Podiatrist Thien Trinh loves keeping people on their toes with his snappy social media videos.
From how to walk “mindfully”, to heel pain and why we should ditch slippers, he’s found a firm footing with his thousands of followers on hot foot topics.
But the owner of cork insole business Stryda still gets cold feet about posting on Instagram, Facebook and Tik Tok.
He’s experienced two social media hacks on his business pages since 2022, robbing him of $12,000 and hundreds of hours in lost sleep and stress.
In the first incident, he says he was sent an “alarming” private message from a friend on Facebook. A simple click on the accompanying link led to an online disaster.
Cyber criminals quickly gained a foothold in the Facebook account of his podiatry business, Stepwell Podiatry, and his freshly-launched Stryda page, posting inappropriate material on his business pages and spending up big using his stored credit card details.
It was just the start of a distressing three-year journey to try and regain his accounts and rebuild his digital presence.
“It was pretty debilitating, I still have a hard time trusting social media now,” he says. “You feel violated, you feel unsafe. It was pretty traumatic, because this is my livelihood, and I spent hours and weeks and months trying to recover my accounts. They were posting child porn, cryto scams, everything.
“We ended up just stopping all operations on Facebook for a good two years – and that was our main source of clients through advertising. The inability to control your business, and how you market your business online, factors into the monetary loss. We just had to stop what we were doing and there were so many lost opportunities.”
He never regained control of his podiatry account, and ended up starting from scratch with his Stryda page.
And it wouldn’t be his last brush with faceless cyber criminals.
A week before he was due to appear on the Network Ten TV show Shark Tank in 2023, hackers struck again.
Fortunately, he spotted them infiltrating his Facebook account this time, and managed to kick them out within an hour.
But he says he is now “paranoid” about another attack and wants to share his story to help others avoid facing the same fate.
“I’m ashamed to admit it happened a second time but we were much quicker onto it that time,” he says.
“I noticed my account was flagged for something and initially I thought it was something I did. But then I noticed a lot of my controls were completely gone. I couldn’t access my timeline. I got removed as admin and couldn’t sign back in to recover the account. But at this point, we had a few safeguards. It’s important to have a few admins on accounts such as Facebook so if something like this happens, another admin can get on there, change the passwords, and kick anyone foreign out. And that’s what we did in time.”
The father-of-two has recently completed the Cyber Wardens training and says it built on his cyber security knowledge.
“If I had done this course years ago, I probably never would have been hacked,” he says.
“Using multi-factor authentication, and doing software updates as often as you can, are among the most important things you can do. We are watertight now. Cyber security is so crucial.”
And there is a happy ending for Thien, who was born in Vietnam and emigrated to Australia with his family as child.
He says his cork insole business has exploded in popularity since his appearance on Shark Tank, where he struck a deal with Showpo founder Jane Lu.
“I knew I had something to give to the world of feet, and I knew I could help people suffering with debilitating pain,” he says.
“I am so proud of our growth and grateful to our community of customers.”
For more information, please visit cyberwardens.com.au
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