you'll find a lot of them.

52:32

You want to find ones that are going to be ranked a lot higher and have a lot better ratings and looking for ones that have that.

52:41

I went with Hotspot because in the industry at the time, it was one of the more secure ones.

52:48

It doesn't do the history logging. And it also has ways of speeding up because a

52:56

VPN will slow down your internet search. And so I paid for a lifetime... There's actually some ones that may be a little better out there now, but I paid for a lifetime use.

53:06

And well, I'm Jewish and I'm not going to... I'm not paying... And again, I paid a lifetime.

53:11

I'm not going to pay a second time for a lifetime. But that becomes the thing to think about is to get a

53:18

VPN. And that just encrypts. Now, one of the things that with it is you can actually... My VPN, I can move it anywhere

53:25

I want in the world. And this is one of the things, when I get these emails and people tell me,

53:31

I've been watching your computer. Well, if they were thinking they were watching my computer, they would have actually been on a computer in Brazil.

53:41

Because that's where I... And I actually changed where I route it to. So that's kind of my fun.

53:46

I just route it to different places at different times. So if anyone was trying to hack into the computer, every day

53:52

I'm in a different country. Now, you may not be as nerdy as me. I understand. So, you know, these are just some different things.

54:00

I hope that, you know, this is helpful. But you're going to see a lot of times you get...

54:07

A lot of this stuff comes through email that we have or websites that lure you into stuff.

54:13

You have people that do fishing. Now, Bud, you do some fishing, don't you? Yes, I have.

54:18

Yes. Deep sea, offshore kind of stuff. Yeah, I've done that. So you've done the fishing where you contact a person pretending to be someone else and try to get some information from them, right?

54:29

Oh, no, not that. Except with you, but nowhere else. There's a thing called fishing scams where people try to...

54:36

They try to pretend they're someone else to try to gain information from you. And a lot of people fall for that because what these guys are typically good at is because they usually have enough information on you that they can figure out the rest.

54:50

And they just do a little guessing here and there. And they use that to try to get more information.

55:00

One classic fishing trick that I saw was a guy in a city.

55:05

And I want to try this, Bud. It really would be a great video. But this guy did a video where he goes into the city and he's telling people, we're out here just trying to talk to people about how secure their passwords are to their email address.

55:20

Do you have an email address? Yes. Okay, what's your email address? And they give the email address. Okay, so we want to make sure that you have a secure password.

55:28

How do you remember what your password is? You know, this one girl. Oh, well, it's the name of my dog and the year

55:34

I graduated high school. Oh, you got a dog? What kind of dog do you have? Oh, I got a little French poodle. Oh, that's so cute.

55:40

What's its name? Foo -foo. Oh, so what school did you go to? Oh, such and such high school.

55:46

When did you graduate? Oh, you know, 2010. Oh. And they just gave away their password.

55:52

I love the one guy that he did that and then went, wait a minute, I just gave you my password. That's a phishing experiment.

56:01

That's where they're phishing for information and people don't even realize it seems innocent and they fall prey to it and give that up.

56:11

So my encouragement is to not fall for that. If someone's asking for information, know who they are.

56:17

Like I did with the youth group in that experiment, one of the things I told the youth group is I told them never to accept a friend request from people without knowing they actually know that person.

56:26

After that, I ended up adding all the kids on Facebook in the youth group that I wasn't friends with and I was so glad that they all called me up,

56:35

Pastor Rappaport, are you, was that actually you? Is that you? And I said, yes, you can accept it, right? That was good.

56:42

That only lasted for a few weeks, unfortunately, but kids don't learn, right?

56:47

So I hope, Bud, that we didn't put anyone to sleep in this episode. But in case we have put them to sleep, it would be good for them to get a good pillow, good mattress topper, good blankets and sheets to sleep on, don't you think?

57:05

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These pillows are made in the USA, which is a nice thing. We're not outsourcing to some other country.

58:08

Like Brazil or something. Like Brazil, where my computer, if you try hacking into my computer, you think

58:14

I am. Well, I happen to be in Brazil right now, as we're recording. But you know what?

58:20

Maybe I'm going to change it to sunny Florida tonight, just for you. Do that, yes. It's a wonderful evening tonight.

58:27

No, seriously, this is an important topic. And it applies to Christians.

58:32

I mean, Christ sending out the disciples, told them be shrewd as serpents, be innocent as doves.

58:40

That applies certainly in the spiritual realm. But look, we're aliens in this world, and we're going to increasingly be targeted.

58:46

So we need to be savvy about these kinds of things for the sake of our children and for the sake of our integrity and reputation before the world.

58:55

So very valuable. I knew Bud was going to find a way to slip a Bible verse in one way or another. I was going to quote

59:01

Stephen Hawking, who said he thinks that computer viruses should count as life, but we didn't have time for that.

59:08

So we'll catch that some other time. Yeah, you know, I actually think, I could be mistaken, I think 2020 caught a virus and we should just reboot.

59:17

Yeah, yeah. And the people said. Well, I think they said, that's a wrap.

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