Gadgetory

hey guys this is Austin I was literally in the middle of working on a video on hacking when my credit card got hacked so I think this is a great time to talk a little bit about cybersecurity and a huge shout out to LastPass for sponsoring this video great timing guys so I've been keeping all of my information safe and last past four years way before they ever reached out wanted to sponsor a video I think like a lot of people I used to use a couple of passwords across all of my sites whether that would be for Twitter or for my bank account however with LastPass you can easily create completely custom and random passwords for each and every individual site and keep them all locked up behind a single password and LastPass vaults so even if one site gets hacked none of the rest of your logins are going to be vulnerable and that's available on the free plan step up to LastPass premium which I've had for like four years now and you get better two-factor authentication options the ability to easily share out your logins it's only like two bucks a month best of all it works basically across all of your different devices whether it be phone tablet computer whatever so the LastPass is legitimately something that I use every single day so if you guys want to give it a try and help support the channel the link to check it out will be in the description of this video when it comes to getting hacked through a lot of ways that it can happen so maybe it's something simple like you open a phishing email attachment you're visiting a site that you probably shouldn't be looking at recently though these hacks have become much much more ambitious so take for example Equifax this is a credit agency that recently had 143 million people's information leaked and this isn't like small stuff like your phone number or address this is like really important information like your social security number which makes it very very easy for identity theft to happen growing fallout this morning over its massive data breach the biggest and most significant yeah possibly putting 143 million American every back in March a major vulnerability was found in Equifax is back-end and it wasn't fixed until the end of July meaning that four months about one third of the u.s. populations information was wide open for the taking this is hardly an isolated incident so only a few weeks after the Equifax hacked ccleaner had their own issues so CCleaner is a very popular utility to allow you to clean your computer however for a short time the legitimate version was replaced that you downloaded from their site with a version that was loaded with malware the scary part of this is is that there was actually no real way of telling that what you were downloading was actually now we're and not the proper program you're going to the official site you're downloading it installing it everything looks completely legit and the program even worked however in the background was a serious virus so the popular DVD ripping tool handbrake had a very similar thing happen for period of four days the legitimate download was replaced with a version that had a Mac specific version of malware inside of it even worse is that hacks are no longer confined to just software they're hitting close to home literally with products like Amazon echo and Google home being brought into more and more households these companies are getting closer and closer to our personal lives than ever before now this can be a good thing so it's nice to be able to walk into your house until Alexa to turn the lights on maybe if you forget to lock your door when you leave you can just do it straight from your phone with a smart lock and stuff like net security cameras will give you a much better sense of security when you can see exactly what's going on inside your house but like all good things in life it doesn't exactly work all the time and like a lot of people fear when stuff like the Amazon echo first came out there is a way to now hack this if you peel back the little rubber pad on the bottom of an Amazon echo you'll see a series of contacts so using these if you have a little bit of technical knowledge in about 10 minutes you can actually turn in Amazon echo into a listening device the upside is as long as you don't have a super nerd as an enemy this is not an easy hike to pull off Emily do you need that technical knowledge but you also need to have actual access to the echo in hand and to Amazon's credit they actually have removed this vulnerability from the most recent model the real issue here is when there's an echo in a public place so take for example the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas they have an echo at every single room and all it takes is for someone to hack at once and they can listen in to the conversations in that room pretty much forever all right so what can you actually do about this well the first thing to understand is that there's no way of keeping you and your data completely safe if you apply for a credit card five years ago and the creative agency gets hacked too bad I'm probably never going to know how my credit card got compromised it could have been something simple like being skinned at an ATM or gas station or maybe some site that I use the card on was hacked and I just didn't know it but there are some things you can do to help protect yourself the easiest thing is to just check your credit so if you live in the US federal law guarantees that you can get one free credit report from each of the three major agencies per years on the digital front it makes sense to have some kind of antivirus and keep your devices up to date so that it includes those Windows updates that you've been saying to for the last six months you keep your browser up-to-date your phone all these things are constantly getting security updates and they can really save you when these things come up threats like this are never going to go away biz long as you're smart and keep an eye on things then you should be fine so have you actually ever gotten hacked yourself let me know in the comments below and I will catch you in the next one