UPDATED 22:22 EST / APRIL 16 2018

EMERGING TECH

YouTube ICO guru hacked while livestreaming cryptocurrency investment advice

A YouTube guru who pitches initial coin offerings to a surprisingly willing audience has been hacked while livestreaming, the latest in a growing list of cryptocurrency-related heists.

Ian Balina, referred to favorably by some as a “cryptocurrency investor, adviser and evangelist,” but by others as a “shillmeister” thanks to many of his YouTube videos pitching dubious ICOs, was livestreaming when a user informed him that someone had moved tokens out of his wallet. Initially ignoring the warning, Balina later discovered something was wrong when he was required to sign back into Google to save changes to the spreadsheet he was using during the stream.

The amount stolen is believed to be around $2 million in various cryptocurrencies. But where the story gets better, depending on how you look at it, is how the funds were stolen: via Balina’s Evernote account, where he was storing private keys to his cryptocurrency wallets.

“This is how I think I got hacked,” Balina explained Monday. “My college email was listed as a recovery email to my Gmail. I remember getting an email about it being compromised, and tried to follow up with my college security to get it resolved, but wasn’t able to get it handled in fast manner and gave up on it thinking it was just an old email.”

He added that he kept text versions of his private keys stored in his Evernote account as encrypted text files with passwords. “I think they hacked my email using my college email, and then hacked my Evernote,” he said.

Balina is trying to play down the hack, saying that he’s not concerned about the lost cryptocurrency. But incident does raise an obvious question: Should users trust advice from someone who stores his security keys on a cloud website and is seemingly incapable of taking basic security precautions?

The theft wasn’t the only recent example of cryptocurrency-related crimes. While Balina was being hacked, across the Pacific a man in Taiwan was shot by gangsters following a dispute over his bitcoin mining operations. According to CCN, two suspects, Gao Qitang and Chen Yumin, shot Wu Nan after an investment they had placed in bitcoin mining equipment had gone sour thanks to the ongoing crackdown on the industry in mainland China.

Image: Pixabay

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