minus Tech tips was hacked they were using a simple password and their
website's 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 atlus tech
Twitter handle the recent Banning of our Amazon Associates account and of course
the
hack the AKG k7xx 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 that I was
aware of to alter previous L 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 3
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 speculated 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 LMG 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 linch 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 lineus tech Twitter handle and my personal Hotmail and Gmail then by
extension my domain name register account were compromised had almost
nothing to do with poor security practices on our part yes my registar
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
individual's phone my mother-in-law's first reaction when I told her about
this was did they place any longdistance phone calls different generation right
so I explained to her and I guess in recounting the story also you that 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 verification
acts as a a pseudo physical authentication Factor if you want more
information about multiactor authentication check out this video and
in some cases it can even act as a
single authentication factor for loss
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 of similar attacks being used on Boogie and leafy with the same group
claiming responsibility for stealing Lily sing'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 onlocation 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 Ivonne great work to them too 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 highjackers never got into the YouTube channels so
all they pretty much managed to do was vandalize my Twitter and use our regist
our dashboard to redirect website traffic from Linus tips.com and incoming
mail heading to the at Linus medag group.com 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 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 their 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 at Linus 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 lus G
Sebastian a similar transition will likely occur on Instagram very shortly
the reason for this being that I feel like I am underutilizing the huge team
of social media experts here at lus 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 dentist last order of business
congratulations to the Techquickie 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 Fun 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 goto
place from their 19,000 free step-by-step repair guides to their huge
inventory of replacement parts to their tools with lifetime warranties I fix it
has got your repair needs covered we use their stuff all the time but my go-to is
the prot te 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 3 years ago so
instead of 54 bits it includes 64 bits
you know 64-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 redesigned screwdriver their Flex
extension their ESD tweezers including a pair of reverse tweezers they plastic
opening tools they suction cups the metal spudgers 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$ 69.95 and the best part is that you
can save five bucks just by using our offer code which is linked in the video
description so that's code Linus in the checkout 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 featured at
Amazon 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 toally
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 lonus
Media Group makes money