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Side rant:
To make it worse, SMS is incredibly insecure. Nothing should send you codes via SMS, and if you have the option to use an authenticator app, do that. It's atrocious so many banks only have SMS as an option.
The really dumb part is, the SMS codes are literally the same authenticator algorithm, but running on their servers and sent to you via an insecure medium.
And one little lapse in not paying a cell phone bill can cause you to lose your phone number, which then means you can no longer authenticate.
this is why I don't like it and why I often advocate that countries should provide a secure email that you can come to an office in person if you can't get to it. People get mad as if Im suggesting it should be the only email they have but what I really want is a guaranteed thing that is made as secure as possible and allows for real in person support to make sure you can get access or stop someone that somehow got access.
This shit drives me nuts. I've put in a lot of effort to secure my accounts but a number of them require SMS without any opt out. We have known about the risks of SMS plenty long enough at this point.
I never understood why SMS is insecure, are you saying it's easy to intercept someone's number? How would that even work without the SIM?
Getting a replacement SIM from the phone company is often shockingly easy, just a tiny bit of social engineering. And then you have access to the number and everything that 2FA "protects"
It is but only if you are targeted. I completely disagree with people who say it’s insecure because most attacks are remote and in bulk. Which your password they can login from any browser but are stopped by the SMS code.
For the SMS code they can use mostly automated social engineering to trick a certain percentage into giving it up.
However while A SIM attack may be easy enough for a targeted individual, I don’t think it scales: they have to do work that only helps with one user. It’s too “expensive” compared to automated social engineering against a million vulnerable users
It's all just a big "in theory" really. It's "insecure" in that if someone knows the telco you are with, and the telco that you're with doesn't follow procedures to verify that a caller is who they say they are, you could have someone else steal your phone number by getting a replacement sim card sent to them.
In reality it's nothing to worry about. Like..........at all. Every telco I've been with sends you a sms to confirm that you requested a new SIM card, and that's after they've confirmed that you are who you say you are via sending you a code on your phone number or email.
The most common way is basically calling up your phone company and pretending to be you saying you needed to switch phones
But also beyond just that the networks that route calls and texts globally are not very secure... and it's not as hard as it should be to get access to it.
its also very inconvenient if you are outside of the country and dont want to pay for roaming. Cellphone providers should offer a way to forward sms messages to an email address, their own webpage or an app.
It is coding for the lowest common denominator of user -- those who use the same easily-guessable password for everything. Making them click a link to login is honestly better security.
Of course there should be an option for those of us who have a TOTP app and use a password manager.
Can't brain today, I have the dumb. What's TOTP, other than that BBC show?
Time based one time passwords. Those (usually) six digit codes which get replaced every 30 seconds or so. During setup you copied the secret to your device (usually smartphone) and now your device and the server you authenticate at can calculate the same secret code every thirty seconds.
Which reminds me: I just got a new phone and totally forgot about Authenticator apps
I was able to recover one but the other is lost and I still need to get those accounts reset
Adding a shameless plug here: Aegis is available on f-droid and allows you to backup your 2FA secrets on your own server (e.g. own nextcloud) in case you don't trust the default Google authenticator.
I’m due to rebuild my lab this winter so I’ll make sure to take a look
Personally I’m frustrated with always having to give a working phone number to accounts.
I have no idea if I’ve been at all successful in poisoning my data but all my accounts use unique generated emails in addition to generated passwords and fake profile info. It’s just habit now.
However all too often the one piece of real data I have to give is my phone number, and that would be really useful to cross-link all my accounts for data brokers building a dossier on me.
I have hundreds of fake emails but can create at most a couple phone numbers
Same situation for me. I'm hoping a forward thinking cell provider can develop something to combat this. I guess dummy phone numbers wouldn't work, at least not in large cities since they already run out of phone numbers and have to invent new area codes. Maybe provide customers with unlimited extensions?
Outsourcing the securiry risk to a third-party
Yup. "That's not on me! Your email was compromised! That's between your email provider and you!"
They're offloading authentication to your email provider. It's basically quick and cheap oauth. I think it's because they're trying to avoid being a vector for a data breach.
The irony being that putting all of a user’s eggs in one basket makes things far riskier for the user, and not less.
Smearing authentication credential data out across the entire Internet makes a sloppy user safer because the inevitable breeches that come with being sloppy are contained, but it increases the demands on a safe user while also increasing their attack surface. Though such a user does typically have a single point of failure in the form of their own sloppy password management.
gg ez ease of use feature, which is hilarious because that's exactly where smishing attacks come in. People are actually more willing to give out the OTP than their actual password, so it definitely less secure.
I think this started out as a decently good idea, like sign in with a device type of feature (think QR code from an authenticated device), but then along the way someone just went "screw it" and changed it to an OTP.
Even in 2025 password managers are rare, people still reuse the same 8 character password everywhere, and people fall for low effort scams. So someone thought "if they're gonna be insecure anyway, lets just make it so they never have to use a password and sync it to their phone or email".
Because people don't realize how ridiculously insecure SMS and (usually unencrypted) email are.
It's just kids who never had a mentor.
My previous bank does this sends an SMS. Extremely insecure & also pointless if a would be thief has my phone (if im stupid enough to use no/easily guessable PIN) or has compromised it.
Is there not an argument that password managers have been around long enough now that anyone reusing logins & easily guessable passwords responsible for their own stupidity? We all know not to leave our doors & windows wide open when we go on vacation.
banks have the most obnoxious, yet the stupidest security measures.
Banks are the web sites most likely to reject a generated password from my password generator
It's been a few years, I dont know if they ever fixed it...
However, at least as of 2022, Wells Fargo (the 4th largest bank), had case insensitive passwords.
If you made your password hUnTer2, you could also log in with HUNTER2, hunter2, HUntEr2, etc.
All I can say is: Take my money!
How stupid of WF.
you underestimate how bad a lot of people are at using technology. something like banking can be a necessity and must be accessible to all. many banks should encourage more secure MFA but i understand why they can't require it.
I hate the SMS ones, because I don't have a good phone signal in my home, so I have to ruin around trying to get a couple of bars so I can get the effing code. My banking app just uses a fingerprint.
Check out if your router and provider supports SIP. It allows sms and calls over your wifi connection
No, is the answer. Moving to another ISP when my plan runs out. I'm paying extra for a VoIP line and want to move to WiFi calling.
i have no proof, but im semi sure that this way you cannot sign up with a temp mail or temp sms, so you are kinda forced to use your real data, which means the site is selling your data
You can generate one-time-use email addresses by using the little-know mailbox field of the email address format:
kepix+you_can_write_anything_here_and_it_will_reach_your_inbox@gmail.com
Obviously this will not fool a human being into thinking you are a different person, but I have never encountered authentication code that treats two mailboxes at the same address to be the same person. This is useful for identifying the source of data breaches, when you start getting phishing attacks at your "kepix+reddit.com@gmail.com" address, and makes it trivial to train your spam/important filters.
It's an immediate red flag for me.
Which services? I haven't stumbled upon a single one
Can't be liable for theft if there were no locks?
well, in case of sending an email with a temporary access code it's not different than using the "forgot password" link
From my experience things like this are not important services. they are things where I keep the password in an online password service which I won't do for anything important.
If the registration email is compromised, the attacker can reset the password. So the password doesn’t offer any additional security, in actual practice, over just testing control of the registration email address. If anything, passwords are less secure.