Protect yourself, your YouTube channel, and your online business from hackers
right now. Hi, I'm Marisa Romero and in today's video we're going to talk about
how you can prevent yourself from hackers because recently my ninety one
thousand subscriber YouTube channel was hacked and deleted and if you want to
know all the details of the story including who did it, what happened, what
went down, you can watch this video right here after this video to understand
everything that happened. I highly recommend it because it is very very
important. So I learned a lot about security and preventing online
cybercrime and about hacking when my channel was hacked.
It was a devastating time but I told myself that whenever I was able to do it
or got my channel back and was ready to share the message, I would definitely let
my audience know how they can protect themselves, starting today, from online
hackers and anyone trying to cause malicious harm on the Internet. It is
really a traumatic event, I don't wish this upon anyone and especially now
during this pandemic and COVID-19 we need to be very, very secure online
because there's more and more people working from home having zoom calls and
doing personal, secure things and business things online. So let's get
started. So I wanted to first talk about the methods in which hackers are hacking
into YouTube channels. There's been a few big time creators lately who have lost
tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars of people hacking into their
YouTube channel and stealing their Adsense money because they transfer
basically the bank account of the Adsense to another bank account. It
really really is traumatic. And one of the ways that they're doing this is with
sim swapping. So what is sim swapping? If you have a two-factor authentication on
your YouTube channel or on any online website where you want it to be extra
secure, and when you log in that website sends you a code to your phone and says
"Enter this code so that we can verify it's you," that's called two-factor
authentication. It is very secure, however, these hackers are impersonating the
youtubers and what they're doing is they're going to their phone companies
and saying "Hey, I lost my sim card, my sim card broke," whatever the case may
be so that they can get a new sim card and once they have the sim card they can
access pretty much everything that was protected with two-factor authentication.
It is extremely scary because not only is your YouTube channel compromised, but
also your banking, if you have two-factor authentication with banking, and other
personal online accounts that you try to protect with online security. And so how
do you prevent this from happening to you? So the first thing I would do is
call your service provider right away whoever it is, t-mobile, Verizon, AT&T, or
whatever service out of the country, and ask them "Hey, what extra layer of
security do you have to protect this sim card swapping from happening?" So
maybe they have a secret word that only you know, or maybe there's a secret pin
code, or maybe there's voice recognition, ask them what extra layers of security
are available to you as the customer so that no one can impersonate you and
access a brand-new SIM card. The second way hackers are getting into YouTube
channels is with email phishing. Now this method is not new, it's been around for a
very long time, but unfortunately it is getting more and more popular right now.
So what is email phishing? It's when you receive a fake email from either Google
or YouTube or you receive an email from a "sponsor" that's not really a sponsor it's
a hacker trying to hack the channel and they try to get you to either click
a link, download a program, install an application, and when that happens and
when you do click that link or put a program on your computer they then have
full access to all your data and your computer and it's like free rein for the
hacker and they're able to get in to your channel and whatever else they
want on your computer. And so these emails that you'll receive, they try to
be slick and they try to ask you, sometimes, things like "You need
to remove your two factor authentication so we can blah, you
need to change your password or give us your password," sometimes it could be
really, really obvious but just please be aware and always make sure you're
hovering over the sender information to verify it is indeed YouTube or Google
and never, ever, ever click on a link if it looks suspicious. If there's spelling
errors, if there's weird things in the email, if it's not personalized, probably
just delete the email and not click on anything. There's two other YouTube
creators that this happened to, they got their channels hacked and deleted from
email phishing, one of them is now my good friend Kenneth Russell. He has a
channel about guitars and his was actually a fake sponsor trying to get
him to download a music app and he did download and install the software and it
was a disaster and they made him turn off all antivirus software.
I'll leave his story in the link in the description so you could see what a
real-time example looks like, it seemed devastating, it was like this
person got ahold of his channel after they hacked it and they deleted all his
videos and uploaded a bunch of crazy copyrighted videos, and it's just- it's a
crazy story and I'll leave that resource for you in the description below. So
please I'm going to go over the security measures that you can do today to secure
your channel and protect yourself online in general and the first thing I want to
say is never, ever, ever, ever, like I can't emphasize that enough,
never make the email connected to your YouTube channel public. So your Google
Account email that you used to make your YouTube channel, never, ever, ever, make
that public. In the About section put another email where people can email you
if they want to inquire about brand or sponsorship deals. No-one should ever
know this email associated with your Google account because that's kind of
step one for them trying to hack you as they have the email so they could try to
hack you. The next thing is to use two factor authentication. Now I know the sim
swapping thing was kind of scary, but definitely make sure you have two-factor
authentication on because it is a really important layer of security.
The next thing I would advise to do is use an
Authenticator app. I personally use an application called Authy, what that does is
it allows you, and it's extremely safe, it allows you to log in to your account
using a code that the authentication app gives you so that way you don't have to
use a code being sent to your phone. And the great thing and what makes
it extra secure having an authentication app, is that the codes that are sent are
changing every 30 seconds so it makes it very, very, I don't know, maybe
impossible, I don't know, it makes it very, very hard for hackers to get through
this because the code is always changing and there's not enough time for them to
dissect the code. The next thing is be careful who you hire. I went over this in
my video about how I got hacked, the entire story, I know who hacked my
channel, it was actually an ex-employee who worked for me and I'm not gonna say
much about that because I talk way, way, way more about that in this video so
definitely check out my story on how I got hacked. If you are liking this video
and getting major value so far please give this video a like and subscribe to
the channel. It helps support the videos we make here on this channel and if you
know somebody that could really benefit from this information and online
security and preventing cybercrime and hackers go ahead and share it with them
because it's so important to me that I get this message out there about
awareness of cybercrime. I do not wish this upon anyone.
It is super detrimental and devastating and it is traumatic. So the next security
measure that I want to tell you guys about, and this is just for general
computer security, is to keep your operating system up-to-date. You know how
you get those notifications on your computer that says "Update bla bla bla is
now available," don't ignore it. The reason why you need updates frequently and you
need to follow the updates is because they have better security measures and
it's easier for hackers to hack something when the operating system is
not up-to-date. The next thing I would HIGHLY advise is to get an anti
virus for your computer. I personally have a MacBook Pro so the antivirus I
have is called CleanMyMac and it's something that regularly scans for
different malicious software, it also scans to make sure there's not junk
files taking up your computer that you could eliminate and it's simple and
effective and it's as good as malware protection you're going to get. The next
thing you should be doing is to have a VPN. There are many reasons to have a VPN
or a virtual private network and that first reason being is because people
cannot know the location of where you are. It's privacy because they can't
locate your IP address and the exact location of where you are. So, for example,
if I'm in another country like Mexico or Columbia, my VPN shows that I am in the
United States. And that's the other nice thing about VPN is it gives you access
to things in that country that I wouldn't normally have access to. So, for
example, Amazon Prime. I can't get that in Columbia, but if my computer, or
my VPN, shows I'm in the US, I can access to features of Amazon Prime, just as an
example. And one of the other more important things about a VPN is that
your internet service provider cannot see your history, they cannot see what
you're doing online, and this is really important because this information
really should be private to you. The next thing when you're online is always make
sure the browser says HTTPS and not HTTP, because with the S it means that it is
secure and encrypted. You're not viable to be intersected by a hacker
because if you're on a website that is using HTTP, that is much less secure so
you want to make sure that all websites you are going to have HTTPS. So I hope
you've taken some notes and implement all of these ways you can be more secure
online and I know if you're loving this video, please, please check out the
original story of how my youtube channel got hacked, you can see this video here
and that video starts right now.
Marisa go to your computer right now, I think your channels been hacked.