Cybersecurity Best Practices to Protect Your Wealth | Left Brain Wealth Management Webinar

All right, everybody, thanks so much for joining today. We're very excited for our first ever cybersecurity webinar. This is a really important topic, and cybersecurity is an issue that's really growing in severity as far as bad guys having bad tools to do harm to good people. So we're happy to jump on and kind of go through, talk about some tips some things that you can do to protect yourself. We're going to start out talking about some things that Left Brain is doing to keep you safe. And we're hoping you get a lot out of it. Looking forward to your feedback for afterward. Who knows? It's something that we may do as maybe an annual. Hopefully all of our clients and everybody listening will be so cyber ready that we won't have a need to do this in the future. Let's keep our fingers crossed. All right. Are we up with the presentation? Awesome. All right. So let's jump right in. I think you guys know who the team is. We're really excited today. This will be the first presentation that we've done with the topic where we actually have brought in a guest. We have— I'll be introducing Nick here in just a second, but we have a cyber expert. A couple of things logistically. As Nick is going through kind of talking about some phishing, some other things to protect yourself, I'm sure you guys are going to have questions. You're going to want to react to things. In the interest of time, we will be taking questions. I'm going to encourage you to grab a pen and paper to write those down. Or better yet, at the very bottom of your screen, you're going to see a Q&A bar at the bottom. You can actually just post your questions there. We will see them as they come in. And then at the end of the presentation, Nick will get a chance to answer. So don't hesitate and you can just start firing right away. So I think you guys know who the internal team is, myself, Freddy and Brian. We also have China, who helped us out and created the presentation file, Nick, and set up the webinar. So many thanks to her. And I think you guys also know Marina, who's our Director of Client Relations. She's a participant today as well. A few things that you guys should know that we're doing as a team to keep you guys safe. The one thing that we do do as a firm is we dual authenticate. So for any money request inbound or outbound, you guys will typically do what you normally do, which is to send that— either give us a call or send an email, whatever you choose. And then we will verify you, and then we will dual authenticate the request before the transaction actually happens. And we're generally going to do that via text message. And again, we just do that for safety as a double check. The other thing that we do is for document sharing. You know, here recently, the last couple of years, not only are we doing 401(k) reviews, but we also do income tax reviews. After you get your tax done, we often request you send us the tax return. And the documents we're asking for are really sensitive. They have sensitive information in there. So email is not the best way to share. What's best to do is to use our secure vault. So all of you guys have this on our website. You just go to Wealth Tracker and once you're in Wealth Tracker, each of you have your own personal portal in there. You can go to the vault section of the portal and you can share documents. You can just upload them. We can share documents with you. It's a much safer form of getting us information. And that's the other thing that we're doing to make sure that we can do all we can to give the bad guys a really hard time. And then last but not least, I know we have many sites that you guys have access to. You see here a picture of our home page. I know a lot of you go in to check your account every day. You can do that a few ways. On the right, we have the investment tracker. We actually have a, a Left Brain app that I'll be talking about at the end. But it shows you the same data as the investment tracker. Then we have Wealth Tracker that I just spoke about, which is where your personal vault is. And then finally, I know a lot of you go to Charles Schwab directly. Most of the accounts that we manage are at Charles Schwab. We encourage you, if you're visiting any of these sites, to come to our web portal first and then link through here. And the reason being is there's been a lot of malicious activity where people set up these spoof sites. I think— I don't know if that's the technical name for it, Nick, but they put up these sites that look like real sites. I know Charles Schwab sent out a memo a few weeks ago that a lot of bad guys had an impersonation site that looked like Charles Schwab and then ask you for your credentials, but it wasn't actually Charles Schwab. So be really careful. If you just go to the internet and you just Google a name like Charles Schwab or even your bank, A lot of times the bad guys can actually be in the rank of Google search. So you have to be really, really careful. So we ask you to always come to our website first and then link through our website. And then finally, there are a couple of resources that we, that we offer you. And we put these in the chat. These come directly from Charles Schwab. One of them is an online checklist of things that you should be doing to protect yourself. And then the other one is how to handle fraud or identity theft if you have an issue. And then finally, if you have something where you think your Charles Schwab account may be compromised, there is a phone number there at the bottom right of the screen where you actually can call this Schwab cyber team and they'll be able to handle and help you directly. And again, those resources we put right in the chat box. So without further ado, we're going to turn it over to Nick. We're really excited to have Nick, Nick Ohls. He's been a cyber expert and been in the industry for about 15 years. He has experience not just working with individuals, but the U.S. military he's worked with. He's taught before, and he's also worked with, with enterprises and institutions. So we think we got the right person to help us and to keep us all safe. So Nick's going to talk to us about things we should all be doing to protect ourselves. And then I'll be back at the end for, for wrap-up and for Q&A. So without further ado, Nick, we're really excited that you could join us today. We're really excited that you're going to be telling all of us what we can do to keep us and our money safe. And hopefully at the end of it, we're going to feel like we're at— from a technical standpoint, we're on the cutting edge.

Yeah, thanks, Nolan. So super excited to be here with you all. As Nolan gave a little bit about my background, so I've been doing this for a long time. Most of my experience is in incident response, so responding to bad things happening on networks, to people's accounts, things like that, dealing a lot with, you know, some of these bad actors that Nolan talked about that are really criminals in nature. You know, the end result usually is to get money out of people or to steal things from people and sensitive information. So we're going to talk about a lot of those things today. Really excited to be with you guys tonight and kind of leverage Left Brain leaning forward to get this in front of you guys because it is an important topic. So some of the things that we'll cover today. So how to avoid and recognize phishing scams, the difference between phishing and spam. We'll just cover that at a high level of what the different terms are, what they mean, how that applies to you in your everyday life. Some best practices to secure your accounts and devices. So kind of overarching things to do to help yourself out to to make it harder for these bad people to do things to some of the good people here on the call. I've got a ton of real-world examples of cyber fraud. I've seen all kinds of stuff all over the world, you know, finance-based, ransomware attacks, things like that. A lot of these are phishing-based. That's kind of why I wrote a book on phishing. But we'll cover some of those, and I've got some real-world examples that I can share, and then some immediate steps you can take, you know, at the end of this call or even during this call, really, to help protect yourself. In the cyber realm. So first, we're going to talk about phishing tactics. So email phishing, this is the number one infection vector across the board of all incidents that I ever see. Everyone's got email accounts. Everyone that has an email account receives phishing emails. Phishing emails are messages where attackers or criminals or malicious people with bad intentions send emails to individuals impersonating something, pretending to be something, trying to trick you to do something to click a link or provide some sort of sensitive information. That is the bulk of the attacks, but there are other attacks that criminals use to target individuals. Those could be voice calls, so voice phishing, where they'll call you on a landline or a cell phone or a work number and elicit information or entice information from you. There's SMS phishing, where they'll send you a text message that's got a link in it, or it's requesting sensitive information. They're getting— the intent is to try and get you to respond or interact with that link. And then finally, one of the newer ones, QR code phishing. So QR codes are newer. You scan them on your phone. They use the camera and the web browser on your phone to go to a specific page. Attackers are now using that. They're embedding those in emails or text messages or whatever delivery method they can, asking you to scan that QR code. You think, because I'm scanning it on my phone, that there's no risk to it, or you're not really thinking. You scan it, it takes you to that malicious site, and again, achieves the same the same end result of either a piece of malware being installed or information being stolen from you. So how they do this, you know, attackers use tricks and deception to steal your information and your personal and financial information. Some of those tactics, they'll use emails that look very convincing. They have embedded links. They have attachments. They're impersonating a trusted resource. So Nolan mentioned like Charles Schwab before. They could, take a Charles Schwab logo, put that in the email, send it to you, and impersonate Charles Schwab. They could take an individual from Charles Schwab or any other, you know, organization or bank or entity, but the goal in all of these messages is to send you a convincing email or text message or a phone call, whatever that is, and they're getting you to click a link or interact with an attachment or send sensitive information. Those are the only 3 things that happen in phishing emails in 99.999% of all cases. We will look at some real phishing attempts as we go on in the presentation, and I'll teach you guys— I cover this a lot more in my book— but how to go through these messages methodically, pick out suspicious indicators, and then make that determination of whether or not this is a good or bad email and then how to handle it. So who do attackers target? Who do hackers target? Really anyone and everyone. There's no one that's off limits. Usually though, it's people that have money. Those are the best targets because almost all attacks are financially motivated. There are certain attacks that are going to be, you know, like government-run or government-focused, or they're called hacktivists. They're for a specific cause, but the end result in most cases is for these groups, these criminal enterprises, to make money off of the victims that they're leveraging. And then they will rinse and repeat. So they'll gather some money, they'll do more attacks, gather more money, and then they'll funnel that into different ventures that they have or to continue making attacks. I saw this statistic earlier this week. I thought it was super relevant and interesting for this crowd, but the FBI, Federal Bureau of Investigation, they have the Internet Crime Complaint Center, IC3. This is where they aggregate all of the cybercrime data that is reported to them over the year. and they do a bunch of really interesting reporting and statistics on that. But one of their main statistics was individuals over 60 reported the most complaints of cybercrime and suffered the greatest financial losses totaling nearly $5 billion. So over the last year, $5 billion were lost. That's only what was reported. I can guarantee you there was much more that wasn't reported. And a large segment of that was individuals over 60. There's a lot of reasons why that probably happens, but It's just an interesting fact to know that they released, I think that came out on Wednesday, so just a couple days ago. Some of the different kinds of phishing. So we've got general phishing. This is where just a very wide net is cast. So think like an organization sending 5,000, 10,000 emails. It's not very sophisticated. They're just looking for someone to click, and it's just a numbers game. The more emails they send, the higher the likelihood of someone interacting with that email. There's also spear phishing. This is a little bit more targeted where they might just take a specific group or a company or a department. So maybe I'm gonna just target the marketing department or the sales department of a company, or I don't know, one company in particular instead of all the companies in an organization or an area. And then there's whaling, the most targeted and restrictive of the three, and this is where you're going after one particular individual or entity or account or something like that. So think of an attacker targeting the CEO of a company, the CFO, the CIO, or a celebrity or a professional athlete or something like that. They're making a very crafted, targeted campaign just to that person. It probably only makes sense for that person receiving the email, but it's something that they're trying to gain information or, you know, financial records or money from that particular person. So this email, or this slide right here, we're going to cover, you know, how to spot a phishing email and then some of the social engineering tactics that are really prevalent. I've got this graphic here on the right that I put in my book. I love this. It's one of my favorite graphics to explain some of the tactics and the techniques that attackers use in social engineering. Social engineering is just the way that they trick you to to click and interact with these emails. So one of the first things that you'll see, your friend or supposed friend, someone's impersonating a friend or a trusted resource, sends you a strange message. This could be like, "Hey, I need help. Hey, I'm stranded. I'm lost. There was a natural disaster, a hurricane, flood, whatever, COVID. Like, I need your help. Send me some money. Bail me out." It's usually not your friend. They use things to heighten your emotions. So it's usually like some sort of adverse reaction or a windfall or something like that. Someone's lost, hurt, in trouble, they need your help. The request is urgent. They're almost always time-bound. So they might say you have a day to respond to this, you have a week, an hour, whatever that is, and that just gets people on edge. It gets people more anxious. They're more likely to interact with the email because there's a time-bound, even if there is no real adverse action. There's an offer that's too good to be true. So it's something, you know, it's the lottery that you never played. A sweepstakes you didn't enter, a bonus or something like that that doesn't apply to you. You're receiving help you didn't ask for. So someone reaches out to do something very generous to you, but you know, you didn't really ask for that. You don't really know them. It is, if it's too good to be true, it usually is. And then the sender can't verify or prove their identity. So if it's someone you don't know and you start asking questions, or it sounds a little off, and they can't, you know, verify who they are and say something that only you and them would know, like, that's usually a pretty strong indicator that this message is suspicious. We've got some steps here that we'll cover a little bit more in detail in some of these other slides. But really, like, the overarching theme here is that we're going to start at the bottom. We're going to look at some interesting things like the sender. We're going to look for spelling, odd greetings, urgency, if there's any links and attachments, and then, again, not to download unexpected attachments you don't know. But we'll cover that a little bit more in detail with some examples as we go on. So here's some tips, you know, just to get started that apply all over the board. These aren't just phishing specific. So one of my first like rules that I always advise individuals when teaching courses or responding to incidents, not to send sensitive information via email or text message. So Nolan talks a little about the portal that you guys have. That's outstanding. That's a great way to share sensitive information. What is not a great way is to send that in an email or a text message and get into the habit of doing that, because eventually there's a chance that that turns into, you know, a malicious actor impersonating someone requesting that information. You send it and it's gone. So always trying to use, you know, like portals and apps and things like that. That's usually a lot safer than just responding to emails and text messages. Using multifactor authentication everywhere possible. So almost every banking application, financial, you know, even a lot of emails right now, they will have the option to set up multifactor authentication. If you can, set it up. I mean, I know it takes an extra step or two, but it helps protect your account. It helps make it harder for the attackers to get in. Otherwise, all they need to do is compromise your password, and they can log in whenever they want. Update applications and devices. So all of my devices, my phone included, I always auto-update. I set my phone to update at night when I'm sleeping. It updates in the background. I wake up and it's updated. Same thing with my computer. I try and have that update off hours, any applications I'm using. These updates, they fix, you know, security vulnerabilities and bugs and things like that. So doing those makes them harder for the attackers to gain access to your computers unauthorized. Backing up sensitive information, you know, thumb drives are extremely cheap right now. You can buy those for next to nothing. You can save some of your important documents like tax returns and financial records, statements, things like that. If you do have an incident, your computer's compromised, or it just fails, you know, things get older and stuff like that, you've got that information somewhere else. It's a lot easier to recover if it's backed up preemptively. And then using strong passwords, and I have long here in parentheses. So length always trumps complexity. So you can have, you know, characters and numbers and stuff like that. But if it's like a 4 or 6-digit password, that's easily crackable. I always try to do like passphrases, like the dog jumped over, you know, the bridge or something like that. Something that's 10+ characters, a lot harder to crack than something that's 8 or less characters. So trying to get those long passwords can help, you know, protect your account, make it harder to crack. And make things a little bit more secure. So now we're going to go into some of my favorite things. So how to recognize phishing. If we can go to the next slide, we're going to go through some examples. So this email, there's nothing malicious about this in nature. This is just a test email. I went to, I spoke at a conference, a VetSecCon, so it was for veterans entering cybersecurity. This was the notification that I got picked for the talk. But what it does have, you know, it's got some great things that all emails have. At the very top, we've got the sender. This is Tom Marsland. It doesn't have his address, but it tells me who this is coming from. It's got a subject at the very top. It's got a greeting, "Hello from the team at FedSec." Then, the middle section, it says, "It's been a crazy year." That's the content. That's the body of the email where it's telling me what to do. And then, it's got some attachments at the bottom. Looks like a link and a phone number to call. But what we want to do, and we'll go into a little bit more of this, is when you get a message like this, we all get emails every single day, you want to scan this from the top to the bottom. So I always look at the sender and the subject first. Then I'm going to look at my greeting, then my content, and then any links and attachments and try and make an assessment whether or not I think this is legitimate, if there's any suspicious indicators and whatnot. Next slide, please. The first thing we're talking about is the sender recipient. So the sender is who is sending this message to me. I'm the recipient. I'm getting this email. When I look at this, if you look at this, is a lastpla— lastpass@secure-monitor.com. So when I see that initial sender address that's coming to me, I'm taking a look at that, and I'm thinking, does that make sense to me? Am I expecting email from them? Do I have a relationship with LastPass? You know, do I use this service? Do I use this product? Does it, does it make sense? Do I have previous communications with them? And then secondly, does this email account make sense? So for me, out of the gate, this is a little bit suspicious because I would expect LastPass to have something that's @lastpass.com because that's the name of the company, not secure-monitor.com. So that's kind of a suspicious indicator to me, like Maybe they're using a different email address, but maybe this is also something that's not normal, not accurate, not safe for me to interact with. And this is an example of this. So this is a phishing email that I responded to. It was a Chase email impersonation. So this individual had Chase for their banking account. They're a large, you know, financial institution. They had a relationship with them. They had sent, you know, information back and forth to them. And then they got this email. When we take a look at this email, we look at the sender address really quick, and we can break down these different parts of the sender address. This gets a little bit technical, but the important part here is, you know, we have this display name. That's who it's coming from. Online banking, not that suspicious, you know, could be, could not be, who knows. But then after the symbol, this is the subdomain, the domain, and the top-level domain. The subdomain right here is e., which is kind of odd, and then it's got Chase, and then it's got.com. The.com part, not really important for this part of it, but the important part is the attackers are using this subdomain e., um, to impersonate the actual chase.com domain. So when I see this, you know, at first glance I might overlook it, but if I take a closer look or I investigate this, you know, because I think there's some other indicators that are strong indicating this might be a phishing email. I would maybe catch this and say, "Hey, maybe my last Chase email didn't have this 'e.' or maybe they changed it," or something like that, but it would raise my senses a little bit. Next slide, please. The greetings. So I love greetings about emails. You know, this is used to establish trust amongst the individual that's receiving this message. So Nolan introduced me, he said, "My name is Nick." When I get an email that someone calls me Nicholas, I know right out of the gate either I've never talked to them, I've never met them before, it's a new relationship, or they have no idea who they're talking to because almost everyone I know that I talk to via email, my friends and my family, they all call me Nick. If I get a very generic greeting, you know, in this email right here from HSBC, it says, "Dear Sir, Madam." So they don't even know if it's a sir or a ma'am. In this email. Kind of interesting. Over here on the other email, they've got Gareth. Maybe, maybe that's the right greeting, maybe it's not, but these are things to take into account when you're looking through this email. Like, are they using the right name? Are they calling me what they normally call me? Is this something abnormal or something only, you know, a friend or family would know? Content analysis. So we talked a little bit, the slide that I showed you guys earlier that was in my book, about some of the things to look out for. The main things really, like a sense of urgency, some sort of negative action, a windfall, a false contest, if there's any sort of established trust they're trying to leverage, and then like empathy and support. So in this part of the scanning, you know, we've taken a look at the sender, we've taken a look at the greeting. Now we're looking at what's in the message of the body. What are they actually trying to get me to do? "Let me take a pause. Let me take a second, read what they're doing. Does this make sense to me? Is this something I need to be interacting with? And is it a suspicious indicator or not?" So one of the important things is none of these individually can be, you know, the sole indicator that is the end-all be-all. Like, if I see a weird greeting 100% of the time, that's a phishing email. That doesn't exist. If I see a weird sender 100% of the time, that's a phishing email. You really have to take a look at all of these different indicators and then make an assessment and say, "Okay, The greeting was weird. The content's weird. There's, you know, links and attachments that I don't expect. I shouldn't interact with this. And then you make that determination. So email attachments. So when I first started out, email attachments were huge in the industry. There was always malicious attachments being sent to people. Fortunately, a lot of the native email scanners and the things on your computer and your smartphone will remove malicious email attachments before they're delivered. So this is a lot harder. It's a lot easier for attackers to send you malicious links than as attachments, but they do still happen. When you're thinking about— if we can go back really quick— when we're thinking about attachments, you know, these ones at the top are the main ones you're going to see: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, you know, images, things like that. The important thing to know is, like, does this make sense to me? Should I be getting this attachment? Does it align to what's in the message in the body? So if someone sends me— I don't know, a spreadsheet, and they say, "Hey, this is information of all of the bonuses for the entire company for 2026 that we're projecting," but the attachment is a PowerPoint. That doesn't make any sense to me. Like, it's a spreadsheet. It shouldn't be a PowerPoint. I'm not going to interact with that at all. Things like that are things that you should be looking at. It's like, one, also, did I request this information? Should I be getting this bonus information or this attachment with the presentation. Did I ask for it? Is it part of my job functions? And then, does it make sense with the attachment that's actually enclosed? Next slide, please. These are some of the points that I just covered. So, does it make sense? My recommendation when you get some of these attachments is not to interact with them at all. So, there is an option to save this. You can submit it to tools. You could submit it to your security team. But just simply saving an attachment like this from an email could put you at risk for being compromised. If you don't know what to do with it, you know, the safest bet is just to delete the message completely. But for attachments specifically, you know, you have different options, but the best bet really, if you're not sure, you don't know what to do with it, just delete the message or forward it to, you know, your security team or whatever your trusted advisor is that can assist with that. Next slide, please. So some organizations, you know, some corporate entities will have these integrated phishing alert buttons. These are outstanding. They're awesome. Most home, you know, users like your Gmail, your Google, Yahoo, things like that, they're not going to have these built into them. But if there is a phishing alert report button, I highly recommend that. That, you know, that kind of helps the defenders, people like me that are trying to stop these actions. It helps them investigate these attacks, share this with other teams and other individuals. What happens when you report a phishing email usually It packages up that email, takes all the information, all the technical details, sends it to a security team, and then they can then analyze it and investigate it. It usually takes it out of your environment, takes it out of your mailbox. So there's really no risk to you, you know, at that point of providing any sensitive information, interacting with it, downloading any malicious attachments. But if you're not comfortable with that, that's fine. My recommendation always is to delete the message. Some people say ignore it. That's all great until one day you're searching through your mailbox looking for some important invoice message or something like that, and you stumble upon, you know, like a previously identified suspicious message, you forget that it's suspicious, you're in a time crunch, and you click on it, and then you infect yourself from something that you could have cleaned up a long time ago. So when in doubt, just delete the message. So we covered this, you know, in summary, like scanning the emails from top to bottom, starting with our subject, starting with our sender, the greeting, the content, links and attachments. Be cautious with interacting with links and attachments, reporting and deleting those messages if you're not sure. These are kind of like the high-level tips. Next slide. Some of the themed attacks. So I love these because they change over time as current events happen, you know, as different events go on throughout, you know, the year. One of my favorite ones, IRS attacks. We just got through tax season. There's a slew of attacks that kick off, you know, right before the 15th, around the 15th, and right after the 15th, because that's when people are scrambling at the last minute to process their tax returns. But attackers will use, you know, a very convincing symbol like this. They stole an IRS symbol, took a screenshot of that, captured it. They've embedded in their message. Unfortunately, you know, their tool didn't work really great because it's got a redacted name in here. I think this is actually how it was delivered. And then it's got content and then a link down here at the bottom. I've seen some really nasty IRS-themed type attacks. I've seen individuals targeted who they think that they're interacting with the actual IRS. They're told that they owe some back taxes. There's going to be major fees and fines and potentially jail time if they don't pay this fee. And then, you know, I find out later on that they're sending Venmo or Coinbase or some sort of crypto money to the IRS, which the IRS never does that, and they are paying money to these criminals. And I had one individual that she ended up wiring, you know, $35,000 to this criminal enterprise. We contacted law enforcement. Unfortunately, we were not able to recover that money. It was a major hit to that individual, and she learned a lot about the process, but unfortunately we were not able to get any of that back for her. Package deliveries. So these, These are really great around Christmas time. So, you know, the end of December, everyone's getting— I do a lot of Amazon shopping. I don't know about you guys, but we have packages coming every single day. My wife never knows what they are, but somehow they're always, you know, for our house. But anyway, we're always getting messages about these packages, and attackers know that. So they will craft very convincing phishing emails that will impersonate you know, Amazon, UPS, FedEx, the Postal Service, things like that, saying, "Hey, your package is delivered." Especially around Christmas, everyone wants to get that Christmas gift, you know, right before Christmas Eve so they can wrap it up and put it under the tree. They ask you to, you know, you can track your package, or you can scan this QR code and figure out where your package is. It's a common attack method that I've seen many, many times. Wire transfers and gift cards. So This is really big in the banking industry. If you're purchasing a house, like wire, ACH transfers, things like that. There's also a lot of like impersonation for CEOs and things like that. So I think I've got an example actually here. Yeah, this, this Dear X1 in the middle. So this was an individual that reported this email. The CEO is being impersonated. They will often, you know, reach out to an individual in the company and say, "Hey, I've got a very time-sensitive ask for you." I need help. Please don't share this with the rest of the company. It's a surprise for a party, or it's a really special task that I can only trust you to do. And they'll have these individuals go out, you know, buy $100, $500, $1,000 in Apple gift cards, scratch off, you know, the QR code on the back or the specific code on the back, provide that via email, and then the attackers will then use that to, you know, redeem those gift cards, spend that money, and then rinse and repeat. So I see that one all the time. If, you know, a boss or someone of a trusted authority is asking you for gift cards, it's probably not legitimate. I also see, you know, wire transfer, things like that, where individuals will hop into— they'll compromise an account. They'll wait to see discussions about invoices, payments, things like that. When that occurs, then they will insert themselves in the conversation and say, "Hey, I know you're going to transfer this." this money to Charles Schwab or Chase Bank or US Bank, uh, but, uh, I got a new bank account. I need you to transfer it over here to this bank in the Cayman Islands or in Russia or China or wherever that is. Um, my recommendation, you know, this is coming from Nichols. Left Brain might have their own, but if there's any kind of change in financial information, I always recommend verifying that with a second mode of communication. So if someone emails me and says, hey, I need you to change your banking information, or I need to change that. I'm not going to respond to that. I'm going to pick up a phone and call them, and I want to talk to a person on the phone and say, "Hey, is this legitimate change that needs to occur? Why is this happening? When does this have to happen by?" and things like that. I would not verify that via email. I would not send them an email. I would always try and use a second, a second mode of communication to verify that. So More themed attacks. This is one that I've seen a rise in specifically in the last, you know, couple weeks and month and a half or so is some of these very targeted SMS phishing email or messages, not email messages, SMS messages. A lot of these are toll-related, and I'm not sure exactly why they're toll-related, but that just seems to be the current theme and campaign that this particular group is using. So they're sending out these messages to a large audience, and they're saying, hey, you owe a toll, like an EZPass toll or a parking toll or something like that. It's overdue. You need to pay this right away. If you don't, there's going to be some very adverse reaction. You click on this link on your phone thinking, hey, this is weird. Maybe I should pay this so I don't, I don't pay this fee, or I don't go to jail or something like that. If you look on the The far right, that's one of the pages that it renders you to. It asks for your full name and zip code. You're gonna hit search. It's gonna go through the next thing. It's gonna ask for your account information, whether that be banking information or username and password to log into your email account. And it's gonna harvest that information and monetize it. Go ahead, next page. Which this is where most of these attacks lead to. So I mentioned before, you know, like, A large portion of these are financially motivated. These individuals are criminals. They want to make money to fund their enterprises and to do bad things to good people. If they are not financially motivated, they are almost always credential motivated. So they're trying to capture your username and password. What they're trying to do with that, they're either going to sell that, so still make money, or to log in and steal sensitive information from you. So if I can compromise, like, your email and your password, I could then maybe log into your bank, and then I can manipulate your banking account or your banking information or stuff like that. Or then I can sell that, you know, to an individual who will then try and gain access or sell it to someone else or things like that. But there's a whole underground market that buys and sells compromised credentials like that. Also, a lot of these, you know, I mentioned these QR codes. I've been seeing recently in the past, like, 2 or 3 weeks, a lot of DocuSign impersonation email attacks. So they will send you an email that looks extremely convincing, just like this one in the picture, and it says, "Hey, you have this DocuSign document that's ready to verify and sign. Please click the link, log in, and finish this transaction," whatever. They look really, really convincing until you click the link. When you do click the link, it's going to come to something that looks like this screen on the left. It's going to ask you for username and password. Looks very, very convincing. If you look closely at this address bar at the top, it says accountoffice.dynv6.net. That's not Microsoft. That's not what you're going to log into for Microsoft. It's a malicious— it's a fake landing page, basically, that they're using to try and get you to log in. An interesting thing that I've seen attackers do, they will display something like this. They'll ask for your information. You will put it in, you'll click next, you'll put your password in, click next again. It will say incorrect username and password. You'll do it again, incorrect username and password, and then it will redirect you to the actual Microsoft page. So then on the third time, it will look exactly like this. The URL will change. You'll log in, you'll get to your email account, and you won't think anything is different. But really what's happened is you've now provided your username and password twice to the attackers. And they've kind of obfuscated that and directed you to the legitimate site. Next slide, please. Computing best practices. Okay, we're good on this one. So we covered this, you know, at large previously in the presentation, but I wanted to get in a little bit more detail of it. I talked about, you know, using long passwords. So short passwords aren't your friend. They're not going to help you. They're going to really help attackers crack your password really fast, get in, and, you know, do whatever they want to do with your account, whatever that be, like financially motivated or information motivated. Use complex passwords as much as you can. Use long passwords as much as you can. And if you're able to and you're comfortable with, I'm a fan of password managers, but I'm also a fan of using whatever is best for you. So I just advised a client recently, you know, this individual, lives in a very remote area. They don't get out a whole lot. Uh, they have a large property with them, and they were using password managers, and it wasn't really working for them well. They kept forgetting their passwords, uh, they kept forgetting which password manager they used and all that stuff. And they just asked me, hey, does it make sense for me to write these in a book? And I said, for you, 100%, it makes sense because no one is coming to your house. There's a very, very small risk of someone breaking into your house, going to this password manager book that you have, opening it up, reading your passwords and logging in. Whereas if you have a password manager, or if you're storing them somewhere online, you know, now the pool of people that can access that or are going to try and access that is much bigger. But I do like password managers. I think they're great. If you're comfortable using one, they're, you know, they're secure platforms. You log in with 1Password username and password. They, they store all of your other credentials and your passwords in an organized manner. You open it up, you get the password, and you log in. Close it. You don't have to remember, you know, 5, 10, 15, 20 passwords. You just remember that one. I've got a resource in here. This is a link. It's security.org. You can test how secure your password is. So if you're not sure, the bulk of this that I've kind of hammered home is the longer the password, the more secure, the harder it is to crack. Enabling multi-factor authentication. The more places you can use that, the better. If you can use an app, So I use, like, there's a Microsoft Authenticator app, there's a Google Authenticator app. Like, those are great. Those are the preferred method if you can. If you can't, like, you're not comfortable using that, or there isn't an app, just opt for the text message. Get the text message where it sends you a code, and then you have to put the code in the machine. That's much safer than not having multi-factor at all or just trying to use, like, a click button or anything like that. I also recommend, you know, I've been a part of, Personally, myself, my stuff has been compromised probably a dozen times or more. I recommend, you know, when you get these notifications, you get these letters in the mail saying, "Hey, you were part of a breach. Your Social Security number or information was compromised." I recommend freezing your credit. What that does is that makes it a little bit harder for the attackers to then monetize that information, open false, you know, credit lines or loans in your name. It's not foolproof. There's still ways around that, but it makes it harder. So if I'm an attacker and I'm a bad guy and I've got a list of all these compromised accounts and I start going down the list one by one, and the second one on that name or on that list, their credit is frozen, I can't do anything unless I unfreeze their credit, I'm probably just going to move on to the next person because that's one more step that I have to take that I don't want to take when I can just find someone else that hasn't frozen their credit. There's also data deletion services. These are things that go out on the internet on your behalf. They remove some of this information that's publicly available about you that's published online. Think of, you know, like addresses, names, phone numbers on pages like Whitepages, Spokeo, things like that. You pay like a monthly or an annual fee. They go out and they continuously request that information be removed. I've used DeleteMe and Incogni before. They work really well. There's other ones out there that work work well too. It just depends, you know, what you're looking for and your appetite. Your PC usage, so I recommend, you know, updating your smartphone and your PC as quickly as possible. So I always do auto-update on those devices. You should be running an antivirus if you've got a Windows machine. If it's a Mac, you know, you can get a little bit more flexible with that. When you're traveling, Use a VPN when possible. So there's a bunch of paid VPNs. I wouldn't recommend really a free one. The paid ones are much better. So I've got 3 here: ProtonVPN, Surfshark, Nord are all pretty good. Restarting your phone and PC pretty regularly, that helps, you know, just with performance and improvement. But also sometimes if there is something bad on your PC, just rebooting it helps kill that process and give you a clean, you know, instance of your machine running. And then this is my last slide. So I've got a few resources. So these are my 3 top favorite news sites. So these are just daily news sites that put out articles about information security, cybersecurity, not overly technical. The Hacker News, Bleeping Computer, and then Krebs on Security. Really, really good ones. Podcasts, if you're interested in learning about more about this field, you know, Cybersecurity Headlines is great. 10 minutes, you can listen to it on the way to work or in your car. It's not overly technical, just, you know, the wave tops. The other ones are a little bit more in the weeds. And then my favorite books of all time, The Cuckoo's Egg, really, really good, interesting cybersecurity book. Dark Territory is more about the power grid and attacks on the power grid, but super interesting. And then Fifth Domain's a little bit more military, you know, how we're focusing on the cyber domain as a means to conduct information operations and cyber war and things like that.

All right, thank you, thank you everybody. Just as a quick reminder, we are going to get to Q&A here in just a second. First off, we would definitely like to thank Nick Oles for being with us. He's going to stick around for Q&A. I know we do have one question in the Q&A box, so continue to fill those up. I'll have a couple of items to share with you, but I know you have some reaction and some questions. I've got about 6 or 7 of them. So if the Q&A doesn't get filled up, I have a lot that I will fill in. The other thing I was going to mention at the beginning, I forgot to mention, Nick is the author of a book. I guess my system is blurred, but How to Catch a Phish is the name of his book. He wrote it in 2023, a practical guide to detecting phishing emails. And as I breeze through the, through the content section, There's a lot of good material in here. I know he gave us the 40-minute version, but I think the book is, is interesting and definitely worth a read. I have a copy and will certainly be paying close attention to it. A couple of things I wanted to bring to your attention. I want to remind everybody this presentation is recorded, so we will be sending out the presentation afterward. I know a lot of these slides had good information. Some of the stuff you're going to want to reference later. So we will be sending out the, the presentation. For now, your only job is to relax and fill up the Q&A box. A couple of announcements we wanted to make. One of them is speaking of safety. I mentioned the safest way to actually look at your data is going to our website first. And if you want to look at your account information, we do have the investment tracker. That's a new software that we're using to show you your portfolio and your accounts. Earlier this year, they rolled out an app with the software, but we just got the, the, our own app, the Left Brain Wealth Management app. It's available now. So if you go to the iTunes Store or the Google Store, you actually see our app and then you can just go to our website and go to the investment tracker and use— it's the same credential you use for the investment tracker. But in the next 24 hours, China will be sending everybody an email with the link to download the Left Brain Wealth Management app. It'll give you instructions about your credential as well. So we encourage you, you know, one of the— as Nick mentioned in this presentation, one of the safest ways to access or interact with data is through an application, and that's on your phone. So we wanted to roll this out. We've been working on this for a very long time. We're excited to have it. We think you're going to like the features. We think it's going to like what— we think you're going to like what it shows. But more importantly, it's going to keep you safe when you look at your account and it's safe and easy. We have set up multi-factor authentication on there. So in addition to your user ID and password, when you log in, it'll also prompt you to enter your cell number. So it'll text you a code to get in there. So that was the first thing that we wanted to mention. The other thing we wanted to encourage you, for all of you who have not scheduled your 2025 financial checkup review, we'd love to get you scheduled. Most of our calendars are updated. I know mine is right in through Thanksgiving. So even if you're not ready to meet now, I would like you to calendar something, even if it's for not to the summer or to this fall. We try to do these checkup meetings right up through Thanksgiving, December. We usually leave for business planning for the new year. And year-end capital gain, capital loss. But right on our website at the very bottom on the right, there's a yellow tab that says Schedule Your Checkup. If you click on that, that will take you here. You fill in your information, your name, and then choose your advisor at the very bottom. So whether you're a client of Freddie's, Brian, or even mine, you'll select that and then it'll bring up the calendar. So we encourage you, if you have not had your review yet for 2025, to schedule that. We can't wait to connect with you. All right. Finally, we are going to get to Q&A. We do have a couple of questions in the Q&A box. Just wanted to— one more thing on cybersecurity. As you guys know, we've been talking about cyber for a very long time and, you know, we're really concerned about keeping clients safe. Unfortunately, we've had some situations where clients have been taken advantage of. You know, we had one client, their bank account was compromised. It's very unfortunate. It actually happened twice. We had another client who had some Bitcoin pilfered from them. We're really proud of the work we do. You know, I just want to remind you, when your money's here with us, you have two kind of levels. You have Schwab watching, and then most things have to be approved locally by our office. So you kind of have two eyes. So it's really tough to— it's not impossible, but it's really tough to have something go wrong with the money that's here. I would encourage those that are keeping large cash balances at the bank. A lot of bad things can happen. We've had clients here recently in the last 30 days that have had issues on their debit card where you swipe that debit card in some type of way. The bad guys get your debit card information. They've gone in the clients' accounts, made charges and taken money out. And unfortunately, when it's in a bank account, even if the bank catches it, the money's removed from your account for a while, then they investigate and then it might go back. But depending on how you do your budgeting, it could impact you. So obviously you do need your emergency money, your 90-day cash stash. But we've run into a lot of people, both clients and prospects, that are holding hundreds of thousands, in some cases millions of dollars in passbook savings accounts. They're not earning good interest. And they are susceptible. So we would encourage you, any excess cash, you think about possibly moving over and depositing. And it's the same thing with old 401(k) accounts. So we would just ask you to think about those. So I'm going to go ahead and open up the Q&A. We have a couple of questions in here. Before I do that, I want to mention, Nick, as you were going through your slides, one of the things dawned on me, well, a lot of these hacks and attempted fakes have One statement and then one question. This observation I made is I think a lot of breaches happen when we're in a rush. It seems like these bad guys put these emails together and they count on us. You know, most of the time we're either looking at our email and doing something else or we're scanning quickly because we want to get through the email. But I think a common theme of what I heard is we're not taking a ton of time, and they're kind of counting on that.

100%. You know, they're, they're, they're leveraging, you know, the human factor, and that's that we have multiple priorities. We get a lot of, of emails. You know, you have a lot of different email accounts and things like that, and they're, they're banking on that. They know that, you know, people are busy, they have limited time, or they're using other things like I mentioned, like to heighten your senses, to say, hey, I need to respond to this email really quick because My account's going to get disabled in an hour, or in reality, you know, it's not, but things like that. Or I'm going to have to pay a big fee, or there's a large sum of money that I'm missing out on, and things like that. So absolutely, you know, they're trying to use time as their, you know, accelerator to try and make you to interact with this message in any way that they can.

And the other one I had is Who are these bad— who are these hackers? Who are the bad guys? Is it like some automated system where, you know, some 13-year-old hacker just kind of puts all these emails on autopilot? Are these, you know, is there somebody behind this? Are these organized groups? Like, who are these hackers?

Yeah, so the bulk of them actually are organized crime, uh, organizations. I'll say that much. Um, there are, you know, like some militaries and countries will do this. Like, North Korea is a great example. Um, their cyber army, uh, conducts operations to gather money to support their government and their military operations. They're one particular organization. Most of them, though, are usually like organized crime groups that have seen this. They saw, you know, it doesn't take a lot of money to spin up infrastructure to send out phishing emails. You hire some smart people to sit in a room in a basement, you feed them some, you you know, pizza and energy drinks and hoodies and things like that. They can send out a bunch of messages and then they get money back in, and then they'll funnel that to other operations, whether that be, you know, criminal elements of, you know, money laundering, drugs, whatever else that is, firearms, things like that. So I would say the bulk of it is organized crime groups. I don't want to go down a huge rabbit hole with AI, but one of the things that artificial intelligence has done has made it very easy for non-English speakers to craft convincing messages and content that could be used in phishing messages. Where previously, you know, we used to teach a lot like, hey, look for misspelling messages and things like that. That's still a concern. But right now, you know, I can go into ChatGPT, Google Gemini, like any AI tool. I could say, hey, craft up an interesting email about an invoice payment. ChatGPT has no idea how I'm going to use that, but they have just wrote an English message for me. I can copy it, paste it, uh, it's unique, throw it in a message and, uh, and leverage that. So, uh, to answer your question, yes, it is people. It's mostly organized crime. It's almost always finance-based, and they are using tools like AI, uh, machine learning and things like that to help, uh, craft their messages, get them out faster and at scale.

Wow. All right. So thank you for that. So I'm going to go ahead and start. We're starting to get some good questions that come in. So I'm going to go ahead and start firing these off. So this first anonymous attendee asks, well, they mentioned that they average a phishing attempt per day through text. They say they report them. I report them as I delete. But how can I get them to stop? They seem to rotate phone numbers, which I assume bypass the block that I put on their number.

Mm-hmm.

They said also, um, this anonymous attendee, uh, traveled to Europe last year and they noticed that many attempts came from Euro-based numbers. They said they used WhatsApp while they were over there and they wanna know, is there something in that app that exposed their number? Are these phishers getting phone number lists off the dark web?

Yeah, so a lot to unpack here. I will start to just go through one by one as I'm reading them. If there's something else that I'm missing, you put it in the chat. But the first thing, you're doing the right stuff by blocking these numbers. So when you get suspicious or junk or malicious text messages on your phone, you can report and block them. I recommend that. It's not going to stop them completely. Unfortunately, you're probably on some sort of number or list that the attackers are using to target these for a number of different campaigns. But attack— or blocking those and reporting them makes it a little bit harder for them to keep targeting you. Traveling to Europe, you know, by itself, that's not really a risk. Using WhatsApp, not much of a risk either. You know, there's legitimate uses of WhatsApp. What I would recommend, if you're not using that app anymore, I would uninstall it from my phone. You know, the more apps you have, the more vulnerabilities potentially on your machine or on your phone, the more things you have to update and things like that. There's nothing, you know, natively that's insecure about WhatsApp. Traveling overseas might have done it. What I would recommend— well, you asked this question, are they getting lists off the dark web? Absolutely. They're selling, you know, information about individuals on the dark web, you know, names, addresses, phone numbers, account information. What I would recommend as like a proactive approach, I talked a little bit about this, is some of these data deletion services like Delete.me and Incogni and things like that. Those will proactively go out and try and minimize that information that's available about you out on the internet. And what I've done myself personally, you know, I will sign up for one of these services. I'll Google my name first and my phone number, see how many results I get. I'll let the service run for a couple months. Do the same search, and I'll see that my numbers are drastically reduced. So I might have 1,000 hits on Google. After I run that service for 6 months, maybe it's down to 200. And it's just trying to minimize that attack exposure. There's nothing foolproof that's going to get it 100% to stop, but that is a way to help minimize that information being available out there and attackers using it.

Thank you. Thank you, Nick. So I'm going to go to the next one. And our guest asks, as a rule, do you recommend that we change all our passwords periodically? And if so, how frequently?

Yeah, that's a great question. So we used to recommend every 90 days in the enterprise, you know, corporate environments, things like that. It was— that was the standard. Every 90 days you would change your password. And then after years and years of doing that, we found out that all that was doing was creating bad password habits. So I have seen so many instances where summer2024 is a password, and then it's fall, and then winter, and then spring, and then summer again. And it's like, I can predict what they're going to be. And if it's a large enough organization and I'm doing a penetration test, I can guess that and say, hey, it's summer, let me just try summer and the year, and someone's password is going to be like that. So we've switched away from that. Um, usually now it's 180 to, uh, once a year. So every 6 months or once a year, it's recommended to change your password if you're doing all the right stuff, like if you have multi-factor authentication, if you're trying to use a password manager, um, if you're updating your devices and things like that. I, I don't think you have to change your password on an interval, um, unless your information is compromised. So if you get notified that you're part of some sort of breach then I would probably change it. Otherwise, I would just keep doing the right things. I would try and keep a really good, long, strong password, and I would not recommend, you know, changing that at a very rapid interval because like all humans, we're going to pick something that we can easily remember, that we can iterate, that we can change. And then in essence, that's going to be easy to guess.

And Nick, I'm going to ask, I don't know if I can't remember if you mentioned this earlier in your presentation, But can you speak to the danger of using the same password for multiple sites?

Oh yeah, absolutely. So that's one of the first things, you know, attacker will do is there's tools that can— you can quickly query a bunch of different sites and pages and say, hey, you know, my username is nick1. Let me see all the places where that username is valid at. And that might be a banking site, a Facebook, TikTok, whatever. Twitter, X, whatever you want to call it. And then it'll tell me like, okay, hey, out of 150 sites that it tried, it's good on 50 sites. If all of your passwords are the same, the next thing that they're going to do is try and log into all those accounts with the same password that they compromised from you. So if you're using the same password everywhere and it gets compromised, you know, then your attack exposure is very broad. If you've got different passwords for every single one, you know, then they just get access to that one account. So absolutely, they will check other accounts. They will try and log in and try and make money whatever way they can.

Wow. All right. So thank you for that, Nick. I'm going to fire off the next one. This is a really good one. If your computer has been corrupted, one, what are the steps you suggest we follow? And two, what local resources do you suggest for help?

Yeah, so if a computer is corrupted, my first take at this is to always run an antivirus scan. So if you're using a Windows device, you're going to have an antivirus program, whether that be Symantec, Trend Micro, Windows Defender, whatnot on the machine. I would always run a full scan or a scan of the machine to see if that fixes it up. If I'm not running something, you know, Windows just comes natively with Windows Defender. If it's Mac, if it's an Apple or Mac product, they usually don't have antivirus, so you're not going to do that. But I would first try and do that. See if the tools internally can natively remove this. If they can't, then you're going to want to look at what we do. It's called a system restore, where you're going to return the machine back to a good known state. So most Windows devices, they will have restore points. So they will say, we backed up everything on this PC a week ago, a month ago, a day ago, a year ago, whatever that interval is. You can restore to that machine or that point in time. Whatever files were saved between that restore point and the current time would be lost unless they're backed up. But that is my second recommendation, is to go back to a restore point. If you can't do that, then I would just say you've lost all your data. You need to reinstall the operating system again. Sometimes they send disks for that. Sometimes they send you like a thumb drive, or you can get that information online. But I would recommend, you know, a fresh, clean install is probably the best way to make sure that if there are any artifacts or leftover malware, it's been removed. Local resources, that's going to depend a little bit where you're at. I know, Noland, we discussed this before, like Geek Squad at Best Buy, like those are okay resources for cleaning up your computer. There are, you know, like local IT shops, break-fix shops that will do that. Geek Squad is probably the biggest, most well-known, you know, corporate environment that's located in a lot of places. You're going to have some mixed results. Some stores will be a little bit better than others, but they are pretty good about cleaning up, you know, like malware and cleaning up PCs and things like that, or giving you new ones and things, you know, helping you through that situation. Otherwise, you know, pairing with a consulting company or an organization that that does this type of work. That's usually better for the, you know, the small business, medium business enterprises, individuals. You're going to want to go to like probably a retail location like, like I mentioned.

Thank you, Nick. And let's stay on the theme of computers and people having issues with their computer being corrupted. So we have a question from a guest and a good client. One cyber problem is that a lot of support for computer problems are handled online.

Yep.

That requires you to allow access to your computer. From personal experience, it's hard to tell what is safe and what is not, especially if the name of the organization is one that's legitimate but really isn't.

Yeah, this is a great question. So these are like what I classify as like tech support scams. So the individuals will send you an email or they'll somehow get interactive with you and they'll say, hey, we need to fix your PC or we need to install this or something's not working, we need to fix it. "Let us remote in." They remote into their PC, they do some stuff in the background, they install some malicious software, or they take something, and then they a lot of times will charge you to fix it, and they'll say, "Hey, this is broken. We need extra money to fix this," when it wasn't broken before that. Or they'll leave, and then they'll gather that information, you know, later on. So how to verify that? This is a great question. I would recommend— I talked a little about this in my presentation— verifying with a second mode of communication if you can. So if I get an email saying, "Hey, I need to remote into your PC to fix something," I'm going to want to pick up a phone and call them and say, "Hey, I got your number from a business card," or, "I bought something from you a while ago, and I have, you know, the information of the business on this package," or something like that. I'm going to call them and say, "Hey, someone is saying there's something wrong with my PC. Can you verify this legitimate?" Like, Who should I be talking to? Things like that. That is like the first step that I would recommend. The second one, I would verify internally, like, is this something I need to fix? So am I having this problem they're saying I'm having? So if they're telling me my computer's running slow, is it actually running slow? Am I saying I can't access a resource? Can I actually not access that? I would try and verify that before proceeding. And then me personally, I don't really like to let people log into my machine and do things, but that's more my background in the industry that I'm in. But I would stray away from that as much as possible. So unless they absolutely have to, I would, you know, ask, are there other ways that we can fix this? Are there other resources? Can I take this to a location if it's close by and have someone fix it?

Geek Squad.

Can I take it to Geek Squad? Yeah.

All right. And then the last one, Nick, this has come up in a couple of different ways. It seems like there's been a proliferation of bad guys calling, like unknown phone numbers and just strange calls that happen from unknown callers. So two parts to that. So one, what are they trying to do by calling? And then two, what's kind of the best way? I mean, now we're all kind of like scared of our phones, right? If it's a number we don't recognize, we're like, oh, I'm not going to answer it. So is it best to put that feature, you know, the silence my phone from unknown call features on the iPhone? So what's with the bad guys calling our number?

Yeah. So, so first, great, great question. So the first part about this is they're trying to verify this number is still valid. So if they call this phone number and it rings, that tells me that number is still valid and connected. If someone answers it, that's even better because now I know that there's a human on the other side. It's not, you know, like a help desk or a work desk number or, you know, like a landline somewhere that no one is answering. I know that there's someone on that other end. So the first thing is just to verify that it's a valid number and that someone is there. Um, the second thing is then they will then use that for follow-on attacks. So then they will sell that and say, hey, I've got these 25 verified phone numbers. I know there's people on the other side of them because they answered. And then a second group of attackers or things like that will then use those phone numbers for social engineering attacks. They'll call and say, hey, I'm your tech support person, or hey, I'm your whatever, I'm here to help you out, blah blah blah. Maybe you answer, maybe you don't. So those are kind of like the two intents with the phone calls. I absolutely recommend ignoring calls you don't know. That feature is great. There's also apps that you can download on your phone that can help you block, you know, unknown messages or unknown phone calls. Or if phone numbers have been categorized as spam, it will block those or give you notifications saying like, "Hey, this is a spam call. Do you not want to answer it?" And if you're unsure, I wouldn't answer the phone, and I would let them leave voicemail. A lot of time attackers don't want to leave voicemails because it takes more time. So if I'm calling, you know, 25 numbers in a row, I don't want to leave 25 messages. I just want to keep going down that list trying to get someone to answer so that I can either, you know, entice them to give me information or, you know, verify that there's a human on the other end and, you know, package that up and sell it to someone else.

Yeah, it's crazy. So it really is dangerous answering your phone if you don't know the number.

Can be. Yeah.

Can be crazy. Crazy. All right, one last one. I think we are— we're done with the questions. One more, Nick, that I had. So for spam text messages.

Yep.

So if there is a spam message that continually comes through, Is there a way to block text messages?

Yeah, so most phones, like smart— like iPhones and Androids, uh, they have an option to report junk and block. So if I get a message that comes through, it seems suspicious, I don't know who it's from— I know on an iPhone, I'm not an Android expert— right underneath the message in blue text, uh, there's a little button that says report Report and block, I believe. And once you do that, it takes the message out, it reports it, and it'll block that particular number. Now, the problem is the attackers can quickly spin up a number. They have got your phone number. They can send more messages of the same nature to your, to your mobile phone. There's not a really great way to stop that from happening because once they have your number, they can then, you know, repurpose for different attacks and things like that. But if it is unwanted, if it is spam like you're saying, I recommend either just deleting it outright or ideally using that report and block feature in most of the modern smartphones.

Awesome. Well, thank you. Thank you, Nick. This has been great. And as a reminder for all of our clients, it should be no surprise that when you look at your account and you see cybersecurity stocks that we're adding in the portfolio, we think Uh, protection is mission critical, not only for individuals like we are, but also for organizations. And so I know CrowdStrike is a name that we own. There's a couple of other new tickers that you'll see us looking at and buying in the portfolio. Zscaler is one of them. CyberArk, uh, is another. Cloudflare, Okta, uh, those are kind of like our top 5 names that we like in cyber. Um, we don't see this going away anytime soon. Even as IT budgets were cut in some areas earlier this year for technology, cybersecurity along with artificial intelligence were two areas that, you know, definitely continues in spend and awareness. So we think from an investment standpoint, this is a theme that we're going to be able to play for, for a while. Our main interest today is just to get you to be aware, uh, just the increasing number of attacks, the increasing sophistication, As Nick mentioned earlier, with the onset of AI, the tools that these bad guys are going to have are just at some point maybe indistinguishable, indistinguishable. So we're all going to need to be vigilant both on our phones and especially in our emails. Be really careful about links. Hover over addresses to make sure where they're coming from. And finally, just take an extra beat, an extra heartbeat to ask yourself, You know, does this make sense? Because as Nick mentioned, a lot of the times the bad guys rely on us just moving quickly. So thanks again. I'll remind you guys, we are recording this event, so we will— China will be sending this out here in the next 48 hours for you to have at your disposal. Interested in hearing your feedback. Let us know if you like this or not. This is the first presentation that we've had. It's kind of a more of a public service presentation. So if you found value in it, let us know. and that'll determine whether we make the energy and effort to do it again. So thank you all. We will bid you a good day. We have sunshine here in Chicago, and we got basketball on tonight. So let's make it a wonderful Tuesday, and we look forward to hearing from you or seeing you all really soon. Thanks again for your attention.