Take the Bite Out of the AI Hacking Scare

You’ve probably been seeing some scary news reports. Things like AI, 70% of websites, the Internet is going to kill us all, that kind of stuff. Or you’re not on the same nerdy side as Twitter as I am. But that’s okay. That’s what we’re gonna talk about today at tool time, and we’re gonna take the bite out of it.

Here’s the quick version. The kind of hacking we’re talking about now used to take years and took very specialized and very talented people, and right now it’s just taking a guy with a laptop and a well trained AI saying, hey, go hack this. That’s what happened in the last couple of weeks. We’ve had a lot of websites go down. We’ve had government websites go down all because of a thing called PHP.

Doesn’t matter. You don’t even need to know what that stands for. I don’t even know what it stands for. Anyway, don’t worry about it. Here are the five things I want you to do or I want you to check.

Alright? It’s just five. Super boring, super easy, and it takes about five minutes apiece. K? So split it up over the next like week.

You ready? Alright. Number one, get a password manager. I don’t care that password manager is one password, Apple passwords, the, Google version, Google passwords, whatever. It doesn’t matter.

Just have a passwords manager. You don’t need to remember your passwords. Okay? It doesn’t help you. You need to remember the one password that lets you in to your big password manager and your passwords need to be crazy long and annoying.

It is super crazy and is super annoying, but it’s the only way that’s going to keep you safe. Rule number two, stop using text messaging for two factor authentication if your system allows it. Things like your bank and specifically your email. You’ll want to use an app. Remember that whole Okta video we did a couple weeks ago?

It’s that but for your email. Google has it built in. Office three sixty five has it built in. They all have some version of it. Use that.

If it says two factor authentication or 2FA one of them is text and one of them is an app, choose the app and because you did step one with your password manager, step two becomes easy because guess what? It provides the code. Look at that synergy. Number three, this one’s super annoying. You’ll get an email from Amazon and you’ll get an email from your DocuSign or your email or whatever, and it’ll say something like click the link to log in and it’ll look super legit.

It’ll say it’s from your bank. It’ll have all the information to look formatted correctly. All I want you to do is just go to a different website, go to a webpage, a browser of any kind and type in chase.com instead and log in there and look at messages on there. The reason for that is the crackers are getting really, really good at it’s called spoofing. Sorry.

Little lingo, little hacker lingo for you. The crackers are getting really good at spoofing. I don’t know who comes up with these names. Anyways, really spoofing those emails, both the addresses and the actual format of the emails. Okay?

So we’re no longer clicking on the links. We’re now going to the websites. I know it’s annoying, but whatever it is. Turn on automatic updates on everything. Your phone, your computer, everything.

And I know you guys, I have been zooming with you a lot and I have been looking at a lot of your computers and I know for a fact at the top right of your Chrome, it says update available. K? Update everything all of the time. It’s annoying and I hate it too. And you need to update because if you don’t update, you’re gonna get hacked or you’re gonna get cracked and you’re gonna lose all your honey.

Sorry. Money. Alright? Last thing. Okay.

This one isn’t super duper crazy important, but it’s important to me. If you have a website that is not sothebysrealty.com, I want you to send an email to your website builders, the people who made it and said, Hey, did you do the latest updates? Is there anything I need to worry about? They’ve getting these emails a lot. They’re going to be a little annoyed, but it’ll be fine because you need to know.

Most of you, if you use luxury presence, don’t worry about it. I already checked. They did. If you use somebody else, just send them an email and ask. It’s worth knowing.

Odds are your website doesn’t use PHP, so it doesn’t even matter, but do it anyway. Just send the email and ask. That way if something bad happens, you can say, look, sent an email and asked. Cool. Last thing, and this one’s only a little spooky.

I know I said five things, but I’m doing six. It’s really easy to clone your voice. It like takes a six second snippet of you talking for AI to be good enough to fool your grandma and probably your brother. So please get a safe word with your family. Safe word can be whatever you want.

I don’t care. Mine’s bandit. I’m kidding. It’s not. But you just have a safe word where you talk to your people either in person or on the phone.

Do not ever text it. Do not ever email it. And I know that sounds crazy, but they’re calling it Black October, which is like Red October except the submarines or AI agents that have gone crazy and are hacking everybody. I mean, who saw the movie Titanic? They were very important in the movie Titanic.

Who saw it? Show of hands. Not really sure what movie you’re talking about. I’m sure you got the title right. Titanic?

I think you’re thinking of the hunt for Red October. No. I’m Leo DiCaprio. Come on. This video is going long.

I apologize. Do those six things, and I will thank you forever. Hope you have a great rest of your week and a better rest of your year, and we’ll talk next week about home stuff. Love you. Bye.