The playbookSIM swapping

SIM swap

Moving a victim's phone number onto an attacker's SIM, usually by persuading or paying someone at the carrier. Every code sent to that number now arrives at the attacker instead.

Why it matters to you

SMS is a recovery channel as often as it is a second factor, and this defeats it as both. Where an account matters, bind the factor to a device rather than to a number.

Where we meet it

Carrier insiders are recruited in the open, by network and by country, in the same channels that recruit money mules. The recruitment is visible before the swaps are.

Where this term stops being vocabulary

Dragnet is where you watch it happen to you

Knowing the word is the cheap half. The platform is the half where the term arrives attached to your domain, with a timestamp and the source it came from.