The Most Expensive Lesson Of My Life: Details of SIM port hack
--
I lost north of $100,000 last Wednesday. It evaporated over a 24-hour time span in a “SIM port attack” that drained my Coinbase account. It has been four days since the incident and I’m gutted. I have zero appetite; my sleep is restless; I am awash in feelings of anxiety, remorse, and embarrassment.
This was the single most expensive lesson of my life and I want to share my experience + lessons learned with as many people as possible. My goal is to increase awareness about these types of attacks and to motivate you to increase the security of your online identity.
This is still very raw (I haven’t even told my family yet); please reserve judgment with regards to the naive security practices laid out in this post.
Details Of The Attack
You might be asking yourself, what exactly is a “SIM port attack”? In order to describe the attack, let’s examine a typical online identity. The diagram below should look familiar to most people.
Authorized SIM Porting
The ability to port your SIM card to another device is a service that mobile carriers provide to their customers. It allows a customer to request their phone number be transferred to a new device. In most cases, this is a perfectly legitimate request; this happens when we upgrade to a new phone, switch mobile carriers, etc.
Also Read: The Best Cryptocurrency Hardware Wallets in 2020
A SIM Port Attack
A “SIM port attack”, however, is a malicious port performed by an unauthorized source — the attacker. The attacker ports your SIM card to a phone that they control. The attacker then initiates the password reset flow on your email account. A verification code is sent from your email provider to your phone number — which is intercepted by the attacker, as they now control your SIM card. The diagram below outlines the attack step by step.
