4 tips to keep your passwords safe

I know it has been almost a year since I published my last video on Youtube. And something is different... I’m speaking in English! And from now on all my content is going to be in English.

In the past few months, a lot has changed in my life. And when I say a lot I mean a lot. 

Today is about the happening that made me pause Youtube for so long. What happened was that I got hacked!

Back in June I was at lunch at a friend's house when I suddenly started to notice all these people following me on Instagram. At the beginning, I didn't pay much attention to it. As I was refreshing my profile page, I noticed that I was following lots of accounts involuntarily. I had no idea who these people or accounts were. I immediately thought this couldn't be normal. I had probably been hacked by some app or something that follows people who buy followers or have these apps that bring you followers. I don’t know.

So, I changed my Instagram password and it stopped right away. That indicates that whatever was doing that had access to my previous password. It was so bizarre looking at the screen and seeing all these accounts being followed and I was doing nothing. It was like my Instagram had a life of its own or a ghost was controlling it.

So I thought this was solved and I got back to my life. Minutes later I received a text from a person I know and he asked why my Youtube channel was deleted. I was like “WHAT?!” What do you mean? So I tried to access my YouTube channel, yeah... It had been deleted and I received no message from Youtube or Google explaining why this was happening. I didn’t freak out but I wondered what happened. I tried reaching out to Youtube through e-mail and all I got was automatic responses telling me to do this and that which got me thinking that no actual human was looking into my situation. It was all about filling up forms after forms and getting automatic replies. And this kept on for a few days. No response from Youtube and my channel was deleted.

Then this other YouTuber I know who had already had a similar problem like mine told me to watch videos on Youtube about situations like this. And I did. And one of those videos was with this guy also complaining about the automatic replies from Youtube and that no one was taking care of his situation. So he found out about a Twitter account named TeamYoutube. It's kind of a support account and they actually talk to you, real humans. So I turned to Twitter and started to post on their account, endlessly until I got someone’s attention and they took a look at what was going on. They slowly responded and they were looking at it. On the same day my account was back online, the url was the same but the channel was completely different. They named it MicroStrategy Lab and unlisted all my videos and published I think they were crypto currency content. Youtube probably deactivated my channel because of all these weird movements that were taking place and because the videos they published were against Youtube rules. It took me about 3 weeks to get my channel back to full capabilities.

After this I changed all my Google accounts passwords and I can’t say I trust Google with my passwords anymore. Because I had two-factor authentication and this still happened. Weirdest thing. Basically I store all my passwords in a Password Manager that’s totally independent from Google.

And I thought all this was over but guess what? Nope, my Twitter account was also hacked. The people that did it were also related to cripto because they published a couple of cripto ads on my account. And someone tried to access my Microsoft account as well but the Two-factor authentication worked and they didn’t get lucky.

I was in this situation for almost a month. Accounts being hacked or someone trying to hack them but without success. Thank God.

As you can imagine, after all this happened, I lost my motivation to make Youtube videos. I was posting every other week and after a month of not posting I kept pushing it to next week and the next, and the next. And here we are almost a year later. And of course, other stuff happened in my life that I’ll be addressing here soon.

I want to leave you guys with 4 tips to keep your passwords and accounts safe:

1. Have a password manager an independent one that is not related to any browser what so ever. I use LastPass I have been using it for the past year and a half.

2. Change your passwords from time to time.

3. Don’t use the same password for every account. If someone gets access to it they get access to your entire life.

4. Don’t go for simple ones related to you or your life. You shouldn't make them your birthday or your cat's name. The good thing about Last pass is that it generates random passwords so you don’t have to. And these are not easy to crack. Good luck hackers!

I’m sure there are a lot more tips out there but these were the ones I could remember.

Thanks for being here I’ll see you soon. Adios!