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Here’s how SIM swap in alleged bitcoin pump-and-dump scheme worked (arstechnica.com)

submitted 4 weeks ago by Xatolos@reddthat.com to c/technology@lemmy.world

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[–] pandapoo@sh.itjust.works 8 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

Oh my god, someone please tell me about understanding of the following facts are wrong:

They did all of that, compromised a SEC employee and the official SEC Twitter account, to move the price of Bitcoin only around 2.2%.

They could have just put sell orders in, and waited a month.

Here's the hourly BTC high and low prices for the day in question, Jan. 9th., 2024

All that risk, just to bump the price up $1,000, when it was already trading between $45-47k.

That is so dumb, so painfully dumb, that I almost feel bad about laughing my ass off about this. JFC.

Just over a month later, it was back trading around 50k....

[–] shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip 7 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (2 children)

Idiot. Why did they not run those searches over the tor network to anonymize themselves? That is quite frankly stupid. And the fact that the SEC was using SMS-based two-factor authentication is also stupid. One time pads or bust motherfuckers.

[–] cacheson@piefed.social 7 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

One time pads or bust motherfuckers.

Not sure if you're being facetious, but one time pads are for encryption, not authentication. They're also impractical (and overkill) for most purposes.

[–] shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip 3 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

OTP 2FA Codes are one time pads

[–] InverseParallax@lemmy.world 9 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

They're actually not, they're algorithmically derived state machines, most are public key hashes of secrets concatenated to the current time in seconds from the epoch.

Ideally they would be otp, but that would also be obnoxious.

[–] shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip 4 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

Oh, interesting. Okay. In that case, they are totally misusing the term.

[–] InverseParallax@lemmy.world 4 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

Yeah, I think it's because that's where the model originated, and that's basically what it's supposed to be, but having almost everyone synchronized on time gives us a new trick because we can just generate 'keys' and have them expire, so even if you manage to get one by force, it's only valid a short window. Instead of one time pad they often call them one time passwords.

You need extended access to a generator over time to be able to use it, which gives the user a chance to report it for invalidation.

Not perfect, but it does its job fine especially compared to passwords or sms (where you're at the mercy of the minimum wage kid down at the mall's Verizon kiosk).

[–] cacheson@piefed.social 5 points 4 weeks ago

Ah, gotcha. Those are one-time passwords. Same acronym, so it's easy to confuse them.

But yeah, I agree that everything should use (T)OTP for two-factor authentication, instead of SMS messages. The later mainly provides a false sense of security and presents only a minor hurdle for attackers to overcome.

[–] dhork@lemmy.world 1 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

More like the insecurity exchange commission

[–] shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip -1 points 4 weeks ago

Well then again, you expect government agencies to be secure? Yeah, not hardly.