 Linus 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 atlinus 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 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 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 Know, 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 LinusTech 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 LinusTech 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 individual's 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, 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 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 of similar attacks being used on Boogie and Leafy, with the same group claiming responsibility for stealing Lily 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 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 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 LinusTechTips.com and incoming mail heading to the at LinusMediaGroup.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 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 LinusTech Twitter handle moving forward will be the official Twitter for the LinusTech tips video publication, and I will be starting a new personal Twitter account, LinusGSebastian. 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 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 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 Superfund next, right? Well, it might take a while, but it's gonna happen. Well, that's probably gonna be a while, but in the meantime, if you have to fix any electronics, ifixit.com is your go-to place. From their 19,000 free step-by-step repair guides to their huge inventory of replacement parts, to their tools with lifetime warranties, Iixit has got your repair needs covered. We use their stuff all the time, but my go-to is the ProTech Toolkit, 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 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, their plastic opening tools, their suction cups, the metal spudgers, the Jimmy Pry 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 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.