A year ago I felt a panic that still reverberates in me today. Hackers swapped my T-Mobile SIM card without my approval and methodically shut down access to most of my accounts and began reaching out to my Facebook friends asking to borrow crypto. Their social engineering tactics, to be clear, were laughable but they could have been catastrophic if my friends were less savvy.

Flash forward a year and the same thing happened to me again & my LTE coverage winked out at about 9pm and it appeared that my phone was disconnected from the network. Panicked, I rushed to my computer to try to salvage everything I could before more damage occurred. It was a false alarm but my pulse went up and I broke out in a cold sweat. I had dealt with this once before and didn&t want to deal with it again.

Sadly, I probably will. And you will, too. The SIM card swap hack is still alive and well and points to one and only one solution: keeping your crypto (and almost your entire life) offline.

Trust No Carrier

Stories about massive SIM-based hacks are all over. Most recently a crypto PR rep and investor, Michael Terpin, lost $24 million to hackers who swapped his AT-T SIM. Terpin is suing the carrier for $224 million. This move, which could set a frightening precedent for carriers, accuses AT-T of &fraud and gross negligence.&

From Krebs:

Terpin alleges that on January 7, 2018, someone requested an unauthorized SIM swap on his AT-T account, causing his phone to go dead and sending all incoming texts and phone calls to a device the attackers controlled. Armed with that access, the intruders were able to reset credentials tied to his cryptocurrency accounts and siphon nearly $24 million worth of digital currencies.

While we can wonder in disbelief at a crypto investor who keeps his cash in an online wallet secured by text message, how many other services do we use that depend on emails or text messages, two vectors easily hackable by SIM spoofing attacks How many of us would be resistant to the techniques that nabbed Terpin

Another crypto owner, Namek Zu&bi, lost access to his Coinbase account after hackers swapped his SIM, logged into his account, and changed his email while attempting direct debits to his bank account.

&When the hackers took over my account they attempted direct debits into the account. But because I blocked my bank accounts before they could it seems there are bank chargebacks on that account. So Coinbase is essentially telling me sorry you can&t recover your account and we can&t help you but if you do want to use the account you owe $3K in bank chargebacks,& he said.

Now Zu&bi is facing a different issue: Coinbase is accusing him of being $3,000 in arrears and will not give him access to his account because he cannot reply from the hackeremail.

&I tried to work with coinbase hotline who is supposed to help with this but they were clueless even after I told them that the hackerchanged email address on my original account and then created a new account with my email address. Since then I&ve been waiting for a ‘specialist& to email me (was supposed to be 4 business days itbeen 8 days) and I&m still locked out of my account because Coinbase support can&t verify me,& he said.

It has been a frustrating ride.

&As an avid supporter and investor in crypto it baffles me how one of the market leaders who just supposedly launched institutional grade custody solutions can barely deal with a basic account take-over fraud,& Zu&bi said.

How do you protect yourself

I&ve been using Trezor hardware wallets for a while, storing them in safe places outside of my home and maintaining a separate record of the seeds in another location. I have very little crypto but even for a fraction of a few BTC it just makes sense to practice safe storage. Ultimately, if you own crypto you are now your own bank. That you would trust anyone & including a fiat bank & to keep your digital currency safe is deeply delusional. Heck, I barely trust Trezor and they seem like the only solution for safe storage right now.

When I was first hacked I posted recommendations by crypto exchange Kraken. They are still applicable today:

Call your telco and:

• Set a passcode/PIN on your account

  • Make sure it applies to ALL account changes
  • Make sure it applies to all numbers on the account
  • Ask them what happens if you forget the passcode
    • Ask them what happens if you lose that too

• Institute a port freeze

• Institute a SIM lock

• Add a high-risk flag

• Close your online web-based management account

• Block future registration to online management system

• Hack yo& self

  • See what information they will leak

  • See what account changes you can make

They also recommend changing your telco email to something wildly inappropriate and using a burner phone or Google Voice number that is completely disconnected from your regular accounts as a sort of blind for your two factor texts and alerts.

Sadly, doing all of these things is quite difficult. Further, carriers don&t make it easy. In May a 27-year-old man named Paul Rosenzweig fell victim to a SIM-swapping hack even though he had SIM lock installed on his account. A rogue T-Mobile employee bypassed the security, resulting in the loss of a unique three character Twitter and Snapchat account.

Ultimately nothing is secure. The bottom line is simple: if you&re in crypto expect to be hacked and expect it to be painful and frustrating. What you do now & setting up real two-factory security, offloading your crypto onto physical hardware, making diligent backups, and protecting your keys & will make things far better for you in the long run. Ultimately, you don&t want to wake up one morning with your phone off and all of your crypto siphoned off into the pocket of a college kid like Joel Ortiz, a hacker who is now facing jail time for &13 counts of identity theft, 13 counts of hacking, and two counts of grand theft.& Sadly, none of the crypto he stole has surfaced after his arrest.

Dark Sky, one of the more popular mobile weather applications on the market, is out today with a complete refresh of its app, which has now been re-written from the ground up, the company says. The biggest change is the introduction of a new unified timeline that combines both the precipitation predictions Dark Sky is best known for, and its weather forecast all on one page. This makes it easier to view all the critical weather information in a single view, without having to tab around to different pages.

The appdesign has been updated, as well.

Before, a simple bar graph would show you the rainfall predictions for the day ahead, with the rainfall percentage to the right of the hour blocks. With the new release, that graph has been replaced with an animated chart that instead has the rainfall percentage displayed within a circle that fans out to the right of the bar, with the higher percentages out further to the right than the lower ones. This allows you to better visualize the ebb and flow of the rainfall over the hours ahead.

Combined with the map above the chart, you can get more of a sense of the dayrainfall patterns & like if there were breaks in a storm thatpassing over, for example, or if you&re in for all-day rain.

The only qualm we have about the changes here is that the dayhigh and low temps are now given less prominence & they&re in small italics above the animated chart, making them easier to miss.

The same animated chart for rainfall can be changed to display the daytemperature, the &feels like& temperature, and the wind (mph) in the same way by tapping on those options at the bottom.

Plus, you can see these charts for any day of the week ahead, by scrolling down to the daily forecasts and tapping on the day you want to view.

Therealso a clever, if not always practical, &Time Machine& feature here at the bottom which can show you the weather going back decades. You just put in the date you want to see and press &jump.& This may be more fun for true weather nerds, than for day-to-day use, but itworth noting.

Another big fix, and one that was prompted by user feedback, was Dark Skylack of support for saved locations. Thatnow been addressed with this new release, where you can manage locations from the Search screen.

Another nod to weather nerds is available from Search, too & it will show you &interesting storms& from around the country in case &your weather happens to be too bland,& the company says, in its announcement. However, this could be useful if you&re checking in on friends or family in the path of a major storm or hurricane.

While no weather app is perfect, Dark Sky allows users to report the weather at their location which helps improve the apphyperlocal forecasts. That means the app may seem to be more accurate in places where theremore consumer adoption. If you live somewhere rainy, then therea good chance a number of Dark Sky users are nearby because of the appkey focus on precipitation forecasts.

The updated app offers an improved set of notifications, allowing you to toggle on or off things like Next Hour Precipitation, Daily Summary, Severe Weather Alerts, Umbrella Reminder, Sunscreen Reminder or your own custom notifications, based on other conditions that matter to you & like UV index forecasts, for instance.

The Iconfactory designed new weather icons for the updated app, which has also been entirely rewritten to load more quickly, be more responsive and stable.

The company didn&t have to improve Dark Sky & the app was pretty good as it was, and was almost always the No. 1 paid Weather app on the App Store, as well as ranked in the Top 50 Overall. Today, however, itranked No. 1 in Weather, and has shot up to No. 4 in the Top Paid charts, as result of the update.

Current users will be able to download the update for no charge. The app is a free download on Android (with in-app purchases), and a $3.99 paid app on iOS. Itavailable in the U.S., U.K, and Ireland. The company also makes money through licensing its API, which is used by organizations like Yelp, Citymapper, Microsoft, Runkeeper, DuckDuckGo, and others. As the API is updated with more functionality, those will come to the app in the form of new features, we&re told.

Cloud computing has become an important tool for business, enabling redundant data processes, and computing resources that can scale to meet the challenge of an uptick in demand, all in an instant. It has enabled offerings as diverse as Software as a Service, and the increasingly popular container technology.

With many of today’s businesses reliant