A Writer Among Creatives: Richard Lowe on The Douglas Coleman Show

Richard Lowe (The Writing King) joins The Douglas Coleman Show as the first of two guests for a wide-ranging conversation on computer security and disaster preparedness, drawn from his two early books. He covers how hackers actually break in, what a malware infection really does, the security habits that matter most, and how to prepare a household for hurricanes and earthquakes without living in fear.

Richard Lowe is The Writing King, a professional ghostwriter and author who has written more than 113 books under his own name and ghostwritten over 54 more for clients. Before writing full time he spent 33 years in enterprise IT, including two decades as Director of Computer Operations at Trader Joe’s.

DISCUSS YOUR BOOK

Full transcript of the conversation follows.

From Trader Joe’s security audits to full-time writing

Douglas: Please welcome Richard Lowe. So how are you, Richard?

Richard: I am doing fantastic, thank you.

Douglas: Can you give us a little background on yourself? Tell us how you got involved with this and how you became a computer security expert and now an author.

Richard: Back in 1980 I started working for a startup company, got lucky, and became vice president of consulting for that company. Even back then we had security concerns. I moved on and became VP of consulting for another company, and finally wound up at Trader Joe’s, where I stayed for 20 years. One of my primary duties there was computer security, because Trader Joe’s has credit card numbers and those all need to be protected.

Richard: Every single year there’s an audit by security experts to determine whether our credit card data was secure, and I was one of the people in charge of that audit. Several hundred points. It’s not an 80% pass; you have to pass every single one, so it’s quite rigorous. On top of that we had desktops, laptops, cell phones, all the usual things with security issues. I became very interested in it out of necessity. Then two years ago I realized I didn’t need to work a full-time job like that anymore, so we took an early retirement, moved to Florida, and now I’m a professional full-time writer making a pretty good living at it.

Douglas: That’s fantastic. Most people are concerned about computer security. Everyone has a computer these days, so it’s relevant to most people’s lives.

How hackers actually get in: social engineering

Douglas: What are some ways that hackers can gain access to your computer?

Richard: Hackers very often depend on what’s called social engineering, which is attempting to make you believe they are something they’re not. You’ve all heard of the Nigerian scam.

Douglas: Yes, the postal money order one.

Richard: There’s a whole bunch of variations; it’s also called the advance-fee scam. Somebody sends you something saying they have a job available and you need to float some money to pay an entrance fee, and then they’re just scamming you. That’s social engineering. Another common one at supermarkets and stores is somebody coming in dressed in a uniform saying they have to replace the credit card swipe. They’re actually hackers installing their own swipe, and sometimes it isn’t caught, so the hackers get all the credit cards that go through it. For normal people and their computers, it’s typically through email or websites, clicking on bad links, going to bad websites, and making a bad decision about what to look at.

Viruses, botnets, and what an infection really does

Douglas: In other words, if somebody sends me an email, I click a link, and it installs on my computer, does that give them access to all my personal information?

Richard: It’s far worse than that. You can think of the virus as a workbench: it installs on your system and gives the hacker complete access. He could install a keylogger to see everything you type, take over your video and audio, but even worse, he could join your computer to a botnet. A botnet is hundreds of thousands or even millions of computers joined together, which the hacker then sells. He sells your computer’s resources to people who send spam or run denial-of-service attacks. If you’re a criminal and you want to send a hundred thousand spam messages, you pay for a thousand computers on a botnet for an hour and send from a thousand different machines, which becomes very hard to trace. So a virus doesn’t just affect you; it turns you into a product the hackers sell to other criminals.

Richard: One type of infection is called a drive-by infection. All you have to do is look at a website, and if you’re not taking proper security precautions your system becomes infected. So you can get a virus simply by opening a website. You have to learn which sites to visit, which to avoid, and what links to click. My book covers that.

How spam filters work

Douglas: I’ve always been curious how mail servers decide what’s spam. How does the computer recognize spam?

Richard: It could be from what’s called a bad neighborhood; email from certain regions gets flagged. It could be patterns in how it’s written, misspellings, and so on. There are also common signals like a link to a website that’s known to be bad, or a picture that’s known to be bad. It’s pattern recognition.

Salvaging a wrecked system, and ransomware

Douglas: You learned the hard way by protecting and salvaging systems ravaged by viruses and hackers. How do you begin to salvage a system that’s been wrecked? Is there anything left?

Richard: It depends on the virus or hacker that damaged it. It could be as simple as putting in a recovery CD, or as complex as the system being toast and going in the trash. Usually you have to call in an expert. Norton and the other antivirus makers give you access to their experts, Geek Squad does it, and so do a number of other places. It’s not for the faint of heart. Viruses are very well hidden and all over the system; you delete it here and it comes back, and it can be a nightmare unless you know exactly how that virus works, which the antivirus companies and professionals do.

Douglas: I’ve had adware where every time I opened the browser I’d get crazy pop-ups, and the one where you open one window and fifty open at once. More annoyance than real damage.

Richard: One of the nasty ones is ransomware. You’ll be cruising the web innocently and get a pop-up saying your system has been scanned and infected by 42 viruses, click here to download the antivirus. Go into Task Manager and kill it; don’t click anything, because if you do it installs ransomware. It encrypts everything so you can’t access it, then demands money to unlock it. And I’m not going to trust a criminal I just gave 500 bucks to unlock my disk. When that happens you’re pretty much throwing away everything on that computer.

Safe computing is like safe sex: habits, firewalls, and backups

Douglas: What can you recommend to people to stay safe? Your book has a great title: Safe Computing Is Like Safe Sex. Essentially you have to put a condom on your computer?

Richard: It’s more about processes and procedures, which is why I equate it to safe sex. Change your habits, be aware of what’s out there, install a firewall, don’t click links in emails. The absolute first thing anybody needs to do is back up their system. There are backup programs that are totally automatic and back up to the web for you. Get one right away, because if the worst happens, your system is destroyed by a virus or fire, or somebody steals it, at least your data is safe up in the cloud. All those pictures you’ve taken for ten years, your taxes, the book you’ve been writing forever, you want it safe. Something like Carbonite or LiveDrive is 70 or 80 bucks a year.

Douglas: What about just backing up to a memory stick or card?

Richard: That’s useful, unless your house burns down. If you back up to the cloud you’re protected against everything. There’s always the possibility of a breach up there, but you have to trust somebody.

What the cloud actually is

Douglas: When Windows 10 asked if I wanted to back up all my data to the cloud, I said no. I didn’t want my stuff going somewhere I didn’t know. What is it, and who runs it?

Richard: The cloud is really just a word that means computers out on the internet. What it means is your data is stored on the internet in a secure computer room instead of on your computer. Backing up to the cloud means backing up to Microsoft, Amazon, or Google, in their massive computer rooms with hundreds of thousands of disk drives that go on for miles.

Choosing antivirus, and why systems are so complex

Douglas: Are there particular antivirus programs you recommend over others?

Richard: The major ones are pretty much alike. Norton is the one I use; McAfee is pretty good. You also want two of them. There’s one called Malwarebytes: Norton is antivirus, Malwarebytes is anti-rootkit. A rootkit is malware that buries itself in the operating system where you can’t find it, and Malwarebytes complements Norton so they help each other. If you ask Norton, they say you don’t need it, but I’ve found Malwarebytes to be one of the better tools. If my system were infected, the first thing I’d pull out is Malwarebytes. It scans for particular kinds of malware and removes them, and it tends to go a little deeper into your system, into those hidden places.

Douglas: Why are there so many hidden places in computers? If there’s something on your computer you end up seeing it in a hundred different places.

Richard: Because it’s extraordinarily complex. I’m technical, I can go into the guts of it, and it’s millions of lines of code doing video, audio, documents, games, written over many years by many thousands of people. If you’re web surfing and a site downloads a photo, that photo is displayed in your browser, stored in the browser’s temporary files, then if you save it it’s in your folder, then in your backups, and it might store another copy somewhere for speed. So it can be in multiple places.

The survival book: preparation over fear

Douglas: I want to talk about your other book, Real World Survival Tips and Survival Guide. When I first saw the title I thought of the guys who go off-grid with canned soup and ammunition in a log cabin. I’m guessing it isn’t like that?

Richard: That book is for the average person who, instead of being afraid of a hurricane, earthquake, tsunami, or fire, would like to learn about it, prepare, and be ready. With both the computing book and the survival book, the idea is that there are a lot of dangers, and you can be afraid of them, ignore them, or learn about them and protect yourself. It’s a lot better to learn and protect yourself than to live in fear. The survival book goes through things like being aware of your surroundings: when you go into a theater, note where the exits are. Go through your house, sit in each room for a minute, and ask how you’d get out in a fire. I have an invalid mother, how do I get her out? Then sit down with the family, including the kids, and come up with a plan. If your kids know what to do, they won’t be afraid, and you’ll know they’re safe.

Bug-out bags and surviving the first two weeks

Douglas: What would you recommend people do for, say, a hurricane? How do you prepare?

Richard: The way you prepare for any disaster is to create a bug-out bag, usually a duffel bag, ideally on wheels so your arms don’t get tired. Fill it with a day or two of supplies: a change of clothes, a bit of money, food that won’t rot like MREs or granola bars, maybe some water, though I keep water separate because it leaks and it’s heavy. A first aid kit. I have a companion book with an inventory of what should be in a bug-out bag. Make one for each person, so when the police say it’s time to evacuate you grab your bag and go, which is why it’s called a bug-out bag or go bag.

Richard: Then you stock up: two weeks of food and water, because after a big hurricane or earthquake nobody’s going to reach you for two weeks. You’ll be on your own, so make sure you have enough food, water, first aid, and heat. You don’t have to spend a lot of money; instead of buying one can of soup, buy three and keep going until you have two weeks’ worth.

Douglas: This sounds like the modern-day version of the fallout shelters. As a kid we did drills getting under our desks, which I always thought was funny.

When cell phones fail

Douglas: Obviously a cell phone would be useless in something like that. Do most towers survive a hurricane?

Richard: The problem with cell phones isn’t the towers; it’s that phones communicate over landlines between towers. Even if the towers are intact, the phone lines between them might be down, so your cell phone will probably be gone after a hurricane. When my sister-in-law was lost in Katrina for two weeks, we couldn’t reach her on the cell phone and didn’t know whether she was alive or dead until we finally found her. After the World Trade Center collapsed the cell phones were pretty much dead, and in a terrorist attack the first thing the police do is cut off cell phones. That’s why you want a landline, even one through your internet, to back it up if you can.

Surviving an earthquake, and the triangle-of-life myth

Douglas: With a hurricane you have some warning; earthquakes you don’t. What would you recommend to prepare for an earthquake?

Richard: One thing you should do in any state for any disaster is a class the fire department offers called CERT, Civilian Emergency Response Team. You can look up your local one on Google. It’s a seven-day class, it’s free, and it teaches you how to survive in your local area. I went through it twice and it’s wonderful.

Douglas: How do you survive an earthquake?

Richard: When it happens, get under something big like a table or a desk, obviously not a glass desk, a heavy wooden desk or dining table, so things don’t fall on top of you, and stay there. Ignore the triangle of life, that’s going to kill you.

Douglas: What is the triangle of life?

Richard: It’s something somebody came up with where you get next to a wall instead of under a desk because there’s supposedly an air gap. The fire department pretty much says don’t do that; get under something. And don’t get under a car, it turns out cars bounce all over the place in an earthquake. If you’re in a car, I’d stay in it, because things are flying around outside and you’re probably safer inside.

Douglas: The other advice I remember was to stand in a doorway.

Richard: That turns out to be bad advice from a long time ago. If you stand in a doorway the door swings open and shut and can smash your hands and break bones. Get under something instead. If you have no choice a doorway might work, but be aware that door is going to swing hard.

Where to find the books

Douglas: Tell us where people can find and buy your books.

Richard: I made it easy: go to coolauthor.com, that brings you to my Amazon page, or go to The Writing King, which brings you to my website.

Douglas: Thank you very much for coming on the show. This was enlightening and I think my listeners will find it informative as well.

Richard: Happy to be here.

Quotable moments

Frequently asked questions

How do most computer hackers actually get in?

More often through social engineering than technical wizardry: convincing you they are something they are not. Advance-fee scams, someone in a uniform swapping a store’s card reader, and bad links in email or on websites do most of the work. The technical exploits matter, but the human decision to click is usually the opening.

What is the single most important thing to protect a home computer?

An automatic backup, before antivirus or anything else. Cloud backup services run automatically and keep your data safe even if the machine is destroyed by malware, fire, or theft. Everything else (firewalls, safe browsing habits, antivirus) is second to having your photos, taxes, and documents backed up off the machine.

What should be in a disaster bug-out bag?

A day or two of supplies per person in a wheeled bag: a change of clothes, some cash, non-perishable food like MREs or granola bars, a first aid kit, and water kept separate because it leaks and is heavy. Beyond the bag, keep about two weeks of food and water at home, since after a major hurricane or earthquake help may not reach you for that long.

Is standing in a doorway good earthquake advice?

No. That guidance is outdated; a swinging door can smash hands and break bones. The current recommendation is to get under something solid like a heavy desk or table so falling objects do not land on you, and to ignore the so-called triangle of life. A free CERT class from the fire department teaches the right responses for your area.