Oh god, no god it was a regular tuesday morning. I woke up at around 9 00 a.m and i did what i usually do. I checked the market. I checked out a few tick tocks and uh.

While i was on my phone, i got one of the worst notifications in my life. My bank had alerted me that someone logged into my main business bank account, without my approval surprise. So at that very moment i realized shoot. I think i just got hacked.

I rushed upstairs checked my computer and realized that they had changed my password, i called up chase and after about 10 minutes, i was lucky enough to get my account back. Whoever did this had changed my password and my username within a matter of minutes, but the worst was yet to come. I had this strange gut feeling to check my mailbox, which i often don't do. What i discovered next was one of the most scariest things.

I've ever encountered in this life, someone had opened about 13 different credit cards and personal loans under my name. So what did i do? Next? I freaked out. I went back to my computer logged into my credit bureaus and realized someone had applied using my social security number for a ton of different credit cards and loans, and for the next few days i spent the time talking to credit bureaus and companies in order to Resolve this now, things could have been way worse because the person who had applied for these credit cards and loans using my identity, they actually got denied for all of them. You would think superstar credit brian, celebrity youtube star good.

Looking korean american from the dmv would get approved for all of these cards and loans, but, to my surprise, they actually got denied for every single one of them kind of embarrassing to say not the proudest flex in the world. But this case it did save my butt. I have a great credit score. My finances are well in check, but whoever did apply applied for way too many things in a short period of time and they got hit with a denial reason of way too many inquiries.

In a limited time period anyways it's definitely been a stressful week, but i've learned so much throughout this process and i learned different ways in order to maximize security so that this doesn't happen to anyone because believe it or not. A lot of people are victims of identity theft. I had no idea until i put a post on my instagram sharing with you guys exactly what was going on and i had countless amount of stories of people who themselves or their relatives or their close friends who have all been some type of victim to identity Theft, so let's talk about how you can protect yourself as well, for this section of the video you actually may want to take notes, because that's how important this material is going to be regardless, if you're, making a thousand dollars a month or you're, making 10 000 A month, this stuff is so important to make sure that you don't lose everything that you've worked so hard for. Please take the information that i'm about to share with you very seriously, because identity theft is something that will come out the cut and it can ruin your life.

I am someone who generally does a good job with security and privacy, and yet i still got targeted, regardless of the reason, it's still important, to make sure that you guys know exactly what to do. So. Let's talk about it here now. The first thing that you should do is to make sure that your firewall is turned on.

I have a 2019 macbook pro and i actually found out that they had turned off my firewall as soon as i got my device. I did not know this until one of you guys had told me over on my instagram as an apple employee. That apple goes ahead and turns off all the firewalls for their devices. So if you do use an ios device make sure that the firewall is turned on because apple does automatically turn it off.

It's always good to have that additional layer of security so make sure you do that. It's the easiest one on this list now. The second thing i'm going to mention is to use a password generator, so one of the things that you will hear over the internet is to check out a website called. Have i been pwned.com? This is pretty much a source where it will tell you whether or not your email and password has been compromised to an attack.

I personally have used a password generator for the past three years and, although i did get my main business checking account compromised, they were only able to access that because that password was completely different from everything else. Now pretty much the way lastpass works. Is you put one master password into this app and it'll automatically generate whatever length symbol number you want into other websites, so you don't share the same easy password for all of them. If anything happens to one of these websites and they get compromised using a website like have ibn.com to check, you can make sure that you have your security up to date, because if that one password gets compromised, you're still good to go.

The other ones are secure because they are all different. Not only will it save you time, but it will save memory too, because if you're trying to remember all these different passwords and you're, always locking yourself out, you don't have to do the heavy work. Remember one password for the app for the website: they have a chrome extension. They have a software you can download onto your computer and even an app on your phone.

It's pretty much like keychain or google chrome autofill. They do it automatically for you. It's such an easy thing, and you can know that you are secure. If you do want to check out lastpass, i did get a special holiday promo from their team that you guys can check out down below in the description now.

The third thing that you need to do is call two-factor authentication. Now, most of you guys may already do this, but you may do this where the two-factor authentication is set up through your phone. Just in case you don't know what it is. Let me give you a 10 second recap: if i'm trying to log into gmail, for example - and i put my password in normally what happens after that is, they will ask you for a two-factor authentication where you get a passcode sent to your phone, and you put That into the email address, of whatever account you're trying to log into there are a couple issues with this.

When you do use your phone, one of them is called sim swapping or mobile porting, where hackers will actually go ahead and steal your phone number and they're able to retrieve that number for you back about three years ago over on youtube, a ton of big finance. Youtubers actually got sim swapped and almost lost everything. This included cram, stefan tanner fox and a couple other people that i used to watch back in the day so guys this is some super. Like serious stuff, i mean it's really scary when you start to think about it, but all of my accounts have been hacked my youtube channel.

My social media accounts, all of my email accounts and my phone. That's how crazy this is. Two-Factor authentication is great, but you want to make sure that you're using the right security tools for this, so instead of using your phone number use this. Instead, i actually downloaded an authenticator app off of the store.

This seems to be pretty popular right now, where it'll generate these automatic codes every 60 seconds. So if a hacker does get their hand on this, because the codes are randomly generated and it's synced to whatever website or account you own, it's gon na work in a way where people can't actually get that information as easily as they could. If you just hooked up your phone on top of the authenticator app, i actually use one more tool that many people really don't know about. This right here is called a fido u2f security key, and it's actually one of the best investments you can make.

You could find these running for only 14, but this is seriously so powerful. Let me share with you exactly how this works, any account that i log in that i have this setup with. They need to physically press this button and put it into their computer in order to have access. This means, if i'm trying to log into gmail - and i don't have this around and i'm trying to log in on another computer somewhere else - i myself won't be able to get in, but this means other people sure as hell.

Won't it's really nice because you can have like a little keychain little here, there's a little hole for a keychain. You put this on your keychain, take it wherever with you. I actually just keep this one plugged in at my home, i'm not going anywhere and whenever i need to re-log in or they want to re-verify my account. I simply just press this little button right here.

That's as easy as it is make sure that you get one of these security keys, best investment. You can make trust me. It will save you so much in the future. Now so far we have firewall, we have a password generator.

We have authenticator app and the security key. There are still a couple things that you can do in order to improve your security. The next thing i want to talk about is a vpn, so i always thought i would never need a vpn, i'm not a hardcore. Gamer, i'm not someone, you know like a government employee or someone who's.

Just sharing like super super sensitive information, but i realized a vpn is something that every single person should use, regardless of what your occupation is. The first time i heard about it was from all the youtube sponsorships use a vpn go ahead, it's the best thing ever, but i always just thought it was just something i didn't need. So if you don't know what a vpn is, let me explain pretty much. Non-Inappropriately think about like a condom for the internet.

It's the easiest way. I can explain this. You pretty much get protection for the data that comes into your computer and leaves your computer nowadays, it's not enough to just go incognito or to think that your home wifi router is good. If you are sensitive about the world, knowing what your home address is use.

A vpn because your ip address is literally the digital version of your home address and many people can have easy access to that. The vpn of choice that i'm personally using is surf shark. It has been the easiest process. I literally just downloaded it onto my computer.

They would automatically choose the fastest vpn to me. It has worked flawlessly with my computer, and that was always a concern i had because i'm constantly uploading and downloading things for youtube. It hasn't affected my performance at all. My security has gotten better, and on top of that i didn't know this, but with netflix they actually censor a lot of great content depending on the country you live in.

So whenever i change my country now to anything outside the us, i got a whole bunch of new tv shows and movies that i have access to, and i just got a vpn that i pay. Maybe two or three bucks a month for and my security is more encrypted, it's a win-win-win now. The next thing i did was probably one of the most important things on this list and i actually signed up for a service called lifelock. So i always heard of lifelock from the commercials and the radio, but i never knew what they really were.

Actually one of my other finance youtube friends, ryan scribner had told me guys just sign up for lifelock, it's worth it. If you ever get hacked or anything happens, they'll give you back a million dollars in reimbursement, and i said you know: ryan. Okay, like i probably won't need it turns out. I actually needed it.

It would have been great. Luckily, you know none of my money got leaked out, but just in case it does. Lifelock is a service that not only monitors all three credit bureaus and monitors. Your information that you can put in like your passport driver's license home address, email, address, cell phone number credit cards, they monitor the dark web and, if anything happens with your identity, they will reimburse the amount of money that got taken from you.

Based on what package you have so, i went ahead and just signed up for the most expensive package, but i also did this because i was able to stack a promotion with a company called rakuten which allowed me to get lifelock practically for free identity theft. Monitoring on top of protection on top of reimbursement on top of a technical support team that has rated some of the best in the country. This is exactly what i needed before all of the crap happened. Lifelock has been great so far.

I wish i had it previous to this attack, but that is all hindsight you guys can learn from my errors and sign up for a package like this. It took me a while to decide if this was going to be worth it or not, but someone in my shoes at least i know that this is so so worth it and if you guys plan on being a youtuber or you want to be a ceo Or you just care about your own privacy. This is seriously one of the best investments that you can make everything i mentioned up until this point is going to be some of the most important things that you can do in order to secure your account, but you should also consider doing this. One last thing just to make sure that someone is not watching you after i'd, signed up for lifelock got my security key.

My password generator got my vpn. I realized that someone could still actually be watching my every move on the computer. The last thing that i did was download malwarebytes it did a total scan of my computer. I realized that i was good, but so far this is everything i did in order to make sure that i was secure, and this is all everything you guys should consider doing as well.

Thank you all so much again for watching this video. I really hope you guys did enjoy it. Let me know down below in the comments what you guys think if you guys do enjoy these type of videos, because i did i did have to pay my videographer quite a bit of money to get some of the b-roll in the beginning. But if you guys did really enjoy this, i would say these are investments that are worth it to be on youtube in order to help you guys out even more so that pretty much is right there.

All links will be down below in the description full transparency. They are affiliate links, but they don't cost you any more money than if you were to take any real public links that they offer. These links actually offer you a much higher discount than most of them do so using them not only help me, but they also help you they pretty much help. All of us accept the hackers and we hate hackers.

We hate people, we hate scammers. Don't forget that. Thank you all so much again for watching this. Video follow me over on instagram and until next time don't get hacked happy holidays.

Peace out.