The spam-to-ham ratio on my phone number is now far worse than any other channel for me. The traditional phone network is at risk of going the way of the fax machine if we don’t do something about the spam problem like we did with email.
If I’m on a call, even with family, it’s now almost exclusively on FaceTime/zoom/meet/etc. I can’t remember the last time I talked on the traditional phone network or received a legitimate call. Which isn’t great because those aforementioned platforms are all proprietary walled gardens with terrible incentives — once they capture the market fully they will eventually dump ads all over your calls. Don’t believe me? Just look at what Gmail did to monetize the lock-in on your inbox.
Doctors and dentists.
Most of the calls I get are spam, but then the MOST important calls I get are from doctors, labs, and dentists. I do as much as possible online of course, but not all of these professionals have good online systems and phone calls are often required.
Sometimes you know what number they're going to be calling from ahead of time, but often you don't... especially if you're in a large medical network that has different offices for different specialists, etc. It's a really sad situation if you get sick and you're trying not to miss these important calls, especially when it's a long wait for a specialist and then you miss their call when they get to your name on the waiting list.
This will literally cost some people their lives and legislators need to act on making spoof calls impossible -- there's no reason why anyone should be allowed to spoof a number that they can't receive calls at.
Dealing with his healthcare providers was a bit of a pain, but it was way worse because he has stopped answering calls, primarily because of the call spam rate. I think because he owns his own business, he never fails to hand out his contact info when he is shopping, and he owns his own business (so his contact info is published by the city).
His phone provider has a feature to opt into spam filtering, his phone has another, and I downloaded a spam list filtering app for him. I disabled the ringer for numbers not in his contact list. I did similar actions to reduce spam in his text messages.
This was a good triage, but the damage is already done to his psyche. He doesn’t answer the phone anymore.
It’s absolutely ridiculous. I wish I would have used a different number than my personal one back when I had started.
That sounds like fax spam.
Shady outbound call based operations purchase, trade, and mine data all day long. You can have Equifax directly sell you reams of demographic specific contact information. God help anyone who ordered from a catalog.
My grandparents received easily 30 scam/spam calls a day. Mostly from Medicare scammers and sketchy organizations that operate right at the edge of illegality. Not even counting the outright fraudulent “Microsoft Support” scams.
Offer the second number with much greater discretion.
I've never had a single spam call on my main phone number, but friends who have got a new number get maybe 20 spam calls per day, with only having given their number to their closest friends and family.
I think one factor that weighs in heavily is if your contacts download thousands of spam apps onto their phones and click YES to every permission. Then your phone number is harvested from your contact's phone and sold. TikTok, for instance, will beg me multiple times on a frequent basis to see my contacts. I don't think you can even install WhatsApp without giving it your entire phone book, can you?
Some carriers do try to keep excessively dirty numbers inactive for a while after a customer cancels a plan and returns the number, in the hopes that the spam will fall off after to many "this number is disconnected" responses.
But sometimes they don't bother, and sometimes it just doesn't help all that much, because spammers are just running through the phone number space.
This is a long way of saying that even getting a new number doesn't always work. The number you end up with might already be inundated with spam.
But best I can tell, 80% of my spam calls are just war dialing; a new number would get war dialed just as much. Probably wouldn't get collections calls for my deadbeat cousin though.
I got fed up, told the caller that I hadn't seen her in years and she could be dead in a ditch for all I knew, then asked if he could call me if he got a hold of her.
They never called again.
I believe most reasonably modern phones should support at least one active eSIM in addition to the physical SIM now.
I switched to low population area codes and that helped a lot. Currently getting 0-3/mo.
308 is low pop. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_code_308
It works like a charm though. I have three tiers of numbers - one that I'll keep and goes to only friends and family, one that I will likely keep for a couple years until it starts getting too much spam, and a third tier that I cycle regularly and use for one off things like online orders.
I was still living in Vancouver, Canada when I learned maybe six or so years ago AT&T has removed all roaming restrictions in North America. So a few of us banded together, one of us crossed over to New York picked up a group subscription of sorts and we had very cheap subscriptions. Only the last 1-2 years did Canadian providers caught up, somewhat.
But the real advantage was if anyone called from a "local" number, local to my SIM at least, I immediately knew it was spam. I do not know anyone in Buffalo, I do not do business in Buffalo, there's no authority which has anything to do with me there, nothing. It's spam.
I can see when someone is calling and in realtime see them leaving a voicemail via speech-to-text and pick up the call if I want but 99.999% of the time it's spam.
For doctors offices, it's a whole different bag and a true pain... you'll get voicemails with half a message that has none of the important details.
Social services are another example. Many services are county-administered and thus don't have a centralized online platform. As always our most vulnerable populations suffer the most from techno-greed. Not the families of software engineers who built the system.
I think a whole lot more people still make regular phone calls than the ones who don't. Anyone who runs a business for example is usually on the phone ALL the time.
Is it not this simple ? With dual SIMs any phone can serve 2 lines so employees officially switch to the hospital e-sim within the hospital premises.
1. Phone rings no matter what (doctors and other high profile contacts that I do not want to miss a call from)
2. Phone rings unless sleep mode active (family/friends). A second call within 3 minutes rings through in case of emergency.
3. Call goes straight to pre-recorded message (generic or unique to that identity) that tells them to text me their message/request (or when AI gets good enough, and it doesn't seem like it there yet for all accents, it transcribes their voicemail message).
4. Caller can leave a message but it is completely ignored by me and I don't know they left a message unless I go and check my spam folder.
I can change the call handling of any identity at any time, and there should also be an email and text message layer on top of this system so the same rules apply and I choose who can contact me with those methods as well.
Complain to your government.
I settled on never answering my phone if not in my contact list, if the caller is not a spammer they leave a voicemail.
Even if they do want to call, they all have to support deaf people using TTYs, and phones all support RTT (TTY to cell). There's no need to take voice calls from legitimate businesses in the US.
The number in my main phone changes every 90 days.
I get a new starter SIM every month.
My phone is out of state due to my previous address, and 95% of spam i get is spoofed to that old town or the surrounding area.
No doctors office/etc calls me from that area. It works pretty nice
The problem with that idea is that when you make local calls, people think that you are the spammer.
I too have an out-of-state number after having moved, and I can definitely confirm that when I make a local call, some people will not pick up after seeing the unusual area code on their caller ID. They told me so.
There's another problem too: Even when I leave voicemail for a local business (plumber, dentist, replying to a "for sale" ad), some people will be thinking, Why does this guy need a plumber or want to buy my kayak if they live 1500 miles away?
I've resorted to leaving an explanation saying "Even though my area code is XYZ, I'm in the same city as you".
Everyone i know has kept their phone number for years. You'd think businesses would be used to people who moved from out of town but kept their number.
I don't call places much aside from doctors/etc tho, so i guess i just haven't had that issue personally.
These people who don't pick up for an unusual area code: don't they know that spammers are more likely to call from a "usual" area code? Am I mistaken?
The area code wouldn’t be a red flag for me, but this absolutely would.
Or we may end up in a world when doctors send us important Tiktoks.
It sounds like a lot of work, but when I started doing this about two years ago it took about two weeks for the calls to just... stop. Now I get a spam call maybe once a month. It's glorious.
My theory is this is the only route to get put on the _real_ do-not-call lists - the ones that spam companies in India have labelled "unprofitable numbers.txt". Seems like once you're on those, you're good.
Every minute they're listening to you use them for rubber-duck debugging is a minute they're not scamming Granny out of her 401k. Be prepared to get called bad names in foreign languages. Bonus points if you learn some phrases in their language to really get under their skin.
I started doing this as well.
I mimic the Jolly Roger call service and they usually hang up in less than a minute.
Ex…
- Act like you can’t hear them
- Ask them to restart what they were saying
- Start a conversation with a fictional person in the background
It’s fun and makes getting spam calls enjoyable.
I really don't get that. I don't get these, on neither of my phones (I've got two numbers). When it rings, it's virtually always friends or family. Sometimes the bank/insurance/doctor. Very exceptionally do I get a commercial or scam call.
I think it's not an argument good enough to excuse to excuse Authy here: "my phone already leaked, so what's one more leak!?".
> Which isn’t great because those aforementioned platforms are all proprietary walled gardens with terrible incentives
Oh I fully agree. I'm using Telegram for chat but zero FaceTime/meet/WhatsApp here. People want to call me, they usually phone me. Once in a rare while Telegram.
Almost all spam is instantly recognisable. Mostly visa and parcel delivery scams.
In do not block unknown numbers because lots of organisations use them here (UK) This includes people I really do want to be able to contact me if they want to such as the police.
I don’t understand what they are calling for either. I’ve answered a few and most of the time it’s a dead line when I answer. Just silence.
The primary operating goal of a predictive dialing system is minimizing agent downtime. Ideally, when an agent transitions into being ready to talk, they want as little time as possible before they're connected to a live lead.
In above-board telemarketing, where there's a finite list of leads instead of 000-000-0000 through 999-999-9999, the administrator will adjust dialing aggressiveness to minimize the chance that a lead picks up the phone but no agent is available to take the call. Because when that happens, the answering party experiences nothing but dead air, followed by a timeout, and a hangup.
The one nice consequence from this, though, is that if you do answer a spam call and get connected to a live person, chances are very high that several other potential marks got dead air instead. Maybe you saved grandma for another day.
However, my real problem is with what I call “The Google Strategy.” Basically, they take publicly funded infrastructure like HTTP and SMTP, capture the network by dumping “free” products on the market (with basically no advertising), kill off competitors, then monetize their market capture by removing the "free" part, packing these products with ads, making them worse and worse over time in the process. And everyone is trapped, since they captured the network of this public infrastructure. This is the story of Google Search, Gmail, YouTube, etc.
It’s anti-competitive, anti-markets, and quite frankly should have been regulated away as a strategy a long time ago.
Google basically ran Microsoft's classic anti-competitive B2B strategy to capture the consumer internet, and got away with it!
In old school economic terms its called "dumping." When international trade started becoming a major thing, aspiring monopolists would flood foreign markets with goods sold below-cost to push out local competitors, then ratchet up prices and reduce quality once they'd captured the market (basically the Google strategy).
Just like crypto people had to learn that financial regulation was in place for a reason, internet people have had to learn that industrial age anti-trust rules were also put in place for a reason. Now we just need to enforce them.
You should, honestly.
Any modern system is going to use IP as a transport. Even the traditional phone network is VoIP under the hood in modern networks. The replacement system should be kept as far from the influence of the last mile providers as possible.
The thing that definitely shouldn't happen is that you get your phone number from them. Let it be "user@host" like email or otherwise assigned via DNS.
Whenever I visit, I switch to my US SIM card and am immediately bombarded with spam texts (mostly from political parties) and scam calls. In my experience, Android is pretty good at marking calls and texts as "potential scams," but they're still there. In the Netherlands, I've gotten a few scam attempts via WhatsApp. Other than that, I think I've received one phone call soliciting donations to the Red Cross, and nothing else.
Personally, the only “spam” I get is flagged by the cellular provider and 99% of the time the calls are silenced. Not really an issue for me. The only people that “call” me are in my contacts list anyways. Everyone else can leave a VM or text message.
They target the US, and to some extent the UK, Gulf countries like UAE where English is the de facto language.
Luckily at the moment, there's still a delay after you answer the call as (I assume) you're being connected to a human. How long will this last....?
Currently, when I don't hear a voice within 1s or so, I hang up. A legitimate caller will (hopefully) call back pretty quick.
I had issue with Vodafone here - they were pestering me with calls/messages... even after I switched to Digi they were calling me for a week to try to convince me to stay (it just confirmed my decission to switch ;) )
Yes, and this is the slope that we keep sliding down with these data breaches not being taken seriously. First it was your name and email. Now phone numbers. What's the next bit of our private info that we'll normalize leaking?
This is why I have my own mail server and domain. Full control over mail, and access to features that you pay for (ie, unlimited e-mail aliases, control over mailbox size). No more worrying about “google decided to shut your free account down for whatever reason. Bye bye decades of emails and loss to services that use email based OTP or magic link login.
I wind-up using the phone because so many organizations malevolently misfeature they websites - doing what you want to (pay basic bill or whatever) is hard but upselling and new features, those you can do instantly.
Doing it the opposite way - tying all outbound school/camp calls to a single callerID - risks blending the important with the automated reminders. LAUSD abuses their automated calling system to the extent that my wife and I have both screened calls from the front office involving an injured child, more than once.
The real issue here is getting to the root cause, which is carriers and their intermediary aggregators having incentives to carry large volumes of spam.
In a number of markets, operators have increased the cost of SMS messages to deter spam, only to find a massive increase in traffic pumping fraud that mysteriously appears in the system of trusted intermediaries. Everyone's making a goddamn fortune off it, and no one actually cares to fix it.
I used to get a couple of cold calls per year for surveys, but I got unlisted via GDPR requests and now its down to zero.
Companies do try collecting your phone number, but then I answer NO to the obligatory "do you want the latest offers" question (in the EU, this is opt-in not opt-out). And it doesn't matter if my phone number leaks.
This is similar to my email address use. I used to get emails from recruiters, but after a couple of replies informing them that whatever profile they have is illegal, with my email address not being public, asking them to delete it, the emails stopped. I still get spam, but it's mostly fraud and US companies. Fastmail's spam filters are good enough, BTW.
My phone number works just fine, and the phone network is valuable given the better signal 2G can have, or the fact that not everyone is on the app du jour. And I find it odd when people call me on WhatsApp.
I frequently see US folks criticising GDPR, so I'm guessing this is one of those "the US mind can't comprehend" moments.
Given that you're European, do you not have any friends/family outside your country, in neighboring EU countries? Wouldn't they have to pay high per-minute rates to call you?
Right now my plan, with Orange, costs 7.5 EUR / month with unlimited 5G (for real), 16 GB of data when roaming, unlimited minutes when roaming in EU/EES, and 600 international minutes in EU/EES. We do have great deals here, BTW, I'm sure it's more expensive in other EU countries.
I'd have to upgrade for another 100 minutes with US / Canada, however, I have another plan from Digi that charges per minute but that's dirt cheap.
I do have acquaintances from US with which I communicate primarily via WhatsApp, but I don't need it for my family within EU.
Nowadays... but not so long ago it wasn't like that and the prices were abysmal. And considering that EU is somewhat smaller and there is higher chance of having international contacts make the IMs so popular (especially whatsapp)...
Example from one provider: nope with 100 countries. Including the US, Canada, China etc.
National calls and calls to nordic and Baltic countries are typically included in the subscription. But once you have to call to let's say central Europe per minute rates are exorbitant compared to today's data volume pricing.
Giving your phone number out to all these services also means that it can be used as a single identifier to track you and your behavior across all those services.
I'm not sure that GDPR is helping us a lot there.
Doctors, dentists, moving companies, home improvement contractors, recruiters, etc. These are some of the most important phone calls I've received in recent memory.
I don't know what world you live in, but I religiously block phone numbers after just one spam call. And I usually don't give out my phone number. (I'm much happier giving out email addresses since I have an infinite supply of addresses.) I never get enough spam calls that I feel like the phone system is going the way of the fax machine.
While I do get a few regular phone calls a week, they're all in my contacts and I don't answer if the number isn't... at least 2/3 the time if I decide to answer as I'm expecting an out of band call, it's spam. On the flip side, I am wanting to setup for "your code is XXXXXX" as a verification on a personal website I'm working on to allow for public users. I know it doesn't add too much, but it's enough to reduce the noise. I'm not even sure what more hoops I need to jump through with Twilio to get to send said messages. I'm not a company, and not sending any kind of marketing campaign.
Spam callers are likely the most lucrative customer of the telephone network for the telephone companies.
I don't see how that could be correct. Once you pay your monthly fee, the fewer minutes you tie up the company's resources the better for them. That's true too for pay-ahead plans.
This is very valuable data to have, not only for advertisers, but also criminals and other bad actors.
Also, the fact that nobody ever questions the authenticity of leaked data should be VERY alarming. Imagine what power someone can hold over someone with manipulated leak data.
I would rather not have my own life intertwined with either of them but undoubtedly it already is to some degree.
I still don't recommend to do that and just toss those that demand your phone number away. Get a business phone if your work demands it.
Which will definitely end up in some data breach at some point.
Yes, I'm exaggerating. No, it's not by much.
Sure there probably is some regulatory capture but if anything at all can be regulated it’s spam calls / messages. If the government can’t regulate spam then what could it be expected to regulate.
The general population is increasing worried about scam calls for their elderly relatives, it’s already a big deal.
In fact there are really only two groups that are pro-spam: spammers, obviously, and the entities that provide them services from which they may spam.
Oh sure basically any provider of any service be it phone, web hosting, email, etc. will say they don't want spammers, and the email providers may actually mean it what with them not wanting their server's scores trashed and be unable to get email to anyone (though plenty others don't give a shit), but website hosts, telephone companies, and SMS providers? They utterly do not care and in fact go out of their way to not know when spammers are (mis)using their services.
Meanwhile like that other commenter said, everyone is incentivized to enter walled garden services that actually do the barest minimum of enforcement for spam activity. I doubt they're conspiring in a dark room somewhere, but neither side is going to upset at the other in that situation.
you forgot the entire marketing industry
> everyone is incentivized to enter walled garden services that actually do the barest minimum of enforcement for spam activity
These walled gardens actively spam you—that's how they make money. They only act against competing advertisers.
For there to be an incentive to avoid spam, we would need a social network not funded by it. To my knowledge this is essentially ActivityPub. In order for ActivityPub to be useful, we need an incentive to drag celebrities away from private paychecks that benefit from manipulation of other social networks (twitter, ig, tt). I don't believe there is any such entity or incentivization right now.
The (US) government does an excellent job of regulating many things, such as commercial airplane design and construction. Oh wait...
If the US government wanted a healthy industry, they would have bought one or otherwise directed actual competition. Instead we only have Boeing, which taxpayers also subsidized, which seems incompetent and unwilling to acknowledge fault, which seems to be generally a gargantuan waste of taxpayer dollars compared to a properly efficient and reliable no-profit outfit.
I don't understand what this has to do with spam.
It would be highly improbable that the people making those kinds of decisions could successfully regulate an airline industry, or even the much easier task of spam.
The US government has also gone to great lengths to protect Boeing from competition by boxing out concord, canadian aircraft, and embraer . I think such companies like Boeing should be considered for-profit arms of the government instead of independent corporations.
They are if you point out ads are just spam by another name
And it's not like there's no technical means for the phones either. Just enforcing caller ID would go a long way to curtail spam. Like in our great Red Tape Europe, even with uptick in recent years we have a tiny fraction of spam calls compared to the United States.
If this were true we wouldn't have spam
> And it's not like there's no technical means for the phones either. Just enforcing caller ID would go a long way to curtail spam.
A) this is insanely naïve given the international treaties that make up telecommunication agreements. B) "Just enforcing caller ID would go a long way to curtail spam." telecoms don't have any clue who is calling, see above comments about treaties.
Absolutely disagree, email is the spam king. Just the fact that you can contact someone without consent breaks the entire system.
> Why does Authy require I provide my cell phone number and email address? Why do I have to have a user account? This is completely ridiculous. I do not need nor want cloud syncing or backup. You are making Authy a potential target for attacks by associating a user to cloud stored 2FA information.
> This is not in the spirit of 2FA.
https://1password.community/discussion/116314/sendgrid-requi...
(I know the irony of this in particular being Authy, but nevertheless phone numbers should NOT be risked to be exposed anyhow)
Unluckily sooo many give zero or negative fáck among their potential and existing customers. This includes businesses providing medical services sending all the clien't data and medical results in clear text email and even declaring for their own convenience that "The property and copyright or other intellectual property rights in the contents of any document or images provided to you shall remain our property", for your ultrasound results. Your medical results are their property for those use their services. So they do as they plase with their data, not your data, not your concern if it is protected or not. And people go there and rate this service 4.8 on google, insane. Of course no-one really reads TOC, not even for sensitive medical services. People do not learn.
https://www.twilio.com/docs/sendgrid/ui/account-and-settings/two-factor-authenticationDo you have recovery code printed out? Do you carry them with you? If you do then what's the difference between this and a password?
The difference compared to a password is that these recovery codes are single use, used only in exceptional cases and physically airgapped. On the other hand my password is multi use, is used daily by me and in the event of a breach will be exposed to the attacker.
I will know if someone steals my recovery codes. I'll have no idea if someone gains knowledge of my password though.
No. I agree the MFA is big improvement and I use it for many of my accounts, but I still don't want you forcing me to do something "for my own good".
Make it the default or show me scary warnings, but still give me the option to make my own decision in the end. Sometimes, it's okay for convenience to take precedence over security, and the user is the only one who should make that determination.
2FA protects you from someone getting access to a leaked password. They still can’t connect even with user and password, without doing a very elaborate hack. That’s a huge benefit.
My recollection is that someone reversed their algorithm and they used almost TOTP which hurts me even more because that implies that they knew about the standard and still chose violence
There's this small web portal in Poland that for years provides a simple free email service (and an instant messenger with same login) with occasional "messages from our sponsors" in your inbox - you had to tick your "interests" during registration. In time banners started to appear and that was still fine because the Web was still a pretty innocent place and tracking was years ahead of us. At some point inbox was getting flooded with spam; either one you had to have or outside the service because the domain was popular and probably addresses were scrapped from the associated instant messenger. Then, banners started to be aware of inbox content and sponsored messages included tracking - milking your habits and activity become a thing.
Fast forward to some 10 years ago the service offers a premium plan where you can turn off banners around inbox, the permanent banners that pretend to be emails at the top of the list. Of course paying turns off only these banners and sponsored messages and every other spam will pile up. There's a built-in filtering option but since people started to using it to get rid of these mandatory messages - it stopped working at all. And any filter entry is a dummy one. At this point it's more an ads and spam gallery with an optional email service. Instant messenger was killed off in 2016 as people preferred global networks, and so were small but popular discussions forums turned off.
Around same time portal was bought by what for year was a bigger competition to them (not the only one ofc). The idea that both portals should use a single login appears. So people saw messages at login saying that you should transfer your account to this unified platform because it's more secure and there are some "benefits". Later, a darkpattern message was displayed saying that the unified login service will be the only way to use all services including email. And this unified login comes with company's own 2FA mobile app which you can't replace with a generic generator of any kind. Aaand in the end, nothing really happens. The darkpattern messages disappear and you can still log into the email with same plain password you used for years. The 2FA becomes suddenly optional but "recommended". People complaining in Appstore reviews about login issues and fact that no generic generator works are suggested to talk with support where apparently something can be arranged.
What my hot guesses are is that the company believed that domestic service popularity combined with mandatory 2FA app that does collect a lot of additional unnecessary information will provide a steady source of money for this service. People accustomed for years to an attractive short local domain won't force themselves to move elsewhere. But that didn't work as planned and honestly, I don't know how they managed to survive till today.
I did created few addresses there but over the years I managed to move elsewhere; what was once cool and fast and plausible become obnoxious to use.
If you remember poczta o2 you surely remember tlen emoticon: [10ton] - that's the best way to sum up what happen to this portal and service.
https://i.imgur.com/PoZ2ssc.png https://i.imgur.com/heiJer6.png
It took them two years to fix it.
Isn’t it what you are describing?
Definitely some similarities though, I’d love to see some concrete technical information on it.
I’m trying see if the issue is some unanticipated issue with the iOS client app itself, or if it is only affecting people who created online accounts with Authy to sync their 2FA credentials across devices.
Entering your phone number was mandatory. This was what turned me away [1] from Authy to Duo Mobile on my Apple devices.
When companies integrate Authy into their system, they can use it for SMS OTP (also deliverable by phone call + TTS iirc) as well as regular TOTP, Authy's proprietary TOTP, and others.
Your phone number would only be at risk if you used a service which used Authy for SMS 2FA
you probably gave them your phone number at some point if youve got authy on multiple devices.
/Edit: just checked on a clean install. It prompts for a phone number instantly and won't let you scan codes without creating an account. Not sure when that happened, as I haven't really used it in years.
We used Authy for 2FA at my last company and migrated off it to use a complete auth platform. The amount of user (consumer and business) hostile shit we found in the process was astounding.
Twilio was nice to work with way back when it was the only decent API-driven POTS connection service out there. They've steadily gotten worse over the years and acquisitions though. Wouldn't recommend them to my worst enemy these days.
For consumer password/2FA management, Bitwarden and Yubikey.
Mobile App Authentication
Secure your account with TOTP two-factor authentication.
Today they have incidents almost every week, and now data breaches.
Also having an investor base that demands removing as much equity compensation as possible. (Whilst, IMO, not being aggressive enough to cut executive compensation)
But it's no surprise that when you ask management/executives "who needs to be laid off", the answer is not that many managers/executives...
I do think Kho is the right person for the job though, and Aidan was surprisingly smart too, so I my[1] bet is that they'll get there.
[1]: I'm long twilio btw.
How do I avoid such problems in my own app? Force authentication for all requests with row-level security? Rate limiting?
Any testing frameworks that would catch this? Something like "given endpoint /user/phone-number-validate make sure only <user> can access it".
If an endpoint is decorated with something that is considered dangerous (i.e. public access), that triggers additional review steps. In addition, the authentication forbids certain combinations of decorators and access patterns.
It's not perfect, but it has saved us a few times from securing endpoints incorrectly in code.
> that triggers additional review steps
Is this done by some sort of a linter running in CI?
1. build a single endpoint handler that handles auth, then looks up the endpoint on the path. 2. Never create direct endpoints, just register endpoints in the system that the auth endpoint works under.
You know table driven tests?
Use table driven endpoints. It works and makes things so much simpler and secure.
So like, an authn/authz middleware ?
But the last 2-3 times I setup a config management, I made sure to configure the local firewalls as deny-all by default, except for some necessities, like SSH access. And then you provide some convenient way to poke the necessary holes into the firewall to make stuff work. Then you add reviews and/or linting to make sure no one just goes "everything is public to everyone".
This way things are secure by default. No access - no security issues. And you have to make a decision to allow access to something. Given decent developers, this results in a pretty good minimum-privilege setup. And if you fuck up... in this day and age, it's better to hotfix too little access over losing all of your data imo.
SSM for life. Fun fact, one can also register non-AWS assets as SSM targets, so I could imagine a world in which it makes sense to create an AWS account, wire up federated auth, just to dispense with the hoopjumpery of SSH attack surface and Internet exposure
The break-glass is always a consideration, so it's no panacea but I still hope one day the other clouds adopt the SSM protocol same as they did with S3Api
I believe a lot of folks have had good experiences with Wireguard and similar, but thus far I haven't had hand-to-hand combat with it to comment. We use Teleport for its more fine-grained access and auditing, but I've had enough onoz with it to not recommend it in the same way as SSM
1. Everyone tests authenticated user can do the right thing.
2. Can <wrong|expired> authenticated user access the data?
3. Can an unauthenticated user access data?
If there’s a testing framework that does this scaffolding automatically, I’d love to hear it.
You build into your testing framework/library a mechanism that will craft sessions across your range of authentication-levels - unauthenticated (no-session), authenticated but unauthorized, etc. You mandate new endpoints must have permissions test in code review.
Simple, straight forward, and absolutely the bare minimum of competency for any endpoint returning personal data.
This kind of arrogance is exactly how these mistakes get made.
Our digital data must be recognized as human rights but lately the world has been vocal about it but silent when it comes to action and enforcement.
More and more reason why people no longer trust cloud hosted solutions. Offline-first, local-first with optional data sync is the only path forward to combat violation of our rights to our own digital data.
Case in point, feeding haveibeenpwned with a bunch of HN user handles reveal a good chunk of you aren't even aware your data has been leaked, especially ironic since I see comments from those handles are very anti-regulation when it comes to user data ownership.
But phone numbers aren’t something I’d consider confidential in most cases. Hell, we used to publish our phone numbers in physical books and give them to the whole town for free (literally).
The data was even monetized with ads plastering every page. I guess the digital age isn’t all that different from the analog age (in certain ways!)
Exporting the raw totp tokens can only be done from the desktop version that is currently deprecated and scheduled to be nuked from existence later this year. It requires getting the tokens loaded into the desktop app, then downgrading to an older version so you can use the chrome remote debugger to run a javascript function against the desktop app (embedded chromium) which pulls out the raw tokens and gives them to you.
Oh. Fucking great. So I'm locked in to using Authy forever now I guess.
I hate 2FA. It literally does exactly nothing for security, it's just another tool for these big companies like Google and Twilio to put themselves between me and the services I need access to, all while locking me in to their services and siphoning out information they can sell to advertisers. I hate it. I hate the "security" people who are pushing this garbage. I hate everyone involved in this space. I hate that I now can't log in to anything without going to fetch my phone. I hate these people.
You can get the old desktop version from chocolatey/choco - https://community.chocolatey.org/packages/authy-desktop/
If anyone wants to try this themselves, this is the recipe that worked for me;
- Enable multi device for authy on my phone
- Install the 3.0 desktop authy client from chocolatey
- Get logged in and set up on the desktop client so that you can see the current OTP codes (not the lock symbol)
- Uninstall the 3.0.0 desktop authy client
- Install the 2.2.3 desktop authy client from chocolatey (https://community.chocolatey.org/packages/authy-desktop/2.2.... or choco install authy-desktop --version=2.2.3)
- DISCONNECT FROM THE INTERNET AFTER OPENING 2.2.3 AND BEFORE IT POPS THE UPDATE DIALOG
- The update dialog will block the program and you can't use the chrome remote debugger in the later steps
- Start from step 2 of https://gist.github.com/gboudreau/94bb0c11a6209c82418d01a59d...
I've been using pass (https://www.passwordstore.org/) for quite a few years now and it allows to use multiple GPG keys to encrypt secrets in different subfolders. So I have a default GPG key that encrypts all my regular passwords, protected by a master password that is easy enough that I can regularly type it in on my smartphone.
Then I have a second GPG key with a much more complicated password that I use to encrypt my 2FA secrets (strings like "FX5D MJE8 F9F9 XFE0" that can be used to "seed" apps like Google Authenticator). These 2FA secrets I never access on my smartphone, I only access them on my laptop where I have a proper keyboard to type in the absurdly long password required to unlock these.
I wrote a small Python script that takes a 2FA secret and uses it to generate a TOTP URL that is then fed to "qrencode" (a command line program available on Linux and MacOS) which renders a QR code that I can scan into a TOTP app like Google Authenticator (like if I was first signing up for 2FA via the original website or service, the only thing that changes is who generates the QR code and when).
Because I saved the original 2FA "seeds" (my term, not sure what the proper term is here, but it's akin to the seed you feed into a random number generator) I can regenerate the QR code whenever I wish, which means that if my smartphone dies and I lose the 2FA secrets loaded into Google Authenticator, I can take an empty new smartphone, install Google Authenticator, and rescan all of the QR codes that bootstrap my 2FA sequences via my laptop. The other side (the website or service where I enabled 2FA) never needs to know I went through this procedure, in fact fundamentally it cannot know.
I've been using this same scheme to share 2FA codes with a team of system administrators so that we can properly protect e.g. AWS root accounts while still providing multiple individuals access without being tied to a single smartphone or 2FA app.
So long story short, it is possible, although admittedly (my way) it does require some cobbling together of different tools in order to get a workflow that handles this smoothly. But I sleep better at night knowing that all of my important accounts are protected by 2FA yet I can never be locked out of them, even if I lose my smartphone or laptop (the actual password store git repository lives on my server where it is backed up to several disks every couple of hours).
Which, to be clear, is perfectly fine. 2fa is completely unnecessary: the increased risk of getting locked out from my accounts and the risk of using services from companies like Twilio and Google is greater than the risk of someone guessing long randomly generated passwords.
That said, the significance of using two separate password stores isn't clear to me. Under what threat model is that supposed to be an improvement over a single password store? Basically, your idea is that passwords are less essential than OTP secrets, so you take less care keeping them safe. However I think it'd make more sense to just apply proper protection for all secrets.
It’s bizarre to me that Twilio decided to get into the Authenticator business at all, especially while SendGrid had plenty enough problems to keep them busy.
If you need a cross platform authenticator, do check it out.
FOSS, optional e2ee backups.
I followed this guide - basically, run an older version of authy with devtools enabled and use the js console to export your items.
https://gist.github.com/gboudreau/94bb0c11a6209c82418d01a59d...
If anyone else is considering a switch, our community has documented a migration guide here: https://help.ente.io/auth/migration-guides/authy
https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/automatically-fill-in...
But it seems to me that Apple only supports adding TOTP codes if you have a password for the account. Which is annoying if you want to split your passwords and second factor into two different places. (For example if you wanted Bitwarden for passwords and TOTP/Passkeys in Apple.)
You can of course put a dummy password in Apple. But that is kind of annoying.
This is truly unacceptable for an authentication product.
An authentication product that doesn't implement authentication correctly in their own APIs?
I haven't been able to find anything about the endpoint, but based on the data exposed[0] I think the endpoint they are talking about is the register one which requires a phone number.
I'd bet they didn't rate limit it, and someone just blasted through all phone numbers with it and stored the data for ones that didn't error out.
[0]
The CSV data columns:
account_id
phone_number
device_lock
account_status
device_count
I used this project for exporting: https://github.com/alexzorin/authy
EDIT: it appears this project was actually using the unauthenticated endpoint (used in breach, too) to facilitate exporting, lol. Good luck to anyone trying to get off of Authy, Twilio really doesn't want you to export your data for "security" reasons.
Also, if anyone is going either direction, Android <-> iOS, both of these open source options allow easy export.
The main purpose is that people won't get phished as easily or if they reuse passwords it can't be abused. Or if password was to leak for any reason.
It makes it unlikely someone has access to both your password and the TOTP URI. So, if you leak your password on a public forum (for example), the person who gets that is not likely to also have your TOTP info.
I believe they do, yes. Been on the $10/year plan and have forgotten the details on their tiers, though.
> It's why I ended up on Authy.
All 2FA really boils down to is a "otpauth://totp" URL that clients use to generate time based tokens. Once you have those exported somewhere, you can move to any TOTP app you want (desktop or mobile)
And how do I do that in Authy
Dog shit company. Avoid.
In general, after that I started poking, and discovered a lot of things I hadn't bothered looking into before that make me extremely suspect of Authy's general security.
For those looking for an alternative, I use 2FAS and Yubico Authenticator with a Yubikey now. Yubikey only allows you to store up to 32 TOTP slots, which is very limiting (I have more than 60 TOTP accounts for 2FA), so I use two apps and "tier" my 2FA.
Like if I crawl hackernews and download all the somethings am I a "hacker"?
To me a hack is some kind of escalation of privilege beyond what I'm truly entitled to (such as stuffing passwords, tricking software to run a payload, crafting a payload for service A so that it tricks Service B) ...
Not using curl on a loop.
Tried to do the same on an android phone and it didn’t work.
You can also port your phone to google voice or Fi and give away all your call information to them. Very few spam calls get through their filter.
I like the change phone area code to out of area and block all phone calls from that area that some call services provide.
If there are any high-profile victims in this list SIM Swapping those phone numbers should be a very attractive approach.
I think security cautious companies should consider turning off multi-device support and start planning for a migration. This leak feels way riskier to me than what media reports it to be.
> There are account recovery options outside of multi-device, but those require the attacker to compromise your primary email. These also take a minimum of 24 hours, during which you would receive email notifications, and could request a cancellation
https://help.twilio.com/articles/19753631468059
And for multi device you can require current device to approve new ones
Multi-entity is enabled by default when creating an account. Enrolling a second device is possible via an OTP code received via a text message. This makes the phone number (in my mind at least) the default single-factor needed to access an Authy account.
As far as I can tell, the user has to either enroll either a second device, or manually disable multi-device support to make Authy SIM swapping resistant. I have not been an active Authy user for many years now so I might be mistaken here, but I strongly suspect a majority of Authys non-technical users have not done either. Meaning they would be susceptible to SIM Swapping attacks.
My old Authy account definitely was, at least.
It's been possible for a very long time now.
Yet, companies keep leaking. And people keep sleeping.
encryption of data at rest is for hard drives that walk off, not for access.
The issue is starting the migration out of Authy. Assuming Authy has no easy export, I suggest you migrate over a few entries at a time (maybe from top down) while keeping account of transfers somehow. You can have authenticators live side by side in the meantime!
then, a misconfigured endpoint (or a zero day etc.) can't be exploited by any_actor_on_the_internet - actors need to first complete the provisioning process you choose to enforce to be authorized to use the private overlay.
*not one size fits all, e.g. bad option if endpoints need to accept requests from unknowns.
however, many endpoints only need to accept requests from known (identified, authenticated, authorized) endpoints, and the added friction to id/authN/authZ get use the private overlay is not a business impediment.
there is a stigma here due to the horrors of NAC on private enterprise WANs. but NAC goals can be accomplished without that baggage via internet overlays and modern cryptography.
to be clear, i am by no means advocating to abandon traditional methods of endpoint auth - this it is just another layer which recognizes that single layers are rarely airtight (e.g. what just happened to Authy and Twilio).
Do you mean clients for the last part? I'm not a networking expert but I don't see how layering on certs here is going to help?
I manually set this up several years ago, to only ring for contract in my address book. It was annoying, but worked. At the same time, I submitted the feature request to Apple and it came to iOS about a year later.
I found my calls have gone down dramatically since using it. I used to get 3-4 calls per day. Now, even if I have the feature toggled off, I might get a couple calls in a month. Once the number appears inactive, I think it drops off a lot of lists.
https://bitwarden.com/blog/bitwarden-just-launched-a-new-aut...
And there is a FOSS app I forgot the name of to allow exporting Authy tokens from cli
https://f-droid.org/packages/com.beemdevelopment.aegis/
Or if you have a YubiKey you could also use it for TOTPs
Windows, Linux, Android: https://github.com/Yubico/yubioath-flutter
iOs: https://github.com/Yubico/yubioath-ios
I personally use Bitwarden for TOTPs (with a self hosted vaultwarden instance), it's by far not the most secure way to store your passwords and TOTPs next to each other, but it saves so much time.
I migrated to Aegis a while back because I wasn't happy with how hard it is to get secrets out of Authy, or that someone else is managing them, and they they need my phone number (guess I was right, again).
I use Folder Sync on my Android to sync the Aegis auto-backups to a MinIO bucket I host at home.
Migrating from Authy is a headache, though you don’t have to reset the tokens. I found a way to do it (1), but I had to do it manually because Authy only exported the email/user and the token. Now, if you are like how I used to be, having the same email for different accounts, the exported JSON will be confusing and there's no way to tell which account is for which service. Only in the Authy UI can you tell. I had to follow the order of the JSON and the app, one by one, for my 700+ accounts, and verify that it works by going to the service site and testing the generated code from the new app, and also changing the email to a unique one. It took a whole week!
Edit: to add, I wouldn’t recommend using Yubico or hardware-based ones unless you will have two or more replicas, losing them is easy compared to having your tokens backed up in an encrypted KeepassXC db for example.
(1) https://gist.github.com/gboudreau/94bb0c11a6209c82418d01a59d...
When it’s not a system I’m deeply concerned about I will just use the 2FA on the password manager.
This one[1] seems the most up-to-date, by a German research group. You'd share the link as text to the KeePassDX app, search for the entry it's for, and it populates it with the HTOP/TOTP secret.
There are iOS Keepass clients that support this as well, though from what I can tell there's some drama with source code[2][3] in the landscape.
[0] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.kunzisoft.keepass.libre/
[1] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.secuso.privacyFriendlyCo...
[2] https://github.com/MiniKeePass/MiniKeePass/issues/606
[3] https://keepassium.com/articles/keepass-apps-for-ios/welcome...
And other allegations under the ethics & transparency sections of KeePassium's list of iOS alternatives https://keepassium.com/articles/keepass-apps-for-ios/
And you actually know what is going on. Works for GitHub.
https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1d3zqvv/raivo_auth...
While it’s nice that password managers can handle this as others have mentioned, the whole point of a 2nd factor is to ensure an attacker can’t get in if they somehow get your password. Storing the second factor along with the 1st factor doesn’t make much sense to me.
In my case, 1 Password can do this now. I believe the same is true for Bitwarden and Apple passwords.
The reason why I started using Authy a long time ago is that it supports multiple devices and isn't linked to any other account (such as Google or Microsoft).
Manage your own sync between devices with syncthing, dropbox or whatever you prefer.
For authentication, authorization, and 2FA, run it yourself on-prem or go home.
anotherservicetwilioruined.example.com/api/doesthispersonhaveanaccount?phone=+12012000000
and then the service says 'yeah that number has an account' (and nothing else?)? then whomever repeats that for every possible phone number?
or... more than that?
There are no more excuses other than asking for your phone to be sim-swapped and your bank accounts or your wallets to be drained by call centers.
If this breach doesn't scare you from using phone number for 2FA, then maybe nothing ever will and AI and deep fakes will make this even worse.
https://www.authy.com/integrations/ssh/
"Someone in your organization doesn't have a smartphone? We got you covered. Authy SSH can send them the token via SMS or a phone call."
> It's used to store and retrieve your 2fa secrets in case you lose your device
The phone number doesn't store anything?
But if somehow knowing that phone number is a key to getting your 2FA secrets, you'd have a bigger problem.
Except it often is, and that's the problem.
https://authy.com/blog/understanding-authys-multi-device-fea...
Using the device advertisee ID that the user is entitled to change.
// Sorry, for a moment I thought you were serious.
Ignoring the security pitfalls of phone numbers, it really doesn't seem like these advertising IDs are a drop in replacement for using phone numbers.
I agree, and I say this to whoever asks me too, and I avoid any services that still use phone numbers as a way to associate it to you (Signal, I’m looking at ya!)
However, easier said than done, some services still require you to use a phone number, like banks, some government agencies, insurance companies, etc., the services that actually matter if your data get leaked. I believe there should be a regulation to prevent using the phone in any way to confirm your ID, and never force you to provide one to access such services.
The phone number here just acts as a username.
