Veritasium - Exposing the flaws in the SS7 phone system.
Veritasium - Exposing the flaws in the SS7 phone system.
00:00 I hacked Linus!
00:59 How Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak hacked the telephone network
02:22 Early history of the telephone
07:08 The kidnapping of Sheikha Latifa
08:41 How Signalling System No. 7 works
11:03 Why SS7 is vulnerable to hacking
12:15 How hackers gain access to phones
16:17 How I was able to spy on Linus’ phone
18:09 How hackers can intercept text messages
21:04 How your location can be tracked via SS7
29:03 How to protect your phone from hacking
It's been known for years that SMS-based 2FA is terrible, terrible security. The sites that use them have no interest in their users' accounts' security: all they're interested in is harvesting their phone numbers.
SMS is fine for 2FA, as long as you can't use it for anything else, like a password reset.
Once the SMS is used for account recovery, it's now 1FA with a terrible security hole.
If you have complex, single use passwords, and have SMS 2FA, then it's pretty ok. Not the best security, but at least better than a most.
Obviously offline time based passkeys are better for the 2FA, but typically the real problem is how to get into an account if you've lost one part of your login.
im always downvoted and screamed at for saying this but yeah.
i hate stupid forced 2fa
2FA is great. It's the best tool there is against impersonation and account takeovers.
But it's only great PROVIDED
- It's a real, proper second factor like a hardware token or - less great but okay - a "secure" cellphone app. When it's a totally insecure factor like SMS, 1FA is preferable.
- It's not such a PITA that you hate using it.
- When it's a proprietary app from one of the big data sonsabitches, it's also an app to spy on you and your activities.
Agree. I appreciate that banks offer 2FA, but do I really need to be forced to give up a real phone number to access a forum, news site, etc.? No.
Whose job is security? Mine, the user, and if I decide one of my accounts is a throwaway or I just mash some keys to get access to something, I shouldn't have to sign up for 2FA to do it.
the worst are apps that use it as the sole form of authentication
I think you're going for malice a bit fast when incompetence and negligence seem like pretty likely culprits to me.
I've read this for years too, and this video demonstrates exactly why in a clear way.
I am constantly surprised how many people are unaware how bad SMS security is.
I knew about sim-swapping but not that this exists...
Yeah, I did not know it is that bad....
I used to wonder why we were in such a hurry to phase out 3G networks entirely.
Now I know.
One of the reasons. Another is bandwidth efficiency. You can service a lot more devices with higher speeds and less errors using newer higher modulation schemes.