Gadgetory

- tech tips was hacked they were using a simple password and their websites database was dumped you can buy it for five bucks only one of those four rumors is true and even then only in a fairly loose sense more on that later welcome to an impromptu episode of honest answers that I'm calling wTF is going on over there I'll be addressing the abrupt shift in branding of the at line is tech Twitter handle the recent banning of our Amazon Associates account and of course the hack the AKG K 7 xx headphones are back on mass drop check out my review of them up here and check out the drop at the link in the video description so on June 14th 2016 Amazon sent me an email warning me that my amazon associates account was not in compliance with the operating agreement specifically the part where associates are not permitted to disclose how their referral fees will be used I was instructed to make any and all necessary modifications to my site and processes within five business days and notify them when I was done one small problem my call-out for Amazon was baked into the tail end of nearly 500 Linus tech tips videos dating back a couple of years with no way at least what I was aware of to alter previously uploaded YouTube videos my efforts to reach anyone by phone or by email basically resulted in a second email to which there was no way for me to even reply three days later informing me that my business model wasn't a good fit for the program and that my account had been terminated effective immediately long story short I'm not revealing names so they don't get flooded with requests to help with Amazon Associates issues but this right now is a huge shout-out to some industry folks who helped me get in touch giving me an opportunity to discuss the situation and plead my case over the phone on June 22nd you guys Rock the result though was not as some have speck related a green light to reactivate our account but rather an opportunity to reapply for a new account which has been approved so in summary our old associates ID and all the tracked links under our old non-compliant videos are inactive though we are pursuing an interesting method that we could use to update those old videos and reactivate the associated links under the new tracking ID so we'll see how that goes but in the meantime because as many of you who watched how does Elam do make money no the Amazon Associates Program has been a significant source of our revenue we are coming back strong speaking of which Prime Day is coming up so you might want to go shop on Amazon or sign up for a Prime membership using the link in our description let's move on to the compromised at Linus tech Twitter handle generally speaking we don't acknowledge attacks on our persons or business for what I'd hope are pretty obvious reasons but in this case it's part of a much larger problem that's affecting other youtubers and even more importantly could also affect you the manner in which the Linus tech Twitter handle and my personal Hotmail and Gmail then by extension my domain name registrar account were compromised had almost nothing to do with poor security practices on our part yes my registrar login email account should not have been a personal one that was just a legacy thing from before I even registered a corporate domain name and that has since been rectified along with some other new security measures that again I hope you can understand this I won't be discussing publicly but other than that there was nothing I could have done to prevent this an individual right now it's not clear whether it was over the phone or by actually walking into a physical location committed identity fraud and was able to convince Bell Canada to activate a SIM card in my name which deactivated my own SIM card and began immediately forwarding all phone calls and text messages to that individuals phone my mother-in-law's first reaction when I told her about this was did they place any long-distance phone calls different generation right so I explained to her and I guess in recounting the story also you but it's much more serious than that with access to my incoming calls and texts this person can break into any account where theoretically SMS account verifcation acts as a a pseudo physical authentication factor if you want more information about multi-factor authentication check out this video and in some cases it can even act as a single authentication factor for lost password requests now as a rule I don't do YouTube drama go subscribe to h3h3 productions or something if you're into that stuff I'll stay focused on tech but even inside my bubble I've managed to catch wind a similar attacks being used on boogie and leafy with the same group claiming responsibility for stealing Lilly Singh's account and a handful of others so I felt the need to address it fortunately for us even though I was in the middle of an on location video shoot picking blueberries of all things when my cell phone service turned off which also made it harder for me to notice the army of loyal followers who were messaging me to inform me of the problem thank you very much guys Nick and Yvonne great work to them to very quickly figured out the method of attack deactivated my mobile account deactivated our Twitter account and called me back into the office to start locking everything down the hijackers never got into the YouTube channels so all they pretty much managed to do was vandalize my Twitter and use our registrar dashboard to redirect website traffic from Linus tech tips comm and incoming mail heading to the at Linus Media Group comm domain both of which were happening for under an hour and probably are where the worries about our forum users data comes from rest easy this was a simple social engineering exploit and they were nowhere near any of our servers let alone harvesting any data from them however even if this is a social engineering trick and it has to be executed on a one-by-one basis because this method of attack has been demonstrated to be so successful I feel like it's important to recommend to our viewers that they do a security audit ensuring that their accounts do not have a single point of entry including through their phone and that they call a provider to check who is authorized to make changes to the account and what the process is for validating that person's identity those guys aren't going to understand how serious this problem is until it starts increasing their call volumes and affecting their bottom lines anyway make lemons out of lemonade right since I had to reset my profile picture anyhow I figured it was as good a time as any to finally make the transition the outline is tech Twitter handle moving forward will be the official Twitter for the Linus tech tips video publication and I will be starting a new personal Twitter account Linus G Sebastian a similar transition will likely occur on Instagram very shortly the reason for this being that I feel like I am under utilizing the huge team of social media experts here at Linus Media Group and that by having everyone posting content and replies to these accounts we can provide you guys with much more behind the scenes more timely updates and more sexy shots of products and/or Dennis last order of business congratulations to the tech quickie team which throughout its history has involved every single member of the company but currently is mostly the John and Dennis show with me and Luke hosting and also thanks to all of you for your support they just broke a million subscribers making us double gold channel super fund next right well might take a while but it's gonna happen well that's probably going to be a while but in the meantime if you have to fix any electronics ifixit.com is your go-to place from there 19,000 free step-by-step repair guides to their huge inventory of replacement parts to their tools with lifetime warranties I fix it as got your repair needs covered we use their stuff all the time but my go-to is the pro Tech tool kit which has actually been upgraded in the time that we have been advertising for it and also since I bought my first one over three years ago so instead of 54 bit's it includes 64 bits you know sixty four-bit am i right it's like better more ram no there's no ram in it but there's all kinds of stuff like their redesign screwdriver their flex extension there ESD tweezers including a pair of reverse tweezers their plastic opening tools their suction cups the metal spudger is the jimmy pride tool and you've got an ESD bracelet that you can wear to make sure you're not zapping the components you're working at it's priced at $69 code which is linked in the video description so that's code Linus in the check out to save $5 on any purchase of $10 or more so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we feature to dammuz on in the video description or maybe even a prime membership I think that's actually the only thing I mentioned in this video also linked in the description is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join now that you're done doing all that stuff you're probably wondering what to watch next so click that little button in the top right corner to check out the last episode of honest answers where I talk about how exactly it is that linus media group makes money