Cybercriminals Steal 100,000 from Crypto User via Sim Port Attack

On May 20 2019, a Medium post by Coinmonks contributor Sean Coonce chronicled a harrowing tale of how he lost over $100,000 in cryptocurrency from a SIM port attack. In the world of cybercrime, SIM porting is a method where an attacker impersonates their victim to a phone carrier and convinces the carrier to transfer ownership of the phone number to an attacker-controlled phone. Although the service to port SIMs is a legitimate offering by carriers, it is often abused by criminals to take over a user's phone. Depending on how much the victim relies on their mobile phone number for the security of their accounts, an attacker can theoretically gain access to most of the victim's accounts by issuing reset codes directly via text.

Recommendations

• Contact your carrier and ask to put a PIN passcode on your account as a layer of protection
• Consider using a two-factor authentication application instead of text messages for your auth workflows
• If you have to use text messages, use a VOIP service like Google Voice, which cannot be SIM swapped

Details

The blog post goes into detail of a multi-day fiasco where the author thought he was dealing with a bad SIM card. He believed that the attackers gained enough personally identifiable information from his social presence in order to socially engineer his phone carrier. This news comes a few days after the breach announcement for the infamous account hijacking forum, OGusers. Wired published an article in 2018 on preventing SIM port attacks, but protections can differ by carrier.