Ian Balina, crypto millionaire and ICO investor, lost nearly $2million worth of tokens in an apparent hack during one of his live streams. Balina was reviewing ICOs on his channel that has over 110k subscribers when hackers attacked his assets by assessing his private keys. Security is one of the biggest challenges that the blockchain community faces right now.

Balina is one of the well known names in crypto. His rated and reviewed ICOs have a reputation for reaping rich dividends for the investors and he has made a name for himself starting from zero. The sequence of events, though, that led to the hack are suspicious to say the least.

A user by the name of DABusiness commented during his livestream that his tokens had been transferred from his account. Here's the full text of the message:

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

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This comment went unnoticed, however, Balina's video feed went offline after 15 minutes due to a 'power-cut'. When Balina returned after some time to continue the stream, his Google sheet profile had been signed out.

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It was later revealed that almost all of his crypto assets were stolen in the hack. This is the official statement that came from Balina after the hack:

“This is how I think I got hacked. My college email was listed as a recovery email to my Gmail. I remember getting an email about it being compromised, and tried to follow up with my college security to get it resolved, but wasn't able to get it handled in fast manner and gave up on it thinking it was just an old email.”

“I kept text versions of my private keys stored in my Evernote, as encrypted text files with passwords. I think they hacked my email using my college email, and then hacked my Evernote.”

This hack comes at a time when agencies are looking to regulate the crypto ecosystem and tax the savings of rich crypto millionaires. This is one of the reasons why many are calling this hack an inside job to evade paying taxes. This reddit thread explores the possibility of the same:

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Whatever be the case, if you hold any crypto assets then you need to invest in proper security measures because it's the key to ensuring safety of your crypto money.