Crypto YouTuber hacked out of $2 million during a livestream

Ian Balina, a popular cryptocurrency evangelist and YouTuber known for his ICO reviews was hacked out of $2 million during a YouTube live stream session.

It was just a standard live stream session where Balina was reviewing an ICO to his 116,000 subscribers when one of his viewers asked:

“Ian, did you know that somebody transferred all your tokens from your account?” “Hope that it’s controlled movement.”

Balina did not pay much attention to the comment and carried on with his live session, however, just after 15 minutes his live chat suddenly went down.

After a few hours, Balina returned to finish the review and said that his previous live stream was cut off by a power outage. However, during the second livestream, Balina noticed that something was wrong.

He discovered that he had been mysteriously signed out of his Google Sheets profile where he tracked his crypto holdings.

Balina found out he was hacked and had to end his live stream immediately. Later, on his Telegram channel, Balina revealed about the hack and asked for help from his 26,000 Telegram followers:

“Hey Crypto Family, I need you now more than ever.

“I had to end today’s live stream abruptly because I am being hacked.”

Crypto Family, I need you now more than ever. I ended today's live stream b/c I am being hacked. I'm not worried about the money. I learned my lesson. I only care about catching the hacker. Please email any information to [email protected]. Thank you all the support. $ETH $BTC

Ian Balina (@DiaryofaMadeMan) April 16, 2018

He also mentioned three Ethereum wallet addresses that he was struggling to track.

He also tweeted the incident later and said that he was “not worried about the money” but was only concerned about “catching the hacker”. Balina mentioned his Gmail address and asked his followers to share any information they find out about the hack.

It later came out that Balina had been hacked during his live stream session when all of his digital tokens were stolen from his wallet that included more than 20 million Nucleus Vision, 2 million Pareto Network, 1 million Loom and others.

Balina says that the hackers have already started to move his tokens to popular cryptocurrency exchanges like Binance and KuCoin.

He figured out that he was hacked because of his old college email address. In a now-deleted message he explained:

“This is how I think I got hacked. 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 a fast manner and gave up on it thinking it was just an old email.
I kept text versions of my private keys stored in my Evernote, as encrypted text files with passwords. I think they hacked my email using my college email and then hacked my Evernote”

Balina’s hack theory seems very odd for a crypto guru who knows crypto science very deeply and holds (held) millions in crypto but still does not take basic security measures. This does not sound right, right?

Well, whatever the reason behind the hack, it serves as a reminder to every crypto holder out there to follow proper security standards and stay awake while handling personal data and private keys.

Original Post: https://viraldocks.com/crypto-youtuber-hacked-out-million-livestream/