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The Most Expensive Lesson of My Life: Details of SIM Port Hack

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Re: The Most Expensive Lesson of My Life: Details of SIM Port Hack

#11
This kind of sums up the whole article:

> I knew the risks better than most, but never thought something like this could happen to me

This also explains why this article is useless as a warning. Someone who will be hacked like this in the future is reading now this article and saying "hmm, I should be securing my holdings against this, but I don't have time now, and this won't happen to me right away, I'll look into it next week"

It's like the countless articles which appear after backup failures. "I knew I was supposed to test restoring from backup, but...."

Re: The Most Expensive Lesson of My Life: Details of SIM Port Hack

#12
Part of the problem here is the lack of fraud insurance from CoinBase/exchanges. If the attacker would have instead stolen from his bank (several US and Canadian banks I know happily allow logins with only a password or are only starting to introduce SMS-only 2fa), it is likely that the bank would have returned the money, whether they could revert the transaction or not, and then pursued the hackers themselves.

Re: The Most Expensive Lesson of My Life: Details of SIM Port Hack

#13
post #6

> Do not leave funds idle on exchanges or fiat on-ramps. This warning has been publicly repeated hundreds of times since 2010, yet people still insist on ignoring it. The author didn't lose anything. He gave Coinbase his bitcoin in exchange for a promise to pay it back. That deal backfired. > I knew the risks better than most, but never thought something like this could happen to me. There's knowing the risk, and the…

Do you also keep your cash under your mattress, instead of into a bank account?

Re: The Most Expensive Lesson of My Life: Details of SIM Port Hack

#14
I'd like to see more companies introduce "time locks" into various big aspects of accounts.

Want to port a SIM? I'll put your request in now but it will wait for 5 business days before it happens, and at any point if you or someone claiming to be you calls up to stop it, we stop it, no questions asked.

Want to change 2 factor information for an account? We can put in the request now and it won't take effect for a week while we reach out to you using every communication method we know how to let you know it's happening and give you ample time to stop it if you discover it wasn't actually you that did it.

It seems like a fairly "low cost" way of upping the security quite a bit.

Also, not to make the OP feel worse, but Coinbase even offers a service like this called the "vault". The idea being that withdraws are time-locked for a specific amount of time, and there are multiple ways to stop it during that time lock, even if you got locked out of your account entirely.

And while we are doing PSAs, I'd like to give one piece of seemingly conflicting advice: make sure you have backups of your multi-factor authentication systems.

Sure, having your accounts taken over is awful, and it can happen to anyone, but something just as bad is losing your 2-factor systems and being locked out of accounts with no way to recover them.

Print out 2-factor backup codes, put them somewhere safe, maybe split them in 2 and put half of the codes in one place, and half in another. Think through possible problems. It really sucks to have your house flood, then find out that your phone with the 2-factor app on it was destroyed, and your backup codes ruined as well...

Re: The Most Expensive Lesson of My Life: Details of SIM Port Hack

#15
Large tech companies like Google push 2-factor auth to "increase" security, but this article shows that 2-factor auth with SMS verification opens up a huge security hole since the attacker can access your email if they can get your provider to port your SIM over to their device. Am I missing something and if not how did companies like Google not foresee this huge security hole?

Re: The Most Expensive Lesson of My Life: Details of SIM Port Hack

#16
post #15

Large tech companies like Google push 2-factor auth to "increase" security, but this article shows that 2-factor auth with SMS verification opens up a huge security hole since the attacker can access your email if they can get your provider to port your SIM over to their device. Am I missing something and if not how did companies like Google not foresee this huge security hole?

[deleted]

Re: The Most Expensive Lesson of My Life: Details of SIM Port Hack

#17
Stuff like this freaks me out and I'm sure I'm not the only one. Thanks for the wake-up call. It's a terrible amount of money to lose. I hope things get better for this guy in the future (and I don't think anyone would say they're to blame for this.)

Security is becoming so difficult to balance with an every day life... I don't know how anyone can remember everything that they're "suppose" to know about security.

Re: The Most Expensive Lesson of My Life: Details of SIM Port Hack

#20
I have a question related to this that someone expert in Bitcoin could answer.

Could the victim monitor where the bitcoin (we assume) went to using the public blockchain record? Then, trace it every step of the way (and in whatever chunks it divides into) until it reaches the account of a publicly identifiable entity? At that point, there might be legal recourse in recouping stolen goods (at least, this is how it works in the UK with stolen physical goods.. even if someone "legitimately" buys them, they can be reclaimed).

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