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this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2025
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The issue is that the banking app is often the only way to get 2 factor authentication. The other way is to use SMS but that can be hijacked by social engineering attacks so it cannot be considered secure.
Can you please share an example? I'd be curious how that would work, especially if it works while understanding how it works.
It's nothing sophisticated. You just steal someone's phone number by calling their phone service provider pretending to be them. I don't know how serious this threat is but for this reason SMS is not considered secure in the "security circles".
https://www.howtogeek.com/358352/criminals-can-steal-your-phone-number-heres-how-to-stop-them/
https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/cell-phone-fraud
I would consider that VERY sophisticated. One needs to basically conduct identity fraud, so have enough information to port your SIM via your phone company. I imagine that if you do not call your phone company with your existing number they have a few extra steps to allow anything to happen.
Anyway, beyond that, which as you shared (thanks for taking the time to put those links) is indeed not infeasible (but still requires targeted work and skills) this is only 1 step out of 2 for authentication against a bank. One still needs to know the bank and the login/password pair the Website requires.
Even once that's done, I believe most banks do not allow large transfers, e.g. above 10K EUR, without another verification. Typically transfers have a daily and weekly limit that can be modified temporarily.
So... IMHO it's sophisticated (in the sense that a "script kiddie" or scammer without technical skills can't do it) and has limited economical value.
I will remember it (again, thanks for pointing it out) but I won't lose sleep over it.
PS: I'm wondering what's the consumer law on this actually because arguably some steps, e.g. no limit transfer or SIM porting would be on failure on the side of companies, not consumer. I wouldn't be shocked if companies had insurance for that and might have to pay back whatever amount would be stolen. Obviously this would be regulation dependent.
I honestly did not give much thought to the difficulty of pulling such attack off. With "not sophisticated" I just meant that it's not complex to grasp. "You just have to pretend to be a different person". I guess yeah that is pretty difficult.
Yeah I mean it's often said that any second factor is better than just password so it's probably not a big deal. My issue is mostly that it's an attack vector that could easily be eliminated. For example if banks allowed third party 2FA apps. I think I've read somewhere, that some banks even only allow hardware keys for business accounts which is honestly absurd.
My hope is actually that standard compliant (that's the important bit) hardware keys and passkey, e.g. WebAuthn, get more broadly accepted. This way open source and hope hardware solutions, e.g NitroKey, would allow anybody on any OS supporting those standards (which does include Linux without proprietary blobs AFAICT) to work.
I hope for that too