My First Idiot Video Making Backpacking and Camping Adventure!

Golf course servers where I play were hit by Ransomware! Read my book!

Folks, years ago I wrote a unsuccessful book about Small Business and Home Cyber Security. I continue to be entertained by stories from people and Small Businesses that are continually victimized by cyber security criminals. Every time I hear about these incidents I always recommend you/they buy a copy of my 980 page book to which I get blank stares or ignored. I even offer my services.

This latest breech resulted in my golf course losing control of its client lists, handicaps, inventory and so on as they did not have a backup since 2018. They refused to PAY the ransomware which I respect but they lost everything.

The moral of this story is if you know nothing about Cyber Security and don’t want to read my book is at least keep maintained backups.

Veterans, like myself, want to end these senseless mass shootings!

 WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE AGAINST U.S. CORPORATIONS FOR NOT PROVIDING ARMED SECURITY TO RAPIDLY RESPOND TO DOMESTIC TERRORISTS!” That is the question the drive by media and U.S. congress with their political agendas will never ask…

The question not being addressed by the drive by media is where is the security in light of all these mass shootings? The answer is U.S. corporations don’t want to provide it! In the wake of their MASSIVE profits why would they want to pay an unemployed veteran $100 a day to provide security for 1,000+ customers? It seems they would rather see 20 people die and 27 wounded while law enforcement takes 6 minutes, 6 MINUTES to respond!

Most of you have never been in a war or battle, and as such you don’t understand what 6 minutes means. Imagine that your enemy is heavily armed and loaded. Your enemy starts out lobbing in mortars from a distance, sending in machine gun fire, and eventually shooting small arms fire at you as they advance across your undefended defenses. This is possible because you can’t shoot back as happened in Lebanon.

From Wiki, “The attack killed 307 people: 241 U.S. and 58 French military personnel, six civilians, and two attackers.” In the attack on the American Marines barracks, the death toll was 241 American servicemen: 220 Marines, 18 Navy personnel and three Army soldiers, along with sixty Americans injured, representing the deadliest single-day death toll for the United States Marine Corps since the Battle of Iwo Jima of World War II, the deadliest single-day death toll. The sentries at the gate were operating under rules of engagement which made it very difficult to respond quickly to the truck. From wiki, “On the day of the bombing, the sentries were ordered to keep a loaded magazine inserted in their weapon, bolt closed, weapon on safe and no round in the chamber. Only one sentry, LCpl Eddie DiFranco, was able to chamber a round. However, by that time the truck was already crashing into the building's entryway.”

I met some of the marines returning who said they were limited to three rounds per magazine and the attack took place very rapidly. Now imagine Everyone in your unit has no ammo so while all this incoming fire goes on with soldiers screaming and dying, a few are running to the ammo supply to enable you to shoot back. I hope this helps you understand what 6 MINUTES is before you can load your weapon!

For now, arm someone with a squirt gun or a child’s toy and try to avoid getting wet or popped while running around the house for 6 minutes! There are only so many places to seek cover or hide. Your enemy will hunt you down and get you wet in that amount of time unless you are very, very lucky.

Been working on the new Florida house and a degraded RAID 5 computer

I have a failed drive in one of my RAID 1 home computer servers that I have been ignoring while working on my Florida house. Today I received a comment from the over 7000+ viewers of this blog so I decided it is time for a new blog entry after months of neglect.

I have investigated fixing the RAID but one problem I cannot figure out how to fix it without possibly destroying the computer. I recently took a Windows 7 system image (still provided by Windows 10) as to try and rebuild the RAID. However, work on the house and GOLF have gotten in the way of making the final jump into the unknown. I will keep you posted as things progress.

ThatCyberSecurityGuy

How to analyze a Stock for purchase, is NPIFF a buy?

This blog is about more than computers and cyber security. In a Kiplinger’s article by Kathy Kristof she outlined how she sizes up a stock.  I thought it would be fun to put her formula to work and add a few things that I also look at.

I recently purchased Northland Power (NPIFF) which pays a nice 5.53 % dividend. This Canadian company produces electricity from natural gas and biomass as well as wind and solar. Some 60% of its construction and development pipeline projects harness wind. I like green energy and I think the millennials will also. Therefore, I see a bright future for this company.

Using her formula, let’s try to look at the projected earnings for NPIFF to see what they are for the current year and next year. Surf to https://finance.yahoo.com and type in the NPIFF ticker symbol to call up the stock. On the tenth right tab is Analysis so click on that. Unfortunately there is no Analysts data but this will work for other stocks. What she looks at is at the top of the page are per-share earnings estimates for the current and next quarter. Then if you scroll down to bottom of the page you can examine under “growth estimates” which is how fast analysts expect earnings to grow.

She then says, “Before you leave this page, also take a look at the section in the middle titled “earning history” which shows what analysts had expected earnings to be in the recent past. What I like to see is that analysts have either been accurate or have projected low, allowing the company to “beat” the projection. If the column shows a string of negative numbers, it means analysts have overestimated profits and really don’t have a handle on what to expect."

Moving on I will deviate from her formula click on the "Holders" tab. There are some big names that own a lot of NPIFF such as Vanguard, American Funds and so on. If they like the stock it is a good sign that possibly you and I should also. Seeing these big guys investing in the stock gives me a lot more confidence in the company as a holding in my portfolio.

Next click on the second “Chart” tab. What I like to see is that we are purchasing the stock at a lower than normal price for a utility like this. NPIFF is not really a growth stock but a value stock. For example, Amazon and Netflix from birth to today rocketed up in price from the teens to hundreds of dollars per share. If you look at the 5 year history of NPIFF it has bounced around from about a low of 12 to almost a high of 20. Consequently, picking it up at $16 a share seems to be a good price.
Getting back to her formula click on the “Financials” tab and examine the company’s income statement, balance sheet and cash flow statements. As she states it, “you want to see income that’s rising steadily, plenty of cash and short-term investments on the balance sheet, and more than enough free cash flow (the cash left after making the capital expenditures necessary to maintain the business) to cover the dividend.” Another thing I look at is Total Revenue, is it going up? In our case with NPIFF it has almost doubled since 2014 so things are still looking good. A lot of the numbers here are common sense.

• Operating expenses for NPIFF are rising, NOT GOOD
• Earnings Before Interest and Taxes more than double 2014, GOOD
• Income Before Tax, Rising, GOOD
• Income from Continuing Operations, UP, GOOD
• Net Income Applicable to Common Shares, Rising, GOOD

Consequently, looking at the Financials we still like NPIFF! The next step in her formula is also a dead end for NPIFF since it is a Canadian/foreign stock. However, for other stocks here is what she has to say, “go to the Securities and Exchange Commission website ( https://www.sec.gov ) and search for the company’s latest SEC filings. The company’s annual report is called the 10-K. I like to make sure I understand the business and to see what management has to say about the company’s progress and prospects, which is usually in the chairman’s letter up front. I then look at the financial statement in the back where at least three years’ worth of data is reported.” This data may or may not collaborate what Yahoo is reporting. As she points out, “Yahoo is theoretically reporting most of the same numbers. However, Yahoo often picks up “adjusted” earning, which may exclude a laundry list of supposedly one-time items. Sometimes these adjustments are legitimate. Sometimes I think they’re essentially excuses for not doing better."

She next recommends that you glance at the K-1 stock-performance chart, which shows how the company’s shares have fared against competitors over the past several years. The next one I did not know about but is good advice. She says look as the DEF 14A, also known as the proxy statement. In her words, “I want to see a management team that isn’t overpaying itself given its performance. If the company executives are in the top percentiles for pay (this will be noted in the compensation report) but the stock is in the bottom percentiles for performance (from the stock graph in the 10-K), there’s a problem."

A couple of other numbers I look are Insider Activity. This used to be available at Yahoo but all I see is the breakdown of major holders which helps but does not tell you if management is buying stock in their own company. She purchased Costco recently but when I look at the Yahoo “Holders” tab I see that only 0.63% is held by “All Insider”. To me this is a RED FLAG on the stock. For NPIFF we have no data so you will have to use your brokerage account to gather this information. I logged into ETrade and clicked on the “Insider Activity” tab to see all the latest. If you dig you will see that 41.2% of the shares are held by Non-Institutional investors which is GREAT.

Now we move on to “Shares Outstanding” which we want to be reducing or staying the same. This can be found on the “Balance Sheet” at your brokerage. NPIFF shares have increased from 132 in 2013 to 175 in 2017, NOT GOOD. We also look at Long Term debt on the balance sheet. NPIFF has gone from 1,778 in 2013 to 6,996 in 2017, NOT GOOD, but if you look closer Total Assets have gone from 3,063 to 10,281 so they are putting the debt to work, GOOD!

Last thing I like to read is the news on the stock. You can always find an article or two that someone has written which may give you a little more insight into the company. Seeking Alpha is an excellent source for most stocks. For example, https://seekingalpha.com/article/4198302-northland-power-inc-npiff-ceo-mike-crawley-q2-2018-results-earnings-call-transcript?page=1 .
Overall, NPIFF is a mixed bag that I will invest in because I like clean energy!

Syncing up Thunderbird to a sky drvie works but you need to clean house!

Never say never as I wanted to admit defeat as syncing up the Thunderbird files took forever at first. However, after I deleted a TON of old email and compacted the Thunderbird files everything now syncs up very quickly. Depending on your Internet speed such as travel in hotels sync times may take longer than you want to wait so consider this option carefully.

Therefore, only consider this cloud solution if you have a small amount of email with few attachments and only one or two accounts. In my case I still have a large amount of text only email and things sync up very quickly.

ThatCyberSecurityGuy, LLC
Kirk A. Ellis

How to snyc up a local Thunderbird email client to the cloud on multiple computers in small amounts

Please understand that when you send an email in plain text it is shared with the whole world. It is a real bother to keep Internet access 24/7 everywhere you go on your computers so I use the local Thunderbird Mozilla client. This way, I can view multiple email accounts offline when I don't have Internet access. The beauty of this is when I'm traveling all I have to do is go to the local coffee shop or fast food restaurant and establish an Internet connection on my laptop and shazam, I have all my multiple email accounts up-to-date in one email client application.

However, there are drawbacks to this that we will discuss, such as all of your computers being out-of-sync every time you turn them on. In addition, Thunderbird also has local configuration files signatures and account information that you will find hard to keep synced across all of your computers. For years I have used WinMerge (http://winmerge.org) with a USB drive in an attempt to keep all of the local files that Thunderbird uses in sync which has been a pain in my a$$. I also copied my local Thunderbird email files to my USB backups which is also painful and time consuming. There was also a lot on manual configuration to be performed on each computer to keep them in sync.

It is for these reasons that most people just log into their online email and manage everything at google.com or outlook.com, or one account on their smartphone, which I think is a mistake. If you have that power outage or are traveling to places unknown, you are completely cut off from your email. She had maintained all of her email with our ISP and when we moved, the ISP closed that account. What she did not understand was that when the account closed, she would lose all her email, all of her contacts, etc. and begged me to get them back, but no can do, not without a local copy backed up to your home computer! We also had hurricane IRMA when we lost power for five days!

Therefore, I set out to solve the best of both worlds for us all, so I will never again have to hear my wife cry about her email and contacts being lost. I also don't want to waste my time for years to come, manually syncing configuration files on all my computers that are running the Thunderbird email client. The first problem I ran into was finding all the local Thunderbird files and then moving them to my sky drive. Directions on how to do this will be coming in my next blog entry, as I ran into a few problems syncing my first two computers.

NOTE:  You will have to assess whether or not your email files will fit into your sky drive by right-clicking on the directory and selecting Properties to see just how big your email files have become. It is surprising the amount of junk email we have hanging around.

In my case, everything fit so I moved it all thinking that I had a solution to the Thunderbird local email client, now sky drive problem. However, my computers began taking large amounts of time syncing up to my Google Sky Drive, as my local (now sky) files were gigabytes in size. Thunderbird constantly reshapes its local .msf storage files that house your email, thus causing constant syncing to take place as you read, delete and compact these files.

Also understand that Thunderbird is syncing with its configured email servers as local email accounts/files download and adjust to your ISP accounts. This causes a double sync in where your email client is syncing to your sky drive because your email client just synced which makes this solution sound impossible (round and round) unless you have an incredibly FAST Internet connection and in that thought you are correct, somewhat.

As a result before I can finish this project I had to go through about 7 years of email and delete and compact everything I could before making this all work. Once I got the Thunderbird .msf files down to a small size this worked beautifully! Please understand this process of deleting email, compacting files and then syncing them up again is painful but liberating (like starting a whole new life!). I had to relive deaths in the family, arguments, emails from my editor, bad news from my master tax preparer, and so much more. However, I kept at it and after each evening of work my sync time is got shorter and shorter with my Gigabyte Internet connection making this a very viable and awesome solution to a multiple email account local/sky/IMAP former problem.

WARNING:  Do not enter into this project unless you are willing to spend the time to delete a ton of old email.  If you do not, you will forever see your Thunderbird email and files continuously syncing up both to your email servers and to your cloud drive. If you don't clean house you will find yourself unable to even send an email while minutes or hours of syncing takes place.  In my case it took me weeks to delete all my old email and compact the Thunderbird folders to a suitable size but what a refreshing experience it was!

Also, even though Uncle Sam keeps all your email for you entire lifetime at U.S. Taxpayer expense (why U.S. citizens put up with this is unknown) your ISP does not. By cleaning out all your old email you get back a small measure of privacy as this correspondence can no longer be read by the whole world! You ISP has to maintain it for a while but they will eventually purge it from their databases.

How to Setup your Windows 10 Pro VPN Client to use at Hotspots and behind firewalls Everywhere

Things are very exciting now that we have 2/3 of the SOHO VPN pie complete. Our router and Windows 10 server configurations are complete. We now have to configure our client as an outgoing VPN connection. Be sure to read all of this blog entry because things get a little tricky. We will need our ISP provided IP address which can be obtained by logging into our router or by opening up Microsoft Edge and typing (What is my IP?). We are going to need this later to configure this VPN client.

Now things get really cool as we are going to configure a local VPN client to test everything out. This eliminates the router as a possible connection point of failure before we even venture out on to the WAN and use infected hotspots. Bring up the Network and Sharing Center by typing in the Type or talk box. Select Set up a new connection or network > on the Choose a connection option screen choose Connect to a workplace, Set up a dial-up or VPN connection to your workplace , Next > On the How do you want to connect? Screen select Use my Internet connection (VPN), Connect using a virtual private network (VPN) connection through the Internet. > on the Type the Internet address to connect to screen we can enter the IPv4 or IPv6 local IP address (I prefer IPv6), leave everything else at the default value > click on the Create button lower right.

Now let us test everything out to see if it is working locally. Bring up the Network and Sharing center and click on the Change adapter settings link on the left > double click on VPN Connection, WAN Miniport (IKEv2) on the VPN screen double click on VPN Connection which was the default name we accepted. NOTE: We could have gotten here by just typing VPN in the Type or talk box. Click on the Connect button > this will bring up the Sign in screen where you will enter the username and password you configured on the server > you will see Verifying your sign-in info and now you are done OR NOT! This is the tricky part I described earlier.

Suddenly we see, The remote connection was not made because the attempted VPN tunnels failed. The VPN server might be unreachable. If this connection is attempting to use an L2TP/IPsec tunnel the security parameters required for IPsec negotiation might not be configured properly. Whoa, what happened? Everything according to what you have read says this should have worked! It is a great thing we tested our VPN connection behind our firewall on the LAN. When you look at the event log on the server side you might see something like, Event ID 20171: Failed to apply IP Security on port VPN3-0 because of error: A certificate could not be found. Connections that use the L2TP protocol over IPSec require the installation of a machine certificate, also known as a computer certificate. No calls will be accepted to this port.

Correction step 1 is reboot your VPN server and try again. If that does not work disable the Windows 10 firewall and reboot again. When you do and try to connect your client again you may see, Can’t connect to VPN Connection, A connection to remote computer could not be established. You might need to change the network settings for this connection. WOW! Well we have made progress but now we have a different error. Looking at the server event logs again we get Event IDs: 7023, The Connected Devices Platform Service service terminated with the following error: Unspecified error; or RoutingDomainID- {00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000}: CoId={3F6A5694-A54B-4F8D-A7F3-204DC42D8442}: The user ASUSCROSSHAIRV\kirk connected to port VPN4-1 has been disconnected because no network protocols were successfully negotiated.

You can beat your head into a wall searching for this error but from my experience with Windows 7, this was a 720 error code and we have to configure the VPN server to assign IP addresses to incoming VPN connections rather than allowing them to be assigned by our DHCP router. Make sure your IP range is one not being used by devices in your LAN.

On the VPN server right click on the Network icon on the desktop arrow down to select Properties, which will open up the Network and Sharing Center (or use Type and talk) > on the left menu click on Change adapter settings > right click on Incoming connections > click on the Networking tab at the top > double click on Internet protocol version 4 (TCP/IPv4) > tick Specify IP address and type the IPv4 range values that will not be assigned to devices on your local network and later your cable modem IP address from your ISP, OK.

Now that we have everything working click on your client VPN network adapter and use the advanced settings to set up all your info to happen with a simple point and click of the mouse. Open up Change Adapter Settings > double click on VPN Connection > click on the Advanced Setting button in the middle to add your connection information

We are done right? Well not really, because we disabled Windows 10 Pro firewall and rebooted out VPN server. It is now broken and wide open to crackers. You can test all this out by enabling your firewall again, rebooting your VPN server as you will see The remote connection was not made because the attempted VPN tunnels failed... error message again. Therefore, we have to figure out how to allow our client VPN through our Windows 10 Pro firewall.

More to come...