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Hackers claim they breached T-Mobile more than 100 times in 2022

krebsonsecurity.com

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Re: Hackers claim they breached T-Mobile more than 100 times in 2022

#81
Do you know how expensive it is to support physical keys for a large organization? I'm not talking about the cost of the key. I'm talking about how many people lose, break, or have another problem their keys (data corruption, software issues, USB port is broken, etc). You need dedicated staff at every physical location with all the support capability to troubleshoot those issues and replace keys. Every time a key doesn't work, that's one less person working, plus time taken up by support staff. The TCO is millions of dollars. It's much cheaper to use software tokens that have fewer failure modes and simpler support requirements.

Even if you do use physical keys, malware on the machine from a phishing+0-day attack can simply wait for the user to log in with their physical key, and use an existing, valid session to inject an attack. This has existed for at least 15 years since I first saw the attack, and it still works great, even with FIDO2.

What happens to T-Mobile if an attacker takes over an account, regardless of security method compromised? Basically nothing. Yeah, some customers get sim-swapped, who cares? T-Mobile has not lost any money. So there is no incentive for T-Mobile to have better security in those cases. Hence, no need for physical keys, which wouldn't stop all attacks anyway.

Re: Hackers claim they breached T-Mobile more than 100 times in 2022

#82

This is an interesting development. We've always known that sim swap attacks weren't hard. But I've largely understood them to be not scalable . You can sim swap almost anybody by calling Verizon on the phone. But you needed to call them. This, in my mind, largely meant that the risk of sim swap for most people was pretty low - certainly far lower than the risk of phishing. With this method, it scales. Pwn one person…

Have you missed how much spam a regular phone was getting regularly? Doesn’t seem difficult to regather such an operation to do SIM swap attacks. With AI the mechanisms are even easier.

Re: Hackers claim they breached T-Mobile more than 100 times in 2022

#83
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, most carriers (except ATT & Verizon) are just T-Mobile resellers... so you might think you're not using T-Mobile but you're still affected. Even if you use ATT or Verizon, the article mentions they're also hacked and SMS intercepted often.

Honestly, I’d assume being on a MVNO carrier would actually protect you from this, as you’re simply roaming on the T-Mobile network through the carrier agreement. Even ATT and Verizon have roaming agreements. The issue is for T-Mobile direct customers, which obviously their internal systems have access to. I see no reason why T-Mobile would have access to users accounts at another company…

It depends on the MVNO. Some have their own backends. Others only do the marketing and leave the backend to the carrier.

MVNOs do not roam on the carrier, however. The MVNO has a close direct relationship for wholesale access to the network. Roaming is a wholly separate method of access.

Re: Hackers claim they breached T-Mobile more than 100 times in 2022

#84
post #8

> T-Mobile declined to answer questions about what it may be doing to beef up employee authentication. But Nicholas Weaver, a researcher and lecturer at University of California, Berkeley’s International Computer Science Institute, said T-Mobile and all the major wireless providers should be requiring employees to use physical security keys for that second factor when logging into company resources. > “These breaches…

I think why regulation hasn’t happened is because the computer industry has changed so quickly. Two-factor auth wasn’t even a commonly accepted best practice two decades ago.

And regulation takes a while to create and put into practice and with the rate things are going, by the time regulation has been out in place, the current best practices will have changed.

Whereas writing regulation on building bridges is easy because the timescale of us building bridges spans literal millenniums.

Re: Hackers claim they breached T-Mobile more than 100 times in 2022

#86

> Phish T-Mobile employees for access to internal company tools, and then convert that access into a cybercrime service that could be hired to divert any T-Mobile user’s text messages and phone calls to another device. If they are doing all this through phishing and aren't being as successful with other networks there's some serious issue that's being overlooked. It's unclear from the article if this is due to traini…

>If they are doing all this through phishing and aren't being as successful with other networks there's some serious issue that's being overlooked.

A few years ago I had to regain control of an account that I had lost the credentials for. No problem, Tmo support just needed me to provide one of the last 5 phone numbers dialed. So yes, there are some serious issues overlooked.

Re: Hackers claim they breached T-Mobile more than 100 times in 2022

#88

This is an interesting development. We've always known that sim swap attacks weren't hard. But I've largely understood them to be not scalable . You can sim swap almost anybody by calling Verizon on the phone. But you needed to call them. This, in my mind, largely meant that the risk of sim swap for most people was pretty low - certainly far lower than the risk of phishing. With this method, it scales. Pwn one person…

Have you missed how much spam a regular phone was getting regularly? Doesn’t seem difficult to regather such an operation to do SIM swap attacks. With AI the mechanisms are even easier.

I have no idea what you are talking about here. SIM swap and spam texts/calls are entirely different issues.

Re: Hackers claim they breached T-Mobile more than 100 times in 2022

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not calling for regulation on general security outcomes. I'm talking specifically about access controls on sensitive and highly privileged systems that have ripple impacts to consumer security, which should already be obvious best practice .

You assume that T-Mobile didn't try and just fail miserably, or repeatedly fail to insider attacks. If it was multiple insiders, the systems could be perfect technically and completely useless practically. We also don't know what the similar statistics for Verizon or AT&T or any other global carrier are for comparison.

What point are you trying to make here? That T-mobile maybe needs to screen employees better? That compromises are inevitable and we just need to deal? That we shouldn't give out so much data to corporations?

Re: Hackers claim they breached T-Mobile more than 100 times in 2022

#90
post #26

> Phish T-Mobile employees for access to internal company tools, and then convert that access into a cybercrime service that could be hired to divert any T-Mobile user’s text messages and phone calls to another device. If they are doing all this through phishing and aren't being as successful with other networks there's some serious issue that's being overlooked. It's unclear from the article if this is due to traini…

> But there's still a large number of sites and services that rely on SMS. I avoid using my actual phone number whenever possible and use a Google Voice number. Hacking Google Voice would require hacking my actual Google account instead of just tricking someone at the phone company.

why do you think that? Presumably Google Voice uses a phone company downstream, which means if that company is hacked they can reassign your number to someone else and thus you have the classic SIM jacking attack.
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