How Entrepreneurs Can Easily Protect Their Most Important Assets While Building Their Future with Kevin Donahue

0:02Who's ready to rock today, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. The only daily show interviewing the world's top entrepreneurs seven days a week. Today, we'll be breaking down how entrepreneurs can easily protect their most important assets while building their future. To draw these value bombs, I brought Kevin Donahue into EO Fire Studios. Kevin is the founder of Stealth Family, a company that protects entrepreneurs, executives, and their families from becoming victims of the tsunami of cybercrime. In today, Fire Nation, we talk about the three greatest cyber threats and scams to our business and family, how to avoid being a victim, what about kids and senior parents and dark web and oh so much more.

0:41And the big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Kevin and our sponsors. Want to learn how to get booked and paid to speak? Great news. I've arranged direct access to my good friend, Graham Baldwin's proven speaking business system from the Speaker Lab. Go to eofire.com slash speaker to grab your spot for our live training on May 28th and learn how to get booked and paid to speak. Over 41 ,000 businesses have future-proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one platform. Download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning for free at netsuite.com slash fire.

1:26Kevin, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. Yeah. What's up, Fire Nation? Great to be back. One of the things I've lived by that has worked for me that I don't think everyone would agree with is I have a phrase that I say is book the ticket, the rest will work itself out. It's almost like don't have a plan B, just go with it. Because as soon as you book the ticket, whether it's to a destination or you decide to start a business, the road becomes more clear. And I think people procrastinate on booking the ticket and they never get to go because they're waiting.

2:07And people say, well, and I say book a one-way ticket, you know, so don't even plan your return. Let your return come when you're ready. But I don't think a lot of people actually live that way or may agree with that. There's a great quote by Martin Luther King Jr. that I love, which is, you don't have to see the whole staircase to take the first step. It's so true. Like, in fact, you usually cannot see the whole staircase because that's not how life works. You take the first step, the fog parts a little bit, maybe you see the second or third stair, and then you keep figuring things out along the way.

2:40And Fire Nation, we're going to talk about how entrepreneurs can easily protect their most important assets while building their future. And I want to start by talking about the three greatest cyber threats and scams to our businesses, to our families. Yeah. We started this company, Stealth Family, because we saw a gap in the marketplace, John. And that gap was a lot of technology companies were focusing on big companies, looking for that big paycheck. And I partnered with a former FBI supervisory agent from the Cyber Task Force, Scott Augenbaum, because we just saw this huge gap and And we saw victims of these crimes, you know, small business owners, families, kids, elderly parents.

3:30And, you know, the three of the three scams that we're seeing right now are really social engineering scams. The big one right now is AI voice. People who are mimicking the voice of a mother or a daughter at college. and they're getting a phone call from the person's voice saying, I'm in trouble. I've been in a car wreck. I need money now. And, you know, what these genius social engineers do is they play on emotions, whether that's fear or greed or lust or love, whatever it may be. And they're really good. Another scam that people should be aware of, you know, we're all aware of phishing, email phishing scams.

4:15Smishing is text or SMS phishing. There's a new one out there, and it's called Quishing. And this is QR code phishing. And over the pandemic and all of that, people just became lackadaisical. You just scan things on signs, on menus. Well, if it's a good scammer, all they have to do is replace that QR code, and they'll download all the information on your phone, right? So you have to be very, very aware of your surroundings. And of course, the other one that has been really highlighted recently is sexploitation. You know, there's entire organized crime rings out of Jamaica, Nigeria, India, and they're going after teenagers.

4:57You know, 14 to 17 year old is one of the hottest markets for these folks. And they'll trick them using social media. You know, they'll get a young boy, young man, and they'll send him a message from a girl, pretty girl from a rival high school, and they'll develop a relationship. And somewhere along the line, that young man sends a naked picture or something inappropriate. And then the scammer says, if you don't send us money, we're sending this to everyone, and you're going to go to jail. And these young kids are immature. They don't know. And John, this is really hard to say, but they're committing suicide.

5:32It's one of the fastest growing cyber crimes right now because they don't know what to do. It's why we encourage families, you know, parents to be better digital parents. If you hand your child a mobile device or a gaming console, just know that you're opening them up to a world of danger. And, you know, John, when we grew up, it was stranger danger. You know, stay away from strangers and you'll be safe. It's no longer that way because these strangers are showing up looking like your friends, sounding like your parents, you know, acting like their colleagues or co-workers. So those are the top three cyber scams that we're seeing right now.

6:09There's a tsunami of others that we have to deal with. But those are the top three, John. How do we avoid them? How do we avoid being a victim of cybercrime? Yeah, John, as with anything, the first step is getting educated. You know, my partner wrote a book a few years ago called The Secret to Cybersecurity. And the subtitle is A Simple Plan to Protect Your Family and Business from Cybercrime. Now, Scott, my partner, has investigated over a thousand cybercrimes, you know, big ones, small ones. And the fact is that the FBI is overwhelmed. If you get scammed out of money or data or information, they're not going to be able to help you.

6:49You know, 911 can't help you. They're not educated. They don't know the local sheriff and the police department can't help you. So, John, it's really getting educated. It's the first core and the first principle of our business. The most vulnerable victim is the victim who's uneducated. If you're not aware of the cyber threat landscape, you're just waiting to be a victim to the latest scam, whether it's a gift card scam or a jury, fake jury duty scam or a romance pig butchering scam, cryptocurrency fraud scam. They're just waiting to be a victim. So number one, John is getting educated. Two is have a technology platform in place that can help you avoid some of these things.

7:35Scam call blocking, dark web monitoring, some of these types of solutions can help a virtual private network, antivirus, et cetera, et cetera. And finally, like I mentioned before, if someone breaks in your house or there's a fire, you know exactly who to call. 911, right? There's nothing like that set up right now, which hopefully in the future will change that for you to call. So you have to have a guy or a gal or a resource that you can call if and when something happens. But, you know, and that's incident responses. That's what it's called in the cybersecurity world. But if you're educated, John, you more than likely, you're not going to fall victim to many of these scams.

8:17That's the first thing to prevent these things from happening. Fire Nation, you need to start with education. And I want to kind of focus the next thing on kids and senior parents. I mean, you kind of talked a little bit about the kids where even if they get on a game console, I mean, they're starting to be targeted. Social media, of course. Let's talk more about with kids and with senior parents. How do we, if we do go ahead and get educated, how do we protect them? Yeah, John, it's just like anything, you know, It's having the conversation. It's having a free plan. You teach your kids to lock the door at night.

8:51They go through fire drills at schools every day. Everyone knows what to do if something happens. But when it comes to cybercrime, it's sort of this kind of private thing that people deal with. Sometimes it's shameful for them to have to deal with it. When you've been scammed, it's nothing to be proud of. And so I say avoid giving your child access to the Internet. whether it's a mobile device, iPad, or a gaming console, until you've sat down and had that conversation with them. One of the modules that we do for training is, you know, being a better digital parent. You know, it's really understanding the threat landscape, having a conversation with your kids.

9:30In fact, we tell folks, do not give your kid a mobile device or a gaming console until they've taken the first three modules of our training. You know, they're actually speaking to an FBI guy who's been there, done that, and has seen the victims. The other is the seniors. The biggest scams right now are going after seniors because they have some net worth and some wealth. They're in vulnerable positions. Let's say they're living at a senior assisted living facility. And I'll just tell you one story. A woman got an email with the logo of the senior assisted living facility she was living in and said, your three months past rent.

10:12If we don't get rent in two days, we're evicting you and putting all your stuff out in the street. Now, of course, this was a hacker. It wasn't the assisted living facility. They would never do that. And they said, if you don't come up with$17 ,000 by tomorrow, you're out on the street. So this woman took an Uber to a local bank and the bank sort of was onto the scam. And they said, no, we're not giving you$17 ,000 cash. But she took the Uber 30 minutes away to another bank and they gave it to her. And she met a guy in a Walmart parking lot and gave him$17 ,000 in a paper bag. He gave her$200 back and said, thank you so much for getting us this money.

10:50You won't be evicted. And of course, you know, days go by and she realized she'd been scammed. Here's the important thing to remember, John, and just for everyone to know is the average hacker is in your system six to 18 months before they take action. Like I mentioned before, it's not that these people are genius technologists, they're genius social engineers. So they're watching and waiting. They're watching the transactions that are going on. They're watching the emails. And then they'll just copy the email with one letter off and send you an urgent message that says, and typically when you're in a vulnerable position, going through a divorce, you know, going through a bankruptcy, selling your home, et cetera, et cetera.

11:30And that's when they'll strike. So that's one of the things people have to understand, especially if you're running a, you know, a small to medium-sized business is you better hire someone, an MSSP, managed service security provider, or some sort of technologist to come in and do a penetration test once a year to kind of flush out the bad guys, secure your systems, you know, proverbially locking the windows and locking the doors of your technology system. It's the reality that we're faced with Fire Nation is only going to get more sophisticated as we go forward. I mean, the voice that AI can mimic, it's incredible.

12:10They just need a few syllables of you talking, and then they can literally reprogram an AI to essentially say anything in your voice, in your tonality, in your diction. Video is getting there as well, where pretty soon it's going to be a quick video that looks exactly like you and sounds exactly like you with your mannerisms and blah, blah, blah. So one thing that I've always done, and I don't know, Kevin, if you have something to add to this as well, is you have to have like an ultra secret secure word where if you ever get like a freaky call from like, like if I got a call from Kate and she's like, Oh my God, John, like this happened, that happened.

12:47You have to send this money here now. Like it's crazy. And it sounds just like her. And it's got, I'd be like, Kate, what's the secret word. And if she couldn't say that word that only she knows that she and I know, then you know right away. Cause that's one thing that they can't. Cause that's, again, that's a word that you've sat down in a private room. You've only verbalized to each other. You haven't emailed to each other. It's just between you two in a room, maybe your family, keep it tight. One secret word. What are your thoughts on that, Kevin, and anything you can add to that? Yes, I will add to that.

13:16You know, sometimes I tell people I'm the director of the CIA for high net worth individuals and families. Like we help you prepare almost like 007 to be able to deal with these types of things and to sort of, you know, avoid it. That's the key is avoidance. But I would, I would step that up and I would say, have a meeting with your family and come up with a secure question. It could be something as silly and you make it fun. How many monkeys are in the zoo? And everyone in the family has a different answer and it doesn't answer the question. So, you know, your daughter might say purple elephants, you know, you might say pink monkeys or, you know, whatever.

13:55So it does, it's, or pizza, whatever it is. So you ask a question and then the answer comes and everyone knows it's kind of laughable. It doesn't make any sense, but this way scammers could never figure it out. It's, you know, people, they can find your mother's maiden name, your birthday, these types of things. And also don't email that or text that private question ever. Keep it off the web. Right? So if you have a private word, never email it, just have that private conversation and just know. But yes, John, I would say having a secret word is the first step. And then having a secret family question where everyone in the family has a different answer, that takes it up another level.

14:33Byron Nation, we have so much more to talk about. When we get back from thanking our sponsors, speaking from stage is one of the most impactful ways I found to share my message and grow my business, but if you've never done it before, it can seem intimidating. How do you get booked and paid to speak if you've never done it before? Great question. And to answer it, I've arranged direct access to my good friend, Grant Baldwin's proven speaking business system from the Speaker Lab. This is a live training where you'll learn the proven five-step process that led Grant to over 500 paid gigs, current paid speaking opportunities you can pursue right now, plus the number one marketing tool that's working for his students in 2025.

15:13The Speaker Lab is committed to helping 1 ,000 new speakers land paid gigs this year, and I'd love for you to be one of them. This live training is going down May 28th, and there are limited spots available. So head over to eofire.com slash speaker to grab your spot on this live training where you can ask questions and get them answered, plus learn how to get booked and paid to speak. That's eofire.com slash speaker. It would be really nice if we could predict what the future holds for our business. Talk about saving a lot of time and frustration, but predictions are just that, predictions. Rates will rise or fall, inflation's up or down.

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16:28Speaking of opportunity, download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning at netsuite.com slash fire. The guide is free for you at netsuite.com slash fire. netsuite.com slash fire. Kevin, we're back. And you already mentioned this a little bit, but law enforcement, are they able to do anything about these growing cyber threats? Like who do we call if we're a victim? Yeah, that's the problem right now. The answer is not really. You know, they could comfort you maybe, but there's nothing they can do. The, you know, the cyber crime is in the trillions of dollars per year now. And it's just too big for them to handle.

17:05You know, if it's not a, well, this is the way it was 10 years ago. If it's not a quarter million dollar loss or more, they won't even take your call. Right. And so a lot of criminals know this and they're overseas as well. What's the local police department going to do? What's the FBI going to do overseas? Nothing. The Department of Justice has no subpoena power. Your money, your data, everything is gone. So most of the cyber criminals are operating overseas. You know, we do see as the technology becomes more and more available on the dark web, we are seeing 13, 14, 15-year-olds learn how to hack.

17:42And you can get ransomware as a service for, you know, 25 bucks a month on the dark web. So you can become a sophisticated cyber criminal here domestically or overseas. So every once in a while, you'll see people that do the swatting and these types of things. They're able to track them here and they can arrest them. but in most cases, John, you're, it's just a loss. You have to take the L, the money loss, the data loss. And, you know, and it's more than just the money. It's emotional. You know, we, we work with a lot of business owners and a lot of senior assisted living facilities and organizations, and we tell them good cyber hygiene starts at home, you know, and you do have a responsibility as a business owner to protect your organization and your employees and your customers' personal data, you know, you're supposed to take what they call reasonable measures.

18:32Because if, you know, you're working for a company and then someone hacks your system and you didn't take reasonable measures to protect those people's data, your employees or your customers, you could be open to litigation. But to answer your question, John, no, law enforcement really can't do anything. They just kind of throw their hands up. There is an organization called CISA. I actually met the head of CISA under the Biden administration. And that's the federal organization. But again, they're looking to protect big companies, big data, these types of things, really for the average person and the average entrepreneur who's starting up a business, you're on your own.

19:09So get educated, get an easy to use, easy button tech stack, and then have a guy. You know, if your pipe breaks, you can call a plumber. Right now, you better have a cyber guy because no one else be able to help you. Let's bring it home. What would you say for Fire Nation is the best solution that you can share for us, the listeners, for our business, our families, our life? Yeah, we had a customer recently who just got our services and our partner service. And they're a company that went from a million to 20 million this past year. You know, they're a startup, they're entrepreneurs, and they've really made a splashed in their industry.

19:48And they got hacked. Their third time was a business email compromise. And, you know, the hacker sent out an email to their entire Shopify list. And so, you know, as a new company, as a new entrepreneur, you know, you have different people working on different laptops. You don't have the infrastructure in place. And maybe you don't have the capital to do that or any reason to do it because you haven't been hacked. These folks had their third time. And it was like, wow, we could find ourselves out of business if this happens again. And so we brought to them a solution that was an enterprise solution.

20:23Basically, we help build their infrastructure or helping them build their infrastructure, tie it all together, put all the security measures in place with one of our MSP partners that stands for managed service provider. It's basically outsourced IT person, right? IT team, because you don't want to bring that stuff in house unless you're really sophisticated. You know, for example, I was the peer group leader here for the chief information security officer group at the Nashville Tech Council. You know, this is Bridgestone, it's Vanderbilt, it's Asurion, HCA, the big boys. These companies have the ability to protect themselves with chief information security officers, highly paid professionals to put the infrastructure in place.

21:05The other thing we've done for this company, John, is we've put our system in place in the employees' homes. I mentioned before, good cyber hygiene starts at home. You're going to bring whatever your habits are in the workplace, into the workplace from home. And so we're protecting their homes and their families first, and then we're protecting their infrastructure as well. This company plans on doing about 40 million this year. They are an entrepreneur on fire for sure. They're just crushing it in their marketplace. And so, you know, protecting them. And then the other piece, like I mentioned before, this is the key critical piece, is education.

21:42Just having that one second, that half a second before you click on a link or before you accept the text message or before you go do something, before you wire the money. And that's a big one, too, is the wire transfers. You know, oh, just to go back to the code word real quick with your bank, I would put measures in place. No money over a thousand dollars is allowed to be wired, transferred without dual voice authentication, meaning they have to call John and call your wife or call your COO or whatever it may be. You cannot wire money. If the bank does it, it's on them. So you put those policies in place.

22:17But, you know, at Stealth Family, John, I mentioned we have a three tiered solution. It's education. It's an easy button. And it's education. It's our technology stack platform. And it's our incident response. We have 24 by 7, you know, white glove concierge service. We also include an insurance policy. This is critical, too. You know, it's a million dollar insurance policy per adult. We cover up to 50 devices in the home, unlimited children. And so, you know, I think having these easy button plans, because listen, John, it's one of those things you don't want to think about. You want to set it and forget it.

22:52You just want to know and have the assurance that you have the things in place. You've taken all the measures. You've educated your senior parents and your kids and your entire family. And then have the technology in place in case something does happen. So what's the direct call to action? If Fire Nation wants to learn more about you, your company, where do they go? Yeah, go to stealthfamily.com. We have a downloadable on there. It's the seven hottest, so to speak, cyber scams or the seven latest cyber scams. And it's authored by myself and my partner, Scott Augenbaum, who is a former special agent on the Cyber Task Force with the FBI.

23:30and I think that's a good way to engage with us. That'll put you on our list with your email and you'll get some really great information that you can share with your friends and family and I really recommend sitting down with your kids, your aging parents and to have this conversation. Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with and you've been hanging out with KD and JLD today so keep up that heat and for links to everything we talked about, visit eofire.com. Just type Kevin in the search bar and the show notes page will pop right up And Kevin, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today.

24:03For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Thank you, John. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Kevin for sponsoring today's episode. And Fire Nation, over the last decade, I've interviewed more than 4 ,000 of the world's most successful entrepreneurs. And I've created a revolutionary 17-step roadmap to your financial freedom and fulfillment. I put it all into my first traditionally published book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success. personally endorsed by Seth Godin and Gary Vaynerchuk. The Common Path to Uncommon Success, it's the step-by-step guidance that you need to achieve the lifestyle of your dreams.

24:37Visit UncommonSuccessBook.com and I'll catch you there or on the flip side. Want to learn how to get booked and paid to speak? Great news, I've arranged direct access to my good friend Graham Baldwin's proven speaking business system from the Speaker Lab. Go to eofire.com slash speaker to grab your spot for our live training on May 28th and learn how to get booked and paid to speak. Over 41 ,000 businesses have future-proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one platform. Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning for free at netsuite.com slash fire.

25:26Thank you.