Happy New Year and welcome back to the Sandwich Bread Podcast. We took a short break for the holidays, but we're back and we'll be releasing new episodes every other Tuesday. Today we're speaking with Danny Schwartz, CEO of Your Cyber Life, focusing on tactical ways families can protect themselves online. We've already recorded another episode with Danny that focuses on cybersecurity for aging parents. Think of this as putting on your oxygen mask before you help someone else. And with that, let's get into the episode.

Welcome everybody to another episode of the Sandwich Bread Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Kaminski, and we have a very, very special episode today. We have a guest, Danny Schwartze on CEO of Your Cyber Life, which is a cybersecurity education platform, I'm excited to have this conversation. Cybersecurity is such a huge part of our lives, I've gotten so many calls and so many fraud texts. in just the last couple of weeks, there's something going on where the uptick, I don't know if they've really figured out how to leverage AI to scale cyber probing, but it's gotten nuts.

And it makes me worry about my clients because I'm very paranoid about this stuff and I do a lot of things to safeguard, but it's breaking through if you will. So crazy.


And it is unfortunately with kind of the advent of AI and what its ability to do.
to do a couple of things, right? Mimic voices and actually the bigger component, AI is able to go out and gather all of this information through social engineering. So it makes those fraud calls and spam calls seem so much more real. Then you start to mix in AI voice cloning. So it can even sound like someone that you might know.

So having a good air of skepticism when receiving those things is very, very good thing to do.

Tom Kaminski (02:15)
Yeah. Yeah. And it's too bad because as a financial planner, I want to make myself available to prospective clients. But now it's at the point where if I get an unsolicited voicemail or email that even looks pretty good, I'm reluctant to respond to it.

AI, whether you're talking to a bot or an actual person can serve up everything you need on a silver platter to try to manipulate the conversation. So,

Danny - YourCyberLife (02:31)
Mm-hmm.

100 %

Tom Kaminski (02:38)
We're going to lead off with some deeply paranoid stuff. ⁓

man.

All right, Danny, Could you share with us a little bit about your background, what led you to this point, and why you founded this company, and a little bit more about what it is.

Danny - YourCyberLife (02:54)
Yeah, you bet. actually, it's sort of more of...

of my career, I was with Schwab for about 20 years. I was one of their lead technology consultants on the business development side. actually helping build RAs and discussing all things technology and cyber security was a huge component of that. So what I kept kind of hearing was, how do we protect our business and kind of what we're doing today? How do we protect our clients? through that need and some really personal experiences I had with cyber crime. So I had my identity stolen and I had a couple of family members

targeted by cybercrime really led me down the path of trying to build a company that's focused on educating advisors and their staff, as well as their clients on all things cybersecurity.

Tom Kaminski (03:31)
That's awesome. And ever evolving. mean, it's crazy how quickly things are changing. ⁓

Danny - YourCyberLife (03:37)
Yes,

very quickly.

Tom Kaminski (03:38)
so with that, my hope with this episode today was that you can impart us with some knowledge, things you've seen out in the field. And we're going to focus on a series of recommendations that you would have.

But getting us from a place of vulnerability to starting to build a defense system around yourself and your family. And so this content specifically will be tailored toward people our age, you know, of that quote unquote millennial demographic, things to think about for themselves and maybe even their children as their children start to become online.

we've assembled a list of six things so with that Let's dive in. What's the first thing first thing we should think about doing to protect ourselves from cybercrime?

Danny - YourCyberLife (04:22)
Yeah, and I think probably the key thing to understand about cybercrime.

A lot of times it's a crime of opportunity, right? So cyber criminals kind of prey on people that don't have safeguards in place. And if you do have safeguards in place, a lot of times they'll just move on to someone else. one of the big recommendations that we talk about is having an antivirus

virus

solution on computers, phones, tablets, Cause malware and viruses can affect any device that's connected to the internet. So the couple of ones we typically recommend to folks also include things like cyber insurance at an individual or personal level, things like dark web monitoring, spam call blocking, or

actually removing your information from data broker services.

Tom Kaminski (05:03)
Okay. All right. So there's a lot to unpack there, but my first takeaway would be malware protection. Did I say that right? Do we need to cut that? Malware, malware, malware protection, malware, tomato, tomato.

Danny - YourCyberLife (05:11)
malware malware. You're close enough.

the interesting part about it too, again, malware doesn't care these days. it's device agnostic, it can infect anything. And your phone, for example, think how much information goes through that phone on a daily basis, emails, text messages. You're kind of talking about, you know, all the fraud text messages you get, you can click on

one of those text messages and get spyware involved on your phone then it kind of branches out once you get one device infected it can spread through a household

Tom Kaminski (05:41)
Helpful to know and think about. when I do open enrollment reviews for clients, they'll have identity theft protection, which usually includes some type of malware service or antivirus service. And I always encourage my clients to at least take a hard look at the discounts offered through their employer benefits, or if it's not the right fit for them, try another, subscribe through another channel.

Danny - YourCyberLife (05:57)
Mm-hmm.

Yep, yeah, 100 % recommend that as well.

Tom Kaminski (06:04)
Okay, good little nugget there. All right, let's move on to the next one. What is number two?

Danny - YourCyberLife (06:09)
Yeah, so this one, plays along the same lines, but it's regularly checking to see where your devices are connected. So that includes your email, or maybe if you're using Google or Apple, seeing what platforms those are connected to. So luckily Apple, Google, Microsoft have security centers that kind of make this easier. But what happens is a lot of times folks will connect to an application, an app or a website. And the thing that they fail to realize

is you're kind of opening a gateway. So really monitoring those connections is important because it helps protect personal data, preventing unauthorized access and really reduces security risk.

one of the things we recommend is going through an annual review, pulling up the security center for Google, Apple, Microsoft, whatever it happens to be, and identifying where you're connected and removing unused or really unrecognized connections.

Tom Kaminski (06:59)
Okay, good. Good one. Okay. Awesome. All right. Let's move on to the next one.

Danny - YourCyberLife (07:03)
⁓ It's knowing how to track and remote wipe devices. So this is again often part of the security consoles for again Google, Microsoft, Apple. And really what it helps to do is prevent data theft. In the event you lose a device or it's lost or stolen, a lot of times what cyber criminals will try to do is break into that device.

So what this does, it remote wipes them and you're not having any unauthorized access or access to personal information, photos, things like that.

Tom Kaminski (07:32)
That's a good one. And that is one where it's easy to overlook or like you get an ice and you just move on. I want to say a lot of these new devices have systems built in where you can remote wipe. Yeah.

Danny - YourCyberLife (07:37)
Yes.

It's much easier than it used to be. It

used to be a lot more difficult. yeah, Apple, Google, Microsoft, really all your major platforms have a pretty easy ability to remote wipe. And you hit on something that just popped in my head. wiping your old device. if you get a new phone, you know, all the data transfers to it, but there's a lot of residual data left on old laptops, phones, especially. And sometimes people will trade those things in or they'll donate them. Go through a process.

Tom Kaminski (08:09)
Yeah.

Danny - YourCyberLife (08:10)
and clean those out because all of that information can be valuable especially for phones so actually cleaning all of that data out of those is a very good cyber security habit

Tom Kaminski (08:20)
Is

that as simple as taking out the SIM card and destroying it and just handing in the hardware like the remaining hardware? Yeah.

Danny - YourCyberLife (08:26)
Move it!

So

destroying your SIM card will help more from an account takeover perspective, So probably the best thing you can do is take out any external memory cards to your point, obviously remove SIM card

or get those transferred, then do a full factory reset on the device itself, which should in theory kind of wipe out any residual data.

Tom Kaminski (08:46)
Okay, good to know. All right. Very good. Very good. All right secure home networks and have a guest network. That's a number four

Tell us about that.

Danny - YourCyberLife (08:54)
Number four.

Yeah, so this is one of the most, overlooked perspectives from a cybersecurity standpoint. So really securing your home network and setting up a guest network is important because your home Wi-Fi is the gateway to all connected devices. So if it's not protected, hackers, even malware can access, again, personal, financial data, even work-related scenarios. a really simple example is, say, someone

comes to your home and connects to your Wi-Fi and their device is infected with malware. If you don't have kind of primary and secondary network set up or really have security measures set up, that malware can now spread to any connected device throughout the homes. So again, one of those things really important and you're probably going to start to see a lot more employers, especially if you're working remote, actually require you to have security standards on your home Wi-Fi because same scenario works. If you've got a work laptop and it's connected to your home Wi-Fi,

and it's not secure, that can be a gateway to the business as well.

Tom Kaminski (09:53)
Yeah,

that's an interesting and challenging situation. Everybody wants to have convenient Wi-Fi for guests who may come to their home, but that's part of my paranoid journey as a business owner. It ⁓ doesn't make for convenience.

Danny - YourCyberLife (10:08)
Yeah.

It used to be a lot more difficult to create a primary network and a secondary network. Now most systems, it's automatically built in. So you just turn it on. there's a whole discussion to be had too about what devices get connected to what. So one of the things we typically recommend, your primary network, it's only for head of household. So maybe parents are only ones connected to it. Then it's really important systems connected to it. So I think of a really simple example would be home security.

Tom Kaminski (10:12)
Yeah.

Danny - YourCyberLife (10:35)
security

systems are connected to that, maybe cameras, but then everything else gets connected to the guest network. So I think about things like robot vacuums is a really good example, ⁓ refrigerators that have wifi, because all of those pieces of tech over time age out and the software gets out of date. And since they're connected to a wifi network, they can actually be vulnerability points into your home network. And again, pretty keeping a pretty limited connection.

to your primary networks, usually advise and push everything else to that guest network.

Tom Kaminski (11:06)
Good stuff. All right. Let's move on to the next one. Number five.

Danny - YourCyberLife (11:10)
Yeah, so this one's more around helping kids.

Tom Kaminski (11:13)
Yeah.

Danny - YourCyberLife (11:14)
So unfortunately, cybercrime is now a multi-generational problem. So cyber criminals are targeting kids with malware, and a lot of times that's laced back through video games. So a free game, they download it on their phone or device. And again, goes back to that idea, now we've got malware on one device, we're going to try to infect the entire home network. But it's not limited to that. I'm starting to see a lot of reports of kids having their identities stolen, then manipulating ages and things like that to open up

and really taking out credit lines in kids' names. So there's a really big push, and I recommend it if you can, is to freeze your child's credit. So it's probably another subject we'll touch on here a little later, but going through and taking some of these early, I would say, protocols really kind of helps set them up for the future. Teenagers are heavily being affected by cybercrime. there's a lot of reports now about

about teenagers being caught up in extortion scams. And there's a huge variety of those. So one of the things we typically recommend for folks, and it's a free resource, is the FTC provides a PDF document called NetCetera. So it's a guide to helping chat with kids about cybercrime and being safe online. It's a really great resource, provides some really interesting, really kind of starting points, if you will, on chatting with kids.

Tom Kaminski (12:11)
Hmm.

Awesome.

Cool. All right, we'll link to that in the show notes. That's really good. Yeah, it's as a parent, you know, it's just you don't have a child with the expectation that you have to worry about cybersecurity. You just have a child because you want to have a child and then they come into the world and you're like, my God, there's so many dangers I was not thinking about. Yeah. And so it's, it's a little bit tricky, but fortunately my kids are young enough where we, are not grappling with the internet that much, you know, in their daily lives and

Danny - YourCyberLife (12:39)
No.

Nobody says that.

It's coming.

Tom Kaminski (12:54)
but it is something I want to be out in front of, know, with my planning and my thinking. So for those free games, are so popular everyone loves playing games on their phones or their tablets. What's a good way to flush out the legitimacy of a game, do you have any basic ideas around that?

Danny - YourCyberLife (13:11)
Sure, there's the couple things I always say if you're going to download a game, make sure it comes off your provider's network. So for example, Apple's got the Apple Store, Google's got their kind of play network. Only download those from there because a lot of times they're actually doing a little bit of vetting. But the most important thing is when you download the game, it's going to take you to a securities menu, meaning here's what this game wants to access. So if that game is accessing microphones, contacts, all of this really important data, do not download it.

really taking the time just to understand what it has access to is the key to that as well.

Tom Kaminski (13:46)
I had a really crazy experience recently that's similar to this we were dusting off our old Christmas decorations and I was going to plug in one of those timing adapter things where you can set the schedule for your lights, I hadn't used it in a year or two. I went to pull up the app to use it.

and it wasn't working and it prompted me to go to settings and accept some new settings before it would start working. it wanted everything. It wanted to sync my contacts from email. It's a $20 piece of hardware to run the lights that syncs to an app. And I was like, they're trying to get all my data with this piece of junk.

Um, yeah.

Danny - YourCyberLife (14:24)
There's a whole

world of consumer electronics that we could talk about, especially when you're buying really kind of cheap electronics off platforms like Amazon. So if you order off-brand cameras, they're going to want the same thing. But a lot of folks don't realize is you're setting up a camera in your house. You really have to understand who has access to that information and what's being pulled out from it. So yeah, consumer electronics.

electronics, there's a massive problem with that right now and there's not a really good way to combat it other than you have to be vigilant about understanding what it has access to.

Tom Kaminski (14:55)
Yeah, crazy stuff. Anything else in the realm of protecting kids? Having a grip on, you know, the apps, tablets, hardware they're using, Like getting out in front of just

navigating a kind of a scary world for your children online.

Danny - YourCyberLife (15:08)
Yeah,

if we're going to go back to our conversation around having a secondary network, one of the benefits of connecting your kids' devices to that secondary network is you can just turn it off at any point in time. So you can just kill Wi-Fi and it doesn't, candle, it doesn't affect you, right? You can still stay on Wi-Fi, but your kids now are limited.

Tom Kaminski (15:18)
I like that.

Danny - YourCyberLife (15:24)
Thank

Tom Kaminski (15:24)
I can be on my iPad in my ivory tower while they have to go back to using their imaginations. I like it. Very good.

Danny - YourCyberLife (15:27)
Exactly.

Tom Kaminski (15:31)
Appreciate that, Danny. All right. Last but not least is number six. No public wifi or USB walks through that one.

Danny - YourCyberLife (15:36)
Mm-hmm.

Yes.

Yeah, so this is of a big one. It affects people that travel a lot. So we always recommend avoiding free or public wifi because most often it's unsecure and it's really easy for attackers to exploit. simple example of that, and I'll use a hotel for example, is say you're staying at the Marriott and you see a wifi connection that says Marriott free wifi. What scammers can do, and this is kind of referred to

as man in the middle attack is set up another wifi network that mirrors it. Say it says Marriott free wifi 5G. what folks will do is they'll connect to that. Now you've opened up a direct gateway from an attacker to be able to access your device. And similarly, it comes to USB drives and this includes cords or really of any of the public charging stations that you see. So those are really common at places like airports, conventions or things like that. All of those can actually

easily have malware or viruses installed on them. and that is a direct connection to your device. So if you plug in a found USB drive directly in your computer, a lot of times it might even bypass some of your anti-virus security and actually install it directly, bypassing some security protocols on your device and giving a direct port into it. And so an example

Tom Kaminski (16:45)
my gosh.

Danny - YourCyberLife (16:54)
here, read about this actually happening a couple times, is really cyber criminals will take malware loaded USB drives and actually drop them close to schools. So kids are obviously curious, they'll go through, grab one those devices, plug it in a laptop, again, now your laptop's infected with malware, goes back to that idea, they take it home, connect it to the home Wi-Fi, and now it's spreading across all devices.

Tom Kaminski (17:04)
⁓ No, jeez.

So it's sort of like a Trojan horse concept where it's sitting dormant. They plugged it in, didn't see much happen, didn't think much of it, take their laptop home and then it's on. Yeah.

Danny - YourCyberLife (17:19)
It is.

Mm-hmm.

Now it's a problem. Yep. And

are probably a couple of different forms. It'll either try to lock up the system. A lot of times you'll see spyware get installed. all that means is your point is they're sleeping within your home wifi network, collecting logins, passwords, accessing your cameras, all of those different things. So big recommendation. I know it can be a little bit of a pain is never ever use a found USB drive cord, use those charging stations. If you are traveling a fair amount, typically what we recommend for folks is to bring your own

battery pack or just use the AC plug-in. So just plug it in without using USB drives, probably the safest thing you can do.

Tom Kaminski (18:01)
it. Okay.

Danny - YourCyberLife (18:02)
Yep, basically all of those devices, especially if it's a charging station, have a really base level operating system on them, so it's just living and breathing within that.

Tom Kaminski (18:09)
No kidding.

Wow.

I don't use them. So I learned long ago to be scared. But I did not understand the mechanics of that. That's wild.

Danny - YourCyberLife (18:15)
Good.

Tom Kaminski (18:20)
Yeah, wow. All right, what else? What's next in this list of joys?

Danny - YourCyberLife (18:23)
No, I-

I think those are the big ones. I think about some of the public resources that are out there. So the FTC actually does a tremendously great job about providing education and resources on cyber crime. The FBI does as well. the nice part about those government resources, they can actually span out into other education resources, especially around kids.

Tom Kaminski (18:44)
Super helpful, Danny. yeah, and then I use Danny's product, Your Cyber Life. And that platform is awesome. It's designed, for education and for both advisors and advisors clients. So we'll add that link to the show notes as well so that you can access the platform and start inquiring about a range of scenarios and situations.

Danny - YourCyberLife (19:01)
Yeah,

bet. Yeah, and our platform is designed to be very user friendly. provide really resources, especially if you become the victim of cybercrime. So what to do in kind of a huge variety of scenarios.

Knowledge is power.

Tom Kaminski (19:12)
I appreciate your expertise. I appreciate, I just lobbed a lot of improvised questions at you and you handled them with grace and dignity. So I appreciate that.

Danny - YourCyberLife (19:20)
No problem.

Tom Kaminski (19:21)
Danny this is a dynamic and evolving space. So I hope I can have you on again and again so us keep us on our toes. ⁓

Danny - YourCyberLife (19:28)
Glad to do it.

Appreciate the opportunity.

Tom Kaminski (19:30)
Yeah, man. Thanks so much for coming on, Danny, taking the time and bringing us a lot of good ideas and thoughts to take away from this conversation. Like I said, throughout ⁓ any resources or materials that were referenced, we will link in the show notes.

Danny, we're going to have you back again for another episode in the not too distant future here, specifically discussing the impact of cybercrime on ⁓ elder individuals, aging parents. it's a slightly different conversation, but I want to arm our audience with the same kind of ideas and concepts.

but how to help your parents. So I look forward to that conversation. That'll be coming soon. Thanks again, Danny. And that's a wrap for the show. Have a great week, everyone.

Danny - YourCyberLife (20:07)
Appreciate it.

Tom Kaminski (20:09)
Sandwich Bread Pod is hosted by me, Tom Kaminski. Huge thank you to Lauren Nos, our executive producer for making this show happen, and to Andrew Maxson of Celebrator Creative Studio for branding and design. And lastly, to Audio Nautix for our theme music. Are you someone in the sandwich generation? We'd love to hear from you.

share with us your story, and maybe we'll find a way to work you into our podcast

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