My Cyber-Crisis Solution: Peterson & Associates Inc.

Small businesses must come to terms with the Internet. There is no way around it, a business owner cannot let the power of technology be left to competitors. A recent event in my own business brought this blinding realty home to this writer. As a result of this experience, somebody 40 years younger than me has rocked my world. His name is Pete Peterson, and his company—with his lovely wife, Alexis—is called Peterson & Associates, Inc.

This story will give you appreciation for the good possible with the Internet, which we have all feared is transcending into Dante’s Inferno.¹

On short notice, Peterson dealt with the problem of my own business digital platform being savagely hacked. As a long-time Alaska journalist, I was betrayed by someone I had trusted to set up my domain (donnliston.com). Instead of making it my property, he put it under his control and ownership; a fraud.

I have known people who were ruthless before. We have all heard of outside scammers who prey on good Alaskans. I simply wanted a platform to write instructional stories, and at this time I have over 120 such stories on my new and better platform: DonnListon.co.

Frankly, I didn’t care about the technical requirements for setting that up, and it never occurred to me that this person would be malicious. I now also know a person with any common sense would not have done this criminal activity so sloppily.

Born and raised in Alaska, Peterson has a good story: I was home-schooled by my mother, a martial arts instructor. I am really blessed to have her, said Peterson, sitting at the kitchen island of my home. I made my first website for my mother’s business, and soon all the parents bringing their kids to her school wanted websites too.

But my earliest challenge with technology happened when I received a computer from IDEA Homeschool, and plugged it in to the family’s dial up connection to start my coursework. The computer instantly got infected with a virus called Blaster ² that crashed a critical service, which resulted in a message appearing on the screen, to the affect “You have 60 seconds to fix this before it reboots again”.  If I didn’t fix it, I couldn’t do school work.

Many kids would have just said: “DARN!”

After a few speed runs ³ on Google, I found a man named Steve Gibson, at the Gibson Research Corporation, and he had a well written article on how to patch your system from this malicious worm. From then on, I was hooked. I followed Gibson on Security Now, and became a fan of the now defunct Tech TV.

Peterson has been watching the evolution of the Internet since the PayPal Mafia and the raise in popularity of instant messaging platforms. He has become activated by the variety of Alaska websites publishing news and information of merit, and has been monitoring my own, now abandoned, blogspot set up by Bill Borden, dba High Caliber Realty, in May of 2019. Peterson told me he considers mine one of the better such websites in the state.

Now Peterson is teaching me what I need to know to move into the World Wide Web on a grand scale with a bona fide website. Watch for it!

When I heard you had been hacked, I thought “who the hell would hack DONN LISTON?” said Peterson. This is one of the best blogs in the State of Alaska!

Setting up domains for websites and the range of functions necessary for a credible business is something Peterson & Associates, Inc. does well. Had I gone to him in the first place, I likely wouldn’t have been scammed. After all, any sleazy Outside real estate broker can set up a website. But once a website is established, it must have security.

I have learned this the hard way.

Note to potential High Caliber Realty customers: A guy who will set up a company, domain name, and website under his control to try and indenture someone will also say anything it takes to sell a piece of property—then care less about what he knew and didn’t tell you—when the deal is closed.

In another scam, even Gov. Michael Dunleavy believed Borden had sold Mt. McKinley Meats & Sausages in Palmer, but turns out he finagled a lease-option hustle. The owner of Mt. McKinley Meats & Sausages didn’t know the acquiring company is partly owned by Borden and the real estate company he owns, High Caliber Realty.⁴ Borden has a 1% share and the company has a 13% share, according to state records.

Additionally, Peterson & Associates, Inc. can deploy for you an Open Digital Platform to launch segmented omni-channel marketing communications that’ll keep your customers coming back for pennies on the dollar! Peterson calls his business a digital marketing agency with an in-house attitude and a team ready to deliver on a variety of projects.

We can manage your website, but also empower you to handle it without us. We can launch inbound cross-platform, pay-per-click campaigns, or outbound omni-channel marketing campaigns to keep those customers coming back!

Just like returning readers to this website, retention increases the total lifetime value we may gain from customers’ and that tends to boost revenue. We can automate most of your social media accounts and pages so they’ll experience consistent growth and engagement. Social media may be one of the most affordable sources of traffic and leads for your business, if done right. This all helps to build amazing relationships with YOUR customers.

Anyone who has been watching my blog evolution since March can see this has been a blessing for DONN LISTON COMPANY.

Who is this guy, Pete Peterson?

I went to school to learn information security and computer science, but resolved to be a jack of all information trades as I started helping other Alaskans with their websites and security concerns, explained Peterson.

I knew from a young age that I was going to work with technology, Peterson continued. I grew up on the Internet, as a result of my education. Most of my college education has been done remotely, too. I spent a lot of time on the Internet exploring, learning, and hardening systems against attacks, while becoming friends with security enthusiasts around the world and witnessing just how insecure everything was. Thankfully, we’ve come a long way in the last 20 years.

The reality is, with the Internet you can persuade at scale. Big-tech has demonstrated that we must assert our autonomy, yet we’re still giving these critical information systems, essential to our daily life and well being, to folks who frankly don’t have our individual interests at heart. Knee-jerk censorship policies offend us all and free-living people ought to be taking this technical onus into their own hands.

Savvy individual business-owners today choose software solutions that respect their freedom and autonomy. Peterson & Associates, Inc. offers maintenance, management, and support for many of these self-hosted solutions—instead of trusting Big-Tech globalists for cyber business needs, uwu.

Peterson explains the foundation of his business

I have a System Administration and Information Security background, explained Peterson. I deploy and manage entire systems. That’s what we formed Peterson & Associates, Inc. to do: help Alaskan businesses build their own Open Digital Experience Platforms.

Increasingly, businesses are discovering the benefits of digitizing their organizations, but Peterson knows there are charlatans trying to resell over-rated marketing, website, and technical services, too. We provide Big Tech vibes with Small Town values, and I hope people will see that a website can be so much more than just a flyer for their business. When done right, a website will drive business!

But the reason this writer needed Peterson’s services is because I had NOT done essential security required for MY blogspot. It never occurred to me that someone would try to steal a business of my name, DONN LISTON COMPANY. I just wanted to produce instructional content about what I have witnessed in Alaska since statehood. Someone from Atlanta, GA wouldn’t be expected to see the value in that, would he?

Criminal behavior required to shut me up!

As it It turned out, Peterson was uniquely capable of dealing with a misfit thief who apparently wanted to control what I write. Since Borden had signed up my business domain as his own, he was able to steal it—and offer it for sale!⁵ To answer Peterson’s previous question: That’s what kind of person hacks DONN LISTON.

This is where the story gets good.

Peterson continued: I would normally only do this when the business was also hiring me to protect their systems. Typically, Peterson & Associates, Inc. will set up information security systems in the network to collect logs to protect the integrity of data in the system. Many details go into securing an organization. To respond to an incident within an organization that doesn’t have any of those necessary security controls in the first place is incredibly challenging. To make this valid in court, the systems must be set up correctly to assure chain-of-custody.

But in your case, the criminal was just so negligent. If they didn’t access your Facebook account, I wouldn’t have had any real evidence to present in the upcoming court appearance. I was only able to assist you in this instance because the criminal actually used your system to access your Facebook account while you where in State custody!

We are able to see someone use DONN’s very own laptop to accesses DONN’s Facebook account, and the logs directly from Facebook show that there was an attempted compromise! said Peterson. Facebook knows exactly what computer accessed DONN LISTON’s Facebook account and a fair amount about what they did during the unauthorized access to it. The State of Alaska knows exactly where DONN was at that time, so it wasn’t DONN changing DONN’s Facebook recovery email address to billborden@rocketmail.com, and later the next morning again to a bogus email “donnliston@yahoo.com”, which DONN will confirm has never been associated with him.

Excerpt from Exhibit: record_details.html

Many long-time Alaskans have experienced people who try to exploit Alaskans, by pretending to be an Alaskan and engaging in criminal behavior. There is a lot more to this story, of course, but as I have now won three court cases against this mother-fishing scheme, I am telling the story for the benefit of other businesses. As a long-time Independent Journalist who has always told the truth, I have now documented harm done, and pray our courts will arrive at justice for these criminal acts against me.

I also believe God sent Pete and Alexis Peterson to me so I could tell this story. The entire day I was in jail my two cellmates and I sang Christian songs of glory! That’s what you do when you know you are innocent and everything is in God’s hands.

1. Dante’s Inferno is an undeniably Christian text, as it catalogs various types of earthly sinners and describes the torments they experience in hell. The poem is the first part of Dante’s three-part religious project, the Divine Comedy, which goes on to illustrate Christian purgatory and heaven. [↩]
2. Blaster (also known as Lovsan, Lovesan, or MSBlast) was a computer worm that spread on computers running operating systems Windows XP and Windows 2000 during August 2003. [↩]
3. a speedrun is a playthrough of a video game, or section of a video game, with the goal of completing it as fast as possible. Speedruns often follow planned routes, which may incorporate sequence breaking, and might exploit glitches that allow sections to be skipped or completed more quickly than intended. [↩]
4. https://web.archive.org/web/20211130161106/https://www.adn.com/business-economy/2021/11/28/a-north-pole-farm-family-a-struggling-palmer-slaughterhouse-and-a-step-toward-alaskas-food-security/ [↩]
5. Registrars are organizations accredited by ICANN and certified by the registries to sell domain names. They are bound by the Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) with ICANN, and by their agreements with the registries. The RAA sets out responsibilities for the registrar including maintenance of WHOIS data, submission of data to registries, facilitating public WHOIS queries, ensuring domain name registrants details are escrowed, and complying with RAA conditions relating to the conclusion of the domain name registration period. [↩]