Vitalik Buterin recently shared his hacks experience with the people. He stated how his X account ‘Twitter’ attack had been attacked through a SIM swap. The hack occurred on the 9th of September.
He added that the scammers had already posted some fake NFT giveaways before authorities came into the picture, thus leading users to follow false links causing them to lose over $691,000.
Listening to more reports on Farcaster, a decentralized social media site, he said that he could recover his T-Mobile account on the 12th of September. He stated, “Yes, it was a SIM swap, meaning that someone socially engineered T-Mobile itself to take over my phone number.”
T-Mobile has always had issues when it comes to security purposes. Back then, in 2020 telecom giant was sued because of authorizing a $8.7M that was carried out through a SIM-swap attack.
SIM-swap is a way that scammers are able to fully control our mobile numbers, however with the help of two-factor authentication (2FA) they can easily access social media accounts, crypto Wallets, banks, and any other account of their interest.
However, he added that let it be a lesson to learn from and that, “A phone number is sufficient to password reset a Twitter account even if not used as 2FA,” He also added that scammers can completely remove your phone number and access your account within no time.“I had seen the ‘phone numbers are insecure, don’t authenticate with them’ advice before, but did not realize this.”
T-Mobile should, however, try to come up with more techniques for securing SIM cards to help avoid and completely get rid of these misdeeds. As we have seen from Vitalik’s experience, the attack of one individual can also affect other people, especially if it involves influencers that have an impact on people.
