Beau Friedlander:
Adam? Well, we talk a lot about Bears, but they’re usually the Russian bears and like Cozy Bear Travis. What are the other bears?
Travis Taylor:
Well, there’s Fancy Bear. I think there’s another one called Crazy Bear even. And these are all hacking groups that are, if not sanctioned, are at least operating within Russia.
Beau Friedlander:
So Cozy Bear has a cozy relationship with Putin,
Adam Levin:
Something like that. Yeah.
Beau Friedlander:
Well, I think I’m about to have a very cozy relationship with an actual bear,
Adam Levin:
A black bear, A brown bear.
Beau Friedlander:
Well, it is a black bear. I was hoping you would think it was a grizzly bear or something really impressive. But it was actually super impressive. I was making coffee. I looked out the window and I kid you not, it was 10 feet, maybe even five feet from my window just sitting there breathing through its mouth and looking like he owned my house.
Adam Levin:
So was the bear looking lovingly into your window contemplating the possibility of dinner in the not too distant future?
Beau Friedlander:
No. He looked sort of like, this place is annoying me for its lack of food. I am going to keep walking. But he walked around the house and then down the hill and went down a hundred foot. There’s a big ravine ramp behind my house, and he walked down it like it was nothing. And then when he got to the bottom of it, he stood up and stretched against a tree, which is when I realized he was actually ginormous. It was like Andre the Giant down there. He was huge.
Adam Levin:
It’s important to realize that when Revenant two comes out, it won’t be starring Leonard DiCaprio. It’ll be starring Beau Friedlander.
Beau Friedlander:
And then what was really weird was online I thought like, oh, I’m going to put this online because everyone’s going to want to see the bear. Bears are cool, and especially where I live, because there didn’t used to be bears here and now there are bears. So I put it online and the main argument was like a jellybean guessing contest. Everyone wanted to know how much the bear weighed and the guesses were all over the place. Travis I think resolved it though. He decided that the bear was giant and very heavy. So my bear, my backyard bear, maybe he was looking for apples. That’s what I thought. And I had some apples and thought about feeding them. Everyone was telling me not to be continued. This week’s show has an Apple hook.
Adam Levin:
Hi there. I’m Adam Levins, cyber Bear and Cyber Philosopher.
Beau Friedlander:
And I’m Beau Friedlander Cyber Mench, cyber Curious.
Travis Taylor:
And I’m Travis Taylor, cyber defender and just all things cyber.
Adam Levin:
And this is what the hack a shame-free zone where people can tell us exactly what happened, why they did what they did, or why they didn’t do what they did, and maybe reflect upon how to do it better the next time. So hi James. Adam here. Hey Adam. We also have Beau Friedlander. Travis Taylor. Hello. Hey. Hey. We’re delighted to have you on the show.
James:
Great to be here. Thank you.
Adam Levin:
So what do you do?
James:
I am an engineer for a paper company manufacturing paper for international paper.
Beau Friedlander:
And what part of the world are you in?
James:
I’m in the southeast in Savannah, Georgia.
Adam Levin:
So as an engineer for the company, what exactly do you do for them?
James:
Well, it’s a lot of work. I didn’t realize when I stepped into the role about a little over a year ago. But it’s to manage the repair, the maintenance, the inspection of all of our tanks for the mill. We’ve got a lot of chemical processes and storage of product and storage of other chemicals and that type of thing. So I have to maintain those tanks. If there’s leaks or if there’s a scheduled inspection for an internal inspection. We do external inspections. We do thickness readings of the tanks. So I manage all of that and budget for annual outages because annual outages are mostly when we do our work. So I have to get all that ready and it takes a good while. With about 700 tanks, it’s quite a bit.
Beau Friedlander:
What do you do to unwind given the immense amount of stress, all of those tanks and the oversight of those tanks provides you on a daily basis?
James:
Well, it’s just nice to come home to relax. It’s not a lot of high stress, it’s just a lot of workload. But I do come home, spend time with my wife, and we just got married in May, so we’re just learning
Adam Levin:
Congrat. Congratulations.
James:
We remarried. So both of us are divorced and remarried. So I also do some woodworking, which is fun. I’ve built a lot of that bookshelf right behind me. I’ve built that. Nice. That’s just a small piece. But I’ve done tables, I’ve done beds, I’ve done end tables, I’ve done coffee tables, done desks. So just lots of fun. I enjoy doing that. Super
Adam Levin:
We’ll expect to be getting an invitation soon from Beau to come up to Connecticut because he’s working on a house and I’m sure he could use someone with consummate carpentry skills.
Beau Friedlander:
So we’re putting in a new kitchen and I thought maybe before we put in the new kitchen, we should at least persuade the kitchen to stop sinking into the dirt. So we put in a better footing and making the kitchen level. And then once that happens, anyway, the carpentry involved has been fascinating and it’s really beautiful to see a well done carpentry job.
James:
Yes. And of course, myself building a project, I know where every flaw is. Somebody that walks into the room would look at it and say, man, that’s gorgeous. And if I say, well, it looks good, but that little spot over there that Derek was a bad cut, that kind of thing.
Beau Friedlander:
Well, and that actually is the same with cybersecurity and with privacy and scams is like, you remember what went wrong, and at the end of the day, there’s a lot of things that went right, otherwise you wouldn’t be sitting here with your nice carpentry that you didn’t have to sell behind you.
Adam Levin:
But my sense as an engineer, you are somebody who does pay attention to all things cyber as well, right?
James:
Yes. I think that for me, I like to learn technology. I like to learn what’s out there, what’s going on, just to be up on things. I don’t like to be left in the dark if there’s an opportunity that I can capitalize on. And of course, crypto was one of them. I think it was just browsing on YouTube. There’s a couple of channels that talked about it, and I looked at it, it looked pretty interesting, but I just was like, maybe I should get into it, maybe I shouldn’t. But then I went to this conference and this conference, I met this guy and he was telling me, and I couldn’t believe it, he was telling me that I put all of my retirement money into XRP. I said, what? First of all, what’s XRP? And I said, all of your retirement money is in crypto. Are you kidding me? And I’m thinking, are you an idiot?
Beau Friedlander:
Now, back up. Hold on. What did you think? I mean, you’re old enough to know a day and age before crypto existed and investments were a very specific thing and you did it a certain way. What’d you think?
James:
Well, I thought my first thought would be I wanted to find out more information. What does he know that I don’t know. I just followed him around. Not like a dog, but I just kind of said, Hey man, just let me know. How do you know this? Oh, I’ve done research on this and XRP is a great token. It’s going to be adopted by central banks and blah, blah, blah. I’m like, wow, how do you know all that? He said, well, it just is from his research. So I had some IRA money, and that’s why I was interested. If he said the potential is go from whatever it was, 23 cents at the time, he said, it’s going to go to maybe $5. I said, $5. Holy mackerel. So to me, that’s just fascinating. So again, what did he know that I didn’t? So I just sat there and followed him for a while, just trying to learn as much as I could.
I even texted him a little bit after, and I bought some crypto after, just from cash. I didn’t have my IRA in it. I just said, no, not right now. I’m going to see what’s going on. So I did some research after the conference. Now I’m like, what’s going on with this money or crypto? What do I do with it now? And then of course I learned, well, you want to put it on cold storage. I said, well, what’s cold storage? And I was just found some guys online talking about the two best crypto cold storage wallets were the ledger device and then the, what is it, the
Beau Friedlander:
Travis?
James:
Yeah.
So I said, okay, let me look at those two. And I said, well, ledger has pretty good. And it was on sale at the time. It was a good deal at Thanksgiving. So I bought one at Thanksgiving, I got it in and I moved my crypto to the ledger. The ledger is what I got first, and everything was good, no problems. And then I realized if I lose my seed phrase, what am I going to do? I’m going to lose my crypto. So I said, okay, I’ve got a few online or digital type wallets that I can store information on. I’ve got a password remembering database. Lemme put it in there. So I put it in there, and then I found out later on, you’ve never put your seed phrase in a digital form. I’m like, okay, okay, stupid me.
Travis Taylor:
And just to confirm the seed phrase, is that the, what’s it 12 or 24 passwords
James:
Or Right. That’s the one though that you can rebuild it. If you lose your device, you can rebuild it and move it off of that device. It’s just your access to the blockchain. So I said, well, I better get it off this trace or this leisure device. So I bought a tracer in its place, and by the time I bought it, it was beginning of February of 2021, and that was right when we had our annual outage start at the mill. And of course we’re working 12 hour shifts, sometimes 14 hours. And I really wanted to get this device in because I didn’t want somebody compromising it. And I said, okay. It finally came in. Okay, great. So I took it and I moved it from my ledger to my tracer and everything was good. I’m like, okay, awesome. And then I said, well gee, if I did that, because when I had the ledger device, it has an app for the iPhone, you can connect to Bluetooth from your phone to your ledger device through Bluetooth.
I’m thinking, okay, well all the devices have it, don’t they? I just assumed they did. So I went to the Apple app store and I said, okay, where’s the trace device app? Sure enough, there it was. So I downloaded the app and then I had the slash screen come up and looked pretty cool and said, okay, enter your password. I think it was password or passcode or something. I don’t remember exactly the term. And I said, well, okay, I’ll put the seed phrase in here. So I typed in my seed phrase and everything looked good and nothing happened. I thought it was going to reboot or restart the app and then get access to my coins from my device on my iPhone. Well, sure enough, nothing happened. So I put it in again just to make sure if something’s supposed to happen. It didn’t say, of course, I didn’t know.
Then I said, well, okay, it’s getting late. I got to go to bed. So about 10 o’clock I shut everything down or shut it off. And I went to bed, and then I think it was the next day I checked it, or two days later or something like that. And I said, well, let me check that app again. And I went on my phone and just nothing, it said, enter your phrase like, okay, what’s going on? So I said, well, lemme go check on my tray device. I brought my tray out and I connected it and I looked back and it said from the time I put it on about 10 o’clock that night, or when I shut everything down, about two or three in the morning is when there was a transfer out of my tray wallet to another
Address. I’m like, oh man, what just happened? And I’m thinking, did I do something wrong? Was it like maybe there’s a time zone difference? I’m thinking because so time zones are universal time code, and some are eastern. Like I’m in Eastern. So I thought it was just the time, but did I send it somewhere? I’m thinking to myself, did I send it? Where did I send it? If I sent it? And I looked and I said, I don’t remember doing that. So I just was wondering, and I thought it was something that I did. Of course I sent it somewhere. So I went and I thought, there’s someplace else on my trailer. I think there’s a hidden wallet or hidden part of your trace. So I looked into it a little bit more and I just realized, I think it was probably three weeks later once the whole outage ended that it was gone.
Travis Taylor:
Ouch.
James:
But this is how I realized it. I actually went to the Trace Forum on Reddit and I typed in, I just typed this, what happened, man? I typed my seed phrase into the app and it’s gone. And the guy says, there is no tracer app. I said, what? That’s when I realized instantly my heart sank. I just said, oh, really? Oh man. I was not really mad. I was more upset at myself for what I did, because when I look back, I said, okay, well probably the tray didn’t have Bluetooth connection. I remembered you had to plug it in, and then the power came on. So I’m like, yeah, there’s no power button on the device, so maybe there is no Bluetooth. So what’s the app then? And then I’m thinking, so I went back to the Apple app store and I searched for Trace again, and it’s not there anymore. Oh boy. And I still had it on my phone, but it wasn’t in the search engine anymore. I’m like, what’s going on? So that’s when it hit me like a ton of bricks. There is no tracer app
Travis Taylor:
Or there was rather, and then I got taken offline because it, no,
James:
It was somebody else’s build of, so-called Tracer app. Right.
Travis Taylor:
And I’m sorry, one quick thing here is what date did you download the app?
James:
I think it was early February.
Travis Taylor:
Right. Just for a little bit of background here, the Tracer app that was on the Apple App store was on there from January 22nd to February 3rd. So they took it down on February 3rd. So that’s, wait,
Beau Friedlander:
And when did you download it?
James:
Well, like I said, I don’t recall the exact date. I mean, I think I can look at my,
Beau Friedlander:
But towards the end of that run, right,
James:
Right. It was close. It was in early February.
Travis Taylor:
Yeah. Yeah. Not to rub salt in the wound, but it sounds like that’s pretty close to when they discovered something was off.
Beau Friedlander:
Yeah, missed it by that much.
Travis Taylor:
Yep.
James:
I know. Isn’t that crazy? Well, there’s apparently been a number of different trader apps that show up on the app store, and of course, after a period of time certain people get scanned, they just take it down.
Beau Friedlander:
So we were kind of amazed about this situation, and Travis got in touch with Apple to see if they might say something other than what they’d already said to the media. And sadly, Travis, not so much. Yeah,
Travis Taylor:
They gave me a couple things. They first of all gave me a cand response, which was a direct quote from what they said when the news first broke in early 2021,
Beau Friedlander:
Which means that they sat around a room and really figured out that response. And that’s their story and they’re sticking to it.
Adam Levin:
That’s kind of like the oops moment.
Travis Taylor:
And so, I mean, part of their language is saying, study after study has shown that the App store is the most secure app marketplace in the world, and we’re constantly at work to maintain that standard and to further strengthen the app source protections, which
Beau Friedlander:
No, I saw it. And they also, they’re listing the thousands of reps that they don’t allow and they spike. But the fact is that for all of that bluster that they threw at us, there’s the fact that, and maybe they release a thousand apps a month, something like that, cold
Adam Levin:
Comfort to someone who’s a victim of a scam. But you
Beau Friedlander:
Have this Apple thing, Adam, you have this logo. It says, that says, trust me, man, a apple.
Adam Levin:
But this is an example of where people look at a logo and hope that they see a shield, but unfortunately it’s not necessarily a shield.
Beau Friedlander:
No, it’s just a logo. It’s just a piece of marketing, and it has nothing to do with the product, unfortunately. So in this case, the product was, I mean, is it fair, Adam, to say the product was faulty Travis?
Travis Taylor:
Yeah, I’d say absolutely. I think one thing I’d like to be able to hear too though, is if you tried to get in touch with Apple, what their response was.
James:
Yes. I was just about to say, I called Apple after I realized and I said, okay, well, they need to have accountability for an app, which was a phishing app. Because again, their whole premise is that their app store is maintained. It’s the best in the world, it’s secure. All the apps are safe, everything’s good. That’s why I downloaded the Tray app. I said, okay, it’s got an app. Great. I trust it. It’s here. It says Trace. So I mean, why would I question it if they had let’s slam
Beau Friedlander:
On the brakes? Were there reviews? Do you
James:
I don’t remember, but I’m thinking if it’s, well, vaguely, if I remember, there’s probably about three stars, and I think someone who said, well, it needs more functionality, that type of thing.
Adam Levin:
But also the question too is that it may have had three stars, but how many people actually reviewed it? And I always feel that when I go to the app store, if I see very few reviews on anything, I get a little nervous because either it’s too new and I’d rather someone else experiment with it before I do, or there’s something wrong in River City.
Beau Friedlander:
The fact is, this is the best advice you can possibly get. James, what Adam just said is a hundred percent right. But Adam, I’ve definitely downloaded, I downloaded a game that was so clearly just designed to steal my data, but it looked like a fun game. I’ve done it out of curiosity to see whether or not I would get hacked, which always amuses Travis. But the fact is, if I need it, I don’t always follow my own rules, which is there should be a lot of reviews. They should be basically positive.
Travis Taylor:
This should be recent as well. One thing that the Apple rep wrote back to me that I thought was interesting was they said that the Trader app was initially marketed as a cryptography app, not a cryptocurrency app. So
Beau Friedlander:
What’s the difference?
Travis Taylor:
Cryptography. That was just supposed to be an app to help secure your email. So what they did was they released this to the app store and said, this is a cryptography app. It is not a cryptocurrency app. And then as soon as it got approved by Apple, then they swapped it out for the thing that stole your seed phrase. And by proxy your cryptocurrency, which it’s sort of the equivalent of when you go to the airport and they scan your bags, and then after they’re done scanning them, you can just take your bag back and put another bag on there and say it’s still safe. It was as much of a social engineering thing as it was a sophisticated hack, because this shows a pretty big loophole in their security here, that they can just replace the app with a scam app after it’s already been vetted and
James:
Approved. That is exactly what the concern is. And that’s exactly what happened. Yes.
Travis Taylor:
Right. So it’s looking for a lot of reviews is indeed important, but if it’s something where it goes from having five stars and then the most recent things in the last month or two, or with the most recent version are one star, that’s another huge red flag.
James:
Well, for myself in general, if I just look for a utility app or a game app or something, that’s where stars are important to me. But I’m talking about, this was an OEM sold to me as an OEM app. So I’m not going to go and download an app for Tracer that’s not a tracer manufacturer.
Beau Friedlander:
This was supposed to be an original equipment manufacturer app.
James:
That’s correct. I had no questions because it’s a trace app for my trace device. Why would there be any question? Right.
Beau Friedlander:
Did they market it as OEM? I’m curious because that means they’re going after
James:
Dudes. Sure. They had the logo and everything. The name,
Beau Friedlander:
No, OEM specifically that term. Do you remember if they used OEM?
James:
I don’t believe OEM was on on there. No, I just
Beau Friedlander:
Was curious because that would mean they were really going after dudes our age.
James:
But like I said, maybe I said it before, but I believe Tracer has made many appeals to Apple to say we will never have an official app for an iPhone ever. They’ve mentioned this multiple times to Apple, and yet there still seems to be apps that get on the app store. There was more than one too.
Adam Levin:
Now, did you lose money that you don’t have to total the amount of money for anybody, but I mean, so
James:
I lost, yes, it was about $20,000 worth.
Adam Levin:
Whoa,
James:
But you think that’s a lot of money. I’m in touch with another fellow who had the same, he was a victim of the same app and the same situation almost. He lost 18, almost 18 Bitcoin.
Adam Levin:
Oh,
Beau Friedlander:
18 Bitcoin at $45,000 a coin. I’m horrible at math, but that’s a lot of money. That’s the biggest tractor I can imagine. I want to buy one. Anyway,
James:
Three quarters of a million dollars.
Beau Friedlander:
How much?
James:
Three quarters of a million dollars.
Travis Taylor:
Ouch. God. The total here was that five people ended up reporting. Not sure if you specifically reported this to the authorities, five people reported getting robbed by this app from the iOS version out of a thousand that downloaded it. And the total losses are supposed to be in the neighborhood of $1.6 million.
Beau Friedlander:
Did you report it to the police?
James:
Like I said, I called Apple and got the standard typical can response. I filed the FBI cyber crime division. I filed a report there. I’ve never gotten any replies, but I filed there. It was also a crypto recovery service from the uk, which really didn’t do much for me. So they said, we’re not going to pursue your case at the time at this time. So it just means we’ll never get to it.
Adam Levin:
No, the problem is that unless you have critical mass on something, the FBI doesn’t really get involved.
James:
Right. No, I’m not expecting. It’s just I wanted to make sure I follow with
Adam Levin:
The proper Oh, absolutely. You were totally right to do it, to notify them. And this is tragic, and someone goes, well, it was 20,000. 20,000 is a lot of money.
James:
Well, 20,000 back in February in May. I guess around Mother’s Day it peaked probably would’ve been worth over 30,000. And there’s some expecting that crypto will eventually get up to a lot higher, and it could have been worth a hundred thousand. So there’s just a lot of possibilities with that.
Adam Levin:
So James, you got no justice on this deal at all, right?
James:
Zero help. Zero of any support whatsoever.
There has been another fellow who lives in California who has been in touch with the friend that lost the 18 Bitcoin, and he’s wanting to get his money back. I think he had a same similar situation himself, and I haven’t been in touch with this other fellow, but he seems to be a little going his own way. So we’ll let him go his own way. Philippe and myself, he’s the fellow who lost 15 or 17 Bitcoin. Him and I are kind of working together. There’s a case that was recently filed, which it’s pretty interesting because what they’re doing is they’re suing Apple and it’s a nine count class action lawsuit against Apple for allowing a phishing app. Oh, yes. And this, it is looking pretty good for us because it said there’s a phishing app in the app store disguised as a cryptocurrency wallet, and it’s looking pretty interesting. So Philippe has been in touch with this lawyer who’s been putting this case together, and I think there’s some interest that they may pursue it for us as well. So,
Adam Levin:
Well, my feeling has always been that people talk about regulators, but the ultimate regulators of the American economic system or class action lawsuit attorneys. Because if enough people band together and you can convince a court, you can definitely get some relief. It’s just a question of how much and what the settlement would be. But I think you’re doing the right thing, being aggressive and staying on it, and not just simply saying, ah, shucks, and walking away. I mean, money’s money and it’s also principle involved. And you could be helping a lot of other people by participating in an action like this.
Travis Taylor:
I was about to say, it’s also important just to make sure, even if you didn’t get a response from the FBI that anytime something like this happens that it gets reported. Because one of the things that they’ll look into for whether or not they should bother andfor or bother following up there are how many people and how much money was involved. So if people are failing to report that, then that means it’s not on their radar. If you have five, 10, a hundred people reporting this, then that actually escalates it as a priority and also escalates their outreach efforts just to make sure that people are being educated about it, that Apple’s aware, et cetera.
Beau Friedlander:
If you’re listening to this, and you may have experienced some kind of scam of this sort yourself, listen, when you go to the police department and report this, it’s a pain in the butt. But I’ll tell you, it’s worth doing and it’s worth taking the time because you’re not only taking care of yourself, but you’re actually making the world. I’m serious, it’s going to sound ridiculous, but you’re going to making the world a better place because the only way that these holes get plugged is by people doing their civic duty and reporting when something goes wrong. And so take the extra 20 minutes that it’s going to take to get the cop who doesn’t want to fill out a report and is trying to tell you that I had one tell me once James, oh, well, we don’t do that here. Well,
Adam Levin:
There are a number of police departments where they just don’t want to do it. And that’s why many people are beneficiaries now of programs that are available to help them through cyber or identity incidents, because these organizations of professional fraud experts, they can get through to police departments that may not be as willing to take complaints as they should. And that’s what you should also look into. You should look into through your company, do they have a program to help people? Because many employee benefit programs now have identity theft or cyber incident programs to help people through these situations because companies have realized how important it is not to have distracted employees as well as it’s important for the company to know that if an employee had an incident, because it could directly impact how they operate with the company.
James:
That’s true. Yeah. Our employee assistance program does offer a lot of services. I’ll have to look into that
Adam Levin:
Check into, because you might be surprised that with companies that have programs like this, there are those that are deeply discounted, but there are others that are free as a perk of your relationship with the company. So check it out.
Beau Friedlander:
So I have a question for you, James. Are you back in crypto?
James:
Oh, yes. That didn’t deter me.
Beau Friedlander:
Excellent,
James:
Excellent. I learned a very hard lesson, a lesson that I will never repeat. Obviously I know what to do. I know how to do it. I’ve secured my new pass phrases or passcodes or seed phrase. I’ve secured that by fire flood. Nothing’s going to hurt it. It’s not been near a phone. It’s not been near a video camera. I’ve never spoken the words. What are those seed phrases I’ll tell you later? So yeah, I’m
Adam Levin:
Surprised Bo hadn’t asked you for your phone number or your social security number yet, but he’ll get around
Beau Friedlander:
To that. I have some boundaries. Come on. So yeah, that’s great news. I mean, that is a victory. That is a victory.
James:
You learn the hard way onward. Well, and there was Twitter, I should say. There was Reed Erti, he’s a Washington Post reporter, and he’s the one who put the article up on the Washington Post about Philippe and myself. And there was a lot of a Twitter firestorm over it, a lot of negative comments about how you guys are idiots and what do you think You’re dumb. You should never do this. Never put your seed phrase in a computer or in an app or anything, blah, blah, blah. It’s easy for them to say until they’re caught by some scam themselves. But there was a lot of support for us and for what happened to us. They were sympathetic in a lot of cases. I mean, there’s really nothing anybody could do at that point, but it was just nice to see that he posted that article and it was an article written very well, and there was nothing wrong with it whatsoever. But there’s also another company you’ve probably heard of, the recent oil company that had the Bitcoin scam or Bitcoin
Adam Levin:
Colonial Pipeline.
James:
Yeah, colonial Oil. Well, they used a company called Slow Mist, and I’m not advocating them at all, but I’ve heard that Philippe has filed with them, and they may be able to also get some of our, they’re a very good blockchain analyst company, so apparently they can possibly help too if they can get, however, what was it, $6 million back for Colonial Oil? They can possibly get some back for us, it’s not hard to follow where the money went. You just follow from what account to what account and where it goes. It’s not hard to find out where it is right now. So unless they moved it to an exchange and then the exchange is accountable for a hacking account,
Beau Friedlander:
Well, we wish you much luck in hoovering that back into your life
Adam Levin:
History always favors those who are not the meek. And clearly in this situation, you are not going quietly into that good night, and God bless you for that.
James:
Absolutely not. No, I will never stop. Well,
Adam Levin:
Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your story with us Again, it’s so important that people do this. We want people to tell their story and to feel open and honest about it. And we’re going to give you open and honest feedback. And again, we can’t thank you enough for having the courage to come on and talk about this. This is important.
James:
Thank you. I appreciate it. And again, if somebody can learn from my mistakes and not repeat it, that’s what I’m here for. It’s what it’s all about. Take
Beau Friedlander:
Care. James. Thanks so much. Thanks a lot. Thank
James:
You. Okay, thank you fellas.
Beau Friedlander:
So James did something that I’ve done, Adam, which is freaked out that I lost all my money in crypto, only in my case. It didn’t happen. I was able to figure out what had happened. But I think everyone on, I don’t know about Travis, but I know you’ve had experiences where you weren’t able to access an account. It’s so important to get this right, to get the cyber around crypto if you have it right.
Adam Levin:
Well, the crazy thing is, and Travis worked with me through this, but this is where it was a highly respected site that said, oh no, we want you to have more security. So we’d like you to use your Google Authenticator, which I did. And for whatever reason, it didn’t sync up properly and I was barred from doing anything at a particular moment where it was the difference between over $4,000 and something and 2,500, and it was a one week. That’s all it took one week.
Beau Friedlander:
I know
Adam Levin:
It’s like, let me in. I’m in. I’m at the door.
Beau Friedlander:
But it’s great that it didn’t let you in. Actually, if you think about it, if you think about what the opposite of not letting you in is and letting someone else in, it’s, it’s amazing how important it is to get this right. And then if you don’t figure out how to get it right, because it’s okay to mess up, but it’s not okay to mess up and then continue messing up. You got to learn from your mistakes, brush yourself off and get ’em. And that was cool that James is back in the game.
Adam Levin:
Oh, I totally agree. And I think points out another thing that we talked about earlier in the show, which is that if you think about it, in the old days, a logo on a shield would either make people feel comfortable that the shield was standing in front of them or scare people half to death, that someone holding the shield was coming at them with a sword. And there are many companies where the shield is really the shield, but there’s no absolutes in cybersecurity other than you will have a cyber incident sometime in your life. And it’s just important to know what the threats are and know how best to protect yourself. What the Hack is, a Loud Tree Media production in partnership with Larj media. That’s LARJ Media. You can find What the Hack wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to follow us on social media and find additional information at adamlevin.com.
