An Empirical Study of Wireless Carrier Authentication for SIM Swaps
summary
Study signs up at five prepaid carriers and repeatedly convinces customer service to transfer numbers by exploiting weak challenges: asking for the last payment (refill-card payments can be created by attackers), recently dialed numbers (victims can be tricked to call), incoming-call history, and unauthenticated refill codes. Customer-service reps sometimes approve swaps without correct authentication. Reverse engineering of websites finds 17 websites whose accounts are breakable with a SIM swap alone; full dataset and disclosures at issms2fasecure.com.
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chapters (8)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:23What are SIM swap attacks?
- 1:11Attackers can intercept messages and calls
- 1:32All five carriers had flawed policies
- 2:08Key vulnerability: Manipulable information
- 2:55Key vulnerability: Customer service reps
- 3:17Why does this matter?
- 4:17Most sites don't stand up well to SIM swaps
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