Cyber-risk expert talks about latest T-Mobile security hack
The bad guys take control. Then they call your phone company and tell them they want to switch your information to a new phone.
FOX 2 – It’s Deja Vu for some T-Mobile customers. In August, hackers exposed 50 million customers’ data.
Now there is another issue. The bad guys finding a way to swap your SIM cards.
Cyber risk expert David Derigiotis with Burns & Wilcox explained how it works.
“Your phone essentially goes dead and the attacker ports out your number to their device and now they start receiving all of your calls, all of your text messages,” Derigiotis said.
The bad guys take control. Then they call your phone company and tell them they want to switch your information to a new phone.
“The other is, good old-fashioned social engineering,” he said. “They called, they trick the individual pretend that they are you. And they’re asking to port out that number and they’re able to simply do that by deceiving and tricking which is social engineering, taking advantage of that human element.”
There are some things you can do to protect your account
Here’s the real danger. Many of us have authentication for other programs on our computers tied to our phones. So, think about it. You try to get into a program on your laptop, it pushes an authentication message to the cellphone the crooks now have in their control.
“If you’re using the text message as a second form of…
