Welcome to the Business Credit and Financing Show. Each week, we talk about the growth strategies that matter most to entrepreneurs. Listen in as we discuss the secrets to getting credit and money to start and grow your business. Enjoy as we talk with seasoned business owners, coaches, and industry leaders on a variety of topics from advertising to marketing to the nuts and bolts of running a highly successful business.
Now, to introduce the host of our show, financial expert and award-winning author, Ty Crandall.
Ty: Hello everybody and welcome to the show today. I’m really excited everybody can join us. Today, we’re talking about a topic we’ve never talked about on this show which is cybersecurity and the importance of things you’re doing on your website and doing a lot of these things the right way to make sure that, one, you get the biggest and greatest impact to your business, and also you’re doing it in a way where you are keeping yourself protected.
On this topic, I brought in one of the foremost experts, Chris Park. Chris is the founder and CEO of whatismyipaddress.com, the number one website in the world for finding your IP address. According to the Alexa ranking, Chris’s website is one of the top 3000 websites in the entire United States with over six million visitors a month. Chris started the website on January 4, 2000 and for the first five years, his revenue didn’t even cover his website or his internet bill. In 2005, Chris made $30 from display ads and he knew he couldn’t give up.
In 2014, he was laid-off from his corporate job and was faced with scary opportunity to make his website a full-time business. Since then, he’s aggressively grown his site to generate just under seven-figures a year in revenue with no employees, no office, and no inventory which is pretty phenomenal. We’ve got to figure out how he did that. whatismyipaddress.com has granted Chris and his wife time and financial freedom that they’ve used to travel the world and raised their mini schnauzer Bailey which I love.
Chris, welcome to the show today.
Chris: I’m glad to be here. Thanks for having me on.
Ty: Yeah, man. That’s a cool journey. I love how your bio explains what got you from here, the pain that pushed you over the edge to get in and make this a full-time […]. Congrats on your success, man. That’s awesome.
Chris: Thank you. It’s been a wild ride.
Ty: Yeah, that’s crazy. I’m glad that you’re here because these are the things that a lot of people just aren’t aware of. I’ll just start off by giving you an example. I worked for an employer that didn’t pay a bill. It’s a pretty big bill on Upwork. I used Upwork a lot. They banned me. It took me a long time to figure out how they kept knowing. I come in on these alias accounts. They would figure me out. I figured out it was all back to an IP address. Once I realized what my IP was, I realized how to change it, it immediately let me get into that relationship which is great because I never did anything wrong to break it, but I can go on and on of all these examples of how knowing these kinds of stuff and being up on the security of your website is so important. From you, why is this stuff so important?
Chris: I think for a lot of people, they were more concerned about their personal safety, their personal information. Entrepreneurs and starting a business, they don’t have massive IT departments. They’re left to try to figure it out on their own but it really is a crazy world out there. For those who don’t know, an IP address is kind of like the return address on an envelope when you send off a postal mail. When you send something to someone, you want to be able to get a response so you write your return address on the envelope, you mail it off, postal service delivers it, the guy writes a response, and sends it back to that address that was on the envelope. Your IP address is the internet equivalent of that. You can’t get a request back from a website. You can’t connect to anything out there. You can’t listen to iTunes. You can’t get on YouTube. You can’t get on social media if those sites don’t know where to send the data back to. That’s all kind of what an IP address does.
It also reveals lots of stuff about you. In your case, it was showing that your employer didn’t pay a bill and so they said, “Hey, anyone who’s coming from this IP address in this office, we don’t want to allow you to use our website because we think they’re dead people.” I’m sure he’s not but you know. That’s what a lot of people do. You’re living in a household and one of your roommates says something nasty on your favorite forum, they’re going to block your roommate and probably block you and everybody else in your house at the same time. There are all sorts of some fun things that you can do to get around those things. We can talk about that if you like.
Ty: Sure. I’d like to talk a little bit more about what else IP address’ say about you. It really narrows down the location. How much does it really narrow down the location for example?
Chris: Well, it really depends on kind of what you do online. People don’t kind of realize that they’re disclosing information about them while they’re doing things. In general, if you’re not going around and sharing your location—we’ll talk about that more in a minute—it can often get you down to a city within 10-15 miles. For most people, that’s not scary. It could be a little disconcerting but that’s kind of what you want when you go online and you search for something, you want results. When you’re looking for a piece of place you want results near you.
Where it can get kind of alarming is when you visit whatismyipaddress.com and you see the pinpoint on your street, can freak people out. You go to the weather sharing website and you say, “Well, here’s my zip code.” They turn around and sell that information to database providers. Now, these database providers know that these IP address is in this zip code. They now narrow you down to a smaller area. If you’re doing this on your cell phone and you’re sharing your location on your cell phone because you want hyperlocal weather, they’re probably sharing your hyperlocal location with data providers. It could be really really close.
One of the guys who’s doing some graphics work for me was poking around on the side, came to the homepage, and he’s like, “Oh my gosh, it’s pointed at my kitchen window.” It can be like super accurate to the point where if you got some stalking things going on, it could be a problem for you.
Ty: Is there a way for IP addresses to be changed?
Chris: Yep. There’s a couple of different things that you can do. If it’s like your home residential internet connection, turning off your modem for eight hours usually causes a technical process called DHCP Release. Basically, your ISP assigned you an IP address and as long as your device is connected, you’ll stay in that IP address. Once you shut off your modem, you’re basically telling your ISP, “I don’t need this IP address anymore.” Usually, give it eight hours or so, they reassign it to somebody else, you power up your device, they give you a new IP address, and you’ve kind of change it that way.
A lot of more what people are doing these days is they’re using VPN services. If you’re an entrepreneur and you’re travelling around the world, websites are restricting your access, “We only allow people in the US to visit our websites or people from a particular area, region of the world to access our website.” You can use a Virtual Private Network service which routes traffic through their servers and pops out on the internet in the city or in the country you want to appear at. There’s lots of people that are starting to do that because they’re worried about, “I don’t want my ISP knowing what websites what I’m going to. I don’t want my government knowing what I’m doing online. I don’t want advertisers to be able to track back to me specifically. I want to aggregate it with a bunch of other people.” Lots of people are starting to use VPNs to do that kind of stuff.
Ty: Sure. It makes sense too specially if you’re working with foreign contractors. There’s a lot of foreign contractors. Like you said, they can’t even access sites in the United States because of that. Having the ability to change their IP address to the United States IP address for example, fixes our problem.
Chris: Exactly.
Ty: What about online security in general? Should we be more worried about online privacy these days? Are there really things we could do about it? I’m a […] belief that, “Look, if you want privacy, don’t get online. The minute you do, your life is over. Everybody knows everything about you.” That’s just the way I think. I mean, that goes to the territory but is that really accurate? What are the things that we should be worried about? What should we be doing to protect ourselves online?
Chris: I operate under the same philosophy as you. I assume that anything that I do while I’m connected to the internet is out there, it’s going to come back to me. Therefore, I’m not going to do things online that I don’t want people to know about. I’m not going to say things via email, via chat, because I’m just going to assume that it’s in somebody’s database somewhere and it’s going to be hacked. I don’t think that you could really live off the internet these days.
I think we need to take reasonable steps to be mindful about what information are you sharing, kind of the typical things. When you’re going on a vacation, don’t share on social media, “Hey, I’m leaving the country for a month because…” Now, you’ve just told anyone who can access your profile, “I’m not home. Come steal from my house.” You see that a lot with famous people. They’re gallivanting around the world and now everybody knows, “Hey, their home is ripe for the picking.”
Probably the bigger issue that people have is data breaches and things like that. Back when I was younger, whatever password you use, that was the same password you used on every website you went to. Every account you created you used the same password. Now, when you get these breaches—Marriott was a few weeks ago, half-a-billion Yahoo! accounts a couple of years ago. You just can’t assume that your accounts are secure anymore. You have to use different passwords on different accounts and that leads to using password managers. That way you’re not creating the password yourself. You’ve got a program to do it.
I think there’s a lot of small little mitigation steps that we can do. Part of that is being aware of, “Do I really need to create an account here?” A lot of ecommerce sites will allow you to create an account to shop there but they also allow guest accounts. “Do I really need to have a username and a password to associated with one more account out there?” Just trying to be mindful of limiting what you’re sharing, where you’re sharing, who you’re sharing it with, and not just that free-for-all, “I’m going to tell everybody everything.”
Ty: Yeah. That’s awesome advice. One of the other things I’ve learned in going through your stuff or dove into and started to touch on is this thing called IDS. What exactly is IDS and what are the benefits of it?
Chris: If you’re referring to Intrusion Defense?
Ty: Yeah.
Chris: It starts getting really technical really quick.
Ty: We don’t want to get technical.
Chris: There’s a lot of products and services out there—Software As A Service—to monitor incoming traffic into your website, into your home internet connection, and things like that. Synology makes us really great router that looks at the traffic coming in. It doesn’t just say, “Hey, you requested something. Here, I’m going to open the door and let it in.” It looks at stuff for signature of malware, maybe not ransomware, but it looks for things that are associated with attacks and you’ll see that a lot on corporate network infrastructure. You’re now starting to see effectively Software As A Service to prevent on your website.
Cloudflare offers, for blogs and small websites, perfectly free service that not only allows your website to be faster to people all around the world but prevents known attacks into your platform. There are little things that you can do like that that are totally free that reduce the likelihood of your website being compromised, your website being used to attack other people’s website and stuff like that.
Ty: If your website, for example, hackers and IP addresses, is there a way you can hide IP addresses from hackers? Or is the way to use one of those tools that you mentioned earlier?
Chris: Yeah. Realistically using a VPN services is a good way to protect yourself. You’re lumped in with all their other customers’ traffic, so you’re not as easily identified. You’ve got to get through all of their defenses before they even try to get through your defenses.
Ty: What about emerging and future technologies? Are the things like that are out there now that you think we should be worried about that will adversely harm our security?
Chris: Absolutely. What those things are going to be, who knows? Artificial Intelligence is going to be able to start. We look at it with the things that Google is doing on their end. They’re trying to figure out intent on what you’re searching for and being able to deliver you the right results. As that technology becomes more and more available to hackers, data breachers, they’re going to start employing that technology to taking over systems, finding bugs. I think we’re going to see a larger and larger and more and more invasive data breaches over time. It’s going to escalate, unfortunately.
Ty: We see a lot of these. The biggest thing I see which we do too is we’re on the process of building our own database. In doing so, there’s all these technologies. They go out to all these third-party foreign places and pool in all that people’s data into your database. I’m seeing more and more companies do this where they’re deploying bots, AI, whatever may be. You go into their system and give them your email address. You think you’ve given them the first name and email. The reality is, is that they’re building a database with all these bots from all these third-party sources that pool in these elaborate amounts of information about you, and most people don’t even know this is going on. What are you seeing in that world that kind of adversely is scarier effects people’s security?
Chris: I think it’s more scary towards the privacy side in the terms of, you give someone your email address and now they know where you went to school, they’d know where you work, where they live. They’re tying that information back to credit histories so they can see your credit history. This world of high transparency, not in the sense of, “We know what corporations are doing.” But there’s going to be a lot of transparency on us as individuals that companies are just going to know everything about us.
I don’t know that there is a good security thing that you can do about that today other than what we’ve talked about. It’s almost this historical, “You can’t go back and un-ring the bell.” What information you have historically provided, it’s already out there. Younger people these days, millennials, seemed to be less concerned about what they share. It might just be our generation is, “We’re going to sit here and freak out about this.” In two generations, “Oh no! Everybody knows everything about me. It doesn’t bother me. It’s just the way it is.”
Ty: Yeah, we’re in that transition mode. It’s very true. I just did a webinar on LexisNexis for example. I don’t know if you’ve ever looked at LexisNexis, most haven’t but mine’s almost 300 pages. It has every speeding ticket, every traffic violation, every license, I have my pilot’s license and mortgage license. It has every email address I’ve ever owned, every address I’ve ever lived at, every phone number I’ve ever had, every school I’ve ever attended, every insurance policy I’ve ever had, every vehicle I’ve ever owned. It is mind-blowing when you get into these data warehouses and see all of the information they have.
When I handed this to my wife, I said, “You should see this.” She had the same reaction I did. When she got in, just absolutely insulted. “I can’t believe this exists, that people have this!” I think we’re in that transition right now where we’re just used to our information being private and we’re in this world now where these data warehouses are gathering it and then selling the data to anybody that wants it, and everybody else is creating their own databases. Like you said, a couple generations down the road, I don’t think they can even be thinking about these stuffs because it’s all going to be out there.
Chris: Yeah. On the advertising side, this stuff can be really neat because if you know your target audience that, “Oh, they grew up in this particular area. They have these times of affluence. They like these types of car.” You can start hyper localizing, hyper targeting your audience on your ads and spend considerably less money to reach the audiences that you really really want to reach. You can look at it in a positive and negative. The more people know about you, the more they can try to sell stuff to you. The more they can provide you the resources that you’re actually interested in—if you want to twist it around the other way.
Ty: That’s very true. Bill Gates, I think I’ve read once, that when he goes through the rooms of his home, the art changes that’s different for him and his wife—the color, the lighting changes. I think that’s part of the world that we go into. I think, Minority Report or something had that where you walked down the street and all the ads and everything change to you which is what is it. I love that. I like that Facebook shows me all kinds of crazy things I never even thought about that’s custom to me. I like that Google does the same. I’m like, “Take my info and customize experience just for me.” It saves me time; I prefer it that way. But I think there are so many people out there that are so freaked out that this is even happening because for some reason they don’t even know what’s happening when it’s everywhere.
Chris: I think that’s the biggest thing for people when they go from not knowing this is happening to realizing, “Oh my gosh, this is happening!” That instance is alarming for a lot of people. If I have to see an ad because websites need to make money, they’ll pay you to keep the sites up and running, that’s a business, they need to keep it running. I would rather see advertisements from things that interest me than things that I have no interest in ever doing. I’m not going to be buying potted plants at a local hardware store. But if it’s for some really neat computer tech or the latest accessories from iPhone, that might interest me. That could be interesting.
Ty: Yeah, very much so. I call it the Facebook gods when I find things like, “How’d you find this?” My Facebook gods, they just served it up. I was like, “I want this.” Then, they just delivered something I didn’t even know existed. I’m one of those guys that literally get on social media more for ads than I actually do for social stuff because they have all these algorithms that look at my likes, that look at my engagements, and look at all these things and then get me this only stuff that I really care about that I don’t really know exists. To me, that’s so super cool. I’m willing to give them my info to get that.
But I think you’re right, there’s this alarm that everybody else has, “Wait a minute, my likes? All of the stuff I’ve engaged with? All of this stuff is being tracked in a way that the advertisers are using it?” Those of us who were entrepreneurs we’re like, “Yes, it is.” It makes it a lot easier and cheaper for us to market to them.
Chris: Ultimately, it’s going to come down to government legislations going to have to step in at some point and say, “How can this information be used? How can it not be used?” In some sense, as a consumer, I want insurance companies to charge more money to the people that do risky behaviors. But at what point can they say, “Well, 20 years ago you did something risky. We still think you’re going to do something risky. We’re going to charge you more now.” What point does this data starts being overly aggressive on the opposite end and preventing us from being able to get insurance. “Oh, sorry sir. You can’t buy that car because you might get a speeding ticket and put other people’s lives at risk.”
Ty: Right. Again, it comes down to that Minority Report where the more information that we get, the more this predictive behavior predicting what you may do. Then, the future world, you’re judged based on maybe what you haven’t even done because of what you may do. What other online scams are you seeing that are out there right now that people should be aware of and know the signs to avoid?
Chris: It was funny, I was just corresponding with someone about this and talking about the telltale signs of things that you should worry about because they’re constantly changing. I think a couple of weeks here ago in the US there was a nationwide bomb scare. Basically, someone spammed out to 100,000 people and of course, the people in the government got it. It basically said, “My associate has built a bomb under my specifications and put it in your building. If you don’t send me $10,000 via Bitcoin in the next two hours, I’m going to blow up the bomb. Oh, and by the way, I’m watching. If you call the police or anything happens, I’m going to set it off.” This was just a spam trying to get people to, “I’ve got to send the money in because I don’t know if it’s true or not out of the abundance of caution.” I got this email when I was in a meeting and I looked at it and I’m like, “Oh, interesting. That’s an interesting scam.” On my way home from the meeting, I’m hearing about this high school is in lockdown because they got that email. I’m like, “Argh.”
Anytime you get an email, or a phone call, or text message that has some alarming emotional element, you have to stop and go, “Okay, I have to separate myself from the emotion.” Whether it’s your grandson has been arrested and in jail, or I’m travelling in Europe and I lost my passport and I need help. Or one of the more recent ones, “I hacked your computer and I’ve recorded the inappropriate websites that you’ve been visiting. If you don’t want me to release this, send me money.” One of the interesting things that they did is what made it concerning to most people is they went to one of these data breaches and associated the email address that they sent it to with a password that had been used in one of those data breaches. “As proof that I’ve hacked to your computer, here’s a password that you recently used.” “Oh my gosh, it must be true.”
Ty: Sure.
Chris: There’s that suspension of the emotion that got people to stop thinking logically. “Oh my gosh, I better send this money. Who knows what I’ve done?” As opposed to, “Wait, they didn’t address me by name. Let me go see.” It’s just that thought process they skipped thinking about, “Is this reasonable? Is there any personally identifiable information in this email?” Unfortunately, we’re going to get to point where they’re going to start naming us by name and things like that.
Ty: It’s so true. People that are watching or listening are like, “Yeah.” I got to tell you that I was just involved in this where I went to sell a car which I have not done in many many years online and that was a whole other experience. It was scam, after scam, after scam. Eventually, I became numb to it. In the beginning, there was this legit process, I checked him out, I checked the company they’re sending the money, it all seemed so legit. And then, it was like, “Send me a payment for the shipping.” My mind didn’t trigger red flag which it should of. I’m like, “No. due diligence check was already checked off. I’m good here.”
But then, he switched links in between into something that looked close to what that was legit but wasn’t. I literally had the money order in hand and then it happened. I had my wife, “Get the money order.” And then I’m like, “Wait a minute. That doesn’t make…” It’s just like all this logic came in. “That doesn’t make any sense. Why would I do this?” Literally, it was so close to have lost a considerable amount of money. No matter how smart you are, I was emotionally attached to a selling of a vehicle. I wasn’t able, in that moment, to separate that emotional attachment and let the logic take over. I had to stop myself just as you suggested and then I’m like, “Wait a minute.” Very susceptible to what you described is when you let the emotions get tied up.
Chris: Yep. I just remembered one, a business that I was working with. This is probably a good warning for businesses. The accountant got an email that looked like it came from the president of the company—the proper signature, everything. It looked like his email. It addressed her by name and said, “Hey, so and so. I’m on a call right now. I can’t talk about this. I’m probably going to be on a call for another hour or two. But we’re setting up with this new vendor and I need you to wire them $5000 right now. Here’s all the account information. We could talk about it after my call. I just need you to do it right now.” It looked like a perfectly legitimate email for her.
She starts going through the process. It just happened to be a fluke that she didn’t know which account that he wanted her to wire the money from. She saw him walked out in his office and said, “Hey, what account did you want me to send the money from?” He’s like, “What are you talking about?” She was like, “You just sent me an email asking you to send up this new vendor.” “I didn’t send this email.” The person had apparently, at some point, called him on the phone, had emailed and talked to the owner of the company, and asked him, “Hey, I need to talk to your accounting department. Who should I have talk to?” That’s why he had the name of the person and it all looked so legitimate. They created a whole new domain name that looked very similar.
Most people just don’t think about that because it was his signature on the email and he addressed her by name. It was all very plausible sounding. But because they didn’t have this process in place of anytime you set up a new vendor and you’re going to send them more than this amount of money, you need someone to sign off in a piece of paper or confirm it via some other methodology. They almost lost thousands of dollars. She was about ready to, “Well, I guess I should just probably do it from this account.” It was a total fluke that they ended up not losing the money.
Ty: It’s crazy. What kind of online habits do you think, or practice should be put in place to protect privacy? To protect and stay safer online?
Chris: I think, again, what we talked about using a password manager and not using that same password anywhere. Password managers, you can basically get them for free. If you want really fancy ones, you can get them for a couple bucks a year. People should be using password managers. I think for a lot of people, if you’re working a side hustle and you’re doing work in a coffee shop or Starbucks, anything like this, don’t assume that the person who’s running the shop that can make you a great cup of coffee has a degree in security infrastructure. You should be using a VPN service when you’re out in public, particularly if you’re traveling in countries that are a little bit more, shall we say, concerned about what their citizens are doing. You want to get that service before you go to that country because you wouldn’t be able to buy it when you’re in the country. I think there’s those sorts of things.
Some of it is doing things that are kind of assuming that you’re going to have problems. I’m one of those weird people that I’m risk-averse. Not only do I have my computer auto-backing up to a storage device in my closet. I make a manual backup once a month, take it down to a safety deposit box, and swap it with another one. Then, I also use an offsite backup service. If for some weird fluke, I’d become a victim of malware or ransomware, and my computer gets compromised. “Do I pay the ransom or do I lose my entire business over this?” I got backups all over the place and places that are secure. If I do get and become a victim, it’s not going to shut my business down. It’s just going to cost me the cost of having a hard drive shipped to me or something like that.
Ty: In the example you gave by the coffee shop, where does the responsibility of private firms begin and end when it comes to cybersecurity?
Chris: I don’t think there is a legal responsibility. I think individuals have to consider it for themselves. “What do I need to do to insure my protection when I’m doing things?” I don’t think you’re ever going to be able to legislate coffee shops, “If you have free Wi-Fi, you have to have this much experience.”
Ty: Right. Besides passwords and some of the things you talked about, how do business owners really filter the kind of information that people have access to?
Chris: Can you clarify your question?
Ty: It seems like there’s all these data breaches. If there’s data breaches because that information is being stored or housed somewhere where they’re inaccessible—I’m not Marriott. When you’re in a small business, what are some things that you’ve think and you found that people could maybe do to try their best to protect that information and make it where it’s less accessible to these kind of hackers and people that are trying to access it to do bad things?
Chris: I think you need to have access controls in place that only the appropriate people, only the appropriate platforms have access to the data. That you don’t just have one username and password that anyone inside your office can login into your database and get access to everything. Unfortunately, it becomes very technical very quickly.
Ty: You’ve talked about networks. Is there a way to know the right networks to prevent? Like you said, you go to a coffee shop, it asks you, “You’re logging in to an unsecured network.” Then you’re possibly susceptible to that information being stolen. Are there ways in those circumstances you can protect yourself?
Chris: Using a VPN helps you because you’re now protected. There’s a company called Keezel—I’ll send you the link so you can put it in the notes. It’s a combination of a hardware VPN and a software VPN service. One of the things that you have to do is when you decide you want to get on the internet in the cafe, you have to connect to your VPN. Your computer is actually on the cafe’s network or the coffee shop’s network for some period of time. When you use a Keezel, it actually works as a hotspot that connects out to other hotspots. Your device is totally insulated from the network by this physical device. Then it routes the traffic through a VPN to wherever country it was. It’s not a cheap solution, but it’s kind of a nifty way of doing it where you don’t have to worry as much about, “Am I connecting things in the right order?” “Who else is sitting on this network?” It’s kind of a neat device.
Ty: You mentioned ransomware, malware, you mentioned a solutions of making sure you have different passwords, you’re protecting the passwords. You talked about having multiple backups. Anything else people should be doing to protect themselves against malware and the ransomware?
Chris: The biggest thing is common sense. Do not be clicking on links that you are not expecting. That’s one of the biggest things you can ever do.
Ty: What about getting a new device? Getting a new computer? Getting a new laptop? Or discard the old? In either of those situations, anything special I should do to try to protect myself.
Chris: I think when you’re getting rid of an old device, don’t ever just recycle it or don’t ever just throw it in the dumpster. You’re probably not at risk of someone digging through a dumpster to find a hard drive, but there are things like if you are in a business in a sensitive industry and you’ve got a photocopier—an industrial photocopier—that you need to get rid of, those things actually have hard drives in them to record the copies so they can, “Hey, I need to make more of these particular copies.” A lot of that data’s actually stored.
There was a case where there were data thieves going out and buying copiers that police departments were getting rid of, that banks were getting rid of, because it had copies of arrest records on it. It had banking records on it. You really kind of need to know, “What data is on this device that I’m getting rid of? Does it store data?” If so, “How do I format that data? How do I get rid of it?”
I worked for a life insurance broker for many years. When they got rid of computers, we would pull the hard drive out and go to a drill press and drill a hole through it just to make sure that personally identifiable information didn’t get out there by accident.
Ty: That’s great piece of advice. What about if you’ve already been hacked? Any advice there?
Chris: If you think your phone, or your laptop, or your device has been hacked, the best-case scenario is always restore to factory setting and reinstall everything from scratch. A lot of viruses these days, malware, it’s really hard to get off the system. It’s really hard to detect when it’s on there. The best solution is just wipe and restart which is why a backup is important.
Ty: As we get ready to wrap up, any parting or advice regarding cybersecurity? Avoiding some of these things we talked about, knowing your IP address, keeping these types of things protected. Any parting advice that I haven’t already tapped into that could help everybody that’s listening and watching today?
Chris: I think people just need to take their security—their cybersecurity—seriously and not assume that other people are out to protect them because they aren’t.
Ty: If I want to know how people are identifying me online which is my IP address—we talked about that’s how they know who I am—what steps do I take next? What can I do to figure out my IP address? I want to see how much they can zoom in on me. What can I do to figure that out?
Chris: You can always visit my website, whatismyipaddress.com, and we’ll show you as much information as we can figure out about you to you, so that you can be aware of what people know about you. If you’re running a website and you have people buying stuff from you via ecommerce, you can find out some more stuff about the people that are buying from you.
Ty: That’s awesome. Chris, this has been a really informative, man. This is an important topic that everybody needs to know a lot about and we’ve yet to talk about. I really appreciate you coming on and sharing your expertise with us all today.
Chris: Thank you. I had a great time being on here today.
Ty: Listen, everybody. Cybersecurity is really important because as business owners, it’s not about your information, it’s about your customer’s information as well. You have a dual responsibility to protect your own and also to protect their responsibility. We’ve talked about a lot of things here today with Chris that should help you at least be armed with the information and knowledge you need to start making the right decisions that will protect yourself and your customers from all different types of online scams, information being stolen, and all these bad things that can happen.
Get started by figuring out your own IP address. It’s pretty interesting to know what all these other people can easily know about you and they all automatically know your IP address. Learn what these other guys know by going to whatismyipaddress.com. That’s whatismyipaddress.com. I’m going to put a link to whatismyipaddress.com, and a link to Chris’ blog as well in the show resources page.
Remember, you’ve got to take steps to keep you and your customers’ information protected. One of the easiest and best places to start is find out what others know about you; find out what’s your IP address actually is and what that says about you. You could do that at whatismyipaddress.com. Thanks, everybody for tuning in. Have a great day!
You’ve been listening to the Business Credit and Financing show with your host, Ty Crandall. Watch for our next episode to get even more insight on financing and growing your business. Don’t forget to check us out online at creditsuite.com for even more business growth strategies.
Chris Parker
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