So I am connected with Kim, a woman on LinkedIn and she owns
a skincare brand, and she wanted me to be an advisor for
her company.
I've been in the beauty industry for years now, so I get
requests like this all the time.
She told me that they were a smaller company and can't pay
a lot, and I was honestly totally okay with that because
I love beauty and I know what it's like to be in a startup.
So I was happy to help. Because I don't really know her,
I decided to do some digging.
I browsed through her connections,
I looked at her website, I also scrolled through her social media
accounts, and it all looked really legit.
Her engagement was a little bit low, but I just assumed it
was because she was brand new to the industry.
Regardless, I asked her to send me more info, so she sent
me a link to a document and said it included confidential
information about the business.
I clicked on the link and was prompted to sign in with my
Gmail account, so I logged in and I got an error message.
It literally wasn't even 30 seconds, but I got a notification
from my Gmail on my phone saying my two factor authentication
has been enabled on my email account.
I'm like "what?" I was so confused.
My heart was racing.
I didn't know what was happening, and that's when it struck
me: Kim used that link to hack me.
She changed my password and enabled two factor authentication.
I heard about the two factor authentication before, and I
keep telling myself, if I had turned it on, this probably
would have never happened.
And because Kim turned it on for me, there was no way I could
reset my password or log in to my email account.
Guys, if you don't have your two factor authentication enabled
or turned-on on your apps, your emails, your social media
accounts, do it now.
And if someone sends you a link that makes you log in, don't
do it.
As much as we all hate picking up our phones, you need to
verify who you're talking to, take it from me.