Tuesday, August 17, 2021

How hackers can use mirroring apps to see your texts — and bypass two-factor authentication security

VIDEO SHOWS DESPERATE AFGHANS TRYING TO ESCAPE COUNTRY BY JUMPING ON AIR-BOUND US PLANES, FALLING FROM HUNDREDS OF FEET: ‘No words can describe these scenes.’



TOXIC SOCIAL MEDIA:  ‘Likes’ and ‘shares’ teach people to express more outrage online.


Do tell.



MARK STEYN:  The Afghan Humiliation:“Kabul Could Fall To The Taliban Within 90 Days, U.S. Intelligence Warns. Thank you, geniuses. That was Thursday. So it turned out to be well within ninety hours – which is close enough for US intelligence work. Was this the same ‘seventeen intelligence agencies’ who all agreed Russia had meddled in the 2016 election – and with whose collective intelligence only a fool would disagree? . . . To modify Hillary Clinton, what difference at this point would it make if the US government simply laid off its entire ‘intelligence community’? 


It's now well known that usernames and passwords aren't enough to securely access online services.

A recent study highlighted more than 80 per cent of all hacking-related breaches happen due to compromised and weak credentials, with three billion username and password combinations stolen in 2016 alone. 

The implementation of two-factor authentication — which aims to provide an additional layer of security to the relatively vulnerable system — has become a necessity.

It works too. Figures suggest users who enabled two-factor authentication ended up blocking about 99.9 per cent of automated attacks.

But as with any good cybersecurity solution, attackers can quickly come up with ways to circumvent — in this case through the one-time codes sent as an SMS to a user's smartphone. 

Yet many critical online services in Australia still use SMS-based one-time codes, including myGov and the Big Four banks: ANZ, Commonwealth Bank, NAB and Westpac.

How hackers can use mirroring apps to see your texts — and bypass two-factor authentication security