Loss of Two Good Men, Food store issues, Cyber Attacks, Block, Schools closed until?
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Peeps,
Loss of Two Good Men
On this Sunday, the last Sunday for March I share with you two good family men, fathers, role models and one a loyal follower who we lost this past week. Both men I have a connection with through their children. Both succumbed to cancer, the disease that I have been fighting since last April.Each of these men were in their early 50’s tragically adn suddenly taken from this life, this time and most importantly from their families. This strikes a huge chord with me since I am in this fight and have to be very careful with what I do so this ugly, hanis disease doesn’t get the best of me either who would write so humorously about the weather or keep you ahead of the curve?? It also strikes another chord with me since both families have their youngest kids in high school, one a senior and one a junior – as did I a senior when my father passed in 1987. So, on behalf of the Lutz and Weber families I pray for the father’s souls that they may watch down upon their families adn help guide and be with them teh rest of their days. That the pain, sadness and suffering they are experiencing may wane in teh coming days and that positive unintended purposes come about from this as crazy as this may sound. God’s grace on them all and strength during this time. Amen.
Food store issues
Welp, actually did my food shopping for the next two weeks in no other place but Centre County Pa!! That’s right my son and I drove 3 hours and 5 minutes (should take 3 hours adn forty peeps but no traffic, no troopers) so we put the pedal to the metal and said
We had to close up my son’s apartment in State College – Pennsylvania State University! – and it was a ghost town! Two folks on the main street we saw, and one was a mailman! Everything was closed except for a cafe’s restaurants. So whilst out there I said let’s go shopping, it’s 40 degree out and cloudy – the dairy and frozen goods will be fine in the trunk for the car ride home – and that they were. We found just about everything there except for bleach. As we were leaving a rush came in due to the Governor ordering a shelter in place for the county starting at 8PM. Staying ahead of the curve.
So food store issues – say what? Yes, they are starting to have issues with workers calling out sick, scared they may catch this virus, I heard that at some stores a couple of workers tested positive but mild symptoms and the supply is running low on certain goods – pastas, sauces, flour, vinegar, bleach and based cleaning products, paper towels, to name a few. Speaking with my neighbor who spoke to the butcher and the grocer (food division manager) and they both told him if this keeps up they’ll probably have to scale back store hours or at worse close. He was astonished and said when they both said in about 3 weeks. Case in point yesterday afternoon they had only 4 checkers checking folks out on a Saturday!! Coincidence or a foreshadowing?? Time will tell.
Cyber Attacks
I read an article that since most folks are working from home tehir is the higher risk for cyber attacks on companies servers adn even school servers. A leading expert in this area has agreed with this adn said this can be the newest invisible threat on us.
Articles:
https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/us-facing-catastrophic-cyberattack/
Another excerpt from an article
COVID-19 Cyberattacks
And there’s definitely no shortage of COVID-19 threats these days. Cisco Talos’ latest threat report says the team continues to see malware and phishing campaigns using coronavirus-themed lures along with fraud and disinformation campaigns and attacks against medical and research organizations performing COVID-19 work.
“Talos has not yet observed any new techniques during this event. Rather, we have seen malicious actors shift the subject matter of their attacks to focus on COVID themes,” it said. The Cisco threat intelligence team recommends that businesses protect against these threats using “the same strong security infrastructure foundation that your organization hopefully already has. However, security organizations must ensure existing protections and capabilities function in a newly remote environment, that users are aware of the threats and how to identify them, and that organizations have implemented security best practices for remote work.”
As a growing number of employees work from home, and use software-as-a-service (SaaS) and cloud-based remote connectivity services, attackers will try to collect credentials that potentially allow them to access these SaaS accounts and companies’ data, warns Adam Meyers, who oversees all of CrowdStrike’s intelligence gathering and cyber-adversarial monitoring activities.
“The eCrime big game hunting (BGH) ransomware industry in particular leverages Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) brute forcing or password spraying for initial entry,” Meyers wrote in a blog. “As many sophisticated BGH actors remain highly active at present, they will likely attempt to capitalize on possible staffing disruptions COVID-19 may bring to organizations, as well as attempt to compromise employee devices while they work remotely.
100,000+ Coronavirus Domains Registered
Unit 42, the Palo Alto Networks threat intelligence team, notes that over the past few weeks more than 100,000 of domains have been registered containing terms like “covid,” “virus,” and “corona.” While not all are malicious, “all of them should be treated as suspect,” wrote Ryan Olson, VP of threat intelligence at Unit 42 in a threat briefing. “Whether they claim to have information, a testing kit, or a cure, the fact that the website didn’t exist until the pandemic became news should make you very skeptical of their validity.”
Additionally, VMware Carbon Black calls out masquerading as one of the biggest cyber threats associated with the pandemic. “Cybercriminals are now most commonly masquerading fake VPNs, remote meeting software and mobile apps,” according to its latest Technical Analysis.
Ultimately, hackers want to profit off of the pandemic, Zaidenberg said. “It can be phishing attacks with social engineering methods playing on the fear of people or their wish to find a vaccine, it can be ransomware attacks against hospitals, it can be wipers. Every attack has its cases, and in some cases, the causes might be death.”
Now to the weather:
NAO Block = North Atlantic Oscillation Block
The circled areas are the regions I am referring to and when you see the redish colors in these two regions it means its blocked up. So what does this mean? A blocked up EPO which is over Alaska means it can usher in colder air into the west then through the plains and then to the East if it doesn’t moderate over the land which it can.
The NAO or North Atlantic Oscillation over the Greenland and Iceland region offers up a locking mechanism to this cooler air and forcing storms not to run into the Great Lakes or up the Appalachians but forces them to the coast.
So what does this mean for the 1st half of April? It means that will we bring can have cooler than normal temperatures and wetter with possibly white more so inland but can’t rule out some white gold falling from the skies to the NNJ Rockland & Westchester areas. We’ll have to see.
April 1st storm looks to get squashed to our south – RATS!!
Example for April 9th – coastal storm with another rd L (storm) coming in on its tail over North Texas
After this pattern breaks down get out the shorts peeps !!!
Schools closed until?
April 17th at the earliest from what Murphy Law in NJ has stated.
Peeps, as I spoke
friends of mine who are NJ Public School admins and they both said to me May at the earliest if these social distancing measures take full affect. If not then who knows!
I said:
Just a huge T-storm roll through our area about an hour ago – HAIL!!
Wicked T storm with intense lightening and hail the size of nickels!! pic.twitter.com/WKrpGCjyn5
— Al Mugno (@MugnoaAl) March 29, 2020
Some fun with the toilet paper and time on one’s hands:
Okay, be safe, stay healthy and we’ll get through this. It will take time and dont be surprised by the numbers growing exponentially folks.
Be prepared not scared!
Al Q
