The DNC Hack, CEO Fraud, and Why Ghostwriters Don’t Mind: Drive-Time Radio Security | The Don Rosen Show

This is the complete conversation from Richard Lowe’s appearance on The Don Rosen Show, live on AM 1380 WBEL out of Beloit, Wisconsin, on the first day of summer 2016, lightly edited for readability. Commercial breaks and station news segments are omitted. Historical book counts appear as spoken; current figures are bracketed.

How did hackers stay inside the DNC network for a year?

Don Rosen: This is Don Rosen on the Big AM 1380 WBEL. Thanks for joining us on this first day of summer, live and local on the radio, also streaming at thebigam1380.com and on TuneIn. We’re going to talk about computer security, because if there’s no break-in on your computer system, we probably don’t care, but if it does happen to you, good luck trying to clean it up. Just recently, the Democratic National Committee, the DNC, had been hacked by Russia, I think for a year. My guest is Richard Lowe, computer security and disaster survival expert. Richard, thanks for joining us again. I do appreciate it.

Richard Lowe: You’re welcome. Glad to be here.

Don Rosen: So the Russians were supposedly hacked into the DNC computers for a year. How could you do that for a year and not know that somebody’s hacked into you?

Richard Lowe: Well, the Target breach was for something like six months; they were inside Target. And eBay was several months. It’s hard to detect hacks once they get in. The vulnerable point is the first breach. Once they’re through that, they can cover up their tracks.

Don Rosen: Wow. Now, you said eBay was also hacked?

Richard Lowe: That was a few years ago. eBay was one of the largest hacks of all, and Target was a big hack.

Don Rosen: So how would the DNC know they were being hacked, if they were in there a long time? What’s the tip-off?

Richard Lowe: I don’t know the exact tip-off in this case, but they could start seeing their information appear on the internet, or somebody could tell them it’s happening, or one of their security people could notice something strange. It could be any number of things.

Don Rosen: Is it possible to find out who did it? Can they backtrack it? Do you leave footprints, a trail of crumbs leading back to you when you hack into something?

Richard Lowe: They do, and the trails frequently go back to low-level operatives, people they hire to take the fall, so the high-level people never get caught. In this case, the Russian government says, “We don’t know anything about it.” We know they’re lying, but: “We don’t know anything about it.”

Don Rosen: For people that don’t know: they hacked into the DNC computer systems, and supposedly they got information on Donald Trump, an opposition research file. And there was nothing in there that wasn’t already out in the media somewhere. Is there a law against doing something like this? Does the DNC have any legal recourse against Russia?

Richard Lowe: There aren’t really any international laws, but there are national laws against hacking. And we’ve had cases where hackers operated from other countries; there was a famous one a while ago in the Philippines, a big hacker, and there was nothing we could do, because it wasn’t a crime in the Philippines at the time.

How do hackers pick their targets?

Don Rosen: Give it to me in layman’s terms. I always say, well, if someone hacks into my computer, it’s all boring stuff on there. I don’t do my banking online. There’s no personal information of mine on my computer. Now, on my cell phone, it’s a different story; I do some stuff on there, but I still don’t do any banking. How does somebody determine who they want to hack? Which people do they pick? How do they know how to get into my computer?

Richard Lowe: There are actually several different approaches, and I’ll start from one and work my way up. Interrupt me anytime.

The first one is just to throw out a virus, and whoever it catches, it catches. That’s probably the most common thing hackers do. They use a virus toolkit, which is available very cheap in the hacker world, and build a virus. It gets into thousands and thousands of systems, and they use it to build what are called botnets, which are collections of systems they can control to do things for them, such as sending spam emails and finding credit cards. So the vast majority is random: throw it out there and see what you catch.

The second one is called spear phishing, and that’s where somebody targets a company or an individual, and they investigate that individual. Let’s say they wanted to target your company. They would target your CEO and find out everything they could about him, and then your CFO and your other people, and send emails designed as if they came from somebody inside your company, so people would be fooled. They’d think it was from the accountant or somebody else, because it has details that only somebody, quote, on the inside, quote, would know. But all that stuff’s available on the internet. That’s spear phishing, where they’re actually trying to get into a company.

And then there’s a third type, directed specifically at executives. A big one happened in New Zealand, where the CFO started receiving emails from, quote, the CEO, quote, saying they wanted to do a million-dollar transfer, and we need to do it now. The hackers knew the CEO was out of the country and difficult to reach, and they had been monitoring; they got his information and knew what his habits were, so they were able to successfully pretend to be the CEO. I believe in that case they actually got one transfer through. Then the second one exceeded the normal safety limits, and the CFO sent an email to the real CEO, and the CEO said: I have no idea what you’re talking about. The second one didn’t go through.

So those are three examples of the kinds of attacks that happen.

The spoofed email from your cousin

Don Rosen: I’ll tell you how I know this problem. I’ll get an email; I got one from my cousin. Now, she has never, ever sent me an email before. The subject line was kind of strange, it was odd, it wasn’t anything that would come from her. And I asked her, did you send me an email? She says no. My mother received the same email; I said, don’t open it. So somebody must have gotten into her mail account with all her contacts and sent out a general email. Is it when you open the email that the trouble begins, or when you open an attachment?

Richard Lowe: Let me back up a minute. It’s not necessarily that her email was hacked. It’s that somebody’s email account with her contact information in it was hacked. All they need is her email address. They can send it from anywhere, and they can pretend, it’s called spoofing, they can pretend that they’re that person. So her email may not have been hacked at all. It may have been her buddy’s email, with her contact name in it. That’s the first thing.

The second thing, your question about what they’re trying to do: they’re trying to get you to open an attachment, number one. Number two, if your system’s not patched, say you’re running some older version of Windows and you’re not up to patch, then just looking at the email itself could cause you to become infected.

Don Rosen: Oh, just looking at it? See, I have Windows 10 on both my computers. One I got downloaded by accident: one day I meant to hit “no thanks” and I hit “let’s do it,” and the rest is history. I got Windows 10, and I’m happy I did. So the patch would be on there, then?

Richard Lowe: Your patches are pieces of code sent out by the manufacturer of the operating system, in this case Microsoft, to fix a hole in the security. There’s some way a hacker could get in; Microsoft detects it, and they send out what’s called a patch. It’s just as if you were patching a hole in a wall, like a plaster patch; that’s where the term comes from. And you get sometimes as many as 30 of those in a month. Sometimes people forget, or they don’t want to patch, or they have a really old operating system that’s not patched anymore at all. That leaves the holes there, and the hackers get in through the holes.

What should the average person run?

Don Rosen: A friend of mine who’s in computers, whenever I have a computer problem, I call him up and he fixes it. I asked him what security program I should use, and he said, well, none of them are great. There are some good ones, but no foolproof ones. He said if you want a simple one, Microsoft has Security Essentials; it’s not going to be perfect, but it’s free, and it keeps an eye on your computer. What do you recommend for the average guy who’s just got a laptop? Is Windows Essentials good enough, or do they need something else?

Richard Lowe: Well, first of all, all of that is discussed in my book, which is called Safe Computing Is Like Safe Sex, and it has quite a few steps you can go through to secure your computer. What you have to have is a multi-layered defense. He’s absolutely right: one product is not going to protect you 100%. In fact, antivirus will only protect you about 40% of the time, and it’s not that great, because it’s after the fact; you’ve already been infected. But a product called Malwarebytes is a good one that detects other kinds of things, and you can run them both together, your antivirus and Malwarebytes. And of course you want what’s called a firewall, which keeps people out. There are several other techniques that are very simple. You could read my book and walk through it on your computer, and by the time you’re done, your computer will be a lot safer. The number one thing you need to do is keep those patches up to date. That’s how the security breaches happen. That’s how viruses infect you: you’re not patched, 90% of the time.

Don Rosen: And I know the one I have updates itself every night, and then it’s up to you to run the scan, or you can have it automatically scan in the middle of the night. Malwarebytes, I ran that; I think you get it free for 30 days and then you have to pay for it. It’s a good program. Now, let’s say you don’t browse all over the place. Are you a lot safer if you just open email that looks safe from people you know, and you just use the websites you’re familiar with and have been using all along? I hate to live in a world like that, but is that just the safe thing to do?

Richard Lowe: Just cruising around the internet looking at sites, especially certain kinds of sites, you’re going to get infected whether you like it or not, by what’s called ransomware. Ransomware is really big now, because it makes a lot of money for criminals very fast. So you definitely want to be cautious about web surfing. What I actually do is I have a cheap one of those Chromebooks that I surf the web on. That’s where I do my web searching. It’s a $150 computer that runs Chrome OS, not Windows, so it’s relatively safe. It’s going to be very hard for it to be infected.

Don Rosen: The Google Chromebook, the laptop.

Richard Lowe: Yes, the Chromebook laptop. It will protect you very well for browsing. Most of your viruses are aimed at Windows, because Windows has a hundred times the number of installations that Apple does. So most of your viruses go for Windows.

Don Rosen: My mother got the Google tablet, the Chrome tablet. It’s like an iPad, except it’s Google. Quick break here. When we come back, I have a few things to ask about Apple versus PC when it comes to getting infected, and also iPhones; I don’t see any antivirus protection for iPhones. My guest is Richard Lowe, author of a couple of books, including Safe Computing Is Like Safe Sex, and later we’ll talk about Real World Survival Tips and Survival Guide. And if you’re living out in California or Arizona these days, wow, we’ve got some tips for you people.

iPhones, find-my-phone, and the airport laptop thief

Don Rosen: Talking about computer security, Richard Lowe’s my guest. iPhones: you don’t see any security software for iPhones. How safe are they when it comes to viruses?

Richard Lowe: They’re relatively safe. They can still be affected by text messages that pull social engineering tricks, where they might say, send some money here, or do this. But that’s a text messaging problem; it has nothing to do with the phone itself.

Don Rosen: I do a lot of my stuff on the iPhone because I feel it’s safer. Is using an Apple product safer than a PC?

Richard Lowe: Yes, generally Apple’s safer than PC. There are actually a lot of security holes in Apple software, and a lot of patches. But because there’s a smaller number of Apple systems, and businesses don’t tend to run Apple for their servers, the hackers haven’t targeted them as heavily. So you’re much safer, with one exception: if you do all of your business on your phone, and then you lose your phone or it’s stolen, you’ve just given the person who stole it everything you’ve got.

Don Rosen: You know what I love about phones: that find-my-phone feature. Somebody steals it, some amateur grabs it, and you can track them right down to their house.

Richard Lowe: Yep. And then erase the phone remotely. You’ve got to have that application installed. You lose all the information on it, but it’s better than somebody else getting hold of it.

Don Rosen: There was an investigative reporter, ABC television. They suspected people were stealing laptops out of airport security. A person claimed somebody in security took his laptop, so they ran the find-my-laptop system, and they knocked at the guy’s door, and the reporter is looking at his phone, and there’s the thing beeping right at this address. He says, “Did you steal a laptop?” The guy goes, “No.” “Do you mind if we come in? We know exactly where it might be.” He gets real hesitant, then comes back and says, “My wife stole it.” And the reporter says, “We have video of you stealing it from the airport.” The guy was like Ralph Kramden: homina homina homina. It’s very difficult to steal that stuff today. There are cameras watching you everywhere, and you’ve got find-my-computer software. Hold on a second, Richard Lowe’s my guest; we’re going to take a break for news.

Wildfires and evacuation

Don Rosen: Richard Lowe is my guest, computer security and disaster survival expert. Out in California now, and Arizona, these fires are amazing to look at on television. It looks like something out of a disaster movie, and you realize it’s real. These wildfires are just eating up home after home, neighborhood after neighborhood. And there’s really nothing you can do about it, right? Once it’s a major fire like what’s going on in California and Arizona, you’re in the path.

Richard Lowe: Correct. You can prepare in advance by making sure you clean up the scrub around your house and things like that, but if it’s a really bad fire, it’s going to jump right over that. The best thing you can do is have your go bag, your grab-and-go bag, ready with the things you might need to survive for a couple of days.

Don Rosen: I always thought, why don’t these people get a safe, put all their valuables in it, and bury the safe underground? Then after the fire, all your valuables are still there, because the fire isn’t going to burn the dirt. Do people really do that?

Richard Lowe: I don’t know of anybody who’s ever done that, unless they built a bomb shelter or something. That’s pretty expensive.

Don Rosen: These people are just sitting ducks out there. I feel bad for them. They come back and there’s nothing left of these expensive homes they lived in for years. Did these people live in a neighborhood where they knew eventually this fire was going to happen? It seems like every summer in California we’re hearing about these wildfires.

Richard Lowe: Well, California is getting very dry because of the drought, number one. There are the Santa Ana winds, number two. There are going to be fires there, but the fires are getting bigger, so they’re probably burning areas that aren’t usually thought of as fire areas. There was a big one in San Diego a couple of years ago that a friend of mine was caught in. Fortunately she got out. The police knocked on her door and said, “You need to evacuate.” She said, “Let me pack my things.” He said, “You don’t understand, ma’am. You need to evacuate now.”

Don Rosen: Can they force you to leave your house?

Richard Lowe: No, but they can certainly insist.

Hurricanes, earthquakes, and where you choose to live

Don Rosen: My wife will not go out and visit California. She’s terrified there might be an earthquake or some natural disaster. Where I live, we don’t really have earthquakes here in Wisconsin, although we did have tremors not too long ago. They’re always predicting the big one is coming to California. You’d figure people wouldn’t want to live there, but they do. Where do you live? Where am I calling you?

Richard Lowe: I’m in Florida.

Don Rosen: Oh, hurricane alley.

Richard Lowe: We haven’t had a hurricane in eight years.

Don Rosen: My mom and dad used to live in Florida. One summer and fall, three hurricanes in a row came through, including one where my mom put her cell phone out the door so I could hear the 110-mile-an-hour winds going past her house. She was lucky, because when they had their house built, they had it built with hurricane shutters. The builder said, “You want a hurricane-proof house? This is the best we can do,” and they said, let’s do it. Houses in the neighborhood had their roof tiles come off, windows broken, patio furniture missing. They knew what to do in case of a hurricane, and they did it, and their house was intact. One of the big things was sealing themselves in with the hurricane shutters. Expensive, but it paid dividends. I don’t know if you’re in the hurricane pathway; they lived in Boynton Beach, just south of West Palm.

Richard Lowe: I live in an apartment, and the apartment complex is actually concrete, floor to ceiling, and it has hurricane glass, which is double-strengthened. So it’s pretty well protected. Also, I purposely moved to 50 feet above sea level, so I’m not in the evacuation zone. If you’re closer to the beach, you’re in the evacuation zone, but I’m not. And I’m not in the path of the tornadoes we occasionally get here. We don’t get many hurricanes in this area; the one you’re talking about, I think, was eight or nine years ago, and that one was bad, and it did hit this area.

Don Rosen: You mentioned tornadoes. We get them in Wisconsin, not as many as Kansas and Oklahoma. This year’s been terrible for tornadoes, and now with all these phones, you get to see them in real time, coming down the pike and literally ripping homes apart. I was watching with somebody, and they said, “I wonder how these people prepare for this.” They don’t, really. A tornado comes through your home, it’s going to rip the place to shreds. The best thing is to get underground somewhere and protect yourself. I guess there’s no way to protect the home itself from a tornado.

Richard Lowe: As far as I know, there’s no way to protect the home from a tornado. You can have a basement or something in concrete to keep you safe. Tornadoes have a lot of force in a very small area. Unless you’re building a solid concrete building, you can’t protect against that.

Don Rosen: I saw a video of a guy opening up his barn, letting all the horses and animals out: run for your lives, do what you’ve got to do. And it was a smart move, because the barn was soon gone. They’re sitting ducks in that barn, so he let them all out to find later.

Power outages and the two-week rule

Don Rosen: We had a power outage here the other day, and one last summer that was a little longer. My son was playing this comedy bit; the comedian says whenever there’s a power outage, people tend to sit in their garages on beach chairs and watch the other neighbors sitting in their chairs, and nobody’s doing anything about it. Everybody’s just sitting there waiting for the power to come back. And if it doesn’t? Hours turn into days. If roving hordes of people are coming down the street, you’re looking for protection, barricading your house. We’re all kind of sitting ducks when the electricity goes out, unless you have battery-operated fans like I do. But you’re at the mercy of the electric company, especially in the heat of the summer.

Richard Lowe: My neighbors have a generator, which they’ve kindly let me use if the power goes out. Other than that, all you can do is have a supply of food and water, just like you should for any disaster. You should have two weeks of water and two weeks of food in your house, so if the power goes out or there’s a hurricane or anything like that, you can at least survive till help gets there.

Don Rosen: What kicks me off is when the power goes out and across the street they have electricity, because we’re on a different grid than the homes across the street. It goes out a lot, not for long periods; the worst was about five or six hours. But even then it gets hot in the house. I had one portable fan, and the batteries only last so long, and those 8 D-cell batteries are expensive to keep replacing. And I remember when my mom, where they had digital television, I bought her a little handheld color television, so if the power goes out during a hurricane, at least you can watch something. She calls me up: “How do you get CNN on here?” I said, you don’t. It’s not cable. You get your local TV station in Boynton Beach, and you can find out what’s going on. I had to explain that to her. Now, generators: what do they go for? A small one for your home?

Richard Lowe: You can get them for around a thousand dollars at Home Depot or something like that. Generally they take gasoline or diesel, and they give you a couple of sockets that you can power some lamps from. They’re not that much power; they don’t power your whole house. Maybe you can plug your refrigerator in, something like that.

Don Rosen: And then the neighbors, like you, come over: can I patch into it, please? And they say, that’ll be 20 bucks. We used to have one at a radio station I worked at that ran on natural gas, which was really neat, because you never had to fill it up. It was a giant truck diesel engine converted to natural gas, and when the electricity went out, it kicked on. But it was also about thirty or forty thousand dollars.

Katrina: two weeks of silence

Don Rosen: Richard Lowe’s my guest. Your sister-in-law was missing right after Hurricane Katrina for a while. That must have been frightening.

Richard Lowe: Yeah. We were in contact with her when the hurricane was approaching, and then of course it hit, and everything went out. There weren’t cell phones everywhere, really, back then. We just lost contact with her for two weeks. We had no idea whether she was alive or dead. She’d fled in her car, and finally she got hold of us, and we wired her some money. But she’s okay. She survived.

Don Rosen: I was in New Orleans a couple of years after Katrina; my wife and I were touring there. You go through the neighborhoods, some rebuilt, some still have the X’s on the houses where somebody died. It’s kind of scary to go through, but it was rebuilt. Hopefully they’ll never go through something like that again.

Why do people hire ghostwriters if the book earns no royalties?

Don Rosen: You’re also a ghostwriter, huh? You write for other people.

Richard Lowe: I am a ghostwriter. I’ve got a couple of projects going on now, as a matter of fact.

Don Rosen: I just saw the movie Trumbo the other day. Not ghostwriting exactly, but he would use people to front for him during the blacklisting period. He’d write a movie and put somebody else’s name on it, because they wouldn’t use his name. But you actually ghostwrite: somebody else puts their name on your work. Does it bother you?

Richard Lowe: No. I get paid a lot of money to do it.

Don Rosen: It doesn’t bother you to see somebody with a hit book, and you know you wrote it and they didn’t?

Richard Lowe: I just had two of my ghostwritten books come out on Amazon, and I thought it was pretty cool that they were mine, and that I got paid a lot more than he’s going to make from the royalties. It was kind of cool, actually.

Don Rosen: Do you have to keep your mouth shut about it?

Richard Lowe: You’re not supposed to say. That’s the whole idea.

Don Rosen: Let’s get into ghostwriting for a second, because it fascinates me. Somebody comes to you and says: listen, write this book, here’s a topic, I’m putting my name on it. Is that essentially how it happens?

Richard Lowe: More or less. Usually the ones I get are a little more collaborative than that, where we work together on the book and come up with it together. The traditional ghostwriting is: I have this idea, here’s what I want to do, go write it. Mine tend to be more collaborative. But yeah, my name’s not on the book, and I have several on Amazon now.

Don Rosen: I see some of these books, maybe biographies, and it will say something like “My Life in the Theater, by John Jones,” and in tiny, tiny print, “with” and another name. I assume the tiny print person is the one who did most of the work.

Richard Lowe: Yeah. And that byline usually cuts 20 or 30 percent off the price. I just tell them: pay me the money. I don’t care about the byline.

Don Rosen: They say everybody’s got a book in them somewhere. Is it that hard to write? I’m not a big reader. My mom and dad, you should have seen their library when they lived in Florida: walls and walls of first edition books. When they moved from Florida, they just gave it away, boxes of it. Is it tough to write a book?

Richard Lowe: The reading part has nothing to do with it. For me, it’s easy to write a book. But for most people, even getting started on a book is very, very difficult. My first book that actually got published, Safe Computing Is Like Safe Sex, took a good six months. My newest book took three days. I’ve gotten a lot faster and figured out how to do it. But for most people, the writing is very difficult.

Don Rosen: I remember Howard Stern, I think it was, saying about Private Parts, or the one after that, Miss America: there was no money in actually writing the book. It’s all the stuff afterwards. He made the money when it came to the movie.

Richard Lowe: That’s exactly what I tell my clients when they’re exploring ghostwriting: you’re not going to make any money selling the book on Amazon. You make your money because you’ve got that book sitting behind you on the bookshelf with your name on it, while you’re in your real estate office or whatever business you do. You wrote it, and it gives you credibility. It becomes your brand, and that book gets leveraged into tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of business for you, indirectly. The book itself? You’re going to sell a couple hundred copies, maybe make a few hundred bucks. But who cares? That’s not what it’s for, most of the time. Hillary Clinton didn’t have her book ghostwritten so she could make money off the book. She got her book ghostwritten so she could become president.

Don Rosen: Right. I remember John Kennedy: we had to read Profiles in Courage in school. He didn’t write it to make money either. Now, does Amazon have every book in the world?

Richard Lowe: No, that’s the Library of Congress. Amazon is a great bookseller. Probably 40% of the books available in modern times you can buy on Amazon, but they don’t have a lot of old books; public domain books you can find on Gutenberg and places like that. And did you know that 6,500 books are published on Amazon every single day?

Don Rosen: No, I didn’t.

Richard Lowe: That’s why it’s so hard for authors to market their books. There are so many being published, they become invisible.

Don Rosen: When I need something on a topic, I look up the topic, and if there’s a book written on it, I buy it. I don’t read a lot of novels; these are mainly reference books. They just opened a brand new Amazon warehouse by us in Kenosha, Wisconsin. You can travel for what seems like a mile and it’s still there; you can see it from I-94 and it just goes on forever. Now, how does Amazon work for authors? Do they take a cut?

Richard Lowe: When I publish a book, if it’s $2.99 or over, I make 70% and Amazon gets 30%. If it’s under $2.99, I only get 35%. So they want it priced at $2.99 or above, and I get a bigger cut. And by the way, I have 18 books now on Amazon [113+ as of 2026]. They’re all listed at coolauthor.com.

Don Rosen: I have your websites here; let’s mention them. Coolauthor.com, C-O-O-L author dot com, and thewritingking.com/. That’s kind of a neat business, writing other people’s books and not taking any credit for it. Did you see the movie Trumbo?

Richard Lowe: I have not. I just saw it on Amazon during the commercial break. Looks like an interesting movie.

Don Rosen: It’s the true story of Dalton Trumbo, who was one of the most prolific and best screenwriters ever. He was branded a communist by the House Un-American Activities Committee and blacklisted; he couldn’t write, but they still wanted him to write. So he would write movies under a fake name or give credit to somebody else. Everything kind of broke when he was writing for the schlock producers, the King Brothers, John Goodman played one of them, all these terrible movies, and by sheer accident Dalton Trumbo gave them a great movie called The Brave One, and it won the Academy Award for screenwriting. Then they had a problem, because there was a fake name on it. And then Kirk Douglas came to him one day and said, “I want you to write Spartacus for me.” Everybody said don’t put his name on it, and Kirk Douglas said, not only is his name going on it, he’s getting a solo credit. “Written by Dalton Trumbo.” And that was the end of the blacklisting; after that, Otto Preminger put his name on Exodus as well. For all those years, he wrote movies and never got credit. One of his biggest was Roman Holiday; later on, they changed the credits for it.

All right: Real World Survival Tips and Survival Guide, and Safe Computing Is Like Safe Sex. Richard Lowe, thanks for joining me, Richard.

Richard Lowe: I had a good time. Thank you very much. I’ll be back again soon. My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Find Richard Lowe at thewritingking.com/.

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