Interview with Relevant Radio - Morning Air
Transcript, audio and link to the informative interview with CruxVPN done by Relevant Radio's - Morning Air. The show hosted by John Morales, Sarah Tafoya & Glen Lewerenz every day 6am CT Hour brings the audience news and social issues to tips for business, parenting and family life. From minute 30:48, CruxVPN gives an overview on Digital Life from a Catholic perspective and teaches how to stop being tracked online.
Direct link: https://omny.fm/shows/morning-air/why-no-meat-digital-security?t=30m48s
How do Catholic teaching shape the approach to cybersecurity in the families and communities?
Good morning! Ave Maria! Blessed Lent to all the listeners!
In Cyber Security, the Church's interest is on Integrity, Justice and Privacy.
Technology cannot be seen as a Faustian Bargain, or a Revolutionary utopia.It is false that redemption could be attained by science or technology. What we preach is the contrary, Redemption is only by Our Lord Jesus Christ - not science, or technology, or propaganda, or psychology.
Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis spoke about the Digital Life, and we published it on our website CruxVPN.net.
Now, on Lent, I invite our people to examine their conscience, and decide if it is Fair, if there is Justice on allowing Big Tech and Big Government to harvest our Data and Meta-Data, or if we need to have responsibility and improve our cybersecurity defences.
What are some of the key challenges Catholic families face in securing themselves online?
There are small threat actors and large threat actors, respectively materialising: asymmetric challenges and disproportional challenges.
When attacked our lives can suffer deep harm - including financial and civil losses. Spiritual trials also follow.
Attacks can be: targeted, non-directed (by spreading vectors, and harvesting profits), by proximity (e.g. on the same Wifi, or man-in-the middle), phishing messages, adware, malware, trojans, worms, ransomware, supply chain attack.
Some of the damages that can be done are: gain of personal data, gain of login credentials, accesses, data leak, further privileges, installation of software, use of compute resources, C2s command and control, etc..
But large threat actors have even more sophisticated means. Nation state sponsored groups promote APT campaigns (as in advanced persistent threats). These attack vectors remain undetected by the whole security community for long periods of time.
State departments and very large companies also participate in mass surveillance via: cancellations, censorship and AI training with people's data. There are also international collaboration alliances on this, such as the Five Eyes.
How much tracking happens online?
75% of the most popular websites use tracking tools - such as cookies and third party trackers.
Our browsers give out more than 200 data points that can identify and track us.
Big Tech tracks people even when they opt out.
Our technological platform, every device that we purchase comes with backdoors and tracking systems - unless you buy from niche privacy vendors.
Why "data is the new oil"?
Data is the resource that powers the new economy (the new industries). Products and services are data-based now. E.g. AI needs to be trained on large data sets.
Data can be re-defined, analysed and aggregated in different manners, with different tools and methods. The marketplace for data is huge. People's data is being traded intensively.
Data harvested on people concern us. That is why, we created our company - to help stop people's tracking online.
It's not only for marketing that this data is used. There are agendas that most people disagree on that depend on data harvesting.
How can a Catholic family and community stay protected and private online?
First, think about where you deposit trust (e.g. Do you trust your ISP, or a Public Wi-fi? Or should you transfer the trust, to a VPN Service Provider?)
Then think about this trust and what do families depend on?
There are three important layers to reflect on:
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Physical Accesses or the denial of physical access.
E.g.: a SIM Swap Attack is when a smartphone left unattended gets it's SIM card removed. The damages can be huge as banking apps and webservices passwords can be reset with codes received by sms. Therefore, tell your kids to stay alert on parties. Home routers could be tampered with, but if you have a trustworthy VPN that would not be an issue. Imagine now the damage, if a computers is left unlocked at an office or school.
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Devices itself, it's Operational Systems, and Applications.
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Computer Networks, Internet, Mobile Networks.
Please, do read our webpage for detailed measures that can be taken - CruxVPN.net.
Another important measure is: to do some reflection and to design a threat model.
What are parental filters and how does it work?
At CruxVPN we implement and offer optional parental filters. We block more than 2 Million porn websites. That are completely filtered out.
It works in the DNS level - which is a foundational layer of the internet. These websites become unreacheable. The DNS and all other layers of the internet understand that it does not exist. The DNS will not return any IP Address for that domain name.
Even if a pop-up or an ad would come from that porn domain, with our filters, it will not be reachable and r will not be loaded.
What is a VPN and how does it work?
Virtual Private Network is a service that encrypts your connection to the internet and your traffic. It maximizes the confidentiality of communications, data access and privacy.
The VPN hides your original IP Address, and provides a new dynamic and anonymous IP Address. It bypasses censorship and cancellations. The traffic exits, in a country of your choice, and your geographic location is "spoofed". You get a different internet experience, services and streaming content.
It is a protection against malicious actors - it stands between you and the internet services you consume. On public internet access (such as university, a cafe, company network, airports), users of that network are rendered unable to sniff your traffic - because its encrypted. It reduces your attack surface.
It hides your data and meta-data from users and administrators. It prevents session hijacking of: social media, internet marketplaces, banking, emails, direct messaging.
VPNs also protect you from Telecoms, Big Tech and Government. Data collection, analysis and profiling will not happen, or will be expensive. Their agendas get delayed. It will Jeopardise monitoring agreements, such as Five Eyes.
How difficult is it to subscribe and use a VPN?
It takes only 2min to generate the anonymous account id, pay the subscription and configure the first device.
One subscription includes protection to five devices (it can be: android, ios, windows, macosx, linux, routers and smart TVs).
20% of profits are donated to Catholic Charities.
It is a good measure to have the VPN turned on at all times, in all devices. It helps you stop being tracked and profiled, and protecting your kids.
Why did CruxVPN decide to start-up? Are the existing VPN providers not good?
The idea came from a conference call I had whilst in London, with a friend from Miami. I was pitching a complex cyber security idea, and he advised me to start a Catholic company - he mentioned in America, that is the preferred way of doing business now, to be a customer of a company that follows the same ideals.
He said, you were such a successful pro-life advocate from 2002 to 2007, completely shutting down abortion in Brazil. Why don't you start a Catholic Business?
In the pro-life movement I co-founded and directed, at that time, the struggle was all about publicising information that was censored by Big Media. Now we have the same mission with the VPN service: to let people access relevant information.
There is a lot of competition, but very little real competition. Other VPNs Terms of Service (if printed) are a thick book, longer than the Holy Bible - and written in legalese. We understand that they are selling your data, and giving it to governments - a scam. It is the complete opposite to what they sell - it should be about privacy.
We put together terms of service that are three pages only and written in plain English. And we took advantage of our more than 20 years of experience in IT, and Cyber Security to create a service to protect Catholic families.
We hold no personal data from our customers and we do not have any logs of network traffic. Should a court order mandate us to provide information, there is nothing - and it's impossible to identify any individual customer.
We have the written commitment to shut down business in a country that tries to force us to collect data or have logs.
Well, here I have to advise that, other data outside CruxVPN's remit may identity your internet activity, therefore, extra measures are needed to be completely anonymous online.
We are very scared of the agenda announced by Big Tech and Big Government. A VPN is the first step and essential tool to stay safe.
CruxVPN is constantly in R&D to develop other tools that we can promote freedom.
Privacy is not secrecy, it's the beginning of free speech - it's showing the best version of yourself in each occasion. It's about publishing and accessing relevant information.
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