UPCOMING SOCIALS & PROJECTS & EVENTS  

More socials, projects, & events coming soon!

Rotaract Fund Raiser
If anyone would like to donate money to GRA (Global Rotaract Alumni Club) they can donate the money on the GOSC site and include a note that it is for GRA. This would help us tremendously to continue growing as a club and be able to conduct larger scale projects. Here is the donation link: Donate Now – Global Offsite Care

Opening The Meeting:

After our week off to enjoy our Thanksgiving dinners with friends and family, we’re back! Still “United for Good” both locally and around the world. Rich Rossi led us in the reciting of the Pledge of Allegiance and the Four/Five Way Test. His topic today was gratitude: it is his 60^th wedding anniversary (really, he and Joan must have married when they were in kindergarten). He read us some quotes from Abraham Lincoln and Piglet on gratitude.

Visitors:

Angel Marquez, Andrew Reddie, Vicki Groninga, and Michael Tonjum

Sunshine:

Cecil Humes is recuperating at Summerfield after having more of his leg removed due to his diabetes. He will be there awhile as they fit him for an artificial leg, and he gets training on how to walk with it.

Sadly, Pris Abercrombie, the beloved wife of former member Jack Abercrombie, has passed away.  Jack was never interested in using social media, so Pris always did it for him. She was such a sweet lady.  Her obituary was in the Thursday, December 3^rd Press Democrat.

50/50 Drawing:

Per Jim Green, the pot was $25.00, and we had 2 red marbles and one white …Huh?

Our guest speaker Andrew Reddie had the right ticket but did not pull out the “blue” marble. Andrew, who has been at our meetings before, placed his $10.00 prize in the Polio bucket.  Give that man an application!  Fun fact, Andrew works SAG for our Giro Bello Bike Ride.

 

Joke of the Week with Michael Moore:

A certain man was in a discount store to buy some parts for his car, and some flowers. Some women at the register, after him inquired, “Does he do that often?”  The clerk replied, “Every 3 months or 3000 miles, whichever comes first.”

Birthdays for December:

Today we celebrated: Robert Pierce, Nona Lucas, Mary Graves, and Jim Green.  Keven Brown provided them each with a Corrick’s gift card.

Paul Harris Fellow Awards:

Doug Landin gave Heather Thurber her first Paul Harris pin and certificate! But then he gave Curt Groninga his second…third…and fourth!  Thank you both for your generosity!

Letters from the Cherkasy-Central Club:

Our friends from the Ukraine sent a letter of appreciation to our club and individual letters to Curt Groninga, Ann Gospe, Jeff Gospe and Jeff Kolin for their generous support of Ukraine.

Rotarian of the Month:

That is Ray Giampaoli! Why? He is the originator of the Wild Game Dinner, he is chairing the Giro Bello for 2026, he sold tickets for the Veteran’s program, and he and Ann Gospe led the food drive in August. Congratulations, Ray! Well deserved.

Induction into the Club of a New Member:

Today, Marcus Marquez, our new leader of the Santa Rosa Salvation Army, got his red badge. His wife, Angel, came with him today. They have been married 17 years and are parents to four children, ages 10 – 15… and a new puppy. The Salvation Army is in his blood as he was born in Argentina when the Salvation Army had his family working there at the time. He was pretty much raised in Hollister, CA. He has been a Rotarian for many years, most recently in Fresno. He plays the guitar, piano and almost anything brass.  The one thing he hates?  Balloons!  Welcome, Marcus!

Announcements:

1. Anyone have a home available for a social in December? If so, talk to Debi Zaft.
   We will have eggnog on December 17, our last meeting before the holidays.
2. The cost of lunches is going up on January 1st. $2.00 more across the board. If you have lunch tickets left over from this year, you will have to pay $2.00 at the door.
3. The “Book of Why” has been ordered by Casey D’Angelo. We have 1670 on order. He asks us to please sign up to deliver to two schools. The books will arrive in January, and the plan is to deliver them to elementary schools in February.
4. Ann and Jeff Gospe’s daughter is again collecting warm coats, sleeping bags, gloves, hats, etc for Face to Face. Please bring anything that you can donate to the meetings of December 10 and 17.
5. The 2026 Giro Bello kick off starts on Thursday, December 4 with a meeting at Ray Giampaoli’s office.

Recognitions:

Kris Anderson donated $300 to the club because: She just had her 70^th birthday, in Paris.

Jim and she just finished remodeling their home.

This week’s guest speaker,

Andrew Reddie, founder and faculty director for the Berkeley Risk and Security Lab and is an associate researcher professor at the Goldman School at U.C. Berkeley. He works on projects related to cyber security, nuclear weapons policy, war-gaming, and emerging military technologies.

Well, cyberattacks are happening more frequently. We mostly get attacked through our email.  Our email providers are keenly interested in stopping these hackers, so we must always be alert.

It is a conundrum; should they work on high probability attacks with low consequences or low probability, but high consequences? Cryptocurrency allows the bad guys to finance their threats because their money cannot be easily traced.  There are more hackers in Ukraine and the Philippines per capita!

There are 16 infrastructure sectors in the United States that are most critical: commecial facilities, defense industrial space, emergency services, critical manufacturing, food and agriculture, energy, healthcare and public health, chemical, government facilities, dams, transportation systems, water and water systems, financial services, communications, information technology, and nuclear reactors, materials, and waste. Digital transformation is in every sector. There are more areas to attack (cloud, mobile, AI, etc). Cyber is a domain of strategic competition – Russia, China, Iran, DPRK.  There are so many layers of vulnerability.  Ever heard of Script Kiddies? They are amateur hackers.  They generally don’t understand what they are doing but can cause a lot of harm. There are professional hackers, referred to as State Hackers. Across all layers, the cyber domain in modern warfare has become a critical battleground where states and nonstate actors engage in offensive and defensive operations to disrupt, degrade or control information systems and critical infrastructure.

Examples:

1. 2010 Stuxnet cyber-attack was a sophisticated computer worm developed by the U.S. and Israel to sabotage Iran’s Nuclear enrichment facility. It altered the reporting so what Iran thought was normal, was not!
2. 2021 was an attack on the water supply to Oldsmar, Florida. Hackers attempted to increase the level of lye in the water. An astute plant operator detected the attack, and it was reversed before it could harm the public.
3. 2013 was the attack on the Bowman Avenue Dam. Hackers linked to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps gained access to the dam’s flood control SCADA system. It was assumed that the hackers meant to do damage to the Arthur R. Bowman Dam on the Crooked River in Oregon.
4. 2021 attack on the Colonial Pipeline was carried out by the criminal group The DarkSide. The attack forced the closure of the pipeline for several days, leaving much of the East Coast without access to gasoline.
5. PRC-linked threat actor infiltrated U.S. critical infrastructure networks
6. Russia has been using cyber-attacks in Ukraine since the war started.

Now with AI, it is lowering the barriers to entry for the threat of bad actors of all types!

CREDITS

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